Expedition- Summerlands

by Nathaniel Webb

  Cass’s superior expression collapsed as she took my hands. “You did do a better job than me.”

  I laughed in disbelief. “Are you kidding?”

  “I tried, believe me,” she said. “But I choked. Every time. If I can’t lead when it counts, I can’t lead at all.”

  “You led us for five years,” Noah said.

  “He’s right,” I said. “We wouldn’t be here if not for you. You made us learn how to fight, cast spells, survive in the wilderness… we all wanted to give up sometimes, but you never doubted yourself, not once.”

  “Until Jason died.” Cass let go of my hands. “Don’t you get it? He died trying to save me from my own stupid decisions. If I’d listened to him and run, he’d still be alive. Every time we’re in danger I see him lying there on the kitchen floor… and I remember that I’ve got no goddamn right to tell anyone what to do.”

  I threw my arms around her and pulled her close as I tried to think of something, anything, I could say to take her pain away. How could I apologize for not seeing what she was going through all this time? How could I show her that out of everyone touched by Jason’s death, not one of us blamed her? How could I possibly explain why on the day Cass and I met, just two six-year-olds on the block, I’d sworn in my heart to follow her to the end of the Earth?

  “What kind of trouble?” asked Noah.

  “What?” I blinked.

  “You said we were in so much trouble,” Noah said. “What kind?”

  I let Cass go and though I didn’t know whether the tears gleaming on her cheek were hers or mine, there was tiny fraction of a smile beneath them, and it was enough.

  “The Eldest,” I said to Noah. “That old elf who judged us. He sentenced the three of you to… to death.” I shook my head. “He spared me, God knows why.”

  “Sole survivor,” said Magpie. We all turned; I know I’d nearly forgotten he was there. “One person picked to warn everyone else. The families used to do it after a big purge…” His eyes widened in horrified understanding. “They’re going to kill everybody.”

  “That’s the plan.” I couldn’t look at him. “They’re attacking tomorrow.”

  “If I might interrupt,” said Scytri politely.

  “What did he say?” asked Cass and Noah together.

  “We have no desire to execute anyone,” Scytri continued. “We can hide your friends for the time being, until we can find a way for them to escape.”

  “It is only delaying the inevitable,” said the progenitor. There was a sort of scolding tone in his voice, like a teacher correcting a student who should know better. “When we reach the human city, the Eldest will demand we slaughter them all. The war will reach you all eventually.”

  “Yes, Progenitor,” agreed Scytri. “But surely it is preferable to delay.”

  “Surely.” The progenitor’s mouth angled in a half-smile.

  “What if we could stop the war before it started?” I said.

  “I would if it were possible,” said the progenitor. “In the name of peace, I am willing to defy the commands of the Eldest, as you see. But even if we were to raise our swords in open rebellion, it would not be enough. We are only one imru. It is true, we are the most revered. Perhaps others who do not want war would follow our example; in these times, it is impossible to know. But there would never be enough and we would be slaughtered along with your people.”

  “I’m not talking about a revolution,” I said. “I just need a chance to talk to my people. I’m sure I can make them see.”

  “Then they will be cut down,” Scytri said.

  “Do the elves really want a fight?” I asked. Scytri looked away, but the progenitor kept his steady gaze on me.

  “The Eldest does,” he said. “You must remember as well that the first battle with humans is only eight years gone. The wounds are fresh. The plague is still found in some imru. The acts of your ancestors were not so long ago for us.”

  I squared my shoulders, steadying myself for my final pitch. “What if we could cure the plague?”

  That one landed: Scytri looked up with wide eyes and the progenitor’s hand made a claw that crumpled the papers on his table.

  “What did you say?” asked Cass.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said. “Here, I’ll speak English. They can understand it, they just can’t speak it.”

  “Oh my God.” Cass buried her face in her hand. “Magic.”

  “Progenitor,” I said in English, “ever since I saw your scars, I’ve been trying to place why they were so familiar. I finally realized it’s not something we have on Earth anymore— I’ve seen those scars in a history book. The Vikings who came here carried something we call smallpox.”

  “And there is a cure?” Scytri’s gray eyes glittered in the dimness of the tent.

  “The disease was eradicated sixty years before I was born,” I said.

  “If you bring us this cure, war can be avoided,” said the progenitor. “How swiftly can you get it?”

  “Well, that’s the problem,” I said. “The company—there are people who control entrance to this world. They won’t let me just bring the cure in. I’ll have to convince them.”

  “How?” asked Scytri.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  The progenitor sighed. As he leaned on his table, his eyes were on the many maps and orders there, the physical manifestation of the war he didn’t want to fight. Finally, he looked at me.

  “We have been extremely liberal in our treatment of you,” he said. “Would you agree?”

  “I’m very grateful,” I said. “We’re lucky you’re the ones who caught us.”

  “I am grateful as well.” The progenitor shook his head. “But hospitality and trust have their limits. You tell me everything I wish to hear and that makes me wary.”

  “It’s all true,” I said. “Please believe me.”

  “I want to, I admit it. But you must see that it is all a little too easy.”

  I snorted. “We’ll see how easy it is when we get to Wellpoint.”

  The progenitor showed a hint of a smile at that. “Can you make some proof of your good faith?”

  “I’ll do anything,” I said. “I just don’t know… wait.” I touched my pocket, where Scytri’s knife still sat. I slipped it out and showed it to the elves, trying my best to look nonthreatening. “Scytri, you left your surgery tools in my cell. I pocketed this before we were taken to see the Eldest. And I’ll admit… I thought about using it on him.” Unexpected guilt welled up in my chest, and I looked away. “But it just seemed like the wrong thing to do.”

  “You thought to attack the Eldest with a surgeon’s knife?” Scytri’s brow was furrowed. “You would have thrown away your life for nothing.”

  “Well, I had a trick up my sleeve,” I said. I shifted my grip on the knife and began to chant the words of the enchantment I’d been taught. As I spoke, a proud scientist’s voice in the back of my mind pointed out that the musical magic words were just an antiquated form of Elvish, not so different from the language I’d mastered. Far from nonsense, the spell was actually a sort of polite request that the warrior spirit inside the knife give up some of itself in return for victory.

  Apparently, the spirit was interested, because the edge of the blade began to gleam with a wicked blue sharpness. I could feel the eagerness of the knife to be used, to cut and spill blood. For a fleeting moment I felt the urge to drop it, lest I end up using it, but I got a grip on my thoughts and offered the glowing knife to the progenitor.

  “This is what I would have used on the Eldest,” I said. “But I didn’t. I think we can win this war without bloodshed.”

  The progenitor took the knife gingerly and tested its edge with his thumb. He showed a flash of teeth as a line of blue blood stood out, then dripped a single drop onto the table. He stabbed the knife into the blood oak surface with a resonant thunk; it stood quivering next to the blue stain as its glow evaporated.

  The progenitor put his r
ight hand up, facing me. His palm was smeared with blue.

  “May that be the last drop spilled.”

  Spirit Caller

  I tried to look defeated and dejected as my wheeled iron cage rattled along behind an elven wagon, itself pulled by four giant birds with iridescent black feathers. It wasn’t too tough an acting challenge; there was barely room in the cage to sit down, so I’d been stuck in various stress positions for the last day and a half. So far, being a pretend prisoner was almost as bad as being a real one.

  At least I had fresh air, though. The Eldest had ordered that, in my role as sole survivor, I be given a front-row view of the massive elven war effort. Thus my rolling cage was smack in the center of the elven column that tromped its winding way south from the Wall towards Wyatt Falls. Neat rectangles of infantry marched to either side, protecting a line of wagons that stretched apparently to infinity ahead of and behind me. As we passed between the pin-straight trees of the neatly gridded forest, I wondered what exactly the elves were afraid of. I certainly hadn’t seen anything strong enough to take on their army.

  My cage bumped over a rut in the dirt, making me bang my head against its bars, which alternated between black iron and blood oak. Rubbing the permanent sore spot I’d developed over the course of a few dozen such blows, I reminded myself that the rest of Hearthammer had it worse. Noah, Cass, and Magpie were two wagons ahead, stuffed into straw-filled crates that purportedly held spears for Scytri’s imru. Scytri had snuck them out the night before to stretch and relieve themselves, but otherwise they’d spent the better part of twenty-five hours in stinking claustrophobia.

  A shout sounded from farther up the column and was passed back from soldier to soldier until it disappeared into the forest behind me: “Town ahead! Town ahead!” We had reached Wyatt Falls.

  It was a few more hours before my cage rattled down the pitted dirt main street of the little frontier town. I stared around in fearful attention, looking for any sign of the players I knew had lived here less than a week ago. As bad as the coming war would be, I was terrified that it would open with the wholesale slaughter of everyone I’d run into on our way to the Wall: Merric and his Angels, the blue-eyed ranger who’d killed Dahlia, even St George. As I contemplated sitting caged and unable to intervene while I watched their deaths in sunlit detail, I wondered if the Eldest hadn’t given me a worse sentence than the rest of Hearthammer.

  As it turned out, I had nothing to fear, at least not yet. The elven scouts returned quickly to report that Wyatt Falls was abandoned. The elves didn’t seem concerned by that fact, and when word came down from the Eldest to make camp for the night, the caravan was swiftly consumed in a bustle of activity that left me alone to wonder where exactly the rest of humanity had gone. The best I could guess, and the best I dared hope, was that they’d been warned of the elves’ coming and fled for Wellpoint. It wasn’t like the noisy elven column had any hope of stealth, after all. Rangers could easily have seen the war-party coming and evacuated the town with time to spare, and if that thought left me feeling lonely and afraid, that was a problem for me and the long night to come.

  Darkness fell, and the army settled into its familiar evening places, the soldiers in their popup tents and the officers bivouacked comfortably in the abandoned inn, dining on food and liquor looted from the general store.

  Scytri came with food just as the last hint of sunset disappeared from the western sky.

  “What do you call the west?” I asked between bites of porridge. Often when I ate, Scytri stayed with me under the public pretense of making sure I didn’t hide away any silverware to be repurposed into a shiv or lockpick, though I got the distinct impression he enjoyed having someone he could talk to about his kids.

  “The west?” He repeated the English word.

  “The direction where the sun sets,” I said.

  “Inan,” he said. “He was one of the first progenitors, a caller who spoke to the spirits in living things. Flowers bloomed where he walked and animals followed at his heel.”

  I ate in silence for a few minutes, scraping up the last little slivers of food from the corners of my bowl. As I handed the utensils back to Scytri, I whispered as loudly as I dared, “I need you to get my drone for me tonight.”

  “Drone?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “The… flying machine that followed me. I can use it to get a message out, but I need it tonight.”

  “To warn your people?” Scytri asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

  The elf frowned. “Then explain.”

  So I did, as best I could. I told Scytri about the world I came from, the gray-orange sky and the terrible food and the poverty, how the Summerlands had seemed like Eden when we discovered it. I told him how Expedition Games had been the ones to find the portal and build a game in the Summerlands using technology far beyond what we or the ancient Vikings had revealed. And finally I described, stretching for the right Elvish words and finally resorting to English when I couldn’t find them, how the drones were mounted with cameras that sent live video back to tens of millions of viewers on Earth.

  If I’d expected him to marvel at our technology or think of it as some sort of magic, I would have been disappointed. Scytri merely nodded his understanding, his eyes narrowed in thought as he followed the threads of my reasoning.

  “So,” he said finally, “you think that if you turn public opinion against this war, you can leverage that to force the game-makers to give us the cure to the plague.”

  “Yes, exactly!” I would have hugged him if there weren’t inch-thick bars of iron between us. “But if I wait until we get to Wellpoint, it’ll be too late. I need to get a message to my viewers now so they know to tune in when the time comes. Hell, at this point they probably think I’m dead.”

  Scytri opened his mouth to reply, but at the same moment, an elven patrol came around the corner of the inn, their boots barely a whisper on the cobblestones. Scytri banged the empty bowl on my cage, making me start.

  “You’re lucky we give you this much, human!” he barked. “I don’t want to hear any more complaining from you!” Without so much as a wink he turned his back and fell in with the patrol, chatting amiably with their captain as they marched off into the night.

  ***

  Life in a cage was starting to seriously affect my ability to sit comfortably enough for sleep, but I got there eventually, and I was dreaming of Jason and Magpie in broken fragments when a soft click woke me in a thrashing panic.

  “Hush!” Scytri hissed, grabbing my arm. He swung the door of my cage open silently. His hands were empty except for an iron key.

  “Where’s my drone?” I whispered. I was too fuzzy-headed to make myself simultaneously understand Scytri and find the Elvish words to reply, so I fell back on English.

  Scytri shook his head. “I can’t get to it,” he said. “It’s in the Eldest’s armory wagon.”

  “Which I’m guessing is heavily guarded?”

  “No more than the rest of the camp.” Scytri made a few awkward hand signs I’d never seen before. “Besides, shapers have ways past guards. The problem is the spirit fence Eneri has put up.”

  “Spirit fence?” I echoed.

  “A magical ward,” he explained. “There is a radius around the armory that no elf can enter without alerting Eneri instantly.“

  “Shit,” I said and Scytri’s brow creased at whatever Elvish translation he’d heard.

  “There is a chance,” he continued. “If you go.”

  “Of course there is,” I muttered. “Okay, how can I get past this spirit fence if you can’t?”

  “You are a human,” Scytri said.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  Scytri’s pinned me with a searching gaze. “You are a caller. I saw you draw out the metal spirit from a coin at the wall. Tell me, can you hold the spirits of men?”

  I blinked at him. Spirits…? Then I remembered the words I’d used to
enchant the surgeon’s knife before we left the war camp. I’d thought they were metaphorical.

  “Are you saying there are literally spirits in everything around us?”

  “Everything except you.” Scytri’s face was like stone in the deep blue of night. “Your people do not have spirits, nor do the things you bring from your world.”

  “And when you say ‘hold the spirits of men—’”

  “A spell known to callers, which freezes a man or an animal by distracting his spirit. It is effective on my people, but not on yours.”

  “I know that one!” I felt a rush of excitement like a flash fire in my chest, but it was instantly doused by the cold water of disappointment. “But I need my bells to do it. And even if I had them, it would be way too noisy.”

  Scytri held up a hand. “Let me finish. It works on my people because we have spirits. You do not. The spirit fence—”

  “Won’t recognize me!” I finished for him, the warmth rushing back into me. “So I should be able to just waltz through and grab my drone.”

  “I am sure you do not need to dance, but yes.” Scytri nodded. “That is my hope.”

  “Well, it’s worth a try,” I said. “I mean, what have I got to lose beside my life?”

  ***

  God, I wish Magpie were here, I thought as I crept barefoot across the cobbles. Actually, I wish Magpie were doing this instead of me.

  Armed only with Scytri’s directions, I headed for the Eldest’s section of camp as quickly as I dared. I’d promised Scytri not to rat him out if I was caught, but anxiety on his behalf still scratched at the back of my brain; it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that he’d freed me.

  I kept to the shadows, though they were few and far between. The Eldest had circled his wagons south of town, at the base of the cliff where Wyatt Falls, or whatever the elves called it, tumbled over the terminal edge of Hard Pass to crash down into a little lake that hid among the trees. That meant I had to leave the comforting cover of the inn and general store behind and duck from trunk to trunk in the spaces between the little camps of each elven platoon.