He knew there were hundreds of mages who were able to sustain a Cloak of Light and Air as easily as he did now, but Five was proud of his Cloak regardless. He knew that all of his former Pride, except for Two, could have managed to create and maintain this Cloak. His mind was wandering relentlessly as he moved closer to his objective. He never recalled being this torn about completing an objective before.
Before rushing off to turn these deserters back to the Velspe border, he had raced through the rituals and mechanics of creating the proper Artifact out of his front door. Now, anyone wandering within a mile of the door that wasn’t wearing the small bracelet Five had made for himself from a piece of the wood of his front door would find themselves getting turned back upon their own trail. He had set the Artifacts conditional renewal upon the rising sun’s light striking the glyphs he had meticulously carved onto the front of his door. Each new day’s rays of the sun, potent with power and hope, would refill the magical reservoir of the glyphs. If he did it right. And if it worked as he hoped.
He really hoped it would work.
Five had never done much Artifact work, though he knew the theory backwards and upside down.
Moving along the game trail, Five loved the feel of the brisk autumnal air as it moved over his face, and into the places where his garments were looser, or only overlapped lightly. It made him shiver just slightly as the breeze played with the tag-ends of his hair that had escaped his cap.
Looking ahead, he could see the first set of sentries the deserters had put in place around their camp. He moved carefully as he approached, knowing the limitations of a spell was as important as knowing how to cast it.
Okay, he thought. One would have complained incessantly about it, and tried to manipulate me and all of the others into doing it for her. And it may have worked on a few of their number, he considered. His Pride siblings tended to be team oriented and a generally helpful lot, and One had capitalized on that. Often.
If felt to Five as though the longer he was away from the Hamurian forces, and the influence of the Golden Tower, the less kindly disposed he found his thoughts ran towards the former head of his Pride. He remembered often thinking of her as problematic. Troublesome. But lately, he just thought she was horrible, inept, and not nearly as …alluring… as she had seemed all those months ago. Certainly not as alluring as SHE seemed to think of herself. Every spell she had successfully cast, that success had most likely been down his own tutelage of One.
But, still.
Cloak!
He knew that he could not be seen, nor heard, by anyone more than a stride from where he stood. Though, as he walked, he had to be sure to not disturb anything more than a stride from him. Snapping a branch underfoot was fine. Silence. Kicking accidentally a branch that rustled leaves or stones a stride beyond where he stood would be heard AND seen.
Both Four and Six would have just extended the area the spell covered. They had that kind of expansive, all encompassing, ridiculous scale of strength that could cover an entire platoon if needed.
Six might even be able to cover a Century. A legion?
Or more… It was really depressing how vastly different the strengths in Talent the members of his Pride possessed.
Six was probably never in danger of becoming an asologe, because he didn’t have a functional limit to exceed… That thought, the absolute horror of it, brought Five up short, almost making him stumble as he passed the first sentry; a thick slab of a man in the standard Infantry Browns of Velspe, who had his back to a starstone pine and chewed on one of it’s long, blue-green needles as he stared out into the emptiness of the valley.
Five stood still for a moment, and let his breathing slowly fall back into its standard, much slower, rhythm. Three strides from where he stood, the infantryman leaned against the giant pine tree, placidly chewing his pine needle, its tip slowly bobbing up and down with each masticating smear of the man’s molars on the fibrous tissue. The slight left to right motion imparted to the point of the needle gave the methodically bouncing pin-prick head of the needle a doubled circular motion. Five watched it as it rounded back and forth upon itself several times as he allowed his breathing and heartbeat to settle back to a more normal pace.
He allowed himself a full head to toe shake, ending in his hands, before he moved forward again, allowing the spell to absorb the sounds his clothing and the kit he carried on his back to make. Stepping forward once again, Five slowly strode past the bored sentry.
Moving carefully, he stepped silently as a wraith into the outer perimeter of their hastily constructed camp. There were three small rings of tents set up concentrically, with a rope fence on one side to pen the horses, and on the opposite side of the small camp, the lisks were sunning themselves on large stones that overlooked a bow in the local stream. Sunlight broke through the pine canopy here, allowing the large reptiles to indolently laze the day away in the dappled sunlight.
Five had read that the lisks were native to the southern parts of the eastern coasts, and the rocky deserts that could be inland from there. The southernmost tip of Velspe extended into these areas, and the native lisk riders of southern Velspe were known to be as skilled on the great scaly beasts as any Hamurian plainsman was on horseback.
He stepped around several people who milled about the camp as he made his way toward the center of the tents, where he could see a large fire pit had been created, and the man he had identified as a logistics officer of some kind leaned heavily on a crutch over a selection of pans resting upon the stones set around the fire.
He noted their quick, bubbling voices as they rattled along in Velspe. A few people were speaking to each other in Hamurian, repeating basic phrases back and forth to one another. Their accents were horrid. They spoke Hamurat in the sing-song rhythm of their native Velspe. It was funny to hear, and reminded him of the hours he had spent in the Trade Quarter of the capital city in his occasional off hours, listening to the merchants from far flung nations talk and try to good naturedly out-lie one another. He wondered if the few Velspian restaurants he had loved to eat at still existed, with their wine bread heavy meals, and small bowls of cheese topped sauces served piping hot. He missed those lunches.
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He could smell various things cooking.
Mostly variations on what the Hamurian troops called “marching biscuits.” Easily mixed balls of dough, with whatever nutrient dense food they had on hand shoved into the mass, then baked on the edge of the fire.
From the smell, and what he could see in the few open bowls around the fire, it was mostly the oily nuts taken from the cones of the starstone pines, some odd green and red berries he didn’t recognise, and several small animals that had been hunted by someone with skill. He counted at least twelve small skins that had been well scraped, that now hung up on small frames around the fire to cure in the smoke and heat.
Five slowly turned to look into the open flaps of the scattering of small tents that made up the innermost ring of the camp's circular plan. Four were empty of people, and mostly bare of belongings as well. These people had fled with as close to just having the clothes on their backs as he could imagine.
The fifth tent, however, held the sleeping form of the archer captain he had seen three days ago when he had Delved this mob. She had changed.
And not for the better.
Five could see the woman had lost weight in just these last few days, and she was now covered in a layer of sweat as she slept in her open tent on this chilly autumn morning. He chanced moving closer to her, to see if there was an identifiable cause. Five was almost standing with his head over hers as he looked into her tent, finally seeing the source of her illness.
Her leg that had been broken when he had last seen her, had since then been removed. Five guessed the infection his Delving had shown him had worsened enough during the intervening days to warrant the amputation.
Now he wondered if that had been an act of desperation. The tall woman might not make it to nightfall now.
He didn’t know quite what made him do so, but he froze in place, his body rigid in stress and fear, and slowly tried to look around the camp at what it might have been that made his hair stand on end.
It was a slow three minutes, as he stood crouched over the former archer captain, trying to spot the predator his body was telling his mind had to be there.
He was finally able to turn his body from the tent’s opening to view the fire pit in the center, and the cook who was now speaking with the mage he had seen a few days before.
She no longer wore her uniform with the purple borders and edging, but was now dressed in the simple clothing of a woodland peasant. He had seen many women in these scattered hills and deep valleys dressed in exactly this same manor. Heavy boots had replaced her fine, thin leather shoes, and a simple woolen overdress of greens and blues had replaced her Velspe military uniform, and contrasted with a linen underdress of pale yellow, pale enough to almost be white.
He noticed that this new set of clothes almost completely hid the bandages and splint she still had wrapped around the forearm and wrist of her left arm. It made the sleeve a little bulkier than the other, but they were otherwise hidden to those who didn't already know they were there. As they spoke, it became obvious, with the exact curve at which she held her arm Anyone would have noticed after a short while, Five thought.
Five often gave people more credit than they might otherwise deserve, when it came to things like observation of their surroundings, core knowledge, and even manners.
He watched as she spoke animatedly with the camp cook, and from her body language, it was abundantly clear who was in charge.
And it wasn’t the big man with the belt of knives.
He looked pugnacious and defiant. His answers sullen and as close to monosyllabic that the Velspe language would allow.
She looked angry and incredulous. “...you KNOW we must ration the food. You KNOW it. Why are you baking pane now?” He mentally stumbled over the use of the word “pane” and it took him a moment to process that into “breads.”
…Maybe I need to practice Velspian more than I realized… Five thought from where he stood, watching the exchange.
“We need food. We cannot sing. No wine. We cannot drink. So, we eat. I boil river water. All need water. Clean water.” He stuck out his shelf of a cin at the shorter woman. He wasn’t going to budge here.
Her shoulders slumped, and she conceded the points to the larger man. “I cannot keep us hidden much longer.” she said.
The two stared at each other for another moment before the small woman broke the impasse, “There is a village we will pass tomorrow. I will keep us hidden from them all, IF we can move quickly and quietly. Once we are a full day past ‘Garn’s Creek,’” here she emphasized the name of the small village in slow Hamurat before continuing in Velspian. “We can make our way North and then East to Yordani. A week if we push ourselves. There we can slowly lose ourselves.”
He was a little confused by the name “Yordani.” He didn’t know of a town near here by that name. Nor did he know why or how this group might “lose” themselves there. He knew Six loved maps, and had familiarized himself with all of the maps that he was able to get his hands on in camp these last few years, and thought that Six might recognise the place. It was odd for Five to realize he had begun to actively miss his Pride siblings.
Maybe not One, she’s horrible… or Two… Two used to tease me. But, I would take his company right now over being alone here…
His focus was wandering. Again. It was vexing to Five, as he had never had so many issues with keeping his mind on tasks. This could be disastrous, he knew, and so he quickly recentered himself, if for no other reason than to keep the Cloak of Light and Air up as he gathered as much information as he could before he finally chose to act here.
“Commander..” the big man began, but was quickly cut off with a cutting gesture from the little woman’s right arm, and a hissed “Stop!”
The big man had a look on his face like he had just bitten his lower lip, and he slowly began again. “Cicera,” He pronounced the name Ki-KARE-ah. “Please, understand. We have wounded.” And here he looked at the little woman’s arm significantly. “We need warmth. We need water. We need food. This fire, and these little nut and game meat filled pane are all we have for now. There are small things we can do that will yield larger results. And that is my job. Now that Milo is down, this is what I can do to make sure as many of us make it to Yordani as we can manage.”
The petite wizard, Cicera he guessed, was silent at this, just watching the bigger man.
The big man relaxed his stance, and slumped his shoulders. “Have you felt that other wizard again?”
This made Cicera stiffen up again as though he had thrown cold water in her face. She stumbled over a word or two before answering him.
“I felt him this morning. It’s why I was walking around the perimeter since sun up. He’s following us. I just can’t track him. I feel him bumbling along the edges, just out of what I would guess is longbow range, and with Milo down, that doesn’t really matter now. But…” She paused for a moment before continuing.
“...he’s out there. Teasing me. And playing with us. We had better find him as fast as possible, before he kills us all in our sleep or sets the army on us.”