by John Daulton
“Have ya anythin at camp, then?”
“I have some that might work. I am not promising anything, because I didn’t get to pick most of my spells, much less get to write them all. The quartermaster practically threw my trunk together before we left. I know, because I watched him, and when I tried to protest, he told me to, and I quote, ‘get stuffed.’ Honestly, I think all you military people are desperately in need of a course in common courtesy.” He looked down at the haggard figure sleeping amongst the rags and watched her for a time. At least her breathing came easily now, no more panting like a rabid animal. “I will look when we get back. In truth, I’ve been avoiding taking a total inventory as a form of protest.”
Ilbei looked back to the woman who was hanging the gourd up on a nail pounded into the doorframe. “How long she got, miss?”
“Who knows?” She seemed suddenly tired, as if fatigue had been hiding in the energy that animated the work of treating the woman lying at her feet. Ilbei saw the weariness in the deep lines beneath her eyes, lines too deep for a woman of her apparent age. He didn’t think she could be much past twenty-five, if at all. She pushed a strand of hair back behind her ear as she drew in a long breath and then let it go. “She could linger for another week or two, or she could be dead tomorrow. It’s hard to say. She doesn’t know me anymore, so her memory is gone. That’s usually not a good sign. But she hasn’t got the seizures like some of them do. They don’t all get them, though. Sometimes they just drop dead.”
“We’ll bring back Jasper’s trunk of magic tomorrow to help her out,” Ilbei said. “He’s got some fancy magic scrolls in there; somethin might fix her right up.” Jasper frowned at that, started to protest, but Ilbei squelched it with the single finger he held up the wizard’s way.
The woman nodded and smiled, though it didn’t move her lips very far. “Thank you. We appreciate your help. I’m Magda, by the way, but everyone calls me Mags. That’s Candalin there.” She pointed to the woman at their feet.
Introductions followed round, and then Ilbei looked out the door to where Meggins and Kaige were standing in the street, watching the area around the camp sometimes, other times trying to peer inside the shanty.
“So where is everyone else?” Ilbei asked. “Word at Cedar Wood is that you folks had a bigger camp than them, or used to but fer some incursions by highway robbers not so long ago.”
She smiled, a wry thing accompanied by laughter that sounded as if it were being murdered in her chest. “The robberies didn’t last long. They hit a few of the boys on the trails coming down from the excavation sites, and they ran a few others off. But most of the rest were killed or run off by the disease before the bandits showed up, leaving hardly anyone for them to prey on. I haven’t heard of anyone seeing them in a month. They probably got bored. Pretty thin pickings robbing men so poor they turned to digging for copper in Harpy Creek. This is the leanest side of Three Tents. Always was.”
“So they’re all gone off Harpy Creek here? The miners, I mean?”
“Not all. There’s still a few at it, at least as far as I know. The camp here has been desolate for well over a month, and I may just be an optimist in hoping the bandits are gone. The last of the boys to come by was Gad Pander, although he’s actually from up at Fall Pools.”
“Had he heard anythin of bandits up there?”
“Not that he mentioned. He was heading to Hast with three loaded-down packhorses. Said he had a nice strike and was going to deposit what he’d dug at Gevender’s Bank.”
“He came through alone?”
“He did. But he always does. He runs supplies for the miners up there from time to time. I asked him if he’d inquire about the doctor that was supposed to come by, but I haven’t seen him since. That was two weeks ago.”
“Maybe he stayed in town to enjoy his take awhile?”
“I never took Gad Pander for the festive type, but I suppose he might have. Or the bandits got him.”
“Could he have gone back to Fall Pools by a different route? Comin this way seems a bit roundabout if’n a man’s got money fer a boat.”
“He might have. We didn’t ask him to bring us anything, only to inquire about a healer while he was there. I suppose he had no reason to come back this way. And it was a wet winter, so the rivers are still running high enough for a boat to carry horses and gear.”
Ilbei spent a few moments digesting what she’d said, chewing on a stray length of his mustache that had managed to get into the corner of his mouth. After a time, he changed the subject some. “So, I suppose this here will seem a bit uncomfortable, but would ya mind if’n I have a look around before I head up the creek and see if any of them fellers what might still be up there have seen any bandits recently?”
Her smile was polite, if obvious artifice, and her chin dropped some. “Be my guest. I’ve nothing to keep from the reaching arms of Her Majesty.”
Ilbei winced but didn’t say anything. He understood well enough what sort of folks chose a life of such scarcity, and why.
He turned full circle around the small room they were in, but saw nothing of significance. “Jasper, have a look in them other two shacks, I’ll check the rest across the way.”
“A look for what?”
“Just make sure there ain’t no brigands lurkin under a dust cover or beneath the sheets.”
Jasper’s horror was obvious even before he spoke. “And what am I supposed to do if there are some?”
“Holler quick before they slit ya open and gut ya like a fish. Now get movin.”
Chapter 8
The sun was high and bloated above them as they made their way up the creek. Jasper was still in a mood about having been put in “unspeakable peril,” which kept him quiet, sparing Ilbei and the rest further lectures about local fauna, flora and folklore. Traveling along the creek made for easier going. The banks were, for the most part, wide and gently sloping, a few paces on either side carpeted by a low ground cover. The narrow swaths of growth made the creek seem a crooked green line painted upon the browns and yellows of the rest of the countryside. In a few places, brush grew down to the water. In others, long curves of the creek had high walls carved into the foot of a low hill, making cut banks that were impassable without wading across to the other side or going up and around the creek where the water was too deep to cross comfortably, especially given all their gear. But even that was hardly a chore, and travel might have been pleasant were it not for the still-rising temperature.
Eventually, as the heat was approaching unbearable, they came across a hut built atop one of the cut banks. It looked down on a bend of the creek, a wide turn in which they saw a man pounding on a great boulder with a sledgehammer. The hammer was huge, the steel head as long and fat as a loaf of bread. Each blow he smashed down upon the rock sent sparks flying like shooting stars and clanged like a stuffed iron bell. The man saw that he was being observed and stopped his work, setting the end of his hammer down in the gravel of the creek bed, which was only a little more than ankle deep where he stood. He looked up at them, one hand on the haft of his hammer, the other raised up to shield his eyes.
“If you come to rob me,” he said, “then you’ll want to take up hammers and help me at this rock, as whatever’s under it is all I got, be it nothing or a hundred stone-weight of gold.”
“We’re here in Her Majesty’s service, sar,” Ilbei said. “My name is Sergeant Spadebreaker, and we come to dispatch the robbers what been plaguin the minin roads. Have ya seen such in recent times?”
“Since when did Her Majesty care who picked our pockets?” the miner asked. “Surely she doesn’t worry much over losing a few coppers from out here.”
“A few coppers, no,” Ilbei said, growing impatient with the constant disrespect for the monarchy. “But all her subjects have her protection equal-wise, and she don’t abide brigands at all.”
“Well, they haven’t been through here in a month,” the man said, confirming what Mags had told them back at
Camp Chaparral. “I’m hoping them harpies got them and ate them all up.”
“Harpies?”
Kaige and Jasper began shifting nervously behind Ilbei, at which Meggins could be heard laughing behind his teeth.
“Yeah, seen three of them circling a week or so ago.” He let the handle of his hammer lean against his thigh and pulled a tattered bit of sackcloth out of his belt, dabbing at his forehead.
“There ain’t much chance of harpies down this low,” Ilbei said. “And they wouldn’t show theirselves to ya if’n they were. They can fly higher’n a man can see and still keep watch down below.”
“Well, if that helps you sleep at night, Sergeant. A man needs his rest.” He turned and went back to work on the stone.
Ilbei looked to Jasper, then back at the man in the water, pounding on the rock. “How did ya know they was harpies and not just buzzards up there? I expect harpy wings at a thousand spans look the same as buzzards at eight hundred, same as gryphons and eagles do.”
The miner stopped and looked up at Ilbei again. “Because I saw them, that’s how. Males, all three of them.” He paused and wiped his brow once more. “Listen, I been out here every day for near two years. I’ve seen more buzzards than I can count. Even ate one once last fall when times was lean. If those three weren’t harpies, then you ain’t standing there.”
Ilbei turned to Jasper. “Is it possible?”
Jasper, looking pale, nodded that it was. “It could explain the disease back there as well.”
“Mags didn’t see any harpies,” Ilbei said. “I think she would have mentioned that.”
“You didn’t ask,” Jasper said. “But the larger point is that she wouldn’t have to see them. They could be fouling the water anywhere upstream.”
Ilbei nodded. That was a grim but well-reasoned possibility. “Where’s this here creek originate?” Ilbei asked.
“Comes out of the rocks some four measures up,” he said. “Hole in the side of the mountain.”
“Ya noticed any difference in the water recently? Clarity or taste?”
“Nothing that doesn’t measure with having men mining upstream. You get used to strange tastes and odors over time. Best to draw your drinking water well after dark or well before sunrise.”
Ilbei asked the man a few more questions, digging for anything unusual he might have seen beyond the harpies he claimed he’d seen, but that was the main of it: a month since the last sign of robbers and three alleged vulture-men. With that, he thanked the miner for his time, and the troop set off up the creek again.
They hadn’t gotten very far when Jasper broke his traveling silence finally, asking, “I know you people amuse yourselves by teasing me, but if a serious answer is even remotely possible, do you believe it likely that harpies might have come down to roost? It’s obviously more than just theoretically possible, as I have pointed out, but you seem very confident, Sergeant. ”
“Well, I didn’t figure it reasonable at first, but now I reckon it’s damned likely,” Ilbei said. “Ya done pointed some of it out at first, where ya got a creek named for them filthy things, and that feller back there swears he seen three of em. Ya count in that them other miners back at Cedar Wood thinks harpy curses are so likely that they play their first hand at ruffs with the harpy queen wild, well, then it seems these folks up here got harpies on the mind. Ya know as well as I do that these sorts of folks is superstitious, but ya also know most of them stories don’t grow that big a bramble without no roots.”
Jasper shuddered. “I knew it. I should have brought more scrolls for disease.”
“You’re the most nervous little man I ever saw,” Meggins said, and the way he said it sounded as if he’d wanted to say it for some time now. “You’re like that yappy little ankle-biter dog my aunt in Crown City has got. Eyes bugging out in fright at anything at all, shaking like a palsy and pissing itself for fear of everything.”
Jasper seemed unfazed by the analogy. “A reasonable degree of trepidation is to be expected from one who reads. Fear is the logical outcome of having an abundance of information and the intelligence to make connections between that information and potential realities.”
Meggins laughed. “You’ve got a better chance of getting eaten by sand dragons out here than you do getting sickened by harpy spit.”
Kaige turned to Meggins at that comment with the question rising in radiant wrinkles upon his brow. “Sand dragons?” he asked. “Up here, this far off the desert?”
Meggins gave a twisting sort of grin to Jasper and turned back toward the big man in front of him. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “We’re not that far off, and sand dragons love it up here. It’s still plenty hot enough for them, and they can scratch their bellies on all this scrub.” He rustled the blue-green leaves of a nearby manzanita bush to prove it. “Plus, they love eating all these wild apples everywhere. Cleans their teeth and gives them a place to hide. That’s why these apple trees are so dangerous to be among. A man can get scooped up and eaten just as quick as a whip. Never see it coming.”
The question wrinkling Kaige’s forehead squirmed toward doubt. He looked about, all around them, back down the slope in particular, where he could see over the brush and trees. The manzanita and scrub oak didn’t grow much more than man high, and even the oldest of the apple trees weren’t more than three or four spans tall at most, and only a few of those in sight. “But where would they hide?” he finally asked.
Jasper started to say something, but Meggins spun back and silenced him with a glare, pointing at him menacingly. He turned back to Kaige and said, “They hide in the apple trees.”
Kaige’s face might have caved entirely in on itself in his confusion had not the skull bones beneath kept it all in place. Clearly, the prospect of an enormous sand dragon hiding out here in the apple trees was simply beyond believing. “But that doesn’t make no sense.”
“Their testicles are red,” Meggins said, putting on a professorial tone like the one Jasper used almost constantly.
“Their what?”
“Their berries, the boys in the bag. All red like apples. So are their toenails. It all gets mixed in amongst the apple boughs and they blend right in.”
Kaige’s face was absolute vacancy, his expression contorting as he marveled the unspoken question: “Could it possibly be true?”
“Look here, Kaige,” Meggins said. “Have you ever seen a sand dragon in an apple tree?”
Kaige shook his head that he had not.
“So you see, it works.”
“But that’s not even reasona—” Jasper cut in, but once more Meggins spun and silenced him. This time he twitched his finger back and forth a little bit. No, no, it clearly said.
Kaige, on the other hand, looked as if he’d just discovered something incredible and new. And dangerous. He turned back around and swept his eyes across the undergrowth, up the hill and down. “And here I wasn’t even looking for them,” he said. “Sergeant Spadebreaker, sir, you ought to tell a man before you put him on point.”
Ilbei gave Meggins a scouring look. “Now look what ya done.”
Meggins laughed for almost a full half hour as Jasper went through a long and painfully detailed explanation of the nature of dragons, habitat and simple scale. By the time Meggins was done laughing, and Jasper had finally convinced Kaige that Meggins was “perpetrating inaccuracies for the clear purpose of mean humor,” they’d come to another hut.
This one, better built than the last, if barely, occupied a low rise between Harpy Creek and a narrow little rivulet barely a half pace across. The smaller flow ran down out of the hills from the southwest, though it did not appear on the map. There was no one to be seen in the immediate vicinity, and by the silence, it seemed as if the hut was unoccupied. Ilbei called out anyway. “Halloo. Anybody home up there?”
Nobody answered.
Ilbei moved up the gentle slope to the hut, and, cresting it, saw the remains of two people on the other side, their skeletons picked clean but f
or hair and a few of the tougher ligaments, and both lying out in the open by the remnants of a long-dead campfire.
“Stay back,” Ilbei warned. The three men behind him froze. Kaige and Meggins drew their weapons as Ilbei approached the camp with his pickaxe in hand. He pulled back the door of the small plank cabin and looked inside, but soon determined it was clear. He went around back and looked under a tarp that covered a stack of firewood and a few barrels filled with native copper and green chunks of malachite. Most of the barrels were full.
He came back around to the front of the cabin. “Check the trees,” he ordered, sending Kaige and Meggins into the brush on either side. Their movements could be heard as they poked into the brush with weapons and called for anyone hiding to “come out or die.”
Ilbei, in the meantime, looked around the bodies and saw what he’d dreaded he might see: large vulture tracks, three-toed impressions like a trident, each of the thick toes as long as his dagger. The tracks were everywhere, all around the fire and crossing over each other around the skeletons. He went back and checked the cabin to see if there were any inside, dusty prints to match those around the bodies. There were none. Nor were there any near the barrels and the firewood.
Kaige and Meggins returned, declaring the area clear. Meggins saw the harpy tracks straight away. “Damn,” was all he said.
“Damn is right,” Ilbei said.
“Damn what?” Jasper looked more than a little worried as he asked.
“Seems they really do have harpies and bandits to worry about,” Meggins replied.
“Weren’t no bandits what done it,” Ilbei said. “Barrels back there are full of ore. If there was bandits here, they’d have taken some.”