by Andrew Post
Up and down the Highland’s rolling hills, across prairies.
Without incident so far, not even a small headache like a cracked tread connector. To Anoushka, it felt like rolling dice; it was always preferable to have a series of small frustrations sprinkled evenly over a journey—a regulated appeasing of the fates. A good day without a single solitary issue, to the pessimist, merely meant the bad luck was being scraped together in a bigger heap to wait, ahead.
She returned her eye to the periscope. Two hundred miles past the furthest hill she could see, New Kambleburg was there, somewhere over the green curve of Gleese. The fishing town of New Kambleburg, just outside the protection of Matchstick Row, had been sacked and rebuilt too many times to count. It stood on but was said to remain glued onto Rammelstaad entirely by clinging mussels, gull shit, and its citizens’ stubbornness. Hopefully, everyone had heeded the call to evacuate; Kambleburgians were notoriously pigheaded.
Reaching trees formed a tunnel over the road. As they passed under, it was nearly dark. On the other side, the suns shone again.
A cottage off the road. No smoke curled from its chimney. Good. The homeowners had heeded the evacuation notice.
Anoushka announced she was pulling the brake. They’d make camp somewhere along this stretch. Zuther and Russell stopped pedaling, and the springs bled the last of their energy to help the tank off onto the soft, cool grass. They stretched sore limbs and cranked up the side armor to allow in some fresh night air.
Not quite as swift as they used to be, but not bad.
* * *
She called the feeling road-smacked: when the end to a long stretch comes and you feel like you’re still in motion. She blinked a few times, getting used to seeing the world so wide—not restricted by the periscope. Joan rode marvelously. Passing her, Anoushka gave her a couple of raps with her knuckles to hear her toll. Good girl.
With the tank parked to protect their front, angled close to the base of a cliff, they began setting up a camp.
Russell and Zuther volunteered to gather firewood. The pedalers chatted animatedly as they struck out into the nearby grove with axes over their shoulders. They’d missed each other, you could tell, but it’d be a cold day in the thirteen blazes before you’d get either to admit it.
While Anoushka had been at the theater looking for Ruprecht, Kylie-Nae had picked up provisions and some ammunition. The cannon master, back to the craggy cliff face, began work on a stew. She hummed to herself, ladling full the familiar big black pot from Joan’s water tank. Many dinners had been made in the dented old slop kettle; Anoushka figured it numbered in the thousands.
No one needed to ask Peter to take watch. Down the hill, on the road, he remained on his new horse—a burly sable stallion—with Teetee. Teetee, well learned, always watched the opposite of his master, the berserker’s second set of eyes, swapping vantages only when Peter turned and never before.
The cornfield beyond moved as if pet by a giant hand, the rustling stalks sounding almost like a rolling tide.
Anoushka approached as Ruprecht pulled the caravan up.
“Lodi all right?” she said. There were peepholes in the caravan’s side, but she didn’t want to pry.
“She got ill.” Ruprecht nodded at a dark brown splash on the side of the caravan, pulled long by the wind. He retrieved feed bags from a dusty drawer on his caravan’s side, strapping one horse with its dinner of oats and then the second, new steed—brown with white socks, bought with a rubber check.
“Too many elixirs, you suppose?” Anoushka kept her voice low in case the wizardess was awake inside. It also felt strange talking about a woman while she was staring at her; albeit, it was merely an artist’s rendering of a younger, healthier Lodi on the side of the caravan.
“Possibly.” Ruprecht snatched his bag from the caravan’s high seat, ink bottles clinking. “She was also smoking some putrid-smelling stuff, these little dark leaves, saying she’s trying to get into the Hall. Probably didn’t help her queasiness. Nearly made me ill, simply smelling it.”
“The mothdream from Lyle’s apartment?”
Ruprecht nodded. “We should let her rest, if she’s going to be any use to us—or tolerable company.”
“What is the Hall, anyway?”
“I should let her explain that one.” The bard chuckled. “I wrote a bit on it for Thrusting Staffs, but I doubt I did it justice. I’m sure she’d agree.”
Anoushka looked at the portrait of Lodi again. “How long ago was it?”
Ruprecht apparently understood what Anoushka was getting at. “Lodi hasn’t taken care of herself.” A small smile flashed. “I asked her once why she didn’t try to practice her magick clean. She said it takes a certain kind to be willing to keep skating even when the ice is thin. Bravery or stupidity, she’d said, didn’t figure into it. No. Purest dedication. I believe her dedication is of that ilk.”
“Tonight,” Anoushka said, “we should check on her once in a while. Make sure she’s still . . . you know, breathing.”
“A sound idea, yes.”
They crunched through the knee-high grass to Kylie-Nae, sitting in the loose rocks under the outcropping. On a cutting board balanced across her knees, she chopped an onion—quick taps of the knife echoing dully about the stone walls.
“And how is our sweet little murderer holding up?” Kylie-Nae paused to wipe onion tears away. She tore a hairy bit of root from the rocks next to her and diced it.
“We need her,” Anoushka said.
“Yeah, I know we do. I just think . . . I mean, she doesn’t necessarily need to be dead to side with Lyle.”
“Lodi would never do that,” Ruprecht said.
Kylie-Nae set the cutting board aside—hard. “All I mean is Lyle was working in his office for how long before he decided to turn? Huh? Seems to me once you start farting around with magick, your moral compass gets a little spinny. That’s all.”
While Kylie-Nae had been away from those hilly, wooded ranges for most of her life, some prejudices common to the Nae people clung to her like stickers on a wool jacket. Not that Anoushka’s own opinion of practitioners contrasted starkly; to her, magick seemed unnatural. A few muttered words and a spin of the hand and suddenly flowers were growing at your feet? Or fire, from nowhere? It disturbed her to put much thought into how the trusted order of things could be bent. Likely that was where the distrust came from in others. It was generally acceptable to bring violence against one who was magickally inclined; many town sheriffs would look the other way, judges would often toss out cases whenever the word inclined, in relation to a plaintiff, was uttered. Blazes, the Ma’am had paid from her own pocket to have the buried prisons for the unregistered inclined dug. Like the world itself was a rug under which to sweep unwanted things.
“We can trust her, Miss Browne,” Ruprecht said. “I vouch for her. She’s nothing like Lyle. Please be open-minded; last thing we need is for disagreements to get the better of us and distract us from the task at hand.”
“All right, forget I said anything,” Kylie-Nae said. “Just, when things do go tits-up with her, don’t come crying to me.”
Anoushka grabbed a carrot from the sack of vegetables, flicked open her boot knife, and began peeling it. “Starting tomorrow,” she told Ruprecht, ready for a subject change, “you’re gonna have to start riding farther behind. If the Committeemen chasing us catch up to you, you lie. You haven’t seen us. You’re a humble bard, out selling your stories. We went thattaway, get it? Okay?”
Ruprecht nodded. “Fair. I’m not a hero. I won’t have stories written about me, which is fine.” He was looking down the hill at Peter standing in the road. “I don’t mind being the one to bring them to readers, as their conduit, but I’d like to continue to do it—so I promise to give them a marvelous fibbing unlike any they’ve experienced before.”
“Good,” Anoushka said.
“Well, I’m off for a quick conference with our protagonist. Please come gather us when dinner’s
ready.” Anoushka watched Ruprecht duck inside Joan’s open side, take the wax cylinder now ribbed with scratches, their voices, their chatter, and replace it with a fresh one, for the next day’s talk.
Ruprecht tried to negotiate his way down the hill to the road. After successfully accomplishing his feat without a tumble, he stood beside Peter, talking up to him in his high saddle. If he was answering Ruprecht, it was impossible to say.
“Gods, he’s exhausting.” Kylie-Nae said. On to potatoes, she shaved off the skins with quick, practiced dashes. “Or am I suddenly finding myself the asshole here? What happened at the moving pictures? You two fall in love?”
“Certainly not. I just think he’s right, about Lodi.” Anoushka started on another carrot. She stole a piece, crunching the sweet orange disk between her teeth.
“She killed somebody. Somebody we’re not a hundred percent sure deserved it.”
“No, we don’t know Sharona was working with Lyle, but—”
“When I came upstairs, I saw your face. You didn’t like what was happening. You didn’t believe her.”
“No, you’re right. I didn’t, but thankfully, it worked out.”
“Thankfully nothing. She nearly got us hanged. What if we find out Sharona had no ties to Lyle whatsoever, that we’d let that nutcase kill a completely innocent woman for nothing?” Kylie-Nae’s potato peeling grew faster, flick-flick-flick.
Anoushka had no answer. She kept her eyes on her carrot, one long ribbon of orange sliced away at a time, slow.
Kylie-Nae set her knife down again. “What if in New Kambleburg there’s another case like Sharona? Except we know for sure they’re innocent, and Lodi won’t be convinced otherwise? You’re the captain here. Not Ruprecht. Not Lodi. Not Zee, me, or Russ. You, Annie. You need to call the shots.” Kyle-Nae had rendered the potato in her hand—and part of the bandaging covering her burned palm—to bits. “Great. I’ll have to wash these again,” she said, plucking the bloody pieces of potato and setting them aside.
Anoushka folded her knife. “If I have anything to say about it, we won’t be going to New Kambleburg.”
“Then wherever. You still need to start calling the shots, babe.”
“I am.”
“Are you sure?”
“Okay, maybe I’ll call a shot right now. Can your bullshit. How’s that?”
“Great, yeah,” Kylie-Nae snorted. “Well done.”
Anoushka had to adjust the way she was sitting. Her leg had been fine in the tank, propped up on the left actuator pedal, but now with her blood pressure raised, the throbbing returned.
“How is it?” Kylie-Nae asked.
“Hurts.”
“Maybe a river bath wasn’t such a good idea.” Kylie-Nae’s big wooden spoon made a muffled dunn as it connected with the side of the pot. “We should probably boil this really well.” She set the spoon aside. “Want me to take a look?”
Painfully, Anoushka hoisted her leg up to rest her heel on Kylie-Nae’s knee. The wound’s seepage had fused the bandage to the inside of her pant leg with a yellow-and-brown crust. Wincing out of sympathy, Kylie-Nae began to unravel the gauze. With each layer taken away, the wound was giving a preview, the brown-and-yellow spot growing darker, wider.
The flesh surrounding the bullet hole was pale and shriveled, a toothless whistling mouth.
Kylie-Nae got out her kit. One glimpse of the godsdamn brown glass bottle of disinfectant made Anoushka uncontrollably squirm. Forgoing a countdown, Kylie-Nae splashed some on. Anoushka ripped out a fistful of grass from next to her as the little mouth became rabid, foaming.
“If I had a better way to do this, I would.”
“It’s fine,” Anoushka peeped, biting her lip.
After the foam had been wiped away and new gauze had been wrapped, Kylie-Nae shook the last two tablets from their tin into Anoushka’s hand. “Enjoy ’em. Last two.”
Washing them down with a sip from the cook pot’s ladle, Anoushka watched Peter turn again, Ruprecht fumbling to move as the berserker and his dog swapped vantages.
“Sorry about that, a minute ago,” Kylie-Nae said. “All I mean is even though it’s Ruprecht who’s gotten us back together, we can’t do things different from how we used to.”
“We’re not.”
“But we are, kinda. I feel like . . . maybe you’re performing, in a way.”
“Performing?”
“Yeah. Like, back before you wouldn’t have let some wizardess take the reins away from you, but now you are. Because maybe letting her go overboard would make things more interesting for the story.”
Anoushka chuckled without humor. “Why don’t you say how you really feel? Ouch.”
Kylie-Nae groaned at herself. “Okay, maybe not perform but, you know. Fuck, I’d use a different word, but vocab was never my . . . whatever . . . my strength.”
Anoushka held her friend’s gaze. “That’s not why I let her do that to Sharona. I didn’t know she’d kill her.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“I do. Just forget what I said, okay? I’m sure she was in Lyle’s pocket. I just . . . I just wanna do this right is all.”
“We are.”
They’d known each other over thirty years, but that one gap of time, six years—small, when taking the whole into account—had evidently still made its mark. Maybe motherhood had changed Kylie-Nae’s perspective, as it does. Maybe Anoushka, so long from the job, was truly desperate to make this a success and was letting things slide, just to take more interesting turns for the thrill-rag. She wanted to help Rammelstaad. Absolutely. Do her duty, stop the bad guy. But as with anybody doing anything, there’d always be secondary motives. Some which probably weren’t even obvious to her. Anoushka wondered if she’d truly come back to this life, or if she was assuming the role of someone she used to be and found the costume to no longer fit.
The wind blew. Chilly. Dead leaves rattled down from the hill above them, gliding and tumbling. Somewhere far off, a train whistle pealed. It was bound for Wheeling, to its ships waiting in the docks to drop the next batch onto the primary. Two-thirds, Sir Gunnar had said. They were two-thirds through under the Mountain.
Lodi jumped out of the caravan. On unsure legs, she turned a slow circle, squinting, wavering. Grinding a fist to her temple, she said, “Fuck are we?”
“The Ranges,” Anoushka said. “A day from Port Allef. Feeling all right?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Too much chitchat out here.”
Though they scarcely needed further mixing, Kylie-Nae returned to stirring the vegetables, banging the spoon against the inside of the pot more regularly. “Getting dinner made, and a camp set is noisy work.”
Before the two could start up again, Anoushka asked, “Any luck getting into the Hall?”
“No,” Lodi said. “Yarnigrad took the wind out of my sails.”
“Wait, what hall?” Kylie-Nae said.
“Aether Hall? The Records? Nothing? I’m dealing with neophytes; that’s fine. Let’s see, in terms you two would understand: Aether Hall is where the tomes are kept—books that contain everything that’s been forgotten, is known now, and will be known someday.”
“How can things that aren’t known yet be written down in a book?”
“They’re not really books. They look like books.” Lodi searched the ground and her bare feet. “Okay. An example. The steam engine was ‘invented’ by four different men and one woman, the same week. Some would like to suggest they stole the idea from one another, except they lived at different corners of Rammelstaad, had never met, had never written, and shared only having the same idea in the same span of days. The lawyers figured out who really thought of it first—big surprise, it wasn’t the woman—but still, how do you think five people had the same exact idea? It had to have come from somewhere. Inspiration is merely a way to wave away the notion we’re only filters for raw ideas.
“But, to my point, the Hall is of interest to the inclined because it’s
also where every spell’s kept. With magick, nothing can be written down—in our plane. There’s no language for it. It’s more like . . . rhythm of thoughts, idea code. Shit is, to get anywhere near the Hall, direct, not having it visit you through ‘inspiration’ by using leaf of mothdream is a tall order. It’s gotten the nuh-uh stamp as a ‘controlled substance.’ Makes it hard to find. Typically.” The leather pouch from Lyle’s apartment materialized from her cloak’s many secret pockets. Pinching it wide, the wizardess frowned into it. “Two more goes.”
“Getting into the Hall will help us find Lyle?” Anoushka asked.
“Not the prick himself, but if I can find the same tome he’s using, I might be able to make the spell he’s using backfire on the little shit. Which would be great, but the problem still stands that the Hall isn’t like a library. There’s no card catalogue. Just have to feel around, hoping you get what you’re after before a full bladder tows you back to your corporeal.”
“Gods, does it gotta be with that awful shit?” Kylie-Nae said, fanning the mothdream’s stink away with the cutting board. “Smells like a dead thing’s ass.”
Putting away the mothdream, Lodi stepped up to the cook pot. A ring of rocks stood ready but no campfire. “You know, that’d be more appetizing if you cooked it first.”
“If you haven’t got anything constructive to contribute,” Kylie-Nae said, “you might wanna go lie down some more and stay out of the way.”
Over Lodi’s half mask, her eyes smiled. “You’re so easy.”
“Actually, Lodi,” Anoushka tried, “if you wanted, you could go see what’s keeping Russ and Zee. They went for firewood, over there.”
Lodi estimated the way Anoushka had pointed. “Nah.”
“We all need to pitch in,” Kylie-Nae said. “Otherwise, you’re dead weight.”
“I’m dead weight says the stew wench.” Lodi leaned toward Kylie-Nae. “I came this fucking close to scryer. This close. Cost me 1,000 julas just getting registered, only to have a thanks-but-no-thanks rejection slip show in the mail a day later. Do you know what it takes to even get that far, to even make the short-list?”
