by Duncan Pile
“We must catch up with Gaspi as soon as possible,” Hephistole said. “Can you go ahead and find him?” Loreill swooped up into the air, looping backwards in a full circle and stopping in front of the chancellor again. Hephistole was pretty sure that was a yes. “When you find him, ask him to wait for us. We will be following with the greatest haste.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Loreill shot off across the field and disappeared into the trees, leaving a blazing trail of green light imprinted on Hephistole’s vision.
Eight
On their second day of travel, Gaspi’s party passed the estate of a wealthy landowner. Voltan brought them to a stop and went in to see if he could buy some horses. After a quick negotiation, he managed to acquire twelve mounts, though what he offered in payment Gaspi didn’t know. Initially Gaspi had been elated – now they could make much quicker progress towards Pell – but after a single day in the saddle, he was convinced the mounts were as much a curse as a blessing. Neither he nor Taurnil had ever ridden a horse before, and they were extremely sore in some very private places. Baard seemed to think their moans and groans were a source of great hilarity. He guffawed with laughter every time they dismounted, and did imitations of their wide-legged stance around the campfire that evening, which even made Voltan smile!
As the days passed however, Gaspi adjusted to the rhythm of his horse’s gait, moving with it instead of repetitively smashing his crotch against the saddle. Taurnil took a little longer but even he started getting the hang of it, and by the time they’d been travelling for a week, their muscles had stopped aching, and they rode almost as comfortably as the rest of the group.
On the eighth day of travel, the soft, flat terrain gave way to rocky foothills, filled with hidden gullies that led nowhere. They seemed to spend half the day backtracking out of dead ends, and by the time the sun started to set, they were all exhausted. Gaspi was squinting ahead, looking for a likely place to make camp when Taurnil drew alongside him, his mount wheezing like an old set of bellows.
“I think your horse needs a break,” Gaspi said, eyeing its bellowing flanks with concern.
“Tell me about it,” Taurnil said. “I feel sorry for the poor beast.” He leaned forward and rubbed the horse between its ears, speaking to it reassuringly. “Nearly there, Arthur, nearly there.”
“Arthur?” Gaspi asked, raising an eyebrow.
Taurnil blushed. “Why shouldn’t I name him? He carries me every day. He deserves to be treated properly.”
“Fair enough mate,” Gaspi responded. “I was just saying.”
“WE’LL MAKE CAMP UP AHEAD,” Voltan called from the front of the line. They were strung out along the narrow trail, and Voltan and Talmo were up front, scouting for likely places to bed down.
“See Arthur,” Taurnil said, patting his horse’s flank. “Almost done for the day.”
Voltan led them off the track and through thirty yards of thick forest. Passing through the trees, they emerged into a sheltered gully, walled in on three sides by craggy stone. It was large enough for them to camp in, and offered them a reasonable degree of shelter. A stream ran along the bottom of the gully, which meant they could cook, refill their canteens, and water the horses.
Gaspi dismounted, and tied his horse to a tree near the stream. Taurnil tied Arthur alongside and, within moments, both mounts had their muzzles in the water. There was plenty of grass for them to chew on as well, so there was no need to use any of their supply of grain. While the horses drank, Gaspi and Taurnil removed their saddles and gave them a rub down, making sure the creatures were clean and dry before leaving them to feed.
When they re-joined the group, Voltan already had a fire going, and was busy cooking up a lentil stew in a large pot, suspended over the fire on a structure of metal rods. From the very first, he had not allowed the use of magic to accomplish any of their chores. Magic was detectable by other magic-users; it left a discernable residue that would mark out their passage for any magician who wanted to track them down. Gaspi understood his caution - they didn’t want to leave a trail for Hephistole to follow!
Baard was slumped on the ground against the gully wall, eyeing the stew with a critical eye. “When are you putting the meat in?” he asked.
“Not this again Baard,” Voltan said irritably. “We can’t always have meat – not unless someone goes hunting!”
“I’ll go,” Baard grumbled, pushing himself from the ground with a loud groan. “If there’s no meat, it’s not food!”
“No you won’t, you big, bumbling behemoth!” Zlekic interjected. “You’ll scare every creature away for miles.” Everybody laughed except Baard, not because he was offended but because he clearly only had one thing on his mind - getting meat with his dinner.
“I’ll go,” Talmo said. He stood up in one swift motion, picked up his longbow and strode from the gully before anyone could object.
“There you go,” Zaric said, digging Baard in the ribs. “If you complain loudly enough, someone will go and get your meat for you!”
“I was gonna go!” Baard said indignantly, but as he sat down again, Gaspi could have sworn the giant was suppressing a satisfied smile.
…
Talmo returned just as sunset was colouring the tree trunks a smoky shade of orange, carrying a brace of fat game birds. “These need preparing,” he said, and dumped them down on the ground beside Voltan. The rules of the road were simple: if you hunted you didn’t cook; if you cooked you didn’t clean. That way, each person carried their fair share of the load.
“I’ll do it,” Gaspi said. He’d had plenty of practice at preparing meat when living with Heath, so he may as well put it to use. He wanted to earn his place among this company of adults, and not just by performing magic when the time came. He picked the birds up and took them downstream from the camp, where he proceeded to pluck, gut and clean the carcasses. It wasn’t a pleasant task, but the sooner it was done, the sooner they’d eat.
He finished just as the light was fading out altogether and took the meat back to Voltan, who cut it up and added it to the stew. The warrior mage left the stew bubbling away and went to wash his hands, and soon enough they were all sitting around against the gully walls, waiting for their meal to be ready.
“I’m sure there used to be more people out this way,” Zlekic said.
“Definitely,” Zaric added. “We passed through these parts a few years ago, and the hills were full of trappers. There were a few villages too.” They’d passed an abandoned village earlier that day. It was overgrown with weeds, and had clearly been left by its inhabitants in a hurry. Tools had been left to rust out in the open, and the inn was still stocked with alcohol.
“Remember that barmaid in Hilltop?” Zaric said, speaking to his twin brother.
“Ah yes,” Zlekic said. “She was a handful.”
“Or two!” Zaric responded slyly. “She didn’t know which of us was which,” he added, winking conspiratorially at Gaspi. Gaspi hoped the hot flush spreading over his cheeks wasn’t visible in the firelight.
“That’s enough of that,” Voltan interjected sharply. “It certainly seems that something has chased the inhabitants out of these hills. We will have to be on our guard.”
Gaspi peered out into the darkness beyond the light of the campfire. What had scared the villagers away? Was it still nearby? Drawing near to their camp perhaps?
Voltan announced the food was ready, distracting Gaspi from his troubling thoughts. He ate the stew in silence, enjoying the gamey flavour of the fowl and the earthy texture of the lentils. The food they ate on the road wasn’t always tasty so he ate every mouthful with relish, and when the last mouthful was gone, he found himself scraping around the bottom of his tin, hunting down every last morsel.
Soon enough, they’d all finished eating, and Voltan gathered the tins together by the fire. “We can wash up in the morning. Let’s get some sleep,” he said. The group followed a traveller’s routine – up with the dawn, and in bed
at nightfall. “We’re safe from view here,” he added, “so we can leave the fire burning and use the embers to cook breakfast in the morning.”
“Good idea,” Baard said. Gaspi couldn’t help chuckling to himself - the red-bearded giant was shamelessly interested in his stomach. Taurnil chuckled too, which was a bit rich. Taurnil was almost as bad as Baard when it came to food!
Gaspi pulled his blanket out of his pack and lay down on the ground. It was hard and lumpy, the uneven surface digging into his back in several places. If they weren’t being so careful about using magic, he could grow moss beds for everyone that were more comfortable than any bed made by human hands. He understood the reasons for Voltan’s caution, but in that moment he wished the warrior mage was a bit less strict about the use of magic.
Trying to ignore the lumps and bumps beneath him, he watched the stars come out in the sky above. There were thousands of them, winking at him with bright, burning eyes. Gaspi could see milky swathes of light behind the myriad of stars, and if he looked closely enough, he was sure they were made up of an infinite number of tinier points of light. Were they more stars? If so, there weren’t thousands of them; there were millions! It was enough to blow his mind. In Aemon’s Reach, he’d been taught that stars were the noble spirits of the dead, set up in the sky forever as shining examples, but in Helioport he’d read that stars were other worlds, so distant they only showed up as tiny points of light. If that was true, then he was so insignificant it didn’t bear thinking about.
As he lay there and pondered, the air was filled with the snores of his companions, which made him wonder how they were ever going to accomplish a stealth mission with Baard and Taurnil along. Each of them sounded like they were felling a tree! He sighed and shifted position in the hope of finding a smoother patch of ground, but he knew it wasn’t discomfort that was keeping him awake; it was what Voltan had said about the residents being chased from the area. They were only at the beginning of their journey, and the danger had already started. Once they got up beyond the foothills, they’d have to try and traverse the forbidding Broken Ranges – a range of icy, treacherous mountains known to be home to dangerous creatures and murderous men, and if they passed those dangers unscathed, they’d have to try and sneak past ten thousand ogres. The whole mission was fraught with peril, but Gaspi had hoped that they’d get a lot further before facing any real danger, and yet here they were, already under threat.
For what may have been the hundredth time since setting out from Helioport, his thoughts drifted to Jonn. His guardian was in even more danger than they were. He wished he knew how his mission to infiltrate Belash’s organisation was going, but there was no way of finding out. Setting out on the quest had been the right thing to do, but it was hard not knowing what his guardian was doing or if he was okay. It hadn’t helped that several of his travelling companions were good friends with Jonn and kept asking about him. They couldn’t understand why he wasn’t part of the quest, but Gaspi didn’t think Jonn would want him to tell them what he was up to so he wasn’t able to answer. In the end, Voltan had told them he was busy doing something secret for Hephistole, and the others had accepted that and stopped asking about him. Gaspi sighed, frustrated. He had to stop worrying about Jonn. Doing so was just as pointless as worrying about what had driven the villagers away from the foothills.
He lay there, staring up at the stars and thinking in circles for what seemed like a long time, but eventually exhaustion won out, and he began to blink heavily, on the verge of sleep. His imagination began making shapes out of the night, twisting and stretching them until fact and fiction blurred into one. The tree tops, blowing in the wind, became bed sheets billowing on a line. The flickering cook fire became the fire in Heath’s forest home, and the hard ground became his bed in the college. Shadows gathered atop the gully walls, shifting and growing as they multiplied. Those shadows started to slip down the gully walls, leaning out and looking down on the party as it slept, eyes glinting in the faint light of the fire.
Gaspi blinked, shaking off his drowsiness. Those weren’t shadows!
“WAKE UP!” he shouted, just as the first of those shadows dropped from the gully wall and fell on top of him. Hard fingers encircled his neck as the creature loomed over him. Its hands were scaled and coarse, ripping at the thin skin of his throat as they tightened around his windpipe. Its nostrils were narrow slits, its eyes bulging as it squeezed with all of its strength. Gaspi struggled to free himself, but its fingers were too strong, cutting off his breath, and black spots were already swimming in his vision.
A boot slammed into the side of the creature’s head, crushing it against the gully wall and killing it in an instant. Gaspi sucked in a huge breath as Taurnil grabbed him by the arm.
“Get up,” he said, pulling him to his feet and placing himself in front of Gaspi. All around them shadows were dropping from the gully wall, landing on the shoulders of Gaspi’s companions as they shook off the last remnants of sleep and fought off the attackers. There were dozens of them, each the size of a child, with mottled skin, wicked teeth and sharp claws.
Gaspi gulped in lungfuls of air, banishing the black spots from his vision. A novice warrior might have panicked, but Gaspi had been forced to fight for his life at the Measure, and all that combat experience came flooding back to him in a rush. Drawing two throwing daggers from the baldric he wore strapped across his chest, he pitched them one after the other into the darkest huddle of bodies straddling the gully walls. Two of the shadowy figures dropped to the ground and didn’t get up.
With the exception of Bret, the other members of the party were all seasoned warriors, and they were putting up a good fight. Voltan threw a globe-light into the air and leapt into the fray alongside Sabu, laying all about him with his glowing fists and feet. Gaspi drew another two knives, but it was too dangerous to throw them. All of the mottled, hairless creatures had dropped to the gully floor and were attacking members of the party. Taking his cue from Voltan, Gaspi sheathed his knives and summoned power. Clearly, the ban on using magic had been lifted!
He formed a force strike and hurled it at the nearest creature. It took it in the side and smashed into another of the attackers, but the creature bounded to its feet again only moments later. Irritated at himself, Gaspi let go of the follow-up strike. He wasn’t trying to win a bout at the Measure, he was fighting to kill! He plunged his senses down into the ground, seeking the deep roots of the trees surrounding their camp. He searched beneath the rocky walls of the gully and found what he was looking for – thick, fibrous roots, stretching out from the trunks of ancient trees for dozens of feet in all directions. Calling them to obey him, he enlivened them with power, commanding them to seek the surface of the soil.
Responding to the call of a Nature Mage, the roots thrust out new growth at an unnatural rate, wriggling upwards through the ground and bursting through the topsoil. They moved at Gaspi’s command, sliding around the ankles, wrists and necks of the hairless attackers and holding them in place. The dark creatures shrieked in anger and fear, eyes bulging in horror at the magical snares they had been caught in. Gaspi made a slashing motion with his hand and the roots jerked tight, snapping the attackers’ necks as easily as if they were twigs. In a single moment, the fearful shrieking was silenced, and the party of warriors was left with no-one to fight.
Voltan turned to face Gaspi. “Was that you?” he asked, looking around at the macabre display of dead creatures, hanging limply from dozens of sinuous roots.
Gaspi waved his hand and the roots released their captives, dropping them to the ground like unholy fruit. At another wave of his hand the roots slid back into the ground, retreating to the dark, nurturing depths of the soil.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Voltan said. He turned away and stalked around the clearing, toeing corpses for any sign of life. “You can sheath your weapons,” he announced when he was satisfied. All around the gully, blades slid back into their scabbards. “Pair up and clear the
corpses.” Gaspi nodded at Taurnil and bent down to grab one of the creatures by its wrists, while Taurnil took it by the ankles. Hoisting it into the air, they carried it to a spot forty yards from camp, its rough skin chafing Gaspi’s hands with every step. It was much heavier than he’d anticipated, covered in thick, knotted muscle. He looked down at its yellowed claws, filthy and jagged from use, and shuddered as he remembered those hands tightening around his neck. Despite its bestial qualities, the creature was wearing a simple loincloth, so it must have had some kind of intelligence.
Baard carried two bodies over on his own – one under each arm – and dumped them on the ground, starting a pile. Gaspi and Taurnil dropped their corpse on top and made their way back to the gully to get another one. It took three trips to clear the ground of bodies.
“What were those things?” Gaspi asked when they were finished.
“Gaaks,” Voltan answered. “Nasty creatures with a liking for human flesh, but they don’t usually stray below the mountains. This tribe was a long way from home.”
“What were they doing here?” Taurnil asked.
“I don’t know,” Voltan answered. “They shouldn’t be down here in the lowlands, that’s for sure, but I think we found out what drove the villagers out. Their presence may be a coincidence, but it could also indicate something more sinister. From now on, we’ll establish a watch every night – two hour shifts. I was hoping to put that off until we at least got into the foothills, but apparently we are already well outside the protection of civilised lands.” He looked around at the group. “Get some sleep. I’ll take first watch, but I need someone to take over in two hours, and someone else to take over after that.”