“This is way better than worms,” Nina declared, to Dhara’s mortification, and that of the cook as well, apparently. Kaia shushed her and smiled an apology to the cook.
Their meal concluded, Kieran asked the sisters, “Where are you headed?”
“North,” Dhara replied.
“Nowhere specific?” he asked.
“Never been there, so no,” Dhara admitted.
“Well, there is a settlement about five or six days’ walk from here, but I warn you – the northlands are a mess these days. That’s why we’re plying our trade farther south than we have before.”
“What’s your trade?” Dhara asked.
“Our trade is trading,” he replied, chuckling at his play on words.
“There’s no one to trade with for quite a distance upstream,” Dhara supplied. “And, if you find yourself in a narrow canyon, beware of being stoned from above by the savages that live on the cliff faces.”
“Good to know. Your advice is worth its weight in gold.”
Dhara wondered about the worth of advice. It seemed freely enough given – if not overly freely, in her opinion.
Kieran got up to check on his group and bade her good night. Dhara wandered over to Kaia and Zara, who were sitting chatting with each other, while Nina slept soundly in Kaia’s lap.
Dhara patted Zara on the shoulder. “Keep an eye out tonight,” she said. “They don’t seem to have poisoned us, so they’re probably planning on killing us in our sleep.”
“What would they gain by that?” Kaia asked skeptically. “We have absolutely nothing worth killing over. I think they’re just being nice.”
“What would they have to gain from that?” Dhara challenged.
“Nothing. That’s the point – they’re just nice.”
“Well, I’m sleeping with a knife in my hand,” Dhara declared.
“Don’t stab yourself then, you idiot,” Kaia replied. “I’m just sleeping.”
Zara wisely kept her opinions to herself.
Dhara stayed up half the night listening for signs of an attack. All she heard was loud snoring. These are the most inept assassins ever, she concluded, and eventually succumbed to her tiredness and slept. She awoke to an ‘I told you so’ look from Kaia, which she promptly brushed off.
Kieran and his crew had a hearty breakfast of eggs and dried bacon, which they shared with Dhara and her sisters. Dhara’s pride was wounded from twice receiving charity from strangers, and she bristled.
Kieran and his crew finished preparing to head out, and he walked over to Dhara and her sisters to say goodbye.
“It was a pleasure sharing your company,” he said.
Dhara couldn’t imagine how that had been the case.
He continued, “I noticed that you seem a little under-provisioned for your trek north – can we give you anything to help you out?”
“We have nothing to trade,” Dhara replied, “and I refuse to pay with my body.”
Kieran choked. “What? No. Why would you…?” he stammered. “I wouldn’t dream of it!”
“Why not? I’m quite skilled,” Dhara huffed.
“By the gods, woman – I don’t want anything from you – I’m just trying to help you.”
“Why would you do that?” she challenged.
“Because it is the right thing to do,” he said, flustered.
Kaia, who had stayed on the periphery of the exchange, finding it hugely amusing, stepped in front of her sister. “That would be very kind of you and very much appreciated.”
“Come with me, and we’ll get you sorted out,” he told her and walked away with Kaia, still shaking his head.
Kieran and his party pushed off, leaving the sisters standing on the shore watching them. Nina waved at them, and Kieran smiled and waved back before taking his seat and paddling off.
“I don’t understand that one,” Dhara thought out loud.
“I like him,” Zara declared. “I’d mate with him.”
“You two have all the charm of alligators,” Kaia said and threw the pack over her shoulder that Kieran had given her. “Come on, Nina,” she called to her daughter.
They turned and continued their walk north. As Kieran promised, five days later, they came upon a small city. There was an encampment on its north side for new arrivals, so Dhara and her sisters assumed that it was as good a place as any to rest and figure out what they were going to do next or where they’d go.
The camp was filled with misery, violence, and strife. Dhara took it in. This, I can relate to, she thought.
Kala
Skye, Celeste, Petr, and Twill surrounded Kala. “What do you mean we have to steal one of the Church’s airships?” Skye asked her. “And where do you imagine it keeps its private stock of ships?”
“I’m not sure, but if we follow the Priestess, I’m sure she’ll lead us straight to them. She came to the temple grounds from outside, so it stands to reason that the ship she took to get here isn’t inside. We’ve got to hurry – she could leave anytime, and I have to be there to follow her.” She raced over to her pack and pulled out her leathers. She pulled her top over her head and tossed it aside.
“Whoa!” declared Petr, and he, Twill, and Skye all spun around to face away.
“No time for modesty,” she said as she hurriedly changed clothes. Letting them know that she was done changing, the boys turned back around. She pulled a tin of black ointment out of her pack, spread it over her exposed skin, and pulled the hood of her tunic up over her head. She arranged her daggers, but left her swords and bow behind.
Skye gawked at her transformation.
“This is what I do,” she told him. “It’s what I’m good at.” She squeezed his arm and raced out the door into the gathering dusk. She made her way among the shadows to the temple gates and took up a position as far away as she dared. Not long after, several monks slipped out the gate and made their way into the night. Scouts, Kala surmised. Prudent. She melted deeper into the shadows and kept watch.
Soon enough, she saw the Priestess exit the gate with a couple of monks. I wonder if Brother Grey is one of them? Kala thought. The party turned left and made their way down the street. Kala followed at a distance, always wary of crossing paths with a member of the Priestess’s advance party, who were out in the night somewhere. She followed them halfway across the city then abruptly lost their trail in an out-of-the-way alley. Kala traced and retraced her steps but couldn’t figure out where they’d gone. She stood in the lane, trying to stay calm and think when she caught the faint scent of lilac. Still using the same soap? she thought and smiled. She followed the scent to a grate in the ground, but the fragrance went no farther. She bent down and attempted to lift the grate up and out of her way. It gave way grudgingly, and with some effort, she pushed it aside far enough for her to climb into the shaft. It was even harder to drag it back into position from beneath it, but she succeeded.
She descended the ladder into darkness. The tunnel at the bottom of the shaft was pitch black, but she dared not light a torch for fear of announcing her presence. She felt her way along in the dark following the scent of lilac. It was slow going, but she was able to follow the Priestess’s trail. At first, she tried to keep track of the turns she took, but following the Priestess’s faint scent took all of her attention. There is no way I’m going to remember this way later, she thought ruefully. She followed the tunnels blindly until they disgorged her into the night through an exit that was covered with vines. She breathed in the fresh air hungrily after the stale air of the tunnels.
The wind had dispersed the Priestess’s scent, but in the distance, Kala saw a lone torch flit in and out of the trees. She was able to follow it from a comfortable distance, although she struggled not to trip over the uneven ground in the dark. The Priestess’s party walked for what felt like an eternity until strange forms began to poke up into the sky, and Kala started to feel a powerful sense of unease. Had she not made up her mind to follow the Priestess, she would have
turned back. Finally, the torch stopped its steady advance. Wherever it was, the Priestess had arrived at her destination. Kala crept up with all the stealth her long years in the forest had taught her. She positioned herself in some brush close enough to get a sense of what the Priestess was doing. She peered through the branches, all the while being gnawed at by a sense of foreboding.
The Priestess’s party had grown to five and Kala thanked the gods that she hadn’t stumbled into one of the scouts. The Priestess was standing in a stone circle, much like the dais outside her village on which the airships landed, except that this one was surrounded by an odd ring of unevenly-spaced onyx cenotaphs that jutted out of the ground. Three of the monks had established a perimeter, and the fourth was speaking with the Priestess in low tones. After what seemed like an age, one of the monks signaled the others, and the Priestess and her counsel moved outside the circle. An airship slowly descended from a great height. Kala could only make it out from where it eclipsed the stars. The ship drew closer to the center of the stone circle as it drifted lower. How it adjusted its course was unclear as it descended utterly silently. When it finally reached the ground, Kala heard a low metallic thump, and the ship held fast to its position without a small army of people pulling it down with ropes. That’s new, Kala remarked.
The Priestess and her counsel approached the ship and boarded it. He handed one of the other three the torch, waved them away, and closed the door behind him. Two of the monks walked over to one of the creepy cenotaphs. It was hard to make out what they were doing, but it looked to Kala as though they rolled a large stone that had been resting against the cenotaph a short distance away from it. Kala heard the same low metallic thud she’d heard earlier, but this time the ship rose slowly. The three monks that were left behind turned and headed back toward the city. They passed nerve-wrackingly close to where Kala lay hidden but did not detect her. Once she judged them safely gone, she rushed out to mark which cenotaph she thought the stone had rested against, but she didn’t need to, as the stone still lay closer to it than to any of the others. Kala then scrambled to mark the direction that she believed the ship had headed as it rose. It was hard to gauge as it was only by gradations of darkness that she could infer where the ship was at all.
Kala decided that she needed to spend the night near this spot so that she could infer what she could of the mechanics of hailing an airship in the light of morning. However, she needed somewhere safe to stay off the ground, and the surrounding trees weren’t tall enough to provide security. She scanned the horizon and spotted the ruins of some ancient structure. She shivered, looking at it, but decided staying alive was more important than her trepidation and trudged in its direction. Arriving at it, she discovered that it was the framework of some multi-level structure that had canted over as the ground beneath it had given way. What type of structure outlasts the earth itself? she wondered. Something ancient and best forgotten, she concluded. She pulled herself up and shimmed up the cold obsidian pillars until she was several levels above the ground. Only a predator that could jump great heights could follow her to where she lay panting in the dark. She got only fitful sleep that night and was awoken several times to the sound of nails on the stone below her. She pulled her tunic tighter around herself and huddled against a pillar.
The dawning light gradually illumined her surroundings to reveal nothing overtly frightening, but her sense of dread persisted. This place reeks of ancient death, she thought and climbed down. The ground below her did not appear particularly disturbed, and she began to wonder if she’d imagined the sounds in the night. She oriented herself toward the direction in which she believed the airship landing area lay and walked back to it. It was close to where she had thought it was, and she found it again easily enough. She walked around the stone circle that the airship had landed on. In the daylight, the cenotaphs ringing the dais rose skyward like the legs of a dead spider on its back. The thought made her irrationally afraid that it would spring to life at any moment and rend her apart.
Several round stones lay around the circle, but she was able to identify the one that the monks had just moved by the fresh tracks that moving it had made. Kala placed a pebble on top of it to mark it, just in case she forgot which was which later. There was no rhyme or reason to the stones or the cenotaphs, but Kala vaguely recalled that the airship had gone in the direction of the cenotaph against which the round stone had rested. However, the margin of error included almost half of the other cenotaphs, so she concluded that she shouldn’t put too much stock in that theory.
Satisfied that staring at the stones any longer wouldn’t reveal any more secrets, she turned and headed back toward the city. Kala knew that it was unlikely that she’d find the entrance to the tunnels that would take her back inside the city walls, but she had no other immediate option, so she made her way back regardless. As expected, the tunnel entrance eluded her, but she could see in the distance that the gate to the city walls lay open to the farmers that were streaming in and out. I don’t look like much of a farmer in my leathers, she thought but decided that she’d get creative when she got closer. In the heat, she noticed several men and women wearing little, so she turned down the tops of her leathers, exposing her undershirt. She rubbed the black ointment off her face with handfuls of grass until her skin was raw. That’s as good as it’s going to get, she concluded. She walked up to a wagon of potatoes that was being drawn by oxen and mimicked a woman she’d seen picking up fallen potatoes and returning them to the wagon. This kept her busy until she’d entered the city walls and was a little way beyond them. When the wagons veered in the direction that she presumed the city stores lay, she melted into the shadows in the opposite direction and pulled her top back up.
There were more guards out than usual, and Kala observed parents hustling their children off the streets. She headed back toward Celeste’s hideout. Nearing it, she heard sounds of a struggle and raced toward them. She rounded the corner to see Celeste struggling between two guards, Skye with a sword at his throat, Petr lying on the ground with a guard bent over him, and Twill surrounded by the younger children clinging to him in fear.
Twill was the first to spot Kala. “They’ve got Celeste! Help her!” He was beside himself with panic. Something in Kala snapped, and she walked calmly down the alleyway.
“Take your damned hands off of her,” she commanded the guards who were holding the struggling Celeste.
They tightened their grip instead. Wrong move, Kala thought. The guard that had been bent over Petr stood up and advanced toward her.
Skye tried to move to intercept her, but the guard with the sword at his throat prevented him.
“I was going to go easy on you because you’re just doing your job,” she began as she stalked closer, “but it’s an evil job, and you do it anyway. It’s no excuse, so I don’t excuse you.”
“Are you done, little girl?” the guard that beat up Petr said and pulled a heavy wooden mace from behind his back.
“I haven’t even started, but I can already tell that I’m going to enjoy this,” she replied, cracking her knuckles.
The man charged at her, swinging his club. Kala deftly side-stepped him, and he reached up to where his throat had formerly been intact. Kala wiped her bloody dagger on a pant leg and turned toward the two men holding Celeste. They released her, and each pulled out a knife. Kala smiled an evil smile and returned her dagger to its sheath, gesturing the men forward barehanded. The men looked at each other and attacked. Kala ducked under the first man’s blade and guided his momentum in an arc that took the point of his knife under and into the other man’s armpit. Kala twisted the blade, then yanked it free of the man’s side, bent the man’s arm at the elbow, turned it around, and drove his own blade deep into his stomach. She pulled it upward, and both men fell to the ground trying in vain to stop their lifeblood from escaping them.
The guard holding Skye at sword-point grabbed onto him and said, “One step closer and…” He never finis
hed his thought, with Kala’s dagger lodged in his forehead. His grip turned to jelly, and his sword clattered to the ground before he did.
In no more time than it took to draw three breaths, four men lay dead in the street.
Kala advanced to Celeste, who was visibly shaken, and told her, “You’ve got to get yourself and the kids out of here before this is discovered.”
Celeste recovered her composure quickly and nodded. She called over to Twill, “Have the kids gather their things,” then she asked him, “Can we hide at your studio tonight and figure ourselves out in the morning?”
“Of course,” he replied and sent the kids inside to collect their belongings.
Skye tamped down his shock and moved to help Petr up.
“They smashed my guitar,” he said absently, wincing. “Why would they do that?”
Kala turned to Celeste and said, “You’d better keep a low profile for a while.”
“Like hell I will. I’m going to live my life, and these bastards are not going to stop me,” she replied defiantly.
She nodded and turned to Skye. “We should leave immediately. I may have found our way home.”
“Take whatever supplies you need from us,” Celeste offered.
Kala found tears springing to her eyes at Celeste’s kindness and the prospect of parting from someone she’d just begun to regard as a friend and kindred spirit. “How can I ever repay your kindness?”
“By fulfilling your destiny,” Celeste replied.
“Oh, you don’t want that,” Kala said. “My destiny is to plunge the world into fire.”
“Not someone else’s version of your destiny – I mean the destiny you choose for yourself. Besides, in case you haven’t noticed, the world is already on fire… people just haven’t noticed yet.”
Kala pulled Celeste into a bear hug. “I should very much like to see you again,” she said through her tears.
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