by RW Krpoun
“This is a bad location,” a red-faced Fred climbed gingerly back to his feet. “Too close to the river road. These people need to leave.”
“Good luck trying to pry a farmer off his land.” Jeff tried to pet the goat, only to get his knuckles bruised. “I think this one has heard about Derek.”
“There are going to be a lot of hongmen fleeing the city as the rebellion is put down,” the healer persisted. “They won’t get lucky again.” The ‘they’ he referred to was the farmer, his wife, and their six children. The Black Talons had come across the place just as the ex-Dragons had finished up searching but before any real violence had been done. The famer and his family were inside the house putting things to rights and worriedly keeping an eye on the strangers who had rescued them.
Jeff nodded. “I had hoped to drop the kids here,” he said quietly. “Freeholdings are rare. But this one is in the path of the tornado.”
“What are we talking about?” Derek asked, coming up from the now re-stocked chicken coop.
“Nothing. Get to work on the info we got.”
“Bite me.”
“You know that is the first thing Shad is going to ask about when he wakes up,” the Shop teacher grinned.
“He can bite me, too.”
“Tough talk.”
“It is,” Derek fished out the scroll case. “And that’s all it is: talk.”
Shad staggered out of the house well after noon, blearily rubbing at the dried blood on his upper lip. “Where is Derek?” he asked Fred and Jeff, who were seated on a stack of firewood cutting yari spears taken from the late raiders to orphan-appropriate height. “Is he working on the scroll case?”
“Yeah,” Jeff nodded towards the barn.
“Good. Why did you let me sleep so late?” The warder looked up at the cloudy sky. “It must be past noon.”
“No point in travelling without a direction. It keeps snowing.”
“Good point. Anything happening?”
“A steady trickle of people on the river road, mostly Hiemin. Some refugees, the rest looters and Dragon deserters. We kept them off the farm, got what news there was.”
“Which was?”
“Nothing surprising: the rebels are getting three kinds of shit kicked out of them. The garrison is organized, the Dragon is not, and the Samurai are going to be putting heads on pikes before it is all through.”
“That isn’t going to be a surprise to anyone except the Red Dragon.” Shad rubbed off the last of the dried blood. “I’m glad to be out. No more fighting unless it gets us closer to home.”
The farmer’s wife warily prepared them a meal and then the entire family adjourned to the back room, clearly hoping these strange men would continue to ignore them.
“OK, where are we on step one?” Shad asked Derek.
“Physically, a long way,” the Ronin said around a mouthful of fried potato. He swallowed and continued. “Our first task is to acquire the Fang of Ages, which we will need for some unknown purpose. It’s some distance to the northeast, but not in the Nightlands. Say ten day’s march.”
“That’s good news,” Jeff nodded. “The part about not being in the Nightlands, I mean.”
“The problem is that the Fang is in the possession of the Nezumi.”
“Crap. Spoke too soon,” Jeff shook his head.
“What are the Nezumi?” Shad asked.
“Non-Humans,” Jeff belched. “Basically rat-men about the size of Goblins. They mimic Human society, but hate Humans.”
“That isn’t bad; I prefer killing non-Humans.”
“The problem is that they live underground, and they’re warlike. It is going to be like invading North Korea.”
“Damn.”
“My point exactly. So do we have to kill every single Nezumi to get this Fang, or do you have a location?” Jeff asked Derek, who was grinning like an idiot. “And quit grinning. These guys aren’t Skaven.”
“Close enough. Yeah, it is in a ruined temple; the Nezumi occupy the ruins, but don’t know about the Fang.”
Shad held up two fingers. “Two questions: how are they not able to detect what I assume is a potent artifact, and since when are there temples here? The spheres are not really big on religion.”
Derek looked uneasy. “That is the tricky part. See, when they made the escape from the Prison to get back to Earth they used various structures to control the magics involved. This structure is one of those control facilities. The reason the Nezumi haven’t noticed the Fang is that the entire place, and some distance around it, is soaked with magical after-burn. You couldn’t detect Excalibur if it was sticking out of a stone next to you. Which is why the Nezumi are there. They revere the place, which is why I called it a temple.”
“So we have to fight our way into the Mecca of the rat-men?” Shad shook his head.
“Something like that,” Jeff sighed.
“So why did they hide this Fang there? If I was a Death Lord assigned to find something that was hard to find, I would consider looking in a magical blank spot.”
“The Death Lords don’t know that the Fang has anything to do with the Lance.”
“So Midori’s group stash the Lance, and do so in such a fashion that you need the Fang to get it,” Shad picked points off on his fingers.
“Probably like a key, is my guess,” Derek interjected.
“Fine. Then they stash the Fang in a null place, magically-speaking. And that is it? That is the security plan that has safeguarded the Lance for two hundred years?”
“It has worked,” Jeff shrugged.
“What do the Death Lords think about the rats?”
“No love lost between ‘em, but you can’t use Nezumi for necromancy.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know-you’re the expert on Undead.”
“Expert on fighting them. I know you can’t use non-Humans, but not the mechanics of why. Anyway, back to the key point: this seems awful simplistic…wait a minute: how do they describe the magical residue?”
“Here.” Derek passed over a scroll and pointed out the passage.
Shad read swiftly. “OK, that makes more sense: the place is Undead-proof.”
“Which means the Death Lords should be doubly interested in searching it.”
“Not in this case. The Old Power that created the arcane half-life is the same stuff in the Lance. Putting the Lance in that place would be lethal to everything within a mile. That is one place the Death Lords can be sure the Lance isn’t, mainly because it isn’t a mile-wide smoking crater.” Shad passed the scroll back.
“So it is a good place to hide the Fang,” Fred noted.
“Yeah. Especially since the Death Lords don’t know it’s connected to the Lance. So now all we have to do is kill hundreds of rat-men to get to it.”
“Not really,” Derek held up a map. “Midori’s group used a back way to hide the Fang. We can get a long ways in and out without being detected.”
“But not all the way,” Fred noted.
“No.”
“So we are counting on secret passages? Why haven’t the rats found them?” Shad drank off the last of his cider.
“You’ll understand when you see it, but basically the temple is indestructible, the material of it, because of the escape attempt. Midori’s group know a way through that the Nezumi can’t find.”
“Derek’s holding something back,” Fred announced.
Shad glanced at the two men. “Cough it up, goat-boy.”
Derek sighed. “Look…I don’t know for sure.”
“Know what?”
“I think Midori’s group was started by survivors of the escape attempt organizers.”
The Talons were silent for a moment. “That would explain why they could teach the Council about roads, and change the Lance so it couldn’t be found,” Shad said thoughtfully. “But what is their angle?”
“I don’t know,” Derek shrugged. “I just got that impression from what I read, and it fits.”
“They haven’t even bothered to tell us their organizational name,” Jeff pointed out.
“Great, another conspiracy,” Shad swore. “You could create a UFO convention out of all the secret groups running around the spheres. I’m surprised anyone has time to procreate.”
“Still, we don’t have much of a choice,” Fred pointed out. “They claim that the Lance is the key to stopping the Wind.”
“Yeah. As usual we have to trust people who shouldn’t be trusted.”
“It’s their world,” Derek pointed out. “We’ll tag at least three Death Lords in trying to stop the Stone, which means we will be going home. If Midori’s group is wrong, they have to live with the outcome, not us.”
“They better pray that they are right,” Shad observed sourly.
“Great,” Derek shivered. “An inch of snow overnight, it’s still snowing, and we are travelling north.”
The Black Talons were forming up in the predawn grayness, their breath misting in the cold air. Fred was fussing over the children’s clothes while Jeff checked the mule and donkey. Shad stood a bit apart fingering a spell-coin, frowning into the distance.
“Shad? Are you listening?”
“You were griping,” the warder said absently.
“Yeah. What’s on your mind?”
“I don’t know. You remember in the Realm I said I kept feeling like we were being rushed, stampeded?”
“Yeah. So?”
“I don’t feel that here. I feel like we are bit players, largely ignored.”
“Midori’s group is trusting us with their sole weapon.”
“So they say.” Shad absently flipped the coin and caught it. “We were told that we needed to review the seal on a prison, and to find Cecil’s girlfriend, too.” He frowned, his eyes distant. “You know how the Army safeguards its tactical nukes?”
“No.”
“A couple times we guarded convoys moving them when I was in the Regular Army. They design the devices so they are in two parts, and neither part can explode by itself. Then they move the parts separately.”
“So?”
“So they set it up so that the people guarding the weapons can’t use them, and the people guarding part A do not know where part B is being held or moved to, and vice versa. It is impossible to bribe or threaten a man to do something that is beyond his knowledge.”
Derek was silent for a moment. “You think that Midori’s group might not adhere to the core beliefs of their founder?”
“I wonder if Midori’s group wants the Lance, but are prevented from getting it because the first people who stashed it put in safeguards they can’t overcome, but we can.”
“Crap.”
“The Death Lords don’t have the Lance, and they don’t consider us a threat. I am assuming they know a lot more about the Lance than we do. So if we are uniquely shaped to use the Lance because of past events, and the Death Lords know this because they used that same ‘shaping’ to facilitate their plans in the Realm, why are they ignoring us?”
“There are only ten more days until we drop off all detection,” Derek said thoughtfully. “That could be why Midori’s group insisted we do things in a certain order.”
“True.”
“Mannn, why does everyone lie to us?” Derek shook his head disgustedly.
“Fu Hao told us the truth, and it got us killed,” Shad grinned. “We’re playing high-stakes games, just like in the Prison. Nobody asked our opinions there, either.”
“So what do we do?”
“Get the Fang, follow the steps. Midori’s group won’t try to kill us until we have cleared away whatever obstacle they want cleared away. The key point will be spotting when we have reached the stage where they don’t need us anymore, before we reach that point. Our timing has got to be spot on”
“Business as usual. You know, I have always wondered: why did you trust Fu Hao? That was a fast decision.”
Shad shrugged. “She was the only one who asked us to follow her, while the rest told us to go do this or that. That impressed me.”
“True. Well, everyone’s ready. I guess we should start adding being tired from cross-country marching to freezing.”
“I thought you saw the wonder in this place?”
“There is no wonder in snow.”
“We need to do something about the kids,” Jeff observed to Shad as the pair led the small column; it was mid-morning and the snow was still coming down. “We can’t keep dragging them around.”
“I know,” Shad scowled from under his coolie hat. “We’ve gotten them into too much already. But they have no home to return them to, so now what? What happens to Hanni orphans in the usual course of things? And why were there so many in that one village? How many times have we already discussed this?”
“I expect the villagers had been trading Hanni to the Orcs for years. As to their fate, life on the street.”
“We can’t just give them money and say good luck,” the warder fumed. “There has to be a way to fix this.”
“Our best bet is to find a freehold farm or a village in dire need of extra hands. I struck out in Litam because they have a surplus of non-people.”
“Maybe things will be easier when we get back; once the Samurai get done venting their rage, there should be plenty of peasant jobs available. I don’t like waiting that long, though.”
“No choice.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Derek joined them.
“The kids,” Jeff shrugged.
“Yeah, we need to find them a position quick. Things are just going to get worse for us.”
“If you come up with a cunning plan, let us know,” Shad advised.
“I will,” Derek grinned. “Man, I feel like Usagi Yojimbo!”
“A rabbit with swords?” Jeff cocked an eyebrow.
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t understand why the author had to add animals to Humans,” Shad observed. “And he had comments like ‘they ran like scared rabbits’ right in front of Usagi.”
“Usgai is his family name,” Derek reminded him. “I think it was to make it interesting for kids.”
“It wasn’t bad, overall,” Shad shrugged. “At least the first two books I read were OK.”
“His depth in depicting the culture and history of the Edo period were amazing.”
“Yeah, yeah. Have you checked the map?”
“We have seven day’s rations, and there is a village called Boam halfway between us and the temple. We can restock coming and going.”
“Their temple seems very close to Human lands.”
“The rats like to keep close to Humans,” Jeff noted.
“The village in on the border,” Derek added.
“Ten days of this crap, one-way,” Shad shook his head. “And then ten days back, if we survive. And this is just Step One.”
“We never seem to catch a break,” Jeff nodded.
Jeff bagged deer and wild goats when the opportunity presented itself as the Black Talons skirted the civilized regions. Light snowfall dogged their march, but they were well-prepared for winter travel and didn’t suffer. One through Four enjoyed the trip, cheerfully performing their chores and eating prodigious amounts at each meal; luckily Jeff had factored this into his ration planning. Both Ula and Durbin ignored the weather and trudged stoically along under steadily-lightening loads.
The Talons passed their time as was their custom: bickering, insulting each other, arguing about movies, games, and books, and generalized complaining. The four were as close as brothers but they hid their feelings under a façade of ritualized insults and accusations. Any sign of sensitivity were pounced upon and subjected to withering scorn.
Once they spotted Orc scouts watching them from a distant ridge, but the humanoids made no effort to make contact and the Black Talons were not interested in encouraging them.
“We’ll reach Boam tomorrow evening,” Derek advised as the Talons sat down to dinner. �
�We’ll restock there and push on to the job.”
Shad eyed the ruts faintly visible under the deepening snow. “I take it this old road leads to the village?”
“Yeah. It’s on the map as a logging trail.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Shad studied the battered sheet of vellum Derek passed him. “Why is Boam so far out on its own?”
“Iron,” Jeff said around a mouthful of rice. “There are major peat bogs to the north of the ville, and they extract bog-iron. It wouldn’t be profitable if they had any decent ore.”
“Explains why they are cutting trees,” Shad eyed the carpet of stumps between their camp and the surrounding tree line. “This symbol on the map means there is a garrison, right?”
“You feeling paranoid?” Fred asked.
“Always.”
“Good.”
The orphans had attached themselves to Fred on the march, and when he got up for his guard shift they got up as well and huddled around the healer, their blanket-wrapped figures slumping against him as one by one they fell asleep.
Sitting on a log with his great club across his knees and the orphans snuggled against him Fred thought about his wife and daughter. He tried not to dwell on them because they were just hours of real time in his past, safe back at home, but still it was hard not to think about them. The others were rootless and carefree, but he had a family and he wanted to see them again. He wanted to go bowling and load pallets of beer onto trucks. He was sick of the cold and the snow and living the infantry life again. Jeff was a Ranger so their circumstances couldn’t suck enough for his taste, Derek saw the magic in everything, and Shad lived to walk down hostile streets armed to the teeth and daring the locals to take a shot.
To be honest he didn’t mind a little of this; he hadn’t killed anyone who weighed on his conscience, after all, but they had been in the Isle for twenty-two days, and the Realm for months before that. He was ready for all this to be over.
It wasn’t noise that alerted him, but rather its absence: since he had started his watch he had automatically been scanning the darkness, watching for movement while absorbing the myriad night sounds. And now there was a patch of silence behind him where once there was the faint sound of a pack saddle strap tapping the pack’s frame in the light breeze.