Seablood

by Cameron Bolling

  After a moment of sifting through shelves and muttering to herself, Sreovel produced a familiar long bundle. She pulled out the bow she had given Oleja on her first day in the forge.

  “I don’t know what sort of bow you used before, but this is a war bow, different from any common weapon for hunting or for lesser combat. Its draw is heavy, as you surely noted, and it slings arrows with far more power than a typical bow. It should be able to pierce all but the finest armor, that of the envoy included.” She set it down on a bench. “But I still don’t have a string. You will have to purchase one from a shop in the city.”

  Oleja reached within one of the small outer pockets of her bag and removed the sole item within. She held it before her in an outstretched palm—her old bowstring, the one she took from her bow after the limbs broke and it became useless.

  “I have one.”

  Sreovel grinned and handed the bow to Oleja. Using a great amount of force, Oleja strung the bow.

  She drew it back as a test. The power Sreovel spoke of showed clear in the heaviness of the draw; pressure built in the wood as she pretended to take aim. She brought the bowstring carefully back to its resting position.

  Most importantly, the string didn’t break as the old worn one had. Oleja set the weapon down; it was perfect.

  “Here,” said Sreovel, handing over the four arrows from the bundle. “I think I have more around here somewhere. They might be out back, let me go look.”

  While Sreovel was gone, Oleja checked over her packing again and then went to the grindstone. Knife in hand, she spent a few minutes honing the blade until Sreovel returned.

  A leather quiver of arrows hung from one arm, but she carried several other items as well. A full suit of leather armor piled up in her arms, as well as a heavy cloak lined with fur. She dumped it all atop one of the workbenches.

  “I grabbed this old suit of armor for you as well,” she said, looking it over. “It should be about your size. The leather is light and will keep you better protected against the earthborn and anything else you might come across out there—mutant wildlife and the like—but it won’t weigh you down. Perfect for an archer. And here—this cloak will keep you warm. The mountain peak will be frigid, and you must protect yourself against the winds if you want to make it back down.” Oleja joined her beside the bench and surveyed the armor, then put it on. It fit—loose in a few places, snug in others, but otherwise as good as she could expect of armor not tailored specially to her own body.

  “This is excellent, though I hope it does not prove necessary,” said Oleja, patting the leather. A small plume of dust leapt from the surface.

  “And here.” Sreovel handed her two additional pieces that matched the armor. “How many times did you strike your own forearm with your bowstring?”

  “Plenty often, especially when I was still new.”

  Sreovel nodded. “You had a lighter bow then, it sounds like, and so you suffered some bruising, yes? Well, the war bow is far heavier, and such an accident has the power to take the skin from your arm. You’ll want these.” She handed Oleja the guards, which Oleja tugged on and laced up quickly. She took up her bag next, and then her cloak—warm, and certainly too much so for the forge, yet surprisingly breathable. She slung her quiver atop it all last. Picking up her bow, she stood there in the center of the forge, a great sense of power coursing through her. At last, she was off—out of the city, following a clear path towards heroism and her people.

  Taking a step back, Sreovel looked her up and down. A smile crossed her face—slight, gentle, and with what Oleja thought looked like a flash of sadness.

  “Good luck out there, Oleja,” she said. Oleja nodded, and after a deep breath she crossed the floor to the door and opened it. Tor waited just outside. He peered through the opening and growled.

  Oleja looked down at the coyote, fur bristling, teeth bared in a snarl. She was glad to have his company for this journey. In all her time travelling, she had gone only a short way completely on her own, and it was the period during which she fared the worst and suffered the most. Pahlo was right, and she understood it now, even if she struggled to remember it at times: she needed help, or at least someone at her side. For this journey, she had Tor. But she couldn’t help but feel like something was missing—a companion, walking at her side. When last she set out on a long journey, Pahlo walked with her. Now, aside from Tor, she set out alone.

  She owed a lot to Pahlo—even her own life—and she had never properly thanked him for any of it, only brushed aside his aid and even tried to cast him out. That was a wrong she could never right.

  Tor growled again, peering past Oleja’s legs into the forge beyond. Oleja turned back to look within once more. Sreovel had returned to her work, her focus down on the metals in her hands.

  “Sreovel?” said Oleja, grabbing the woman’s attention and drawing it up to meet her gaze. She sucked in a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

  And then she set out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Inside Oleja’s cabin, everything remained in the same state of disarray as the night before. As far as she could tell, no one else had broken in since.

  She needed only a few things from the cabin—mostly food and water. Repeating the mistakes of her last journey and leaving with little of either seemed unwise, as food and water were, in fact, quite crucial for healthy and enjoyable travel.

  She still had two waterskins and her old clay canteen, all empty and stowed in one of her desk drawers. After packing those, she went next to her food supply. From there, she grabbed anything that wouldn’t spoil and could be wrapped and carried easily. When she passed through the city on her way out, she’d stop by a store and purchase some more to add to her supplies. All of that, supplemented with the hunting she planned to do, should meet her needs for food. Hopefully.

  A few of her tinkering components caught her eye and found new homes in her bag as she went quickly about the room, checking that she had all she needed. A coil of rope wound all about the table legs like a long rattlesnake, thrown there from one of the cupboards by some unknown hand. She took it, coiled it back up neatly, and hung it from the side of her bag. Finally, she pulled one of the blankets from her bed and folded it—deep blue in color, worn, a gift from one of her friends, though she could not recall who.

  Cyrah and Sreovel had both warned her of the cold, thin air atop the mountain. The cloak that hung about her shoulders kept her warm—perhaps too warm at the moment, as the sun still looked down from high in the sky and bathed the world in warmth—but their warnings rang loud in her mind. She was a girl of the desert, and no stranger to heat, yet still she nearly met her match beneath the sun’s beating rays in the heart of the desert. If Cyrah and Sreovel—both better accustomed to the mountain temperatures than her—warned her of the cold, she could only imagine how frigid the peak truly was. Now was not the time to take risks. She rolled the blanket as small as she could manage and then crammed it into the last bit of free space in her bag that wasn’t already allocated to the food she planned to pick up in the city.

  At the door, Oleja took one last sweeping glance around the room. Her eyes fell upon the corner where her crutches leaned. An ache in her leg bade her to grab them. A moment of debate passed through her mind, and then she hastened over and took them in her hand. She no longer needed them for balance, but a long walk lay ahead. If the circumstances called for it, she could use them during the journey to bear some of her weight and give her leg a break. Crutches in hand, she left the cabin.

  Down at the river, she filled her waterskins and canteen and drank her fill. Tor lapped up the cool water beside her.

  As she walked, she used a bit of the rope to fasten a makeshift harness for her crutches, which she hung tightly beneath her quiver so they did not rattle or impede her movement. That left her hands free to use her bow at a moment’s notice.

  Having a bow in hand once again offered an unbelievable relief, one she hadn’t realized she missed so
greatly. The familiar rattle of arrows in her quiver just behind her ear made her smile. Off on another adventure at last, and not a moment too soon. Ahwan was nice, but stifling. She needed to be on the move again.

  She stopped by a store in the city and picked up a week’s worth of rations in salted meat, hardtack, and nuts. Placing it all on the counter as she’d seen Maloia and her friends do, she handed her coin pouch over to the boy on the other side of the counter. He looked down at it.

  “This is… more than the cost of that food,” he said, baffled. “You know… you can just give me what it costs, right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Oleja with a shrug. “Keep it all.”

  The boy looked at her with a tightly furrowed brow and deeply startled eyes. Oleja waved it off. She scooped up her rations and shoved them into her bag.

  “Have a nice day!” she said and left the store. Tor jumped up from where he sat beside the entrance, ran a quick circle around her, and then hurried along at her side.

  Westward through the city she went, the cobbled streets turning to gravel paths as she reached the outskirts of the city. She passed the training pit and wound through farmlands, passing into the West Run. The valley turned southwest as she followed it, the last of the buildings disappearing behind her only to be replaced with trees and fields and the enormous walls of the mountains to her left and right. A waterfall cascaded down the cliffs to the right, larger than any of the others around the city. The stream that cut through the ground and led away from its base ran to meet the larger river that flowed through the heart of Ahwan, the one that formed from the junction of the river powering the forge in the North Run and the one that ran past the palace and through the South Run. She walked along its bank now as it snaked back and forth through the valley.

  She breathed in the air and took in the new sights. Since her arrival so many weeks prior, she hadn’t once left the valley and city, going only as far as the outskirts or up the cliffs where her room in the medical ward lay. Now, she got to see the world around the valley at last.

  Hours passed beneath her strides. The cliff walls sank lower to the ground, changing from nearly vertical faces of silver-grey rock into steep slopes dotted with trees, the severity of their inclines lessening the farther west she walked. The valley narrowed too, shifting from the wide, bowl-like landscapes of the city into narrower passes that reminded her more of the canyon, though still the walls did not rise straight up, and the rock was far from the rusty orange of the terrain back in her village.

  A hill rose up ahead—or a mountain, likely, but after the immensity of the mountains around the city, she no longer knew how to categorize the lesser mountains she came across. The river and valley turned sharply south just before it. Up in the vibrant blue sky, the sun still hovered above the mountain she faced.

  A growl cut through the air and Oleja looked down. Tor had stopped walking. His fur bristled sharp like spines along his back, and his lips arched high to show his razor fangs. He looked up the slope to Oleja’s left—steep rubble and dirt dotted with pines until it turned to a cliff rising a few hundred feet above them, then turned back to a steep incline as it stretched for the mountain’s peak.

  Oleja nocked an arrow in her new bow.

  “Come on, Tor—quickly,” she said. The river to her right ran shallow around many stones and beds of gravel that stuck up from amidst the waves. She hurried across, hopping from stone to stone, keeping to the dry areas to remain steady in her footing rather than pitched prone into the current. Tor followed close behind. On the opposite bank, she clambered up the steep slope to a trio of ginormous boulders. She ducked into the middle of them and hunkered low, motioning Tor in alongside her. There, she waited.

  Minutes ticked by, and she began to wonder if Tor’s growl had been aimed at only an animal in the brush or a suspicious shadow cast by a tree or tall stone. She kept her ears alert nonetheless and poked her head just far enough around the foremost boulder to see the river and other bank.

  And then she saw them—two hulking figures descending from ridge to ridge down the steep cliff face. Their nimbleness took Oleja by surprise. They reached the slope and disappeared amongst the pines.

  “This way,” said a faint voice.

  “She went up the north bank.”

  Oleja ran her thumb along the fletching of the arrow nocked in her bow. The eclipsers from the envoy were not as heavily armored as Honn, so they had chinks in their defense—places she could target away from the metal plate—but if her arrows could not pierce their armor where it was thickest, she still faced a tough fight. Hopefully, Sreovel had not misled her.

  Climbing up onto the tallest point of the boulder before her, Oleja looked down into the gully below. The two eclipsers approached the water’s edge on the far bank. It did not take them long to spot her. They paused, and one of the two stepped forward—the one who had spoken to the people of Ahwan in the street the night before.

  “You! Come down here at once, or we bring your head back with us in a bag,” he shouted.

  “I took my last order from an earthborn long ago. I’ll give you no such courtesy,” Oleja called back. Down on the ground behind the boulder, Tor growled.

  The lead eclipser drew his sword. “You cannot best us. We know how you fled from Honn, and he was one.”

  “Then you also know how I killed him,” said Oleja. “I was injured and starved when I took his life. I am not now. I can kill two, and swiftly.”

  Tor growled again. The eclipser’s eyes darted to something past Oleja.

  “And what about five?”

  Oleja’s eyes widened and she spun around in a blur. An eclipser bounded towards her, only a few paces away, sword raised. Two more ran down the slope behind him.

  In a flash, she unsheathed her knife, and just as quickly, it sailed through the air and sunk to the hilt through the lead eclipser’s cheek. He staggered as a roar of pain shook the trees, but it came out hoarse.

  Unsurprising, given that he had a blade in his mouth that had just made its own method of entry.

  His pause gave Oleja just the extra second she needed to raise her bow, and she fired an arrow into his chest from only a few feet away. With the echoing, shredding sound of metal cracking and splitting apart, the arrow pierced his breastplate and sunk into his flesh. Feet skidding across the ground, he tumbled forwards—dead before he even lay still.

  Drawing another arrow, Oleja took aim at the next eclipser coming down the hill and fired. The arrow sailed clear over her head, striking the dirt and sending up a spray as it imbedded itself in the earth. Oleja kicked herself in her mind; it was a new bow, and heavier—she had to lower her aim accordingly.

  Her second shot flew truer, though not perfect, and pierced the eclipser in the shoulder. She grunted in pain and slowed. Her companion bolted past her.

  Going for yet another arrow, Oleja knew at once that she didn’t have the time to nock it—the eclipser ran too quickly. She chanced a quick glance back down to the other two; one charged up the slope and was almost upon her, picking a path up just beneath the boulder she perched on. The last—the supposed leader—still stood in the middle of the river, the current coursing around his heavy boots.

  The eclipser descending the hill leapt onto one boulder, and then up to Oleja’s. A few more strides and she reached where Oleja stood. She raised her sword.

  Oleja ducked and sidestepped. With the arrow she still clutched in one hand, she jabbed at an exposed spot on the eclipser’s calf. Dark black-brown blood dripped from the wound. The eclipser skidded to a stop as she reached the boulder’s edge, scrambling to correct her course after Oleja’s dodge. She waved her arms to regain her balance and avoid sliding right over the side.

  With another low-crouched step in the direction from which the eclipser had come, Oleja placed herself firmly behind the soldier and then sprung back to full height, slamming her shoulder into the eclipser’s back. The shove was all she needed to steal what little balance
the eclipser managed to cling to, and then the beast fell, her boots scraping on the rock as she twisted her body, lashing out with her arms for anything to grab.

  But her body found nothing but the open air—at least until it struck the other eclipser on the ground below who was caught unaware by the large falling obstacle. Both hit the ground in a mess of limbs and metal and swords. Together, their bodies tumbled and slid back down the slope. Oleja half-hoped one might accidentally stab the other with an unsheathed blade, but when they came to rest at the bottom, river water swirling around them, she could clearly see luck did not favor her quite so heavily.

  Taking the moment of reprieve from having eclipsers approaching her from all sides, she turned back to the one with the arrow already imbedded in her shoulder. Though she had taken her mind off that one for the moment, it seemed Tor had not, if having his fangs buried in her calf meant anything. The eclipser shouted and kicked her leg; Tor kept his grip tight. But with one great swing, she sent him tumbling to the ground. He rolled twice through the brush before he got his feet back beneath him.

  Oleja loosed another arrow. It sunk deep into the eclipser’s sternum just below her breastplate—lower than she intended to hit, but fatal nonetheless, merely a slower death. So what? The monsters had it coming.

  The eclipser dropped her sword and grabbed at the arrow with her hands, her muscles failing as she tried to grasp it. She swayed, the blood draining from her face. She locked eyes with Oleja.

  And then she fell into the dirt. Oleja stared down at her body.

  A hand appeared on the ledge of the boulder and Oleja’s attention snapped back to the remaining eclipsers. The one she tripped wound around the boulder to climb back up beside her, and the other now pulled himself up onto the stone.

  Oleja brought her boot down hard on the climbing one’s hand, but his metal gauntlet kept his fingers protected. He did not slow his advance. The second reached the boulder and leapt onto its surface, sword raised, teeth bared. Oleja nocked an arrow.