“Maybe,” she replied, unsure of anything right now. The past days had been tough, and despite the kindness she was shown, this place would likely turn into a bad memory before long.
She could only hope it wouldn’t remain that way.
3. To Cross a River – July 22, Year 216
A sheepstealer is a bird of prey ripped straight from the nightmares of a child. In fact, Sally remembered having plenty of nightmares featuring the bird, no doubt because of the sayings and stories her mother told her about naughty children leaving the Villa without an adult.
And now, her nightmare had materialized. Well, partly.
The bird was about a hundred feet or so out in front of the rocky overhang she’d slept under. It had a large, hooked beak capable of tearing apart the toughest hides and strong claws with a grip easily capable of cracking skulls. It was completely white, including its beak, and had eerily piercing sky-blue eyes. Its wingspan was around twenty feet – nearly four times her length!
The sheepstealer was thus a popular boogeyman for parents to tell their children. Their coloring and method of hunting meant it was nearly impossible to spot it before it dove, while their strength was such that it could swoop down, grab a sheep and take off with them in the blink of an eye. Children would be easy prey for them.
Such a thing had never happened. Or, at least, she had never seen or heard of it happening, and her mentor had told her neither he nor other Wardens had to deal with a case in which it actually happened. It was always some other animal, like a simple wolf, that was to blame. But truth never stopped stories from spreading, certainly not when it scared children into listening to their elders.
Or, maybe, was the fact it never happened that it was used to scare children? True tales of children gone missing might be a bit too gruesome.
Regardless, despite its impressive size, the thing was just an animal rather than some form of demon or another, and thus tended to avoid humans like most animals. Apart from the occasional theft of some of their flock, of course. The only time they hunted people was when one approached them while they were grounded, or when people encroached on their territory.
The one in front of Sally had spread its large wings around its prey: an elk calf. The sheepstealer had dropped it from up high and the thud it made on impact was what had woken her up.
Now, normally, that would be it. She would carefully sneak away while it was busy devouring its prey, and while she might not be successful, the noise of a gunshot would likely be enough to scare it off. Generally, hunting it wasn’t worth it, since outside of bragging rights or selling its feathers – neither of which Wardens really concerned themselves with – there was no reason to do so. And while she could use the money, it wasn’t dire enough for her to try and hunt a sheepstealer. Besides, plucking the thing was too much of a hassle, one-armed as she was. The reasonable thing to do would be to just sneak away while it was busy eating.
But it was her second day of travel and she had yet to encounter something suitable to practice her aim on; a practice she sorely needed. She had never been a great shot with a pistol – good, but not great – and she was certain she would never shoot a rifle again. She needed to get used to firing a pistol with only her right arm and at great distance, and she now needed to be exceptional. Survival, professional pride and, presumably, her future career depended on it.
Plus, she was feeling just a tiny bit vindictive for it interrupting her sleep.
So instead, she snuck closer to the bird. She couldn’t make the rocks stop crunching, but she wasn’t heavy and knew how to make her steps land lightly. It was also busy enjoying its meal, complete with tearing of flesh, clacking of beaks, snapping of bones and thrills of satisfaction, hindering its otherwise great hearing, and it was facing away from her. Altogether, it was relatively easy to sneak up on the bird.
She didn’t have to travel far, of course. That would defeat the purpose of the exercise. So, when she got within seventy feet, she stopped. Drawing her Guardsman .45, she switched off the safety and took aim at its back.
It felt awkward, holding it with only one hand. She’d been drilled time and again to always, if possible, fire with both. While she also – thankfully – had some training in how to shoot it with single-handed, it hadn’t become second nature. The one-armed training had focused on shooting in case of emergencies only, and at a much shorter distance of ten feet.
Well, there’s a first time for everything, she thought. A final look down the barrel, adjustment of the aim and a deep breath later, she fired.
And missed completely. She expected a poor performance, but to not even clip its wing? She hadn’t even seen where the bullet landed hit the dirt!
She winced at her poor showing. That stings, she thought. Niall would’ve chewed her out.
The bird startled from its meal and, without even glancing at Sally, beat its wings and leapt into the air. For a second, she debated firing another round, but her pride was wounded enough. Besides, while she had plenty of spare ammunition thanks to the Grandies, conservation of resources was always more important than pride.
Watching the bird fly away, Sally holstered her gun and returned to her camp.
The sheepstealer would probably hang around the area for a while, she knew, waiting for her to leave her shelter and strike down from above. But this wasn’t its territory – their usual haunts were much further up the mountains – and as long as she remained underneath the overhang, it would not approach her, cautious as it was.
Besides, it had undoubtedly eaten the best parts of the calf, and sheepstealers were notoriously picky eaters. The carcasses they leave behind often have plenty left for scavengers to enjoy.
Once back at her hideaway, she debated going back to sleep; the bird had woken her up uncomfortably early. But she didn’t really feel tired, just annoyed at the rude wake-up call.
Instead, she took the coat used as blanket and put it on, then grabbed her bag and pulled out a green-brown canteen full of fresh water and a cup. She filled the cup and side it aside before pulling out some cheese and tack.
It was time for breakfast.
X
After breakfast, Sally continued her journey. She had made good time yesterday, roughly twenty miles in spite of a somewhat sluggish pace and the rough terrain. It had come as some surprise when she reached the Graidle river yesterday. She had expected to arrive at around the start of noon on the second day at the earliest. Instead, she had arrived there at sunset and doubled back to find a good place to rest for the night.
Thus, it didn’t take long before she saw the river again.
Like most rivers flowed all year round, the Graidle was poisonous and looked the part. It looked sluggish, a meandering thing with ugly, slate-grey water flowing eastward to Lake Prior, merging with the Gesker river along the way. It also looked like it had the consistency of gruel, adding to its sluggish looks.
In reality, it neither sluggish nor did it feel like gruel. The water had a deceptively strong current, especially at the center, where it could drag under and drown anything attempting to cross it, be they man or beast. There were only a few select locations where it could be crossed, and even then only carefully.
Because of this, the Graidle river acted as a natural boundary of sorts, the closest thing to a ‘border’ the Villas had. There was very little in the way of formal borders within the Grand Circuit, simply because holding land too far outside of your local area was both too difficult to maintain and essentially worthless; all worthwhile pieces of land were already occupied by their own inhabitants.
Conquering these lands likewise wasn’t worth it. Maintaining an army was costly, and resources in the Grand Circuit always scarce. Furthermore, any force send to attack another community was one not protecting their own, and there were threats out there that always knew when a community left itself undefended, somehow. Even the Anteer cities, by far the most resourceful and safest places in the Circuits, wouldn’t risk it.
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In fact, the Wardens are the largest intercommunal fighting force within the Grand Circuit, and it is only a loose association rather than a formal army belonging to a state. They rarely had to kill people at all, barring the occasional band of bandits, and never an army from one of the other cities or Villas. There were plenty of threats and natural barriers – such as the Graidle – to stop such things from happening.
Sally stood in front of a gap in that natural barrier, on the riverbank. It was a particularly wide – and thus shallow – stretch of the river, some distance still before it bend, and littered with large rocks in its course to break up the flow of the river.
Looking at its grey waters churn and flow around these rocks, she felt strangely nervous. Not of the crossing itself – she had done that part plenty of times. It was dangerous, yes, but not difficult so long as you knew the right spots to do so, and Niall had made sure she knew. The water might be poisonous, but unlike some other rivers, it wasn’t the kind of poison that ate your skin, flesh and bones within seconds; that one was further south, lining the Red Circuit.
No, there was something else, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Was it because it she was doing it alone? Niall had always been there with her, watching over her, ready to catch her if she fell.
But it wasn’t loneliness or loss that gripped her – at least, not more than normal these past few days – nor was it simply fear. It felt like she was committing a form of transgression, the breaking of a sacred oath.
It made her want to turn back, but then what? There is nothing to go back to, Sally argued to herself, only forward.
Taking of her socks and shoes, rolling up her pants and steeling her will, she marched down the riverbank and into the water.
The water was quite cold, but not as cold as the meltwater she had woken up in five days before. She felt coarse particles – salt from the plains on the other side of the river – bite into her skin, less like sand during a sandstorm and more like dried sweat after a particularly intense work-out.
As she stepped further into the river, it deepened and grew stronger. Even at the crossing, the water still came up to just below her knees and the current had a vicious pull to it, but it was manageable with the rocks as cover. Before she knew it, she’d reached the other side; it was only two dozen feet wide, after all.
She felt odd, having reached the other side. She felt neither relief nor guilt, either of which she had expected. Instead, she just felt… okay.
After a final look at the river, she shrugged. She waited some time her legs to dry before rubbing the salt off her skin. Then she put her socks and shoes back on and continued her journey.
X
The Gold Circuit was the ancient, one-hundred-fifty-mile-long road on which she would continue the journey, though thankfully she only had to travel ten of them. It lay but a mile out from the river crossing and was a monument from the Old World, one of the few that survived the Long Sun. Over forty feet wide and covered in greyish-brown dust, underneath it was an oily-black road of unknown substance, thoroughly cracked not like rock, but like glass. Within this mesh network of cracks was another unknown material, a clear substance glueing it together and giving the road its oily sheen.
Stepping on it, Sally felt an odd current running through the soles of her feet and tickling the inside of her scalp. Run, it seemed to say, run away! It was as if the road had a mind of its own and didn’t appreciate being stepped upon.
The impulse wasn’t strong, however. More a feeling of restlessness, of unease rather than anxiety or outright fear. Easily ignored even by the dumbest of pack-animals used by various trading caravans, as long as they were somewhat trained and conditioned for the journey.
It was enough to deter most demons and other monstrosities from approaching it under normal circumstances. All Circuits acted as a containment circle of sorts – albeit with effects specific to them – and kept the worst of the worst prison within its confines, only spilling it in rare events. It was the reason the vast majority of people lived on the outer rim of the Circuits rather than inside it, barring a few exceptions and these exceptions were, to some, not even people to begin with.
Directly south of the part she entered at – to her right, as she was heading eastward – Sally kept a wary eye for any movement while journeying onward. The Greysalt Plains covered half the territory within the Gold Circuit and was home to many different threats, two of which in particular were often found at the edges of their prison, ready to snack the unwary traveler.
She could see them even now, despite the perpetual winds flowing across the Greysalts, throwing up salty dust-clouds and obscuring traveler and demon alike. Worms wriggled in the distance, flashing gold in color whenever the rare ray sunlight pierced the grey veil. They were continuously diving in and out of the salty earth that made their homes in a frenzy as they battled the second most common creature threatening travelers of the Gold Circuit.
Hovering over them were outsized flies encrusted in and partially made out of the very salt that made their home. They were the outriders, scouts and hunters of the Grey Hives lying deeper in the Greysalts’ interior. These saltflies used their crystalline limbs as spears, jabbing at resurfacing goldworms and, if caught, carried them away to their homes deeper in the desert.
Like all demons, they liked the taste of human flesh, though thankfully their fellow’s flesh was an acceptable alternative. It was why travelling alone was generally the safest option on the roads of the Circuits. For your average trader, this limiting themselves to a very small group, mobile group, favoring speed and stealth over defense. On the other end of the spectrum were the large, foreign merchant caravans, great processions larger than entire Villas, numbering into the hundreds, and banking on firepower to survive their tracks.
Since the goldworms and saltflies were busy fighting each other, Sally’s journey remained smooth, even when she passed the confluence of the Graidle and the Gesker – the river running from up north, through Villa territory, separating the Villas Guha and Palters from the Zjevik-Ong.
The mixing of the two toxic rivers caused a great deal of rainbow-colored vapor to be thrown up, shrouding the confluence, but she could still see the devil-eels, siltspitters and alligators lurking in it. Thankfully, these were just animals and had no particular desire to eat people, though they still sometimes ventured onto the Gold Circuit when desperate enough, infected by some strange illness or parasite, or magically corrupted in some way.
But with wary eyes, a bit of luck and the occasional veering off the Gold Circuit – a group of devil-eels had crawled up the riverbank a bit too close for comfort – she made the ten-mile journey easily enough, arriving at the crossing with the Red Circuit some time past noon.
The plan was to rest at the crossing for a quick lunch, but Sally noticed two things as she approached. One of which was worrying.
First was, of course, the road of the Red Circuit. Made of the same stuff as the Gold Circuit, the Red Circuit was wider at over fifty feet across, and a roundtrip would be three-hundred miles rather than a hundred-and-fifty.
Unlike the Gold Circuit, however, stepping on it brought no particular emotion to mind. Instead, the black substance made your feet stick to the road, as if wanting to keep you on the road rather than off it, albeit without the mental influence the Gold Circuit had. Furthermore, it was cold to the touch – very cold, with both effects increasing in strength the longer you walked on it.
On occasion, you could spot a creature that had gotten stuck to the road and subsequently either starved or froze to dead in the blistering heat. There was no consistency as to why it happened, what caused it or how to prevent it from happening. Sure, sometimes it was because you walked the road too long, but other times things just got permanently stuck at random. The only reason it practically never happened to people is simply because they wore shoes; you could, in fact, sometimes find an imprint of a sole stuck to the road, left behind by some unfortunate soul.
The only thing you can do is walk beside the road as often as possible, and make the moments on the road as short as possible.
Still, encountering such a corpse was very rare, not only because it was uncommon in and of itself, but because of the scavengers, both animal and human. They were always willing to take the small risk to get to these creatures for either a quick meal or a small profit.
Such a frozen corpse wasn’t the second thing Sally saw at the crossroads, however. Instead, it was smoke.
She was still some distance away. Unfortunately, the Grandies hadn’t gifted her telescope – understandable, really, they were expensive – so there was only one thing to do. Drawing her trusty sidearm, she began slowly moving toward the crossroads.
She saw no movement, nor were there any shouts or cries, growls or roars or anything else indicating life or an active fight. As she got closer, the smoke seemed to come from the smoldering remains of a small number of tents. It was apparent that it had been quite some time since the attack; there were no active flames and the tents were mostly ashes.
Still, she remained wary and as she approached, she saw the cause of the destruction: a bloodfiend.
Much like a skinner, bloodfiends have a stereotypically demonic appearance: hairless, lanky with long limbs and a somewhat hunched figure, although much thinner than a skinner. Instead of pale white skin, bloodfiends have dark grey skin with a somewhat blueish hue to them. They have a broad, human-like grin without any teeth. They also lacked the sharp, slicing claws on their hands like skinners possessed. Instead, they have a tongue with a barb, fang or tooth at its tip, capable of penetrating through flesh and bone and through which they sucked the blood out of its victims.
Bloodfiends were solitary hunters, always. They hunted only at night and their color made it very difficult to spot them. Battles with them were rare, simply because their stealth made it likely their prey was dead before it could realize the danger.
If it did come to battle though, bloodfiends were far from helpless. Their speed was incredible, the fastest of all creatures she knew. If you blinked during a battle with them, you would either lose sight of them or crossed whatever distance you and them.
Thankfully, she encountered this one during the day, and after it had a feast, if the desiccated husks she spotted were anything to go by. The burned-out tents also meant there had been a battle, though she could not see any wounds on the bloodfiend. Even if it wasn’t wounded, the bloodfiend would be slow and tired, likely resting or even asleep currently.
With its back facing towards her, Sally had no trouble getting closer to it, stopping at fifty feet instead of the seventy she’d done with the sheepstealer.
Taking aim and remembering the lesson from earlier today, she fired once more.
It was a hit. Not exactly where she aimed, but a hit nonetheless.
The demon’s shrill scream filled the air for a second, arching its back, its tongue spasming into the air as if attempting to taste where she was.
Sally fired once more, but this time she missed the demon, seeing the bullet hit the ground a few inches beside it.
Then it stood up and turned around.
Only now did she begin to realize how stupid of an idea it was to engage the demon. Her pistol wasn’t particularly powerful, nor did it have the range to fire at a bloodfiend from a safe distance – for as much as a safe distance existed when facing the thing. Nor did she have backup or fallback plan in case her first plan failed, which it did because she didn’t have a plan. Failure meant death. She shouldn’t have started this fight at all.
It was as if all Niall had taught her had been forgotten.
Do I have some kind of a death wish? But there was no time to respond to that thought. The bloodfiend charged her.
She shouldn’t be able to respond. A moving bloodfiend was less a quick dash and more short-distance teleportation. Her life, which had been miraculously recovered by the waters of the arroyo, was forfeit once more.
But either by grace, fate, divine will or some ancestral blessing, Sally could respond, and did.
The demon’s tongue lashed out towards her sternum. She ducked underneath it and before the bloodfiend could respond – and wasn’t that a thought, faster than a bloodfiend! – her Guardsman was under what passed for its chin. Blood running cold, she fired up once, twice and, seeing the bullet enter and blood leave, gave it a final kick.
The bloodfiend toppled over, dead.
Holy-
She stood still for a second, a chill coursing through her veins before being replaced by fire and a shiver crawling from head to toe. Sweat broke out in buckets and she began panting. Her face became pallid, and nausea and vertigo got a hold over her. She fell on her ass.
Whatever it was that passed over her had taken much of her energy in return, but it didn’t matter.
Ancestors preserve me. And perhaps they had, for what else could have?
X
She had cut out the fang on the tip of the bloodfiend’s tongue – it could fetch a decent price in Cardinar – and looted what she could off of the corpses and the rest of the camp: some ammo, coin, two rifles and four pistols. Apparently, it had been a small caravan of sorts, complete with pack animals but very low on guards – a mistake that had clearly cost them.
Sally had never travelled with a caravan, and thought them a big waste. They always lost something during their travels, whether it be lives, livestock, resources or, most often, all of the above. It was a very un-Circuit like way of doing business, but she could understand that it was a cold calculation of profits and loss.
What these people had done was straight off-the-wall and, in very Circuit-like fashion, they had paid the price.
That she almost paid the same price with her own stupidity was ignored, for now.