The Blackbird and I didn’t talk much after the altercation, except for unimportant matters like who was going to sleep in what corner of the cave, or arguing over who was going to go out and scout for more firewood. The storm passed as quickly as it had come, before night even fell, but for the safety’s sake we stayed the night in that cave. That next morning, the Blackbird waved us off, something about biding her time, and we journeyed off into the snow.
Without a raging blizzard to slow us down, the rest of the crossing was manageable, if not easy. We pushed ourselves as much as our stamina would allow, continuing late into the evening in order to get out of the heights before we made camp. The next several days after that all blended together. By the end of the first day out of the mountains we’d crossed the foothills, at which point we turned east and resumed traveling in the direction of Yazthaan. Sarnai guided us along small foot trails, the sorts of places that didn’t warrant being marked on a map, but which were more than enough for three people to travel on. Our detour paid off, however, in the complete and utter lack of ghouls, or any other servants of the Cassandran Empire.
Not that there was anyone around who wasn’t a ghoul, either. The only other living things in evidence were small rodents, wild dogs, strange plains-dwelling monkeys, and a single massive herd of grazing creatures that looked for all the world like a hybrid between a moose and a pig, and which Sarnai told me were the ancestors of what would become the domesticated falt. For every hour where there was some visible evidence of animal life, there were at least ten where none could be seen between ourselves and the horizon.
We eventually circled around the edge of that thin little mountain range, re-entering the main body of the plains, where we would have ended up even if we hadn’t taken a detour. The terrain became more hilly, rockier, the remnants of the last ice age more prominent with each passing mile. Yazthaan, though dozens of miles away from being visible, felt suddenly more present.
“It’s really incredible how much the Durkahns have built,” I asked at one point, trudging sideways down the side of a knoll so that I wouldn’t slip. “It’s so big and cold and inhospitable, I’m surprised that you were able to build towns like Zrimash and Yazthaan.”
“I don’t imagine it was easy,” Sarnai had said with a laugh. “But I know Yazthaan gets a lot of rain and meltwater, and they grow buckwheat and raise cattle there. I remember, before I was hired by Murahnok, escorting a wagonload of mountain silver and alum and lapis down to the northern coastline, to be sold for lumber and shell and fruit. There’s a lot of labor around that the temples can put to use, especially during the winter months.”
I hit a patch of loose gravel and nearly lost my footing, slipping down the last several feet to the bottom of the knoll. “So it’s all built on webs of trade and exchange. I guess that’s something you’d be good at, being descended from nomads.”
What remained unsaid was the implication of all that, of how fragile the whole system must have been. How the sheer industrial might of Cassandra would absolutely wreck it given a single chance at a fair fight. Dinara’s assistance in securing the mountain routes was that chance. It was a reminder that this was about more than just Zrimash, more than just the reikverratr and the late Dr. Ironseed. What I’d somehow gotten myself into the middle of was about the fate of empires, decisions that could destroy or save entire cities, safeguard the Durkahn civilization or destroy it utterly. It felt too important for anything that I had influence over.
There wasn’t much time for me to ponder the huge and abstract, because as we moved into the hills, the immediate and concrete started to make itself known again. Sir Margaret’s wound began getting worse. I don’t know the details of how it happened; not even she did. She and I speculated that the cut may have opened up at some point and gotten dirt in it, but that was only speculation. Whatever the truth, she woke up one morning feverish, nauseated, with a pounding pain in her gut. An infection.
She kept up a good face at first, and more or less kept up for the first day. By the second, it was clear that this wasn’t just a minor thing. She woke up that morning covered in sweat, her skin an unhealthy ashen grey, shutting her eyes against a pounding headache. When we finally packed up our things, it soon became clear that she wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace. Not that she didn’t try; she tried as hard as she could, even assuring us that we didn’t need to slow down for her sake, but her exhaustion was obvious, as was the toll that pushing herself was taking on her. We slowed down, took frequent stops, made sure she was well rested and well-hydrated. Fortunately Sarnai knew where to find plentiful water in the hills, or we would have been in even worse trouble.
Sarnai, being the tallest of the three of us, was also the first one to see the village on the horizon. I had to climb up a tree to see it, and Sir Margaret took our word. It was only barely visible, and it must have been ten miles away at least, ahead of us and to the side of our direction of travel. But that it was a village was clear enough, especially as we came a little closer: there was a thin white smoke plume emerging from it, and the pointed shape of slate roofs stood out against the grass well enough.
There was a bit of a debate about whether we should even go up to that village. Sarnai was adamant that our food supplies would last us all the way to Yazthaan, if we stretched them. Going to such an obvious landmark would make us a target for ghouls, assuming the place wasn’t already overrun. I pointed out that, if the village hadn’t already been attacked, they might not know about anything that had happened, and need the warning. It was Sir Margaret who made the decision for us: even if we didn’t need food, the villagers might have medicine. Without some kind of treatment for her infection, we wouldn’t be getting anywhere.
So that was how we ended up approaching the little cluster of wood-and-stone huts, moving slowly and silently so as to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible. It was an unnerving experience. The closer we came to the place where the grass was cut away, the more it became impossible to ignore the fact that the entire area was absolutely dead silent, far too quiet for there to be anyone actually there.
“I hear tell that some of these sorts of places don’t actually have any permanent inhabitants,” Sir Margaret whispered, “and are simply left empty for the next caravan or what have you to take the place.”
“Or perhaps everyone who lived here has already been eaten by a swarm of ravenous ghouls,” Sarnai muttered.
I shivered. “Yeah, let’s not stay here for long. We grab what we need and get out.”
The place we’d found was a fairly standard example of the rest stops where Durkahni nomads could rest and recuperate after long weeks out on the steppe, as well as a junction for traders going to Yazthaan from some of the more northerly city-states. The two main buildings were a pyramid-temple and a storehouse, both small compared to Zrimash, with everything else clustered around those two buildings. We instinctually stayed together, making a beeline for the storehouse.
It was a low, squat structure made from interlocking stone blocks, with the only source of lighting being a pair of unlit candles hung by the entryway and no windows or anything else to make the inside even slightly less unnerving. It felt like there was something waiting for me inside every shadow. It also didn’t help that the Durkahns hadn’t remembered to put helpful labels on every stack of barrels, shelf-load of sacks and cluster of baskets in the place, meaning we had to spend a few minutes pacing back and forth looking for what we wanted.
Sarnai grabbed a small bag of some kind of powdered dairy product which she absolutely swore by, and I found some dried meat to stick into the empty pockets of my backpack. That would be more than enough. But it soon became clear that there was nothing there that would help with Margaret’s infection. We agreed, then, to split up: Margaret would search the temple, and Sarnai and I would go and look through the outlying structures, and we would all meet up back at the same place we’d entered.
At this point my nerves were under more tension than the cables in the Brooklyn Bridge, a feeling which only intensified the longer I was in that little village. My instincts were telling me that this had been a bad idea, and I wondered if maybe Sarnai had been right. But I wasn’t going to let that fear prevent me from finding something for Sir Margaret. So I moved quickly.
I assumed that any kind of medical supplies wouldn’t be hidden away, and so didn’t bother looking. I would duck into a building, power-walk from room to room, open any chests or cabinets I saw, not that there were too many of those, and then go on to the next one. For the most part I moved in a systematic kind of way, like I was scanning points on a grid, except for the times when my paranoia got the better of me and I doubled back because I wasn’t sure if I’d accidentally skipped a building or not.
I went through about a dozen outbuildings like that, to no luck. Most of them just seemed to be normal houses or barracks, containing a bunch of beds and not much else. A few were more elaborate, with cooking fires or tables with sets of iron tools on them or things like that. Still no medicine.
The worry was starting to build up within me that we wouldn’t be able to find anything when I noticed one building that looked different from all the others. It had wood panelling on the walls instead of sod, for one thing, and a steeply peaked roof. There was Durkahni script painted on the wall in green paint, to the right of the door. I didn’t know what it said, but it was promising.
The door was jammed, and it took three attempts rocking my shoulder into it to finally get it to open up. Inside was darkness. All of the other buildings had been dark, of course; it had been long enough since anyone had maintained them that all the candles had burned out. But there was something different about the darkness here as well. Maybe there was a smell, or maybe it was the air being heavy with moisture, or something else barely on the edge of my awareness, but the building made me uneasy. At first it didn’t look very promising: the main room which took up most of the interior was just more low-slung cloth and wood-frame beds. I took a quick walk around them, then noticed an odd, bitter scent emanating from one of the side rooms.
Following that trail, I found a small, cramped side room. As soon as my eyes had adjusted to the light, they zeroed in on the large box sitting in the corner, between the scroll case and the portable writing desk. I crossed the room in huge steps and pried the chest open, at which point I sighed in relief: the chest was full of glass bottles, each one containing some liquid or bit of plant matter. Given the size of each bottle, I could only assume this was some kind of herbal medicine.
Thinking quickly, I went back to the main room (an infirmary, not a dormitory!) and cut a section of cloth off of one of the bedsheets with my saber. Then I went back and, wishing that I could read Durkahni, carefully tossed all of the bottles onto the cloth, then tied it shut, before going back to grab even more cloth to wrap around the whole thing to make it a bit padded. I figured at that point that I was ready to leave, until I noticed that there was a second door going to another side room. On some impulse, I pushed through that door, at which point I nearly vomited.
The room was full of bodies, dead Durkahns who were still so fresh that decomposition hadn’t set in yet. They had been piled there, neatly, almost respectfully… and there was a circle of small blue pebbles on the floor in front of them. The same blue stones that I’d seen at the last ghoul-ravaged outpost.
“Sarnai! Margaret!” I screamed. “We need to get out of here, right now!”
I didn’t wait for them to respond before I turned and ran, in such a panic that I nearly tripped over my own feet on the way out of the door. As I pushed through the doorframe I cursed myself for not noticing the obvious earlier. Why else would the whole place be abandoned if it hadn’t been attacked? Worse, the state of the bodies meant that the attack had been very recent, so the ghouls were probably nearby.
Or, as it happened, they were still there. I slowed to a stop a couple of steps past the door, my breath catching in my chest as I saw them. There were twenty ghouls, maybe thirty, with more arriving with each passing moment. Each one was wearing the Cassandran green, and carrying the same brutal iron clubs and hooks and axes that were the norm for them, mixed with rifles and shotguns that were clearly much beyond them.
At the front of the group, with their hands bound and mouths gagged, were Sarnai and Sir Margaret. They glared at me with wide, bloodshot eyes, trying to tell me something through the cloth. It took me a second to get the message and run. I made to go around the infirmary, avoiding the gathering crowd… and made it about twenty feet before a pair of expertly-aimed bolas crashed into my feet and tangled them. I hit the floor hard enough to skid. Reality went white for a bit. The moment I regained control of my limbs I flipped over, ready to unwrap the bolas, just in time to see the ghoul crossing the dirt to collect me.
Her enormous, sinewy hands grabbed me by the arm and throat, hauling me up and onto her shoulder. With a word in a language I didn’t understand, she signaled for the group to move on, her bringing up the rear with yours truly hanging over her back like a sack of potatoes.
So that was how Sir Margaret, Sarnai, and I ended up tied to a post, watching the stonewose set up a campfire while they argued over which one of us they were going to eat. At least, I assume that’s what they were arguing over; none of us could speak the language.
The stonewose camp was a small-ish affair of tents, set in the grassland a few hundred yards from the outpost, hidden from sight by the surrounding hills. By my estimate, there were maybe fifty stonewose, all armed fighters. In other words, about enough for each one to get one or two decent meals out of our butchered carcasses.
Escaping was basically impossible. For one thing, we weren’t tied in place with ropes, but thin strands of metal wire that bit uncomfortably into the skin. For another thing, the outer edge of the camp was constantly watched, and we had eyes on us most of the time, given that we were just on the edge of the light from the main fire. If we were going to get out at all, it was going to require some luck and a good opportunity. That or a really, really smart idea. So we waited, and we watched.
By the time the cooking fire was at full heat, and all the knives and cauldrons and everything else had been brought out, it was late in the evening, and the sun was just touching the distant hills. All of the ghouls gathered in the middle of the camp in a large circle and began what I could only describe as a debate. None of us could understand what they were saying, but they were doing it with organization. One would step forward and deliver a brief speech or a few remarks, then step back and allow the next one to go.
“If only we had a wizard around to sneak over and trick them into arguing until the sun comes up and they all turn to stone,” I muttered to myself.
Sarnai, ignoring me, looked on with a mix of awe and horror. “Looks like they’re holding council. Reminds me of a ship at sea, when there aren’t any orders from the admiral to follow. I think that one in the red hat is the captain.”
I followed her eye-line and saw that, indeed, there was one ghoul on the far side of the circle wearing an elaborate tricorne cap. She wasn’t dominating the discussion, but she was paying keen attention, occasionally making hand gestures that drew the attention of the whole circle.
“What do you think they’re discussing?” I asked.
“Which of us to eat, presumably,” said Margaret. “And they’re definitely planning on eating one of us.”
“What gave it away?” I muttered. “All the knives?”
“Well, that’s a part of it, but there’s also the factor that I don’t think they can hold off on eating somebody for much longer. Look at those two on the left of the captain; they’re shivering, their blood vessels are inflamed, and I don’t even know if they’re hearing the rest of the conversation.”
It took me a bit to pick out the two she was referring to from the rest of the crowd, but the description was accurate. Even from a distance I could just barely see the awful purple color of the blood vessels just below their milk-white skin. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“Loss of muscle control, changes in blood chemistry, and profound confusion are all symptoms of the wasting that occurs if and when a stonewose goes too long without consuming the flesh of a human, Durkahn, or related species.”
I already knew that ghouls had to eat people, that that was why they were such a threat. It wasn’t until then that it really sank in that they had to eat people, that it was a matter of life or death. There was something profoundly scary about that thought. The raiding, the kidnapping, the cannibalism; none of it was by choice.
“So those two are going to die?” I asked.
“Well, first they’ll lose control and go into a berserker rage, trying to find any source of meat they can. After a day or so of that? Then they go into the terminal phase, with all the coughing of blood and seizing and heart failure that that implies.”
I had a sudden idea. But it wasn’t a great one. “Are you, like, an expert on ghouls or something?”
“Not really, no,” Margaret said. “Honestly, Dr. Charcharias has put much more time and effort into studying the issue than I have, though uncovering the secrets of the unusual abilities possessed by our neighbors has been something of a pet cause for anatomists and doctors within Bluerose for almost a century. I just keep up-to-date on things, really.”
“Any idea how long before those two enter the ‘berserker rage’ phase?”
“Not really, no. The degeneration takes weeks even once it sets in. But if I had to guess… not particularly long. Could be a few days, could be a few hours, could be a few minutes.”
“Damnit,” I said, abandoning my plan. “And they’ll probably be cured by eating one of us way before that happens.”
“Most likely,” said Sarnai.
“If only there were a way to trigger it early. Fuck, I feel bad for even thinking about that, but it’s us or them, so… Not like that would even be possible.”
Sir Margaret considered it. “It’s a psychological issue. If you did something really really stressful, it might cause them to break.”
“What do you propose, then?” Sarnai growled. “We yell at them? We aren’t exactly particularly mobile here.”
“That is a bit of a problem with any plans we could come up with, yes.”
We fell silent again, after that. Whatever discussion was going on amongst the stonewose slowly wound down to completion. But before they actually ate us, the whole circle instead sat down and started doing something that I couldn’t understand. It looked like they were praying, eyes shut with their hands on their knees, speaking only softly to themselves.
It was about a minute later that I heard the noise from behind us. It was a grunt, but so quiet and distant that I thought I’d made it up. Several seconds later came another noise, this one like wind blowing over a tent. There was no wind. None of the ghouls could have heard it over the cracking of the fire, but Sarnai perked up at the sound and tried to twist around so she could look at it.
The first sign that what I’d heard was actually real and not just my mind breaking down under stress again was when the huge, heavy hand landed on my shoulder. Forgetting for a moment that I was bound, I jumped and immediately kicked away, throwing myself painfully into the metal wire.
“Stop moving, you’re going to draw the attention of the ghouls. Trust me,” she whispered, not bothering to hide the Creandasian accent.
I froze, tears forming in my eyes. “Rook?”
“That I am,” she said. “In the steel.”
Sarnai grinned. “Have you been following us?”
“As it happens, this particular pack of ghouls has been following me. But there’ll be time for sharing stories later. I’m getting you out of here.”
“How are you going to—” I began to say, before Rook demonstrated how she was going to by grabbing the wires around my waist and snapping them between her hands like they were dry pasta.
“We still have the problem of how we’re going to get out of camp without being noticed when there’s all four of us,” Sir Margaret whispered as Rook circled around and broke her wires.
“Surprised they haven’t heard us already, with the size of you,” Sarnai added.
“What if we had a distraction?” I said.
“How?” said Rook.
I suppressed a laugh, one of those humorless laughs you make when you’re really, really stressed. “See the two ghouls who aren’t praying with the others, with the weird veins? They’re about five minutes from breaking down for lack of human flesh. If you can give them a shock to the system, they might just go off.”
Rook nodded at the suggestion, going around to break Sarnai’s bonds. “Right. I know just the thing. But as soon as I do it, there’s no waiting around to see if it works or not, you understand? We run.”
We all nodded, rising from the ground into various states of readiness. “On the count of three?” Sarnai asked.
“On the count of three,” said Rook. “One.”
“Two,” I said.
There was a bit more than the proper second between that and when Margaret said “Three.”
And before she could even finish the syllable, Rook had pulled a revolver from out of absolutely fucking nowhere and fired a bullet right into the chest of a ghoul sitting nearby to the sick ones. I followed her instructions, and ran as quickly as I possibly could.
Fueled by adrenaline, I ran substantially faster than any of the others, racing into the dark of evening. But even with the blood pounding in my ears I could hear the sound of two incoherent roars of fury coming from behind us, followed not long after by the cacophony of an all-out brawl. The plan seemed to have worked.
Several seconds later, I was well on my way to dashing right past the sentry guards when I heard Sir Margaret yelling from behind me. “I saw falts on the way in! We should take those!”
I stopped, my heels scraping on the dirt. The others were a solid thirty feet behind me. “I can’t ride!”
“Good thing you’re tiny, then!” said Sarnai. “We’ll have to share. I for one am not sure how well we can escape on foot.”
The others turned, following Sir Margaret’s awkward limping run. I caught up quickly, and it wasn’t much longer before we saw half a dozen falts tied up near the edge of the camp.
Rook drew a combat knife and started cutting through the ropes keeping the falts in place. She found the largest and claimed it for herself, while Sarnai took the second largest and offered me a space on the back. Rook and Margaret each claimed one of their own. Once we were all seated, Rook fired two shots into the ground, sending the other three animals galloping away in terror.
“Now they can’t follow us,” she said with a grin.
“Wonderful,” I said, remembering my last experiences trying to ride one of these things. “Oh! We need to go back to the village. I found medicines for your injury,” I said in Margaret’s direction.
“All right, we go there first. But no wasting time, or else—”
Sarnai would probably have said something about getting hunted down by a pack of angry ghouls, if she hadn’t been interrupted by the sudden arrival of a pack of angry ghouls. That was all the prompting we needed to leave, the three riders kicking their falts into a gallop, leaving me to clutch desperately to Sarnai’s back and hope I didn’t fall off.
Not even ghouls, for all their athletic capabilities, could outrun a falt. We made it to the village in half the time it took them. I grabbed the bag full of drugs, though I was dismayed to see the stain spreading across the bottom. Hopefully whatever bottle or bottles had shattered weren’t the ones that contained what Margaret needed.
But there was no time for wondering, or to do anything in general. As soon as the bag was in my hand, Sarnai heaved me back onto the falt, and we peeled off into the distance. It was over an hour before the screaming taunts of the ghouls faded into inaudibility.
“Loss of muscle control, changes in blood chemistry, and profound confusion are all symptoms of the wasting that occurs if and when a stonewose goes too long without consuming the flesh of a human, Durkahn, or related species.”
That's suspiciously specific… bad theory time: they are genetically engineered by the Creandasians to eat Blueroses
Oh gosh! All's well that ends well?
Ugh I really want to know who she is!
Thanks for the chapter