A Time to Prepare

A new day had come, same as the last. Blue was the sky, clear was the air, and down in the town which bore three new arrivals – four, if one counted the donkey – its inhabitants milled about their daily lives, unafraid, of what the day might hold in waiting.

The town was nestled into the green expanse of valley, bordered on one end by a copse of trees with splotched bark bored children enjoyed peeling away in long strips. Many of the buildings had been constructed from that bounty. Through the town ran a wide river shallow enough for Ol-Lozen to traverse without wetting his black hair, and deep enough to encourage fishing by rod in some stretches; by hand if one had the persistence. A bridge had been built for convenience of travel. No tolls needed paying to cross, and no trolls would leap out and harass crossers with threat of consumption. Farmers one side of the river grew corn and wheat, and the occasional onion, while their opposites had taken up a queer obsession over the numerous applications of green beans. Ol-Lozen had thought all their plants picked until sticking his head over a weathered fence to confirm the stringy fingers were bodies intended for picking, and not a symptom of underlying threat.

From the hard look he received from the plump farmer rocking in a chair on the raised porch, a clear threat had been made of the Orkan. White smoke belched from the pipe held between his lips.

Far as Ol-Lozen knew, it was a town none of its inhabitants had thought to bestow a name. Given how he and the magi would soon depart, that preconception was unlike to change.

In the town’s approximate center there were posts for Jackbee to be tied. A youthful looking stallion joined there also whinnied, as their reliable animal was hitched into place. Daigay rubbed his ears affectionately.

“Come,” she said to Ol-Lozen. “I spotted a fine wagon laying unused to the north. Let’s see if the owner isn’t willing to part with it.” To Mouse, still in the saddle, she gave a pat on the leg. “Keep an eye here. With any luck, we’ll return shortly.”

Ol-Lozen stepped in as the woman left, lowering down to meet his master’s eyes. Dark smears underlined them, as though she had forgone days of rest. What crowned her hair was no longer unkempt but a beggar rat’s nest.

“What troubles you, girl?”

“Go help grandmother, demon.” The voice was curt, empty of youthful inflection and – above all – law. Ol-Lozen’s legs carried him away before his consciousness.

In the days previous she’d appeared merely frustrated. Today, her temperament had awoken crestfallen, and had only sunk with the road. Ever since that demon had slithered out from the dead wyrm she had been plagued by troubles of the mind, reluctance to share them allowing room for the infection to fester; ever since the night that followed. But the lockbox of a child’s thoughts was not so easily broken into, not collected into readable lines as those in a diary, she would need to share them of her own volition.

“What is it you’re looking for?” asked Ol-Lozen. He had caught pace with Daigay with little effort.

“A wagon, for the journey ahead. We have dozens of miles of ground to cover and not the proper transport for goods. That,” she added, rubbing her lower back, “and my back will bend a crone’s arch if I’m forced to sleep on the ground each night. Sheets and hard wood will suit me decently.”

“Will there be room for me?”

“I believe so! Just so long as we unload it down to the nails. Silly Orkan, no wagon was intended with your proportions in mind.”

“Then what you’re telling is I’ll need to build one myself.” He imagined a cross section of prodigious dimensions. “It’s been sage advice not to reinvent the wheel. Given your wheel isn’t built to me, I may need to lift its design.”

“On the contrary.” Daigay waggled a finger. “Your people designed their wheel based on science, and science has immutable rules. Building a wagon here based on those principles would cost you –” Her hands flew up, an exasperated noise by their side. “Twice-tempered nails, alchemist’s honeyglue, the imported ironwood alone would make Larkhen’s coinkeepers flinch – if finding anyone willing to trade across the lostlands were possible – none of this accounts for the specialized tools to work these materials, for your own knowledge.” Shrugging, she gestured around at the town. “But I fail to see anything other than my own world here. Adhere to your world’s rules at your own peril. Here we have different ones; more pliable ones.” When Ol-Lozen chuckled, her eyebrows furrowed together. “Do you doubt my words?

“I watched you turn a throne room into an oven suing a piece of the floor made molten. I’d be a fool to question you, or magic, but my mind grapples poorly with the evidence all the same.”

Daigay grinned. “Then you require another demonstration? So be it. I shall make room in my day for your teaching.” In the distance was a well-built farmhouse, ripe fertile land laid in orderly alleys at its back. She pointed at it. “And there we shall have your lesson.”

“Looking forward to it.” His boots crunched against the dirt road. “Will Mouse be alright?”

“She’s a willful girl. I imagine she will be.”

“She was honest about her feelings. Vocal, too.”

“I raised her to be so. Not that I mean insult to her parents. Good people as they were, I’m certain they would have done the same, given the chance.” She looked to Ol-Lozen, reading his face for the concern he attempted to conceal behind a sheet of tissue paper. “You have a solid head on you, and good traits: yielding, determination, a strong arm and appropriate pride. In time she’ll understand.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Between the waving green stalks of beans, a pair of wide eyes peered through at the two approaching from the road. The child took off for the field’s edge, a hand to her wide-brimmed hat woven from straw to keep it from flying away, where father squatted down, harvesting closer to the soil, burgeoning sack at his waist. The child grabbed her father’s hand, shouting words reminiscent of “Papa!” and “Strangers!” The farmer, an old hand to his trade, considering his face carried more wrinkles than a tree had rings, shaded his eyes from the sun at the newcomers. His mouth drew to a thin, wan line. He clutched the necklace he wore, an heirloom of his father’s, bronze burnished with repeated pleas. With a gentle shove towards the house the child ran inside, returning with her sibling and their mother, suckling babe in her arms, cramped into the doorframe. He met the two strangers at his fence. Tired, as his day had been long, he propped a foot atop one rail of the fence he’d built, and leaned his weight forward.

Daigay matched his stance, lifting her leg until it was even with her chest, before she planted her foot firmly onto the white-painted rail of the man’s fence; an act which drew shocked gasps from his familial loves observing from afar to whom naked disdain in the face of their patriarch was akin to an act of war, and for the span of two heartbeats alleged the old woman – beholden as they were, to that nefarious smirk – the sole other human besides themselves, enraptured by all the swagger of a magus, who believed, wholeheartedly, that she possessed the skill, the charisma, the ego (no one doubted had the ego) the devilish silver tongue, audacity, and sharpness of mental saber essential to engage in loquacious duel a gruff, hardworking family man near her own age, in the sight of children and spouse and Riversworn, into giving up the vehicle for his livelihood built across weeks of backbreaking labor in the hot sun: cutting lumber, laying boards, hammering nails, cutting thick curtains of canvas; all so she may charge it straight down their devil’s own maw from which recovery would be impossible.

Transferring their supplies into the wagon had taken the greater part of the afternoon, and by the time they’d finished the farmer was tapping his foot, impatient for Daigay to complete her side of the bargain. In exchange he’d received a jar of bluish powder with a perforated metal cap, intended for sprinkling onto fertilizer to increase its potency. In addition he’d been given their cart, and a number of services from Daigay herself. He and Ol-Lozen watched the magus perform her enchantments upon his farmhouse, and when she had finished tossed a handful of water from a trough. The water struck a barrier lining the wood. She performed the same trick with his roof and her – his – cart, proving their water-repellent quality.

“Is there anything magic cannot accomplish here?”

“Oh, a great many things. And after I discover them, you’ll be third to know. Now lift the wagon, I want to be back on the road before sundown.”

Ol-Lozen took the edge of the wagon in both hands. Shuffling his feet into the proper positions he lifted the wagon for Daigay to crawl under. Sacks ground around in the bed, but nothing broke. The wood shuddered under his fingers. “Enchantments,” she’d warned him. “Some of the same I’d applied to my former cart, and a few choice others. Jackbee’s spirit may be strong, but a day pulling this will see it in tatters.” There was a sound like a swishing broom. Wood grains skittered into new alignments like insects under their disturbed rock. “And without proper precautions to ward ourselves from terrors of the lostlands, we’ll join him: bears, wyrms, minotaurs…”

“Incursion.” Ol-Lozen rotated his head to the source of tiny, flat voice slumped over in the donkey’s saddle. “And Incursion,” repeated Mouse, when no response crawled out from beneath the wagon in a timely manner.

"Aye. Those, too,” replied Daigay.

It was Ol-Lozen’s turn to shudder. One morning Daigay had cracked eggs for their breakfast and found him holding the hilt of his sword when she’d gone to ask how he preferred the eggs. Since that demon slithered out of the wyrm’s leg he had been seeing it in his dreams, watching him from shadowed corners, present in every sight glistening yellow.

“Have you given night’s thought to what I’d proposed,” she’d asked Mouse.

“I hadn’t summoned a demon to fight in battles.”

“No such complaints reached my ears regarding the wyrm. So, animals are fair game, but a true threat to the world should go unacknowledged. Share with me your logic, child, I fear this area beyond my studies.”

“He is here to do chores and assist you, not bring death.”

“A noble goal! One worthy of applause for altruism, a dying mannerism in this day and age! A shame the Incursion desire nothing less. If he is here to assist, then assist with our goals he shall, and should include those in the expanding lostlands.”

“But this was not my goal! Why is it yours? Why do you so wish to go off to battle and die?” There was a long, hollow silence between them, of which Mouse’s was coldest. She clenched her fists, but only felt her own skin.

Daigay’s eyes flitted downwards, then back up. She inhaled deeply before continuing. “I have spared you the stories, child. You have not read what I have. One is small threat to him, but in the face of tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? “Ol-Lozen wields weaponry beyond yours or my imagining, but even he will fall should the Incursion go unchecked, myself following soon after, and what will your altruism have wrought then?”

She gave that a moment to sink in. She strode over to the girl, and bent down with a groan on one knee. “You read my locked volume, of that I know, but I was not aware you’d missed a vital section: the latent power linking summoned and summoner; the interlocking of wills to make miracles manifest. I should have known better, trained you more thoroughly, and for that I am ashamed. I will see my failure rectified.” Regret brimmed in Daigay’s eyes. “To that end, you must find the will to assist me in your heart, and command your demon for our sakes: fulfill the purpose he was summoned for. This, I cannot do; only you.”

Ol-Lozen jerked forward as weight was ripped from his hands, and had to grab the wagon before he tipped it over. Laughter snapped from beneath the wagon.

“There! That solves the problem of heavy labor.” Daigay crawled out from beneath, dusting off her hands. “Watch.” She picked up a pebble and tossed it under the wagon. The stone bounced off the grass and preceded a strange pittering. Ol-Lozen frowned, placing his cheek to the grass and found the stone stuck to their wagon’s undercarriage.

“Is this similar to Mouse’s wind?”

“Think more complex.”

“If not air, then…” The lightbulb sounded a ding in his brain, and an urge to smash it nearly overcame him. Daigay’s grin stretched to the width of a clown’s, painted on, as Ol-Lozen pinched the crinkled bridge of his green nose. She hadn’t. She couldn’t have.

(She did.)

“That’s right – localized gravity. And you say your world has no magic.”

“Perversion of natural laws feels… I would call it blasphemous, but no gods are involved to insult.”

“Perhaps not in your world. Here the circumstances are quite different, of that you can be certain. Now help me rein in Jackbee. One of the townsfolk has already taken an interest in us, and I wish to be on the road again before nightfall comes to encourage his suspicions.” She nodded her head across the way at the alehouse where inhabitants were cavorting, laughter as they clinked glasses and made merry in the smoky one-roomed dwelling, seeming more interested in nursing their drinks than the affairs of magi and Orkan, for the moment at least.

“The tree. Look at the tree.”

Sure enough, by the roots of shady tree lay a sun-hardened youth. A tied rag kept the hair from their eyes in a cinched cylinder, giving the appearance of having donned a wooden pail, albeit one with a spike bottom. A misshaped travel sack weighed down on their back, and their fingers tapped like the nervous mouthparts of caterpillars. Tall grasses concealed little. The Orkan was surprised over missing such an obvious watcher.

“Should we be concerned?” Ol-Lozen asked.

“At the moment? Hardly,” replied Daigay. “But a world can change in an hour.”

They packed up the wagon, their curious spectator remaining where he lay.