Chapter 36: Journey East

Note: Thanks to WRC 264 for beta reading this!

Ealaín

“Followed?” my charge gasped.

“What’s going on, Master?” Nathalie asked. Her voice lacked the normal fear. Since the fight, she had shed a degree of her timidity. She had discovered her strength thanks to Rubyforged, her armor.

“One of the Biomancer’s things has been following us,” Sven said. He knelt and nudged the dead creature with his knife. “For days. Since Az.”

“Longer,” I said, shaking my head. “I remember hearing owls after we exited from Faerie and while traveling through the woods. I didn’t think anything of hearing those hoots.”

“Carsina says it hooted the same way every time, no variation,” Sven said. He straightened, staring out at the woods, arms folded across his bare chest.

“It was,” Kora gasped. “I just thought owls hooted the same. I didn’t even think it was the same one, just ... It was waiting for us when we emerged from the ring?”

“It tracked us there, probably with Keythivak,” said Zanyia.

“If the Paragon was tracking us that long, why did the Biomancer’s vermin waited so long to attack us?” Sven asked. “You saw what they did at Az. If it wasn’t for the armor we found there, they would have killed us.”

“Most likely,” I agreed. “Perhaps it took time for the Paragon to gather those monsters.”

“Why would the Paragon use Zizthithana at all?” asked Ava.

“Zizthithana figured out how to find the amulet,” said Zanyia. “I bet she held back where she found it. Used it to negotiate. Then, when Master interfered, the Paragon took time to gather her foul compatriots. I bet they were scattered across the world. If they were all in one place...”

“Yes, they’d be hunted down by those new knightly orders cropping up,” said Kora, her hand grasping the amulet. “I can’t wait until we destroy this.”

I swallowed, glancing at Sven. His jaw tightened.

I glanced back at my charge, at the amulet. The ruby seemed so dark now, an empty void gripped by her pale fingers. I shifted and said, “I feel like we’re missing something important. There is something about this that makes little sense.

“Doesn’t matter,” Zanyia said. “We’ll reach the Altar of Souls soon. We killed the spy. They can’t track us, and it’s not like they know exactly where we’re going. We don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Just east,” Sven said. His head glanced to the south. Towards Echur and Prince Meinard? “Let’s eat supper and get to sleep. I want us up early. We need to cover more ground. I don’t want to find an ambush set up by Prince Meinard’s soldiers.”

Princess Ava

The next week passed in a blur of hard traveling. Sven’s concern over my father’s activities set unease in me. I kept checking his study, sinking into my jade beetle proxy I left in the crack in his wall., but he was never there. I’d tried different times of day: early in the morning when I first rose, late in the afternoon, midday, late morning, sunset. I even woke up in the middle of the night to check.

It was empty.

My father wasn’t at Echur. He was out... somewhere. He had to be hunting us. It made me worried as we left behind the Forest of Lhes and rode through the farmland of Eastern Kivoneth. The Despeir Mountains reared up on the horizon, daggers thrusting in the sky.

The fence separating our civilized lands from the cruel domain of the nagas.

My stomach grew tighter as the stress mounted. Where was my father? At every crossroad I expected ambush. I kept turning around to look behind us to see if any great clouds of dust hazed the horizon, announcing a large column of soldiers in pursuit. He had the troops, soldiers manpower so long as he ignored the western front where his armies were in rout.

The hammer kept leading us east. I had claimed possession of it from Carsina as we entered the easternmost lands. The hammer pulsed more and more. It trembled, growing closer and closer to where it yearned to be. It was created to work the Altar of Souls, to forge powerful artifacts at the hands of the God of Crafts.

And now it was in my hands.

At night, I slept with it cradled to my breasts. It filled my dreams with strange images of the muscular god working, crafting all the artifacts of the gods: Grimsilence, the Tourmaline Mask, Heart’s Key, Balance, and even High King Peter’s famed sword with which he conquered everything west of the Despeir Mountains, uniting them beneath his High Kingdom.

A mad feat my father ached to repeat.

The hammer sang to me. It longed to be home. I made me push Sven to keep us riding hard and long. To take as little breaks as possible. We were all tired, but we were coming closer and closer to ending this. To destroying the Biomancer Vebrin’s soul.

What a wonderful treat that would be. To end his villainy once and for all. He would not get a second chance to populate the world with those abominations like the ones who attacked us. Or the thing that followed us pretending to be an owl.

So far, we’d found no new creatures tailing us.

I wasn’t the only one who often rode in silence. Ealaín didn’t speak much, her eyes distant, her mind working on her theory that we were missing something important. The Paragon’s behavior made little sense. If she had access to forces more powerful than Zizthithana, why didn’t she dispatch them after us right away.

It was only when we went to the Temple of Krab that the Paragon approached my father. And in a day, her monsters had traveled a distance that would have take a human four or more to cross. They were scared by us entering the temple that they acted precipitously.

But why not just do that from beginning? What held them back before we went to the Temple?

I couldn’t think of it. Not with the hammer’s song pulsing through my thoughts. We were coming closer and closer. I could feel it. When we woke up on the tenth day since leaving Az, I could feel we were close.

We would reach it today.

The Despeir Mountains swallowed the horizon as we set out passing the orderly farms. We were a days ride from them. I could even see the pass, the gap between the mountains. Zizthithana’s foul slavers rode through the gap to take prisoners for my father to use to spread his power. The Zeutchians who lived here kept weapons in plane sight, polearms leaning against fences while the men worked the fields, youths perched in makeshift towers looking east.