Mitchell wasn’t sure what to make of his first actual town in this new world. On the one hand, the people here were, for the most part, human-shaped, even if they were in a larger variety of body sizes than one might find on Earth. But on the other hand, he expected something more… alien or unusual. People everywhere needed four walls and a roof and once that was decided he supposed there weren’t all that many variations for the average person.

As the town came into sharper focus, that morning’s language lesson was put on hold as all stood up to get a better view. After weeks spent overland in the desert, they were all eager to be in civilization again. The village–or maybe it was a city here, he didn’t know–was vaguely circular in shape and the town proper was surrounded by high walls that, as far as Mitchell could tell from his vantage, completely encircled it. His view of the far side of the city was blocked by a hazy cloud of dust from the bustle of activity inside the walls but he could still see the irregular-shaped spire that shot up like a needle from the center of Besari.

Revos saw him squinting at the towering structure and explained.

“That is the Great Basari Wellspring,” he said. “Water shoots up to the surface night and day, laden with minerals. Over time they collected and formed the spire. It provides water for the entire city as well as some of the outlying villages. Look there.”

The cambion extended a thickly muscled arm and pointed a black-clawed finger to the right, what would be the north of the city. Mitchell could just make out what looked like an aqueduct that snaked away into the distance.

“And there.”

Pointing to the left he saw two more heading in a southern direction and, to his surprise, one that was running almost parallel to the Diran Road. The aqueducts were made of the same tan sandstone that was found all over the desert and they had blended in almost perfectly with the landscape so Mitchell had not noticed them before.

Mitchell had never been to Italy, although he had always wanted to go. One of the things that had always fascinated him was the aqueducts that the Romans had constructed, some of which were still standing and in use. The people here had developed the same technique and even used arches to support them. Mitchell didn’t know enough about engineering to know if these sorts of ideas were just that common or if there was some sort of cultural mixing that had gone on in the past. Maybe the Romans had developed the idea and it had been brought here? Or was it developed here and brought to Earth? Or had both societies come upon the idea independently?

“What is it?” Allora asked him, seeing him staring hard at the water system.

“It’s nothing. Just that an ancient civilization built the same sort of system to transport water on my world. Exactly the same. It’s a little weird seeing it here. But it makes me miss home.”

A pained look passed over Allora’s features, there and gone so fast that if Mitchell hadn’t been studying her face for the last several weeks he might not have noticed it. He did notice, however, and felt a little guilty. He was no longer angry about what had happened and, as he’d learned more of the situation, he could understand the desperation that had forced her into it. He hadn’t meant to cause her grief over it yet again but before he could try to alleviate her guilt, she’d turned away and scanned the horizon. She was ever watchful for danger, even this close to the city. Maybe more so now because of their proximity to Basari. A town meant people and potential threats.

They rode on in silence for a bit, each of them taking in the signs of civilization after weeks in the wilderness. He appreciated the break. Mitchell couldn’t deny that the intensity with which they pushed him had been paying off. Revos or Allora still used the language spell on him from time to time, but mostly it was when they needed to explain something technical about the magic he was learning. It helped that the language followed the same subject-verb-object structure as his native English, so he didn’t have to learn all new syntax. Once he had the format down, it was more a matter of vocabulary than anything else.

The language, which they called Common, seemed fairly forthright and direct, which reminded him a little of English in that way. Some of the vowels and consonants were a little tricky to get out with his untrained tongue and there seemed to be a few more throat sounds than he thought were necessary but Allora explained that the common tongue had descended from ancient Draconic. The dragons, she explained, were the original rulers of Tewadunn. The entire world had been divided up amongst the powerful creatures at some point in the far past. Tewadunn itself meant land of the wyrms.

“Wait wait,” Mitchell had interjected, stunned. “There are dragons here? Like actual dragons? Huge flying lizards with wings that breathe fire?”

“Of course,” Allora responded, matter-of-factly, before amending her statement. “Not many. Females rarely choose to reproduce and over time their numbers have dwindled, but there are maybe two or three dozen on the continent. Two make their homes in the Skybreaker Peaks. Oh, and not all breathe fire. In the peaks, one is an ice dragon and the other is a lightning dragon.”

The implications of that had struck him mute for nearly a quarter-hour.

A good portion of their language practice was Lethelin or Allora introducing some new words and then him trying to make sentences. The women would talk to each other and he would try to translate what was said and repeat it back. This was the most useful because he got to hear the language used in real-time and it allowed him to pick up things that weren’t introduced during the lesson. It was sometimes a little tense when Lethelin seemed to be picking a fight with the overly-serious paladin. Mitchell wasn’t nearly adept enough with the language to pick up on the nuance but he could sense that there was something in the way Lethelin would express herself that seemed to needle Allora. When he caught Revos smirking at their exchanges, he knew he wasn’t imagining it. Sometimes, the two seemed to get along and other times it looked like Allora wanted to strangle her. Still, he picked up some helpful words that way.

With his magical training, things were progressing much more slowly. The revelation that he had a mana reservoir that was at or near its full size didn’t mean a whole lot to him because he didn’t have any experience with what that meant in practice besides casting more powerful spells more often. What excited him was that he had access to six of the eight mana types which gave him a wide variety of spells he could choose from when casting. That was assuming he could learn them which Revos said was the real limiting factor for arcanists and mages. It took time to master new spell runes. The more you knew, the more versatile you were as a caster but it also meant more time to become adept at them. That and access to gemstones of sufficient quality.

Allora had told him that before the cekip had exploded the six gemstones that had lit up were the ones for conjuration, abjuration, evocation, enchantment, illusion, and divination. Mitchell didn’t know exactly what that meant yet but Allora and Revos both said those were very good. Unfortunately, getting started wasn’t as easy as he had hoped. It wasn’t like with the sword where you could just pick it up and start swinging.

For any spell to work, the mana type had to be channeled into a rune, which you had to learn, that shaped the mana into the desired effect and then directed through either a glove like the one Revos wore, called a sevith, or a headband–what Allora preferred–which was called a krisa. One was not better than the other, it was more a matter of personal choice. Because Allora also used her blades in combat, she preferred to have her magic directed out of the headband. Revos, being a much more powerful and versatile caster than Allora, didn’t use a blade very often and so found the glove more suitable. Those weren’t the only choices but they were the most common by far as, in order to minimize mana loss through the stones, it was necessary for the gemstones to touch the skin. Allora told him she would explain more about the gemstones and their uses in spell casting once they had him fitted with his own gear.

Without his own sevith or krisa, Mitchell was mostly learning magical theory. Thanks to Revos’s sadistic training methods he could seize his mana almost without thought, at least when he was doing mundane tasks like walking or eating. There had been moments where he found he had it in his mental grasp ready to be used for a spell and he hadn’t even realized he’d done it. A few nights prior when they had insisted he do it during sparring practice had been a whole new level of difficulty. It had taken three evenings of sword practice and pain before he’d finally managed to get through the basic parry and thrust exercises in sequence without losing his hold on his power. And while he had wanted to celebrate, he found he was too exhausted. He thought his exhaustion and frustration were what was responsible for the way he spoke to Allora and Lethelin last night.

He had heard them squabbling over Lethelin’s price and the whole thing had sounded so stupid to him. They needed as much help as they could get and Lethelin was fun to be around not to mention being easy on the eyes. Revos was too alien to befriend and, on top of that, Mitchell never got the feeling they could trust him. Knowing how easily he had sold out he and Allora didn’t help.

But Lethelin felt like she could be a friend. She was funny and brought a much-needed brightness to their days of travel over this bleak landscape. Despite being a part-time assassin, she was fairly optimistic and carefree about most things. As the days passed he found he had come to rely on her sense of humor. Even her punishments for his frequent language screw-ups were playful. She never missed the opportunity to thump him on the forehead and never once cut him a break, but there was no malice in it.

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With Allora, he’d given up trying to deny how he felt. That didn’t help him when he tried to approach her, however. There was this wall around the elf and he couldn’t find a crack to squeeze through. Until now he had mostly been restrained by the language barrier but that excuse was becoming more flimsy by the day. Yet, when he tried to spark up a natural conversation with her he found the words died on his lips. She would look at him with her purple eyes–beautiful, expectant, and intense–and whatever thing he was going to say would evaporate like mist in the sun.

So between the cambion that might sell them out and the holy paladin on a mission, Lethelin became the one person with whom he felt he could relax. He wasn’t going to see her run off because of Allora’s pride or sense of propriety. Lethelin was smart, quick on her feet, and had shown herself to be surprisingly resourceful. The red-headed thief had tracked a mercenary band for a year, taken them out one at a time, then traveled alone across the Stormbreaker Peaks, across the desert of Iletish, freed them, and finally eliminated her target. That was impressive by any standard. Mitchell suspected that in her own way, she was just as talented and deadly as Allora or Revos. He wanted her on his side.

He hoped his threats against her hadn’t crossed the line, but it had felt right at the time. Mitchell liked her quite a bit, in ways that were starting to make him feel a little guilty about his feelings for Allora, but this was life and death and he couldn’t afford to take chances with her. Lethelin’s oath had sounded real enough and it had satisfied Allora, so he considered the matter closed. He did wonder just how much money five thousand Awenorian crowns was as he had almost no sense of the monetary system on this world, but he could afford it, apparently, so let her have it.

More than anything else, he had just been tired of everyone deciding things without him. Mitchell had come to accept his role in this mission quest thing. He had accepted that he would be the king–assuming he survived–and that his life was here now. With him being able to communicate more efficiently, it was time that he began to take a more active role in things. Naturally, he would still need to rely on Allora’s council, but he vowed that he would learn as much as he could so that he didn’t feel so damned helpless all the time. In that vein, his language toward both of them might have been a little harsher than it needed to be, but he had decided that it was time to pull rank. Lethelin would stay and he would meet her price.

This morning had been a little tense, with both her and Allora stepping lighter around him but that seemed to end once they got on their way. Lethelin took the first shift with his language practice and, after a few uncertain glances, she was right back into the swing of things. She was teaching him swear words today, which Allora disapproved of, but Lethelin said swearing was an important part of any language. She herself could call someone a jivi fucker in Common, Elvish, Dwarvish, and Demonic. She’d tried to get it down in the original Draconic but she couldn’t get the throat sounds right. Revos grimaced when Lethelin demonstrated her “skills” in Demonic and told her, without fangs, she would never pull it off, but Lethelin just blew him a kiss and ignored his criticism.

Far from being blasphemous, the people of this world seemed to take great pride in how much of the sun god’s anatomy they could work into a swear. Lethelin seemed especially fond of Stollar’s swinging cock and hairy taint. And Mitchell agreed that they did have a nice cadence to them. When he asked about swears with Denass, Stolar’s wife and the goddess of death and night, Lethelin had wobbled her head vigorously.

“That would be a bad idea,” Allora said.

“Why?” Mitchell asked, looking between the two women.

“Denass is not as open-minded as Stollar,” Lethelin said, somewhat cryptically.

“She is a lady,” Allora chimed in. “One does not speak of a lady in such a way.”

Mitchell thought that if a goddess was a lady then surely the god was a gentleman and shouldn’t be spoken of in that fashion either, but he didn’t comment on the weird double standard.

“What about Isthasy and Vish?” Mitchell inquired. “Can we say Isthasy’s swinging cock?”

Lethelin blinked at him in incomprehension and Allora looked at him like he had lobsters crawling out of his ears.

“Why would we do that?” Allora asked.

“I mean…” Mitchell faltered as he was confronted with the baffled expressions of his tutors. “Isn’t it the same?”

Lethelin and Allora had shared a look and Mitchell had the feeling that there was some sort of silent communication passing between him that was comparing his level of intelligence to roughly that of the clorvol pulling the wagon.

“That would not make any sense,” Allora finally said, and in a way that indicated he should know better.

Mitchell had wanted to press for details but decided to let it drop. If discussions about religion back home had taught him anything, it was that sometimes a faith didn’t make sense and the people preferred it that way.

It took another half an hour at the clorvol’s slow and plodding pace to reach the outskirts of the city. There was a thriving market economy that had grown up alongside the Diran Road and it came with all the sights, sounds, and smells one would expect. Humanoids of all shapes and sizes were mixed together, working among the stalls, tents, and wagons, and commerce was brisk.

Mitchell heard scraps of Common but also several other languages as buying and selling were done. He also noticed that people seemed to get out of the way of their wagon and always seemed to keep a wary eye on the massive beast pulling them.

“Did you never wonder why we were not attacked by anything in the desert?” Allora asked when he questioned her about it.

“A little bit but it wasn’t high on my list of priorities at the time.”

“Clorvols are extremely dangerous. Especially the females. Not many beasts will knowingly engage with one. They are mostly ambush predators but will track and kill prey if they get hungry enough. Also, their bite is venomous. They can kill most creatures outright but even if they don’t, the venom doesn’t take long. Their hide is almost as tough as dragon scales and they have a natural immunity to the giant scorpion venom. Their smell alone is enough to keep most of the other predators away.”

“Ivaran picked a clorvol instead of a jivi because of that?”

Allora nodded.

“It was a calculated risk on his part. The jivi in Iletish are well adapted to travel over the desert terrain and move at a much faster speed, but they are also food to many creatures that stalk the sands, including clorvols. He took the slower but safer option. Traveling with jivis would have cut weeks off his travel time but we would have been in constant danger of attack.”

That explained a lot, Mitchell thought. He’d seen how quickly the jivi teams could move and thought he noticed subtle changes in some of the wagons that they pulled to make moving at the higher speeds more comfortable for the riders.

Mixing among all the enterprising traders and merchant caravans were groups of four soldiers who were wearing what looked like leather armor that fit over a flowing white fabric. It wasn’t all that dissimilar to the simple clothing he and Allora were wearing but it had a sturdier look. Two carried swords and two carried wooden staffs but were wearing krisas that were clearly visible. To Mitchell, it looked like people weren’t even aware that they were moving around the soldiers and that allowed the squad to patrol in a constant bubble as the crowd found a way to make space for them.

“The Scorpion Guard,” Lethelin told him. “These aren’t the royal guard, just the city watch, but you still don’t want to tangle with them.”

Mitchell watched them, suddenly nervous for some reason, but Revos and Allora paid them no mind so he tried to act casual.

“The one with the black bands around his krisa,” Lethalin said, drawing Mitchell’s eye to the subtle difference between the two magic users, “is an executioner.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not as long as you don’t piss him off,” Lethelin said with a smirk. “But an executioner has the authority to execute you on sight if they catch you in the act.”

“You’ll be fine, boy,” Revos spoke up from the driver’s seat. Then, in what was probably more for Lethelin than Mitchell, he said, “Just don’t go picking any pockets or cutting any throats and we’ll be back on the road in the morning. The Guard is strict but fair.”

Mitchell saw Lethelin make a face at the back of Revos’s head and silently mouth the words in a mocking manner back to him and they both shared a grin.

“I saw that,” Revos said, never looking away from the front where he was guiding the clorvol through the crowd and towards the large city gates.

Lethelin’s grin dropped and she looked up at Mitchell, slightly chastened but still with a mischievous twinkle in her emerald-green eyes.

Before they could actually make it through the gate, the wagon was halted by a harried-looking human functionary who told them that clorvols were not allowed inside the city gates but that they could store the beast at specially designed stables and gave them directions to where such establishments were kept a short distance down the city wall and separated from the merchants.

Before the wagon continued on, Allora turned to Lethelin.

“There is a bathhouse in the city called The Maiden’s Mist. Can I trust you to take him there? I need to sell some of our provisions and resupply for our trip to the mountains.”

“I know it. I stopped there when I was tracking Ivaran. I can get him there.”

Allora paused long enough that Mitchell thought she was going to change her mind about trusting Lethelin with this simple task but apparently decided against it.

Turning to Mitchell she said, ”Go with her, get cleaned up, eat, and take some rest. I will meet you there in an hour, maybe two. You should be safe.”

Mitchell felt nervous at the thought of being away from her. For better or worse, she had been beside him every moment of every day in this strange world and even this small separation gave him a moment’s pause. But realizing he was being childish, he nodded.

“See you there.”

Allora handed Lethelin a small pouch of coins that she said should be plenty to take care of them and repeated she was to take him straight there.

“I got it, I got it!” Lethelin said, pulling her hand out of Allora’s when she didn’t let go fast enough.

They hopped out of the back of the wagon. Revos flicked the reins and they veered left down a side lane that would take them to the clorvol stables. Mitchell watched them go and saw that Allora was watching him as well. Soon, they turned off and he lost sight of her and the wagon as they went around a building.

With the clorvol out of the thoroughfare, the crowds of humans and other things began to push back in and commerce resumed. Lethelin grabbed his hand and started walking towards the towering gates that suddenly appeared to Mitchell as a giant mouth that was about to eat them.

“Let’s go get cleaned up,” Lethelin said with no small amount of excitement in her voice. “I’m tired of smelling like the ass-end of a dead clorvol.”

Mitchell chuckled and followed along through the gates of Basari.