by Heath Pfaff
"What makes you think I'm anymore capable of getting these parts than you are? What precisely do you expect me to do?" Xan asked, though he had a good idea what Lottan wanted from him.
"I don't know what you're doing out here on your own, but you're obviously not just some random unfortunate traveler. You've had run ins with the mages and survived, and you've been out here in the wilderness surviving somehow. You've been to the Reach, and you approached a camp full of people who might have been hostile just to find some food. You can pretend to be just a wandering man lost in the wilderness all you want, but I think it's more likely that you're some kind of mercenary or maybe even a fighting mage. I don't know what you are, but you're resourceful, and right now we need any help we can get. I want you to get us some scrap metal. I don't care how you do it. I don't want to know, but if you can bring us back the materials we need I'll make sure you're provisioned for your trip north. I'll even make a place for you on this caravan if you want. If you want coin instead, I can pay you in coin."
"They went from tying you up, to pleading with you for assistance. This has been a strange day." Xan's shadow personality had manifested again. He was standing in front of the assassin, between him and the men from the caravan. "I think we should take them up on this offer. It will make things easier on us going forward. Besides, I really want to see how these carriages work."
"Curiosity can be a dangerous thing." Xan caught himself speaking without meaning to. He received some strange looks from the real men, and his shadow laughed at him dryly. Before anyone could comment on his lapse, Xan went on. "I don't see any fires to the west. Do you have a map with the position of this town?" Kassa wouldn’t have let him pass these people by without helping. Xandrith knew that, even if the part of him that was born to survive at all costs told him to keep moving and stay on task. She wouldn’t forgive him for leaving people behind.
Lottan smiled. "We do." He waved to one of the men. "Go get the map from my room. Hurry." Turning back to Xan, he continued, excited and not wanting to lose Xan’s interest now. "We can get some volunteers together to go with you. I'll go along, of course."
Xan was already shaking his head. "No, you said it yourself. Your men here aren't trained for this kind of situation. I'll go alone. I'll need a heavy pack that can carry a lot of scrap metal." Xan tossed his procured sword to the ground. "I'll take my knife back, and I'll need another long bladed knife if you can find me one."
Lottan seemed on the verge of arguing with Xan, but instead he just gave a short nod. "Alright, I'll see what we can do. We melted down most of the weapons we had, but I'm sure I can find you something."
"Good. I'd like to get going as soon as I can." Xan had no intention of wasting time. If the people in the caravan were going to be of any help to him, he needed to get them moving again before trouble found them. Sitting in one place for so long with their fires burning long into the night made them a prime target for many kinds of danger. Raiders might be about looking for easy prey to resupply away from the dangers to the south, and that was probably the least of the problems that might come looking for them. Trolls were the real concern.
There was a small flurry of activity as Lottan and his men went in search of supplies for Xan to take on his journey. Within ten minutes Xan found himself surrounded by a group of men and women with looks of hopeful concern etched on their features. It was clear they were all aware of the importance of the assassin's task. He'd gone from being an outsider, to a beacon of hope to the men and women of the horseless caravan. The expectant gazes on the faces of those who'd come to see him off weighed heavily on Xandrith.
Lottan split the tide of onlookers, waving them off like biting insects. Lottan definitely seemed to be a leader of sorts. He came with a collection of supplies for the assassin. Xan recognized his own knife, the blade he'd given Haley, and a sense of relief passed through him. He'd had no reason to suspect he wouldn't get the knife back, but seeing that it was within his grasp again made him feel at ease. He took the blade from Lottan as soon as it was offered and quickly fastened it to his hip.
The second blade the wagon leader had found him wasn't nearly as nice. It was little better than the knife a man would use to eat his supper, but Xan took it without complaint. He doubted Lottan was holding anything back. If this was the best he could find, then it would have to do. It was a single sided blade, iron, with too much of its weight in the blade. He could remake the hilt to balance it better, but the quality of the weapon wasn't really worth the effort that would take. He fastened the blade to his other hip.
"This was the best pack we could find." Lottan said as he handed over a large, heavy weight, sack. There was no question that it would hold a good deal of metal, but it wasn't well designed to carry and run. Xan frowned at the bag as though it were a dog that had just defecated on the carpet.
"Everything else was too small." Lottan explained.
"It'll work." Xandrith replied without enthusiasm. Maybe he wouldn't need to escape quickly. "The map?" He decided it was better not to dwell on matters that weren't yet a problem. He quickly removed his cloak and put the pack on before refastening his cloak over the top of it.
Lottan took the rolled piece of parchment from the man who’d been sent to fetch it. He unrolled it and pointed to a position on the map that had been marked with a cross. "This is where we are." He tapped the cross. "The town, Marekston, is just here." He drew a line with his finger to a place on the map that was marked by a depiction of a walled village. "We followed the road north, and then took this branch to the west. We marched fast and it took us most of a day to get there."
Xandrith scanned the map closely. It was obviously a new map, and it looked accurate per Xan's knowledge of the area. "I think I can shave some time off the trip by cutting across the country." He said after a moment. His mind was going over the various possibilities and difficulties associated with the task ahead of him. "Give me two days. If I'm not back on the morning of the day after tomorrow, then you can assume something has gone wrong and I won't be back."
Lottan nodded. "We'll be waiting."
Xandrith took the map and slipped it into a pocket on the sack-pack. Without another word he oriented himself west and set off from the makeshift camp. He had a great deal of walking ahead of him, and a hostile town waiting for him at the end of his journey.
Chapter 2
There and Back Again
Xandrith made fast time across the uneven terrain of the countryside. Over the course of his career as an assassin there had been many occasions when he'd been forced to travel roads of his own making, and so he was quite adept at finding the fastest route across even the roughest countryside. The trip that had taken the caravan men nearly thirteen hours to make only took Xan nine hours. The day was still bright when he found his way to the walls of Marekston.
He snuck in silently, moving cautiously towards the town as he broke free from the surrounding wilderness. He'd spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the best course of approach, and his natural tendency for stealth had won out over a more direct approach. If the caravan men had been turned away with only an arrow for warning, then Xan doubted he would be met by a more friendly welcoming crew. At least the caravan crew were human, and Xan doubted they'd come marching on the small town with anything like hostility. Xan figured he would look just a tiny bit more suspicious. No, if Xan was going to get inside Marekston and get supplies, he was going to have to do it using his own methods. It would be best if they never even knew he'd come and gone.
The assassin watched the top of the wall as he slid from tree to tree, bush to bush, inching his way closer to the wall. Annoyingly, his less than solid shadow-companion accompanied him. Young Xan walked out in the open at his side, striding about like there was no chance anyone would see him, which there wasn't. Only Xan could see the other Xan, but that didn't make his brazen attitude any less disturbing to witness in comparison to Xan’s careful stealth.
"I don
't like the looks of this." Young-Xan said as his older, more trollish duplicate was dashing behind a low piece of brush. "Or the sounds of it." He added after a moment. "There are no fires burning in that town, and I can't hear anyone. This isn't a huge town, but even in these troubled times there should be some sign that there are people inside."
Xan didn't answer himself. He didn't want to risk the noise. His younger self was right enough about the depth of the silence around the town. It was early enough in the day that people should have been going about their tasks. The smith should have been working his anvil. The mills should have been grinding the last of their grain from the silos, getting them ready to welcome a new year of harvest. There was none of that. The town was dead, and it smelled dead too. Yillan Reach had reeked far worse, but the smell wafting from Marekston was no more comforting.
"Maybe the trolls have already taken this place?" Shadow Xan spoke the words that old Xan was thinking. "Even they should make more noise than this though, and why didn't they come out and attack the caravan men that'd come calling? Sure a single arrow was fired, but trolls would have done much more."
Xan nodded his agreement as he slipped forward into another piece of cover just at the base of the town wall. He had a sinking feel that he wasn't going to like what he was about to discover.
"We could just pass the town by and keep heading north. We don't owe anything to that caravan." His younger self spoke the thought that was drifting through his mind in hopeful tones. "In a couple of days they'd assume we were dead, and they wouldn't be any worse off than they were before we came to them." He sounded nearly cheery about the thought.
Xan glared at himself with hard eyes. What would Kassa think of him if he did something like that? Xan’s mind jumped from his various conversations with the woman, her darker moments barely hinted at, but also her clear and undaunted sense of duty and morality. Kassa had never really strayed far from being a Watch Captain, from upholding the spirit of the position. Maybe walking away was something he'd have done when he was just Xan the assassin, but he was trying to be better than that. He had to make up for what the world had lost when it had lost Kassa to his meddling, as impossible as it seemed. Besides, both she and Leahn would have expected better of him. He'd told Lottan that he would try and get them the metal they needed, and he intended to keep his word like the good man he was impersonating. Besides, he'd already dealt with an entire cursed city, what could possibly be so bad about a strange little town?
"Well, it's your grave we're digging." The younger version of him commented before blipping out of existence again. Xan closed his eyes and took a few calming breaths. Being insane was not making his life any easier.
After watching the empty and quiet wall for nearly an hour, Xan decided it was worth risking an ascension. No one was patrolling the wall, at least not that he could tell from below. The wood walls would have been difficult for most men to scale, but Xan wasn't most men. He found his first hold and began to climb, moving along the well-crafted wall with ease. It felt good to be doing something he was familiar with. The larger portion of his job as an assassin had been infiltration, and climbing a town wall was exactly the sort of thing he'd done many times. Of course, before he'd burned out his own magical ability by opening the Great Vault, he'd have first scanned the wall for magical traps. He couldn't do that anymore, but he hardly felt that it mattered. Most small towns wouldn't have magic wards, and Marekston seemed even less likely than most to have such a sophisticated method of security.
Whether it was warded or not, Xan reached the top without incident after only a few minutes of climbing. He crested the wall slowly, pulling himself over the edge carefully, just in case someone was watching. There was no walkway atop the wall. There were watch towers in strategic locations, but the wall was only about four hand-spans wide. It was a border against the world, but not the sort of fortification meant to make the town a fortress. After getting an idea of the layout of the town, he dropped down the other side of the wall using his hands and feet to slow himself enough not to make the landing dangerous. The road met him with barely a whisper of leather on hard packed dirt.
Xan crossed immediately to the side of the road and pressed himself against the nearest building, his profile vanishing from visibility. He took a moment to get his orientation. He'd seen several different buildings that might have been the town smithy, and that was the direction he intended to travel. His scan of the town hadn't shown him any sign of the people who should have been there though. As far as he could see the roads were completely quiet. He felt like he'd entered Yillan Reach again. After being certain that no one had seen him, Xan pulled himself from his hiding place and began to move further into the silent town. He followed a snaking path through the town's smaller roads, keeping close to cover whenever possible.
Twenty minutes of careful progression later, he began to get the sense that he was wasting his time on stealth. He'd carefully checked windows of several homes and businesses as he moved, but nothing stirred within any of them. Shops doors hung wide open, products still on their shelves, and homes stood empty with family keepsakes apparently undisturbed. What could have happened in Marekston to leave the entire town vacant? People wouldn’t so easily up and abandon their homes and possessions. Something terrible must have occurred, but where was the evidence of the travesty?
Xan was still trying to puzzle this out when he rounded a corner and saw what looked like a body slumped over in the street. There was only one, and there was no one around it. The man was in a fetal position, his body curled as though he'd been fending off blows. Xan scanned the streets carefully before stepping out from his hiding place and moving slowly across open space towards the body. His curiosity was pulling him where his good sense told him not to go.
He was still several feet from the body when the stench of rot assailed him anew, striking at his nose as viciously as any fist might. Not wanting to lay a hand on the body, Xan reached out with a foot to nudge the corpse onto its back so he might see what had killed the person. His foot struck flesh and he pushed to turn the body, but the result was not what he'd expected. Instead of rolling over onto its back, the corpse disintegrated under his foot, rupturing like a melon that had been left too long in the sun. Xan recoiled in horror, and then took another startled step backwards as a horde of tiny insects began to rise from the bloated chunk of decaying flesh.
Plague. The assassin turned and ran, the swarm of insects in close pursuit. He'd been told that the plague of insects wouldn't be interested in his flesh since he was part troll, but Xan had no intention of experimenting with the possibility that he'd been misinformed. If even one of those tiny bugs decided that maybe a part-troll wasn't such a bad place to lay some eggs, it was over for Xan. He ran towards the town center by chance at first, then deliberately. He still needed to get those metals, and if it was true that he was immune, he was truly the only one that could get them with any degree of safety for the horseless caravan.
He rounded a corner coming out of an alley, his insect pursuers finally lost somewhere behind him. He emerged out onto a street with even more corpses lining its length. As he drew closer to the center, there were more and more of them. What had drawn them toward the town center? Xan slowed his progression, stepping carefully around the bodies as he tried not to disturb another nest of plague insects.
The body nearest him stirred as he moved past it. Xan took a sharp breath in. Suddenly the corpse was moving. It lurched awkwardly to its feet with a terrible shriek.
"Shit!" The word of exclamation exploded from Xan as he started to run again. Other corpses along the street were starting to stir as well. One of them exploded into a putrid mist of blood and swarming insects. It was clear to the assassin that he needed to leave the streets as soon as possible. He charged at full speed towards the nearest building he could find, almost tripping over another of the dead as he drew near the door. It had been behind a line of water barrels and he hadn't seen it. The pla
gue ridden thing reached for his leg as he regained his footing and went for the door.
He turned the handle and slammed his shoulder against the wooden frame but it didn't move. Great, he'd chosen the one building in town that hadn't been left unlocked. Behind him the stirring of the plague ridden thing he'd disturbed sent a sense of urgency through him. He looked over his shoulder long enough to see that it was already to its knees. The thing’s flesh was falling from its body like meat from an overcooked pig. Insects poured from the gaping wounds. The rotting creature stood between Xan and the road, which looked quite open now compared to his position against a locked door. The insects were swarming closer and closer.
Xandrith tore off his cloak and threw it at the corpse and its insects in front of him. As the cloak struck its intended mark, Xan charged past the mess and held his hand tightly over his mouth and nose. He always kept his pack under his cloak while traveling, and he was thankful that the habit had allowed him to make such a move. His cloak wouldn't buy him much time, but it would be enough. Xan flew back down the street as fast as his feet would take him, recklessly fast. He wasn't sure where he was going, or if he was going to escape, but he knew that it was vital that he keep moving.
He was still trying to decide his next course of action when his eyes fell across a building with a sign that read, "Togg and Sons Metalworks." He changed his route immediately and made a straight line for the building, running between several of the rising corpses. Luckily they moved slowly. When he reached the building he was surprised to see that the door was already open. A feeling of mixed relief and dread filled him. Anything might already inside, but at least he wouldn't have to waste time trying to pick the lock while fending off plague ridden corpses. He ran straight into the building and slammed the door closed behind him, turning the heavy metal lock on the door. It clicked into place with a satisfying, sturdy sound.
