Chapter Fourteen

“As you can see, nobody’s taking this path any time soon,” Izurb said as he stopped at the threshold of the ruined section of road, where the stone that had formed the surface since Gavamir came to an end.

Indeed, it did not look very usable. The unpaved path had become slick mud as far as the eye could see, dotted with bits of silver poking up from the ground. A carriage was liable to get stuck and it would be difficult for walkers to maintain their footing.

“I suppose there was truth to your claims,” Lusya said. She had started to become suspicious after they had spent the previous day and much of the morning following the road without issues.

“Yup,” Izurb said with smile. “Just gotta work on my marketing a little.” He gestured out at the road. “You can even see one of our esteemed Baron Inthal’s little traps there too.”

“Oh, I know about Baron Inthal,” Ariya interjected. “Papa really doesn’t like him.”

Izurb chuckled. “You could count the people who do on one hand.”

Ariya giggled.

Lusya was not sure if Ariya’s home fell under this Inthal’s domain. They were still in Ariya’s native Kingdom of Ovda, however, so it was not strange that her father may have had a strong opinion on one of the nobility.

“Anyway,” Izurb went on, waving to the path once more, “check it out.”

“The metal?” Lusya asked. Now that she looked a bit closer, it looked like blades growing from the ground.

Izurb nodded. “Yup. Hundreds of little spikes buried just below the dirt so you’ll stab your feet. The way the mud’s moved makes them easier to see.”

“Ouch,” Ariya said. “That’s gotta be, like, at least as bad as getting a splinter in your foot. And that hurts, I got one this fall, and my foot was sore for the rest of the day, even after Papa pulled it out.”

Izurb chuckled, though Lusya was not sure why. She suspected it had something to do with Ariya’s underestimation of such an injury’s severity. “Yeah, that’s putting it lightly. This isn’t even the worst of it. See there, where the trees get thicker?”

He pointed down the road. The land around them was still a grassy field, but a forest cropped up on either side of the path just a thousand feet or so ahead.

“I see it,” Lusya said.

“All kinds of tripwires set up there,” he said. “One wrong move and you’ll have a volley of arrows or a couple tree trunks flying at you.”

Lusya cocked her head. She could just make out a hint of the sun glinting off one such wire. It was possible that one was meant to be seen. Setting obvious traps to get an intruder to lower their guard against better hidden ones was a viable tactic.

“This baron’s commitment to his preparations is impressive,” she said.

Izurb scoffed. “That’s one way of saying he’s nuts and a paranoid bastard.”

She nodded. “That may also be an accurate characterization.”

It had not been unreasonable of this nobleman to think the war might have come to his lands. Much of the fighting had been centered around the south, after all. It must have seemed a miracle to the inhabitants of the southeast that they had gotten off so lightly. However, rendering some of his territory all but impassable on the mere possibility did enter the realm of paranoia. It was questionable how effective such traps would have been in the first place if Father had attacked in earnest. Perhaps this baron had been the one who had destroyed that bridge as well. She did not know if that had also been within his domain.

“Guy didn’t even have the decency to tell us about the traps,” Izurb went on. He made a disgusted sound, almost like a gag. “All we got was ‘we’re fortifying the road north of Gavamir.’ I guess he thought the sympathizers or demons in hiding would tell the Demon King or something, but I’m sure there was some middle ground he could have found.”

“How do you know so much about them if he didn’t tell anybody?” Ariya asked.

Izurb’s opened his mouth to reply, but his eyes widened and whatever he had been about to say turned into a single, drawn-out syllable that continued until he ran out of breath and had to inhale. He cleared his throat and looked at her with a strange smile. It seemed strained and exaggerated.

“Ah, well, some people found them when they came out this way,” Izurb said with muted cheer. “So, then they and…their friends let the rest of us know.”

Ariya gave a beaming smile and added a bit of spring to her step. “That was nice of them.”

Even without understanding his strange tone and expression, Lusya could surmise that the traps had first been discovered when people had fallen for them. Izurb had likely been about to say as much before remembering he was speaking to a young child. It was fortunate for all three of them that social norms valued protecting children from such knowledge.

“Well, I assume you two don’t want to sit here and admire our esteemed baron’s handiwork all day,” he said. “I’ll lead you around the traps. There’s some in the woods themselves too, so you have to be careful.”

“Very well,” Lusya said. “Lead the way.”

He led them off the road, giving the path proper a wide berth before continuing toward the forest. Lusya followed with Ariya in tow, though Lusya no longer led the child by the hand. Outside of the chaos of the city, that was unnecessary.

Izurb led them into the forest, where he weaved through the trees and ducked under branches with practiced ease. It was clear he had traveled this way before and, though his movements were slow, his sheer size meant he covered plenty of ground with each step. Through simple speed and reaction, Lusya was up to the task of keeping up with him. Ariya, however, was lagging and came close to tripping over a couple roots in her efforts to stay close.

“Slow down,” Lusya said. “The child is having difficulty keeping pace.”

Izurb chuckled. “No need to blame the kid if—Ah!” He jumped and screamed when he turned to face her, bumping into a tree behind him in the process. She looked around, but there was nothing that might have frightened him. She had certainly not intended to. “I didn’t realize you were so close behind me. Say something next time!”

Ariya giggled. A glance revealed she seemed to be trying to contain the laughter behind a hand over her mouth, but she was not succeeding.

Lusya cocked her head and blinked. “I am over a foot behind you, as you should have been able to tell from my voice.”

“That’s still pretty close,” he grumbled. “And you don’t talk very loudly. Anyway, I’ll slow down. Just not used to having kids in the group. Sorry.”

“You are forgiven.”

They continued onward. True to his word, Izurb did seem to make an effort to slow his pace. Ariya did not struggle to keep up near as much. His proficiency in navigating the forest continued to impress. He must have had much of the area memorized, with how he stepped over holes or protrusions without so much as a glance.

“You really know your way through the woods, mister,” Ariya said. “You’re barely even watching where you’re going.”

He chuckled. “When you put it like that it makes me sound bad.” He gave a sigh, almost wistful. “’Course I know my way around here. I’ve lived in Gavamir for over twenty years now.”

“I did not think many tiransa lived in Gavamir,” Lusya said.

While the mortal races mixed more in cities than elsewhere and tiransa had long co-habited more readily with humans than relti did with either—or either did with relti, for that matter—Gavamir was still predominantly inhabited by humans, despite the relative proximity of the Kingdom of Jirania, ruled and majority-populated by tiransa. She had seen some of both them and relti in the city, but the population had been minuscule compared to the humans and it had been unclear how many had lived there versus how many had been passing through. The number who had been raised there could not be very high.

Izurb nodded. “They don’t. My old man is an artist. He dragged us out here so he could study under some hotshot sculptor who was a big deal at the time. He got pretty good himself, even had nobles and rich folk ordering from him.”

“So, he has sculptures and stuff in castles?” Ariya asked.

“He sure does,” Izurb said. “Of course, he forced me to make the deliveries. And seeing as he was barely paying me and I always liked exploring, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take a detour every now and then.”

“And that is how you familiarized yourself with the area,” Lusya surmised.

“That’s right. The old man and my ma moved back home a couple years back, said they were getting too old for the hustle and bustle of the city. But by then it was home to me, so I stuck around and started this work.”

“You must really like it there,” Ariya said. “I don’t think I could live somewhere so loud and crowded all the time.”

“I thought the same thing when we first got there. Now the road almost feels lonely if I’m out here too long.”

“Being one of the few tiransa in the city must be difficult as well,” Lusya said.

Izurb laughed and looked back at her over his shoulder, moving branch out of his way without looking at it.

“You’re not a huge fan of tact, are you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I have no strong feelings on the matter, though you are not the first to suggest I lack it.”

“No surprise there.” He turned his attention to where he was going again and sighed. “You’re not wrong, though. The city’s just not built for me. Can’t even fit down some alleys and side roads, not to mention a lot of the buildings. Even some of the ones I can get into won’t let me in.

“That’s not even getting into my personal life. If it’s friends, I’ve got plenty, but I wasn’t exactly planning on being single at thirty. Unfortunately, the few tiransa women I know are spoken for. I wouldn’t have any problem with a reltus or a human, but they tend to be…intimidated by my size. In more ways than one, if you know what I mean.”

Lusya nodded. “I can imagine they would be.”

“You’re huge and kind of scary,” Ariya said. Then she smiled at him, hurried to catch up, and gave him a pat on the leg. “Until you start talking, at least. Then you’re pretty nice, even if you lied to us in the inn.”

“Thanks?” he replied with obvious uncertainty. He shrugged. “Either way, though, home is home, sunshine and rainbows or not.”

Ariya gave a rapid series of nods. “I know what you mean. My house was kind of boring sometimes, but I think I’m starting to miss it still.” She hurried to move her gaze to Lusya. “Oh, but I still wanna finish our duty and stuff.”

“Then it is fine,” Lusya replied.

Izurb sighed again and looked to his right. The trap-infested road was off in that direction, hidden from sight beyond the trees and brush. He scowled and clicked his tongue with an angry shake of his head.

“It’s because it’s home that I hate seeing things like this,” he said. “This was a nice area to walk through and that bastard had to go and ruin it. Didn’t even end up doing anything, except maybe ending the tranquil age quicker.”

“Why would the traps impact the length of the tranquil age?” Lusya asked.

Izurb glanced at Ariya and made an uncertain humming noise. “Well, you know, because they make people upset. And then people who know those people get upset. And stuff like that.”

So that was his reasoning. He feared the combination of people being hurt or killed by the traps, the grief of those who knew them, and perhaps the frustration of those forced to avoid the traps would speed the accumulation of Malice and thus the manifestation of the next Demon King.

His concern was moot, seeing as Lusya would be reviving Father before long. Even putting that aside, however, his worry was misplaced.

“It is unlikely that these traps will have any appreciable impact on the next Demon King’s manifestation,” Lusya said.

It took large-scale suffering and tragedy to accelerate things. That was how the cycle worked. Malice was created by negative emotions and vented at various rates. Within a mortal, Malice was formless and did not take up physical space. Once vented, it gained something akin to form and volume, but remained more of an intangible, invisible energy than any sort of matter. Sufficient amounts and concentrations, however, could gain life and physical form as demons, who in turn created their own Malice and would often go on to drive the creation of more from mortals. As such, demons were never born quickly enough to offset the rate at which countless souls flooded the world with Malice.

When there was a certain amount of Malice in the world, the bulk of it would coalesce into the Demon King, the most powerful demon who, up to the present, had always attempted to destroy or conquer the world. They would then continue accumulating Malice and growing in strength until they were defeated, usually by a gifted human who was born shortly after the king, known these days as the Hero of Balance.

That cycle had gone on longer than any could remember. It had surely occurred more than the twenty-one times—including Father—that were included in the typical count. Times from before written history or in distant lands no one here had heard of. The Demon King did not always appear in Ysuge, after all. Of course, in just a year the cycle would be disrupted. Lusya did not know what long-term effects reviving a Demon King would have. She was curious, but not concerned.

While phenomena like war and famine had been observed as hastening the next King’s appearance by increasing the Malice in the world enough to significantly shorten the time before it hit this critical mass, these traps would never be able to cause enough strife to have a noticeable impact. Every age would have its inconveniences and hardships. One so minor would not be new. In the grand scheme, its contributions to the world’s Malice would be little more than that of an argument between friends or a drunken brawl.

“You sound pretty sure,” Izurb said. “You a Sacred Knight or something?”

She shook her head. “No, but I am well-versed in the mechanics of Malice.”

He pursed his lips and was quiet for a moment. “What about all the bandits?”

“History suggests that happens every cycle,” Lusya said. “So even if it is technically an exacerbating factor, it is not worth considering as such.”

He shrugged and seemed content to leave things at that. Ariya looked from him to Lusya.

“Why are there bandits?” Ariya asked. “Aren’t things supposed to be boring after the Demon King is gone?”

“Not sure if boring is the right word,” Izurb said, scratching his head with a pensive look. “But yeah, they are supposed to calm down. And they do, I guess, but nothing’s perfect. Some scum just see an opportunity to cut loose in the aftermath. That’s the kind we get around here, although they usually won’t strike so close to Gavamir.” He sighed. “Other cases get a little more complicated.”

“You are referring to those from the battlefields,” Lusya said.

Broadly speaking, one could divide the criminals that sprang up in the early days of a tranquil age into two categories. There were simple opportunists, as Izurb had outlined. Those tended to appear in areas that had experienced just enough strife to devote resources toward fixing it, or were close enough to such regions that they would lend their aid.

The second category were those from the regions that had seen the worst of the fighting, driven to crime to survive.

Izurb nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of. They’ve lost everything. It’s kind of hard to blame them.”

“But they do the same things, right?” Ariya asked. “So, they’re still bad.”

“They do the same things, and it’s not okay,” Izurb said. “But their reasons are different, and that counts for something. That’s why I said it was complicated.”

Lusya was aware that motivations often factored into mortal moral judgments. She was not sure how they made such determinations, however. She would admit that she often factored motivations into her judgments as well, but she tried to be more pragmatic in doing so than mortals often seemed to. The exceptions befuddled her.

He sighed and kept speaking. “I mean, I can’t imagine what things look like over where the worst of it went down. The Sacred Knights had an exhibition tournament of sorts in Gavamir, a few years back, before the war got heated. None of the real brass participated, but even so, watching some of those guys go at it was…well, it was scary. If the Paladins went all out against demons just as strong, not to mention the Demon King and Hero fighting at the end, the land’s gotta be in pretty sorry state. I can see how someone might decide they need to go outside the law to rebuild, or how they might be numb to hurting others.”

Ariya gave a long, uncertain humming sound, then went quiet for a couple seconds. “I don’t get it,” she said at last.

“I’m sure you will, one day,” Izurb said. “Though it might be better if you didn’t.”

“You are correct,” Lusya said. “And as such, this conversation is over.”

“If you say so.”

She understood the basic conceits of Izurb’s view, but she had no strong feelings about it, mixed or otherwise. As long as they did not bother her, she did not care what those people did in their attempts to get back on their feet. She was too far from those areas for them to do so and she intended to keep it that way.

And, while she could not be certain, she believed exploring the issue further may have been distressing for the child. As it stood, Ariya gave no signs of distress or Malice increases. Indeed, she seemed content to let the topic pass and began humming a tune as the continued their trek.

They walked on in silence until they came across a large tree that had fallen over. Izurb groaned.

“This wasn’t like this last time,” he grumbled, seemingly more to himself than to Lusya or Ariya. “Must have gotten knocked over in the storm a couple weeks back.

Lusya cocked her head. “Can we not simply walk around the tree?”

“Oh, we can,” Izurb said. He rubbed his palm against the tree’s trunk as if petting an animal. “I just kind of liked it. When I first started making deliveries, it was one of my favorite finds. The roots formed this nice little nook to sit in, with the leaves shading it from the sun all through the day.” He sighed and gave the trunk a pat. “Shame to lose it now. But I can mope about it later. This way.”

He led the way around the tree and onward. Indeed, there was no difficulty in doing so. It took a few extra seconds, at worst, to circumvent the obstacle.

“Did you two have a particular destination in mind?” he asked. “I won’t take you much farther than to safety unless you want to pay more, but I can angle us toward any town or city you might want to visit.”

“I intended to stop at a village called Clearwood,” Lusya said. “The nearby Misthaven is also acceptable.”

While visiting population centers increased the risk of her getting caught, it also allowed her to conserve resources and put more in easy reach if needed. With that in mind, she felt the risk was small enough to begin with to be worth taking, for the most part.

Izurb rubbed his jaw as if stroking a beard, though he was clean-shaven. “Those are a little far for the price,” he said. “But I can get you close and point you in the right direction. Clearwood’s a little closer, so you might as well go there if it’s your first choice.”

“That is acceptable,” she replied. “Will avoiding the road extend our travel time?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Nah, maybe a few hours. Still about two or three days total.”

“I see.”

He glanced back and grinned. “Don’t worry so much. I take my job seriously. If there’s something you need to know, I’ll tell you.” He faced forward and stood a bit straighter. “So just relax and leave it to m—”

He cut off and looked down. Lusya followed his gaze to a razor thin black wire he had just stepped on. Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw something approaching through the woods on either side.

While Izurb stood, frozen, and Ariya looked up at him with an inquisitive frown, Lusya grabbed them both by the backs of their clothes and jumped back, pulling them with her just before two logs swung through where Izurb had stood a moment before. It was doubtful they would have hit Lusya or Ariya, but it didn’t hurt to be safe.

Lusya set Ariya back down on her feet, but the size difference meant she had little choice but to fling Izurb to the ground. He landed on his back with a grunt and a hiss of pain. For a moment he lay there, panting. She hoped he was not injured. It would be inconvenient to have such a thing happen in front of Ariya and to lose their guide.

“Wow,” Izurb said as he sat up, rubbing at his face as if to wipe something away, his gaze fixed on the logs as they swung back and forth, losing energy until they came to a rest. “That’s…a new one. I just saw my life flash before my eyes. I didn’t think that actually happened.” He looked to Lusya and bowed his head. “Thank you for saving me.”

“No thanks are necessary,” Lusya said. “I did not want to expose the child to your gruesome death.”

Though tiransa, much like relti, were stronger and tougher than humans, those logs still likely would have dealt enough blunt trauma to kill one and quite possible tear his body apart in the process.

“Just say, ‘you’re welcome,’ for Alaka’s sake,” he grumbled, invoking the name of a deity Lusya recognized as belonging to the pantheon of a faith practiced in many tiransa-ruled nations. He sighed and stood, then his smile reasserted itself. “Whatever your reasons, I’d say you’ve earned yourself a discount. I’ll knock what you owe me down to fifty copper.”

“That is for saving you?” she asked.

He nodded.

“I believe it would also be appropriate to ask less since you are obviously not aware of all the traps as you implied.”

He narrowed his eyes and stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “Now that I think about it, I probably just misjudged where we were after going around the tree, but fine. I’ll make it forty. But not a single copper less. Unless I fall into another trap, that is.”

“I hope that doesn’t happen,” Ariya said. “That was scary. What’s a gruesome death?”

“It is not important, child,” Lusya said.

“But I want to know.”

“I will not explain it to you.” Lusya looked to Izurb. “Neither will you.”

He shrugged. “She’s your kid. Kind of.”

Ariya let out a dejected whine but did not press the issue.

“Let’s keep moving,” Izurb said. “I’m going to get us back on my usual route now, so be extra careful until we’re there.”