by Arthur Stone
Camai had been able to charge the amulet for near one calendar month. That was the amulet’s maximum capacity.
But if the enchantment’s status was to be believed, the effect would fade in fifty-six days. Roughly twice the expected duration.
The boost seemed similar to the one applied to my parameters. So, the simplest answer appeared to be that the power that had escaped the abunai was to blame. The power of the Crow. In my veins coursed their blood, and around my neck hung their amulet, which the clan’s chi had also apparently taken as belonging to me.
The unleashed power had somehow impacted both the claw and me. Unlocking a source of chi and activating my inner eye, and making the black claw more effective.
And the latter must have been the source of my pain. Previously, my frail body experienced discomfort even after Camai’s brief absences, the boosted attributes manifesting as a kind of soreness that might follow a month’s worth of exercise condensed into a single high-intensity workout. The sensations were such that I wouldn’t have wished them upon an enemy.
And now, I was “blessed” with three times more attributes. Which meant three times the stress—or more like a year’s worth of exercise. After all, the attributes weren’t just numbers—they were directly linked to their owner’s physical state. In other words, my new attributes had to be reflected in my physique. And they were hard at work doing exactly that, transforming my body with haste and considerable cruelty.
The conditional degree of enlightenment was an entirely new development. And not one, but two of them, technically.
Where had it come from? Probably from the same source. At least I had no other guesses.
And the forty-four-day invisibility? That seemed to involve Treya somehow, rather than the “unknown spellcaster.”
Pushing through the pain-induced brain fog that made it difficult to think and act, I recalled yet another item hanging on my neck.
A pouch of Heirutean silk, decorated with an enchanted crest of the Crow Clan. A tiny reservoir of chi imbued with a snippet of the Crow Clan’s power. Hinders others from noticing the items stored within. Hinders others from detecting itself.
Treya the Enlightened from the Crow Clan
Invisibility (26 days remaining)
You have bonded with this item
The pouch was unique in its own right. Not to the same extent as the black claw, but also not without surprises.
One of those surprises I had half-expected: the invisibility that had something to do with mother.
Or rather, with the mother of the degenerate whose body I had been forced to occupy.
Standing on death’s doorstep, she had grasped at both the pouch and the talisman. This must have been the reason. It would seem that Treya was capable of applying enchantments, albeit with dubious success as far as effect type and potency. No wonder she had had to resort to hiring outside specialists—even at the expense of a lion’s share of the family’s budget.
What was the invisibility part about, though? I could see both the amulet and the pouch quite clearly.
What about the moneybag? I reached for it, but, as suspected, it wasn’t in its usual place. Nor anywhere else that I looked. Either it had gotten lost, or...
Mother hadn’t touched the moneybag. Meaning the mention of invisibility probably hadn’t been applied to it. And assuming that the invisible items had been rendered such for everyone but me, logically, that could mean only one thing.
The moneybag must have been taken off of me. After all, I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. Likely more than enough time to search me and rob me of all my valuables many times over.
All except for the black claw amulet and the pouch, both with quite valuable contents.
The invisibility effect was clearly effective. The thieves might not have even been able to feel the enchanted items on my body.
Now it was time to begin figuring out just where I had ended up.
* * *
Movement came surprisingly easy. Despite the pain wracking my body as if it had been run through a meat grinder a couple of times, with physical exertion only exacerbating the sensation, my arms and legs obeyed my brain’s commands sufficiently well that I was able to accomplish independently what would normally require assistance.
Assuming a seating position, I took a curious look around. My eyes were watery, blurring the picture. Perhaps I’d been looking within a bit too long, which wasn’t something my eyes were accustomed to doing. Thankfully, the discomfort wasn’t so great that it hindered me from surveying my surroundings.
As suspected, I was in a wagon. It was your standard farmer’s cart—a rough wooden trough stuck to a pair of creaking wheel sets. Serving as the engine was a solitary draft horse, driven from the coachbox by a veritable munchkin of a man in his middle years wearing plain homespun clothing. His shoes, woven of bast and hemp, betrayed him as the poorest kind of peasant.
Another man sat next to the coachman, taller and sturdier than his neighbor. His head was covered by a primitive helm of yellowed bone plates, like fish scales stitched to a leather base. A peculiar looking horsehair braid hung from the helm’s back, coming down to almost the tailbone. A simple but effective means of protection against chopping attacks from the back. It wouldn’t help against an enemy slashing directly at the waist, but could certainly prove useful against others. His padded jerkin, though not much to look at, should likewise offer decent protection. But the short boots looked more like house winter slippers than combat equipment. Still, the man’s gear and the axe at his waist left no doubt that this was a soldier, though probably not from the army of a respectable feudal lord. No, the man was either part of some merchant’s security or a lowly merc, the kind too useless to be hired on his own, but only as part of a band of similar fighters of dubious skill.
My eyes glimpsed the shaft of a spear to his right, and I focused on it. It was your standard hunting pole, favored by locals to hunt big game, with a crossbar just beneath a spearhead that looked unnecessarily clipped. The blacksmith must have been far too economical with expensive metal. To the left, on the coachman’s side, the handle of a crudely carved club stuck out of the hay.
The wagon was one of maybe a dozen in a caravan rolling down a narrow broken-down dirt road. I counted the wagons to the front and back of us, and indeed, there were eleven others besides ours. Nearly all were driven by the same duo of a coachman and a poorly equipped soldier.
At the head of the caravan was a solitary rider. Clad in a full suit of armor of leather and metal, wielding a long pike with a proper spearhead, this one looked to be the only serious soldier of the bunch. A bow of wood and bone peeked out from a flat bag affixed to the left of the saddle, alongside an open quiver containing bundles of white-feathered arrows. I couldn’t see any other weapons from my vantage point, but I had no doubt that there would be more. An axe, a warhammer, a mace, maybe even a sword—something along those lines for close combat.
Bringing up the rear of the caravan were a bunch of people moving on foot. Women, old men, and children of all ages. Roughly thirty in all, among which I only saw a couple of relatively young men. They appeared to be common peasants. The wagons had no room for them, having been loaded with crates, sacks and barrels. But the pace of the caravan was slow enough that the pedestrians didn’t seem to have trouble keeping up.
The road didn’t seem to be used all that often, with many of the deep ruts filled with rainwater covered with duckweed. Every so often, you could see tiny frogs leap out of the water as a wheel rolled through it. A strip of tall glass ran down the middle, too tall to have been regularly trampled by horse hooves. Almost as tall as the bushes encroaching on either side of the road, edging against the wagons’ sides.
Further ahead, past the thick brushwood, loomed lines of tall oak-like trees. Massive trunks with sprawling crowns and large, unfamiliar leafage that sort of resembled chestnut, but not quite.
So we were in a forest, and a thick one at
that. That wasn’t good. There hadn’t been anything of the sort in the vicinity of our homestead. The farmers didn’t need any decrees from their feudal lords to keep vegetation at bay, preventing the appearance of thickets in which something foul may begin to germinate.
The northern lands weren’t like the south. Here, the forest meant only headache for those with the misfortune of dwelling near it.
And this clearly wasn’t a grove the likes of which shudras and free settlers might tend. No, it was precisely the kind of dense woods one ought to avoid.
Where was I, then? And who were all these people?
The coachman turned around and spat out a lump of tar he’d been using as gum, nearly hitting me square in the forehead. Then he grinned, displaying a mouth with more gaps than teeth, and spoke in a nasal voice.
“Took you long enough to wake up, beauty queen.”
“How long was I out?” I thought to clarify.
“You were picked up yesterday, near the side of the road. Closer to morning. So, just over a day, it looks like. You just kept lying there, drooling. What the heck happened to you, eh? Are you just sickly?”
“Oh, I just... hit my head, is all. Where are we?”
“In the devil’s asshole! Can’t you see?” the coachman declared a bit too enthusiastically. The soldier next to him chortled without turning around.
“Are we on the left bank of Redriver?” I asked, figuring that a proper forest such as this could only lie across the river if we’d made it here in the span of a day.
“Still the right bank, but if you want to be on the left one so badly, I can make it happen for you,” the soldier groused, joining the conversation.
My grasp of the local geography was worse than I had thought. If we were on the right bank, I could relax a bit. Though it still had a fair bit of wooded stretches, they weren’t anywhere near as troubled as those on the other shore.
After digesting the information, I dared to inquire about one important detail.
“I had a purse with some coins on me. Where is it?”
“And why would you want to know such a thing?” the coachman said with a chuckle. “Do you prefer walking on foot or riding in a wagon?”
“I’m in no condition to walk.”
“Keep quiet, then. Don’t worry about your coins—they’re being kept safe by good people.”
“And who might those good people be?” I wouldn’t relent.
“See me and Rycer here?” the coachman asked, elbowing the soldier.
“Sure do.”
“He and I are good people. But the more you talk, the more likely we’ll turn evil.”
With those words, the soldier let out a loud fart, causing both men to guffaw with laughter as though they had never witnessed anything so funny.
And maybe they hadn’t, judging by their appearance and manner. I still didn’t know who they were or where they were headed, so the matter of the purse would likewise need to wait.
For someone in my situation, information was far more valuable than money.
Chapter 8
The Crossing
Degrees of Enlightenment: Unknown
Attributes: none
Skills: none
States: none
Despite regular threats of forcing me to walk or, worse yet, feeding me to goblins, neither Rycer nor the coachman—whose named turned out to be Krol—left my curiosity unquenched. The key was avoiding unpleasant questions or making them feel interrogated. Both men were clearly bored, the journey offering little in terms of entertainment. The horse barely needed driving while the wagons kept moving in a line, so why not indulge a feeble boy with a word or two?
Good people they were, indeed.
It took less than an hour to find out plenty more, though I didn’t understand much of what I’d learned. Both of my interlocutors were free people, meaning neither shudras nor vassals of any clan. They belonged to the so-called free folk of the north. No people were actually native to these lands, the locals comprising a mix of rebels that had fled from their feudal lords, servants that had lost their masters in the civil strife, fugitives and other such disreputable folk. Though these people grew mellower with each new generation after settling on the right bank of Redriver, their freedom-loving sentiment remained just as strong. As a result, virtually all attempts by aristocrats to gain a foothold in these territories had ended badly. Moreover, the emperor appeared to approve their presence. Perhaps he was content with having this border of the realm populated not by perpetually squabbling nobles, but by people that made up for their lack of blue blood by living as a close-knit community—and keeping similarly close control over the border.
Of course, their lives weren’t filled with many comforts. The soil was simply too poor—which I suspected was also the main reason why the nobles hadn’t bothered laying claim to the entire right bank of Redriver. The free folk had a hard enough time feeding themselves, supplementing farming life with all sorts of odd jobs.
Rycer, Krol and the rest had been hired by a small merchants’ guild. At least I assumed that they were small, if only because I had never heard of them before. They were called the Three Axes, and I definitely would not have forgotten the name, as it reminded me too much of my college life. Back then, my buddies and I would often drink a brandy called “777,” dubbed by one creative thinker from our crew by the same name.
The mercs had only uttered the full name once. Between the two of them, they simply referred to the guild as the Triad. The organization controlled a trading station on the left bank of Redriver. The lands were perilous, no doubt, but promised quite the reward for those capable of settling them.
And the merchants appeared to have settled here pretty well. The trading station had been in operation for years now, and must have been making money given that it kept being supplied. Were the operation unprofitable, it would have been shut down long ago. Such had been the fate of most ventures that sought to extract some kind of profit from the Wild Wood.
Mother’s subjects made infrequent sallies into the area as well, with the same purpose. And many of them were successful in terms of the haul. Yet, the loss of life was likewise heavy, leading to Camai admonishing Treya to forgo any such raids for the foreseeable future on that fateful day.
By my estimation, the wagon held roughly fifteen hundred pounds worth of cargo. The big-boned farm horse pulled it easily enough even along this shabby road—and there couldn’t be a better one this close to the Wild Wood. With twelve wagons in the caravan, the total was coming out to be around nine tons. Despite having lived under rather special circumstances, I’d seen enough to surmise that most of the cargo was foodstuffs. I would guess roughly two-thirds of the total. Plus wares, both glass and ceramic, tools, clothes, medicine and, of course, the cheapest spices—the cornerstone of the local diet. Not pepper or clove or anything banal like that, but something that helped transform plain food into a resource with which the natives of Rock could develop attributes that could be seen by looking within.
In developing its structures, the Order was forced to transform physical bodies. This process could be done with quality in mind—or without. The former made it possible to achieve maximum progress, but required regular consumption of a varied range of spices, which only aristocrats could afford. Everyone else had to make do with budget options, which was nevertheless enough to raise one’s attributes to considerable heights.
So, a total of six tons of food. Given that such caravans were scheduled to run several times a year, and the trading station should be meeting their needs at least partially by procuring their own resources, it had to be accommodating quite a bit of people. A couple of hundred at the very least, and possibly three hundred or more. And most of them able-bodied men, seeing as the hiring contracts lasted no less than one full year and necessitated plenty of hard, albeit fairly well-paid labor. All of that amounted to quite a serious operation—far more substantive than anything the Crow Clan had been up to at the twili
ght of their existence.
Then again, perhaps it was too early to be calling an end to the ancient clan. For all of my oddities and deficiencies, officially, I was still a member of the Crow Clan. And, if Treya was to be believed, the last such member. Which meant that, technically, the clan was not yet extinct.
Of course, shouting about it publicly would be about as smart as a rabbit screaming into a fox hole. The killers had come after us hardly because of a spontaneous impulse to extinguish the remnants of our bloodline. They had been deployed by one Lord Resai. Though the name told me nothing, his wish to root out the last of the Crow Clan had been made fully evident. So, for as long as I was still breathing, I would do well to fear another encounter with the band in black.
Both Pence and Resai were officially on my shit list. Would they care even if they knew? Hardly. I posed more danger to myself than I did to them. But were I to have the ill luck of facing either of them, the result would be tragically predictable. And I wanted to live. I hadn’t a clue as to how I would survive past the near-two-month mark allotted me by the boosted amulet, but I wasn’t throwing in the towel any time soon.
