by Logan Jacobs
I took the cup in my hands as I sat up dizzily. The sorceress watched me as I drank almost all of it. Then the cup grew in my hands, along with the remainder of the water, and I continued to drink.
When the cup became unwieldy because of its size, she gently took it away from me and refilled it. The cup’s shifting size did not seem to faze her at all. I took it back from her and drained the water that time before setting the cup down. Then I wiped my mouth with the back of my sleeve.
“What did you do to me, woman?” I asked.
“I enhanced you,” she said. “The effects should last for about one cycle of the moon.”
“What effects?” I asked.
“Consider it your payment, so that your precious code is unbroken.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“It is time for you to go, Prince Casifer,” she said. “Go and banish the sorcerer’s evil from this land.”
I got to my feet shakily. I wondered how long I’d been passed out for. I wondered how long Theo had been waiting and hoped he hadn’t done anything rash in the meantime. Most likely, he’d just been snacking on some weeds.
“When you reach the castle, remember three things,” she said.
I stood there and tried to not fall over. I didn’t feel “enhanced,” I felt weakened by exhaustion. What if her medicine or her spell only worked on Savajuns? Or what if it only worked on heroes who were truly pure of heart?
“Your past is not just a burden, it is a source of strength,” she said. “Trust nothing that you see. And, it’s the fourth door on the right.”
“Got it,” I muttered, and stumbled out into the sunlight. I hoped it was still the same day’s sunlight.
Two of the raiders who had initially waylaid me in the forest were still waiting outside the sorceress’ house and immediately moved in to escort me when they saw me emerge.
“You know, you fellows just may have done me a favor,” I muttered to them. “We’ll see about that, I suppose.”
“You passed the test,” one of them informed me. It was the fellow with the earlobes stretched with discs of bone.
“I… how do you know that?” I asked.
He glanced at the closed door behind us, then back at me, and answered simply, “You came out.”
“So, am I free to go now?” I asked. “Where’s my horse?”
“Back at the chief’s house,” my other escort answered. He was wearing a boar’s pelt as a cloak. “We will go there now.”
As we walked over to the largest log house in the center of the village, the lethargy seemed to dissipate from my limbs, my churning stomach calmed down, and my vision cleared. As before, all the Savajuns who were busy at their daily chores of crafting tools or tending plants or watching children play outside gathered around to watch curiously as I passed by. I found that it required less concentration than usual to estimate how many of them there were, and even to scan the faces of the crowd and quickly determine that none of them appeared to be an immediate threat based on their body language. It almost seemed that my peripheral vision had expanded, and that my mind could process the environmental details that I observed more quickly than usual.
When we reached the chief’s house, he was standing outside surrounded by his warriors. The older women who had been enthroned beside him, and the four younger ones lounging at their feet were nowhere in sight, so I assumed they had probably remained inside the house.
Theo was still tethered outside right where I had last seen him, and I could see the relief in his posture when he caught sight of me approaching. He stamped his feet to express his impatience with me. I guess he wasn’t enjoying our little unplanned visit to the village.
“The paleface passed the test?” the chief asked the two Savajuns escorting me.
“He did,” the one with the stretched earlobes answered.
“So am I free to go?” I asked again.
“You are free to go,” the chief replied, “after you pay me my rightful tribute. All who are received in my hall must pay tribute.”
“What kind of tribute?” I demanded. “Your men already looted all the gold from my saddlebags.”
“We spared your life,” he said. “Gold is not sufficient repayment for such a debt.”
“What do you want?” I asked him through gritted teeth. I was getting tired of this tribe’s games with me.
“This horse,” the chief pointed at Theo. I had noticed that there seemed to be no other horses in this particular village, although there were some Savajun tribes in which all the warriors were mounted and even the women and children rode better bareback than most cowboys did with saddles on. I imagined that having Theo would have been the ultimate status symbol for Buffalo Rider, who had no buffalo in sight upon which to ride.
“There’s no way in hell,” I laughed. I said “hell” in my own language because I didn’t know what the equivalent would be in the Savajun language, since they had a whole other set of beliefs about the afterlife. But the general sentiment came across just fine.
“You don’t have a choice,” the chief said.
“A man always has a choice,” I said.
There were ten warriors currently surrounding the chief, including my two escorts. My hands weren’t bound anymore, but neither did I have a weapon. I saw my sword, still in its sheath, in the hands of one of the warriors. I suppose they still intended to return it to me. But they thought they could keep Theo.
There was fury in Theo’s big black almond-shaped eyes. If he’d been a dog or a wolf, I knew he would have been snarling. As it was, all he could do was toss his head and stamp his hooves. He was still tethered by the reins and couldn’t break free.
“We will return your gold to you,” the chief offered. “You can buy another horse.”
“No deal,” I said.
“This horse is mine now,” the chief stated. “The only matter still in question is what becomes of you.”
“Yours, my ass,” Theo snorted, and lobbed a big gob of spit at the proud Savajun. It hit him in the ear. Buffalo Rider’s stern, creased face froze.
The surrounding warriors all froze for an instant too. Settlers were always surprised to hear Theo talk for the first time, since talking animals were such a precious rarity, but these Savajuns looked petrified, as if they’d seen a ghost. For a split second, the scene was downright comedic.
Then, the nearest warrior raised his tomahawk and swung it at Theo’s skull. These people didn’t believe there was any such thing as a talking animal. If an animal talked, they believed it was a shapeshifting demon in disguise. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any time for Theo to convince them that he was far too crotchety, pretentious, and opinionated to be a demon.
So I wrenched the tomahawk from the hands of the startled warrior standing next to me and flung it. It somersaulted through the air and thunked in between the shoulder blades of the Savajun who’d been about to cleave Theo’s skull.
He went down like a rock, of course, but my troubles were just about to start.
I felt the wind shift behind me, ducked, and saw the glint of a tomahawk blade as it passed above my head. As soon as it passed by, I reached up, grabbed the wrist of the wielder, and flipped him over my back while continuing to grip his wrist in such a way that the weight of his own falling body cracked his arm the wrong way. He screamed in agony, so I grabbed the tomahawk as it fell from his now limp and useless hand and swung it to my right to bury it between the ribs of the next warrior to charge me. Then I wrapped his body in an embrace and spun around to place it between me and the warrior on my left preparing to loose an arrow.
The arrow struck the Savajun in the neck, and then I dropped the body and charged the archer before he had time to nock another arrow.
I tried to wrest the bow out of his hands, but he was strong and didn’t let go. While we wrestled, another warrior came up behind me. I heard his footfalls and felt his breath on my neck and the shift of the wind as he raised his weapon. At the l
ast second, I let go of the bow and dove to the side. The tomahawk-wielding Savajun’s momentum carried him forward, and he proceeded to cleave his archer friend in the chest. Before he had time to feel guilty about it, I seized his head in both my hands by the chin and the top of the skull and cracked his neck with a satisfyingly loud crunch.
Meanwhile, I heard Theo neigh, and glanced over to see him rear up and smash a Savajun’s face inward with a blow from one of his mighty front hooves. The corpse fell, its lean muscles the gleaming picture of health, the brown skin smooth and unbroken, but the face an unrecognizable bloodied pulp. Then Theo kicked up his hind legs and brought one of his rear hooves down on top of a warrior that had been on his belly creeping up behind him. This time he missed the head but hit the back, but from the way the guy crumpled, I suspected that Theo’s blow had probably severed his spine and paralyzed him.
Within another minute, all ten of the warriors lay either dead or permanently crippled, and only Chief Buffalo Rider himself continued to stand upright in the midst of the carnage. He didn’t carry a weapon and he didn’t try to attack me. He just stared in mute shock and horror.
I faced him, with a Savajun tomahawk in each hand and a liberal quantity of his warriors’ blood splattering my skin and clothes.
“So, Chief, am I free to go?” I asked.
“… Yes,” he croaked.
I chose not to hack down the old guy, because I figured he’d been permanently cowed by my performance. As long as they continued to be under his leadership, this tribe wouldn’t try hunting me down for revenge any time soon. And if he had been weakened in their eyes so much that they deposed him or even exiled him from the tribe and cast him out into the woods to live and die alone, which I’d heard was a Savajun practice sometimes exercised when their leaders failed them, then that would be more of a punishment than a swift execution at my hands.
Instead I walked past him, bent to retrieve my sword that had fallen from the hands of one of the warriors I killed, and used it to slash Theo’s reins in half. I didn’t need them to guide him. I took one of the Savajun tomahawks with me as a backup weapon that might come in handy. Then I mounted up and rode out of the village.
As I went, I heard some of the children whimpering and the women weeping for their fallen warriors.
“He fights like a demon,” I heard one of them whisper.
“A demon man on a demon horse.”
The truth was that I had just fought like a man possessed. I was a good swordsman, a very good one, but not that good. Ten on one wasn’t a fight I normally could have won. At least not without using every bit of guile at my disposal and setting up some kind of elaborate ambush beforehand, which was my usual policy when I knew I was going to be outnumbered.
But I hadn’t done that this time.
I hadn’t even utilized my growing and shrinking power a single time, for the simple reason that the whole fight had unfolded so fast that it never even occurred to me to do so. But my perception of my enemies’ movements and my reaction times had also been sped up so much that I’d somehow survived the ten-man onslaught.
Thank you, Walks with Spirits, for that putrid brew, I thought to myself as Theo carried me into the trees. “Enhanced” for “one cycle of the moon”-- that was what she’d said. Well, this was going to be a damn good month.
Chapter 12
It took us a while after that to figure out our whereabouts. Theo and I argued about which trees we did or didn’t recognize and remember having passed, when I was on foot tied behind him. We both made mistakes. We ended up going in circles. It began to grow dark, and I started to worry that we were well and truly lost, and just as likely to end up running into the same tribe again as we were to find our way back onto the path from Bluegarden to Fairhollow that had been mapped out for us. It was evident that the sorceress’ “enhancement” of my abilities hadn’t included an enhancement of my navigation skills.
But then, finally, we came across the exact tree where we had taken shelter and fallen asleep the night before, only to be awakened by hostile Savajuns.
“I’d know that damn tree anywhere,” I gasped out with relief.
“So would I, my friend,” Theo muttered bitterly. “So would I.”
Better yet, the saddlebags that the Savajuns had lifted off Theo’s back and left there beneath the tree were still there, and the contents did not seem to have been reduced, so guessed no one else had come that way since. I got off and replaced the saddlebags on Theo’s back.
By then it was dark already, but by mutual, unspoken agreement, we continued on probably half a mile farther in the approximate direction that we wanted to go. If we stopped at that exact tree, then we could have calculated the correct angle more precisely in the morning, but even though neither of us were superstitious by nature, that just somehow seemed like it would be bad luck.
We bedded down. I gave Theo some oats and water, and munched on some of the jerky and biscuits that I still had left in the saddlebags, since the Savajuns had rejected them as unpalatable.
“Hal?” Theo said. He sounded uncharacteristically meek.
“Yeah?”
“… I’m sorry I talked. Back in the Savajun camp.”
There was a pause as we both remembered the words-- “Yours, my ass”-- and the projectile glob of spit that had prompted all hell to break loose.
I snickered. “Well, I’m not.”
“I didn’t know you could fight like that,” Theo said.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not really, anyway. Not naturally. The Savajun sorceress that they brought me to; she did something to me. She was trying to help me. To make me powerful enough that I’d have a chance against Gorander. But the effects are only temporary. And I’m sure she never imagined that it would turn out that way, with the chief’s guards.”
“Are you really sure?” Theo asked. “I could see Vera doing something like that on purpose. Didn’t she kill a few of her own tribe members the night she left?”
“Yes, the ones that she felt had wronged her,” I said. “But this woman was nothing like Vera. And she was old, and still had the trust of her tribe, so it doesn’t seem like she had rebelled against the sorcerer’s role the way that Vera did.”
“Some people get old, and decide they no longer give a damn,” Theo remarked.
“True enough,” I said. “I decided that when I was eighteen.”
“Well, today, you sure seemed like you gave a damn about me,” Theo said. That wasn’t a characteristic comment. We both avoided sentimentality like the plague. “You could’ve left me. They would’ve let you just walk away. That would’ve been the sensible thing to do.”
“Guess whatever brew that sorceress gave me probably got me a bit drunk and stupid,” I scoffed.
“Naw,” he snorted. “You love me.”
“Shaddup,” I said, and then I cracked open my eyes a bit to see him staring at me. He noticed, and we both ended up laughing for a spell. Then I shut my eyes, and Theo stayed quiet after that and let me fall asleep.
The next day passed without event. We were both a bit more wary than usual, and sometimes I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and felt sure that there were eyes watching us from the trees, but whether the eyes belonged to Savajuns or woodland animals, they evidently decided not to confront us.
Near the evening, we reached the river that the ranchers in Bluegarden had described. It was a fairly mild river near the shore, although it was a broad and deep one and the currents looked powerful and swift-moving farther out. So I stripped down, waded out just to thigh-level, and took a quick dip to wash off and refresh myself while Theo grazed nearby. It felt good to clear off all the dust and grime that perpetually coated my skin, although I didn’t have any soap for a proper scrub.
I rinsed out my clothes too. Then I got redressed and walked alongside Theo, so that I wouldn’t get his coat all soggy by dripping on him, until we came within sight of the stone bridge that spanned the breadth of the r
iver.
Then we bedded down in the shelter of a grove of trees nearby. I didn’t want to move in on Gorander’s position in the dark without knowing what kind of traps we might be walking into. Sorcerers often commanded creatures that could see in the dark, werewolves not the least of them, and I thought the cover of night was likely to give him more of an advantage than it would give us. I built a fire, which dried the last lingering dampness from my clothes, drained a vial of potencium, and fell asleep with the pleasant tingle of it warming my belly.
“You know, you could stay on this side of the bridge and wait for me,” I suggested.
“Eh, the grass looks a bit tastier on that side,” he said.
So, we crossed the bridge together.
There wasn’t any immediate change. No werewolves pounced on us. Not that they could have, given that it wasn’t the night of the full moon. If the ones that had been raiding Richcreek for potencium every month really were Gorander’s agents, I wondered how exactly he employed them the other twenty-nine or thirty days of the month, when they were nothing more than slightly scruffy and boorish humans, without any exceptional physical capabilities. As housekeepers? Accountants?
I consulted the hand-drawn map frequently to try to estimate how close we were to approaching the dot that represented Fairhollow. Although I didn’t know how much to rely on the ranchers’ cartographical skills anyway. Then, there came a time when I looked down at the map, looked back up, and there it was on the horizon.
What “it” was exactly was hard to say. It didn’t look like a town exactly. It was a dark smudge on the golden plains. A blackened area that seemed to be belching smoke.
As we got closer and closer, I could see that the area was deeply pitted. There were towers built, and lift systems with levers and pulleys. There were precarious ladders and walkways that wound around the edges of seemingly bottomless pits. There were colossal mechanical contraptions that I didn’t fully understand the purpose of, that seemed to be powered by steam, and that was what was generating the smoke.