39. The Journey of Peace

After marking them and making them presentable, Rokuish and Kroon left them in the hands of the federal guards who handled the slave transfers. From Rayorah to Akres, they traveled in two carts, accompanied by a patrol of guards returning to the canton capital. As the wagon made good time on the paved road, Dashvara began to think about Atasiag Peykat. He must be pretty damn rich to have the luxury of maintaining twenty-three personal guards. But hadn’t Kroon called him “His Eminence”? From what Inspector Chubby had told him, the handing over of the Xalyas to Atasiag Peykat was due to a favor from the Council… Dashvara shook his head.

Bah. Why make conjectures that lead nowhere? I’ll see what it’s all about soon enough, in Titiaka. And if Rowyn and Azune ever think I can do something for them, I suppose they’ll explain.

Since it was not raining and not too hot either, the driver of the wagon had offered to remove the canvas roof, and now, vast fields of grain and pastures interrupted by scattered groves spread before Dashvara’s eyes. There were no milfids or brizzias or orcs… This was a garden of peace and harmony. He grinned and then noticed that Makarva was smiling too. He met his eyes, their smiles widened, and suddenly they both began to laugh, and their laughter intensified and spread to the Triplets.

“What the hell is wrong with you guys?” Alta articulated, perplexed.

Dashvara shook his head, unable to stop laughing. He couldn’t even stop to explain this sudden outburst. The driver of the cart gave them a frightened look, and Atok snorted:

“Have our young people gone mad?”

“Looks like it,” Lumon agreed, scratching his nose. “Well, maybe they already were.”

Makarva snorted, trying to control himself. Dashvara was wiping away his tears when, recovering, Miflin said:

“Really, you are not very sensitive to your surroundings. Lumon, look around you! Tell me what you see.”

The Archer arched an eyebrow and exchanged a mocking look with Alta. Then Miflin recited in a curiously deep voice:

Peace whispers in each blooming flower,

Sings to life like a choral of fairies,

And in the happy and laughing breeze,

Emerges a… a…

He whistled.

“Emerges a three-syllable thing from a bag of flour,” he growled. “Why is it that in such a moment of life’s explosion I must lack inspiration? To hell with poetry.”

The others huffed, amused, knowing full well that Miflin would not have sent poetry to hell for a whole herd of horses. Dashvara finally caught his breath, feeling much better. He felt as if the laughter had freed him from the hellish chains he had been wearing for three years. Still, he knew that what awaited him in Titiaka was neither flowers nor poems about peace, but… at least he wouldn’t have to spend the nights patrolling in the mud. If it was true that a free man could appreciate freedom as much as a freed slave, it was also true that a slave hungry for freedom learned to be optimistic when the wind blew in his favor.

They arrived at Akres when the sun was already disappearing on the horizon, and instead of hearing the cries of milfids and night birds, Dashvara heard the muffled rumble of a city of more than ten thousand inhabitants. Akres was also called Silo City, simply because from there, many carts loaded with cereals, vegetables, meat, wool, skins, and an infinity of products left for Ruhuvah and Titiaka. If Titiaka was the home of gambling and maritime trade, Atria was the granary of the Federation. The Atrians were proud to be the hardest workers of the three cantons and mocked the people of Titiaka by calling them tunic polishers: according to them, they could do nothing but pull on the tunics of the rich and worship them without producing anything useful in their lives. The Titiakas, in turn, had elaborated a wide repertoire for naming the inhabitants of the Communes: the provincials, the harvesters, the earthy ones, the clog-draggers… Even among the Doomed, they noted the different origins. But no matter how much they insulted each other, the trade between the three cantons was a continuous flow of money and goods.

As soon as they entered the Akres barracks, an official greeted them and sent them one by one to a doctor to “make sure they were in good health”. While he waited his turn, Dashvara informed Tahisran that he could go out without fear, since the dormitory where they had been brought in was lit only by the outside light of the lanterns in the courtyard. The shadow left his bag, stretching as if his muscles were numb.

“Tired of being stuffed into a bag?” Dashvara asked as he sat down on a straw mattress.

He thought he saw Tahisran shrug.

‘I slept all afternoon. If it weren’t for this dictionary, I’d be like a prince in there, I assure you.’

Dashvara smiled. He still found it strange that Tahisran had decided to follow him, but the truth was that he was beginning to accept it: why try to make sense of a shadow’s actions? He was more troubled by the sympathy he felt for this creature. Even in his wildest dreams, he would never have imagined that one day he would consider a bunch of shadows as a friend. And yet here they were, both sitting next to each other, deep in thought. Dashvara smoothed his beard, a smile lingering on his lips. He couldn’t quite figure out why, but Tahisran’s presence in the Akres barracks beside a group of Xalya slaves put him in a good mood.

Yet, when Arvara the Giant returned first from the medical examination, a dull fear began to drum in Dashvara’s heart. Zamoy hastened to ask:

“What did he tell you?”

“Bah.” Arvara smiled. “That I should brush my teeth more often and that, otherwise, I was in great shape.”

Dashvara fidgeted as the Xalyas came through the door, and his nervousness reached its peak when his turn came. He knew it was pointless to feel so nervous, but he couldn’t help it. He entered the adjoining office tenser than if he were charging at a bunch of orcs. Don’t throw any bowls at that one, eh? a small mocking voice in his head warned him.

The doctor was a dark-haired hobbit with an affable face. He greeted him kindly and asked him to undress and lie down. The visit was quick. He examined him, his ears, eyes, and mouth, and finally said cheerfully:

“Well, everything is more or less in order, young man. Nothing special to report? Tell me, don’t you sometimes feel difficulty in breathing?”

“No,” Dashvara replied.

He knew that when he was nervous, his chest sometimes constricted, and coughing fits came more easily, so he tried to relax and buckled his belt. The hobbit refrained from putting on a skeptical face: he simply handed him a small leather bag.

“These are belsadia leaves. Chew one or two a day, no more than two. It will do you good.”

Dashvara raised his eyebrows, but he took the bag without protest. The hobbit smiled approvingly.

“If there is a cure, it would be absurd not to take it, don’t you think?”

Dashvara replied with a reserved chuckle.

“Absolutely, doctor.”

He returned to the dormitory with a belsadia between his teeth. The taste was unpleasant, and for a moment, he was tempted to throw the small bag through the bars of a window overlooking the guard’s yard. However, he changed his mind and continued to chew the leaf, heading straight for the drow.

“Tell me, Tsu, do you know what belsadia is?” The latter frowned and nodded silently. “The doctor gave me these leaves,” he explained, embarrassed, handing him the bag. “That hobbit isn’t going to poison me, is he?”

Stolen story; please report.

Tsu gave a slight smile.

“Don’t worry, not all doctors poison their patients. Taking one belsadia leaf a day can do you a lot of good.”

Dashvara stopped chewing, suspicious.

“But you told me that there were no plants that could cure me.”

“There are some plants that only licentiates can buy, and belsadia is one of them,” Tsu explained. “Anyway, that won’t cure you; rest and a better climate will. The belsadia will simply speed up the healing perhaps. It is a powerful depressant.”

Dashvara breathed in through his nose.

“Save me the trouble of looking up the word in the dictionary. A depressant?”

“A drug that calms the nerves, basically. In this case, a sleeping pill.”

Dashvara gasped.

“You mean I’m on drugs?”

“In a way,” Tsu nodded calmly. “Belsadia also helps balance energies… Dash,” he exasperated, “don’t spit the leaf,” he warned him as he saw him about to pull it out of his mouth. Dashvara had the sudden impression that this damned plant was already having an effect on him. With an amused face, Tsu stood up and patted him on the shoulder. “Keep chewing. Anyway, we still have two days of travel by cart. You can sleep without worrying about a borwerg breaking through the fence. I think it’s my turn to go talk to the doctor,” he added.

Dashvara followed the drow with his eyes as he left the room. A deep numbness invaded him like a swarm of silent mosquitoes. He staggered back to his pallet.

“Are you going to sleep without dinner, Dash?” Makarva wondered as he approached. “Is that plant affecting you that much?”

Dashvara simply spat out the belsadia and said:

“I’ll tell you one thing, Mak. The only thing I regret is that the slaver who threw that poison dart at me didn’t suffer all that a man can suffer before he dies.”

A few seconds later, his mind was already floating on a sea of darkness.

* * *

The next day he felt great. He had dreamed that he was talking to orcs who were much nicer than the real ones; they were all smiling at each other, satisfied, and Makarva ended up offering to play a game of katutas as a peace ceremony. Dashvara opened his eyes and laughed out loud. He had not slept so well in a long time. He ate his breakfast and told Makarva, Boron, Lumon, and the Triplets about his crazy dream.

Zamoy proclaimed in an oratorical voice:

“And then Makarva cheated, and the famous War of the Katutas against the orcs was unleashed all over Hareka.”

They guffawed, Makarva choked with laughter, and Dashvara took the opportunity to give him some good blows on the back.

“You’ll kill him, Zamoy. Every time you make him laugh, he chokes.”

“That’s because he’s laughing with his mouth full. Look, he spilled the beans.”

“Got some spit bread over here,” Kodarah informed.

Dashvara stopped hitting his friend when he began to protest.

“Thank you, Mak. My hand was getting tired,” he teased.

As soon as they had eaten breakfast, the guards loaded them into two new carts, this time escorted by a patrol from Ruhuvah Canton. At Tsu’s insistence, Dashvara continued to chew the belsadia and spent the rest of the morning dozing with Tahisran. When he woke up, the cart had stopped, and he realized that they had just arrived in Swadix. It was a small village with a guardhouse whose tower stood above the cliff to the east of the misty territory of the Whispers. Even there, the mist reached them.

“Halt!” ordered the leader of the Ruhuvah patrol that was leading them. “Half an hour’s break. Frilk, see that the boys are fed. Don’t let them out of your sight. We’ll resume the march afterwards. I want to be in Melex before nightfall.” Dashvara caught his strained grimace before seeing him rub his back and walk away toward the tavern, followed by two other men. His expression seemed to say “demons, I’m getting old for this kind of trot…”. If only they could all think the same, Dashvara mused.

Before dismounting from the cart, he glanced warily to the west. There, under the mists, the Whispers’ trail stretched about forty miles from west to east. It would take two days to walk through it, so most travelers preferred to use stagecoaches. No one wanted to be caught there at night. According to some of the Doomed, in the Whispers, the mists were alive and stuck to your body like leeches. They said that one should not open one’s mouth, because whoever absorbed the mists would go mad. Three years ago, when he had walked through it, Dashvara had not found it so impressive. On this day, however, he noticed that the mist was swirling in an odd way: it was rising with its grayish claws clutching the rocks, as if it wanted to get out of the depression and invade the Atria Canton. The precipice must have been more than a hundred feet high, and yet the mist overflowed from the abyss, swirling and playing on the grass like spectral lava.

Dashvara growled inwardly, shook off his worries, and stretched his legs. All those stories about the mist spirits were just legends, he thought. Nothing but legends.

Both the Xalyas and the patrollers ate cold garfias that day. The Ruhuvahs did not part with Dashvara and his companions; they obviously took their job as slave couriers seriously. They knew their business. It was not uncommon for one of the slaves to try to run away during the transfers, Dashvara knew. And he also knew that very few succeeded. In any case, running away in this area was unthinkable: whether the stories about the mists were superstitions or not, the Whispers led nowhere; Atria was full of barns and patrols; as for the south… Well, there lay the territory of the Claws, a wasteland full of steep rocks and huge holes. According to the religious belief of Diumcili, these holes were formed after a rain of gigantic steel arrows launched by the Grace of Bravery against the mythical City of the Fallen. Towder, the leader of the Tower of Dignity, had been on an expedition to the Claws twenty years ago, when he was still a federation soldier, and Dashvara had heard his stories. He said the area looked like a huge, dried-out, treacherous clay pond into which a bunch of brizzias would have jumped and danced one frenzied night. ‘Skrat,’ the old Doomed had spat. ‘A land as cursed as Ariltuan.’ Knowing Towder’s nerves of steel, Dashvara had quickly come to the conclusion that the Claws were rather a place to avoid.

Don’t worry, federates, we are not going to act rashly: I gave Rowyn my word of honor that I would follow his instructions, and I will follow them. We will go to Titiaka as good slaves, and it will be better for the Brothers of the Pearl if they did not deceive us about the intentions of this Atasiag.

Dashvara didn’t know why, but he had a dark vision of the future. Perhaps it was the effects of the belsadia. He couldn’t believe that Tsu approved the recommendation of this hobbit doctor from Akres. Did he really think his cough would go away in his sleep?

The leader of the Ruhuvah patrol soon ordered the descent: he did not want the night to catch them in the middle of the Whispers.

“Foreigners,” he barked at the Xalyas as they settled back into the carts. “If I hear one word, even whispered, I will gag you all, is that clear?”

They just nodded in silence. Dashvara caught the exchange of mischievous glances between Zamoy and Makarva and gave them both a warning look. This was no time to play tricks on the Ruhuvahs. Keeping quiet in the Whispers was a very serious matter for them.

Soon they were riding through the fog on a path that was barely visible. Wisps of mist swirled around the patrol riders and the Xalyas. Even Makarva’s face, sitting right in front of Dashvara, became diffused.

There was a deadly silence. According to a Doomed man in the Tower of Dignity, when the whispers fell silent, it was precisely when to tremble. Dashvara rolled his eyes. How could the federates believe that mere mists were capable of clouding their minds? Demons, dozens of carts passed through this path every day! If it had been a truly dangerous passage and many had lost their minds, Dashvara suspected that more than a few would have chosen to go up the Hab River and back down from Suhugan instead of through the Whispers… Anyway, the Doomed loved to convince themselves that there were more dangerous and horrible places than the swamps of Ariltuan: it gave them comfort.

After a long scan of the mist, he got bored, and imitating the others, tried to go back to sleep; however, although the belsadia still made him a little dizzy, he felt tense. Three years ago on the way out, pushed by the slave conveyors, he had been busier putting one foot in front of the other, and he could hardly remember the night he had spent there, in a small lookout post in the middle of the mists; now, however, he had all the time in the world to listen to the deep silence, interrupted only by the creaking of the wheels, the hooves of the horses and several dozen breaths. A few murmurs were heard from time to time. Perhaps it was only the breeze between the leaves of the trees that he couldn’t see… But there’s no breeze, Dash, haven’t you noticed? In fact, the air was totally stagnant, and inexplicably, the mists continued to twist around the carts.

It took him a good two hours for his apprehensions to subside. Letting his thoughts wander away from the mists, he found himself remembering the little he had seen of Titiaka, three years ago. What had impressed him the most was the huge bridge that flew over the city, connecting Mount Serene to Mount Courteous. Then he remembered thinking that in Titiaka, he had not perceived that stench that was floating over Dazbon. And yet, according to Tsu, the federal capital had as many inhabitants as the republican capital, but it was whipped by the winds of the Pilgrim Ocean almost every day.

He yawned, mouth wide open, and smiled as he thought of the mists. We Xalyas may believe a lot of nonsense, but the federates don’t do any better. The mists were now circling the horses’ heads like dark flying snakes. The murmurs had died down again.

‘They are close,’ Tahisran said suddenly. His voice sounded worried.

“Who?” Dashvara asked in a whisper. He stiffened as one of the riders glared at him. He looked away to his bag at his feet.

‘I think they are mirror-specters,’ the shadow replied. ‘You’ve never heard of them? They are the most frightful creatures. I came across one of them once, in the Underground. It’s a miracle I was able to get away before it riddled me with energy. As you must know, we shadows do not have much resistance against energy attacks, and it just happens these beings are pure energy. They are not carnivorous, they eat minerals,’ he clarified, as if anticipating a question from Dashvara, ‘but that does not prevent them from being very dangerous. At the School of Gon, I once read that they take pleasure in tormenting those who enter their territory until they lose their minds completely. Oh,’ he murmured then. ‘I think one of them is coming.’

Dashvara glanced around nervously. Makarva, Zamoy, Miflin, and Lumon seemed to have heard the shadow’s words because they too became agitated and worried.

Mirror-specters, Dashvara repeated to himself with a shudder. Maybe the creatures that lived in Ariltuan weren’t so bad, after all. At least when they attacked, it was because they were hungry…

Suddenly, Zamoy sneezed violently.

The sneeze echoed throughout the abyss and continued. It sounded as if the mist had resumed its echo…