“Stop shifting,” she said. I had only rolled a bit so I could scratch my neck. I shifted back to my original position.
“Stop it.”
I was in the cart, she was pulling. I felt useless and small.
I had the bow ready, but all I could think about was ambushes. Wouldn’t they set a trap on this road as well? And now that I was out of the loops we’d die.
“Maybe we should leave the road,” I said again. Though we’d already discussed this. We couldn’t make any speed at all off road.
“We already discussed this,” she reminded me, “we can’t make any speed off road and if they can track us distance is needed. It’s worth the risk.”
I was grinding my teeth.
We began to slow, and then I heard worry and fear in her voice when she said, “Husband?”
I tried to get up and out of the open cart to fight off whatever danger there was.
What happened was that I rolled, already having an arrow notched, and broke that in half, and then tripped getting over the lip of the cart.
“Are you okay?” she asked. She was having some difficulty turning around in the odd leather yoke.
It was an ingenious set up. There were two pull cords near her ears. The left one was the brakes. You had to pull it down and hook the wooden handle at the bottom of the yoke’s wood and leather harness your waist to release the brakes. On steep terrain you walked with the the handle in your hand so you could control the brakes better.
The right hand pull cord was for emergencies. When you pulled it down a weight near the axle under spring compression was released, shifting it backward and thus shifting the center of gravity back, so that the yoke pulled upward. At the same time the yoke came apart in four pieces freeing up the person hauling it and losing the ballast further shifting the weight backward.
A line of metal teeth lined the bottom side of the back edge of the cart. These would be driven down by the change in center of gravity as the cart tipped backward.
Hopefully it was enough that a person in front of a runaway downhill cart could get away, or someone who had need to disconnect from a heavy object quickly, say a monster or bear attack.
I saw her reaching for the emergency release.
“I’m okay,” I said, “just tripped. What’s going on?”
She pointed. I’d already looked for bandits and bears. I couldn’t see any, and further concluded, by way of not being dead, that there were none in hiding either.
“What?”
“The marker,” she said.
“The stone thing?”
She looked at me. It had been a long time since she had looked at me that way. It was the look she gave me when I didn’t know the completely obvious thing.
“It’s a depth marker,” she said seriously.
“Where is that map again?”
“I’ll get it,” I said. Only realizing as I did that it was a needless thing to say. I felt like a child unable to help in any significant ways. But I could get a map!
It was a leather map that rolled up nicely. The map itself was made of tiny blackened holes. Mrs. Kine said that was from a heated needle. The map must have taken hundreds of hours to make.
“I didn’t see it at first,” she said. Her finger pointed to a small symbol.
“Most maps are color coated, I didn’t think to look at the legend.”
“So what’s that mean?” I asked stupidly.
I knew it meant there were monsters ahead, I just didn’t know what monsters ahead meant for us. Did we leave the cart? Did we go around? Did it mean the gang wouldn’t have any ambushes? I asked about the last first.
“Does this mean there won’t be an ambush?”
“I don’t think I have a bestiary for this area,” she said.
“Bestiary, that’s um, that’s the type of monsters right?”
“Yes, but I don’t know what they are,” she said with some worry in her voice.
I made a mental note to ask in the next loop and then realized this was it.
My hands were sweating.
“Slimes of course,” she said, “but those aren’t even worth mentioning.”
“The acidic flesh melting things aren’t worth mentioning,” I said with nod.
“I think henkals too maybe,” she said, but she was talking to herself.
“Yes? Yes! That’s right she said slimes, henkals, and imps!” she was facing me by the time she finished.
“Who said?”
“The henkals are like very small wolves. Oh. Do you remember what wolves are?”
I nodded, but noticed when she said ‘very small wolves’ she was holding her hand about waist high. How big were wolves here. I knew on Earth wolves were rare and everyone thought they were dong when they were much larger but not large enough that you would call a dog-sized thing ‘very small.’
“They are cowards, so they will yap and yap but they won’t attack until they have overwhelming numbers so they will circle us or follow us if I can run fast enough for long enough.”
She was thinking out loud again and chewing her lip with worry.
“The imps and henkals fight each other,” she said, “but their fire bolts are fairly weak.”
“Fire balls?” I asked. One of beards favorite ways to torture was to used heated metal on flesh. One of his favorite ways to kill was to put your face close, but not in, the fire. You’d get second and third degree burns on your face but it was the hot air burning your lungs that killed you.
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The smell was the worst bit. You could smell yourself cooking and it didn’t matter what you did, you were dead. Just like the men I’d killed with the wands. It didn’t matter where they ran the fire balls caught them and engulfed them. And this was it. No more loops.
She was the only one of us who could pull the cart. They’d be shooting at her, and what, I’d be hiding in the back, having to smell her cook?
I could smell it now actually.
The memories and disgust rolled over me with that smell. That sickly sweet smell of burnt human flesh that skipped your rational mind and made your mouth water anyway.
“What?” I said pulling back.
I was on the ground, sitting, my hands gripping her wrists as her hands held my face.
She was standing, bent over.
Forest.
Monsters.
Vel, the planetary rings, other universes Mrs. Kine.
“Sorry I,” I said slowly.
As I stood the threadbare pants they have given me to wear in the mine moved and I realized I’d pissed myself.
I looked at it, then up at her.
“You don’t have to face the fire,” she said with a quiet whisper as she stared into my eyes.
I opened my mouth to talk and swallowed instead. That hurt. I did it again.
My throat was raw.
The yoke was in pieces.
I’d been screaming.
She was hugging me and I wrapped my arms around her and wept.
It was some Bene Gesserit level weeping that also included, snot and sobbing.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
Except the amount of nothing that had once been fear was surprisingly huge, and the amount of ‘I’ that remained was scarce.
“What did I say?” I said as we huddled under the two blankets.
“It’s not important.”
“It is to me,” I said.
She stroked my face and kissed my cheek before tucking her head back down on my chest. I thought she wasn’t going to answer at first.
“Not the fire,” she whispered, “You kept screaming, ‘Not the fire.’”
“Well now you have something else to tease me about,” I said softly.
“Never about this,” she said seriously and the small grin I wore faltered.
“We need to go,” I said, “minutes matter.”
“I will pull the cart,” she said seriously, “you will lay down-” My exact fear-
“Listen,” she said moving up and then forcing my head down to look at her.
“I will have both blankets on. They will be soaked in water from the stream. Imps are very bad at aiming. Once they start the hissing they can’t adjust their aim and most of them are very stupid, so they aim where you are not where you will be. Most of them will miss me. What doesn’t miss will hit wet blankets. You will stay still in the cart so as to not mess up the balance. You will stay below the edge so I don’t have to stop to tend to you. I will have to speed up and slow down to try to get the henkals and imps to fight each other. So you’re liable to get tossed around a bit. Try to stay still. If we come to a downed tree or get into trouble I’ll scream and get loose from the yoke and then we will run on foot.
“We will stay to the road. The road likely won’t be maintained at all. You will have to look for the carvings on the trees. The road is the shortest distance across. It is only three thousand stride.”
I didn’t translate the difference, I just knew that was roughly two miles.
We left the cart there and went off the road in the direction the map indicated the water would be.
The map showed a pond but it was more like a lake.
“Wait,” she said unrolling the map.
“We have to go this way for the stream.”
She marched off.
“Why not the pond?” I asked.
“Part of it is in the depths. Aquatic monsters spawn there and can go anywhere in the water though they will prefer the deeper sections.”
I didn’t know if she meant water depth or greater mana density, but I didn’t ask.
She made the buttons out of stone again and connects the two blankets together then made a sort of hooded cape out of them.
We put it in the water and stood on it walking back and forth.
“We could just leave,” I said.
She touched my face again and smiled.
“The nightmares are from your time at the outpost,” she said seriously.
“That would have been at a depth of nine, almost ten. This really is nothing. Almost everyone as gone into the shallows with nothing but a big stick. It’s a tradition. I bet you did it a year after your,” she paused, “awakening.”
“What?”
“No I was just-” she shook her head.
“What is it?”
She paused again and I could tell she was considering lying.
“You don’t have any mana,” she said, “none of the unawakened do.”
I nodded. Not that I really understood what mana was. I knew a bit about how the word mana was used on Earth but not what the weird translation meant here.
I mean you didn’t have to be a die-hard Star Wars fan to know that warpdrive was moving faster than light.
Likewise I’d heard of mana and mana potions. They were the power that made spells work.
Then again, I knew as little about mana in fiction and media as I did warpdrives so I could be wrong.
“Monsters need mana. It’s why they stay in the depths instead of spreading out to cover the world. The more mana the happier they are. The awakened are like barrels of mana so they tend to swarm us. You might be able to make it through if you were by yourself. Then again plenty of monsters hunt and kill animals for the fun or flesh of it. The point is you wouldn’t be a torch in the darkness drawing in the moths.”
“But you would,” I said with some understanding.
“You would even if you were hiding in the cart and I was pulling it.”
“Except you can’t pull it fast enough to outrun them,” she said, “and they would be drawn to us anyway. It does mean if there is a problem-”
“No. Deeps no!”
“Grow up,” she said harshly. Then she rubbed at her forehead.
“What are you going to do stay and die with me? Which won’t happen anyway because this is the shallows!”
She’d thrown up her hands and then bent over to pull the blankets out of the water.
“There are living breathing people to warn of danger,” she said once she had the blankets in her arms.
“You will keep the map on you, and you will warn them, even if you have to run. Even if we have to separate, which we will not because it’s the shallows.”
The prep was all over kill. We didn’t see anything for half a mile. She walked it to save her energy.
Slimes were the first things we saw.
Then the henkals. They were dogs. Like looked like dogs with perhaps a bit too short front legs. Not even overly big dogs either. Not that a pack of dogs couldn’t fuck stuff up.
I guess I was just thinking monsters were more-
I mean the slimes looked like monsters. And with how fast they could digest flesh from a body-
I didn’t have to wait long before I heard a hiss.
I sat up a bit to look even though I wasn’t suppose to move.
Imps looked like monsters too.
Or maybe like sickly babies with green saggy skin and knees that bent the wrong way. Also, strangely giant heads.
Or maybe it was the feathers, or were those scales that sort of puffed away from the head while they hissed.
They shot fire bolts, not fire balls, and they did it like that street fighter guy that yelled, ‘ha-Dooo-KEN!’
Their hands came in palms almost touching. Then they started to hiss and their heads sort of expanded. Except it wasn’t their heads but the scales or feathers or whatever it was.
There was a bright little point of red light, then they snapped their arms out, heels of their hands touching, and the red dot grew to the size of a baseball.
I used the wands of fireball a lot. With their cost and scarcity perhaps more than anyone outside of the military.
Actually, multiple wands every loop, with how many loops? That was the mid hundreds. That might be more than all but a few.
I knew what the spells looked like. They were balls of force holding an explosion at bay.
The fire bolts were just balls of fire, and small balls at that. The didn’t expand or explode when they hit something, and Mr. Kine was right about their aim, they rarely hit anything.
The henkals chased us, staying in a pack that grew and grew in number. Then Mrs. Kine would slow or swerve and we’d go by a group of imps. She took a few hits, but they couldn’t even dry out the blankets.
Once the henkals attacked the whole pack attacked. Even if it was a single imp.
Then we’d run on and for a while we didn’t have anyone following.
“Marker!” she yelled when she saw the stone marker on the other side. They weren’t directly on the borders anyway, so we were likely already out by the time she saw it.
It didn’t seem to take that long at all, though she didn’t stop running for a few hundred more yards.
“Keep a look out for anything following us. We wait here for a bit to kill anything that follows then walk some and then find a place to stop and eat.”
I was out of the cart, this time without tripping.
I had to widen the hole in the blankets as we’d left her only a narrow tunnel to look through to better protect her face.
Then I kissed her and hugged her tight through the still-damp blankets.