Majutsu-shi no Chikara Ch. 14

Majutsu-shi no Chikara loosely translates to "Sorcerer's Power"

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: In for a groat, in for a gold.

"I bring these two, Inkar-chief, but they are small and weak." Bharat swayed on his feet, his chief staring him in the face with her fiery yellow-gray eyes.

For a moment, he thought he was dying of fever when she touched the ragged stitches and weeping slashes on his arms.

"How many did this?" her voice was far away, calling Bharat from another valley or from the other side of a blizzard.

"Three or four tens, Inkar-Chief... and their chieftain." Bharat coughed, tasting blood and something rotten in his mouth. "His spear broke in my gut."

"My warriors fell ten-to-one to kobolds?" Inkar sneered at him, and he felt rage within himself... she had not seen them fight... she had not been in the hip-deep water and trackless bog, with needles, darts, and fangs all around.

"You think I shame you?" Inkar jutted her tusks at him in challenge, and Bharat flinched away. "You think I call you weak?"

"Yes." Bharat thrust his jaw as proudly as he could, the burning in his muscles forgotten only that moment. "Chieftain was not there..."

"These are weak!" Inkar bellowed in his face, her clawed hand pointing splay-fingered at the two kobolds with their fresh-carved names on their narrow chests. "I should strangle them with your guts, for losing two of my scouts! Two of your kin! Sidero blood is worth entire tribes to one!"

Bharat waited, expecting Kamakshi's wrath to descend... a dark, primal fear hidden at the backs of their minds, even after Tuwile reported on the Betrayer's death. The fear remained, and the burning gaze of his chieftain called it forward in the heat of his wound fever.

Her blazing yellow eyes closed, her flared nostrils quivering as she took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, Bharat saw something that seeped into his mind and touched something too deep within himself to understand through the fugue of his sickness.

"You are Bharat-pup... you will earn your name back, or die on the road to it." Inkar dismissed him with a wave.

...

"Pup! What are you doing?" Uduak shoved the swaddled Bharat back onto his sleeping mat inside the newly relocated yurt. "It is time for feeding."

"Thirst." Bharat smacked cracked lips, his forehead hot and dry from days of fever. "I thirst... water..."

"Here, be still." Uduak muscled the wounded ork around until he was propped against her bosom in a crude parody of suckling a whelp. "There is plenty to drink, but you will listen and drink slow."

"...water..." Bharat pleaded, not for the first time since his return to camp.

"How is he?" Inkar's voice prodded from the entrance, her silhouette slim against the fading light that filtered through the darkening canopy above the yurt.

"Still sick with fever." Uduak had managed to dribble watered-down wine and blood into his mouth. "We're out of goat milk... his wounds are dry, but the fever is everywhere."

"Wash him in the stream, deep in the woods." Inkar turned to walk away. "I leave you and Muna in charge while I'm gone."

"Where are you going?" Uduak narrowed her eyes, her gaze following after her smallest sister... her chieftain.

"You know where." Inkar hesitated, then vanished from sight.

Bharat coughed, sputtering and shivering with fever as his teeth chattered. Uduak smacked the side of his face.

"Quiet, pup." Uduak snarled low and rubbed her forearm on her brow, smudging the blood and wine Bharat had coughed onto her face. "Inkar-Chief keeps you, stupid pup."

Too few are we. Uduak frowned, looking up as Thato and Nahia passed the yurt's entrance -- each glistening with the sweat of many new labors.

...

"Nahia, rope!" Thato stretched a hand forward and down from her perch atop the newly built timber wall of the breeding yurt.

Nahia tossed the coiled length of braided gut-rope upward, then vaulted up to catch one of the roof beams and haul herself above the structure to guide the sewn-together skins between the beams before they could be stretched over the roof and tied down. Their newest false kin, the kobolds Bharat had dragged in his shadow along with the corpses of his brethren, were tying small loops of gut from beneath the beams. They hung below the beams using legs and tail, their arms free to work the lengths of dried gut into loose ties before the canopy was stretched over the timber. As Thato hauled upward on the rope and several bundles of skins lurched upward through the narrow space between beams. The wood beneath her feet creaked and complained, but the timbers were still green and lively.

Nahia grabbed a handful of hide and lifted, the bundle threatening to wedge between timbers near the center of the yurt.

"Stop." Nahia hissed. "Stop, it will break."

"I stopped." Thato panted, grinning at her now from the edge of the roof. "Will it fall?"

"No." Nahia pulled several handfuls of folded skins up and over the beams, draping them beside her into nearby gaps between timbers. "No, it will sit."

"Sidero has become strange, Nahia." Tuwile called up from below. "Inkar-Chief has gone, she says she will return. Warriors and slaves share work... and this...?"

He gestured up where the sisters were hauling the skin covering ever up and outward.

"Dig with claw, bite with fang, Tuwile." Thato grunted, teetering unsteadily on one beam as she began hauling on the gut-rope again.

"Inkar is strange." Tuwile shrugged. "It is good. It is strange and it is good."

"Inkar-Chief." Nahia corrected him.

"Yes." Tuwile grinned up at her, ignoring the smoldering anger in her eyes.

"Take some of those warriors to fetch branches to lay on top of the roof." Thato barked down, now her hands busy carefully aligning the patchwork hides so the seams did not tear and no gaps shone where the skins reached the edge of the roof.

"Yes, yes." Tuwile waved as he turned and left. "Flat branches, green with buds... torn like this, wet like that, weave like this... slave work."

When he'd left, taking a half-dozen warriors away from their provings, Nahia looked at Thato with a meaningful frown.

"That troll has made Tuwile a problem." Nahia hissed, just stretching the last of the material to the edge of the roof before dropping down the outside to the ground.

"Nothing a good rutting won't fix." Thato likewise vaulted to the earth and smiled evilly at her.

"Muna?"

"And Uduak, both." Thato nodded. "At least Uduak will be spared tending the whelp for the night."

"Inkar-Chief forbids Sidero killing Sidero." Nahia chuckled as they walked to the rough entrance of the now-covered breeding yurt.

The kobolds were scurrying along the underside of the beams, loosening and tying their numerous strands to fasten the canopy to the beams. Thato gave them an approving grunt, leaning with one arm on her double's shoulder.

"So they do not kill him..." Thato snorted. "Just his rut-stick."

Nahia barked a laugh at that, turned to look outside where sunset was washing the southern steppe in gray-violet ash. The last rays of golden light were far above, held aloft by the peaks to the west -- a place Nahia didn't know merchants called the Sea Wall Mountains. The kobolds of the marsh controlled much of the land between the Sidero and the western mountains -- in the drowned lands of their swamp. Now almost five days away from their once-home, the two scuttling lizards above her were looking much healthier than when they'd arrived.

"Inkar-Chief was right." Nahia pointed at the glistening new scales and the flaking of old scales that occasionally drifted down. "The wetland is a sick place. Look, they grow new scales quickly."

"Orenda keep them trapped there." Thato shrugged. "Orenda south and the humans north... now, we have them."

"Or they have us." Nahia frowned. "It stinks like rotten flesh, Bharat-pup said."

"And ten of them, sick and all, killed one each of us." Thato nodded grimly. "We may have caught the mammoth by the tusks."

"It's a slippery rutting mammoth." Nahia shrugged in agreement. "And much smaller than we knew before."

"Maybe not." Thato nodded toward the kobold that was most probably male. "That one speaks Orenda... better than the other. Maybe human-tongue? Maybe they are useful as once-mules are useful."

"So Inkar-Chief would say." Nahia frowned at her sister. "Has she said?"

"Not yet." Thato turned to leave the yurt. "I'm hungry."

"She will, then." Nahia followed her. "I can see it."

"Are you a shaman?" Thato chided, tilting her eyes at her sister in mockery.

"I'm not a stupid rut-stick-brains." Nahia snarled, punching Thato soundly in the breast.

...

"How much for passage?" Saran kept her gray cowl low over her brow, shielding her already dark features from the glare of noon-day sun on the water all about the Tsuro docks.

Before the pox-scarred, blubbery-looking bosun could give her an answer, his eyes drifted over her shoulder and his mouth clapped shut so quick his teeth clacked. Saran let out a long-suffering sigh, but the presence of Nabid was nowhere nearby.

"Wizard Saran." A soldier of Ser Majesty's army, one of her dragoons or perhaps a member of the elite retinue called the Royal Guard (or whatever the latest monarch contrived to call their hired murderers and brainless thugs in Tsuro), with well-maintained cuirass, shining bracers of gray steel, and equally shiny gray greaves atop drab sollerets with well-used spikes at the toe.

She did not turn, but the bosun's eyes darted back to her and over her shoulder like a rat caught between two cats. She smiled mirthlessly at him, giving him the barest glance of her eyes to indicate he should politely fuck right off. He needed no other invitation to bow as politely as his ample waist would allow and scurry up the gangplank, back onto the relative safety of his nearby vessel.

"Who asks?" Saran turned her head just enough that she could see the entourage blocking her return back into Tsuro's bustling streets.

"I am of no consequence, Wizard Saran." She could hear the formalities dripping from a skilled tongue, commanding as one commands when one speaks for royalty. "You are summoned at Ser Majesty's pleasure."

"Then I am pleased to be summoned." Saran huffed slightly, irritated that Nabid hadn't warned her of the approaching soldiers... should she consider this a threat? Hmm.

"This way." The soldier of no consequence spun on his heel and marched before her, his five subordinates -- or peers -- falling in step only behind Saran as she followed the prescribed three paces behind their inconsequential leader.

He certainly had the build of a career soldier, and likely near thirty years -- young for an officer in Ser Majesty's employ -- with the discipline of newly minted youth and the fluid ease of the near-veteran of the battlefield. Politely, she did not take the time to scrutinize him for magical augmentation. Discretion carried as much weight among the nobility as did overt displays... more, in the right circumstances.

"Not to be ill-prepared to serve, may I inquire as to Ser Majesty's need of me?" Saran at last felt the singed, sulfurous presence of Nabid approaching her like a cat in an alley -- but he was too far off to be of immediate use, so she kept to decorum.

"I am to deliver you where I am bid, Wizard Saran." If he meant to put extra emphasis or disdain into her title, he'd failed. "I ask your understanding that I am not privy to such matters."

A politician in training, then. Saran couldn't help but smirk. Not that they could see the expression on her face, thanks to the ink-black pigment of her skin and the glossy, glass-like obsidian catching and reflecting sunlight in such a way that she often appeared featureless.

Her vision shuddered at the edges, the feeling of Nabid's mind reaching out to her and pressing against her defenses. She could feel his sinister chuckling as his thoughts licked against her like blistering-hot slugs melting in the sun.

Where are you going, Wizard? His question throbbed just behind her ears, and the jittering periphery of her sight smoothed. Am I to leap to your rescue?

Hitsuyo has summoned me. No need for bloodletting. Saran answered both inquiries and deftly secured the mental link with the daemon. Do stay close: within ten paces of one hundred paces.

So close? The Wizard gives poor Nabid little room for... discretion. She could see the images his thoughts conjured, and it churned her stomach as it had every time.

Time for feeding when we leave Tsuro. She clenched one fist, tightening the reins of her command and sending through it a jolt that, to a daemon, would feel unpleasant.

The Wizard is cruel. The Wizard is generous. Nabid answered, but she could sense his excited, frustrated squirming against her control and the price exacted for non-compliance.

When he at last relented and followed dutifully, she spied his drab tan cloak and bland brown clothes (recently purchased, against his wishes) as the bound daemon darted from alley to alley, roof to roof... vanishing from one shadowy doorway or alcove to emerge from a shuttered window or around another corner.

Tsuro, perched at the mouth of the Serpent River, whose delta met the Narrow Sea on the west side of the Sea Wall Mountains. The marching ranks of peaks were steep, rocky, and nearly trackless, with a shallower prominence on the east faces than the coastal west. Measuring no more than fifteen miles across by the precise instruments of Tsuro's leading cartographers and surveyors, the range spanned north and south a full two hundred miles. Whether by ancient design long lost to the modern world or the crushing forces beneath the soil that defied the aspirations and expectations of the fleeting, crawling mammals living and dying on the surface of the world -- none could rightly say how Tsuro's broad terraces were formed or whether it was before or after the mountains were cloven-through by the Serpent River.

The Pilgrim's Road west from Renks Cairn followed either side of the Serpent until reaching the Sea Wall, when the jagged cliffs marching up on the north banks became impassable, and only a narrow cart-path wound a many-days trail through low passes in the shadow of a dozen peaks before squeezing out to the highest terraces on the south side of Tsuro; half a mile above the crashing waves in a place where goats were frequently encountered and the terraces were hard-packed soil with stubborn, wiry grass that waited only until the next rain before sprouting new shoots only to be gnawed low by the goats once more. The winding road became less taxing on the terraces, as paved ramps wound down to the sprawling delta harbor. As the terraces neared the crashing surf, ine in cultivated rain pools dominated the terraces, with high banks of fruit-bearing thornbush to slow or deter the goats. The lowest terraces were filled with stone and reed houses, fishing cottages, and small shacks down to the rocky beaches below. Most of three miles, by the skilled surveyor's measure, from the mouth of the Pilgrim's Road to the marks of high tide -- and the terraces fanned south of the river, outward and down, another three miles.

The north side of the delta, where the castle stood above the river halfway up the mountainside, was sparkling with slate and tile roofs wet with spray, where the terraces were kept with walls and gates of varying size. The merchants or petty nobles sunned themselves on rooftop pavilions or raised gardens below the sweeping arms of Ser Majesty's residence inside the castle of Tsuro -- named for the warlord credited with its design (though he was rumored to have died long before a single stone was laid). Curated gardens, orchards, and vineyards carved narrow livelihoods among the richer quarters of the northern terraces -- a place narrower, rockier, and far less welcoming than the southern farmlands. Where the southern terraces spread, sprawled, and sloped; the northern terraces cut, marched, and climbed up from the shore to the Steel Market, the garrison, and higher to the wealthier merchant abodes and petty nobles of Tsuro waiting on Ser Majesty's train. Beneath the shoulder of the castle's outer walls, a wide path carved north and east into the high mountains -- to a mine of copper and silver guarded by all the might of Tsuro. The smell of smelting ore, washing down from the high northern terraces, oft rumored of ill portent and unfavorable winds -- though just as often some mad soothsayer would call such vapors blessed tidings.

The true jewel in Tsuro's crown was the Bell. The great island in the middle of the delta. Choked with shipyards, smithies, and industry of all sort: the Bell was the beating heart of Tsuro's trade from the ocean and the Serpent. The Bell filtered grain, portioned wealth, sieving all and sundry each to each on their way to whatever destination awaited them.

It was on the outer lips of the Bell, where sea-faring vessels made port from far-flung places beyond the Narrow Sea, that Saran had hoped to find her escape from the shadow of Renks Cairn. She was chasing a carefully-laid contingency to a place she could not remember, to a wealth measured only by partial records in her mind. Now, she had been marched over the High Bridge (so named because of its cost to build, most like) and up the steep paths through the Seven Gates of Tsuro -- each as pretentious as the last in name and ornamentation -- to the ever-green orchards of the castle and the very seat of power of the region... if one utterly discounted Renks Cairn and the Tower. One certainly could not rival the Wizards in power -- but the petty, quarrelsome Wizards were less a political match for the position of Tsuro's monarchy, which oversaw trade and war from the Narrow Sea, over the Sea Wall and all the way to the dusty borders of Yesha-Dunn far over the eastern range that Renks Cairn called Yesha's Wall.

In that seat of power, the terrace was as verdant as the southern farms: well-manicured through ceaseless toil and no small amount of magical augmentation. The royal estate, separate from the central Keep and its defenses, huddled in the last sunny spot just above the Keep's shoulder on the southern side of the inner bailey.

"Esmeray!" the tinny, springing voice of a man well past his prime, bounced across the armor of Saran's escorts and sang in her ears with unpleasantly copper ringing -- another voice that knew her yet she could not recall.

Escort and escorted alike halted, halfway across the inner bailey and mottled with shade beneath a peach tree with nearly a dozen ripe fruits daring to be picked. The hustling, wizened mage -- for what else could he be? -- made a direct path from the Keep's low steps toward them. His body moved with the vigor of a man half or a quarter his apparent age, and his head was covered with neatly, artistically plaited white hair far too thick for such an aged pate.

"It's such a privilege to see you, again." His pale brown eyes were far too keen for his years, an obvious augmentation -- likely still his own flesh, rejuvenated to their prime -- and the story she saw within those eyes told her enough that she needn't bother guessing as to their past relationship.

"You will excuse me, I trust?" Saran inclined her head just so, and enough of the truth slipped by that her contemporary in the royal court nodded with pursed lips before backing away and stooping into a low bow.

"Ser Majesty awaits -- I had hoped to precede you, but I suppose following such a one is as much an honor." He bowed again and fell in step with the soldiers, footfalls precise and light.

It warranted the estimation to Saran, even as the acute twinge of sulfurous malice tickled her nose, that this wizard was once a hopeful to a seat within the Arcane Tower... perhaps a former (or even current) member of the Guild. Unless he was among those many unaffiliated sorcerers, perhaps specifically chosen by Hitsuyo for his idealism? Else a double-ruse to seed an agent close to the throne to keep a potentially unruly monarch well in hand.