by K. M. Hade
“Stop playing with your prey, Captain.” Rot says as he and his familiar go over to the dead bodies and start stripping them of everything useful.
The man makes a terrified sound. Blood gives him another tug and smiles at him. “We’re looking for creeping lotus. Do you know where some is?”
Something in the brigand flickers.
“Oh, you’re not going to profit off this.” Blood smiles unpleasantly. “Here’s the deal: you take us to the lotus. We let you live and you may keep that knife and a horse. Refuse? Think you’re going to do something clever? Well. I’ll give you your choice of the familiar pecking your face—”
The bird screeches.
“Him.” Blood points at Atrament. Right on cue, Atrament steps up, his wild hair snaking and writhing and swirling across the ground, a dark aura pushing against the dry, dusty air as he summons his Fell magic to the surface.
“…or her.” Blood points at me. He yanks the man’s cheek to his, his arm around his shoulders, and forces him to look at me as I stand there wrapped in a dark cloak, sword in my hand. “I suggest you take the bird. Atrament prefers to dismantle his prey piece by piece, and her? Well. We don’t even speak her name.”
The man’s eyes slide to the side and he whimpers, somehow going gray-pale under the grime.
Blood widens his own dark eyes. “I know. Do you see that one, over there?”
He points at ScatheFire, sitting like an overgrown doll in the dust.
“Her own teammate,” Blood says dramatically.
I scowl under my hood. Blood’s made his point. Asshole.
“I know where to find creeping lotus,” the man stammers. “It’s two days from here! There’s a vine!”
“Really. Are you sure?”
He nods emphatically.
Blood releases him. “We have us a guide, team. Now if there’s no vine, we’ll decide in the usual way who gets to play with the toy.”
The bird screeches at Blood.
“Shut up, bird. You have to take turns like the rest of us,” Rot shouts.
“I believe it is my turn,” Atrament says.
“We don’t have time for you picking over every sinew pretending you’re a Pit Researcher.” Blood flings back.
Atrament’s face tightens. “It is not every sinew.”
“Just the ones you don’t eat,” Smoke says.
The brigand squeaks.
“Would you prefer to let her have him?” Atrament points at me, his shadows and attire sweeping in the breeze like he was the God of Death And Other Questionable Blessings.
“Losers have to take her off to the side and distract her,” Rot says.
“I was not aware amusing me was such an obligation, and not a privilege,” I reply, still pissed at the ScatheFire joke, but we have to keep up the song. Atrament caught on quick to the tactic—maybe all that time he spent around Aether Mages gave him an idea of how Mage teams work.
“It’s a bit of both.” Blood does a dramatic courtly bow. He gives the brigand a knee in the back. “Up. Get your horse.”
The brigand runs to one of the horses.
I walk after him, careful to keep my head down and my face hidden. I grab the horse’s reins in one hand. My familiar twists into snake form, crawls up my arm, and deposits itself around the pommel of the brigand’s abused saddle. It raises its head and hisses, opening its mouth to expose its fangs.
He squeaks.
“I really hate chasing my prey, so my snake will keep you honest. Put your spurs into your horse and you won’t go far,” I tell him.
He peers at me. “You’ve got a noble’s accent.”
My snake hisses and strikes at him. He yelps.
I turn away and go to help sort our new horses and plunder the bodies for anything useful.
The brigands are (were) a successful outfit, from the looks of things. They’re well provisioned with some strange pellets that are horse feed, fire-pellets, flint, various foods, knives, and other gear. I pick one that’s not as chewed up as the rest and remove his shirt and pants.
“Pebbles, the hell are you doing?” Blood asks.
“Getting some damn clothes and boots.” It’s ghoulish, gristly work stealing from the dead, but it isn’t like I haven’t picked over bodies on the front. Blightlings never have anything of value, but their mortal allies do. Every scrap matters and everything counts. Especially socks and boots and gloves. The QuarterMasters don’t hand out nearly enough socks for winter campaigns, and you get over the whole but it’s a dead body real quick.
None of these people have socks or gloves, but I am able to score a beaten up hat made from something I probably don’t want to know the name of, and I cut up the cloth clothes to make fabric strips of various lengths. Something to keep the worst of the dust off our faces.
We take two of the strongest-looking horses to add to our string, and turn the rest loose.
“You think they’ll be okay?” Rot asks as we strip the last saddle off.
He means the horses, not the people, who are most certainly not okay. I twist my hair up under my new hat so I don’t have to wear the smothering cloak in the daytime heat. “They’ll wander around until they get found by someone else who will be glad to have them. Or eat them. I still hate doing it though. Scavenging too.”
Rot nudges me with a meaty elbow. “You know they were going to do the same to us. The only way we’re going to last in this place is scavenging. Even when you’re geared with remounts for an Empire mission, you gotta scavenge.”
I blink dust out of my eyelashes. “Eh, you have to scavenge socks on winter campaign down south. You’d think socks were made of Aether the way the QuarterMasters refuse to hand them out. Nobody ever bartered their socks for gambling. You know something’s precious when cavalry doesn’t want to wager it.”
Rot chuckles. “Never done a winter campaign on the front. We’re usually off chasing down some bullshit on the northern front.”
“You haven’t lived, my dear Fell, you have not lived until you have participated in a cavalry charge in half-thawed muck at night while it’s snowing.”
“I’ll pass. Honestly, I wish we had time to make that guy show us where the caches are. I bet it’d be the jackpot.”
Time. Something I’m a bit short on. I touch my belly, then pull my hand away. Can’t get in the habit of that. Best to put it out of my mind for now. There’s nothing I can do about being pregnant, if I’m pregnant at all. It’ll have to wait until I’m on the other side of the Fell thread. One calamity at a time. “We need to move as fast as those horses will go. You think he’s lying?”
Rot glances at the brigand. “Nah. Blood’s not perfect at sensing lies, but it takes someone a lot sharper than that to fool him. He knows where to find a vine. Or he thinks he knows. It’s not like he’d be keeping the knowledge for himself. He’d just sell it.”
“Why not just take the lotus for himself, though? Is it dangerous to harvest?”
“Well, it’s dangerous, but it also isn’t valuable. The Academy pays more than a sell-needle, but no big bounty. They get their lotus from treasure-hunters that pick up lotus along the way. Most apothecaries won’t buy it because they don’t want it on their shelves. Maybe there are people here in the lands who can make up the poisons and all, but nobody here is going to buy it. What’s worth something is the information. You barter it for when someone desperate enough for lotus shows up.”
“Ohhh.” Hunters will also sometimes use lotus poisons to dip arrows to deal with wild boar infestations, but for recreational hunting it isn’t “sporting” to use poisons. So if the Academy won’t pay a premium, and the apothecaries won’t touch it because there’s one legitimate reason to even have it at all… easy to see why our new friend there would be eager to sell the information for his life.
I tap my fingertip against my lips. Someone who can make poisons from lotus probably could make other things too. “I feel like such an idiot out here. I just don’t know a thing about
how any of this works.”
He gives me that shy smile of his. “I don’t know a thing about how cavalry works. Aside from all of you are crazy.”
I return the smile.
“You know,” he ventures, “I know it’s not really the plan, but I think you’d be good on the team. I hope we can all stay together. Maybe not Atrament, not sure about him, but I kind of got used to the idea of you being around.”
10
CRYSTAL
“Well….” I say as we come to the literal end of the road. I bit down what now? I dismounted from my horse and kicked at a piece of crumbled road.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry!” Our resident brigand-turned-guide waves his hands. The team has spent the past two days convincing him I am more depraved than he can possibly comprehend, and my appetites barely controllable.
I’ve kept my hair up under my hat, been very careful to keep my Aether covered, and with the layer of grime and lack of real sunlight, the usual soft glow of my skin isn’t visible. The team is passing me off as Bone. Unfortunately, my noble accent is what it is, so I’m a noble bred Bone, which is apparently more terrifying than he can comprehend.
“I’m starting to worry,” I tell him darkly. Because he had said the vine was two days away. “It’s two days, and I don’t see any vines.”
“It is nearby,” he whines, hands clasped. “The vines sprout and die and move around, but there is one nearby!”
Smoke points to the left.
Another pillar materializes out of the dusty haze. Blood and Smoke consult it while my familiar and Atrament’s play bitey-face. My familiar is still wrapped around the pommel of our guide’s saddle, so the poor man is forced to hold very still while the two familiars strike at each other. My familiar has had too much fun menacing him and playing Big Bad Snake.
It tried to play Big Bad Snake with Smoke’s familiar and nearly got eaten, and Rot’s familiar flung it about a mile.
I sigh again.
“You okay?” Rot asks.
He’s talking to me. I make myself look at ScatheFire, still wearing a bag over his head and slumped pillion on Rot. He’s an ambulatory husk, and that’s the best we can say about him. I hoped maybe he’d show a change or something once he was out of the Pit. He is exactly the same as he was the day we’d left.
I thought I’d be fine with this, but I can’t bring myself to talk to him anymore, and I have to force myself to look at him.
“Pebbles.” Rot waves his hand up and down. “You in there?”
“Yes, I’m in here,” I say tersely.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” I reply, consciously not tapping my foot. I ignore Atrament, who gives me one of his meaningful looks, but says nothing. Apparently I’m being a bitch. I’m not trying to be a bitch. I have no right to be a bitch to anyone. I just want to get moving.
Every day ScatheFire is exactly the same. No better, no worse, no variation. I have no idea if he’s slipped further away or fighting back, or that there’s him in there at all. He could be slipping away or suffering or being tortured in his own dark box, and every single second we spend contemplating some arrows is a second that feels like forever for him.
I try not to look at him, wearing his bag, slumped against Rot. Rot’s familiar swishes its harsh broom-tail, unbothered.
“That general direction?” Blood is asking Smoke as they gesture towards the right of the road.
“Yes,” the brigand wheedles.
“We weren’t asking you.”
“But it’s that way.” The brigand points. “I’m sure of it!”
Blood jerks his head at Smoke, who launches his bird into the air.
“So what does the pillar say is in that direction?” I don’t move.
“Don’t know,” Smoke says. “Something.”
“I thought the pillars said what’s in a direction.”
“No, it just moves you to the next major landmark.”
“So we don’t know where we’re going?”
“We’re looking for lotus, Lady Bone—” The brigand wrings his filthy hands.
“Looking for? I was under the impression you were leading us.” Anxiety strangles me. We do not have time for this.
Blood ducks under his horse and tries to sweep me into his sweaty, dust-covered embrace. “We’re on the hunt for creeping lotus. The western edge of the ruined lands is probably the best place to hunt it.”
“Why?” I don’t mention that the ravine is technically the best place to hunt for it. It’s months north of us, and I’d rather not murder and pillage my way towards it.
“Because everyone who comes to the ruined lands to treasure-hunt comes by the easterly route,” Smoke says.
Oh, hell. I’m an idiot. I hadn’t even thought of that.
If you want to go adventure in the ruined lands for fun and profit, there is no reason to get there via a long ride into one of the most remote and Blighted sections of the Empire. You would take the far more accessible eastern entrance. The area around the eastern entrance is quite remote, but it isn’t the same sort of remote-because-it’s-a-literal-hellhole misery of the Pit-lands.
“So our thinking,” Blood captures my chin with his thumb and forefinger and makes me look at him. His hair is so dusty it’s red, his lips are cracked and split, and there’s a layer of grime on his skin that makes him look like a filthy doll, “is we head very west, which would logically be the least likely place for treasure-hunters would go.”
He runs his thumb over my skin and whispers, “Now as to if any of us trust that Atrament ghoul to stitch you, that’s a different matter.”
“He has to,” I say, “it’s the only way to get ScatheFire back.”
“We aren’t going to lose you too.”
I promised Atrament that I wouldn’t leave him alone, and I won’t. I promised I would get ScatheFire back, and I will at least try my damndest to do it. Do I hate myself for dragging the innocent Fells into this mess? Yes. I hate all of this, and myself most. “Please don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
It’s already hard enough.
“One argument at a time,” he agrees.
“Tell me you believe this idiot,” I say.
“I believe he believes he’s telling us the truth.”
I pull out of Blood’s grip. We can’t continually head west, and if we strike out on the vine, there’s something else I need. I approach our guide again. He looks down. My snake and Atrament’s hummingbird taunt him by dancing around his legs.
“This vine isn’t where you said it would be,” I say, affecting my mother’s cut-throat imperiousness.
“A thousand apologies, Lady Bone.” He practically grovels.
“We will go a short distance further west in hunt of it, but given the aggravation you are causing me—”
“Ten thousand apologies!”
“Tell me if you know of a herb-witch or mudwitch or another such individual who may know something about what can be done with the creeping lotus. Perhaps they will be more useful.”
He glances up, his tongue darting between his lips. “That was not the arrangement.”
Well, he’s certainly brave. “The arrangement for your life was creeping lotus in two days. It has been two days, and we do not have our lotus. Do you not value your life?”
“I have heard rumors of such an individual…”
I tap my foot. “Perhaps your bones will tell me faster than your mouth can.”
“No, no! There is a camp some days north of here.” He points towards the western horizon. “I’ve heard there is a woman who knows something about tinctures that is beyond it. They will know. I can take you there, but I can’t promise they will know or she will be what you want!”
I make my mother’s sniffing noise of acknowledgement and walk back to my horse. I ignore all the questioning looks from the Fells. I’ll explain later, but the first priority is getting ScatheFire back.
11
CRYSTAL<
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I squint at the horizon. The brigand gestures emphatically, but it’s hard to focus on him. He’s more like a buzzing, irritating fly. At this point, I’m starting to think he’s delusional.
We are in the middle of absolute fucking nowhere, and it is a dusty, hot, sweltering, fetid wasteland.
“You going to help, princess?” Rot asks as he hefts ScatheFire onto his familiar.
“You look like you’ve got it under control.” Looking at ScatheFire makes me feel sick and despairing. My Aether itches painfully. It better not be because I’m pregnant. I definitely do not want to throw up out here in the lands. Waste of food, water, energy.
There’s something in the distance, but I can’t quite see it. More water, maybe. I get on my freshest horse. “Are you guys ready?”
“Isn’t it a little hot to be so eager?” Atrament inquires.
I scratch my Aether through my stolen tunic. I’d take it off, but then the brigand will see my Aether. “The sun’s going to be baking us soon.”
Atrament looks at the cloud-layered sky.
I glare at him. Fine. The sun doesn’t actually shine in the ruined lands. This place is like being under a smothering wool blanket, and on the horizon the rain torments us but never comes. Occasionally green lightening will zap some poor unfortunate shrub or animal. Not one of us so far.
“You’re being testy,” he says, not hiding his concern. “Very testy. You did not eat either.”
“I want to get moving.”
“I am concerned.” His tone is very meaningful.
“I’m fine. I just want to get moving. We don’t have weeks on end to be wandering around this dust pit while he tries to convince himself he knows what we’re looking for.”
“I do know!” our guide insists.
Atrament’s lips draw into a thin, pale line. “Perhaps we have placed the hunt for Lotus as an incorrect priority. Stitching is not trauma to the body and there is no reason to think it would cause a—”
“Don’t say it,” I growl. If he says miscarriage…
