The Pilgrims

tugs.

‘Changed my mind. I set out tonight.’

‘Tonight?’ said Sharfy. ‘Wait. Sleep on it, Anfen. In the morning. We’ll talk then.’

‘Enough talk,’ Anfen snarled.

Loup returned, a cup of milk in his hand and a drop of blood running from his nose. Even small spells took a lot out of casters in a city, where there was not much magic. Big spells were usually fatal. ‘At least drink this, before you go,’ said Loup. ‘I blessed it a touch. Strength for the road, protection from disease, heal your bones, this little brew. Improve your luck too, I shouldn’t wonder. Just a little.’

Anfen took the cup, sniffed it, downed it in one gulp. The others watched him without speaking. A minute later, his boots and scabbard on, backpack shouldered, he stood to leave, swayed on his feet, and fell back on the bed.

‘Heals your bones all right, I told him true,’ said Loup. ‘Strength for the road, oh aye. Can’t beat sleep for that. Now let’s go get some and leave the boss to his dreams. He needs em more than he thinks.’ Loup winked at them, his gummy smile lopsided.

51

Case sighed as they caught their breath at the tower’s base after the long climb down, its huge shadow leaning over and swallowing theirs. Thick grey clouds rolled over the hillside from the west, threatening rain. ‘Got a bad feeling about him. I’d go back and shoot him, if it wasn’t a bitch of a climb,’ he said.

‘I have that same feeling,’ said Eric, unstrapping the army-issue sword and tossing it away. ‘But we’re the good guys, Case. That’s the point.’

‘No, it isn’t. You said it yourself some time back. The point’s not good guys and bad guys, it’s to survive. And I think we just made a mistake.’

‘It’ll help me survive knowing I’m one of the good guys.’

Case scoffed. ‘Until he shoves a sword in your guts. Then I’ll get your opinion.’

‘You may be right. But before I came here, I couldn’t have killed a guy in cold blood. I don’t want to go back as someone who can. And if we ever meet the group again, tell Siel what I just told you, because she thinks I’m scum.’

‘You think she’ll be impressed we let a traitor live, who killed a few of her friends and will probably kill her if he gets the chance?’

Eric pondered this. ‘Fuck!’ he screamed, kicking the base of the tower as all the frustrations of the recent past suddenly boiled over. ‘I don’t care any more, all right, I just want a goddamn shower and a coffee, and maybe five minutes alone with a Playboy. Go kill him then. I’ll go back to being noble later.’

Case fidgeted with his battered old hat. ‘I’m sorry, Eric. This is my fault. I was a fool.’

He shoots, he scores … ‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘Leaving the others, like I did. Thinking she was going to come for me. She wasn’t following us all around for my sake. She had her own reasons, nothing to do with me.’

Eric had opened his mouth to say hell yes when he was startled to see a tear go down Case’s face. Hesitantly he put an arm around his friend’s shoulder. ‘Hey, come on. Of course she was there for your sake, handsome old guy like you. Why do you think I still hang around you? It’s not for the conversation.’ That got a smile out of him, but he could see Case was sick with embarrassment.

‘Onwards, anyway,’ said Eric. ‘We’re the good guys, at least we have that much, even if it gets us killed. Elvury, wasn’t the city called? That’s where Anfen’s bunch was headed. That’s where we’re going, if I’m calling the shots now.’

Case nodded. ‘Here, hand over those coins he gave you.’ Case took them and slipped on the necklace again, vanishing from sight. ‘We’d better set off.’

A fast-moving shadow passed just off the road. The war mage did not seem to be looking at them as it flew, arms crossed over its chest, two trails of smoke in the air from its horns behind it. Eric was sure it was the same one they’d seen near the inn. He ducked behind the pillar, while Case just watched it, the gun ready if it came back. Instead it veered away from the city and up for higher air, where the magic was denser. ‘It’s gone,’ said Case.

‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say that thing was keeping an eye on us. Let’s get moving.’

There was nothing to make the morning’s daylight any different from the afternoon’s. Nor did they have a means to track time by following a sun’s path. Some regions of sky seemed to glow brighter than others but there was no obvious pattern to it. Since a brief heavy rain shower had come and gone, today was one of the warmer days, though where this heat actually came from was hard to tell; it was just there, in the air about them.

Eric still saw the swirls and streaks of darkly glimmering colour twining on the wind like smoke. Higher up, it seemed to be background mist in some places, with the odd vein of darker shades woven through. In the sky over Hane, this stuff — this magic, he supposed; how strange to think in such terms — was barely there.

Soon enough, the rock pillar was gone from the view over their shoulders. Case kept the charm on and the gun ready in case of trouble, but the roads, though wide, were eerily empty of people. It was many hours of this emptiness before they passed a merchant train, accompanied by mercenary guards in Hane’s city colours. Too late Eric and Case rushed off road, but from beneath their helmets the mercenaries only gazed after them, as indifferent to them as were the ponies hauling the wagons.

The only other passing company was a big group of men and women dressed as druids in big dark hoods. They were sallow-faced and unpleasant to look at, similar to the two strangers Eric had apparently scared from the inn. The group’s excited conversation revealed they were Nightmare cultists, who’d seen the Great Spirit reach down, and were on their way to find the place he’d touched. ‘Hear that?’ Eric said once they’d passed. ‘They think they’ll find treasure there.’

‘Wonder what they’d think of you, if they knew he’d touched you?’ said Case thoughtfully. ‘Might call you a holy man.’

‘Maybe I am, Case.’ He was joking, but he also wondered: how big a deal would it be to these people, if they knew, to have an ‘Otherworlder’ in their midst? Would it create the same excitement as an alien coming to live on Earth?

At a lone roadside store, they were able to buy backpacks and fill them with supplies and rations, though the clerk very nearly refused to serve a customer so oddly accented as Eric. While the guard at the door took Kiown’s sword from him (testing its weight with approval and looking at Eric as if to say: how did one such as you come by a blade like this?), on the shelves, jar lids were lifted by invisible hands as Case pocketed wares, the young clerk only glancing once at creaking steps on the floorboards where there shouldn’t have been any.

With Kiown’s coins — large silver and gold discs, the rune printed on them spelling their city of origin, he guessed — Eric bought the backpacks, a jacket to cover his business shirt, a big map with totally illegible writing, and a spare set of clothes for each of them. The guard returned his sword at the door, but Eric could almost see working across the man’s mind: To kill him and take the blade, or not? With a shrug, the guard handed it back and sweetly bade him safe travels, his grin indicating the decision had been a close one.

From the store, the road led directly south, a few twists and turns aside, through country less scenic, bearing many old scars of war. They played chess on an imaginary board as they walked, though only Case managed to keep accurate memory of where the pieces were, which made the results somewhat predictable. They slept in fields and woods some way off road, their new garments keeping them warm or cool, whichever the shifting daily climate required. Soon, three days of travel were behind them. Every day they woke to the sound of birds chirping and a gently brightening sky growing more familiar and gradually less strange, though they were no less alone beneath it.

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