by Dante King
Dasyr was similarly attired and equipped with an almost identical robe and leather satchel. The tiger ears protruding through her hair were striped in red, as well as black and white, as was her tail. From out of the depths of her cowl, her golden eyes watched us as we approached and came to stand in front of the two Transfusion Ceremony specialists.
For a few long moments, no one said anything. Both parties merely regarded one another while the rain pattered and was whipped about us by the wind.
“Dasyr, Tanila,” I said to break the ice. “It’s nice to see you again.”
Tanila and Dasyr bowed their heads in greeting.
“What is the meaning of this cave-dwelling spirit that you bring with you, Dragonmancer Noctis?” Tanila said in her solemn voice. She gestured at Will, the wisp who was zipping around everyone’s ankles in much the same way an excitable puppy might when it had been invited out for a walk.
“Will is going to be accompanying us,” I said. “He’s proved himself helpful in past expeditions. I thought he might have the opportunity to do so again on this one.”
Dasyr crouched down and scrutinized the wisp, the only one of our company not affected by the lashing rain and the persistent wind. Will, for his part, seemed to glow a little less brightly under the Lorekeeper’s unwavering gaze and bobbed off to hide behind Tamsin’s leg.
“Where the hell is Scrutor?” Saya asked, in her typical brash way. I always caught myself marveling at the way that Saya had the looks of a glamor model and the manners of a sailor on shore leave. “I don’t much fancy being out in this fucking pestilential weather, but if we do, then I’d rather be moving.”
“And move we shall, Dragonmancer Scopula,” came the incongruously high and girlish voice of the Head of Scouts.
Scrutor had appeared without a single sound from around the other side of the elm tree. It was a neat trick. We’d approached from an angle that would have made hiding behind the bole of a tree impossible. Where the leader of General’s Shiloh’s scouts could have popped out from beat me.
“Scrutor,” I said, “the General tells us that you’re going to be the woman to guide us to your secret gap in the wall that divides us from Vetrusca.”
Scrutor’s usual leather traveling clothes were hidden by a voluminous cloak, but her hood was down despite the increasing foulness of the weather.
“That’s correct, Mike Noctis,” she said. Her ever-twitching hands flexed at her sides, as if they itched to get at a dagger or an arrow, or to set a noose. “Follow me and we’ll get you inside the Vetruscan Kingdom without any Vetruscan having the slightest clue that you slipped through.”
“How far from the Acquiescent Breach is this sneaky passage of yours, Scrutor?” Elenari asked.
Scrutor grinned. Her face was bedewed with rain, as was her short blue mohawk. She looked like she was in her element, out in the rising storm.
“It’s far enough for you not to have to worry about bumping into anyone who might have a bug up their ass about you being out there,” she said confidently.
“Shall we get this show on the road, then?” I asked.
Lightning lit the sky over us, illuminating the group of eight—nine if you included Will--like a flare for all of one second. In that second, I saw that we must look like a sinister and unfavorable bunch: cloaked and bundled, eight figures standing outside in the pouring rain while thunder grumbled and lightning cracked the cloudy dome of the sky.
“Yes,” Scrutor said, raising the hood on her cloak so that her face disappeared, “let us get on. The weather, I think, is only going to get worse before it gets better.”
“I freaking hate that saying,” Saya grumbled as we started our march and headed straight off the road into the untamed country that headed northward.
“Me too,” Tamsin chuckled as she fell in behind me. “Of course it’s going to get worse before it gets better, otherwise how would we be able to look back at something and say something like, ‘well, that seems to be the worst of it.’?”
“All right, all right,” I said, “I imagine we have a nice, long march to look forward to this evening, so how about we hold off on the philosophizing for, say, the first five hours?”
“Or what?” Tamsin said in my ear. “You’ll spank us?”
My smile was lost in the dark and the storm.
“No,” I said, “if you keep misbehaving, I won’t.”
Tamsin laughed and, looking back, I saw her teeth flash white in another stroke of lightning.
“If there was one threat that was guaranteed to secure our silence…” she said.
Scrutor led the way into the wild country, her telltale height obscured by the fact that she was hunched down against the rain. Tanila and Dasyr followed close on the head scout’s tail, seemingly unencumbered by the robes they wore. The rest of us followed in a line, swapping positions as we talked quietly amongst one another. Always though, Elenari, Hunter of Wyrmwood, paced lightly along at the back in the place of rearguard. All of us were shrouded in cloaks and hoods that disguised our identities, as well as the fact that we were decked out in full fighting attire.
We marched with indefatigable perseverance of dragonmancers all through the night, while the storm hollered and wailed around us. The wind battered at us, sending rain spraying this way and that, so that it stung our faces like powdered glass. At times, gales tore up older, more fragile trees.
At one point, a tree exploded off to our right in a burst of molten sparks as it was struck by a lightning bolt. It was not a forest giant, but it was still a tree, and had more than enough bulk to turn a car into aluminum foil if it had landed on it.
It toppled over, pushed by the wind, right into our path. Fortunately, I happened to be looking right at that particular tree at the time that the lightning hit it, so I was able to react first.
The tree came down, descending like a bark-covered finger of the gods. Without stopping to ponder whether what I was about to attempt to do could possibly work, my arms were over my head and my knees braced. I caught the falling tree, as big around the trunk as a trashcan, before it could do any harm to anyone. Then, with a heave, I tossed it over onto the side of the rough track that we had been following.
“Nice catch, Mike!” Saya called from in front of me.
I had been tempted to use my Forcewave spell to really get some distance on the tree, but we had all agreed to refrain from using magic unless it was absolutely necessary. We couldn’t be sure that there were no spies observing us out here, even if the weather was as bad as it was.
“Everyone okay back there?” Scrutor cried over the gusting wind. “You okay, Mike?”
I gave the scout the thumbs-up.
We pressed on.
The country was all but invisible in the raging storm. I would not have been at all surprised to find that we had been traveling in circles for half the night, so little could I make out, even with my dragon-enhanced senses.
How the hell Scrutor knew where to go I had no idea, but the lanky scout pressed on unerringly. She might have paused once or twice to check she was heading in the correct direction, but those stops were only for a few minutes and were just long enough for me to fish out a piece of venison jerky from my pocket and stuff it into my mouth.
“Is it wet enough out here for you, Mike?” Scrutor asked during a scheduled stop. We had dispensed with all the Dragonmancer so-and-so as part of our cover, although I couldn’t imagine what sort of spy would be able to hear anything over the roar of the storm.
“Yeah, it’s coming down pretty nicely now, isn’t it?” I said.
It was somewhat of an understatement. Not long before, Elenari, being at the back of the group, had been compelled to make a mad dash along a ridge as the line of hills became so inundated with rainwater that they collapsed into a landslide.
“Yeah,” Scrutor said, happily and pointlessly wiping the water off her face with the back of her arm, “it’s a real turd-floater out here tonight! Haven’t seen it tippi
ng it down like this for a long time!”
“A turd-floater?” I asked. “What the fuck is a turd-floater?”
Scrutor snorted and water sprayed off the end of her angular nose and into the night.
“You haven’t spent too much time in military camps, have you?” she said over the rolling don of another thunderclap.
“Not too much time, no,” I said.
“You’d know what a turd-floater was if you had,” Scrutor said. “You’d definitely know it if your latrine pits had been dug by the kind of assholes that usually get assigned that kind of duty.”
“Ah,” I said, “I see. That’s why you spend so much time out here on your own, is it?”
Scrutor caught the teasing glint in my eye and grinned back. “That’s right,” she said. “You’ve got to be pretty damned unlucky to wake up next to shit if you’re caught in a rainstorm out here. It’s just one of the many reasons I enjoy my time out here in the wilds. Tell me, what’s with the wisp?”
“With Will?” I yelled over another sky-cracking roll of thunder.
General Shiloh’s top spy and tracker nodded, wiping more water off her face and pointing one long finger at the somewhat muted will-o’-the-wisp.
I considered telling the woman the truth, then thought better of it. May as well play this one close to the chest.
“He’s a good morale booster,” I said. “There’s something about him. Like having a dog along.”
Scrutor considered this. “That may be true,” she said after a moment, “but it’s also like walking about with a bloody lit torch out in the wild. Keep that in mind. Although anyone watching might consider him a wild one. Wisps like that can occasionally be seen out in the grasslands that you’ll be heading into. I’ve seen a couple there myself.”
“Only a couple?” I asked. “This year?”
Scrutor laughed. Like her voice, her laughter was deceptively feminine.
“No,” she replied. “In about twenty years.”
We carried on through the whole of the night and into the gray dawn.
With the rising of the sun, the rain finally began to ease, almost as if the coming of the sun was a signal for it to start relenting.
The saturnine clouds that roofed the world were dyed in blood and fire when the sun rose and lit our surroundings. Not that it made a blind bit of difference to me, really. I had no real notion as to which way the Vetruscan Kingdom lay—hell we could have spent the night walking in circles and the Galipolas camp could have been over the closest rise for all I knew.
But at least I could work out directions. With the coming of the sun, east was easy enough to figure out. After that, all I needed was the commonsense of a five-year-old to figure out which way north was.
I didn’t need to determine where north was by using the sun, though. North was marked out clearly by a huge overhanging wall of black rock—basalt I guessed it to be. It stretched as far as I could see off east and west. It was about seventy feet tall and devoid of anything that might have even come close to a handhold. Natural it looked, and yet, conversely, not of this world. It might have been constructed, if only the skill for such a construction and the labor needed to complete it existed anywhere in the world.
“It’s something isn’t it?” Scrutor said, not missing the puzzled awe plastered across my face and the faces of the others. “Normally, when the weather is behaving itself, you get to ease into it. The wall juts out and begins from the last mountain in the chain of which Galipolas is a mere part. It runs all the way from there across the continent to the mammoth cliffs that drop down into Seething Bay. A distance of some seven-hundred miles as the drake flies.”
“And it really is completely impenetrable?” I asked, trying to keep the skepticism out of my voice and failing. “Apart from the one opening at Acquiescent Breach?”
“And the little wormhole that I discovered,” Scrutor said proudly. “I can see, even in this crumby waterlogged light, that you do not believe me.”
“It just seems so impossible,” I said honestly. “That a geographical formation should run for that long with only a single aperture in it…”
Scrutor squeezed the hem of her traveling cloak. Clear, cold rainwater streamed out of it.
“Funny how often we use the word ‘impossible’ in the place of ‘improbable’,” she said. “I might spend ninety-percent of my time with only the leaves and the grass and the sky for company, so excuse my somewhat rustic opinion, but if we saw how often the Mystocean Empire’s progress was detoured or halted because of our misbelief that the words ‘impossible’ and ‘improbable’ are synonyms, I reckon we might be quite astounded.”
I looked along the line of the natural wall stretching away into the unseeable distance. It was a fair point: it didn’t matter how highly improbable something might be, at the end of the day, it was still possible.
Tamsin reached out and tapped the rock wall, which was acting as a shelter for us against the drizzle that had replaced the rain.
“So, I guess we just follow this until we reach your sweet spot, is that right, Scrutor?” the hobgoblin asked.
Scrutor nodded. “We will rest for a little while now and then head along the wall. We’ll make a cold camp just before the official gateway and lie low and sleep until night falls once more and we can safely move past it. My entrance is not more than two hour’s march past the official border crossing.”
Tanila and Dasyr immediately cast themselves down and began pulling out jerky, jackalope buns, and the other foodstuffs that made up our traveling provisions. Clearly, quiet as they might be, the two Lorekeepers were seasoned campaigners and knew how to take best advantage of a few minutes’ reprieve while on the march.
I peered up at the slowly clearing sky. The clouds still threatened rain, but the torrential downpour had stopped for now and it was no longer quite so apocalyptic as it had been.
The wall stood on my right. Southwards, to my left, stretched vast plains of emerald grass which darkened out toward the horizon and hinted at massive swathes of ancient, gloomy woodland. Behind me, to the east, the mountains could still clearly be seen, of course. A good while ahead of us, though I could not see it, was Seething Bay.
I took a deep, long lungful of the moist and misty air. Rich with the smell of minerals and water and rich sod it was. Heavy with the tang of exploits and antics yet to come.
Something hit me on the shoulder—a piece of jerky thrown by Saya.
“Come, Mike, sit down and take a load off while you can,” the ashy-blonde warrior woman told me, patting a delightfully appealing piece of wet earth next to her. “You might not feel like you need it, but your body will be glad of the rest.”
“She’s right, human,” Tamsin said. “The first rule while out on campaign is, as you know—”
“Sleep when you can,” both Elenari and myself intoned. It was something that the preceptors had drilled into us ever since we began our studies at the Drako Academy.
“It’s a rule for a reason, Mike,” Scrutor said. “Rest is as essential as mana and food. We’ll be moving as soon as it is dark enough, and with this weather, that might be earlier than usual.”
“You don’t enjoy sleep?” Tanila asked me in that slightly dreamily somber voice that the two tiger-looking dragonmancers used.
“Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I love sleep,” I said. “When I’m awake is when the world has the tendency to go to hell in a handbasket.” I grinned around at my female companions. “But you have to admit, it sure can be fun when that happens.”
* * *
We could have been over the wall in a matter of seconds on our dragons, obviously. But being said, according to Scrutor, that tactic would have been like letting off a bunch of magical fireworks—the diplomatic equivalent of pulling a giant middle finger at Queen Frami and all her people.
“All of us, both sides, know that the Mystocean Empire’s dragons could make a mockery of this wall,” Scrutor said to me when I pointed this out to
her, “but us being considerate enough not to take advantage of this one obvious strongpoint is one of the few things that holds this delicate peace we share with the Vetruscans together.”
“You mean that all that is stopping a border war is the Empress Cyrene pandering to Queen Frami’s pride?” I asked.
The head of the Mystocean spy network smiled thinly. “It sounds a little cynical and silly when you say it like that,” she said.
“Sounds like fucking politics,” I muttered, shaking my head.
Scrutor’s secret entrance to the Vetruscan Kingdom was little more than a crack in the stone border wall. This crack opened into a pitch-dark fissure that everyone had to feel their way through with their one spare hand, their other being needed to clutch their pack tight to their chest.
As the brawniest and biggest of the company, I had the most difficulty but, eventually, I made it through along with everyone else.
“Here I leave you,” Scrutor said simply.
“Couldn’t you take us the rest of the way?” Tanila asked. “Your skill at finding a path has been well proven.”
Scrutor ran a hand over her short blue mohawk, sending up a spray of water droplets.
“I could,” she said, “but those were not my orders. My orders stop here. Don’t worry, though. It’s an easy amble from here to the capital of Vetrusca, Hrímdale. You carry on dead straight from here for one day until you reach a mere—a crystal pool like a miniature lake. From there you carry on dead north, following the stream that flows into the mere up toward the hills. You will come to a deserted village a day after the mere; an old sheep farming village I believe it was, although it is no longer used. There, the stream bisects. Continue following the rightmost stream, and within another day, you will see the walls of Hrímdale ahead of you.”
Elenari tapped the side of her head. “I have the information stored, Scrutor. Thank you. As one accustomed to navigating in the depths of the Wyrmwood, I am confident I will be able to find the way.”