56. [Uicha] Solstice, Part Four (Patreon)

***

Uicha de Orak, Wildcard, representing The Forgotten One

Those he has met so far…

…and those he will meet soon

***

30 Frett, 61 AW

The Gen’bi Desert, South Continent

150 days until the next Granting

“....let those unwelcome travel upon it.”

Sosupacia finished the incantation. Despite the sharp winds, the gods ensured his Ink kept its shape. He looked up from the symbol of an overflowing coffer he had dribbled onto the clay-colored sand.  From his perch atop the dune, Sosupacia had a clear view of the Bay's settlement below. The colorful tents they had erected a few years ago had recently given way to more permanent structures built from stone. 

“You waited too damn long,” Lavenna said as she peered over his shoulder. “This should've been done when they first showed up, like I told you.”

“Hush,” the Gen'bi Quill responded. “Give the gods a moment.”

Lavenna sucked her teeth and turned away, pulling a canteen from the side of his waiting horsasis. He could not travel like his champion did—in the shape of a whirlwind—so he’d had to ride here, to the westernmost edge of their sprawling desert. A hard journey. But, at his age, weren’t they all? 

Lavenna patted the animal's swollen hump and made a cooing noise. The horsasis responded with a low moan. 

“Your mount is ready to burst,” she snapped. “Do you pay attention to nothing, old timer?”

“I pay attention to plenty,” he replied. He pushed his wide-brimmed hat lower, shading his eyes.  

In truth, the call had been louder than usual lately, and his mind had been a difficult thing to organize. Sosupacia dragged a hand through his pointed beard, dyed crimson with the fruit of the desert, and tasted sweetness in his own sweat. Below, groups of workers from the Bay hustled between the town center and their dig sites—great pits they’d blown open in the sand and were endlessly struggling to keep open. They moved with an urgency unique to the people of the Bay and offensive to the desert. A good way to sweat out your water and drop dead. He knew the man in charge of the encampment—or was it a full-fledged village now? The gods seemed to think so. Regardless, their leader was a cruel one. He did not care when his people fell. There was always a replacement lined up.

Nothing changed in the encampment. They did not retreat from the sand. Sosupacia swiped his hand through the symbol he’d drawn, then stood from his squat. His knees popped and his leathers creaked.

“It didn’t work.”

“I already said that,” Lavenna replied. She held a canteen under one of the puckered udders that poked out from his mount’s hump, draining the water he’d let accumulate to the point of discomfort. 

Sosupacia dragged a finger across his hat’s brim. “It’ll be the other way, then.”

“Start some trouble,” she said with a nod. “That sounds fine to me. Get rid of them and those fucking blondes in one go.”

“If they don’t kill you.”  

“If they don’t kill me.”

He took the canteen from her hands and nudged her aside, taking over the draining. “Suppose you should go tell the others.”

Lavenna took a step back, but lingered. She wasn’t one to hang about for chitchat. Something else was on her mind. 

“The call changed for you lately, old timer?” she asked. 

“Louder,” he said. 

She exhaled through her nose, glad that he agreed. “I been hearing a name in all that shouting. At least, I think it’s a name.”

“What’s the name?” Sosupacia asked, although he already knew the answer. 

He had heard it, too. 

***

Uicha de Orak. 

The Firstson knew the name. He knew the human’s face. These facts arrived in the warm core at the heart of him, and vibrated through his stone. 

Uicha de Orak was the one who held mother. Kept her safe. But also irritated her. 

It was the Firstson’s duty to protect them. He could not accomplish that here, in this prison. The humans of the pyramid had not wanted to listen to him. The Firstson regretted making himself known to them. They could not be reasoned with. They had invaded his humble home and tried to set him on fire.

He fled deeper into the darkness, into the tight tunnels, where he and his kin could not properly stretch their wings. The others were fading. Their stone cracked and their cores dimmed. The Firstson repaired the ones he could, and the others he made part of him. He would stay strong, at least. For mother.

After days and days of down, down, down, the Firstson and his kin felt foreign vibrations in their caverns. They climbed up, up, up, through tunnels and chutes that the people of the pyramid had never visited and, at the end, they stopped and listened. 

Someone was digging. Someone was breaking ground. Soon, there would be a hole where before there had been a ceiling.

The others wanted to charge forward to meet these trespassers, barking and dancing and rampaging. The Firstson made them quiet. He did not want to scare these diggers away. Let them come. 

“Free,” the Firstson whispered, through the pipes he had carved in his neck. “Soon.”

***

After practicing his knots, the next class in Uicha’s pirate education was swordplay. And here, Uicha needed to be careful. He had been able to demur for the first week by claiming that his injuries made brisk movement difficult, but that led to offers of treatment from Sheppa, the Dartmyth’s medic, and Uicha could not accept those ministrations without revealing his crimson Ink. 

So, he stood facing Akoni across the deck with their scimitars unsheathed. Akoni knew the blade well and demonstrated high guard for Uicha, and how to bring the blade down between a man and his shield, or peel into a section of armor with its weighted edge.

“These are the old ways,” the captain explained. “Back when the merchants hired guards in heavy armor. Before our time, little brother. Now, these weapons are toys. Ornaments.” He mimed sinking the blade into the burnished deck. “An anchor in a storm, if you have need.”

Uicha could not explain that his scimitar would not be a toy for long, nor could he explain why he seemed to have so much natural instinct with a blade and yet knew such little technique. When they sparred, Uicha emptied his mind and let [Swordplay+] do the work for him. He parried and evaded Akoni’s every attack, fighting defensively, worried about what might happen if he launched an aggressive counter. He could feel the strain on his Ink. It was meant to augment an existing skill and so, the more he relied upon it, the more Uicha felt the Ink begin to fade. The more he truly learned, the longer it would last, the better it would make him. For now, he simply needed to make sure Akoni never cut him.

He did not want the captain to see how his wounds closed seconds after they opened.

“You fight too defensively!” Akoni complained. “You never take any risks!”

As Akoni swung, Uicha deflected the blade easily but stumbled backward, pretending that he’d turned an ankle. He raised a hand so Akoni would give him a breather.

“Isn’t the point not to get slashed?” Uicha asked.

“The point is to win,” Akoni said. “Sometimes, that requires a little blooding.”

The captain had stripped down to his breeches and his torso was slick with sweat. Uicha wore his shirt and his bandages which were slowly turning yellow. Sheppa and a couple of the other crewmates—with nothing more important to do—stood by the railings and watched the duel. As the fighting wound down, Sheppa caught Uicha’s eye.

“You should come by my cabin, let me change those stinking bandages,” she said.

Sheppa was a hard-eyed and impatient woman who kept her hair cut short and lacked the easy humor he’d come to associate with islanders. Not that Uicha had known many. Only his parents, and now the crew of the Dartmyth.

“I can do it myself.” Uicha paused. “If you can spare the bandages.”

“Part of my duty is to look in on the ship’s wounded, make sure you don’t have an infection brewing under there,” she said, looking him over. “Although, you move pretty well for a man with burns.”

“Leave him be, Sheppa!” Akoni bellowed as he sheathed his sword and sauntered over. “I promised him no questions. Our little brother will share his scars when he is ready.”

During awkward moments like these, Uicha had taken to creating a distraction with his [Telekinesis]. A tipped over bucket, a toppled bowl, an untied shoelace. Some small commotion to draw attention away from him. If the crew of the Dartmyth wondered why they’d grown more accident prone since he boarded, none had commented upon it.

This time, though, a change of subject literally appeared on the horizon. To the north, dark lines radiated upward, like the coastline burned. Uicha took a step around the captain to get a better look. There was a hideous smudge on the ocean, like mold growing on a piece of fruit.

“What is that?” Uicha asked.

“Orvesis,” Akoni said, seeming to resist the urge to spit on the deck. “Winds must be up if we can see it from here. Chamberly!” The captain shouted to his navigator, stomping away. “We need to readjust our course! You got us too far north.”

Staring out at the stain on the horizon, Uicha blinked, and Kayenna Vezz was with him. The Orvesian witch hadn’t made herself known since Noyega. She stood a half-step ahead of Uicha, her back to him. She wasn’t really there, and yet the wind still plucked at her simple black dress. Her fingers trembled and Uicha tasted her bile in his throat.

“My home,” Kayenna whispered. “What have they done to my home?”

***

Petra Reatz gazed down at the clean space on the otherwise charred floorboards. The outline of her prone body was preserved on the wood. The archmage had battered the farmhouse with lightning until it burned around her, but the gods guarded her flesh and turned smoke into clean air within her lungs. They kept her alive until Battar Crodd had come to pull her unconscious body from the blaze. 

Their Quill decried the gods, provoked them at every opportunity. Petra believed there was truth in his sermons—she believed in the necessity of witnessing the atrocities visited upon their ancestors. 

And yet, the gods had saved her. 

Why did she keep coming in here to stare absently at the space where she should’ve died? Why did it fascinate her so?

“Now that we've finished with the salvage, shouldn't be long going back up.”

Petra flinched at the voice. She had thought she was alone in the skeleton of the farmhouse, but here was one of the workmen charged with restoring it. His head was shaved and he wore a line of ash straight down his face, but patches of blonde stubble lit up cheeks red from the cold. This man was born to Ambergran. One of the recent converts. 

“Oh,” Petra said. She gestured at her outline. “Will you keep this?”

The man shrugged. “Might look strange with the new floor around it.”

“Strangeness can be welcome, don’t you think? Makes us question what we’ve decided is normal.”

Before he left, Battar Crodd had ordered the house rebuilt for when Uicha returned. Wishful thinking on Battar’s part. Petra didn't expect Uicha would come back, not unless Battar dragged him kicking and screaming. She had gone back to sleeping in her tent, like in the days before they took Ambergran. There was plenty of room in the barn and the bunkhouse, but Petra didn't feel right moving in there. She hadn't felt right about much since she was first assigned to keep an eye on Ambergran's boy without loyalty. 

In the yard, Parrot was kicking up a fuss. Petra used the barking dog as an excuse to disengage from the blank-faced carpenter. She hopped down from the farmhouse doorway, into the dirt where there used to be a porch.

Parrot was excited because they had visitors. Two dozen Orvesians walked toward the farmhouse from disparate angles—some by the road, others straight through the fields—their movements herky-jerky and stiff. Parrot galloped out to meet them, not sure who to greet first. Petra approached more cautiously, unsure what was going on.

She gasped as a gentle, invisible force shoved her backward. At first, she thought maybe it was the wind, but the air was cold and still. Petra tried to start forward again. Her body came up against a wall and was pressed back. She could go no further than thirty yards from Uicha’s farmhouse—thirty yards in the direction of Ambergran.

The ritualist Hunn Megeer was amongst the approaching Orvesians. The impossibly tall and painfully skinny man walked with his back arched as if he were being pushed from behind. He noticed Petra and, with some effort, steered himself in her direction. Hunn stopped next to her with a gratified sigh and then doubled over to catch his breath.

“What is this? What’s happening?” Petra asked.

“The border starts at the boy’s house,” Hunn said. “Fascinating.”

“Hunn?”

The ritualist blinked at her. “Banished. We’ve been banished from Ambergran.”

Petra held her hands out, testing the air before her. The invisible will of the gods pressed back against her palms.

“Have you never been banished before?” Hunn asked. “It’s actually quite exhilarating. There’s no feeling of freedom quite like when the gods release you from their grasp.”

Petra shook her head. “He won’t be happy.”

Hunn swallowed, but she noticed he had already fished the shriveled ear out of one of his many pouches. “No. But, we were done here anyway, weren’t we?”

“I don’t know.” Petra wiped her forearm across her eyes. “I was starting to like it, I think.”

She crouched down and whistled, hoping that Parrot would eventually run back to her side of the barrier.

***

Through the floorboards, all three champions could hear someone scream with joy. Bells rang out and a bucket of angles was upended with a clatter. A big winner down in the casino. In the Pink Prayer, they made sure there was a scene like that every hour—couldn’t let spirits fade, even if half the time the winners were plants.

Konta Lukte sat behind her desk with her legs crossed and pretended like she wasn’t afraid of the two men seated on the other side. She was no stranger to ugliness. There was always someone trying to cut your throat in Noyega. From her jasmine-scented office, she ran security for the Pink Prayer and four other casinos on Easy Street. The city often felt more threatening than the three Grantings she had survived. She was a blade master of the seventh renown with a fine collection of Ink that Konta kept on display, still favoring the loose silk wraps she’d worn during her days as a red light girl.  

She had been leered at her entire life, but somehow this Orvesian was different. He stared at her chest—not unusual—but not at her breasts. Instead, he seemed fascinated with her ribs. The Orvesian wore a flowing robe of black feathers that mostly hid his body, but Konta had seen the way he moved when he entered. All jutting angles and too many points of articulation, like he had elbows and knees everywhere. She could hear clicking and chattering beneath those robes, skeletal teeth at work somewhere they shouldn’t be.

Athur Buss. The bone mage. A little spider of a man who wouldn’t stop dissecting her with his eyes.

And, with him, the gods damned Quill champion himself. The death knight who, last Konta had heard, was busy murdering entire villages as if there was any profit in that. It disturbed her that, despite the stripes of ash and shaved head, he wasn’t bad to look at. Chiseled features, prodigious muscles, and startling blue eyes. Battar Crodd smiled at her like they were out for tea.

“Your kind are bad for business,” Konta said with a sigh. “You know that, right? You scare the customers away.”

“All the more reason to tell us what we wish to know so that we may never darken your doorstep again,” Crodd said.

“Darken your doorstep again,” whispered Athur.

Konta flicked her eyes to the bone mage, then back to Crodd. The death knight acted like he hadn’t heard his little friend’s echo routine. Konta curled her lips back and pretended not to have noticed, either.

“You’re looking for someone, is what I heard,” Konta said. “We don’t make debtors of Orvesians, I can promise you that. We know it’s not worth the trouble.”

“Not one of mine,” Crodd said. “The archmage Ahmed Roh. Traveling in the company of a young man.”

“A young man,” whispered Athur.

Konta tapped her nails on her desk. She knew a visit like this was coming, but she’d figured it would be some old creep from the Magelab. Well, one freak was as good as the next in this matter, as far as she was concerned.

“Good news, then,” Konta said. “I have the archmage.”

“You have him?”

“Pickling, in my cellar,” Konta said. “I sent word to his people to come get his body. His head too, if they want it. No additional charge. Our fault it fell off in transport.”

The death knight’s grin was a wild thing—wide and gleaming. “He’s dead?”

“Dead,” whispered Athur.

“I wish the mages hadn’t chosen my city to kill each other in. That’s also bad for business,” Konta said, relaxing a little. “As for his boyish paramour, we think a gargoyle killed him. Looked like the beast was hunting him. Maybe one of yours, eh?”

“No. Not one of mine.” Crodd’s smile faded. “Madam Lukte, would you be able to assist us in chartering a boat? Keeping in mind, of course, that we shall see each other in different circumstances in a half-years’ time and that I will very much remember being done a good turn, or a bad.”

Konta nodded quickly. Whatever it took to get these two out of her office and her city. She’d pay double to one of the few honest captains left in Noyega.

“Of course,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”

“The Flamingo Islands,” Crodd said.

Konta thought he would find that too sunny for his liking, but she wasn’t about to argue.