As she pushed through the flap, she immediately noticed a book laying across the cot, opened and face down as a marker of where the reader had left off. She flipped it over. It was a journal.
We made it halfway up the mountainside without running afoul of any enemy patrols. It is silent here. I have not heard anything other than the wind since this afternoon. Charlie is making dinner. He takes over all the cooking when he is nervous and needs to do something with the energy. He feels the stillness, too. Not like I do, however. He is an untrained Grimer. Funny that he is the only one that understands.
I tried to tell the Commander that there was something wrong here. There should be birds. There should be bugs. There should be other living things, besides the trees. There is nothing here. I spent a half hour circling the camp site that Commander chose. I felt the trees, the ground, the air itself. They are lonely. They felt to me as if they have been lonely for quite a while. I cant help—-
The passage ended cleanly after the last word. From the state of the camp, she assumed Charlie had finished creating the final meal for the troop. She flipped through the pages, stopping when she saw a drawing of the men—her men—making soup around a campfire. This was the journal of the Inari boy that had watched them make their pitiful soup the night their mission had began. A wave of sorrow passed over her. Poor kid. To know something was so wrong, but not be able to express it so that others understood. It was a common problem among the Inari, but it usually expressed itself in less lethal ways. A frustration they had to bear due to their nature. A frustration that usually did not end in a pile of bodies.
She placed the journal back on the cot as it had been and bent to look through what was left in his pack on the floor next to the cot. A small pile of clothes covered another journal. She plucked the leather gloves from the bundle and tucked them into her belt before picking the journal out of the bag. The second journal was empty. The boy had planned to live much longer and to document his life. For whom? She found two small sheathed daggers attached to a belt next to the blank journal. She pulled the belt out and wrapped it around her hips, below her own belt. Can’t have too many knives. She turned to leave, but then thought better of leaving the journal. She scooped it up from the bed, closing it. She brushed her fingers over the light, smooth leather cover and then slid off her own pack to place the journal inside. She put her pack back on and left the tent, heading back to the pile.
Shara ordered her men to scavenge for usable supplies as she began to pull on the leather gloves. She pointed to the other Inari in the group.
“You, keep watch.” She pointed to a spot near the edge of camp away from the pile of bodies, not too far from the untouched tent.
The gloves hung loosely around her smaller hands, but they had clearly been weatherproofed, which meant blood-proofed, to an extent. She heard her men moving around the camp behind her as she bent down to look more closely at the intertwined limbs and crystals. She poked again at the arm that was growing a new crystal shoulder. She felt the give beneath the small force and the flesh bounced back as she pulled her finger back. She used three fingers, pushing and prodding around the major wound. The flesh was equally responsive. There was no indicator by touch that a hard crystal was growing in the wound. She took a breath and placed her finger on the large shoulder-crystal. It responded to her pressure and bounced back into position. The facets and sharp lines that were visible wavered beneath her fingertips as she pushed, fading into red, transparent flesh. The corners and definition of the crystal returned when she pulled her finger away.
She systematically worked her way around the pile, testing different crystal growths in the same way. The ones attached to flesh behaved as flesh. A growth on the cross section of a bone that had been snapped, however, was hard and exactly what she would have expected from the crystals from looking at them. She grasped the hard piece of crystal, working her way up the exposed bone to where the flesh of the arm reappeared. There was a distinct difference, discernible only by feel, between bone-crystal and flesh-crystal.
She stood, carefully peeling off the gloves so that no blood touched her directly. She dropped the gloves on the pile of bodies, turned toward the tent, and returned to it. She pulled out the empty journal from the dead boy’s pack, walked back to where the campfire had been, and sat on the large log that had served as a bench. She opened the journal, pulling out the pencil that had been with the other journal, and began to document her findings carefully.
We need to know more about this. We have to find where the crystals are, see what they are doing.
After her notes, she drew a quick sketch of the bodies and the crystalline limbs. It was horrible compared to the drawing the boy had done of her teams. She stopped squinting at her scratches and looked up to focus on back to the pile of bodies, gathering the details for her drawing. A dozen men. We can’t keep fighting this war when we don’t know what’s happening. Did the Xenai do this? Is that why they wanted the crystals?
One of her men passed nearby as she drew. The scientist, Sabeen. She waved toward her, then grabbed her own LightTab and used it to gesture at the corpses.
“Tab scan them. Get a good representation then zoom in on the crystals and their structure. See if there is any way to find other Blight crystals using the Nagata’s sensors. There has to be some way to track the deposits. You’ll need my Tab’s permissions to run them. Once you get that done—” she looked at the bodies and sucked in enough air to keep her voice from falling out beneath her words, “burn them.”
The woman looked at the pile uncertainly. Shara pushed the journal and pencil off her lap and stood to place her free hand on Sabeen’s arm, “We need to protect the rest of our men. We have to figure out if there are any other areas in the mountains that have crystals to steer them clear. You can do this.”
She nodded back to Shara and reached over to take Shara’s LightTab and begin the scan, keeping a cautious eye on the pile, “Alright.”
Shara sat back down and picked up the journal, but instead she watched as Sabeen waved the LightTab in repetitive strokes up and down, a quiet beeping filling the air as she moved around the bodies. She finished the scan and stood still, uncertainty covering her face and wafting over to Shara’s intuition. Shara gave her an encouraging smile before leaning over to grab a half-burned log off the ground next to her. She brushed the snow off and felt the center to make sure it felt dry enough from the snow before standing and hefting the log onto her shoulder. She heard it clink against her amulet chain. She walked over to Sabeen with it, placing the log on the ground and putting her flint and tinder on top of it in her other hand, “We have to send them off.”
Sabeen nodded and handed Shara her tablet back, “The scan analysis is sending, but I don’t know how long it will take to get anything back from the Nagata.”
Shara nodded, “Thank you.” She turned to walk back to the log and make more notes. As she sat, she could already smell the fire in the air as it worked its way through wood, leather, and cloth. The LightTab beeped again.
Not long, I see.
She opened the file. It was a minimized set of coordinates that could overlay her locally stored map data. Sabeen was smart to request the very basics; if the Nagata had tried to send a full map, it could have taken hours to receive it. She tapped the upper right icon to overlay the map coordinates onto her local data and center it around her Tab’s location. A sharp and sour smell of burning meat filled the air as she blinked at the updated map. The crystal markers circled the camp she sat in and as the LightTab continued to beep as new data arrived, the map updated. The single circle updated to show near perfect concentric circles spreading outward from the camp, growing larger until they stopped just shy of Prin’s outer walls to the east and back to the Army’s camp to the southwest.
50
Fiher
Heading back west, Fiher followed at the farthest distance he could away with, pretending to stumble a few times to gain enough distance to
react to their motions. Still, the group of Xenai swerved suddenly and Fiher fought to hide his scramble to move with them. More new commands that Fiher couldn’t hear. Amber kept his distance, now, due to the group’s frequent turns and his tendency to run into them. Fiher had no one to blame it on if he made a mistake.
They had not moved far along the new route when Fiher heard Amber shout behind them. Suddenly, the roots around him heaved up out of the ground, tripping him and the other Xenai. White tendrils like a web grew from the ground and over them before they had a chance to move. Layer upon layer built up over them. They pushed against them, but as many as they broke, twice that many had already grown over them. Soon Fiher’s head was forced down into the dirt. The world looked like it was covered in a wash of white.
Amber’s scream of anger cut through the soft, mycelial blanket. Fiher could hear the movement of the bushes next to him before he felt the prick of it’s branches growing into the white pillow that trapped him. The branches dug around him, breaking through the mycelium network that held him down. Too slow; Amber has to be quicker.
He could feel each step the enemy was taking reverberating through the ground—closer and closer. The footsteps slowed. He heard the squelch of flesh and a scream from one of his troop ahead of him. The feet moved again. The branches still wiggled around him, slicing gaps in the threads that nearly instantly knit themselves back together.
“Make the branches cut at the same time, and I will push! I’ll count!” He yelled in Xenaran. He counted down, yelling the numbers as loud as he could while barely being able to move his mouth. He felt the stab of more branches stabbing into the netting. When he hit one in the countdown, he arched his back as hard as he could, praying to get his hands under him. He managed to slide them beneath his chest before the binds tightened back down, pushing his chest into his hands. His elbows stuck out at his sides at a painful angle and the white tendrils were still constricting. He felt the pain rippling through his back and wrists as his elbows were pushed down and his body couldn’t adapt.
“Again!” He yelped.
He started counting down again. Between numbers, he heard another scream and the ripping of flesh. There were two more of his team ahead of him before the enemy would reach him, and it was getting harder to breathe.
He finished the count down and arced his back, then pushed in a fluid motion as the brush jerked through the lines of fungi. He pulled his knees up to his chest and then pushed back against the barrier from his knees and hands with as much force as he could. He made it into an upright position on his knees. The branches Amber manipulated were curving back to continue cutting around his calves as he pulled and strained against the white growths crawling around his knee and up his thigh. He felt enough give to jump to his feet. He bounced backwards, not even bothering to look at what was behind him. He just had to make it far enough away from the center of the sourcecast. He ended up in another bush and rolled out of it, bounding up to his feet and continuing to retreat.
Another scream pierced the air. It ended in a gurgle.
Thats when he saw her. Standing thirty feet away behind the men killing the Xenai. before a patch of red crystals, her hooded cloak blew in the breeze, but it did not contain the distinctive silver hair.
Shara.
The last Xenai that had been trapped screamed out a coarse word in the Pact’s common language, “Bitch,” as the soldier standing over it plunged the bayonet on his rifle into its back. The soldier wiggled it around with force, then placed a foot on the body and yanked the blade out. Nothing but shrubbery stood between him and the soldiers, now. Only Amber remained from their small group.
Shara turned to him. He felt the coldness in her eyes. The determination. He shivered and heard Amber’s quaking breaths behind him.
The soldiers began to charge them. Amber had good instincts. The bushes he had used to cut Fiher free grew towards the soldiers, grabbing at their legs and feet. They slowed to hack at them. Fiher pulled out his daggers.
He had to convince her. He had to tell her he was on her side—but he wouldn’t ever convince her if he killed her friends. I am not your enemy!
In front of his feet, the leaves began to rustle. Amber weaved together a series of twigs and they shot from the underbrush at the nearest soldier. Fiher felt the shock wave of surprise from Amber when the braided dart abruptly changed directions and flew back to him. Another squelch, and a thud as he fell to the ground.
Fiher threw his daggers on the ground and himself to his knees. He put his arms in the air as the soldiers stepped up to him. He looked Shara in the eyes as the nearest brought his rifle up to stab him.
“Zerstörer!”
He saw Shara’s eyes go wide.
“Wait!”
The soldier barely caught the weapon before it hit.
Shara looked over at him, “Fur?”
He smiled, the flat waves of crinkles in his smoke from his apprehension twirling into ascending spirals as happiness and gratitude washed over him. “Yes, Shara.”
The soldiers turned to her.
She lifted her chin and commanded them, “He saved me once. Take him prisoner. He will not die, today.”
They all turned and glared down at him, but obeyed.
51
Shara
Shara tossed herself from her cot, cursing under her breath and hoping Melana didn’t hear while leaving the tent. The split sleep around mid-watch was never enough, but she had scheduled the guard this way so she could be alone with Fur when the others were deepest in sleep.
Stepping out into the cold night, she wrapped her cloak around her. The ground crunched with snow that must have fallen briefly while she slept. It had been just enough to dust the ground and cover the world in white that the wind picked up and swirled a few inches off the ground. She sighed and tread over to Melana, who sat outside of Fur’s makeshift prison tent with a small fire.
“Go get some sleep. I’ve got it.”
Melana nodded with a yawn and stood and trudged toward her tent. Hers was on the far side of the camp, but Shara still waited by the fire, warming her hands, for around twenty minutes until she was certain that Melana had fallen to sleep.
The tent she had made for Fur was mostly Source cast. She had picked a point in the middle of a small cluster of young trees. Manipulating them to grow into an intertwined cage had been simple enough. They had simply thrown a sheet over it to provide some shelter. Fiher had been led in, then bound with rope that gave him enough leeway to move in the small room.
When Shara stepped inside, the chill did not leave. A small ring of white ran around the edges of the room, where the wind had pushed it past the sheet. She felt bad that they only had one extra blanket to provide. Fur sat in the center of the space, the blanket wrapped around him in a way that allowed him to sit on it. He had it tucked all the way up under his chin, which rested on his chest.
“Fur?”
He lifted his head and Shara felt the smile.
“Shara.”
She smiled and sat down in front of him, the cold from the ground immediately seeping through her multiple layers of clothing, “How are you? I’m sorry it’s so cold.”
Fur shrugged, the motion barely noticeable beneath the blanket, “Not more you could do.”
She accepted his dismissal of the circumstances. “I was wondering if you knew why the Xenai are farming the Blight crystals—the red crystals. Or, even, where they came from?”
Fur shook his head, “Was never part of lab. They go there.”
“You know where they are taking them?”
He nodded, “Many carts go from camp. Only one place to go. Many labs there, east of Shouding. Don’t know which they go to or why.”
Shara considered the information. One lab with Blight crystal controlled by the Xenai was bad enough. Finding out that they had multiple labs for unknown purposes was frightening.
“Do you know what any of the labs are for?”
“Mak
e many things there. Make dragons, make technology, make new embeds, make new Xenai sometimes.”
Surprise knocked the breath out of Shara, “They make the dragons?”
And technology? I’ve never seen a Xenai using any technology.
“Yes, dragons all came from labs. Catch and release, made new.”
What’s the point of that?
“Do they keep any?”
Fur shrugged again, the blanket moving slightly around his shoulders, “Tried to make pets. Hard to control unless made very young. Few kept. First new makes.”
Shara struggled to wade through the broken sentences. “The embedded animals were the first things the labs made?”
Fur grunted with a small nod. “First. Then technology. Then embeds. Then Xenai.”
“What technology?”
“Amplification—uh—Harnesses.”
Shara couldn’t quite wrap her head around what that meant. “Source amplification? What are harnesses?”
“Harnesses like—” He paused, agitated waves appearing in his smoke as he sat quietly, searching for the word. Finally, he made a motion around his neck, then pointed to her.
“Like an amulet?” She reached up to touch hers and balked when her fingers touched her chest rather than the necklace. She grasped around her neck for the chain, but felt nothing. “Shit.” Had it fallen off when she was sleeping? She would go look in a minute.
“Lost?” Fur asked.
“It falls off sometimes when I forget to take it off before I sleep. I’m sure it’s in my cot. How are the harnesses like amulets?”
“Like, but don’t need caster.”
“Source that doesn’t need a caster? I don’t know how that would work.”
Fur opened his mouth, then snapped it shut, cocking his head to the side in thought. Then he pushed one arm out of the blanket cocoon, reaching down to the dirt, and started drawing runes.
Song of Sundering Page 30