The Girl Who Dreamed of a Different World

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘I think we have to,’ Rain said. ‘I did see cart tracks down at the bottom of the hill. Tracks from something heavy in a cart and I think there were seven riders with it. That’s Cadorian and his seven Sintari, one of them driving the cart. Or it could be someone else.’

  ‘I feel like this is the right way,’ Mimi said. ‘Don’t ask me why I think that, but I do. I think the flame was supposed to make us come this way. Maybe the crate wants us to follow it.’

  Kana winced. ‘I really hope not, Mimi. Somehow, I don’t think I want help from the mysterious magic crate. If we keep going this way, we’ll end up back in the Dragon Blight, or maybe the Great Forest. Cadorian could be taking the thing in the crate to the

  elves. Maybe it’s some sort of secret weapon.’ She frowned, looking south. ‘We can hope it’s some sort of secret weapon.’

  17 th Sokarte.

  ‘You think it’s them?’ From the top of a hill on the Sintari Plains, Rain and Kana were watching a group of riders heading south, trailed by a wagon.

  ‘Seven riders and a wagon,’ Kana replied. ‘They’re heading in the general direction of the Blight too.’

  ‘Okay… We can probably catch up to them in a day.’

  ‘No, I think we hang back and watch. I’m not sure what Cadorian is up to, but the fact that he’s dumped his escort from the White Castle in favour of a bunch of Sintari who all look like mages makes me want to watch and learn before going up to him and asking.’

  Rain grinned. ‘I think that sounds like an excellent plan. After spending a while in Sintar, I don’t think I trust any Sintari.’

  ‘Constance is a Sintari.’

  ‘Constance trusts them less than I do.’

  ~~~

  They camped without a fire. Kana’s spell made hot food from grass, of which there was plenty, and they used light spells to see when it got dark. A fire might have been seen and they wanted to remain hidden from the party they were following for as long as possible.

  Cadorian’s group was not so circumspect. Their camp was visible about a mile away if you went to the top of one of the numerous hills. For plains, the region had a lot of hills. In this case, that was quite a good thing since it allowed them to watch Cadorian from a distance, even if all you could see was the glow of the fire and the occasional humanoid shape obscuring it.

  ‘What I wouldn’t give for a good pair of sōgankyō,’ Kana said after coming down from such a watch.

  ‘That’s another of those weird words you use,’ Aneshti observed.

  ‘Uh, it’s… It’s two tubes with lenses in them. You look through the tubes and see a magnified view of things in the distance.

  There isn’t an Alabethi word for such a device, so I assume no one’s invented it. To be honest, I’m not sure it would help at night, but it might. It would give us a better view of their camp.’

  ‘There’s magic to do that.’

  Kana frowned. ‘I guess there would be. I could give it a try tomorrow. Something to refocus the light… I think I could do that. Anyway, so far as I can see, they’re not doing anything we aren’t. Eating and getting ready to sleep.’

  ‘Hm. What in Soansha’s name is in that crate? And why do they seem to be taking it to the Blight?’

  ‘I had a thought about that,’ Constance said. ‘This thing seems to be a source of wild magic. The Blight is basically magically dead. If they put this thing in the middle of the Blight…’

  ‘It might suppress the wild magic,’ Kana finished. ‘It’s as good a theory as we’ve got so far, but then that leaves the why question. What does this have to do with Serpens? Why are they trying to neutralise the thing in the crate?’

  ‘Unless they’re trying to neutralise the Blight,’ Aneshti suggested. ‘Maybe they need to make magic workable there, so they’ve brought something which can raise the level of magic.’

  ‘That… makes more sense. But Cadorian’s not that much of a mage, is he? I thought his thing was cutting things up with magic swords.’

  ‘He almost certainly knows some magic. Even today, the forest guardians learn some magic to help them get around the forest.

  They like ambushing enemies from above. But I doubt he’s particularly versed in heavy combat magic like you are. Maybe that’s what the Sintari are for.’

  ‘Maybe you should report back to the White Castle,’ Constance suggested. ‘Maybe they’ve got some ideas about what’s going on.’

  Kana shrugged. ‘I think they’ll just say they need more information, but it’s worth a try.’

  18 th Sokarte.

  Contacting Sharassa had not been especially useful. As Kana had predicted, the elf had suggested they keep watching Cadorian’s group and to report in every night. There was too little information to do more than speculate on Cadorian’s goals, which Kana had known before Sharassa said it.

  The spell to provide Kana with magic binoculars proved easy enough to perform, but really did not provide a lot more information than they already had. Cadorian was definitely among the group. The others definitely looked like Sintari mages. The wagon was a flatbed design with something on the back of it covered by a tarpaulin. The something was a cube, maybe five feet on each side.

  Getting to the spot Cadorian had camped in the night before confirmed one other thing: the thing in the crate was definitely the source of the weird occurrences happening along the way.

  ‘Those,’ Mimi said as they approached the site, ‘are spring daisies.’ The campsite was absolutely covered in small white flowers which were kind of daisy-like. Mimi sounded surprised to see them.

  ‘And?’ Constance asked.

  ‘And, if the name wasn’t a giveaway, they flower in early spring.

  It’s basically midsummer.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ Aneshti grumbled. ‘Why did he have to come south now ? I wouldn’t have minded a trip to Skonar at this time of year.’

  ‘We’re saving the world,’ Kana reminded her. ‘You should probably make allowances. So, the thing in the crate did to these flowers what it did to the fish on the Endless Wave . It sent them back along their own timeline to when they were flowering.’

  ‘Unless this is effectively next year’s flowering,’ Mimi said, nodding. ‘Timeline? I like that word. It sounds like a word someone educated would use.’

  ‘I suppose it is. I got it from reading manga. I suppose this is more to report to Sharassa. Let’s take a look around and see if they’ve left anything behind.’

  ‘So far,’ Rain said, ‘they’ve been pretty meticulous in not leaving things they can be followed by. It’s a good job this crate thing is leaving such obvious clues.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s like it wants to be followed.’ Kana frowned at the innocent blooms at her feet. ‘Why don’t I feel like that’s a good thing?’

  ~~~

  ‘There’s something going on over there,’ Rain reported as she marched down the hill from watching Cadorian’s new camp. It was still daylight, just, and you could see what was happening over there, but ‘over there’ was still a mile away, so the details were difficult to make out. ‘They’ve been joined by another group. A large group. And I don’t think I like the look of them.’

  ‘I guess I’ll go see what I can see then,’ Kana said, and she started up the hill the way Rain had come. Rain turned on her heel and set off to follow. ‘You don’t need to–’

  ‘Still your charmed slave, remember? There’s potential danger and I need to be there to protect you. Yes, even if you could burn

  just about anything to the ground before I could get my sword out.’

  ‘I was trying to forget,’ Kana grumbled. ‘I’m going to find a way to fix that.’

  ‘I know it’s partially the curse, but I don’t really care.’

  ‘I know you don’t. That’s one of the reasons I want to get it done.’

  At the top of the hill, lying on her stomach to reduce the chance of being seen, Kana cast her distant seeing spell and zoomed her vision in acro
ss the mile or so of grassland to Cadorian’s camp.

  There were more people there, that much was certain. Well, it was true if you classified dracs as people, which Kana did since they were sentient.

  ‘Dracs,’ she said. ‘There are a load of dracs there. Some of them look like shamans or something.’

  ‘I don’t see fighting.’

  ‘Because they aren’t fighting. They look like they’re talking.

  Just talking. If I had to make a judgement, I’d say they know each other.’

  ‘The guy sent to stop the dracs from raising their dead god is friendly with drac shamans?’

  ‘I did not see that coming. I should have seen it coming. It’s a really obvious plot twist.’ Kana started to giggle, covering her mouth to keep the noise down.

  ‘What’s funny about this?’ a bemused Rain asked.

  ‘The Master summoned Cadorian because I wasn’t the “right hero”

  to stop Serpens. And Cadorian is helping to resurrect Serpens.

  It’s not actually funny, but it actually is.’

  ‘When you put it like that… We should get back down the hill and tell the others. Then you can tell Sharassa. Try not to rub it in too hard.’

  ‘I won’t. She didn’t summon me here.’

  They were most of the way down the hill when Rain held out her arm to stop Kana. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said, reaching for her sword.

  Kana frowned, lifting her staff and making a wide circle in the air with it. Nothing looked wrong down at the camp, but Rain had good instincts. If there was something there which was not obvious… Maybe the spell was a bad idea given that she needed to

  cover a huge area to make it useful, but if there was someone with hostile intent there… Her eyes widened.

  Two dozen dracs carrying spears rushed out from cover on either side of the camp. More appeared over the crown of the hill and began running down toward Kana and Rain. Taking them down was something Kana could manage, but the ones surrounding Constance, Mimi, and Aneshti were another matter. They were not actually attacking, just surrounding.

  ‘Lay down your sword, Rain,’ Kana said. ‘They want us alive.

  We’re just going to have to hope it stays that way.’

  Chapter Fifteen: Heart of Darkness

  Dragonspur Mountains, 28 th Sokarte 6024.

  It was hard going, trudging through the Dragonspur Mountains on foot toward an unknown destination. The fact that they were all walking with their hands tied and a rope tethering them to the back of the cart was not helping. The contingent of dracs who followed behind them, watching every move, was… also discouraging.

  On the plus side, they were all still alive. Cadorian had recognised Aneshti and known that she was from the White Castle.

  That had resulted in him recognising Kana, though only vaguely.

  If they were from the White Castle, then they were trouble, but he was unsure about killing them. The Master was powerful and might know if his minions died. Perhaps that was why they were here: Garan’s death had been noticed and more agents had been sent. It would be better to keep them all safe and unable to report back. One of the Sintari mages knew how to ward against scrying, so they would be warded and taken along with the crate to their final destination.

  Even Ranulf was spared. The dracs had wanted to eat the pony, but Cadorian had said no. Or rather, Cadorian had said that the dracs could eat Ranulf if they wanted to carry all the party’s gear the rest of the way. It was policy to leave nothing behind which might be used to trace their passage, and that included their prisoners’ gear. So, Ranulf was now tethered to the cart alongside them.

  Having made his decision, Cadorian ignored them. No one spoke to them aside from giving orders, and the orders were kept to a minimum. For the most part, everyone travelled in silence, but Constance had identified the Sintari as satanists from a few things overheard around the campfire. She was not sure they had figured out who she was. She seemed fairly certain that, Cadorian or not, someone would have slit her throat by now if they had.

  There was still no clue as to the content of the crate; if anyone spoke of it, they spoke of the container or the wagon, never of whatever was inside.

  There had been one surprise, and that came when the caravan swept straight past the Dragon Blight and continued up into the mountains beyond. It was, in some ways, a pleasant surprise because no one had been looking forward to spending more nights in the blighted lands. However, marching uphill while tied to a cart was not the easiest of things to do. It was tiring. Kana found herself quite ready to go to bed as soon as she had eaten, as their guards wanted. Maybe she should have been looking for a way to escape, but she had the weirdest feeling that she was supposed to be going wherever Cadorian was taking the crate.

  In the end, she decided that she was too genre-savvy not to see the coming ‘big showdown’ she was being taken to. The only problem she could see was that there was no absolute certainty that the good guys were going to rally to the flag and win.

  31 st Sokarte.

  Someone had cut a tunnel into a mountain. At least, that was what it looked like. The ‘cave mouth’ they entered did not look natural and, maybe a hundred metres in, it was blocked by large gates of thick wood. The gates looked fairly new, but the tunnel looked like it had been there for centuries. Someone had replaced an existing ‘gatehouse’ which had controlled access through the tunnel.

  Sintari and dracs manned the gate. The latter in particular seemed enthused about the arrival of the caravan, though Kana suspected that it was the crate they were happy to see. Somehow, whatever was in the crate was part of the ritual to bring Serpens back. That much was clear now, though why it had to be brought here, wherever here was, and why it was needed at all were still open questions.

  The first of those became a little more clear when, after a mile or so of travelling through the darkness, they emerged from the other end of the tunnel. They entered a bowl of rock. High, quite smooth walls rose around them and the reason for the tunnel was obvious: no one was climbing down the sides of the bowl without mountaineering gear. School geography lessons came back to Kana and she decided that this was probably a caldera. They were standing in what had once been the top of a volcano. There was no sign of volcanic activity now – which Kana was thankful of; lava was the kind of thing to be expected in the villain’s lair – but in the long distant past, this place had exploded so violently that it had left a hole in the mountain. The rocks were black basalt which almost sparkled in the morning sun, where the sun could actually reach the rock surfaces. This place would be dark long before sunset and it had to be a lousy place to live, but there were doors and windows cut into the rock of the walls; people lived here, in the gloomiest place on the planet.

  ‘Serpens’ lair,’ Aneshti said, keeping her voice low. ‘He was supposed to have a stronghold in the Dragonspur Range It was

  never found, according to the stories from back then, but this must be it.’

  ‘And he’s back,’ Rain said. ‘Part of him anyway.’

  In the centre of the caldera, in pride of place, was a huge skull. That it was a dragon’s skull seemed obvious. It had a long snout, a bony neck frill, and massive teeth. It was bleached white and stood out very well against the black rock. It was supposition that it was Serpens’ skull, but it was twice the size of the dragon Kana had killed and it had to belong to a true dragon rather than one of the lesser sort.

  ‘If they have that,’ Constance said, ‘why haven’t they already raised Serpens?’

  ‘Silence!’ one of the dracs ordered. The word came with some suitable sibilance which would have been sort of amusing in other circumstances.

  They were led around the edge of the caldera toward some of the habitation which had been carved out of the rock, and that was when the lich turned up. Dressed in black robes and carrying a staff which might have been wood and might have been bone, a figure emerged from one of the doors. It had to be a lich. It looked
like someone had animated a mummified corpse. There was no hair and no nose. The skin was dark, almost black, but it was no natural pigmentation. This was age working on dry, withered, human skin. Thin lips were pulled back from yellowed teeth and laid tight across a narrow skull, and the eyes were deeply bloodshot, the irises a clouded, cadaverous blue. The hand which held the staff was bony and desiccated. Presumably, the same was true of the lich’s entire body.

  ‘You have it?’ the lich said in a rasping voice.

  Cadorian dismounted, handing his horse off to an attendant who rushed to take it. Only then did he turn to the lich to answer.

  ‘I have it, Habarus. I said I would get it. Have a little faith.’

  ‘We’ll begin preparations immediately. Who are they?’ Habarus extended his staff to point at Kana and the others.

  ‘They were sent by the White Castle. Keep them alive until Serpens returns. I’m sure he’ll be hungry.’

  Habarus’s dead eyes roamed across the group of prisoners still tied to the wagon. ‘That one. Her I know.’ He was looking directly at Constance, and Constance looked as scared as Kana had ever seen her. ‘She’s a traitor to Lord Satan.’

  Cadorian gave a shrug. ‘Do as you will then. The shitagi and the tall one with black hair are the ones we must keep alive. I suspect the Master of the White Castle will know if they die.’

  Habarus smiled. It was a really unpleasant sight. ‘I assure you that none of them will die quickly. It’s possible that even the traitor will survive for Serpens to feed on.’

  ~~~

  All in all, being chained to the wall of a dungeon was not as much fun as it sounded. Given that Kana had never thought such a position would be much fun, being in it was not ranking high on her favourite times to be alive. At least she was not hung by chains from a wall. The dracs had put a collar on her which was attached to a ring set into the wall, and then they had added manacles. It was all heavy iron and it was severely sapping Kana’s store of magical energy. Or blocking her from it. The exact mechanics were unclear, but she had little energy to work magic with. She was not letting on that she had some available because she was not sure when the meagre supply would be useful.