I’d spent a lot of time in evergreen forests in my life. I’d sailed along the Amazon, hunted in Siberia, and even tracked down a mark in northern Canada, a place he’d thought was too remote and cold for me to bother finding him. Hell, I’d spent much of my time in Soluminos in the center of a large fir-type forest. I’d gotten pretty used to them, or so I thought. The Uttar Forest changed my mind.
The sheriff and I killed time in the saloon until nightfall. I checked on Chomai regularly through the buzzfly, but she seemed to be more or less fine. Her captors had disarmed her and taken her deck, after which Vaya roughed her up a bit. That left her with a bloody nose, a swollen lip, and an eye that was probably going to turn black the next day. They bound her hands and feet, fastened a leather collar around her neck, and tied her to one of the hitching rings meant for roadwalkers. It wasn’t a terribly secure method of holding her–I could have gotten free in less than an hour–and they hadn’t even searched her to find the emergency deck I was sure she had squirreled away somewhere.
Realistically, though, I knew that was probably all they needed to do to secure her. The mill was the only solid building in town, so it wasn’t like they could stick her in a cell, and if they’d stripped her down and left her outside overnight, she’d have died of hypothermia. As it was, I suspected she’d spend a miserable evening tied to that post. Plus, even if she got free or reached her deck, there wasn’t much she could do. They weren’t stupid enough to leave her unattended; a marshal stood watch over her with a pet that looked like an odd and frankly disturbing mix between a small lynx and a large dog. If she slipped her bonds, the marshal could shoot her down, and even if he didn’t, I was certain the dog-cat could run her down in seconds.
Twilight fell early that far north, and as it did, the town grew busier as the woodcutters and millworkers finished their shifts. The old man and I took that opportunity to slip out in the confusion and chaos, riding out of town to the west. Once we were out of sight, we cut north and entered the forest, meandering our way beneath the branches. The trees resembled sequoias, with thick, striated trunks and branches that started well out of reach overhead. The bark was a shade of copper at the base that darkened to almost black as it went up, and the needles were so dark they looked like ebony. I wasn’t sure if they were truly black or just very dark green, and I supposed it didn’t much matter.
The boles at the edge of the forest were fairly widely spaced, and the trees were smaller and less heavily covered in foliage. That let light fall to the soil beneath, so at first, our roadwalkers had to weave around bushes and thickets. As we headed deeper in, though, the trees soared higher overhead, their branches extending out and interweaving into a solid canopy. The sky vanished, taking the fading light with it and plunging us into a darkness so deep it felt like being underground. We were forced to light lamps to see where we were going as we picked our way back to the north, setting up close to where we hoped the marshals would pass.
We spent the night huddled beneath my Sanctum rune. The trees blocked the wind that had pummeled us crossing the northern Gistal, but they also blocked sunlight from reaching the ground, so the earth beneath us was cold and damp, making the still air chill and unpleasant. I summoned my pets to stand guard around us and watched for the first half of the night to make sure nothing they couldn’t handle would bother us. The nighttime forest was a hive of activity; smaller herbivores came out of the ground or descended from the trees to feast on the newer needles carpeting the forest floor, which drew larger predators, who drew even larger ones. Ghostly birds that vaguely resembling my cloudhunter drifted from branch to branch on silent wings, occasionally swooping down to snatch up a rodent or large insect. Lupine things prowled the ground in small packs, while feline monsters crept along the lowest, thickest branches and grabbed meals out of the trees. Everything had fur, feathers, or scales ranging from coppery brown to deep black to blend into the nearly monochromatic forest.
Fortunately, nothing bothered any of my pets, not that I expected anything to. The small predators, no doubt Lesser beasts, stayed far away from my Greater and High monsters. The larger predators that I guessed were Greater had no interest in fighting my pets and simply avoided them, looking for food. I had a feeling if the sheriff and I were visible, that would be a different matter entirely, but since we stayed hidden, the beasts left us alone.
The next morning, I tracked the marshals through my buzzfly and cloudhunter. My terror eagle was really too large to fly comfortably beneath the canopy and had to stay above the trees, but my cloudhunter drifted from tree to tree effortlessly, watching the ground below from silent wings. Vaya and one other marshal left town with Chomai, who they’d tied to her roadwalker, her hands bound in front of her so she could ride easily. We watched them pass, then followed an hour or so behind, moving slowly so they remained a couple hours ahead of us. We didn’t need to see them; I could feel where they were through my bond with my fly, and I kept watch on them with the cloudhunter and moonstalker.
The marshals kept their own pets close, using them to protect themselves from the creatures of the forest. Vaya’s firehopper turned out to be an insect that looked like a three-foot-long, black cricket with bright red legs and wings, and the other marshal seemed to be a hunter-type with a dozen Simple pets that ranged from a blue-winged butterfly that crackled with electricity to a porcine beast with black skin, a frog’s face, and horns curling up in two rows along its spine. Their presence meant I had to keep my pets back far enough to keep from being easily spotted, so I interchanged the owl and the wolf-bear every so often to make sure it wasn’t obvious that the marshals were being followed by either.
We faced our own share of beast attacks, of course, but none were really significant. A copper-colored cougar with a long, weasel-like body pounced on us as we passed; a pack of canine monsters with humped shoulders and curving bull horns surrounded us and attacked from all sides; a pair of six-foot-long beasts that looked like wolverines with leaner bodies and bristly, metallic fur exploded from a hidden den dug into the earth and launched themselves at us. None of the attacks were serious, though, and none of the creatures were really appropriate for me to tame. Most of them were wood or earth types, with some air and vermin creatures mixed in, and none were High ranked, a fact that seemed to bother the sheriff.
“The Uttar’s usually got more High creatures roaming naturally than almost any place in Mukkal,” he explained. “There ain’t many people up here to hunt them, and those that are here usually stay at the edge of the forest, where cutting and hauling trees is easier. Only a few hunters and trappers looking for furs or beasts to sell in Ohr and Na Jhauta ever come this deep, and there ain’t enough of them to really thin the population out.”
He looked around at the dark trees. “Last time I was here, we saw a High-ranked beastie pretty much every day. That’s why most groups that travel the Uttar do it in large numbers or with strong handlers to protect them.”
“Kamath’s been capturing pets,” I suggested. “Maybe he’s had his marshals rounding up all the powerful creatures from the forest, too.”
“That’s a possibility, I suppose.” He shook his head, a grim expression on his face. “I can’t even begin to guess what he wants with all those beasties, boy, but it can’t be good. Unless he’s planning on creating an army of handlers, I can’t see no point to bringing them all together.”
“Could he do that?” I asked. “Create an army of handlers, I mean?”
“Only happened once that I know of,” the old man shrugged. “Ujali created an army she called her Beast Immortals and used them to conquer all of Pala. The stories say they were something like a thousand strong. Now, though, the closest thing is the Imperial Shock Legion, two hundred handlers trained to fight as a force. The Republic and Confederacy each have their own version, of course, but those are smaller and not as well trained.”
He eyed me gravely. “Pala, the birthplace of the Sarjan Empire, is home to over two hundred million people, boy. That’s fifty times the whole population of Mukkal, it’s all one nation, organized and civilized, and they’ve put together a legion of two hundred handlers. There ain’t no way that Kamath can make an army; there’s just not enough people in the whole continent to do it.”
Traveling through the forest was like riding in perpetual twilight. The sun never appeared through the trees overhead, and almost no light filtered through the black needles to reach the ground below. We heard rain hitting the branches above us, but little of it actually fell on our heads. Despite that, the sound of dripping water echoed all around us. It was impossible to judge what time of day it was, which made it feel like we rode endlessly through a single frozen moment. I found myself turned around several times, unsure what direction we were heading, and a ridiculous and dramatic part of me dreaded that we would walk through that gloomy forest forever, unable to move forward or turn back.
The path the marshals took wasn’t hard to follow. As Chotu said, the trail was marked with white stones, each of which had a flat bottom marked with an arrow pointing toward the next stone. In the dimness of the forest, the shimmering rocks, clearly out of place, were easy to spot. The path wound around a bit; as Chotu explained it, the trail meandered to make it easier to watch over. After I remembered that, I sent some of my sneakier pets out further, keeping an eye for creatures that lingered near the path without attacking us.
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I found the first watcher on the third day. Technically, I found his pets: ten Lesser creatures, all wood and prey types that wouldn’t draw a lot of attention in the forest, ranged along the path ahead of us. Once I found them, it didn’t take long to locate their handler hidden inside a blind half a mile from the trail. I considered killing the man and his pets, but according to Chotu, the sentries along the path reported in regularly, so killing one would bring attention I didn’t want.
We avoided the man and his pets with the simple expedient of leaving the path. I could feel Chomai’s direction with my buzzfly, so we didn’t really need to follow the trail itself to track them. We swung wide to the east, assuming that the trail would curve away from us to the northwest at some point and that most of the watchers would be on the western side of the track, a more direct route to the hills.
The first flakes of snow drifted down early on the fourth day, filtering through the branches above and gently dusting us. By midday, the overloaded branches bent and shifted enough to let light and snow through, and the dusting became a steady snowfall. The temperature plummeted as the gaps in the canopy let what little warmth they held in escape and allowed the frigid wind to plunge down upon us, and we trudged along miserably. The snow continued to fall through the day, dumping several inches of powder on the needle-strewn forest floor, and as the snow deepened, the pace of the marshals ahead of us slowed considerably. It didn’t take much to figure out why: the snow no doubt hid the trail markers the marshals used to stay on the path, and they’d have to slow down or even dismount and walk to be sure which lump in the snow was the stone they sought.
The snow began to melt on the fifth day, and sound of dripping and trickling water filled the forest. Drops of snowmelt and chunks of half-frozen slush fell on us was we rode, but fortunately, the needles covering the earth kept it from turning to muck and making the travel even harder. As we continued on, we spent more time avoiding the increasing number of watchers and even saw a few patrols riding through the forest. I didn’t know if they were looking for intruders or beasts, and it didn’t much matter; I had to assume they were in contact with their base, so we carefully avoided them when we could and hid beneath a Sanctum rune when we couldn’t. That slowed us considerably, and I felt Chomai getting farther from us by the hour.
“We should be getting into the Anpads tomorrow,” the sheriff told me as we huddled around a campfire. “Probably late in the day.”
“You mean their foothills?” I asked.
He shook his head. “The Anpads ain’t like the Mahads down south. They’re less mountains and more really big hills. The forest don’t stop for them; the ground just sort of rises up beneath it there. Tomorrow, the land’ll start to slope upward, and that’ll be the start of the Anpad Range.” He grimaced. “It’ll also be when we need to start looking out even more. The forest helps us hide during the day, but it’s brighter up in the hills, and there’s more brush and small trees things can hide in for an ambush.”
We rode more cautiously the next day, with the shockfloater and wave horror nearby and the rest of my pets ranging out, looking for watchers and patrols. As the sheriff predicted, the ground rose beneath us somewhat after midday. As we rode uphill, the trees thinned out a bit, and the atmosphere brightened as the dim sunlight overhead finally trickled through the canopy. Rain misted onto us as we rode through steadily thickening underbrush, picking a path since no trails existed. Creeks and small streams cut through the hillside, running down to water the forest behind us, and we carefully forded these slippery, sometimes half-frozen brooks.
The hillside climbed steadily, then dropped down into a valley, plunging us into shadow once more before we climbed out again into sunlight. We descended again and spent the night nestled beneath the canopy, cloaked in darkness and a Sanctum rune while the marshals camped on the hilltop above us. The next morning, we set out early and resumed our ascent. Sentries roamed the hilltops in force, and we took to skirting the slopes and riding from valley to valley to avoid their gazes. Finally, we crested the side of a mountain and reined in, staring down at the sight below.
“Well, I think we’re here,” the sheriff chuckled.
“I’m not sure what gave you that idea,” I deadpanned in reply.
The valley before us was longer than most of those we’d ridden through, stretching the length of my vision. The hill leading into it slanted gently down, but the sides sloped sharply upward, revealing bare stone. A wide stream ran through the center of it, disappearing around the other side of the hill we’d skirted. The ground and walls of the canyon were scorched and blackened, as though a wildfire had passed through, and whatever trees were left behind were gone, either cut low enough that I couldn’t see the stumps or removed in some other way. The damage extended halfway up the valley’s slopes, leaving the entire gorge open to the sky, and I blinked owlishly at the late afternoon sunlight that streamed through a hole in the clouds overhead.
The terrain only caught my attention in passing, though. The valley was obviously inhabited; not only that, it looked more civilized than Sinakha had. Rows of long, low wooden houses resembling bunkhouses or barracks ran down the center of the valley, flanking the central stream. A paddle wheel jutted from one building into the stream, turning slowly but inexorably, while smoke poured from the chimney of a stone building set farther back from the water. Tightly fitted plank roads wound behind the houses, leading deeper into the valley. A large pasture on the other side of the town held a couple dozen roadwalkers, and simple bridges had been built over the stream to allow people to pass back and forth from one side of the small town to the other without getting wet.
It was well organized, decently constructed, and looked to hold a fair number of people–most of whom didn’t appear to be marshals. At first glance, the place looked like a normal town, one that I might see anywhere in this world. The twisting sensation that hit my stomach as I looked at it dispelled that notion, and my eye began to spot discrepancies that supported my Sense Imbalance’s assertion that this place was anything but normal.
“Something’s wrong with this place,” Ramka rumbled from beside me.
I nodded and pointed. “Yeah. The people.”
“They look just like regular folk to me,” the old man suggested.
“Take a closer look. Everyone’s walking with their heads down and their shoulders hunched, hurrying as fast as they can. No one’s talking to anyone else or even looking around, and not a single one of them is walking on those streets behind the houses, even though it’s probably easier than using the muddy banks.” I shifted my finger to one of the slopes towering over the town. “And look there.”
The old man peered for a second before letting out a low whistle. “Is that a rifleman’s perch?” he asked, pointing to a cleverly camouflaged rock wall behind which a flash of black fabric appeared.
“Yeah. There’s another over there, and two on the other side.” I pointed to the hidden sniper platforms. “I’ll bet there are watchers on the hillside above us, too, keeping an eye on the paths in and out.”
I looked back at the town, activating Telescopic Vision. “And that’s not all. Most of the people look beaten-down. Their clothes are tattered and stained, and some of them are missing shoes. A few have bruises on their faces, and I see whip marks on the back of one woman’s neck.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed. “You think they’re slaves, then?”
“I don’t know about slaves, but they don’t look like they want to be here,” I shrugged. I pointed past the town at a steady line of people emerging from deeper in the valley and trudging toward the town. A pair of marshals rode back and forth along the group, their pets nearby and their eyes hard. “They’re all coming from that end of the valley, and from what my bird can see, Kamath’s got them digging trenches and holes down there.”
“He thinks he’s gonna dig up a Legendary Beast?” Ramka snorted. “Maybe in fifty years or so.”
“I don’t know, but I’d say that’s where we need to go to figure out what’s going on.”
He frowned. “Where’s the girl?”
“There.” I pointed toward the largest building, one near the center of the town.
“How’s she doing?”
“Hold on, and I’ll check.” I closed my eyes and cast my senses down my bond into the buzzfly’s. It saw nothing but the darkness of Chomai’s pocket, where it hid, but I listened carefully for a few seconds.
“…get your asses over here and bust me out,” the woman muttered in a low voice, the sound a deep rumble in her chest to the fly. “I’m done being a damn prisoner. You hear that, fly? You tell that asshole to come get me!”
I grinned as I withdraw my senses and returned to my own body. “She’s fine,” I told the old man. “She’s bitching about being a prisoner and wondering when we’re going to come get her.”
He nodded. “Then we wait for nightfall and go see what the hell that marshal’s doing down there. After that, we break the girl out, kill Kamath, and get my Parri back.”
I kept my face carefully neutral. It all sounded good, but Ishar and Chotu’s words still rang in my mind. If they were remotely close to being correct, killing Kamath might be an impossibility, and trying was likely to get us both killed, Parri or no Parri. Besides, something about the situation bothered me. We’d gotten here far too easily, in my opinion. I didn’t know how many marshals Kamath had left, but I bet that it was enough to ring this place with sentries, especially if he had multiple hunter-type handlers with a dozen or so pets each. Either Kamath was lazy about his security, or…
“Sara, my whip can’t be taken from me, right?” I asked her silently.
“No. It’s bonded to you; if it’s taken, it’ll dissolve back into world energy that I’ll reclaim and use to rebuild it.”
“What if I don’t want you to rebuild it? At least, not right away? How quickly can you create it?”
She paused for a second. “That’s how long it takes me to destroy and rebuild it.”
“That’s fast.” I paused, thinking furiously. “What about the storage function? Can I use it without the weapon?”
“No, sorry. The ability is bound into the weapon’s energy signature.” She paused. “Although I could add the feature to your clothing if you want. It’ll take a couple hundred of your XP to do it, though.”
I grimaced but gave her a mental nod. “Okay, do that, then. Make it as large as you can. I think I’m going to need it.”
I returned my focus to the camp and backed my roadwalker away from the forest’s edge. “Tonight’s a possibility,” I said slowly. “We’re going to need to do some preparation first, though.”
“Preparation?” the sheriff asked.
“Yeah.” I looked at the town again, memorizing its layout and making mental plans. “We’re definitely going to need some preparation–and maybe a little bit of luck.”