Ecumene (No OP/ NO Harem/ No MS/ Isekai)

Camrad_RIP · May 29, 2023

Prologue

* * *

Spider.

Hungry.

Octopus.

Stinger.

Beast.

Chained.

A person in a long, church-like robe sat on the knees right in the middle of a circular cell crypt. Hidden deep underground in the rock mass, as far away from any emanations or magical vibrations as possible. The face was concealed beneath a hooded hood, and only the tips of the fingers, without rings, peeped out from the wide sleeves. Despite the baggy garb, a stack of unusual cards fluttered about in the skillful hands, as if in a gambling house, where a cheat was ready to let another easy victim go to waste.

Over and over again, the adept carefully shuffled the deck, drawing the six cards one by one. And over and over again, the same pattern was repeated. For each card of the dark entities, the worst of all possible signs fell out. The last, seventh card remained to be drawn, but the adept's slender fingers blended the layout, shuffled the deck, and again drew one by one the round, dense cards of matted bone. It's stronger than steel and lighter than fluff.

The Church condemns divination not derived from the venerable science of astrology and knowledge of the course of the stars in the sky. So the possessor of enchanted objects runs the risk of attracting the attention of the servants of Pantocrator and, with special bad luck, of meeting the Demiurges, who multiply the knowledge useful and cut off the harmful. But everyone wants to know the future, everyone wants to discover their destiny. So there is little to stop the risk. And so the 'enchanted' decks of Dark Jotish are a good, marketable commodity. They are taken with great alacrity everywhere, from small fairs to the salons of the Kingdoms.

But true masters know there is no such thing as 'enchantment'. You can create a reading with anything, even greasy cards from the lowest-rated tavern. Even simple scraps of parchment with charcoal marks. True divination lies in the soul of the reader, in their abilities, refined by years of training. The cards are merely the instrument by which the diviner's vague visions are objectified. A mediator between the astral and the elemental. A translator from the unknowable language of the supernatural. And the material is only a matter of prestige and aesthetics. But now the fortune-teller wanted to change the deck in the blind hope of deceiving the universe.

The adept sighed, stirring the cards again. The fingers trembled slightly. It wasn't good. Weakness was always bad. And especially so when you have to peer into the darkness of what was to come, through a web of uncertainty and a thousand mirrors reflecting probabilities many times over. The thin round plates rustled softly in the hands. Suddenly the fortune teller had a change of heart, and the cards went into a bronze box made to their exact size. And in the light of a large oil lamp, a silk pouch was brought out, in which small wooden strips, no bigger than a little finger, were tapped.

Before finishing the ritual, the fortune-teller sat motionless for a while. One firmly decided for oneself that this ritual would be brought to an end and would be the last. Fate should be met with an open face and a clear look. And it took a few minutes of meditation to calm the spirit.

The interpreter's gaze slid thoughtlessly over the stone walls draped with discreet but expensive curtains. Over a small round table with a half-dismantled 'lunar' astrolabe. Finally, by the closet, which looked plain and simple but had some smartly hidden drawers which couldn't be opened without knowing the secrets. There was nothing in the cell worthy of attention, not even books or scrolls. The owner regarded the private crypt as purely utilitarian, keeping only the bare necessities. There was a separate laboratory for alchemical experiments and a tower outside the city for making horoscopes. Every important occupation had to have its instruments.

The adept took a deep breath, trying to capture the tiniest nuances of the scent of the rose oil the lamp was filled with. It was the scent that was believed to promote peace and concentration. On the second breath, one imagined the cold air entering one's body through the nose, washing the chest, descending to the feet, and tingling the fingertips, chilling out the trembling. On the third, a chill trickled down one's heart, moderating its nervous pounding. It helped unexpectedly quickly.

In the light of the lamp, the red silk of the pouch looked crimson. The lace unraveled instantly as if the pouch itself longed to release its contents as quickly as possible. A person disliked divination by the signs of the Old Tongue and didn't want to remember a time when one could only afford stolen wood chips with the symbols of Jotish scratched on them with a nail. But today a simple, reliable tool seemed most suitable for the arduous task at hand.

The cell, of course, had no windows. The air came in through a long cranked duct, reliably silencing all sound and light. But the person knew that now the moon was at its zenith, and its rays penetrated everything, shaking the materiality of this world, opening the way to the impossible.

The best hour for this work.

The owner carefully shook the pouch by gripping the neck. And then, with the long fingernails, one pulled out the first piece of wood, a little smaller than one's little finger. It had a long vertical line scratched out across the entire length of the piece and eight short ones perpendicular to the long one, four in each direction. It was nothing like the most beautiful seven-color image of an eight-legged monster on a map of the finest bone. But the essence is the same.

Spider.

The next piece of wood. A few lines, shallow and thin, depict a human figure without a head.

Hungry.

And four more, one after the other. The same invariable arrangement, three signs of the essence, and three states. Not a single sign of substance, that is to say, element.

What remained to be done was what the fortune-teller avoided: open the seventh. The fingernail creaked on the wood like a harpy's claw. If the adept had believed in the Creator, one would have prayed more fervently now than the most faithful churchman. But one had no faith, so one gritted one's teeth and took out the seventh splinter, knowing for sure it would be Death or the Thirteenth. The steady light of the lamp jumped, casting a crooked, ominous shadow over the curtains. The pouch fell out of one's palm. The remaining wood spilled out in a small heap with a quiet clatter. And for a moment, a person thought it was the clatter of bone phalanges on the skeleton's fingers.

The card would have been painted plain black. There was nothing on the splinter, just the smoothed over time, barely visible mark from the teeth saw that had once snatched a piece from the board.

For a few minutes, the adept sat silent and motionless as if the result of the divination had turned them to stone. Then one gathered up the signs one by one and tightened the cord as if one wanted to hide all the evil of the world inside, not letting it escape. One pulled back the hood with determination and dropped the robe from one's shoulders as if the cloth were suffocating, enveloping one as a heavyweight.

In the light of the lamp, the adept's skin appeared ash-gray, slightly darker than its true color. Her hair, trimmed just above her shoulders, was, on the contrary, lighter. So from the outside, it might have looked like a statue of precious gray marble rather than a young woman with skin of an unusual grayish hue. The impression was reinforced by the inhuman sculptural perfection and symmetry of the face. Just looking at it brought to mind the paintings of the old masters of the Empire, who had mastered the secret of the diamond section and the proportions of the figure. This face was so perfect that it did not even appear beautiful. Rather sinister because the mortal world is incapable of producing something so complete. The thin, pale lips, almost a match to the skin, moved silently as if reciting a prayer, but it wasn't a prayer.

The face glowed with the beauty of a demon. By contrast, the gesture the woman made when she stroked her temples was human and understandable. It was the movement of a tired man trying to tidy one's thoughts and intercept a nascent headache. In the shadow of her palms, the diviner's eyes flashed a soft, pearly light, without pupils. She lifted her head and looked up at the low ceiling of the cave, dry and carefully cleaned of the old drawings that had once been left behind by the first servants of the Paraclete of Solace.

"Welcome, Spark," whispered the ash-skinned magician with pearl-colored eyes.

"Welcome..."

* * *

Camrad_RIP · May 29, 2023

Part one. 'We not in Kanzas anymore...'

Chapter 1 'Dear diary'

* * *

Dear diary.

The quill hovered over the page, its sharp sting twitching slightly. What to write next was not clear.

Elena could not sleep. And it was not just insomnia that seized her, but a strange feeling of unsteadiness, unreality of what was happening. It was more like her grandfather's stories about his second heart attack when he was exhausted, the drug-addled body could neither sleep properly nor swim out of the foggy haze. Grandfather almost became a writer, but the post-war era was merciless to his dreams, and the talented young man became a regular medic. He did but retained the vividness of language so that any story in his mouth sounded like an epic. Even if it was about things very, very unpleasant.

After twisting under the covers for more than three hours, Elena decided that maybe she'd had enough of the irresistible. If sleep is running away, she should do something about it.

She washed her face and walked around the apartment, empty until the next afternoon. Until her parents returned from their trip. She looked out the window and brewed a half-liter cup of coffee. She drank it, diluting it with a good portion of cream. She brushed the dust off the crossed rapiers that adorned the wall above the mantelpiece. Of course, there was no way to install a real fireplace in the city apartment, but her father had tried and created a very good imitation, which nicely diversified the interior. And the good old rapier from 1970 looked much better over the pseudo-fireplace.

Elena smiled, remembering the argument about the carpet and the angry Grandfather's cry of 'Philistinism'! The elderly medicine man knew how to say it in such a way that the pompous word looked appropriate and without pompousness. It's a pity he's no longer with the family... It's been three years now.

No sleep. But not awake, either. A sense of the unreality of what was happening was piling up, prompting her to do something unusual, strange. Something that would make it clear that this was not a dream, but a clear reality.

For example, one could start a diary. Why not? A suitable notebook, moleskin, or something similar, with ruffles and a cute picture, had been lying in the far corner of the closet for more than two years. There was no need for it at all because Elena only used spring-loaded notebooks, from which it was so convenient to tear used, already useless sheets without any pity. But for the diary, a beautiful, very 'girlie' notebook is just right. And for such an occasion, she can use a special calligraphy pen 'Tachikawa G'.

But the problem was that it went no further than two simple words. A big black drop gathered at the tip of the pen, and Elena couldn't decide what to write next.

'Dear Diary...'

* * *

Anyone who lives from the Profit knows that it's best to go down in five. Three is too few. If income happens, there won't be enough people to carry it away. And if someone gets hurt, the wounded and the one who drags him out, that's minus two backs and four arms, which can't be loaded with sacks of thick leather with enchanted padding. Though, of course, anything happened, but, as a rule, the one who was taken out in the darkness - not a fighter and not a carrier. And it is necessary to get the man out. First, the tradition. Second, Pantocrator says so. Thirdly, as long as he's alive, he won't get up and run to catch up with his former comrades...

Yes, three is too few, five is just right. Of course, a lot of dashing guys don't go down for the Profit with less than ten men. But it's a tricky business. Down below, as a rule, in front can not stand up more than two. And sometimes one can barely squeeze through. So when someone jumps up (and they always do, so the whole difference is who will jump this time), only one or two ahead can fight properly. And there is, as team alchemist Bizo would say - "a painful question" - why to pay more to those who are not involved in the fight?

So five men are the right number, time-tested. If everyone's hands are growing in the right way, that's enough. To beat up anyone who is hiding in the darkness of the dungeons, looking out for hunters with vertical pupils, and facets, or not looking at all with blind eyes, but listening with sensitive ears. And if someone doesn't get beaten by a group of five, there's no sense in playing against a group of ten. And it's time-tested, too.

Again, the fewer faces in the brigade, the easier it is to get away, the less crowding in the cramped dungeons. And for someone who lives from the Profit, the ability to run fast and far is just as important as the ability to wield an axe deftly. Only a fool would go down with a sword... and where does the brigade get the money for good swords?

But six fighters would be fine, too. As it is now.

"Fire," muttered Santelli, turning his head. "More fire!"

A good torch was smoldering in the commander's hand, not half burnt out, but the alchemist got the point.

"It doesn't work," Bizo shook his head guiltily as he ran his palm around the moon crystal. His palm was dirty, with wide black grooves under his broken fingernails, and the glass was old, clouding, and cracked. But not long ago it had exuded enough light, and now it barely flickered, like the lousiest candle. The alchemist whispered tried and trusted words, tapped the crystal, stroked it like the thigh of a young virgin (for which he never had money anyway, but, as you know, everything seems sweeter and more desirable in dreams).

It's useless.

"You bloody charlatan," hissed Santelli, driving the torch into the split fork at the steel pen of the slingshot, so that the weapon itself lights the way ahead. "Give me more fire, or he'll put us down here!"

Bizo did not answer, continuing to mutter and shamanize. With the same success, that is, without any visible result.

"We went to get the Profit..." Viall whispered, clutching the thick shaft of his slingshot in his sweaty mittens. "M-m-mother, all was good..." The lancer's teeth began to grind.

"Shut up, talker," Shena commanded furiously. "Quiet! Listen!"

Actually, it should have been Santelli, as the man in charge. But the commander was distracted by a shadow that flickered at the very edge of the darkness and the dim light from the torch.

"It's not working," Bizo complained. "It's not working!"

It had to be decided, and quickly. And Santelli decided... But simultaneously with his decision the moon crystal shone with the brightest light that it had ever known, even in its best times, for a long time. It was this light that finally convinced the commander that they must not just run but run very fast because down there everything happens suddenly and unusually is trouble.

* * *

The ink drop finally came off the quill and squished onto the cover. Elena sighed sadly. As it usually happens - something unnecessary and forgotten now seemed important and valuable. The notebook with the smudge was a pity. And a diary, especially 'Dear', with a blot on the cover - it was not quite ... It was wrong in general.

Only there was no blot. None at all. It was as if the ink drop had vanished into thin air, melted in the light halfway between the pen and the notebook, whether it was moleskin or something else. The girl shook her head and looked at the quill. Clear, just tiny beads of black and nothing else. And not a drop on the notebook.

Elena sighed and suddenly realized that it was all from strange insomnia. She didn't get enough ink, and she thought she saw a drop. And she wanted coffee again. She felt an unbearable craving for coffee. And there is coffee in the house, but, as Grandpa used to say, it must be 'whitened', and she was out of cream.

Elena strode barefoot into the kitchen. The parquet linoleum felt cold on her soles and reminded her of an unpleasant parental dispute about the renovation and design. That rare case when her father managed to insist on his point. As for the window frames... Well, that was a long time ago.

In the fridge, she found a total lack of cream, milk, and even ice cream, that is, everything that can be poured into a coffee cup ironically called 'barrel'. So ... then one has to go out and buy it!

A large round clock with cuckoo and cones on chains (actually a battery inside) scattered its thin hands across the white field. It was almost half past four... A little late for shopping. Or on the contrary, a little early. On the other hand, the convenience store is on the first floor on the opposite side of the house. The neighborhood is quiet and nothing is likely to happen in the quarter-hour it takes to buy one bottle of melted milk. And the cool night air, at least, will cheer you up, and relieve the feeling of waking sleep.

As she took her jacket off the rack, Elena hesitated, trying to remember where her purse was. Wasn't it still in the leather vest? And when she threw on her outerwear, the denim jacket fell to the floor. It was like falling through the disembodied body of a ghost.

* * *

It seemed impossible, but the moonstone flashed even brighter, burning the eyes. Judging by the fact that Bizo involuntarily shrieked and dropped the faceted crystal, it burned with more than just light. And that was impossible because the crystals from the Silvery Mountains always remained as cold as the night light whose borrowed light they fed on.

In the next instant, the stone was extinguished, turning into plain glass. In contrast to the magical flare, the torches seemed almost pitch-black, so Santelie missed the blundering attack. The shaggy shadow glided beneath the low vault, flicking its clawed forelegs, wrapped tightly in its folded webbing, with unimaginable speed. Too fast for a creature that relied on bone and muscle power.

Without time to strike, Santelli released the shaft of his slingshot and rolled over his shoulder, evading the broad sweep of the sickle-shaped claws. Luckily, it only caught the very edge of the thick leather collar, ripping through the thick boiled leather like a razor through silk. The roll was not yet over, and the leader drew his dagger, the last hope of the fighter. And at the same time, he smacked his face on the treacherous rock, so that blood immediately poured into his right eye. It wasn't that Santelli was praying. He didn't have time for that. Things were happening too fast. He just hoped that Shena would be able to put the creature on the spearhead of the ahlspiess in time. At least, she'd been good at it before. The huntress was the fastest in the little brigade, and rightfully so.

Fortunately for Santelli, the feeble-minded subterranean creature didn't go after the swift and nimble man. Instead, it attacked the next man in the tight formation. Behind the brigadier, there was a clang and a thud. Codure screamed as if he'd been skinned in one fell swoop. Or at least a good chunk of it.

And the next moment the world shuddered as if a giant cramp had passed through the rocky interior, twisting the network of dungeons beneath the Grey Lands. Santelli flew to the rocks again, miraculously not dropping his dagger, clutching at the weapon as if it were his last hope.

* * *

She was able to pick up the jacket only on the third try. It was as if the jeans and the thin Elena fingers existed in parallel dimensions. Therefore, like cogs of gears in different planes, they could not mesh in one reality. Elena mechanically threw her clothes over her shoulders, without putting her hands through the sleeves, and thought that this must be what insanity looks like. When things suddenly happen that just can't be.

Or it's a dream. Just a dream. And there's still a calligraphy quill in her hand. Where did it come from? Isn't it...

She saw herself in the mirror, caught out of the corner of her eye a silhouette in which something was wrong, something very wrong. The girl stared at the long and familiar features; the reflection looked back with huge eyes with dilated dark pupils. Her hand reached into her disheveled hair to smooth the unruly red strand that had slid down her right cheekbone.

The next moment the reflection in the mirror rippled, like in a Hollywood movie when they use the 'wave effect'. Elena realized that she could see a coat rack through her. An old Soviet coat rack in the form of a large, full-wall frame of gilded plastic with horizontal bars and hooks. It was Grandpa's favorite hanger, which the old medicine man had defended from all encroachment.

She wanted to say something like, 'Oh, my God'. Or 'Damn it'. Well, one way or another, she was supposed to say or do something. But the girl only moved her lips silently. And, repeating her movements exactly, the ghost in the mirror fiddled, looking at itself with huge dilated pupils.

And then the lights went out all over the world at once.

* * *

Change! The dreadful thought stabbed like a dueling saber.

"Fuuuuuuck!!!" Codure yelled at the top of his voice, hitting a sob. "He's tearing my leg off!"

No. It seems not. Otherwise, things would be very different now. It wasn't. But then what was it?

"Shut up," Santelli said, "He didn't. If he had, you'd be quiet and peaceful by now, and you'd be easier to carry."

"LEEEEG!"

"Shut up, I said!" The brigadier shouted at the top of his voice. "We'll take you out, take you to the cart, and then we'll bandage you up. If necessary, we'll saw it off as it should be."

Santelli estimated the route back, as well as the number of torches left. He correlated it with the approximate speed of movement, adjusted for the wounded, who would not walk himself. It was enough. Not much, but enough, which meant Kodure would live a little longer, at least to the wagon. There, in normal light, it would be clear whether his leg was worth bothering with, or whether the Gray Land would be filled with the nameless bones of another vagrant.

"I don't want!!!"

"Then you will die. Shut up."

Shena rummaged in her purse, pulled out a vial, and tipped the contents into Codure's mouth. The glass clattered loudly, crunching against his teeth. The soldier coughed, swallowed noisily, and quieted down for a few moments.

"Bizo, you fucking charlatan, what was that?" asked the foreman.

The alchemist, before answering, glanced warily upward. Where the darkened vaults of the cave were already quite smoky, and dust mixed with stone crumbs was crumbling. How the brigade had not fallen was a mystery. However, the sudden cataclysm scared the monster away, which was lucky from all sides.

"I can't guess," Bizo muttered quietly at last. "It's like some kind of magic."

"You're an idiot," Santelli said, unceremoniously, as he was already aware of the scale of the failure. Minus the fighter, minus the last vial of 'milk', minus the Profit in this hole. Because what we could have extracted, but did not - it's like a net loss.

Bizo looked down, not answering or interrupting, realizing that he had been talking nonsense.

"Drag the fool more quickly," muttered Santelli. "Let's wrap it up."

"At a loss," Viall whispered, but very quietly.

Codure yelled again, finally getting a good look at his leg. Shena must have thought she'd done enough good deeds for one day and gave him a slap with her left hand, which was covered in a ringed gauntlet. Her hair fell out from under her leather helmet and hovered in icicles over her eyes, reddened from dust and smoke, like a midday witch.

"Shut up," the woman advised the wounded man very firmly. "Or walk yourself. On one leg. You'll get more wound, then they'll take it away for sure, and you'll sit in front of the temple and beg for alms. Maybe they will give it to you."

The lancewoman was not usually much of a talker, so much so that Codure was dumbfounded and silent again when he heard her speak so long and heartfelt.

"How will I survive without a leg?" The wretched man sobbed softly and whimpered again.

Santelli sighed, thinking that everything this week had gone through a spider's ass. It wasn't exactly a loss, but when you add up all the expenses, you don't even think you've made any money. And the crew... and the whole...It's a good thing Сodure wasn't a big loss. A rogue student, a runaway from the Kingdoms, had joined the brigade by accident and would be just as likely to leave it by accident.

Bizo, meanwhile, shook the crystal, leaving it from palm to palm, like a hot turnip. And what the alchemist thought remained unknown. But what he did think was that it was strange and looked like strong magic. Very strong, like in ancient times.

But everyone knows that there is no magic left in the world for two hundred years. I mean, there is, but just enough to do tricks and not too strong witchcraft. And even if it did come back...

He tried again to bring the crystal back to life, or at least to conjure up a tiny fire. The stone remained deader than dead, and the fire turned out as it was supposed to be, that is, weak, barely enough to light.

The alchemist shrugged his shoulders perplexedly, carefully tucked the crystal into his broad pouch-belt, and hurried off after his partners.

* * *

Camrad_RIP · May 30, 2023

Chapter 2. «Riadag»

* * *

It was painful. Not bad, but just "pulling," like after a good (or even immoderate) workout, when muscles and ligaments are well loaded so that they are sure to remind you of themselves the next day. Or, as in the course of the flu, when the pain settles in the joints, and you try not to cough because the unpleasant wave of pain spreads throughout the body.

"Oh," Elena said.

Or rather, she wanted to say that because all that came out of her throat was a hoarse hiss. She was thirsty. Very thirsty.

She was lying flat on her back, something soft under her back, but not like a mattress. And it was wet, enough to make her jacket wet. The sun was shining in her right eye, but her left one was blind. Lena blinked. She cried out louder because her parched throat stubbornly refused to let any sound pass through it. A belated cramp went through her body, her head bobbed, and her left eye was clear. It was just covered by a leaf that had flown away from the jolt.

"Uh-oh..." the girl exhaled, sitting up. It was surprisingly easy, but the sudden movement made her head fuzzy, her eyes blacken, and Lena tumbled back down. Soft and damp smacked the back of her head. A thought flashed, natural and stupid at the same time my God, what will happen to her hair now... The second time the girl sat down more carefully so the movement from horizontal to partially vertical position went smoothly. Well ... relatively calm. Because, reasoning sensibly, everything was wrong and abnormal.

First of all, Elena made sure she wasn't a ghost. She got to her unsteady feet, staggering and looking around with a frantic look. It was as if an invisible counter was clicking in her head, flipping her knuckles, counting out wild, incongruous things.

Day. Not night, as it should have been. The sun... the wrong sun. It was high enough, almost at the zenith, but the light was like before sunset. And there was not a single cloud in the sky, dull and unexpressive, as when photographing with a neutral gray filter.

Fall...? Fall?!

Lena was thrown into a hollow whose high edges blocked the view, but even a cursory glance was enough to see that the thick layer of decayed leaves and the withered grass, twisting in long hard coils like barbed wire, did not correspond to the end of May. It definitely fell here. Wherever this "here" was located.

"God..." muttered Lena, just to do something.

The simplest explanation was that some force had taken her and transported her... somewhere. In a fantastic or magical way. So "here" is fall, the sun is inhuman, and the sky is abnormal.

Only there are no miracles. And people don't transport themselves to God knows where.

It doesn't just happen that way.

It doesn't happen...

Tears welled up in her eyes, and a sour lump came to her throat. Lena felt a wave of hot trembling come over her heart, and panic overwhelmed her already slightly clouded mind. Her fingers trembled uncontrollably, clutching together like a bird's paws. But the far corner of her mind remained calm, cold, calculating. Like a staff officer, the only one who keeps his composure in the chaos of defeat. And that corner whispered in the voice of the late Grandfather:

It's hysterical. It's going to kill you.

Lena sank to her knees, or rather collapsed, bumping painfully even through the stale carpet. On a hunch, she grasped the sleeve with her teeth, stifling the howl that burst from her chest, so much so that she clamped her skin even through the tight denim. The howl of animal terror was howling through the fabric, burning her hand, and it seemed endless. But finally, the air supply in her chest ran out, and the girl inhaled deeply, sobbing and dropping tears.

She felt better. Just a little, but better. Everything hurt now, including her bruised knees, her bitten forearm, and her eyes, which felt like they were being pumped from inside by a bicycle pump. But at least the desire to howl in deathly hopeless longing, smashing her head to the ground, was slowly creeping away, coiling up like the rings of a deadly snake.

Strangely enough, the screaming went on, pounding in her ears and the painful vibration in her eardrums. Lena shook her head. She ran her fingers over her temples, still trembling, but the scream was still in her head. And then the girl realized it wasn't her voice. Quite nearby, someone was being beaten. Or, more likely, being brutally murdered.

Lena had never seen a man die. Even Grandfather passed away quietly in his sleep. But her heightened senses, her ancient instincts, told her that only someone who sees his death with his own eyes could scream so terribly, so desperately. The scream was cut short. It faded quickly, dissolving into the heavy air, saturated with fear and uncertainty. Now Elena could distinguish other sounds, which multiplied like an avalanche. Either it wasn't just the sun that was wrong here, or ... someone had just stopped being careful. Or some other miracle had happened.

There was a thud, a muffled, chugging sound, but with a solid note at the same time. Her memory told her at once. In the movies, horses stepped over like that. Not on the move but shuffling from foot to foot or hoof to hoof. The crackling of wood, as if something was being broken, rather diligently. A cry, soft and monotone, as if a hungry and battered puppy. It sounded more like a child's sobbing than anything else.

Now Elena was really scared. Sincerely, to the most hidden corners of her soul. Because children don't cry like that. A child's voice doesn't have that hopeless, wistful doom. And the fact that the girl could not see what was happening, perceiving only in sound, everything seemed even more eerie.

It wasn't just the sound, though. A heavy smell floated on the waves of the light breeze. The hollow was too leeward of the screaming and crying, people. That was good because it made it harder to smell the girl sheltering inside. And it was bad because the smell was unpleasant. It wasn't unpleasant, but... it didn't smell good, it didn't smell good at all. It was the way a kitchen smelled on a hot day when a lot of meat was about to be cooked.

From somewhere, Elena realized it was the smell of blood that spilled abundantly and recently.

Quietly, again the subconscious whispered the voice of the Grandfather.

Lie very quietly.

The old man used to call her Mouse as a child. And like a little mouse, Lena curled up in the rotted leaves, wishing she could just burrow into the ground like a real field rodent.

And outside, it hit hard and heavy, like a cleaver hitting a chopping block. After a brief pause, there was a clang, a creaking sound, as if a knife had been used on a large sharpening stone. Voices began to be heard. Close, very close. Or not so close...

It was only now that Elena noticed how quiet the neighborhood was. There was none of the noise that usually haunts human beings wherever they go. Complete silence, with only the occasional breeze rustling the grasses. And that made every sound resound far away, gliding over the gray earth.

"Far a bheil i?" A deep male voice asked demandingly.

The girl heard no answer, only soft mumbling interspersed with muffled sobs. It was as if someone was answering quickly, hurriedly, trying not to anger the interrogator.

"Riadag," the voice said. Almost calmly. Confident, but with a touch of irritation. As if the man was visibly angry but in control.

"Riadag?!" repeated the invisible man, louder and more demanding.

Now he was being answered in two voices, by another man and another woman, louder and more tearful. And Lena did not understand a word. That's what happens when you listen to a recording of a song in a language you don't know very well - some syllables and even words seem familiar, especially since the phonetics were distinctly Romano-Germanic. But it just didn't add up to comprehensible speech.

"Freagairt villain!" A new member entered the conversation. This one was angry, too, but he wasn't going to hide or restrain himself. The sound of blows rang out over the gray grass. There was another clang, a hard thud, and the woman howled hysterically. Surprisingly, she managed to squeeze out a long enough and almost intelligible phrase:

"Chan eil fios agam, chan eil fhios air rud sam bith!"

The interrogators were silent.

"Tha i 'eil an so. Bha sinn ceàrr, said another invisible man. Judging by his tone, he led with an unpleasant summation. It seems even with a heavy sigh.

"Far a bheil Riadag?" said a deep, strong voice, but without much hope, just fulfilling the convention. Elena understood that, and so did those to whom the man was addressing. They shouted in three or four voices at once. The girl curled into a ball and clamped her ears around her head. It helped; she heard almost nothing. Only the smell became even heavier. Even more intense. And the word that had been repeated most often was pounding in her head.

Riadag

For some reason, there seemed to be a special meaning hidden in it. It was like looking through a plate of ice - the contours of objects were familiar, but you couldn't see them exactly. You had to wait for the ice to melt for the plate to thin.

Forgetfulness overtook Elena. Something between fainting and trance. A borderline state between sleep and reality, where minutes raced by without counting.

How long she had been like that, the girl could not say. Even if she had put a watch strap on her hand before she walked, she still wouldn't have thought to time it. Long, in a word. Or maybe not. Time loves to deceive. It rushes at a gallop or waddles the old nag. In general, it seemed to the girl that she had been lying curled up for many hours. And the sun seemed, in fact, to have rolled quite far across the gray sky.

She listened. Nothing. Quickly, but trying not to make any noise at all. She checked the pockets of my jacket and old hiking pants. Nothing at all... a wallet, a couple of paper clips, a scattering of coins, a half-empty pack of chewing gum. And that was it, not even a phone. It seemed unnecessary to take it on a quick raid for milk. No penknife, not even a pen. It was all there, including a flashlight, a multi-tool, and a few other very useful things. But in an old, twice darned "Wenger" backpack with the dividers cut out and another jacket for going out on the town. The staple could be bent to make a wire stud, but the thought reeked of such hopelessness that Lena gave it up.

Here, in the hollow, it was relatively quiet and almost safe. Just lie there until someone walked or drives by. Or until it would somehow end on its own. It had to end, didn't it? Clenching her teeth, Elena looked outside, a tangle of hair falling over her eyes, blocking her view. How many hours without a comb? On the ground and God knows where else before... She had absolutely no recollection of what had happened between the flash of darkness and the minute Lena had "appeared". somewhere.

She brushed away the tangled reddish hair with the palm of her hand. She wished, fleetingly, that she'd cut her hair short. Then at least there would be at least one less problem now because there was no comb in her pockets, either. A random and very "homely" thought paradoxically calmed her down. Lena looked around, huddled on the ground, peering out of the hollow like a soldier out of a trench, feeling the damp and slightly warm carpet of dead leaves and loose earth under her palms.

The Wasteland. A gray wasteland under the dim sun, which was now really sunset, descended across the gray sky. A plain as far as the horizon, covered with patches of low vegetation, like an old man's head with tufts of hair. It resembled Savannah more than anything else but with more traditional flora. The air was dry and warm. But the ground was fall damp, though also oddly uneven in patches. Here and there, granite-like stone "tongues" emerged on the surface, rising somewhere up to the knee or even higher. Dolmens? Or what do you call them...

There are trees, but not many, and they are also gray, which, just by their appearance, brings thoughts of a long illness. They are crooked, with long and thin branches that look more like bony fingers. She did not want to stand under such, pardon God, "crone". The species of trees were not immediately identifiable. Not oaks, not poplars, nothing with distinctive leaves that a city person would recognize immediately. They looked like willows but were mutilated by unnatural selection. Such only in the adaptation of "Sleepy Hollow" to be filmed.

In the distance, she could see a strip of dark haze, almost flush with the horizon. Maybe fog or sunset darkness... But maybe distant mountains, too. Good, at least some sort of landmark. With a very large correction for the movement of the sun, having estimated the possible zenith, it was possible to decide that probably the mountains were located on the side of the conditional "south".

Silence... No airplane in the sky, no highway somewhere over the horizon. Nothing at all, just the wind rustling in the grass. Lena gulped, and her throat felt as if it had been pulled through with an emery cloth. Thirst came over her like a bear.

"Is anyone here?" asked Lena quietly. It's unclear why. She doesn't know who. And not even wanting to be heard. Get acquainted with the local inhabitants categorically she did not want to. Rather, just to not be completely alone. Her quiet voice was already company.

"No one," the girl whispered, pulling her jacket tighter.

From edge to edge of "savannosteppe" with elements of forest stretched a road. Or rather, it looked more like a road than anything else. Generally speaking, looking at the short strip of the road immediately brought to mind the old venerable words like "tract," "pole," and other coachmen. It was not even a dirt road, but just a strip in the steppe where there was a little less grass, and in some places, you could still see the old traces of ruts in the ground. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that once there was a real road, which was used to this day, but just enough so that the "tract" had not disappeared altogether.

On the road, there was a sagging carriage and two carts. And there were dead bodies. Not too far away, but not too close. Lena guessed by eye that they were about fifty yards away, maybe farther. No, farther. She remembered from childhood that the height of a five-story house is fifteen meters and used to "overturn" the house on the ground, measuring the distance. Here there were about four houses with plenty of room to spare. And it was not at all clear how she could hear so much in a shallow hole of foliage when she could even hear the individual words of an unknown language.

The bodies were not so much seen as guessed. Six or seven identical elongated mounds were laid in a row by the side of the road. Although, there was no curb.

"Do I have to go there?" the girl asked the wind and the sky.

Don't. And she didn't want to. As her cousin used to say, recalling an unpleasant episode when a drunken company in a Toyota crashed into his truck at a speed of about two hundred kilometers. They knocked out my front axle, and now I was sitting in the truck, but I did not want to look out and see what they had inside. I know it's minced meat in there.

She must.

Once again, the common sense embodied in Grandpa's voice whispered the right things. It was necessary. It was imperative. To understand where she was. What was going on here in the first place? And maybe there would be water. And a knife. With a knife, a confident man is practically invincible even in an unfavorable natural environment, so the old medic said.

"I have to," the girl whispered in time with her inner voice and took the first step. The grass clung unpleasantly to her sneakers like hooks growing out of the ground. She was glad she had time to put on her shoes. It would have been a real adventure to be caught in such a bind, barefoot...

First, she looked into the carriage. Although, it was probably more correct to say a covered carriage. A carriage was something more or less luxurious. The four-wheeled structure was carved out of solid wood. More than once it had been repaired by the scraps of planks and other debris. The inside was empty, utterly empty, with only scraps of cloth and scraps of twine scattered around. It was the same with the wagons. It was only now that the girl thought there were no horses. But there were - the ground held numerous hoofprints. More accurately (because Lena had seen horses at most three times in her life) was torn up similarly, as if horses had been trampled here. Apparently, the wagon train had been robbed, taking everything to the bone and taking the animals away. Elena looked around, squinting and looking for a threat. Nothing. The bandits, whoever they were, were gone.

The smell grew heavier and more unpleasant. It smelled of desolation and death. Lena stepped toward the mounds, which she had previously walked around in a wide arc. She kept repeating to herself, knife, I need a knife and water, to dislodge all other thoughts. It didn't work, then the girl imagined herself as Grandpa. A medic who examines bodies at, say, the scene of a disaster. It didn't work either because the nearest body had a severed head, and a shattered vertebra was pink on the slice. The head was carefully placed next to the body, propped up on a rock.

Elena threw up bile all at once. The uncontrollable attack rolled in like a tsunami. The invisible Grandfather in the back of her mind shook his head, noticing the senseless and damaging loss of fluid. But the girl didn't care. Then she continued to look around because the sun was setting, the thirst was getting worse, and in a place where they kill people by chopping their heads off, it was better to have something more useful with her than an unfolded paper clip.

There were eight bodies. The eighth was just behind the biggest dead body and seemed inconspicuous. The girl was about seven, maybe a little older. Maybe less. Her pupils had dilated to the limit before she died and stayed that way. The muscles relaxed in postmortem smoothed her features a little, and her lower jaw was ajar. The child seemed to be crying out in an endless scream, staring into the darkening sky with solid black eyes. Its throat was cut just above the collarbones. Its simple rough wool clothes were drenched with dried blood. The blood had also dripped around his head, enveloping it in a terrible halo.

Lena took a step to the side, leaned down, leaning her hands on her knees, breathing heavily and shallowly. A new bout of nausea was the last thing her already dehydrated body could afford. She managed, mostly because there was nothing left in her stomach, only air mixed with a convulsive wheeze escaping through her clenched teeth. The tears flowed on their own, without sobbing, like water from a spring. They stung her eyes and dried unpleasantly on her heated skin. Lena wiped her face with her sleeve and continued her inspection.

Nothing useful could be found. The bodies were thoroughly stripped, as were the wagons. They were not even wearing belts, only clothes, baggy and oddly tailored, seemingly made of very coarse wool, and without a single pocket. Gartered stockings instead of pants, loose shirts, and poncho-like capes. Judging by the bloody footprints, the men were simply killed one by one, dragged off, and stacked in rows. They had not been shot. Even a cursory glance by an uninitiated eye was enough to know that all had been killed with cold weapons. Not stabbed but chopped up with something big and heavy, leaving terrible wounds to the bone.

The tears did not stop flowing. Lena knelt almost without strength and covered her face with her dirty hands, which, by some miracle, did not get blood on them - she did not turn the dead people over after all. Despair grew stronger, pressing heavier and heavier by the minute, like a tombstone. At the movies, the girl probably should have yelled and searched for a hidden camera crew. Just wait, finally.

But it wasn't a movie. Everything around it seemed real and was real. Real, horrifyingly genuine. Faces distorted with deathly terror and pain were frozen into wax masks. It smelled of death. A lone fly buzzed disgustingly, circling over the dead.

"God, what is it..." whispered Elena, rubbing tears down her dirty face. "Where am I..."

It was getting dark. The sun was already halfway over the horizon, the sky faded even more, and the forest steppe itself faded, casting a gray canopy of twilight shadow. Something had to be done.

Only now, Lena thought about the simple and obvious thing - after all, the killers could come back, whoever they were. And in general, the idea of spending the night in the company of eight dead bodies is rather unhealthy.

She had to take the clothes off the dead men - it was getting colder in the evening. And there was no heated house nearby. But the thought of touching the blood-soaked, sticky wool almost made Lena vomit for the third time. It was unthinkable, utterly impossible. Better to die at once.

There was nothing to be done here. She should have gone further away before the sun disappeared completely. And find some sort of shelter. For some reason, Elena was certain that this place, no matter where they were stationed, could be more dangerous at night than during the day.

* * *

Camrad_RIP · May 31, 2023

Chapter 3. "The Grave and the Pound"

* * *

Even before sundown, Elena found the house, the grave, and then the pound.

The house was very old, at least it seemed so. The gray stone was almost entirely hidden by a thick layer of greenish moss. It had once been a sturdy, solid building on good foundations. The first floor was of stone, the second of wood. Now all the wood is gone. Only a "box" of strong boulders, held together by something like porous concrete mixed with lots of small roundish pebbles was left. In one corner, a hole was gaping - a descent to the basement without a ladder (it must have been wooden, too). Lena cautiously peered into it, but that was all she could do. It was reasonable to assume that everything useful had been taken out long ago, and who knows if she could ever get out again. The basement seemed very deep, and staying down there without light was not a good idea.

In general, from the size and remnants of the layout of the walls, the house seemed more like a "guest house". A kind of hotel at a crossroads. The ground around the building had been tilled to such an extent that only the stubbornest and toughest grass was growing through it to this day. Lena climbed the wall to look around from a higher vantage point. It didn't turn out so well - the twilight smoothed out the details and diminished her view. Still, the girl made sure there was complete silence and no people around, and that was something.

She wanted to stay here for the night. The old ruined structure seemed a little more comfortable than the bare wasteland. However, the jaw of the basement's gouged-out stones was ... unnerving. Besides, there was no water here. So Lena went on, trying not to lose the landmark - the mountains in the conditional "south".

It was unclear how far she had walked. Lena could not keep track of landmarks, her watch remained "at home". According to her subjective sense of time, she had walked for about twenty minutes to half an hour, maybe more. The house turned into a gray patch behind her, which could be closed with a thumbnail. And then Lena met the grave.

A very ordinary one, as if it came straight out of some story about good old England. It was not a very wide stone slab with incomprehensible symbols. It was impossible to make them out, as time and bad weather had thoroughly eaten away all the chiseled lines. Other things were more interesting: the grave was caged. A real lattice shell covered the stone slab like a sarcophagus lid. Lena touched the lattice and gingerly kicked it with the toe of her sneaker. It was well-made, the iron strips a finger thick were riveted together with copper (copper, she think) rivets, and the frame that held the entire structure was deep in the ground.

Lena remembered that so far she had not encountered a single metal object here. Not in the looted caravan, not in the ruined house. Not even a lousy nail. Either iron was not used here, or it was very valuable in any form. So someone had spent a great deal of labor and precious material on a grave lattice in the wasteland. This unknown "someone" apparently tried very, very hard not to let anyone get to the tombstone.

Or vice versa...

The thought was silly. On the other hand, Lena had seen so many things in the past day that couldn't be why shouldn't there be another delusional incongruity. The next thought ran a cold shadow down her back. Okay, let's say there was an eccentric man who kept the grave peace in this exotic way. But no one had tampered with that lattice in a place where the dead had left their clothes, but all the buttons had been cut off.

Lena walked on, hurrying and glancing around every moment. It was uncomfortable to leave the iron sarcophagus behind. However, the tomb was getting farther and farther away with each step. The girl tried to estimate how far she had walked. She estimated three or four kilometers, and it was easy enough to walk. The stone "tongues" and intergrown bushes were not too common, so it was easy to walk around them.

Twilight was drawing in. It was a bit like a "white night" in St. Petersburg, only darker. The lighting was strange, unlike anything I had seen in my previous life. The sun was gone, but a ghostly light, reflected by an invisible cloth, poured out from behind the horizon. The light was changing as if it were weaker, but it literally dissolved the shadows. So, despite the semi-darkness, it was possible to keep a decent rhythm and speed of walking. In fact, she could have walked even faster, but Lena was afraid of hurting her leg. She could repair her own dislocation, but she could forget about hiking after that.

And the water was still not met.

Her legs ached a little in her left knee, which had been more severely banged this morning. The weakness came in fits as if turning her legs into jelly. The breeze was no longer fresh but a palpable chill that crawled under her jacket and the old Manowar T-shirt. The silence pressed on her ears with the absence of the usual city sounds. The excited subconscious did not feel the usual background and filled it with fantasies. Every now and then, Lena thought of rustling behind her, rustling in the grass, the flapping of leathery wings above her head. It knocked her off her rhythm, and she was exhausted.

And it was scary, too. To the point of trembling in her hands and feet. Because a paper clip and a handful of coins were still the most formidable weapons a girl could wield. Meanwhile, the moon was finally rising out of the black horizon line. It didn't roll out, it didn't rise, it "came up," and it made Lena want to burst into tears again, so she sobbed as she went, choking on a convulsive hiccup.

Such a moon is often shown in movies, but it is impossible to see it in real life because it does not happen. A huge silver disk twice the size of the sun, with clearly visible shaggy spots and a halo. Just looking at the luminary sent shivers down her spine. It also blew away all hope that this was some kind of practical joke or a coincidence.

"I guess we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto," Lena whispered, shoving her hands deep into her pockets and hunched over. It seemed a little warmer that way.

It occurred to her - if normal physics works here, then what should the tides be from such a moon? From physics, the thought bounced on. If time "here" flows at the same or similar speed as "home," then she is gone for almost twenty-four hours. But her parents won't be back until the next day. Though no, they'll probably be calling; they probably already have. And since the phone was left in the apartment, no one answered. So the alarm was already raised to the top of its game, looking for her through friends and acquaintances, near and far. And they won't find her. Because Elena Klimova walks under a wild moon in an unknown wasteland, trying to get away from murdered people and locked graves...

We're not in Kansas anymore.

The repetition was well within the rhythm of the steps. It was easier to walk in time with it. Just a little. And it distracted her from thinking about how wrong and impossible everything was. Her hair was finally tangled and greasy. As luck would have it, the wind blew against her back, dropping the unruly strands onto my face. It was disturbing and irritating, and the cap and bandana were just for such cases, again remained "there". She could have pulled the shoelace out of her sneaker, but her hair hadn't grown back enough after another haircut to get it into a normal ponytail yet. Unless, she could tie a shoelace around her head, like the witch in the book.

God, it's a dream. It's supposed to be just a horrible dream...

A pebble that hit her foot inadvertently stung even through the soles of her feet, reminding her that this was no dream. And then Lena went straight to the pound.

It must have been something else, actually, judging by precise definitions. It was a small lake, almost perfectly round, or just a big hole in the ground with gentle slopes. But still, a pond is a pond. Mysterious and dangerous even in appearance. On the edge opposite from Lena grew two trees that looked like the same willows, only even more miserable and twisted-looking. The water was pitch black without a single wave, like a lens of polished obsidian. She didn't want to go near it, and she didn't want to drink. But her dehydrated body demanded its own, and her tongue scratched the dry sky like a grater of sand.

Lena cautiously walked closer to the shore. Cautiously crouched down. Listened.

Silence. That is the usual quiet background without any signs of life. Only the breeze rippled the grass, tugging at the stiff, dry stems. The girl fumbled for a smaller coin from her pocket. Inappropriately, she remembered the liter bottle her father used to place on his imitation fireplace every first of September and painstakingly fill it with metal nickels. "For vacation." By summer, the bottle held seven or eight thousand, a really good help for vacation expenses.

The coin went into the dark abyss almost silently. It went down like a fog. So that Lena even thought for a moment - whether it was water at all? Then it splashed very quietly, almost imperceptibly, but Lena's sharpened ears picked up the outside sound. The mirror-like surface of the pond trembled and rolled in a low rounded wave from the center straight to the shore. The girl stepped back just in case, clenching her fists, ready to run.

Five meters from the shore, the water was illuminated by a distant gleam of light. Lena involuntarily shuddered - it turned out that the pond was very deep indeed. The yellowish spot of light pulsed as if a real, living fire had been lit far below. And something was moving... Dark against the ghostly light background, sliding, moving. The dark water parted, and Lena saw the last thing she expected to encounter here.

A mermaid rose above the wave. Or not really a mermaid... She suppose it would be more accurate to say that the creature looked a lot like a mermaid. Everything below her waist was hidden under the water, and above her was a naked girl with a mop of long, incredibly thick, "pink sherbet" shade hair. Lena looked silently and stupidly at the mermaid. The mermaid looked at Lena just as silently but with a slight half-smile.

The purple mane fell in a luminous waterfall over the small chest and beyond, disappearing into the water. The individual strands seemed to take on a life of their own, wrapping thin tentacles around their necks, but it didn't look repulsive. It looked attractive, just like in the anime, where characters' hair regularly began to flutter beautifully in the calm.

The mouth was very small, but the nose seemed quite human, a little snubby and thin, on the border between graceful sculpture and "Michaeljacksonian". In comparison, her very large eyes seemed enormous, disproportionate to her face. The inner corners of the eyes were suspended relative to the bridge of the nose. The outer corners, on the contrary, lifted. The irregularly shaped pupils glowed, changing shape like greenish-lilac clouds. But there was nothing human about the ears. The huge, needle-shaped membranes on the long cartilages, larger than a human hand, moved constantly as if they were scanning their surroundings with sonic pulses. The face was covered with a scattering of tiny freckle-like spots.

The pinkish abdomen did not have a dimpled navel. So, despite its outward resemblance, this living curiosity had nothing to do with the human species. In general, the aquatic creature's appearance in some features suggested the prefix "ichthyo," but altogether, it seemed not repulsive and even ... attractive. The mermaid had no scales on her smooth skin, and she did not glisten with slime and water as a fish should. On the contrary, it was as if her body glowed pinkish white from within, with the same purplish hue as her hair, only softer. And the skin was velvet, smooth, but not plastic and glossy. The hand reached out to touch it, to caress it, to feel it with the fingertips.

The creature bowed its head and smiled, keeping its wide, well-defined lips with tiny vertical wrinkles. The webbed ears opened even more, framing its head in a luminous halo. Surprisingly, it was the smile that sobered the girl from the other world. At once, the scene from Pirates of the Caribbean with the mermaids' sweet-voiced song came to mind. Lena took another step back. The creature bowed her head even more, and a soft greenish light flashed in her lively hair, a lily-like flower with dense intersecting petals. Her eyebrows, thin as if drawn with a calligraphic pen, drew together at the bridge of her nose, giving her charming face a look of mild bewilderment. It was as if the mermaid was waiting for something, but the expected didn't happen, and it was not that she was angry, but rather puzzled the aquatic creature.

The water splashed in the distance from the glowing body, too far for a tail of the usual "fairy" proportions of mermaids. Either there was a different inhabitant, or the underwater part of the mermaid was much, much bigger and longer than the humanoid form. This was even more sobering. Another step away from the pond. The mermaid blinked, not her eyelids moving, but a vertical half-moon crease, like a cat's. Her pupils dilated even more, casting an even greenish glow over her eye sockets.

"Who are you?" asked Elena. It sounded hoarse and slurred, mostly from a dry throat. "Who are you," she repeated, and added the same thing in English, just in case. It was highly doubtful that English was used here, but I don't know...

Definitely not. The language barrier was solid. The mermaid frowned with even more puzzlement. Cutting through the dark surface of the water like a figure on the bow of a sailing ship, she swam almost to the very shore. She smiled invitingly and held out her hand to Lena. The hand seemed the most ordinary and even without webbing. With short or neatly trimmed fingernails of such a deep milky-pearl hue that, despite hunger and thirst and leaden fatigue, the girl felt a subtle prick of distant echoes of envy.

"Found a fool," Lena whispered, backing away even further.

The mermaid grimaced, now with a look of obvious displeasure that was still perplexing. Her ears were folded into thin "umbrellas," which went to the back of her head, under her thick hair. The creature covered its eyes with membranes, folded its arms across its chest, and without a splash, with its back to the water, sank into the dark. It was, and it wasn't. Only a blaze deep below, in the deep blackness, as if a bright flashlight had blinked there and gone completely out. Silence and semi-darkness reigned again.

Lena took a breath and sat down. Her legs were trembling and needed rest, and her heart was beating frantically. And in general, her body felt as if it had just escaped a forest fire or some other comparable danger. And the mind felt nothing of the sort. The strange creature came, then left ... and that was it. There was no inviting chant, no hidden claws, and fangs, no sudden attack.

Still, she didn't want to go near the pond. Her legs were getting padded at the thought of approaching the dark line, behind which was an unknown depth. But there was water... Lena sat some more, thinking. As Grandpa had taught her on, she tried to break the problem down into simple inputs with a search of simple options.

"We're not in Kansas anymore," Lena repeats.

She can go further, or she can stay and try to get water, despite the possible danger. Going further is a risk of worsening dehydration. There is a high probability that she will still have to go back but in worse conditions. Trying to get drunk is dangerous. She can still take a risk. She can try to minimize the risk as much as possible.

Thoughts dragged slower and sluggishly, like chilled condensed milk behind a spoon. She just wanted to sit and wait until, maybe, something would change for the better. It was getting cold; her jacket and Manowar T-shirt were not designed for nights in the bare field and didn't keep her warm. Every movement seemed to send a bit of heat into the cold void. Lena crouched down, pulling her knees up to her chin, pressing her hands to her sides, and wrapping her jacket tightly around her.

Wait until morning... When it's light, at least it won't be so scary. And something will probably come up ... or happen ...

She slowly slipped into the state familiar to many travelers experience when fatigue makes her sleepy, but the cold does not allow her to get a good night's sleep. Consciousness floated on a thin line between sleep and reality, trying to fill the cold emptiness with vague visions, a substitute for a full-fledged dream.

Home. Heat. A familiar apartment. Rapiers on the wall. Elena had been practicing fencing for a year or so to improve her posture and coordination. It went no further. Other hobbies, other sports. If only there had been a foil, even a sports one... The search was already going on for sure. Her parents took the first flight, leaving everything behind. Her mother had alerted the police. And she was very good at making people do things they didn't want to do... Something touched her leg, and Lena shuddered, tearing away blindly, crawling back on all fours, still stuck between two worlds. A large shiver pounded every muscle, her fingers went numb, and bright circles swirled before her eyes. Her mind wrenched out of the heavy slumber in jerks, perceiving reality in chunks, in steps.

Nothing... It was the same as it had been. Only the moon, huge and eerie, rose even higher. And the wind picked up. A blade of grass had moved and must have jabbed her leg between her toe and the back of her pant leg. The pond was splashing - the wind had shifted the surface of the shallow wave that was now splashing against the smooth, low shore. Her back was aching, and her muscles felt like they were made of wood. It was very appropriate to remember the stories of Grandpa that one can earn a lifelong disability just by sitting for a couple of hours on the cold ground. The kidneys are a sensitive organ that does not like the cold, even indirectly, through sciatica.

Lena felt a little (a little) ashamed. Her grandfather would not praise her for her weakness and dodging problems. There is a task - to get water, and we must either admit it is impossible or solve the problem. But the first option does not categorically get rid of the need to act. It is only necessary to make an effort for something else.

Lena rubbed her arms through her sleeves and patted herself on the sides to get the blood flowing. She hopped on the spot, sat down, and stood up. She looked out over the plain, where nothing had changed, the same dull landscape of sparse vegetation and overhanging rock outcrops. No one would help. No one would come to help. Her parents, her friends, and the police (whom her father, out of his old habit, continued to call the militia, he had always been a very quiet and conservative man). All of them are far away, and it is unlikely that the distance can be measured in kilometers. For now, let's consider all the old life left... yes. On the very moon that floods the wasteland with unnaturally bright, dead-silver light.

What would Grandpa have done in her place? Without a knife, a bottle, a rope, with his bare hands?

It was easier to think this way. The detachment from the process, the thought of "what would someone else do?" seemed to lighten the load of responsibility, to lighten the burden. Just a little, but enough for her thoughts to begin to make more or less sense.

She can't go near the pond. So she had to draw water from a distance. There is no rope, not even the smallest cord, and even if there was, there is nothing to fill it in. But if there is no rope, can anything replace it? The length of one sneaker shoelace is about a meter. If she ties them together minus the knots and the reserve - more than a half. Not much, but it's something. Is it possible to lengthen it even longer?

It didn't take long to get to the other side of the sinkhole. As she traveled, Lena thought about the fact that it was not just a deep hole in the ground but most likely an exit to the surface of something large and probably branched out. A deep underground network originating from a large river or sea. If there is a sea here.

It took as long to break the "willow" branch as it did to go around the pond - the branch, which seemed old and brittle, was, in fact, springy and bendy, and there was nothing to cut it with. But, visibly warmed up, Lena did find a piece of wood as thick as a finger or two and a little longer than her arm, that is, about a meter more. She got a fishing rod. The main problem remained - finding a container. Lena also had time to think about it, simplifying the problem to the level of "something containing water. In this formulation, the solution was simple.

The sock after a day's wear, to put it bluntly, did not smell like roses, nor did it serve as an advertisement for unsanitary and healthy living. But it could easily be caught in a knot, and it absorbed water. Having constructed the structure, which Lena called to herself a "schizophrenic fishing rod," the girl took another critical look at it just in case, now trying to assess it from the perspective of someone damnably evil and strong underwater. After thinking for a while, she loosened the knot on the toe and between the laces, just in case this evil "someone" grabbed and yanked forcefully. So he'd only get a piece of the fishing line.

The hardest part was left - the practical tests.

The first test of strength was successful and quiet. Lena took a position behind the trunk of the nearest "willow tree" to the water and, wrapping one arm around the thin knobby trunk for security, threw the "fishing rod" with the other. The sock gained quite a lot of water, she could not quench her thirst with this improvised sponge, but she could at least partially compensate for the loss of water. Like the Roman legionnaires, who used sponges with posca on their journeys. Lena had forgotten what a posca was, but imagining herself a legionary with a sponge was more pleasant than an "isekai" of who knows where greedily sucking moisture from a dirty sock. Which, in addition, had accumulated a lot of silt or fine sand with a taste of sludge. But it was water and not even particularly disgusting to the taste. It was the first drink she had had in a day of grueling adventures.

The second cast went even better. She managed to avoid the silt. On the third, an unknown force, without warning or outward signs, grabbed the sock under the water, pulling it off the string. Running away, Lena decided that the venture could be considered a success. Not without loss, not as well as she would have liked, but the thirst receded a little, losing its former severity.

Life was not that much more fun, but a little more optimistic.

"Only movement brings victory," she told herself. The author was also oblivious, but the words were just right. One cannot sit down. Much less lie down at night in the cold. She must keep going, thanks to the dead moon with its light.

After some doubt, Lena unscrewed a button from the sleeve of her jacket, rubbed it on her shirt for cleanliness, and put it in her mouth. Also, an old soldier's trick called "bite the bullet!" Her father told her, recalling his favorite books with descriptions of long passages of Russian troops across the arid steppes. If you suck and roll a pebble or a bullet in your mouth, you provoke salivation, and thirst is not perceived as acutely. There is no water in the body, but it will be possible to deceive your senses for some time. There was no bullet. She did not want to put local stones in her mouth, and she absolutely did not want to think about what interesting ways of developing the local microflora could take. Lena sincerely hoped that vaccinations would protect her from cholera and other vibrios, which probably had already entered her body with water and through a few scratches, from which she had not escaped. Living even without iodine proved difficult and dangerous.

Thank you, she thought, imagining Grandpa and her father. And she felt a little warmer inside. Her family was no longer with her, but their advice continued to help her, gave her clues, and kept her safe from danger. Finally, Elena did something she should have done a long time ago. She broke off another branch bigger and thicker so that she now had two sticks (counting the "schizophrenic rod"). The weapon was so bad, honestly, there was no way to make a normal sharp break with such flexible and softwood. There was nothing to sharpen it on. But it was already better than a paper clip and a coin.

Walking without a sock was uncomfortable but bearable. She tied the shoelace around her neck and waved the sticks in time with her walk. She walked without stopping, toward the morning and the southern mountains.

We ... not... in Kansas ... We ... not ... in Kansas.

The button rolled over in her mouth, and her tongue really wasn't scratching the palate anymore.

Toward morning she switched to "Winnie the Pooh Lives Well in the World," then repeated to herself "Dust, dust, we're walking through Africa."

And just before dawn, when the girl was exhausted to the limit, but convinced herself that she could overcome any adversity, Lena met her death.

* * *

Camrad_RIP · Jun 1, 2023

Chapter 4. "The smirking basilisk"

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The moon had not yet set, and the sun had not yet risen, so the large silver disk seemed to be dissolving, melting into the pale sky. The edge of the sky was a pinkish color, heralding the coming of day. It should have been getting colder by morning, but Lena didn't feel much change. For respite and orientation, she climbed onto a rocky "tongue" to survey her surroundings and catch her breath. The gray stripe of supposed mountains seemed to be getting a little closer, and that "a little" was depressing.

Thinking about what time of year it was here, Lena turned around, peering into the monotonous plain, and suddenly noticed movement in the direction from which she was coming. The breeze swayed the grass giving the sheaves an undulating motion as if the gray-yellow sea were rippling. But in one place, the wind seemed to be blowing in the opposite direction. It was like the movement of a periscope, which itself is invisible to the observer, but leaves a stormy trail. Something was moving in broad zigzags, hiding in the grass and choosing the thickest parts of the tallest feather grass as if it feared the attention of others in advance.

She rubbed her eyes, hoping it was just an illusion. The movement didn't stop, but it blurred, faded. So it could have gone either way. To be on the safe side, Lena gripped the sticks more comfortably and took a few tentative swings. The air whistled under the swings, encouraging. At least she wasn't completely defenseless. The unknowable thing, meanwhile, had gotten so close that there was no doubt that it was no mistake of tired eyes. Someone rather small but brisk was walking briskly and quickly in her wake.

I wanted to quote the immortal lines from "Blood and Concrete" as translated by Gavrilov. The feeling was twofold. On the one hand, a great threat in the grass simply could not hide. On the other, when you're clearly being stalked, it's better to be prepared for trouble. The hidden threat, meanwhile, had come very close, and now she could make out something gray-sandy, with faint streaks and spots, moving in the grass. Lena exhaled involuntarily with some relief. After the grave in the crate and the mermaid of the night, she could expect anything here, including vampires and zombies. She didn't want to face any humans, either. It was as if the stalker realized he'd been exposed, and in one long, beautiful jump he swung out into the open, five meters from the stone.

It was a clear and definite member of the feline tribe, but it was about as different from a cat as a purple mermaid was from a fairy tale character in a book. The beast resembled a lynx, mostly in the complete absence of a tail and its overall size. But while a lynx has a long body and relatively short paws, this animal, on the contrary, moved on disproportionately long limbs with a short broad body with a powerful thorax.

The yellow eyes were squinting, leaving only narrow slits with yellowish oval pupils, the tasselless ears pressed tightly against the head. The lower jaw was oddly hypertrophied, too narrow, like a crocodile's, with taut lips. Clearly visible fangs protruded from the mouth, not as much as those of saber-toothed tigers in the picture, but considerably farther than is the case with felines. In cats, you see this kind of "expression" on their faces when they are angry and ready to attack, but it seemed to be permanent for this creature. The beast seemed assembled from different parts, like a chimera, but, like the mermaid, it did not give the impression of a cadaver. Its movements were smooth and dangerous; the creature was clearly in its usual element.

The grinning basilisk, the girl's thought flashed.

Lena ducked a little, putting one branch in front of her, and taking the other in a swing. The beast didn't seem dangerous; it was too small for a hunter. On the other hand, the "cat" was clearly not going to retreat. And it moved very, very fast, crawling over the ground and jumping like a jerboa on all four spring legs in any direction. The animal circled in front of the stone in a complex network of movements, like a shark in the waves, and there was an eerie, clear sense of purpose in this movement. The creature definitely saw the girl as legitimate prey, not embarrassed by the difference in size and testing the victim's reaction. At the same time, its speed of movement was truly cat-like, and thanks to its long paws under its broad body, the beast could move in any direction without turning its body. This made the chimera's movements completely unpredictable.

Lena's soul stirred up the ancient natural fear of the humanoid ape before the worst enemy of the primates. And the "cat" began to narrow its semicircles, approaching the stone itself, pressing its ears even more against the triangular head, chewing and exposing its fangs half a finger long. Elena realized that what was waiting for her now was not punishment with a twig of bad kitty but a fight to the death with a deadly predator, which, judging by its confident habits, was not the first time it had hunted a human.

Lena missed the first jump, despite all her readiness for defense. The only thing that saved her, perhaps, was that the "cat" itself had not expected a quick success and jumped rather try it out. The gray-yellow shadow spread in the air in a wide swath and immediately spun back. The branch waved idly through the air. The claws grazed Lena's arm only at the very tips, but the denim beneath them parted like it was razor-thin. One not only grazed her sleeve but also clawed her wrist.

In the heat, the girl waved the stick again after the beast, and the beast stopped two meters away and hissed. His ears flattened against his head to the point of indistinction. His eyes squinted even more so that there was scarcely anything catlike about his muzzle. The muzzle now resembled a snake, and the way it moved was like a crab or a spider. The "Basilisk" no longer smirked but hissed, not taking his eyes off Lena's left arm, where the scratch had already swollen into a large red blob.

Elena swallowed, almost swallowing a button. Her heart was pounding as if it wanted to kick out her ribs and run free. But there was no fear, almost none at all. It was displaced for a few moments by the adrenaline, the drive of the fight. Lena changed her stance, stretched her right arm forward like a rapier, and pulled her left back, hoping to catch the next throw on a counter-punch and add a second one if possible. Here was where she wished she had studied historical fencing with a parrying dagger for the left hand.

The Basilisk, meanwhile, got closer, gathered his tense muscles into a clump, and trembled finely, like a cat before it jumped. And he jumped. This time he almost got it, and Lena almost got it. The claws flapped idly, and the branch only brushed the short, thick fur. The beast quickly ran around the rock, forcing its prey to turn as it went. One lap, two... Elena wanted to smile triumphantly - she remembered that solitary raptors are strong in short, powerful jerks, but they have no stamina and tire quickly. And running in a wide enough circle was more costly than just turning in place.

But before she could open her lips to smile, the basilisk sprinted in the opposite direction, like a crazy second hand. Lena lost her rhythm and stumbled, missing another jump. This time only a miracle saved her. The "cat" seemed to take the unbuttoned jacket as part of the victim and cut the free-hanging floor into three long flaps, clean and smooth, like the steel claws of a famous maniac in a red-and-green sweater.

Now it was really scary. Her instincts united with her mind in a coherent chorus, whispering of imminent death. And only - as strange as it might seem - a sense of the incongruity and savagery of what was happening so far had kept the girl from panic. Well, a small creature a little taller than the knee can not kill and eat a man! Feral dogs in a pack, yes, they can. But a disgusting parody of a cat is stupid.

In her hindsight, Lena knew that she had made a fatal mistake. The first thing she should have done was to take off her jacket and wrap it around her arm when the creature first appeared. That would have given some protection, despite the razor-sharp claws. Now it was too late. The wide, oval pupils caught every movement of the victim, and the basilisk would not let her undress.

The "cat" climbed to the edge of the rock with deceptive slowness, scraping against the granite with its full-length claws. She should have attacked herself. Try to throw the enemy off, but... it was too scary. To have attacked her attacker on her own. When it is so fast... Every second of hesitation felt like a life-saving moment, and every movement against the basilisk felt heavy with the weight of the weights. Blood was already dripping from the fingers of her left hand in cheerful red droplets, and her sleeve was wet.

The creature ducked again and hissed, ears twitching. A bifurcated tongue fluttered from beneath its long, narrow mouth, and innumerable rows of tiny claws unfurled. The creature seemed to be tasting the air, which was saturated with the stench of fresh blood.

The sight sobered the girl. The very thought of licking the flesh off her corpse, or maybe even her still-living body with that disgusting appendage, struck fear into her mind. Exactly enough for Lena to look at the hopeless situation with an almost sober gaze. The girl tossed aside the shorter branch and intercepted the longer one with both hands like a spear. She crouched down, covering her vulnerable belly, and stepped toward the cattle, forcing the basilisk to jump back into the grass or attack. A strayб and the only sensible thing in her head was to poke it as hard as she could and grab its head, trying to knock its eyes out. Stupid, useless, but... everything else was worse.

The hiss soared to the top tones, almost disappearing into the ultrasound, and the basilisk lunged toward her. The heat of its hot body hit the girl in the face, a strange smell, more like the stench of an unwashed dog... and the stick went into the void. Lena whirled around, waving randomly, blindly, already aware that she had not had time, and now she would be nailed in the side or leg. She struck two or three more times, turning on her trembling - so slow and awkward! - legs. Until she realized it was over. The Basilisk had gone without finishing its victim and had simply fled. Only the grass moved where the gray shadow had gone, in the same direction it had come from.

Lena dropped the stick and sat down. Or rather, she just collapsed, unable to stand. A hysterical cry burst from her chest, and the girl muffled it by biting down on the sleeve of her jacket until her teeth ached. It was no good because now the taste of her blood was in her mouth. A bitter lump came back to her throat, and Lena leaned back against the rock, breathing heavily and shallowly, trying to fight nausea. It worked, partly from an empty stomach, partly from proper breathing, but mostly from relief. Her blood was boiling in her veins with the mighty cry of her survival instinct.

She's alive. She's alive!

And in the midst of this tumult, a simple thought slowly made its way to the realization.

What scared away the small predator? Who was so scary? And who would she have to deal with now?

The cart was creaking. Horse Number Three wasn't moving too fast, but not too slow either. And it was too early; the animal would need its strength when the brigade got closer to the Gate, where anything could happen. Bizo was in the cart, in his own right, like an alchemist, sick on his feet and all. Codure was still loaded on top of the meager Profft, but Santelli was grimly optimistic that the vagabond would likely have to be discarded and slaughtered by nightfall to spare him the agony of his life. The "daily" spell was nearing its end, so it wouldn't be long before the blunderbuss's venom would take effect. And the leg itself looked bad. From the looks that Viall and Kai exchanged from time to time, they knew that too. And Сodure himself, when he came to, tried to keep his moaning down, biting his lip or a cloth soaked with water, trying to look less "heavy".

Shena was the only one not looking at the wagon, glancing around for danger with an Ahlspiess on her shoulder. Santelli was sure she had at least one more vial of "milk," but the foreman neither pressed nor demanded it. For an old tried-and-true member of the brigade, the lancewoman would be as good as they were for her. But for an outsider who hadn't even been tested in battle... it wasn't fate, then.

The place was quiet and relatively peaceful. It was the first time Santelli had cut a path here, and so far he hadn't regretted it. The Cursed Grave was out of the way, and there was no need to pay off the Lower Seas during the day, but at night if you walked by it, you'd have to pay for it. The only inhabitants of the area were taguars, but the vicious creatures only attacked singles. Biso was supposed to protect me from the usual ambush.

Now, in the light of the rising sun, the brigadier, not forgetting to look around, was summing up the overall balance of the quest. And he came to the conclusion that if they reached the Gate in one piece, they had not gone to waste. Not as good as he would have liked, and Codure would be lost along the way. But he had worse.

"Sergeant,"[1] Kai called softly as always, drawing his sword from its sheath.

The "cartman" always addressed the brigadier in an emphatically polite manner like a real fighter of the knight's "spear". Unless, of course, there were any real nobles nearby. But his gesture told the brigadier more than a word, making him tense. A sword - especially if it's not a ceremonial piece of iron for dusting one's eyes - is an expensive thing, and it's good if there's even one for a regular brigade. And Kai had not even a simple single-handed infantry sword, but the real fighting weapon of a knight of the Kingdoms. The warrior kept it safe and didn't use it in vain. So if the cartman drew his blade, it was a serious matter.

"Where?" asked Santelli briefly.

"Straight ahead and two fingers to the left," the swordsman replied succinctly.

The brigade, as a single living thing, gathered around the cart. Bizo pulled out a vial of "fog" from somewhere. Santelli stepped forward, keeping pace with the horse, with his right hand on the axe at his waist and his left on the hilt of the dagger.

Straight ahead and to the left was... nothing. Except for a large flat rock, common in these parts - two or three people could easily sit on top of it and even make a fire.

"There was something there, just now," Kai said confidently.

Santelli silently cursed his eyes, which were not what they were ten years ago. He could see nothing. And horse number three was still shuffling her feet, trampling the grass with her hooves. Horses are clever animals, and they can sense anything bad a mile away.

Santelli silently drew an axe from his belt and walked ahead of the horse. Those who relax here don't live long. Better that Kai should see a false danger and the brigade be afraid for a quarter of an hour than that they should all miss something worthwhile. Shena stepped lightly from behind to the right, the thin point of the ahlspiess catching the sun with its polished facets.

"Sergeant," Kai called out again. "You won't believe..."

"What?" said the foreman without turning around.

"It's a woman hiding behind a rock," the swordsman reported with immense surprise. "Alone."

A crossbow was already fiddling in the cart. Bizo reasoned sensibly that "woman" was a shapeshifter, a witch, or a "deceiver". That is, an arrow is the best choice.

"Hit it as it steps toward us," ordered Santelli.

There were five of them encompassing the massive cart in a jagged arc. Ahead of them all stood, looking warily at Helena, the obvious ringleader. What he was wearing, the girl could not understand. It was something rag and leather, with an abundance of pulls, garters, and small round buttons in the cloth paneling. The man was bearded but strangely shaven, with almost bare cheeks and thick growths starting from the edge of his jaw. The sides of his head, above the ears, were also shaved so his long hair lay along his skull, laid back in front like a thick roll. Two strands were braided into thin plaits that ran down the sides of his face at the temples.

One hand was pointedly on the hilt of a short sword at his waist, while the other held an axe, small but rather ominous in appearance. There was not an ounce of pretense or pose in the movements and posture of the front man. He looked intently at the girl with large dark eyes. There was a fresh bruise under the left one.

The second... the short-haired, dark-haired fighter was a woman, apparently wearing leather armor. She was partially hidden behind the horse, so Lena could only see her face. The kind of face that could be called "thoroughbred," but with a faintly distorted bridge of the nose, as if the nose had once been broken and then carefully repaired, but there was far more diligence than skill. The woman seemed young by earthly standards, Lena would have given her a little over twenty, but the cold and unpleasant look added as much to her age, at the very least. The leader looked on without enmity, with patient expectation, but the woman's eyes held unconcealed anger. And she had a spear, a short shaft but a very long tip, like a faceted awl, at the ready.

Two other men stood on either side of the cart. One was dressed up to his eyebrows in some sort of armor, a thick woolen coat with metal plates stitched on, long and narrow. The jacket looked old and tattered and had been mended more than once with coarse thread, which knitted rather than stitched together the individual flaps. The plates, on the other hand, shone like polished toothpaste. The second man seemed simply ugly, for he looked like a dead man alive, with a bony face, a cloudy gaze, and a half-open mouth that looked as if it were about to spit. He wore about the same quilted jacket, but without the metal plates, but with a half-jacket thrown over his shoulders like a short cape. The dead man's weapon was a sword, seemingly the only one in the whole strange company. It was large, with a long hilt and a simple cross-guard. The man with the face of a feeble-minded ghoul was nonchalantly holding the blade on his shoulder, but somehow that nonchalance seemed at once to be deceptive.

And there was a fifth man on the cart, and it was immediately clear that he was not a fighter. He was fat and wore a sort of cloak, almost rope-like, with a wide-brimmed hat, like those worn by witches and Gandalf. His face was obscured by the hat's shadow, but the fat man held a cocked crossbow.

With the exception of the fat man, all the natives didn't seem very big, almost stunted from Lena's point of view. Even the leader, who seemed to be the tallest of the group, was about her height. But it was impossible to call the people small. Rather, they were "compact," compact, and wiry.

"It's definitely not a shifter," Viall whispered loudly. "A witch, I guess..."

Quietly Horse Number Three snorted and bowed her head to the ground, flaring her nostrils and sniffing out some grass. Santelli thought intensely, trying to figure out what to do next.

The woman was strange. Not dangerous, which would have been normal but strange. She was tall. The tangled, uncombed red hair wasn't even covered with a comb, just like a "single" or an aristocrat's. But it was not shortened as it was supposed to be. Nor is it long, as in the usual respectable matrons and maidens. Too white-skinned, soft arms, even from here. And all kind of... big. She looked shapely, but her hips were too narrow for her chest, and there was something wrong with her proportions. She looks like a fighter, who from childhood was well-fed, so she put on a lot of muscle. And at the same time, not a fighter. Her face was covered by a layer of dust, and there was a bloody smear of a wounded hand, but her eyes were as wide as a Southern girl's. Pretty. Probably... would have been. Washed up, in a different place, and decent clothes.

The clothes confused Santelli the most. He had never seen or even heard of anything like it. Some kind of frivolous outfit, like the bards at the traveling circuses, only sillier and more useless. All light, thin, unserious. It would have done well in a brothel. Especially that shirt with the lettering that tightens and stretches like it's knitted from a spider's web. Except that the last brothel here closed down about two hundred years ago. A witch wouldn't wear such a thing, of course. "Deceiver" all the more so. He needs to be appeased, to force them to let their guard down so that the other members of the gang will attack at the right moment. And shifters generally wear what they've taken off corpses or do without rags.

"Who are you?" finally asked the foreman.

"Cò a tha thu?"

The leader frowned, uttering words slowly and loudly. Lena could have sworn she'd never heard the language before. But the resonance looked familiar. And it wasn't hard to imagine what a man in such a situation could ask.

The girl held her arms out to her sides, showing her stick, obviously useless against spears, and her empty, bloody palm. The blood was already drying, leaving a sticky, nasty coating on her skin.

Then she pointed her empty hand at herself and answered.

"She's witchcraft!" hissed Shena. "She's about to wave a stick and cast a spell!"

"Or splash poisoned blood," seconded Viall.

"Shut up," muttered Santelli, and he was right because when danger is at hand, the foreman is like a god. Though the priests, of course, should not be told about it.

The situation, on the one hand, was entertaining, and where something is interesting, there can be gain. Besides, Santelli was inquisitive in his own right. On the other hand, it dragged on. The stranger seemed to call herself, though what wilderness you had to be from to call yourself "Hel" was something to think about. And she didn't seem to intend to attack.

"Let's go around her," the foreman finally decided. "Let's go past it. If anything, we'll hit it hard."

Shena gritted her teeth in a way that even Hel seemed to hear. But she remained silent. It might not be the wisest decision, but it was a sensible one. If it doesn't promise prey, don't take it. Don't attack, don't touch. Of course, the girl could be sold at the Gate for a good price, but reasoning sensibly, why would she be here, who couldn't understand human language and dressed as if from the words of a bad bard? Maybe she's crazy.

No, the foreman made the right decision. And out of the bones of the greedy fools who wanted to take all the good of the world, the ghouls make whistles at night and sell them to the Marines.

The cart moved, and the horse, short but sturdy, was pulled under the bridle by a haircutting warrior with a spear-awl. The others gathered on the left side as if to shield the wagon from Helen. A fat man with a crossbow sat on the edge of the wagon, glaring angrily from under his hat and clearly ready to fire. It seemed that the natives had simply decided to go around her.

"What a heck," the girl whispered.

She was not prepared for that. Apparently, the locals were as frightened of her as she was of them and decided not to mess with her. That is, to leave her in the middle of the wasteland. A barren, hungry, waterless, dangerous wasteland.

And what is she gonna do now?

* * *

[1] Originally "sergeants" are well-armed warriors who support knights on the battlefield, but lack the dignity of knights and are somewhat worse armed (most importantly, they cannot afford the knight's "destrie" horses, which are incredibly expensive).

Camrad_RIP · Jun 2, 2023

Chapter 5. Just think

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Finally, Santelli glanced toward the stranger once more. The redheaded witch or shifter was sitting on a rock, her arms around her head. Feeling the brigadier's heavy gaze, she looked back. Santelli thoughtfully tossed the axe into the air with a flip and caught it habitually. The feel of the hard handle in the palm of his hand concentrated his thoughts and cut off everything unnecessary.

The foreman was not a bad judge of character, and he knew it. Now he looked into the eyes of the tall girl and saw nothing witchly in them. Nothing at all. Wise men say the soul looks at the world through the eyes. Maybe they're lying, but the look does tell a lot. Even the most cunning man, the most dexterous "deceiver", luring convoys to robbers and cannibals, can not completely hide the second bottom of his intentions. The look will still give it away. You only need to be able to look and see.

And the foreman saw nothing dangerous in the eyes, reddened from the tears repressed, half-hidden by the red, tangled strands. It was the look of a man confused, incomprehensible, almost crushed to death by the vicissitudes of life. It was the look of a woman in her right mind but not of this world. It was the look of a noblewoman who had never fought for her life, who had never needed anything, securely protected by the walls of her father's or her husband's castle, behind the spears of his retinue.

There was a reason for this meeting... There was a reason.

Santelli sighed, gathering his thoughts. An inner voice, a gut feeling that the foreman trusted, whispered that a choice could be made now, where on one side was nothing, including bad things, and on the other side were very complicated consequences. Complicated but interesting.

"Hold it," ordered the foreman, slipping the axe behind his belt.

Shena slapped the Horse on the withers, and the cart creaked, stopping.

"I'll get her," muttered Bizo, fiddling with his crossbow.

"Did I give you orders?" The foreman was defiantly surprised.

The alchemist whimpered and fell silent, flashing his eyes resentfully.

Santelli sighed once more.

"Viall, help me out here," he commanded, pulling back the burlap with which Codure was covered in the cart. "Hold his leg."

The wounded man slipped into a half-forgetfulness that was soon to be replaced by the fever that was sure to bring him to his grave. When his leg was disturbed, he groaned loudly, his muddy eyes swiveling and clearly unaware of what was happening.

"Sarge... what are you doing?" cautiously asked Kai, who had lost all his courtesies in his confusion.

"Help," Santelli repeated through gritted teeth to Viall. "Drag him."

Codure was in great pain; he even tried to fight, but the weakness and pain robbed the poor man of his last strength. He only howled, twitching his arms and breaking his nails on the clothes of his tormentors.

"That's it, put it down," puffed Santelli.

Viall returned to the cart very quickly, staggering like cancer. Santelli missed no opportunity to emphasize once again who in the brigade was the bravest and most desperate. He stepped back only a few steps and stood there with his arms crossed over his chest. The stranger stared at Codure, who had been placed halfway between the cart and the stone where she had been sitting.

"Sergeant, that's not good," said Kai.

"Feed your own to some creature...," supported Bizo uncertainly.

Shena was silent, but Santelli could feel her gaze all over his back. Cold and angry. The spearwoman didn't like noblemen. That in itself was all right. Who liked them? But with Shena, the antipathy turned into outright hatred, which sometimes took a very strange form.

"Our own?" asked the foreman half-heartedly, raising an eyebrow sarcastically. "Did you share salt with him? Chopped the coin?"

There was nothing to say. The laws of the brigades were unwritten but hardened like iron by many years, very straightforward and not subject to free interpretation. Codure was taken for Profit, but so far, he had not proved himself, and the brigade did not unanimously accept him - he stood on his own. Subsistence and a half share of the income that's all the apprentice can count on. The foreman was acting harshly, but in his own right, when he gave the apprentice up to the undead. Another thing is that after such tricks from the brigade, people usually start leaving without payoffs. And they were in their right, too.

The red-haired witch, meanwhile, took an interest in what was going on. She got down from the stone and approached Codure, trying, however, to keep away from Santelli, whom she was clearly afraid of.

Lena did not understand what was happening at all. It was as if the leader was waiting for something from her. And the rest of the gang was waiting, too, talking softly among themselves in a language that resembled both English and German at the same time. Moreover, it seemed to the girl that the travelers were no less afraid of her than she was of them. She had to make a decision. Maybe she should have done something, according to the local custom. Or, on the contrary, not to do ... Lena knelt beside the lying man, still away from the leader with his sinister axe.

The man was young and appeared to be wounded. Not even apparently, but surely. The man's already unhealthy face was covered in yellowish skin, like a wax mask covered in tiny beads of sweat. The wounded man was conscious but did not seem to understand what was going on around him. His left pant leg was cut almost to the groin, covered by a powerful codpiece, and the leg was encased in a primitive splint of narrow planks and a thick gray bandage with dried blood stains.

Lena looked up at the ringleader. He looked up at her, tucked his pigtails behind his ears, and smoothed his beard. The look in his dark eyes was still one of anticipation.

Did they mistake her for a healer? Maybe the local doctors... or healers are wearing Manowar T-shirts and denim pairs?

What have I got to lose?

She decided to try and unwind the bandage. It was hard, the knots were tight. A shadow fell overhead - the leader was leaning over a lying man, an axe in his hand. Elena recoiled, but the bearded man simply cut the first knot. It looked like the axe had been sharpened for good measure.

"She's about to start eating," Viall remarked thoughtfully. "Or leaking blood."

The brigade watched the witch unwind the bandage ineffectively, wrinkling and cocking its nose funny. Still, no one understood what Santelli was up to. At last, the witch freed her leg and carefully rolled the cloth into a roll. She carefully examined the wound.

"No, she bewitch," Bizo pointed out authoritatively.

"How will she bewitch him?" Kai reasonably objected. "We're on the ground. We're not down here."

"Somehow," Bizo said significantly.

There was nothing to say. The evil deed is simple.

Elena was afraid she was going to vomit again. But she didn't. After all the adventures of the past twenty-four hours, her perception had dulled, lost its sharpness. Merely the wounded man. Merely a leg. Simple... what the hell... Not simple at all.

The leg looked bad. Not as bad as Grandpa's huge Atlas of gunshot wounds, published in Stalin's time, with big detailed pictures, but still bad. A deep, though not to the bone, open wound ran along the thigh muscle, ending just above the knee. Inside was visible pinkish flesh and even blood vessels, grayish-like twigs in a herbarium. Just looking at the wound reminded her of the paw of a hideous cat with a basilisk's face. Only here, the claw had done more work, though it was just as sharp. But that wasn't the only trouble.

The swelling all over her thigh was visible to the unaided eye, as was the unnatural subluxation of the limb (Lena didn't know what to call it properly). Judging by what she saw, there was not only a laceration but also a fracture of the femur. Again from the scraps of Grandfather's memories - a combination extremely dangerous even for the advanced medicine of the twentieth century. Which here, it seems, is still many centuries away.

Lena rubbed her palms together, shaking off the scales of dried blood, carefully running her fingers along the edges of the wound. Instead of heat, her fingertips tingled with an unnatural chill. Something was wrong here, but Lena forbade herself to think about it. She feared that if she stepped out of her meditative state of concentration for a moment, all was lost. The leader of the gang seemed quite peaceful, but the girl was sure that he could kill her at any moment for some unknown motives.

What to do?

As if to echo her thoughts, the bearded man pressed his lips together and set his lower jaw forward in a look of slight disappointment. She had to think of something, and fast. Or run for her life.

What would Grandpa do?

Her memory threw up an unhelpful and inappropriate memory. The early childhood, an old medicine man who liked to sit in a rocking chair, reading Science and Life magazine. He can't rock - there's a cat and a little kid in the house, so Grandpa has permanently wedged the chair in with screws and bolsters. But he still likes to sit. A rocking chair from the old days, the memory of the past. His granddaughter does not let him read, crawling over Grandpa, like "the wood beast Monkey," as he likes to call her, making menacing faces, but through the net of wrinkles, his eyes look kind, with love. Sometimes, to calm down a little runaway girl, Grandfather tells his granddaughter stories from his extensive practice. Uninspired, and well-written. Then his gaze changes. The old man looks somewhere in the distance, and no one knows (and no one will know), what pictures his own memory paints. The granddaughter doesn't understand half of it. The words are terribly grown-up, smart, but the very voice of the Grandfather is soothing, it flows like a huge river, soft and deep.

Why did this one come to mind? Why?

Think about it, whispered the phantom of the old army doctor.

Right. Now she remembered.

Granddaughter sits on her lap, putting aside a thick magazine. And Grandpa says:

When you save a man's life, minutes are a factor. Often it's seconds. That's why a good medic is trained for years. He shouldn't sway. He shouldn't hesitate. Hands should act on their own. But if you don't know what to do... which, unfortunately, happens.

The girl curled up on her lap and almost fell asleep. But only almost, so the adult tale must not be interrupted. The palm, arthritis-stricken but still strong, gently slips into her blond hair, which in time is destined to turn a bright copper color.

If you don't know what to do, sit down and think. Just think as if there's nothing around. It's hard. The patient may die. But it's better than doing anything.

Just think.

Lena sat down, Japanese-style, on her knees, folding her hands on her stomach, and closed her eyes. She tried to detach herself, as much as possible, from everything beyond her thoughts and memory. There was nothing. Nothing at all. No debilitating thirst, no pain in her arm, no danger, no obvious bandits nearby.

Given - a wound. Deep, nasty. But the guy hasn't bled out. The inflammation hasn't developed yet. She thinks they call it "localized." There's a chill, but again not severe, and it's not clear whether that's good or bad.

Given - a fracture. What to do with it - again, it is not clear, but it is closed, and the bones do not stick out. That's a good thing.

Given - she is not a doctor and has no idea how to treat wounds and fractures. Even as a paramedic, she can't help a wounded man.

It's hopeless.

Well, what if she didn't try to become a medic? She took fencing, hiked, and listened to Gramps. They were taught how to deal with bruises and fractures until the ambulance arrived. What could one do for a wounded person, if only to alleviate their suffering? No, not like that. Wrong question. What can be done in the order of first aid for which no education, no medication, and no special tools are needed?

Santelli had already gotten used to the idea that he had wasted his time. It turned out to be a bad choice. The brigadier had gained some prestige by standing unarmed next to the witch, but that was not enough when you consider the lost time. All that remained was to decide how best to end it.

The redhead was only moments away from being struck in the skull with the axe when she suddenly rose to her feet and began to act. Santelli, in furtive confusion, smoothed his beard again. The girl was very determined, not at all like before, when she looked like a frightened rabbit.

To begin with, the witch (or maybe not a witch?) freed Codure's leg from the bow, looked carefully at the planks, and set one aside. She showed the other to Santelli and measured the same amount through the air with her hands. It seems she was trying to say that she needed a longer plank. The foreman thought it over, and the redhead looked straight and open.

"Throw her a plank," ordered the foreman without turning to the cart.

The order was immediately carried out, carefully planting a pole as tall as a man to push the cart out of the mud. In fact, what was going on grabbed all the attention of the brigade. The life of the "tarred men"[1] is full of dangers, but except for the descent into the dungeons, it is very monotonous. That's why they are so fond of all sorts of bards and other conjurers at the Gate. That is, of course, if they are truly entertaining because if a singer doesn't do a good job, he usually goes back to his land without money and forefingers. But something interesting was definitely going on here, and for free.

The redhead put the long stick along the body of Codure, who had conveniently lost consciousness. She estimated something, nodded to herself, and tapped the pole with the edge of her palm. The gesture was understandable, and Santelli, shrugging, with a single blow of the axe, cut off the required thing. Along the way, he noted how the girl did not feign a shudder at the loud clatter of steel on wood. Whoever she was, the witch was afraid of weapons.

The smaller part the girl put aside, or rather carelessly threw away, as if the wood almost two palms long had no value. And the big one...

And this is where Santelli realized he had made the right choice.

Everyone has a moment in life when they think, "Why haven't I done this before? It's so easy." It's much rarer when the thought changes to "Why has no one done this before? it's just...".

That's exactly what Santelli was thinking right now.

Broken legs were always encased in a bowtie the length of the leg itself. Always. It was done in the military, in orders, in drugstores, in barbershops, and simply in peasant huts. Simply because it was the way it had been done for a long time, and it was obvious. What else could it be? But the redhead did things differently.

She put the short plank in place on the inside of the maimed leg and placed the pole on the outside, all the way from the heel to the armpit. Then the witch began slowly, not too skillfully, but diligently to tape the bowstring with a cloth and in such a way as to leave the wound open. The redhead seemed to know what to do but had no practice of her own, repeating step by step the advice of others.

Suddenly Kai intervened, bringing another bandage and a roll of soft linen rope. Santelli frowned because he didn't give the order. On the other hand, it played into the foreman's hands, so Santeli just made a note for the future. Talk to the swordsman. Carefully, without going overboard.

With Kai's help, things got a little faster. It wasn't so easy to move Codure, after all. But in the end, it worked, and the leg was securely immobilized. The brigade watched in silence, glancing around more as a matter of order. None of them had ever seen anything like this before. The miracles, however, did not end there. When she was done with the harness, the witch ran her hands along the edges of the open wound once more. From the look on the redhead's face, she was surprised, as if she had never seen a simple spell work before. The witch gestured that she needed another bandage and got what she required. Then she frowned and thought for a moment. She looked at Santelli, or rather at his belt, and pointed her finger vigorously toward the codpiece. The foreman's jaw dropped a little, and Viall couldn't help but chuckle.

"Not only a witch, but a whore," Shena summed up.

"A healing ritual, I suppose," Bizo forced out, blushing with restrained laughter. "So to speak, over the body of a dying man, to infuse him with the life force flowing from..."

The alchemist could not finish; the laughter broke out, and Bizo fell inside the cart, dropping his hat.

"Sergeant," Kai said, as usual, softly and judiciously. "She needs the flask on the belt."

"Ahhhh..." stretched out a confused Santeli, but after thinking about it, and decided he probably would have had a couple of good sips in a similar situation.

The redhead, however, would not drink. She sniffed the open flask of bluish glass, dripped it on her finger, and licked it. She didn't seem to like the wine, so the witch shook her head and returned the flask. The emboldened healer strode along the uneven line of the brigade, peering for their flasks.

"Give her a lick," commanded Santelli, but more for the sake of order, since everyone was already wondering what else the entertaining stranger was up to.

Viall joked again about what should licking the redheaded lady, but that was all. But there was an obvious hiccup - all the wines that the tarred ones were drinking were deemed unsuitable for their unknown purposes by the witch.

"Bizo, show her the chest," ordered Santelli.

The alchemist grimaced as if he'd been given dung instead of meat, but he complied. Strictly speaking, he could have refused, and he would have been within his rights. What the alchemist uses is up to him, and rightly so, because if he doesn't work well, the rest of the brigade is free to not take him to the Gate. But Biso had always been afraid of the Brigadier, and he remembered the shit that Santeli had pulled him out of. So he didn't argue.

Slowly, showing that he yielded only to the commander's authority but that he would not allow his valuable equipment to be tampered with, Bizot took out the treasure chest of decocts and unlocked the latch. The redhead scrutinized several rows of assorted bottles in wooden honeycombs lined with straw. Mostly empty - the alchemist had already used most of his inventory on his protracted quest. Then she took and sniffed each one, pulling the cork just far enough so that the faintest trickle of scent seeped out. Apparently, the medic sensed Bizo's nervousness and tried not to aggravate it unnecessarily. The alchemist, despite his obvious antipathy to the witch, appreciated this approach and did not let the redhead sniff the last round vial of "green mist. He took it away and made a scary face, shaking his head.

At last, the witch seemed to find what she was looking for. Her choice was an interesting and obscure-a vial of "dead water" from triple-distilled wine. In this mixture, Bizo infused some herbs, used a shot of pepper to cure colds, and simply added it to beer or plain wine for extra strength. The witch also tasted a drop on her tongue, then, to be sure, took a tiny sip, squinting and coughing. She looked at the alchemist with a mute question. May I? After some hesitation, Bizo nodded. "Water" was expensive, but not excessively, so the brigade could afford it.

But the witch didn't apply the potion to Codure. She applied it to herself first. She rolled up the sleeve of her funny jacket, took several deep breaths, and, clenching her jaw tightly, splashed it over the wide cut. Bizo gave an involuntary gasp - he knew how such things worked on scratches. It wasn't acid or fog, of course, but it would hurt. The witch hissed like an angry cat, and she danced around like a dancer at a fair, bouncing. And then, when the pain had subsided a little, she repeated the beastly procedure.

"It's a good idea," Santelli thought aloud. "You can torture your enemies."

Now it was clear what the uninvited healer, who most likely was not a healer, was up to. It looked creepy, but... well, so far, she was doing rather useful things. The foreman drew a glove from behind his belt and placed it over Codure's face. Kai grinned crookedly, and, understanding without a word, he gripped the bowstring tightly.

And the witch tipped the vial directly onto the wound. [3]

Codure recovered instantly and apparently thought he'd gone to hell. Santelli muffled the howl from his throat with a glove-no need to let the neighborhood know there were people here. Kai was the strongest man in the brigade, but even he could barely hold back a man who was writhing in pain. And the redhead was tossed aside, despite her height and weight. Santelli stepped on the wounded man's chest with his knee and deliberately stabbed him in the forehead with the hilt of his dagger. It helped. The screaming faded, Codure's eyes rolled back, and he collapsed into unconsciousness.

"It's not a cure, it's an atrocity..." muttered Bizo, but Santelie was sure the alchemist had remembered exactly what she was doing. Why the redhead was pouring "dead water" into the wound was unclear, but judging by the bows and general determination, she certainly knew what she was doing. Though given Codure's condition, there was certainly nothing that could damage him beyond what he had.

She poured the rest of the "dead water" onto a cloth and wrapped it around the wound, taking care not to tighten the knots all the way so that the bandage lay loosely enough.

Lena did what she could and stood in front of the ringleader. Her hand, drenched in alcohol (though it would probably be more accurate to call it moonshine), was tearing unmercifully with the claws of a sharp pain. It felt like her wrist was being slashed with a red-hot razor. Her legs were shaking, struggling to hold the girl up. Her arms, too, from both fatigue and nerves. After all, immobilizing a broken femur from memory, without any practice, was not for the faint of heart. And trying to disinfect the wound as best she could, Elena expected that now they would start to kill her for bullying their comrade. She had to thank the creepy "cat," for without his claws, she wouldn't have been able to show so convincingly that she wasn't torturing the poor man.

The bearded man was silent and stared at her, almost point-blank. It was the very attentive gaze of a clever and deadly man. There was no anger, no mockery, nothing to be afraid of. The chief simply looked like a supreme being, absolutely certain of his right to decide the fate of others. And if before he seemed to be a little afraid of the stranger himself, now he clearly looked down on her. Lena disliked the fact that someone looked down on her, even if not physically, especially a man. She disliked being evaluated like a pig in the marketplace, tweaking the balance of benefits and costs - and that was clearly read in the clever, tenacious eyes of the bearded man. She didn't like the prospect of being left alone among a gang of outright thugs with weapons accustomed to violence.

Except that the alternative to the bastards was a wasteland of gray grass, of crooked gray trees, populated by nightmarish creatures. And even the graves here had to be protected by grates. It was unclear whether from robbers or from whoever was buried under the stone slab. So Lena tried her best to keep a straight face and look openly into the face of the leader. Not a look in the eye. That was beyond her strength. But at least not to lower her eyes like a submissive sheep, either. The girl instinctively felt these were the seconds that truly decided her fate.

The bearded man grinned crookedly and tapped the glove he had used to gag the wounded man on his own hand as if to knock the dust out of it. He grinned again and waved the gauntlet toward the cart.

* * *

[1] A common nickname for all Profit seekers because tar torches are the indispensable companion of all descents underground, and tar tends to stain everything around.

[2] It may seem surprising, but the so-called "Pott's Rule" (immobilize one joint below the fracture and one above) was formulated only in the 18th century.

[3] The first meaningful attempts at disinfection date back to the 19th century, when they were performed, aincluding phenol, by additionally applying a foil bandage so that not a single drop was wasted. It looks barbaric, but even these barbaric methods gave a 3-5 times reduction in mortality from infection. Unlike cauterizations, which are useless and only further traumatize the unfortunate person.

Camrad_RIP · Jun 3, 2023

Chapter 6. "And they moved on..."

* * *

In Lena's mind, dashing men in dangerous lands were supposed to gallop on brisk horses, flashing their weapons. But the locals had only one horse, though well-groomed in appearance. It was not much chased and was not allowed to chew grass from under its hooves. The horse was given fodder from a sack. She thinks oats. The wagon was filled with crudely chipped crates and wicker baskets, bundles of torches, and some other tackle, on top of which was placed a carelessly thrown roach, on which in turn lay a wounded man with a broken leg. The wagon was ruled by a fat man in a hat, who looked like a local sorcerer. Or rather, he sat with an important look on the fetlock, for the horse mostly followed the leader. Everyone else stomped on foot and seemed to expect the same from Lena as a matter of course. It was hard to walk, her legs ached and her calves felt like wood, but the girl did not complain, reasoning that for now it was walking, and then we would see.

As she did so, she glanced surreptitiously at her traveling companions, and they looked at her quite openly, talking softly in their avian language. Except for the brunette with the awl on her pole, the glances were rather curious. With a slight hint of suspicion, but more out of habit than a concrete complaint. But the dark-haired warrior was squinting just as angrily, and each time Lena got a chill. In the woman's gaze she could clearly read that if it were up to her will, the sharpened awl would have gone to work long ago.

The sun was climbing up in the sky. The fellow travelers smelled tangible, as they should smell of people who hadn't washed or removed their clothes, or even their armor, in at least three or four days. The leather of the armor the warrior woman was wearing creaked. Every once in a while, there was a soft clang of metal. The ghoul, mouth half-open, still had his sword, resting it on his shoulder, pointing up and supporting it by the hilt. The blade clattered softly against his chainmail, and the sound was as unpleasant to the ear as the sound of a needle against the glass. Up close, the fighter seemed even scarier but no longer weak-minded. His gaze was not blank but rather unfocused. He's looking at everything around him at once like a wide-angle lens.

Suddenly the ghoul with the sword turned to Lena. The girl did not understand a word he said again and shook her head with a resigned expression. But she noted this time the words sounded a little different, with an elongated "r" and softened vowels. It seemed to be a different dialect or even a language but from the same group. And it seems the warrior couldn't breathe through his nose, which explains his perpetually open mouth. The swordsman shook his head with a rather sympathetic look and made two more attempts. Each time the phrase sounded short and similar to the previous ones, but the pronunciation and structure of the words changed. Convinced of the utter futility of his efforts, the ghoul shrugged and seemed to forget about his companion.

Lena continued to evaluate her "colleagues".

Fact she was caught up in some medieval age, and not earthly, Elena decided to consider it axiomatic. That is, for the time being, it did not require proof. But for a medieval, as she imagined the era to be, the occasional companions still looked both too poor and too well-groomed. They were poorly equipped and armed; only one had a sword, and the others were armed with spears, daggers, and axes. Another pair of short axes, in addition to the axe at the bearded man's belt, the girl noticed in the cart. It must be said, however, that the gear and clothing looked like things that had been meticulously cared for, and where there were rags (there were many), everything bore the marks of careful, though crude, mending. And no lice, as far as Elena could tell.

The whole gang was wearing short, low-heeled boots of the same pattern and seemingly without any division between left and right. The pants were almost the usual style, only looser, with no pockets, tucked into the shoes. In general, nothing resembled the culottes or huge trousers that Lena remembered from books. But the pants had codpieces, which looked like panties that had been pulled right over the pants. Everyone had codpieces, even the woman with the spear. It was probably not only a utilitarian article of clothing but also a sign of belonging to something, a symbol of a certain status.

No one offered food or drink, and Lena decided she had to ask somehow, but when she had already turned to the ghoul, something changed. The bearded leader got worried and moved quickly forward, keeping his hand on the axe at his belt. He bent down and smoothed the grass with his hand, got up, and zigzagged forward like an angry cat in the morning. There was a tangible whiff of suspicion and unease in the gang.

The fat "Gandalf" on the cart stood at the edge of the cart and gave a quick chant, after which the group immediately bristled with iron on all sides. The fat man in the hat and mantle dived into the cart and took out of his chest a round bottle with a thick cork filled with either wax or greasy resin. It was the same bottle that he had not let Elena open earlier. Inside was a strange yellow-green substance that looked like a viscous liquid and a thick mist at the same time.

Now Lena noticed that something had changed in the world around her. Not for the better. For a few moments, she didn't understand what had happened. The sun was still shining dimly, a few sadly waving clouds appeared in the sky, and the plain hadn't changed either... Though, no, now that the gang was visibly nervous, and Elena's senses were heightened, spurred on by thirst and hunger, the girl finally noticed something quite strange. Beyond all the local "strangeness".

It was rather difficult to describe due to the absence of any analogs from the usual life. The grass and the sparse fallen leaves are blown by the wind from distant trees seemed ordinary at first glance. At a second glance, too. But if you looked at them at a certain angle to the sun and squinted, it seemed that the ghost of winter had peeked into the world. The earth and grass played with a subtle silvery glow. It was as if two photographs had been photoshopped together, one showing the usual summer landscape and the other leaving only the effect of the frost sparkling in the sun. Therefore, the mind simply crossed out the already subtle image, refusing to believe in the frost in the middle, if not of summer, at least in the early warm autumn.

And it seemed to Lena that she had seen something like that a long time ago. But at that time, this very "something" seemed very harmless, one might say, childish. And now...

One look at the gang was enough to realize that there was no sign of childishness here. The serious, very imposing, and dangerous-looking men were clearly afraid. Not fidgetily, but, you could say, busily, in full readiness to fight to the death. But they were afraid.

The horse got nervous, too. It probably wasn't a good turn, but the girl didn't know what else to call the animal's reaction. The animal snorted, moved its ears restlessly, and stepped over its feet several times as if it couldn't wait to get as far away from here as possible. The sorcerer, not letting go of the ball of green slop, muttered a short gibberish and made a strange gesture with his free hand as if crossing the animal between the ears. The horse calmed down a little.

The bearded man, whose name, as far as the girl understood, was "Sateli," or something similar, returned to the cart. He put his hand into his waist bag and pulled out a small metal plate, judging by the dull luster, copper or brass. A hole was drilled into the round plate, and the ringleader stared into it, surveying his surroundings while keeping his other hand on the axe. There was complete silence, only the ubiquitous breeze rustling the grass.

And it seemed to rustle peculiarly, louder than it should...

"Damhain-allaidh!" threw "Sateli" into the void, short and angry.

Whatever these words meant, they didn't put the gang in a good mood. On the contrary, it added to the enthusiasm. Everyone seemed to move at once, to start acting, seemingly in disarray, but actually according to the same plan. It was as if all this was not new to them.

The girl, with her angry face, gripped the horse firmly under the bridles (or rather, the straps that came from the intricate harness on the muzzle, which Lena thought was what they called "bridles"). She pulled to the side, pulling steeply to the side. Ghoul sucked in the air loudly, gripping his sword with both hands. Each of the gang either helped turn the cart around or pushed it, or showed their readiness to defend themselves.

The bearded man caught Elena's perplexed and worried look, hummed, and handed her the plate, pointing his finger in the direction she should have been looking. In general, judging by the changed face of the man with pigtails and an axe, the gang had avoided very big trouble. The bearded man's hard, rugged face was clearly relieved, and he didn't even try to hide it.

It turned out that the plate acted as a simple optical device. I think they're called "diopters," or maybe not. The image in the hole wasn't getting any closer, but it was getting a little clearer, and that was probably useful on a plain like this. But the girl still didn't understand what had happened. Where the bearded man had pointed, she could see only two stones, short, about the waist height of a man. Only these were not as wide and flat as many of the others in the area but as if they were growing out of the ground, long and rather narrow. There was a third, a little further away, about the size of a resting horse.

But something scared the local killers...

Lena blinked, and then everything shifted. Like pictures of black and white illusions, where you can see a vase or two symmetrical faces, depending on the point of perception.

Those were not stones. Two men, seemingly in heavy, angular armor, were either kneeling or sitting. The outlines of their bodies were barely visible beneath the dense robes, which looked like many folded light curtains one thread thick. And the rock, which looked like a horse, was a horse. Only not a resting one, but a dead one. With the diopter, you could see the bones yellowing through the dried flesh.

Something moved next to the dead animal, either behind it or on it... Or in the corpse... It was as if someone had waved the dried branches.

Lena dropped the diopter, stepped back, and literally jumped away, but managed to stifle the cry of unthinking, blind terror bursting from her throat. Just in time. She could tell by the icy stare "Satelie" gave her and by the hand that jerked the axe halfway out from under his belt that the bandleader would kill on sight if only she could keep the voice down. Not wasting a second trying to calm her down.

As the girl searched the grass for the fallen plate with trembling fingers, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place in her head.

Not winter hoarfrost, but a spider's web. A huge field, covered with a spider's web, barely or barely marked at the edges and thickening as it approached the center. Two dead men, braided in an eerie web, surely long dead. And a dead horse, with something lurking in it, with long thin legs like dried twigs. It was alive, waiting, ready to attack.

Lena dropped the diopter twice more before she finally picked it up and handed it to the commander. The chief looked at the girl with disapproval. But at the same time - a strange thing - her reaction seemed to calm him. With what? Why? From these thoughts, her head, already overloaded with events, ached for good.

One way or another, the encounter with the spider terror was behind us. Nothing bad happened anymore. The cart circled a very wide arc around the danger zone and returned to its original path. The gang calmed down perceptibly. Ghoul put his sword back on his shoulder and handed the girl a glass flask with a wooden cork. Just when Lena was about to ask for it herself, by gesture or whatever. Inside turned out to be pale pink wine, very weak. Or water diluted with wine. Either way, it was drinkable.

"Gandalf" threw her a rusk from the cart, which Lena miraculously caught. The rusk was of an angular shape as if it had been pierced around the edges with a chisel, and its appearance alone recalled the definition from an old book - "triple hardening". But to a girl who hadn't eaten in twenty-four hours, had been on her feet for hours, and had lost some blood, it seemed like a gourmet meal.

"Give her some lard, you greedy fatty," Kai remarked.

"Lard costs money," muttered Bizo, not intending to untie the bundle of honey and lard before the evening halted. "You've got to harness that mare. She's stomping along like she ain't tired."

The swordsman grimaced; he could see that the redheaded "guest" was exhausted and could hardly move her legs. And she was gnawing on a triple hardened rusk from the Old Ambar with such a crunch as if a cementavr had crawled out of its lair to sharpen its fangs on old bones. But Kai remained silent, as did everyone else. The incident was not an easy one; it required careful thought.

After her encounter with the Gray Shadow - fortunately a successful one - it was finally clear that the redhead was an ordinary person, albeit a strange one, not of this world. Everyone is afraid of the Greys, even the hunters who catch the nightmarish creatures and sell them to the weaving manufactories. It pays only gold for spider silk, so the risk is worth the sacrifice. But it was not for nothing that the corralmen nicknamed the Shadows "quarters." A quarter of a good squad of thirty or forty fighters that is how many hunters you usually have to bury after a successful hunt (when there is someone to bury). Sometimes more, sometimes less. But on average, one out of every four. Math is a great thing. Kai did not doubt that Santelli had memorized all the landmarks of the Shadow's lair, and when he returned, he would sell them for good money. So they each get a few more coins...

The swordsman jerked his head, realizing that his thoughts were pulling him somewhere far away and out of place. Now, what was on his mind... Oh, yeah. Everyone's afraid of Shadows, but the redhead had an unconcealed horror about her. You can't play that, and there's no reason to. And for anyone who's wandered the wastelands, Shadows are scary but understandable and generally familiar. More than that, not too dangerous, to be sure. That is, she is not a witch.

Then who was it? Kai thought again, glancing at the girl who called herself Hel. A strange, strange maiden with a creepy nickname, the body of a grown woman who never went hungry, and the face of a frightened child, waiting for morning to come and the buka to hide back in the closet. The swordsman realized he was experiencing some confusion. He could usually tell unmistakably what trade any traveler he met was engaged in. The look, the hands, and the build all read like an open book to someone who knew letters and words. And all of Kai's life experiences told him that before him was a woman fighter ... who had never picked up a sword in her life. How is that possible...?

Mystery.

"The redheaded bitch," Shena said quietly, as if under her own nose, but everyone could hear her words in the thick afternoon air.

Soon they stopped for a halt. The sorcerer walked around the camp in a wide circle and was clearly doing something magical, breaking twigs and scratching marks directly on the ground with a bone knife. No brushwood was gathered, though it was possible to cut down a few nearby trees. They used what looked like yellowish laminated charcoal mixed with mica as fuel. Probably some kind of flammable shale; a whole basket of it was found in the cart, under the sacks.

Soon the smoke was up, and a pot of water was boiling on the fire. The cauldron was ceramic, with lugs inside, so it was suspended from an ordinary string without fear it would burn out. The sorcerer generously poured some herbs into the cauldron.

Not knowing where to put herself, Lena sat down by the cartwheel. She desperately wanted to bathe. A nice warm shower, or better yet, a bubble bath. Lots of foam! Lying in hot water for an hour, listening to Candy Dulfer's saxophone. And on top of that, some Clapton...

In the meantime, the wounded man, who had fallen into oblivion after the morning disinfection session, was dragged out of the cart and had not come out of it to this moment. Without mending, they changed his wet pants. The manners of the gang seemed to be simple.

The locals' outerwear was as "European" as it could be in a place where they probably didn't even know such a word. But the underwear (or should she say "underpants" or pants...?) was more like Japanese fundoshi underwear. Lena had seen them a long time ago in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. A long strip of fabric that was tied in a clever way, reminiscent of a cross between a loincloth and a g-string. Lena automatically imagined what such "panties" must look like on a strict dark-haired girl, whose name was "Sheena" (fractioning the second vowel in the stretch), with her quite modern, if slightly uneven, short hairstyle "garçon". It came out funny. However, in the direction of the angry brunette, Lena tried not to even look at unnecessary times. She seemed too angry and unfriendly.

The swelling was visibly gone, and the wound also looked relatively well. At least there was no sign of infection. The sorcerer, who was examining the patient, seemed moderately pleased on the one hand and puzzled on the other. It was as if the dying man had drunk the poison, but instead of dying, he had been miraculously healed. Lena must have looked no less puzzled. In the morning, she had not looked particularly closely at the body of the wounded man. She had enough other worries. Now she saw more and in a calmer atmosphere. Well, the girl could have sworn that a little above the poor man's knee was a familiar scar of a distinctive shape. A smallpox graft, only not in an oval "patch," but longer, like a scar from a cut.

The wounded lad, meanwhile, had regained consciousness and even said something in a weak voice. They gave him a drink, put a piece of food in his mouth that looked like an oily shiny pita with meat streaks, and then "Gandalf" took a flat bowl, put it on the poor man's chest, and poured some water into it. Lena waited for some kind of magical manipulation, but the fat magician just stared at the surface of the water, wrinkling and curling his lips.

When Lena realized what he was doing, she was not even surprised. This world had already presented enough amazing experiences. The girl sighed and began to act much more confidently.

"What does it mean?" Santelli asked.

"Uh..." Bizo didn't know what to say, trying to comprehend what had happened.

Santelli didn't ask for a second time; he only frowned so eloquently that the alchemist flinched.

"You try it," said Bizo, and, taking the foreman's hand, guided his fingers to the neck of the unconscious Codure again. Now it was a good, healthy fainting spell, far from the unconsciousness of a dying man, but that was not the case...

When Santelli realized, he didn't even swear, just took a deep breath of air soaked with the scent of boiled herbs.

"That's it," exclaimed Bizo. "It's that simple..."

A patient's breathing was always checked in two ways. One for big people and expensive doctors - with a polished silver plate or a mirror. Well, the latter, of course, was for the nobles and merchants and not even the middle class. The mirror is expensive, even if the size of a palm. The second is simpler, with a bowl of water on the chest.[1] It showed the heartbeat. The method is reliable, tested, and proven by many generations. And if there is no water nearby, it means that the sick man is unlucky. Now a thin vein was beating under the foreman's fingers, twitching in a clear, very familiar rhythm.

"And you were right," Bizo admitted very quietly. "She'll do us good. We'll sell it, just not on the human market.

"To the Apothecary," the foreman said even more quietly, with a slight smile, pretending that he had intended to do so all along. "We'll give it up for a percentage to Mama," winked Santelli, and the alchemist blurted out an understanding smile. From the looks on the other companions' faces, they understood the idea, too.

Santelli smiled again, this time to himself. It's always a good idea for a boss to pretend that everything profitable was meant to be that way from the beginning.

The attitude toward the girl had changed perceptibly. She didn't become a friend in the slightest, the wariness remained, but the harshness of the attitude had diminished. Now the bandits regarded Lena as someone who had come to the wrong company. He was not welcome, but there was nothing to kick him out for yet. The pulse measurement seemed to have finally convinced the non-believers of the companion's usefulness. She was given more wine, a crumpled tin cup of herbal infusion, and that strange pita bread, which was not bread at all. Rather, it was a kind of pemmican made of dried meat, fat, and crystallized honey. It tasted like lard soaked in sunflower oil, but it was surprisingly filling.

They dined in silence with only the crunching of the hardened breadcrumbs with which they munched the pemmican. Now Lena could examine her companions more calmly and carefully. No one stripped or removed their armor. Weapons were kept close at hand at all times, even the seemingly harmless, well-fed mage carried a thin, sharp dagger like an ice pick in the folds of his cloak.

The ghoul, who was addressed as "Kai," liked Lena more and more by the minute. Well,... It was probably more accurate to say that the warrior seemed less repulsive. The girl was convinced she had been very wrong about her first assessment. The swordsman's gaze was intelligent and very attentive, without the slightest malice. The face was not so much unpleasant as it was very "sharp," with a distinct bone under the skin. And yes, it seems he really couldn't breathe through his nose, hence the constantly ajar mouth. She cannot help but be reminded of Kristen Stewart and the joke of one of Lena's acquaintances, who, at the release of each new film of the actress, sneeringly asked if the lady had mastered the subtle and complex art of closing her mouth.

Lena smiled at her thoughts, and Kai smiled, too, apparently taking her emotions personally. He smiled very stingily, not with his lips, but rather with the corners of his eyes, with a faint movement of his facial muscles. It looked ... manly. However, the moment of good mood was replaced by sadness. Lena remembered that she was actually infinitely away from home, films with Stewart, friends, and even just a warm shower. And away from her parents... Besides, the girl caught the unpleasant, ominous stare of the short-haired brunette again. The dark-haired Sheena had placed her short, nasty-looking spear under her right arm and was occasionally running her fingers over the dark notched shaft. As if she was just waiting for a chance to drive the point into the belly of an unwelcome guest.

In the light of the receding sun, the warrior's pupils glowed emerald with a subtle yellowish cast, like a true panther's. She had beautiful eyes and a striking appearance; if the woman were on the streets of a modern city, she would attract the attention of men and women alike. Even her haircut, made obviously by her own hands and without any mirror, looked like the intentional carelessness of the master. In front of Lena's inner eye again imagined Sheena with her hair artistically disheveled and in a thong band. Elena caught herself wondering how such an unusual lady was among the apparent gang. And, judging by the attitude of the others, she was, how should I put it... "one of her own," so to speak.

The sun touched the horizon and got a murky red color. The fire was trampled, and the rest of the mug's drink was poured over the embers. Helena was surprised at first, then thought that it made sense in its way. Apparently, the gang didn't want to give themselves away with light in the darkness of night. Though what darkness is there... The moon was already crawling out to replace the departing sun, just as huge as the last time but with a much bigger blue.

"If anyone has anything to say to me, now is the time."

Santelli finished his last bite and wiped his greasy fingers with a bundle of grass. Bizo shook his head in a sign that he certainly had nothing to say. The alchemist whispered, wiggled his fingers, and the barred symbols gleamed with a brief, dim glow. Now no one would pass them in secret until the first light of the sun.

Kai shrugged. He even seemed to like the witch who wasn't a witch.

Viall thought about it, shook his head, and pulled the cap he'd never taken off, even in his sleep.

That left Shena, and she behaved exactly as the foreman had expected. That is, she snorted and made a disgruntled grimace, but kept silent. She did not risk going against the whole brigade. Especially since the redheaded witch's undeniable usefulness was now obvious and undeniable.

Santelli sighed and rubbed his palms together, thinking that it would be sooner if they reached the Gate. There would be a bath. A real bathhouse, clean clothes, not roasted on a fire, but washed by hard-working laundresses. And a certain glorious institution where he would be welcomed... At this point, he forbade himself to dream. First, he must get to the Gate. The rest, including the pleasures, must come later.

"That's fine," summed up the foreman. "Shifts as usual. If all goes well, we'll be home tomorrow."

The word "home" sounded dry and unsympathetic. Like just another place, along with many others.

"Wait!" this time, Shena couldn't stand it.

Santelli raised an eyebrow and tucked his pigtails behind his ears with a slight movement.

"I understand everything," the lancer glanced furtively at the redhead, who seemed to be falling asleep sitting upright.

"And?" the foreman prompted her to continue with seeming gentleness.

"I won't spend the night with her," Shena said with stubborn and defiant determination, running her palm through her hair as if she were combing it back. It was a longstanding habit of the lancers, a sign of her willingness to stand her ground to the end and to fight if necessary.

"I don't believe her," finished Shena grimly. "Let her sleep behind the circle!"

Santelli thought that if he was attracted to women, perhaps he would even take the fierce warrior as his wife. A bad spouse in the Kingdoms, an excellent companion here, where the line between life and death is measured by the width of a blade's edge. Yes, it's a pity...

Shena's words were met with understanding if not agreement. Even Kai seemed to have discovered a touch of courtly chivalry. Everyone remembered that the redhead wasn't a witch and knew a lot of useful things, but the other oddities were still there.

"Fair enough," Santeli waited for the right moment when Shena's anger peaked and was ready to break out in a small riot. The brigadier's calm, judicious voice thwarted her impulse and made it dissolve in vain.

"Fair enough," repeated the chief. "But we won't let her out of the circle; if someone drags her there, that's lost money. We'll do it another way..."

When the ringleader took out a thin but strong rope and gestured that he intended to tie Lena to the cart for the night, the girl nearly escaped into the approaching semi-darkness, generously diluted by the moonlight. That was the last thing she expected, and the last thing she wanted, was to find herself in chains in the middle of a camp of some murky and ominous types.

But the gang definitely intended to insist. She didn't want to spend a second night "outdoors". More importantly...

For the first few minutes, the redhead seemed ready to run away right now without a backward glance. And in some ways, Santelli understood her. As a man with a good imagination, he could well imagine himself as a maiden (though not a very young one, judging by her uniform) in the middle of a brigade that was not accustomed to chivalrous courtesies. Except, of course, for Kai. But the crew's wish was indeed a fair one, and the redhead should have chosen what she feared more - an overnight stay outside the circle or the possible intrigues of her companions. For himself, Santelli had resolved that no one would lay a finger on his companion until her price at the Apothecary was settled. But it was impossible to explain it to the speechless girl.

The difficulty was resolved as quickly as it had begun; the redhead suddenly agreed to everything and even put up her own hands. She smiled enigmatically and placidly as if she expected at least a silk handkerchief as a present.

Perhaps the proximity of strangers seemed more appealing and safe than the night terrors after all.

At first, she was frightened. She was very frightened when the familiar feeling of unreality of what was happening came over her. But after a moment, she felt a rush of hot joy. It was coming back! The same lingering feeling of the incompleteness of the world around her, of its partial disembodiment, which was about to be shattered by the shards of non-existence.

Let them bind her in triple seas, let them practice shibari on her! It doesn't matter.

She's coming home. Home!

To hell with damn Kansas!!!

* * *

Camrad_RIP · Jun 8, 2023

Chapter 7. "I'm looking for a woman..."

* * *

Nothing happened.

There was a moment when it seemed to Lena that her hands were translucent, and her clothes were vibrating finely as if every thread was being electrocuted. The girl squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the lights to turn off again, and the outlines of the familiar, so familiar apartment would appear around her...

But that was all there was to it. Kansas didn't disappear, and the world around her remained where it was, down to the last blade of grass and the unfamiliar star in the alien sky. The episode had passed without any consequences.

She had no strength left to even cry. The immense fatigue, grief, and disappointment enveloped the unhappy woman in a dark canopy, plunging her into a borderline state between sleep and fainting. And so the night passed quietly, without incident. Only in the distance, there was a loud and mighty croaking. Like an ordinary frog, but the size of a bull, no less.

Lena woke up, or rather fell out of a semi-consciousness, in the morning, before sunrise. It could not be said that she had not rested at all. Still, for a city girl, the conditions were more laconic than Spartan - a small felt pad instead of a pillow and a thin, though warm cloak instead of a mattress. But on the whole, fatigue was relegated to the background. Perhaps Lena would have walked on her own feet for a few more hours despite the pain deeply embedded in the ligaments and muscles of her legs.

The sentry - it was Kai - was sitting over the cold fire, holding his sword in his lap. He turned his head toward Lena and, after a moment's hesitation, turned back. The girl rubbed her palms together, dispersing the blood. They had tied her up quite neatly, leaving a small gap between the wrists and a short "leash" from a cartwheel. So the blood circulation was not interrupted, and some freedom of movement remained. The knots were very clever. Lena didn't know such, and in the usual fibers were woven thin black threads, glossy in the moonlight. Perhaps the cord was magical, too, so that it could not be cut in secret.

A wizard named Bizo snored in his sleep. A wounded man with a broken leg mumbled softly in his half-slumber. Shena curled under her cloak, cuddling her spear like a long-awaited lover. In her sleep, in the soft moonlight, her angry face softened, and her features smoothed. Usually, sleeping people are serene, but a shadow of sadness lingered on the black-haired woman's face. It was as if she had been dreaming a long and unhappy dream.

But the leader Santeli was awake. He half-lounged and silently looked at Lena with impenetrable dark eyes. Under that gaze, the girl felt very uncomfortable, and she turned in the other direction in the course of the former movement of the small column. There, in the distance, flickered distant lights scattered, merging into a patch the size of a fingernail or even smaller. Fire. And judging by the fact that the blur didn't change, it wasn't a fire; it must have been the Geataichean that the bandits had mentioned several times.

Gate.

"Go to bed," Santelli said softly to the sentry. "There's something about me that makes me sleepy. I'll stay up till morning."

Kai nodded silently and gratefully. After a few minutes, he fell asleep in silence, with his sword on his chest and his tightly rolled-up jacket under his head. He never took off his chainmail.

Lena shuddered, lifted her head sharply, and the remnants of her drowsiness flew off her like an old cobweb in a gust of wind. The girl realized she knew the meaning of the word "Geataichean". And she understood what the leader had said to the swordsman. Apparently, the mysterious shimmer hadn't gone away after all. This time it gave the alien from the other world knowledge of the language.

She felt very cold, a shiver stabbing at her heart. Her hands became numb and insensitive under the ropes. Lena was frozen with fear. And incomprehension. And vice versa, a creepy understanding that the seizure did not bring her closer to home but rather cemented her presence here.

"You understand me."

The bearded man was still watching carefully. He spoke softly but not in a whisper. Trustingly, but with palpable superiority. Like a well-fed tiger that doesn't want to kill. Not yet. She wonders if there are tigers here. If so, it would be the beast of choice for the chief.

"Yes," said Lena, just as quietly.

Santelli frowned, and she belatedly realized that she had answered in her native language.

The knowledge was beating somewhere close by, as if behind the melting ice grid of memory. This is what happens when one learns a language as a child and then does not use it at all for many years. Afterward, the speech seems both familiar and incomprehensible at the same time.

"Dtha," the local "yes," turned out to be very close to Russian.

"That's good," shook Santelli's head.

They were quiet for a while.

"Who are you?" asked the leader. "Where are you from?"

Again it took Lena some time. The newfound knowledge worked like an old water balloon toy with inscriptions on plastic tablets. First, the memory had to be well shaken, and then the right wording, or rather words that had to be tried together, popped into her head.

"I ... talk... bad," she said with difficulty.

"I understand," Santeli said, not objecting but rather stating. He looked around, listening, cocking his head and wiggling his ear amusedly. And then he repeated. "Who are you?"

"I... don't know."

"You don't know? Or don't ..."

Her answer didn't seem to surprise him at all. But Lena did not understand the last word. Or rather, several possible meanings jumped into her head at once. "Memory"... yes, "memory" seems to be the root word here. So, most likely, Santelli asked - does not know or does not remember, has forgotten.

And how should she answer that? To tell a story about suddenly falling out of her world to no one knows where?

"I don't know," she decided.

"I think you're trying to trick me," smiled the bandit. His smile was kind of scary. Quite open, without a vicious grin, but... it made the bearded chieftain look more like a tiger, fully aware of his power.

Lena gritted her teeth and clenched her awkward, still numb fingers into fists. She doesn't want to go off on a tantrum or an excuse. Or ridiculous attempts to tell him about her former life. Hold on, hold on, under the cold gaze of the man with the axe!

"Anything can happen. Maybe you're running away from someone. Maybe you've lost your memory with a spell," Suntelli said thoughtfully. "That's none of our business. The question is... What can you do?"

"Do?" repeated the girl mechanically.

"Tomorrow, even before sundown, we will return to the Gate," explained Santelli kindly. He spoke slowly and very intelligibly. "There, we will have to decide what to do with you. I can sell you. I can put you to work as an apprentice, as a servant, for a fee. What can you do?"

Things got very confusing. It seems that from the ringleader's point of view, selling people was something quite ordinary. Jesus, what is this place so creepy?

"I ... probably ..." Lena wondered.

And what can she really do that is useful in the here and now?

"Do you know any other tricks like that?" Santelli made an eloquent gesture of putting his fingers to his neck, imitating a pulse check.

"N-not much," Lena said quickly. "I guess so. I need to remember."

"Try to remember," Santelli advised him very seriously, without a trace of humor. "That will decide your fate. Tomorrow.

"And if you let me go?" This time the verbal construction came out almost immediately.

"Someone else will sell you," now, Santelli seemed a little surprised at the naivete of his guest. Such an expression might have appeared on the face of a man in front of whom they began to eat soup with a knife and pulled a shoe over the head.

"You're not from around here," it sounded like a statement again. It was as if Santelli were thinking out loud.

"Yes, yes," Lena repeated the answer to be sure. "Distant lands. Very."

Again a distant and huge frog squawked. As if to echo it, something howled from the opposite side of the camp. The howl sounded like a cat's snarl, laced with very high-pitched shrieks. The leader didn't even turn his head, so there was probably no danger in the night.

"It's all amazing," Santelli sighed, running the braid between his fingers. "And mysterious. You're strange."

He looked at her point-blank. Lena tried, out of sheer stubbornness, to hold his gaze, and lasted ten seconds, even a little longer. Then she looked away.

"Tomorrow, I'll bring you to the Apothecary," Santelli didn't ask or speculate. Now he was just putting it out there. And the word "Apothecary" was pronounced with a certain reverence. "Try to surprise, there. Show there something else ... medicinal. You'll be an apprentice. Maybe. And no one will ask who you are. Where you come from. What you do."

"What if I can't?"

"You really are from very faraway places," Santelli sighed with the look of an adult who has heard cute childish nonsense. "Trust me, anything else won't make you happy."

"I can also fight!" Lena remembered the rapiers crossed over the fireplace and the fencing lessons. A wave of self-confidence and even a slight annoyance pelted the girl - how could she have forgotten! It was a world of magic and the sword. And she knew how to wield a sword. Not really a sword, of course, but a rapier, and to tell you the truth, not that well. But she was decent enough, better than most. Most importantly, she knew the techniques, knew the theory, and had a sense of distance. Her knowledge grew out of fencing, which had evolved over the centuries from barbarism to an exact science and sports discipline. This meant that Lena was knowingly several steps above any medieval fighters.

"Fight?" Santelli looked surprised. "You don't look like a fighter. Your nose isn't broken. All your teeth are in place."

"I know how to wield a long, narrow blade," the young swordswoman explained, trying to find the right, most accurate words. "I am skilled in the art of combat."

"Do you know how to fight in formation and back-to-back?" clarified the bandit. "Under the banner, in large and small units?"

"No," said Lena patiently. "I know how to fight with a sword."

"Then you don't own the fight," retorted Santelli. "But ..."

The ringleader hummed, showing offensive disbelief in Lena's claimed talents.

"We'll see where you stand in the morning."

* * *

Morning crept up. Though the people were awake in the predawn twilight, no one was in any hurry to leave the enchanted circle until the sun had risen. Everyone was washing their faces. They poured water from a separate bag on a rag and carefully wiped their faces and necks. Everyone had his rag. From the smell, some light herbal fragrance was mixed into the leather bag, and it smelled unobtrusive yet pleasant at the same time. However, the smell was not associated with any flora known to Lena. No fire was lit. The girl had water poured into her outstretched palms but very little, and the wizard's face read clear condemnation. Not targeted, but rather, in general, concerning the consumption of precious moisture.

She did not notice anything like the prayers she was used to. Either it was not common here, or the rituals were too different from what she was used to, and Lena simply did not notice them.

The news that the uninvited guest spoke (albeit poorly) in human language was taken by the public quite calmly, even philosophically. In general, Elena has a strong feeling that her fellow travelers perceive the world somewhat differently than she does. Somehow ... calmly. More detached in terms of cause and effect. They were worried about what was happening here and now. Perhaps it was the effect of their dangerous lives and frequent proximity to death, perhaps the presence of magic in the world. Although it could be a misinterpretation, Lena's experience with the natives was still minuscule.

And then Santelli, as promised, gave the guest the opportunity to show off her skills.

Viall, the fighter in the thick wool coat and the hat that seemed to be attached to his head burst out laughing, not even trying to hold back. Wizard Bizo hid his smirk in the shadow of his hat. Kai frowned with an expression of extreme skepticism. Shena, on the other hand, smiled broadly and quite genuinely, her whole look of anticipation. It was a beautiful smile, but it was a wicked one. The spearwoman stepped onto the patch between the fire and the inner boundary of the guard circle and deftly turned her short spear like a Shaolin monk, but did not stand up in cunning stances, only slightly crouched on springy legs.

Lena looked around. Apparently, no one was going to offer her a weapon. But even if they had... Only now, she thought about the fact that there was a clear shortage of rapiers in the team. So she had nothing to show for it. However, today she felt a little more confident.

Lena turned to Santelli and silently measured a distance of about a meter in the air with her hands. Just like the day before, when they made a splint for the wounded Codure. The chief looked intently at the whole affair. He shrugged and tossed her the stick they used to hang the kettle from when they cooked. The stick, by the look of it, was multipurpose, knowingly longer than necessary for its primary purpose.

Lena deftly caught it, tried it on her hand, and swung it a few times. It was a bit heavy, the center of gravity was not where it should be, but it would do. She stood in a classic stance. Right foot in front, knees springing, left foot slightly unloaded, a point at left eye level. The free arm is behind, slightly up, and loosely half-bent. Everything is subject to the "one vertical plane" rule.

It was uncomfortable to hold the stick. Her fingers immediately stiffened without a comfortable handle, but her body seemed to respond, joyfully remembering the learned movements. Lena smiled, enjoying the feeling of newfound strength, performed a short parade, and indicated a slight bow toward her opponent. Shena seemed to take this as a taunt. She frowned and clenched her teeth so that her lips turned into a thin, pale line. Her fingers clenched on the shaft of the spear.

"No," Santeli threw in briefly. He snapped his fingers and made a short gesture to Kai. The swordsman quickly replaced Shena as if just waiting for that. The spear maiden was visibly upset but did not argue. Only the spear in her hands trembled as if begging for blood.

"By the clap," warned Santelli.

Kai had his sword in his right hand and a short cloak hanging loosely on his left. He had a frontal and "counter" stance against Lena, which meant that Kai didn't put his left leg back, but instead put it slightly forward.

The sword looked solid, with a simple guard and an elongated hilt that could be held with both hands or, as now, with one. It made the swordswoman a little nervous that the blade was real, uncovered. On the other hand, it looked like a weapon for a wide stout swing. And that meant that the heavy iron trunks were doomed to lose to a measured, mathematically precise, and swift jab.

The whole gang went silent, and even the horse seemed to squint its big dark eye at the duelists. Lena swallowed and repeated to herself the sequence of actions she had learned in regular training. No tricky combinations, just the simplest, quickest, and most proven. A classic jab with a single feint and minimal displacement of the tip. In the chest, closer to the neck, so that the hit is visible and palpable. It is desirable not to hit the face, or the improvised "rapier" can smash into the blood.

Her muscles were humming like steel strings stretched to the limit, demanding movement, attack, victory. Kai, on the other hand, seemed relaxed and as if he were settling, as if all his muscles wanted to drain from his bones to the ground. Even the cloak on his arm hung limply and sadly.

Inhale and exhale. The rising sun wasn't blinding, and her feet were firmly planted on the dry, hard ground so she wouldn't slip. The faintest scent of washing water still tickled her nostrils.

Santelli didn't clap but snapped his fingers. And...

It happens that consciousness begins to lag behind the vision. The eye captures something, but by the time reflection comes, everything has already changed rapidly. Moments before the attack began, Kai in turn, did... incomprehensible what. It was as if a huge bat had flapped its wings. The next second the swordswoman realized that the swordsman had thrown his cloak over her. It wasn't a musketeer's way of deflecting a lunge. It was a special way of throwing it, covering her like a gladiator retiarius net. In a split second, Lena realized this and waved her stick, trying to sweep the cloak aside while taking a well-earned step back. But Kai was already coming off the ground in a powerful throw, body forward, just like an American soccer player in a breakout. And when the swordswoman realized she had to go even farther to the side and back, her opponent hit her.

In fact, the blow was not strong, the swordsman certainly did not want to hurt his opponent. It was not even so much a blow as a stretched, strong jolt. Lena rolled over the ground and found herself on all fours, dropping her "weapon".

Santelli chuckled, and the rest of the gang expressed their feelings in a much more open and unrestrained manner. Kai nodded silently to them all at once, as if thanking them for the honors, and just as silently turned to Lena with a mute question. The girl gritted her teeth and raised her "rapier." Kai threw up his hands, demonstrating that he no longer had his cloak on him.

Gritting her teeth to the point of crunching, Lena got back into position. The gang's taunts burned like nettles on fresh abrasions. Everyone was on Kai's side and made no secret of it. Out of resentment, the girl felt an acute desire to humiliate her opponent in return. To bend in front of his comrades. Demonstrate her superiority in the most insulting way possible. In the corner of her mind, she knew that Kai had only won a training fight, but... it was all becoming very personal.

"And now without ..."

Lena did not understand the last word of Santelli, but in tone and root, it meant something like "a weak trick," or "a giveaway".

"Are you ready?" Kai asked grimly. And again, judging by his tone, he didn't mean technically ready but rather determined to go on.

Lena only performed the parade in silence. Not out of respect for her opponent but more out of habit. The swordsman intercepted the sword with both hands and brought it out to the side, twisting the body slightly so that the long handguard bar partially covered his face. Lena noticed fleetingly that the sword seemed to have seen better days. There were small empty slots at the base of the blade, the guard and the tip, and some sort of file-cut rivets. It was as if the weapon had been adorned with applied details and jewels. Now there was only a strictly functional base without any ornamentation. Also, the blade was single-bladed, though it repeated Lena's usual form of a knight's sword. But all this flashed in a kaleidoscope of images because her muscles were already in motion, acting like an extremely assembled and well-coordinated mechanism.

The tutors would have been proud of the student given her long lack of training. The stab was excellent - good technique, multiplied by the energy of rage. This time Kai was really late with his parry, caught in a false lunge, and then the "tip" of the improvised rapier struck the pelerine, below his throat, exactly the width of his palm.

And ... the fight continued.

The sword dropped flat in an arc from top to bottom and the side, knocking the stick down, and Kai was already shifting his weight from foot to foot, swinging forward like a cobra in a rush. Santelli expected the swordsman to execute a typical countermove - an interception of the enemy's blade with his weak hand and a sharp blow to the face with the hilt. It's hard and sharp, usually with the right punch - and Kai was a very good fighter - the hilt takes out the eye, but the redhead just asking for it. Shena would have nailed her with an ahlspies as early as the first round. Once again, however, the swordsman took pity on his opponent. He simply stepped forward and hit the swordswoman head-on, not even on the nose. That was the end of the fight, to the disappointed roar of the audience. Bizo looked sad - he wanted to bet a few pennies on Kai's victory, but no one accepted the bet because it was a foregone conclusion.

Lena sat with her back to the cartwheel, trying to stop the ringing in her ears. Her forehead rumbled like a pile under a coping hammer. Weakness spread through her body. But it was a cosmic, boundless incomprehension that was stronger - how could all this have happened?

It happened a long, long time ago, as a child, when she had brilliantly learned a poem on a dare with Grandpa, spending the whole weekend on it, and was ready to recite it, winning a special prize. But it turned out that the girl mixed up pages in the assignment and learned the wrong poem. Most insulting of all was the understanding, stubbornly breaking through the insulted pride - the opponent probably did not do anything mean or dishonest. She was the one who had rushed to show off her skills without finding out what the rules of the fight were.

And in the background, a sad thought stirred - her fighting skills didn't belong here. At least not without serious retraining.

"What do you say?" asked Santelli in a low voice.

The Brigadier was very good with weapons and, in principle, could have fought Kai almost on equal terms, axe with a shield against a sword. But the swordsman had a good, proper school of combat under his belt, and he saw things that could pass the eyes of Santelli, who had been taught only by brutal practice.

"Interesting," stretched out the usually terse Kai. "Very interesting."

He was silent, and Santelli waited patiently, seeing that his interlocutor was not stretching out a dramatic pause but was looking for the right words.

"She's been taught, and not badly," Kai finally said. "But taught ... strange. As if her school didn't use armor at all.

"Hmm..." pondered Santelli. "Oh, that's right, she poked you in the chainmail and stopped like that was the end of the fight."

"Yeah. I've seen that in ..." Kai hesitated. "Anyway, it's purely dueling practice. A desperation technique in a fight with a knowingly stronger opponent. "Stab faster and more than you get stabbed," with no regard for defense or "Retaliation."

"What?" the foreman didn't understand.

"When one is almost killed, still chops or stabs in a last effort," Kai explained.

"And where do they teach that?" asked the down-to-earth foreman.

"I have no idea. One thing's for sure, they don't train like that in Monasteries and Martial fraternities," the swordsman looked just as puzzled as his commander. "I'd wager she was trained by some dumbass brether... They make up all sorts of "marvelous schools of unstoppable skill" and run around with them, taking money from simpletons. Until they run into a good fighter."

Kai thought for a while again. And then he finished:

"But it only moves back and forth, like a narrow path, and the "Master's Circle" or "Long Cross" is the first place any mentoring begins."

Santelli spat with an overabundance of impressions.

"And you noticed all that from two short skirmishes?" he clarified, just in case.

Kai wrinkled his face in the grimace of an offended professional. He turned away in silence and went back to the cart. It looked on the verge of disrespect, but the brigadier knew that he had provoked the best fighter with his obvious doubt.

"Strange things are happening," muttered the brigadier, and thought of blessing himself with a holy sign but changed his mind and said only words. "Pantocrator, protect and preserve," and then he commanded. "Let's pack up! Time is of the essence. I want to see the smoke of the Gate by sundown.

Anyway, everyone was already turning down camp at a brisk pace. Everyone was anxious to get back as soon as possible, to face the night in a clean bed and a clean nightgown. Or in a decent inn, over a mug of beer, not magically preserved water with the taste of spider urine.

"Get in the cart," mercifully ordered the foreman to the redhead, who was still reeling from the blow to her head. The scarlet mark adorned her forehead in a most picturesque place, strictly in the center.

Biso went over his markings, carefully erasing them so that Pantocrator wouldn't pull the "thread". Kai checked his sword, for he knew that usually, the worst trouble comes last when you don't expect it. An inner voice told the swordsman that the adventure wasn't over yet.

Lena was used to experiencing her failures seriously, trying to learn the most from them. Her mother's perfectionism was also partly to blame; a strict woman, a typical "self-made woman" from the remote provinces, never allowed her daughter to put the brakes on a mistake. On the contrary, she would go back to the failure over and over again until it turned out to be corrected. Therefore, the defeat plunged the girl into deep grief, and Lena automatically expected the others that she would not forget the shameful loss. But the locals had a very different attitude to life. Everyone seemed to have forgotten about the morning's fight, deeply and completely lost in their travel worries. Even the stern Shena stopped casting gloomy glances at Lena, which clearly showed what the warrior would do to the uninvited guest if it were up to her will.

On reflection, Elena decided it must be because fighting must be the norm of life here. So a catastrophic failure for her was a passing amusement for everyone else. Sitting was tough. The cart turned out to be filled with some crates, barrels, and small implements, among which Lena recognized only a few items like a large-mesh net, a lantern with a half-burned candle, a bunch of short, thick arrows with plumage of thin shavings. I guess the gang didn't have enough money to buy a horse for everyone, so they used a cartload of stuff and work tools for the whole company.

How much time had passed, she could not say; probably two or three hours. The cart moved briskly enough at the speed of an ordinary pedestrian. Santelli cheered with every mile, while Kai, on the contrary, grew darker, not letting his sword out of his hands. All the more surprising that it was the brigadier who first noticed the new possible danger. And he immediately made the right decision.

"Get under the burlap," the ringleader commanded briefly, placing his palm on the axe. It seemed to be a traditional gesture for him on all occasions.

At first, Lena did not realize that the order referred to her, but Bizo understood correctly. He ducked her head lower with unexpected strength for his build and pulled a tarpaulin of the very coarse and thick thread of sparse weave over her head. Nearby sniffled the wounded Codure, who had been dozing all the way, waking only to a morning bandage and a mug of water. For a moment, Lena felt a prick of smugness. After all, it was she who had almost pulled the sufferer from the other side of the world, and his sleep no longer resembled a deathbed lethargy. Then pride gave way to anxiety.

Something seems to happen all the time in this "Kansas"...

"There's nothing to show the girl to the world," muttered Santelli. "It's not a market, there's no money in it."

Kai lightly knocked Lena over the head with his blade, flat through the burlap.

"Stay low," the swordsman warned.

Now the whole brigade could see what the commander was worried about. A small cavalry unit appeared from the east. So far, the men on tiny horses seemed no bigger than half a little finger, but they were approaching fast. And that meant the cavalrymen were looking for the pack of Proffitt hunters.

"Somehow, they're looking for adventure close to the Gate," Bizo remarked with some surprise.

Viall was silent as usual, preparing his spear and pulling his hat tighter. Shena, too, checked the point of the ahlspies with her thumb, which was already capable of scratching diamonds. Kai pulled a simple helmet with an arrowhead without a screw from the cart.

"Six," Santeli reported, using the perforated plate. "And I don't see anybody behind them. Put up the horse."

Shena held back horse number three. The cart shuddered and stopped with a slight creak.

"Well, if it's not an ambush, the vagabonds won't get away with it," thought Shena aloud. "It's almost evenly matched."

Santelli said nothing. As a brigadier, he stepped forward, deceptively calm, with a dagger in one hand and an axe in the other. The bowstring of the crossbow, drawn by the hidden Bizo, creaked. The alchemist knew his place in the fight - behind and under the cart, trying not to get hit, thrusting his arrows and dagger into the enemy's belly as best he could.

"It's Ranyan," Kai said, wrapping the cloak of the day tightly around his arm.

In the meantime, the cavalrymen were close enough to see their armor and equipment. They did not look like sergeants but were close to it. The first had long black hair, shoulder-length and low, waving in the wind, unprotected by helmet or cap, not even a strap.

"'Ranyan-" repeated Santelli, looking as if he had chewed an entire pod of island peppers.

"With him, we'll part ways," Shena suggested quietly.

"No spares horses," Kai pointed out.

No one answered; it was clear enough. No spares meant that the party was off the road and headed this way to meet the brigade. Or maybe the cavalry had gone on a long march and had exhausted their horses, which meant they were at work.

Ranyan was known as an honest and very obliging man, which in his job as a free mercenary routier was not easy but profitable. He was also extremely principled, would not kill children, and would not kill women unless paid twice as much. An encounter with a mercenary on the eve of the Gate could pass without incident - unless the brigade was part of his new order. And it promised a bloody stabbing if there was a conflict of business interests.

The horse unit shifted from galloping to trotting and then to walking at a steady pace. The horses didn't look completely exhausted, but they looked tired. So did the dust-covered riders. They wore thick leather armor, small shields, and "ratty" cleavers forged from a single piece of metal so that the hilt was a thin bar bent forward and upward as a staple to cover their fingers. The staple did indeed resemble a rat's tail, hence the name. Two of them had short jeridical spears in special cases on their saddles.

The cavalry leader gestured nonchalantly to stop his small army and moved the horse forward a few paces more himself. His long, very dark, bluish hair hung loose on either side of his face, without plaits or shaved temples. The short mustache and goatee were very neatly trimmed, though the stubble gave away the fact that he had been on the road for days. The face and hairstyle were those of a professional fencing fraternity batterer. Normally they flaunted heavy two-handed swords, but this fighter had no weapons on his belt except a pair of daggers. But by the saddle in a simple wooden sheath hung a long "piercer" - a heavy cavalry sword, which some particularly strong and skilled knights took in addition to the spear. It was impossible to cut with it - the sword was a long faceted awl without a blade. But if you were fast enough, you could pierce the strongest armor and even ordinary chainmail that was worn on the badlands, "piercer" sews like a needle's handkerchief.

All this was obvious and understandable to Santelli and any other member of the brigade. Lena, lurking under the mantle and watching through the tiny hole, saw only a grim and sinisterly handsome warrior on horseback. He looked more like a musketeer from the movies, a sort of Rochefort with the cold, arrogant look of a natural warrior. He looked as if his hair had come straight out of the seventeenth century.

"My respects," Ranyan was supposed to introduce himself first according to unwritten rules, which he did.

"Greetings," Santelli nodded, not letting go of his weapon. It wasn't very polite, but it was within the bounds of propriety. A wasteland is a wasteland, and the mercenary had not announced his purpose, not even dismounted.

The brigadier did not see the redheaded girl hiding under the cloak. But if he had, he would have been very surprised. Lena was petrified, closing her eyes and clenching her fists. A chilling terror gripped her, an unbearable panic. When "Rochefort" spoke, she recognized that deep, strong voice.

Riadag. The sound of severed flesh, the cries, and pleas of the murdered. The corpses on the road, the murdered girl. Her dead gaze and the mute, endless cry to the sky. The voice of the calm, cold-blooded killer who sought Riadag. Now she understood what the word meant.

Spark.

"I'm looking for a person," Ranyan said with a grim calm in which a note of mortal fatigue rang out. "A woman. A red-haired woman, probably young. Most likely, she is dressed in an unusual, strange way and has a poor mastery of human speech. If you have met her, I am prepared to reward you generously. Very generously."

* * *

Camrad_RIP · Jun 12, 2023

Chapter 8. "The Gate"

* * *

In the silence, she could hear a gadfly buzzing in the distance. A crow cawed farther away as if expecting a quick meal.

"We don't know anything about that."

"Pity," Ranyan didn't seem to expect any other answer. "Do you mind if I take a look?" the fighter pointed his gloved hand toward the cart.

"I'm against it," the foreman sulked. "What we bring in is our business. And the wounded man is there."

Santelli was in his right - Profit is Profit. What you find is yours, you can show it to the world, and you can hide it as far away as possible by hiding it in a hiding place. Ranyan was well aware of that. But from all indications, the mercenary had almost failed another assignment and was ready to go to any extreme. And extremes in the wastelands are commonplace. What no one saw has never happened.

Ranyan pursed his lips, tugged the reins as he did so, and the horse stepped over with its heavy, shod hooves, barely visible from beneath its thick wool, like those of a true heavy-haired knight. It was clearly not a fast animal, but it was hardy and accustomed to combat. If a fight broke out, the four-legged opponent would be no less dangerous than the rider.

Santelli felt a bead of sweat roll down his temple and into his braid. Kai, as usual before a fight, was breathing particularly hard, whistling. It's hard to live with a broken nose, even if it's restored with magic.

"I insist, with all due respect," Ranyan said very calmly, very politely.

Santelli shook his head.

"That's our cart," he said just as calmly, and it was the calm of a string stretched to the limit. "Show it to you today, and tomorrow everyone will know that the brigade is unpacking to the first person they meet. Then there will be a second encounter. And a third."

It sounded like the truth, especially since it was, in fact, the truth. Give weakness once, and then everyone would take it as a rule.

"Pity," Ranyan remarked gloomily, very thoughtful as if deciding what to do next. Maybe he was deciding. Maybe he was just stalling for the right moment. The axe seemed heavy as if it were made entirely of stone. Santelli looked between the eyes of the interlocutor - only the interlocutor so far - and thought about the next action. A sharp throw of the axe, however, at the horse's head, not Ranyan's. And then...

Then many things would happen very quickly, bloodily, and irreversibly. Shena, to put it mildly, looked at life with excessive optimism. The forces were by no means "nearly equal". Six horsemen against foot soldiers, and Bizo was no warrior after all, made the outcome of the battle a foregone conclusion. Just like this morning's "duel" between Kai and the redhead.

But the brigade had Santeli's reputation on its side. And a direct consequence of that reputation was the obvious fact that more than one of Ranyan's mercenaries would die in the fight, and the rest would have to heal their wounds for a long time.

Thus, it came down to how much of a rush the hair-brained brether is. How much he believed the brigade could really hide something. And how much the mercenary is willing to drop his credibility among his own. To give up on the tarred ones is also a defeat, however small.

Lena's heart was pounding so hard it was a wonder the whole neighborhood hadn't heard it yet. Including the terrifying killer with the deep, strong voice of a professional actor. Lena felt a small shiver sweep over her hands and crawl over her face. The girl was immensely scared. Trying to calm her trembling fingers, she accidentally touched the sleeping Codure, who moaned through a half-dream and muttered something. But to Lena's great happiness, he did not wake up.

Hearing a moan from beneath the bunting, Ranyan tilted his head quickly, like an owl that catches every sound in the night. His team moved the well-trained animals forward.

"I told you, we're taking the wounded," Santelli repeated.

An axe right in the horse's face. And back to the cart, where secluded, but, at the same time, available stashed another weapon, more suitable for the skirmish with the horsemen. Or vice versa, with a dagger to finish. If luck is on and the swordsman's horse will fall. And the rest is as it goes. Brigadier looked at the brether and clearly understood that all his thoughts are obvious, like a gallowsman on the gate. Just as Ranyan understands perfectly well that Santelli understands... And so on. And it would end fast, bloody, messy.

But instead of bringing the horse forward and trying to stomp the brigadier at once or, on the contrary, jumping down to impose a foot battle, at which the brether was very good, Ranyan did quite a different thing. He drew from behind the wide sash of his glove a small object like a monocle - a lens with a tiny, two-finger handle and a scrap of the narrow chain of a dozen links. The frame and all the metal parts of the monocle reeked of antiquity - crossed with scratches and patina. The monocle seemed to have been a thing of history long before the Calamity. The lens, on the other hand, looked like it had come out of the grinder's grindstone yesterday. The absolute cleanliness of the glass was striking, especially in contrast to the frame.

Behind the cart, Bizo breathed noisily, sucking in air through clenched teeth like a whale taking in a stream of water with a school of fish. The alchemist clearly understood what it was. Yes, and Santelli had heard of such lenses, too. The secret of making them was long lost, and there were a handful of such artifacts left in the world. Whoever was looking for the mysterious maiden was very... no, VERY wealthy, had good connections, because just for the money "the Eye of Alzor" did not get. And the mysterious employer wanted very much to find the right person...

Ranyan wiped the lens with a piece of suede. Sunteli saw how much the brether didn't want to use it. No wonder. All magical artifacts, in one way or another, are charged for their use. Some required a sacrifice or a drop of blood, and others required a light memory to be turned into its opposite, while others simply reduced the user's life by weeks or even months. Either way, Ranyan finally finished polishing the glass and looked through it at the cart. At that moment, he and his hair looked like an aristocrat, eyeing an actress in the theater to see whether or not she was worthy of the honorable role of a passing infatuation for a couple of nights.

Time stood still. Santelli could literally feel Bizo's hand squeezing the lever of the crossbow and the sturdy leather bowstring barely hanging on the edge of the "nut" - the knurled wheel with the grip. Nor could the brigadier see Kai, but he could sense that the swordsman was frozen with his weapon, ready to rush forward. Kai could move very fast, and more than once, he had cut down cavalrymen who were too sure that looking down from above gave them undeniable superiority over the infantry.

The mercenary stared at the cart through his monocle, and the whole wasteland seemed to stand still in grim expectation. The thin line between life and death now passed through the small glass in the brether's hand. Ranyan stared indefinitely, though really, of course, for a matter of moments. Then he shook his head and hid the monocle back. And nothing else happened. Brether turned his horse around, tossed "Good luck and good riddance" over his shoulder, and moved on, riders one by one stretching out in column behind their master.

Santelli exhaled noisily and with a gasp, realizing that the brigade had once again happily parted with ... not death, but big trouble for sure. He was also well aware of the look on Ranyan's face before the mercenary turned back. And it was obvious to the brigadier that the brether had not retreated in the face of force. Ranyan did not see through the lens what he had expected, and he was quite surprised. He was saddened, too, because the result would be a new ride in the Wastelands. And finally, there was a third thing, something that Santeli again realized and which he saw confirmed in Bizo's eyes when he returned to the cart. Ranjan could not see through the lens of a redhead named Hel. Which meant she had no magic, no magical gift. Not even a tiny drop.

The small group continued on their way as if nothing had happened.

After another hour or so of travel, Bizo grumpily remarked that it would rain by evening, but the crew should make it, even with plenty to spare. Santelli looked critically at Hel, who was still hiding under the tarpaulin, and remarked that the crew had no human clothes for her. Let her sit under the rag until the Apothecary.

In the meantime, the scenery was gradually changing. The mountains came closer, and now the gray-green peaks with narrow tongues of glaciers could be seen. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, step by step, the heath was taking on the features of a more or less settled place. The road from a nominal direction became a real tract, well-traveled. From time to time, there were even foot, horse, and cart travelers. Not so often, but enough to understand that this place is inhabited.

Then Lena saw the first houses or rather huts. They were all one-story, very stocky, with windows at about belly level and low thatched roofs. Around each house was usually a garland of outbuildings laid out haphazardly, obviously according to need and situation, without a plan or aesthetics. The houses with additions looked ugly but inhabited, reliable, and even decorated to a modest extent. There was a weathervane in the form of a wooden animal that looked like a cat (Lena shuddered at the memory of an angry "cat"). There's a rope with flags made of faded multicolored scraps.

There were many vegetable gardens. The girl was completely ignorant of rural flora, but carrot tails, something else that looked like dill, and bushes, one and the same as cucumber and potato bushes, seemed familiar to her. She began to wonder how the agricultural seasons were related here, and how productive agrarianism was in general, with a steady and dim sun and a huge moon, which must have an effect on something.

The gardens were scattered in outward disarray but carefully fenced with ... barbed wire? In Lena's head at once, like a rewinding film, ran a kaleidoscope of frames inspired by fiction. The decline of technological civilization, high-tech artifacts, and savages with smallpox inoculations and barbs. But a closer look revealed that it was not metal wire but the long whiskers of some vines or ivy stretched as a barrier between the wooden posts. It was a very long mustache covered with sharp thorns.

A large cart loaded with dried fish rumbled past. Somehow it was headed away from the unknown Gate, though logically, it should have been the other way around. Probably the owner had purchased a large consignment for some of his needs. The fish were small, yellowish, and almost transparent in appearance.

"Yes. It's going to rain," Santelli reported into the void, drawing in the cool, damp air. "Clouds are coming in from the ocean."

"It'll pour for a couple of days," Bizo added. "Hardly more than that."

"Just right," summed up Santelli as a matter of course.

Lena snuggled even deeper under the covers.

There weren't many people around, and she couldn't say anything special about them. People were like people. They were rare, usually on foot, occasionally on low, funny-looking animals that looked like donkeys with short rabbit ears. They were dressed conventionally medieval, in clothes with a predominance of brown shades and an abundance of all sorts of laces and ties. "Medieval," in the sense that if Lena had seen something like this in movies about the events of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of Earth's history, she would not have been surprised at all, taking it for granted. Almost no one wore hats, mostly hoods with a long "ponytail" at the back, which just hung along the back or foppishly wrapped around the neck like a scarf. The footwear was mostly wooden boots pounding on the rutted road.

The poorer-looking travelers had wooden shoes all the way around. The richer ones had only the soles, but the tops seemed to be leather. They knocked almost identically, though. And they were probably equally uncomfortable to wear. Yeah, it seems that she can't find shoes with supinators here...

And then there was the fact that everyone, absolutely everyone, was armed. There were knives, clubs, heavy staffs, and axes like the one Santelli wore.

The brigade ignored the passers-by, just as the wayfarers ignored the bandit crew. Everyone gave way to the cart, but the brigade didn't shy away from anyone. No, once a small cavalcade of horsemen, like the hunters for the unknown woman, rode by. Except that they had bigger horses and more metal on their clothes. The brigade not so much gave way as moved with the cart to the side of the road, and Santelli made a sort of polite half-bow. Judging by the fact that he, in turn, was not answered, the rules of politeness here were strictly one-sided, from the bottom up, or very different from those Lena was accustomed to.

The girl wondered what her unexpected traveling companions were really doing. Who were they? And then she remembered Santelli's grim warning that she had better demonstrate her medical talents, or else...

Or what?

No one guarded her. No one tied her back to the cart. Even the surly and distrustful Shena had lost all interest in the redheaded Hel. It seemed self-evident to the brigade that this was the best place for her, in the cart and under the burlap. They didn't even think about the fact that all she had to do to escape was slip out from under the blanket and dive over the side without getting caught by her traveling companions.

And that self-evidently kept Lena in place better than any restraints.

"The Gate," Bizo murmured, adjusting his hat and getting a little dewy-eyed. "Finally..."

Lena dared to poke her nose a little further out from under the cloak. As she did so, she struck again at Codure. This time he came to his senses almost immediately and looked at his companion with a quite sensible look. Lena, in turn, eyed him warily. They were lying very close to each other, just a little out of the embrace. The wounded man was hot as a stove, but it was not a painful fever. Just the high fever of a sick man who'd already moved away from death.

Codure was even somewhat handsome. The affliction had sharpened his features and dilated his pupils. She could see clearly now that the wounded man was still very young. No older than twenty by Elena's standards, and God knows how many years old in the local calculation.

"Are you an angel?" the young man whispered unexpectedly.

"No," replied the girl automatically, also almost whispering.

"Angel," Codure repeated, licking his parched lips. "I remember... you hurt me... very badly. I was burning like I was on fire. But then I saw death step aside and say, "Not today." You chased it away from me."

Lena listened to the hurried whispering and tried to figure out how to explain to the young man that he was hallucinating from blood loss, fever, and, apparently, the poison in the wound. On the other hand, reasoning sensibly, a properly applied splint and disinfection did ward off death. So she really is an angel.

The horse's horseshoes, as well as the wheels, tapped on something hard and ringing. It seemed that the paved part of the road went on.

"The Gate," Codure's thoughts meanwhile jumped to another subject. The young man licked his lips again and whispered. "Home. We are home."

Home, Lena repeated to herself and looked outside again. Now she saw it, too.

It was once a building of enormous proportions. No statues, like in The Lord of the Rings, nothing pretentious or symbolic. Only walls and towers. The wall was at least fifteen meters high, with towers of red and gray stone pushed forward. The wall stretched left and right as far as one could see. Even now, the overall appearance was imposing, though little remained of the wall, and the towers looked as if they had been chewed off by some giant. Lena did not know much about stone construction, but she got the feeling that the cyclopean fortress had not been crushed by enemies, but dismantled quite peacefully, year after year, like ants on a dinosaur skeleton.

A defensive structure whose power has been undermined by time and man, but is majestic even in its current sad form.

The two largest towers, polygonal as a pencil, remained almost the same, only the cones of the roofs had sagged, partially collapsed, and the tiny scales of shingles gaping black holes at this distance. On either side of the towers, the walls dropped sharply downward, passing into solid foundations many meters thick, about the height of a man or slightly lower. The towers had probably been hewn with special care, and there was a stone pass between them. There was a bridge between the towers, a sort of superstructure with battlements and projecting balconies. Apparently, once there was a huge gate between the towers, under the bridge. Now there is not even a hinge left of it. Now all that was left was a thoroughfare, through which footmen and men on donkeys hurried and carts of every kind, among which no two seemed alike. Without a doubt, this was the Gate. Home to the Santelli gang and probably many, many more.

Lena exhaled in shock. She tried to estimate the approximate size of the structure, but nothing worked. There were no familiar landmarks, like cars and buildings, for the eye to cling to and build a system of coordinates. The sight of the huge and abandoned Gate evoked sadness. One look at it, and then at everything else in the area, was enough to realize that this world had seen far better days. Or, at least, this visible part of the world. Once giant fortresses had been built here, but now the walls were being torn down into stones and ugly vegetable gardens with thorny vines...

Sad.

"Home," she repeated quietly after her traveling companions, with only her lips.

Home...

* * *

It is possible (and even certain) that Matrice once had a name, perhaps a beautiful one. And some dark secret, too, which is what drove a mature woman to the Wastelands, leaving all her past life behind.

Possible...

Now she had no name, no age, no past. Just "Matrice," that is, "mother of the family," the matriarch. Known throughout the Gate and far beyond, the owner of an Apothecary, a gobbler of rare artifacts, and a mediator of many difficult issues. A person who was able to hold her own and rise in the harsh world of the Wastelands, where there were no stifling shop rules, but no courts with written laws to protect the honest mercantile and artisan.

Santelli had been working with the Apothecary for a long time. It wasn't as profitable as dealing with other fence-sitters, but it was stable and gave a nice bonus in treatment. And someone who goes into the gray desert for Profit, sooner or later, always needs the services of a good medic.

Real medicines, made from good ingredients, not ashes mixed with urine and tinted with Pantocrator know what for glamour. Potions that kill fatigue give strength and night vision. Mixtures for pain and many other things without which the life of a brigade on the wastelands would be short and very sad. It was all available at the Apothecary, at Matrices. That was why the first place the brigade's cart always stopped at. One of the inconspicuous barns with sturdy walls and tightly caulked slots, where they could always lay out their goods without haste, evaluate them, and negotiate a reasonable price. And a lot of other things as well.

This time the brigade's booty was meager, and Codure's treatment would eat up a good part of the income. His career as a Proffitt hunter was over - you don't go into the dungeons with a leg like that - but if you brought him back, it was decent and good manners to pay him at least some care. That's how you get a hard reputation as a good foreman and also as a decent team of "tarred" men.

On the other hand, some silver must have wormed its way into the purses, and a tip on the Grey Shadow's lair would draw gold all by itself, even if it turned out to be only an empty cobwebby field. So they didn't go in vain. And, of course, a strange acquisition in the form of an incomprehensible redheaded Hel.

So at the cart, everything went in the established order. Under strict supervision, the loot was extracted one item at a time by the clerks, who worked naked at the waist - so that there were no sleeves, in which it is so convenient to "accidentally" put small useful items. Then it was stacked on a special long table along one of the barn walls, numbered and written in a special book. It was troublesome and cost money - rag paper, good ink, and quills were only imported. But with Matrice, everything was fair and strict. This, in turn, attracted customers.

This time, contrary to usual practice, Santelli did not take part in the inventory, leaving the procedure to Bizo. He and the redheaded guest were sequestered in a small room where Matrice was conducting particularly important negotiations and measuring powders and elixirs that were either particularly valuable or might cause a stare even here, in a place where written laws had not been seen for hundreds of years and would not be seen again for an equally long time.

Lena did not understand a word. The Brigadier and the fat lady, the apparent owner of a barn with solid walls on a stone foundation, spoke quickly and in some jargon. The lady was a very picturesque person and aroused curiosity. She was not fat but rather what she called chubby. Her hair was carefully arranged under a wide cap, and she wore a leather apron over a shapeless dress. It was stained with many stains, but they looked more like the marks of chemical experimentation than unkemptness. The face was smooth, almost entirely devoid of wrinkles, which made the hostess look like a kindly glossy doll. And her voice was rather pleasant. All in all, the lady looked more like an aunt from some good family movie about a broken-hearted innkeeper with a good heart.

Except for the look... When the kindly aunt with the face of a smooth baby doll looked at Elena, she was at once reminded of the look in Santelli's eyes at the fire and his unctuous reasoning regarding the sale. It was at once clear that for this nice lady buying and selling people was a common occupation.

"That's the way it is," Santelli ended the short story as he rolled up the long cloak he had wrapped Hel in to bring her here without arousing suspicion. "I think some aristocrat who got her memory washed away with powerful magic and tossed through a portal to the Wasteland. The good calculation, but no one knew we'd make the detour there and then."

"Portal, memory..." brooded Matrice, looking at the huddled Hel in her ridiculous jacket and sleeveless brothel shirt. "An expensive treatment."

"The rich have their own quirks," put in Santelli.

"It's still too expensive. There is so little magic in the world that not every Great House can afford portal sorcery."

Santelli just shrugged his shoulders, as anything can happen.

"So you say she can heal?" clarified Matrice with great doubt, crooking her cheek so that one eye almost closed.

"She knows some special tricks. They're very good," Santelli emphasized the word "very." "I've never seen or heard of those. Neither have you, I bet. The Apothecary could use them. A Cave Flier broke a leg of one of ours and clawed it. She made it so he would remain lame, but he could walk. And the wound was not inflamed. Not at all."

Matrice again grimaced skeptically but was clearly interested.

"What else does she know?"

"She says she can't remember anything else," Santeli said with a wave of his hands. "But she might remember in the future."

"That's not serious," Matrice grimaced for the third time.

"This is serious," the foreman push his line steadfastly and persistently. "You'll need her, even if she can't remember anything at all, ever. I remember you complaining that there was no one to grind powders. The apprentices' hands are either too rough or too weak. Look at her fingers."

"All things counted, Honourable," the clerk reported from behind the dense curtain, with due respect in his voice. Santelli didn't see him, but he was sure the man was bowing in a half-bow. And the turn of phrase he used was distinctive - "distinguella" - literally it meant "distinguished". It was a way of referring to lawyers and guilds, treasurers, accountants, and others of ungenerous origin but irreplaceable in their place. Matrice held her household in a strong and heavy hand.

"Wait," the hostess replied briefly.

Matrice took Hel's palms without sentimentality and raised them higher under the light of a good three-wick lamp. The redhead grimaced but remained silent and did not interfere with the inspection.

"Hmmm..." Matrice stared at Hel's hands, rubbing her fingertips, her smooth palms without a blister. The redhead bit her lip but remained silent.

"Well, let's face it, the merchandise isn't as good as you described," Matrice huffed, releasing the victim's hands, and Santeli grinned. The bargaining had definitely begun. "It's also very hot, it burns!"

"Ranyan, we met him on the road," there was no point in denying it, nor did Santelli deny it.

"Exactly. You don't hire a routier like that to show off. Someone's looking for this girl. Someone's looking for her. By the way... why didn't you sell her right there?"

"I don't like that kind of deal," the foreman scowled. "Too murky."

"You don't like the money?" grinned Matrice.

"I'm very fond of money," Santelli frowned even more. "But I prefer to know exactly what I'm selling and to whom. Here's me selling you her hands, two good healing tricks, and maybe something else she'll remember later. A good deal with clear rules."

"Ranyan would have paid more. Much more."

"Maybe. But how do I know it's not actually worth twice as much? Ten times? Or that a Rutier won't pay at all and will rush into battle as soon as he sees it? It's a murky business, and in such cases, they pay with iron far more often than with gold."

"Reasonable," Matrice agreed, frowning her forehead as if she were rolling over-complicated, heavy thoughts with an effort of will. "That's why I like you. You always know exactly what you're willing to sell and buy and for how much."

Santelli grinned, letting her know that he appreciated the slight flattery, and while it was pleasant to the heart, it would not affect the negotiations. Matrice returned the smile, just as light and cold.

"What do you want?" she asked businesslike.

"A good price for the goods," Santelli began listing at once, showing that he had long considered the matter. "No 'scratched,' 'patina suspicious,' 'looks too new.' And a discount for the treatment."

"And for the girl?" the pharmacist raised an eyebrow.

"Here's what I was thinking..." Santelli lowered his voice, though no one here could overhear them anyway. "It's not worth selling her on her own. Who knows how things will turn out? But an apprenticeship with the paper would be fine."

"So you don't sell her to me as booty from the wastelands, but you give her to me as an apprentice," Matrice understood the thought at a glance.

"And everybody's happy," grinned Santeli crookedly. "It's all mercy. And I'll get my money's worth from the treatment."

"How much?"

"Half the regular price. Poisoning, wounds, fractures - all for half the price. And elixirs and other mixtures have a discount of a third of the price."

"Won't your face burst?" inquired Matrice.

Santelli ran his hand over his face and smoothed his beard.

"I think it is still in one piece," he said after a quick check.

"A quarter of everything," summed up the pharmacist, bulging and literally hovering over the foreman, though she was shorter than him by a head.

"Half discount on this bum with a broken leg and our next purchase before the raid," parried Santelli, who, of course, did not expect his first offer to be accepted.

For half a minute, the merchants stared at each other, catching the slightest weakness, looking for an opening to cut in and win back at least a little in their favor. And they didn't find any. They had known each other too long, and they haggled too often.

Hel was sniffing noisily, unaware, but guessing, that her fate was once again being decided. And for a long time.

"Deal," Matrice sighed. "Sneaky dishonest robber."

"Deal," confirmed Santeli. "Greedy spider bargain. By the way, how will you cover her?"

Now the question sounded quite appropriate, without the risk of lowering the stakes or blowing the contract.

"I don't," the pharmacist sniggered. "A lot of people have come in caravans this week. Authority taxed the peasants again in the Kingdoms, and the Church pushed, teaching them the right way to pray. So they come here, dozens at a time. They are all beggars, don't know rules, with all sorts of foreign accents. This redhead will sit away from unnecessary eyes for a month, learn how to make powders and tell her tricks. And then we can show her to people."

"Don't forget to change her clothes," prompted Santelli.

"Teach the spider how to pull the yarn," grinned Matrice, showing an amusing combination of gold teeth and lack thereof. "Well, let's go see what you brought. А ... Oh... there's something else..."

"What?" snapped Santeli, responding to the tone. That's how you tell news you should tell but don't really want to. Or you don't want to.

"There's something happened..." grudgingly stretched out Matrice. "Anyway ... your blond cherubs from Heterion."

"Yes?" the foreman's face turned petrified.

"You know, it's not the Kingdoms here. Nobody cares who's with whom or where, but even here, such things are not flaunted."

"And?" Santelli again confined himself to an interjection that was colder than a chunk of ice from the highest peak.

There was a thump on the roof. Then another and another. It was beginning to rain. The bad weather rolled in from the north in a solid wave, the echo of a terrible ocean storm.

"The boys have got their tongues wagging in your absence," sighed the apothecary. "You're a man of name and reputation, even if the crew behind you is small, but you're known and respected. The blondes are openly bragging about what's going on with you. Building up their value, say, not a little man under the blanket ... . uh ..."

"I got it."

"They did it too loudly. There were rumors. Some people started to speak out quite loudly."

"Who?" asked the foreman very gently.

"Different people. But the loudest one, they say, was Augen."

"Augen the Axe? That's strange. He seems like a smart man."

"No, the one that's very young, without a nickname."

"I know someone like that. He must be... a very brave young man."

The rain was already drumming on the roof almost nonstop, the sound of individual drops merging into a continuous thumping sound.

"He was leaving tomorrow with the first caravan to the northwest, to the Baronies. You're back a couple of days early, aren't you? So he's been running his mouth left and right. He must have thought you wouldn't meet."

"Brave young man," repeated Santelli.

"Solve it," Matrice advised me very seriously. "Don't drag it out. Such rumors are bad for business. And we have, as you remember..."

She didn't finish the sentence, but Santeli understood it perfectly.

"Shall we haggle?"

"No, Bizo will settle this," the foreman grimly decided.

"Where are you going?"

"I will solve the problem. Without dragging it out."

"That's good," Matrice smiled. And Hel shuddered at the smile, more befitting a wolf than a human.

* * *

Camrad_RIP · Jun 19, 2023

Chapter 9. "True Feeling"

* * *

Santelli found Augen quickly. He didn't even have to ask. Where could a man be preparing to depart from the local "hospitable" lands? Of course, in the biggest tavern, which is always crowded, and even more so when it rains.

The brigadier's appearance did not go unnoticed, but without the traditional pat on the back, handshakes, and other rituals that men use to greet and say goodbye. Rumors of Santelli spending time in a special place called "Heterion" had already spread through the Gate, so the Brigadier's appearance next to Augen, who joked most vividly and pointedly about the Brigadier's specific predilections, was understood correctly.

Challenges on the wastelands are simple, requiring no special tricks or seconds. It's not Kingdoms. People see and hear, and that's good enough. So Santelli didn't waste any time with unnecessary words.

"Boy," the brigadier's voice seemed to exude a honeyed sweetness that contrasted with Santelli's eyes, which burned with the dark fire of murder. "A man with such a sharp tongue must have an equally sharp blade. And I'd like to get a closer look at it."

Wooden, clay, and pewter mugs, bottles, and jugs clattered their bottoms against the sturdy tables. The roar of the tipsy brethren almost blew out the bubble-tight windows. The news bounced from house to house, through the wet streets, like sparks from a fire, gathering people together.

There will be a fight!

The rain pounded down from the frowning, gray skies as if someone up there had directed a full-flowing river down. Water flowed down the streets, carrying debris and muddy mud, flooding the eyes and penetrating even well-oiled leather jackets, not to mention ordinary clothes. The linen and wool clung to their bodies like cold rags. And yet quite a few (or rather a lot) of the Gate's inhabitants had ventured out of the safe houses, inns, and brothels with gambling houses. Other people's deaths are the most exhilarating sensation, the sweetest sight for a crowd. And though mores in the largest town in the Wasteland were simple and murder frequent, even here, open fights did not happen often enough to become a daily habit.

The duelists fought in silence, moving in a deep puddle, splashing muddy water. And the crowd was silent - the betting on such fights was forbidden, as it had been since time immemorial. Only Pantocrator decides who will win, and profiteering from God's judgment was not pleasing to Him. Few people believed this, but there are traditions that no one dares to break.

The axe and cleaver thudded against the small round shields, beating out a frightening rhythm. Augen was younger and a little stronger. But, besides, he was not yet hemmed in by the wastelands and feared death, too much in love with life. Santelli was more experienced and knew for sure at least one dead man would be carried from this rally. The brigadier fought calculatedly and methodically, exhausting his opponent with precise blows to his shield so that all his strength went to his opponent's arm, reverberating in his muscles and joints. Augen tried to bombard the brigadier with a hail of blows, aiming mainly at his left leg, but Santelli skillfully kept his distance.

The spectators were silent, the fighters were silent, and only the heavy breathing was wheezing out of Augen's chest. The young fighter was exhausted too quickly. The water was pouring, so much so that the roofs were humming under the pressure of the elements.

Fear flashed in the young bully's eyes, a faint, almost imperceptible shadow. But the experienced Santelli did not miss it. The brigadier became even more cautious and calculated, knowing that the fear of death multiplies strength and that the enemy can pull any trick. It is always on the threshold of victory that one must be most careful.

A blow, another blow. The brigadier's shield began to come apart at the joints of the boards. Several rivets had already fallen out, the waxed skin dangling in shreds. Augen's shield was more expensive and sturdy, but now with every parry, the bully wrinkled painfully. His hand was numb from the brigadier's brutal blows, and every thrust struck the bone and joint like a nail.

Augen pretended to be completely tired and stumped on his feet, but Santelli wasn't buying that inept trick. He hunched over, shielded himself, and swung his axe in a circle. Augen attacked with a fierce shriek, pushing himself to the limit. He chopped Santelli three times in a row, in quick succession. Even mitigated by skillful parrying, the blows nearly shattered the brigadier's shield, splinters flying in all directions. As the excited Augen raised his cleaver for the fourth blow, rejoicing at his quick victory, Santelli counterattacked.

A swift swing of his shattered shield thwarted the young man's attack, causing him to recoil. The brigadier slid in behind his foe, preventing him from breaking the distance. He hooked Augen's shield with the edge of his axe and yanked it aside, deflecting, literally opening his foe's defenses like a clam shell. He hit with his shield, or rather the remains of it, in the chest. Augen lost his balance. He could not roll to the side to evade an attack. The young man swung his weapon incongruously, almost blindly. He missed and received another blow, this time a full-blown one that threw the victim into the dirt.

The club and the axe are the weapons of one successful strike. If you are without armor, all you have to do is make one misstep, and the fight is over. And so it was. Augen didn't have enough for the "retaliatory strike" Kai mentioned. He screamed, dropped his weapon, and tried to crawl away. He tried to crawl away, but the water splashed across the foul turf, and the brown, muddy ground was joined by dark purple, almost black spots, dispersing quickly, like drops of ink in a teacup. The dying man was writhing his legs and howling, with no hope of mercy, no longer conscious of anything, driven only by unthinking fear. A muffled howl mingled with the wheezing of a severed lung.

Santelli didn't even seem to change his face. He dropped the remains of the useless shield from his hand, tossed the axe, and intercepted it "carpenter's way," with the blade forward as if for hammering nails. Now, when all that was needed was to finish off a helpless adversary, the blade should have been spared. They might as well have said something nice for the audience. They liked that on the Wastelands. If only to curse at least one last time at the half-wit who had forgotten that a man should always be ready to answer for his words with a weapon in his hand.

But the foreman said nothing, and the spectators were not amused with a colorful word. He silently stabbed Augen in the head and repeated it twice more to the noise of the rain and the splash of water coming from the gutters. They absorbed as if wrapped in soft, absorbent cotton, the crunch of a fractured skull.

The brigadier straightened up and wiped the blood off his weapon mechanically. Raindrops mingled with the blood, dripping with pink foam on his fingers. Santelli breathed in the clean air, cleansed of dust and smoke by the rain. He wiped his face with the palm of his hand. And went to the Heterion, still with an axe in his hand.

No one followed him. The dead man curled up in a dark red puddle, was very quickly stripped, for he had nothing of value on him except his boots, his weapon, his amulet around his neck, and his good leather pants. Santelli's funny pun about a sharp tongue and a sharp blade went straight to the people, for it was well said.

* * *

Lena was sitting on the bed, staring at the wall with a halted, empty gaze. There was a window in her room, a real one, with a thin plate of mica and even an opening frame (rich by local standards). Behind this window, they drank and walked, so much so that it seemed the mica glass was about to fall out. The natives didn't seem to be bothered by the fierce rain, a real downpour that wasn't going to stop.

In a room about three meters by three meters, there was a stool, built without nails, on wooden spikes; a jug of water; a two-fingered shelf on the wall; a coat rack in the corner, a wooden cross, and an empty chest, so decrepit and woodworm-eaten that it looked as if it were about to crumble into weightless gray ash. A towel hung sadly on the hanger, and its threads were loose at both ends. The apprentice had nothing else for the time being except to eat (twice a day, breakfast and dinner). Other necessities of life were not forbidden for her to buy for future income. Or not to buy.

No, there was also a copper spike with a bifurcated end hammered into the wall. It was a holder for a match, a candle, or a small oil lamp. Now a long leather cord, soaked in some kind of grease, burned in it. Such, as the girl realized, were often used here instead of expensive candles.

And clothes issued "on credit". Well-recognizable solid wooden boots, pounding with every step, like nails in a coffin lid. "Underwear" in the form of a long linen shirt and the familiar thong. Another shirt on top of the undershirt, but longer, thicker, and sleeveless. And finally, the wool dress itself, out of size, was worn and repaired many times. A dense cap on her head with "ears" descending almost to her shoulders. A wide linen sash, in which she could somehow tie various small things, but Lena had not yet figured out how.

The stomach was digesting... not food, but rather a mass. A kind of steamed gruel of coarsely crushed corn (or rather, what looked most like corn, only pale green), sparingly flavored with lean oil and completely tasteless.

Tomorrow, even before dawn, was the promise of a rise and the beginning of a new working life, along with a demonstration of medical skills. Matrice did not even try to soften Hel's introduction to her new life. The apprentice's prospects were outlined at once in curt but expressive tones. Work and unquestioning obedience, in the long term rising to the level of what in the usual terms could be called "practicing physician under the auspices of the corporation," that is, the Apothecary. An enviable prospect, by the way, judging by the whispers. Good medicine was very important to the way of life of the Gate dwellers. Any other behavior had only one result: billing for apprenticeship and charging by any means convenient to the master.

The carrot and the stick. It's as simple as that. A Medic in a creepy city of assassins and hunters for the mysterious underground Profit or ...

"Or" read quite transparently and clearly. An encounter with Routier Ranyan, an utterly ruthless mercenary, and murderer of little girls. Who, as the girl now clearly understood, had only miraculously missed his "Spark", killing completely uninvolved people in passing. Matrice would make a profit on Hel in any case. If the hands don't bring profit, the head sold to the murderer will.

* * *

It wasn't always quiet and peaceful at the Heterion. But it was always safe and relatively decent. The audience was decent, well-mannered, and solvent. The place was relatively small, but it could satisfy the most demanding demands. Because when people walk on the edge of death, their lust for life and carnal pleasures is heightened.

Santelli lingered for a while on the first floor, where among the curtains, hung in seeming disorder and creating an atmosphere of privacy, one could have a couple of glasses of wine and chat with useful people. At other times a pair of burly guards at the entrance would have politely but emphatically recommended the foreman get rid of his weapons, leaving the unwanted iron in a special trunk. At another time, Santelli would have complied without objection. Not this time, however. Everyone already knew what had happened, both today and before. So no one stopped the foreman. There are always rules to follow, but there are situations where the rules become very flexible in interpretation. On the other hand, even in such cases, it is better not to step on some sore spots...

Anyway, Santelli entered the Heterion with his gun, wet to the skin, but first, he drank a glass of wine with the Honourable Gee. Once upon a time, the steward's name was Swallower, and he was a pimp in far-off civilized places. But, like Matrice, he had left the past behind him, having achieved far more in the Wastelands.

"It will become expensive for you," the Venerable Gee informed him briefly, finishing his wine. He did not explain what it was. It was obvious as it was. "Very expensive."

"Not more expensive than money," the usually terse Santelli seemed to have the talent of a philosopher erupted today.

Gee shook his head with restrained approval, remembering the good turn of phrase. But the approval flew from his heavy wide face like the wind blew it away. The situation was very unpleasant. For everyone.

"You won't," Gee stretched out with great doubt. "It would be easier for you to buy out their contract."

"Not easier. It certainly isn't now. I'll pay you back," Santelli decided to wrap up the courtly conversation, and there was a fatal predetermination in his voice. "By the way..."

"Yes?" raised an eyebrow at the Venerable.

"I always wanted to know, but somehow I forgot... Where did they come from? Heterion is good, no doubt about it. But let's face it. They're a little too..." Santelli hesitated looking for the right word.

"Classy," chuckled Venerable Gee, folding his hands on his voluminous belly. Gee never wore rings. It was a memory of the days when his primary means of admonishing female workers was his fist. A ring is the best way to hurt the face.

"More red wine?" inquired the Venerable.

"No," Santelli said briefly, indicating that time was of the essence.

"Okay. It's a long story, almost like a fairy tale."

There was a loud, distinctly hysterical woman's laughter from above muffled by the walls and the thick curtains. Immediately afterward, there was a whipping as if a good whip had been struck on the saddle. There was a woman's laughter again. This time it was interspersed with distinctly male cries. No one paid any attention to this. It's the workday routine.

"A fairy tale?" Santelli asked.

"Yes. There's the rich background, the loving father, the early death of the mother, and the wicked stepmother. Intrigue, poisoning, father's death, exile, fleeing to the ends of the earth, and more. Would you like to hear the full story?"

"No," Santelli shook his head slowly, one of the pigtails tucked behind his ear slowly sliding down his cheek.

"Also true," Gee approved. "The mystery is more interesting."

"Pour me a bottle. For three," the foreman didn't specify, but the Venerable One understood perfectly. And he bloomed, hoping that the bearded man's murderous mood had abated.

Gee snapped his fingers, and the servant-girl (like everyone else here, young and very pretty, ready to serve her guest in any way she could) brought a small, faceted glass bottle with a silver cork on a simple brass but well-polished tray to the brigadier. Santelli took the bottle and walked slowly and heavily upstairs.

The venerable one gestured carelessly to the girl, who looked with some resentment at the "tarred man," who was totally indifferent to her youth and beauty, aptly emphasized by the frivolous attire. Gee sighed, hoping it would somehow work out. But just in case, he tugged at the string of rosaries around his neck that he had been using as an abacus. In case he actually had to count the loss.

Santelli crossed the threshold of a room in which he was familiar with every feature. Venerable Gee, though he was a scoundrel, knew his business. The furnishings would not have been ashamed of a middle-class saloon in the Kingdoms. The wooden walls were hidden beneath graceful folds of drapery. The screens were not of ordinary leather on wooden frames but of real parchment on which a skillful hand had drawn abstract patterns in red ink. There were several tables on gracefully curved legs and a clothes rack of intricately woven willow twigs coated in a glossy brown lacquer. There was also a bathtub. A real tin tub that didn't leak at all. It was running with steam now, filled nearly to the top. A white cloth covered the tub to keep the bather from coming into contact with the metal.

They were waiting for him. Or maybe not him, at least initially. Warming the water wasn't a quick thing to do. But either way, they were at his disposal now. Both of them.

Santelli clutched the vial, standing at the entrance and peering into familiar faces.

The alchemist of Heterion was a rather narrow specialist. He could do little. To be more exact, he was able to do only one thing, but very valuable - to feel people and their feelings and mental attitudes. This skill was in demand among various dangerous people - killers, routiers, brigadiers, bodyguards, and so on. It is always useful to know what awaits you behind a solid door or around the nearest corner, how many there are, and whether these people are preparing to kill. Venerable Gee found an original use for the alchemist's talent. He sat for days on end in a special room in the center of the building and listened to the feelings of the guests. Were they satisfied, had their desires satisfied? Whether they were leaving the place in pleasant relaxation (intending to stop by again) or whether they were harboring dissatisfaction (which would result in lost profits). Whose room did the dissatisfied left, and which of the employees did not show due diligence? The job is responsible and well-paid.

The alchemist did his best, and when Gee looked into the closet with a mute question, the worker only smiled with an obscene gesture. He was used to everything, experiencing with dozens of customers the delightful moments of fulfilled desires, from ordinary intimacy with a woman to very gruesome executions. But the invisible trident of pure white fire that erupted in the hall of the blond twins, combining into a pillar of pure energy, stirred even his senses.

The Venerable sighed with relief.

There will be no killing today.

* * *

Lena was sitting on the bed, a wooden trestle bed on crooked pieces of wood instead of boots. She stared silently at the wall. The lace in the copper spike let out a trickle of smoke and went out. The room was in darkness, the moon was hidden in the clouds, and the torches in the street were out. The girl's dwelling was on the second floor, and beneath the wooden floor of narrow boards was a creaking mill, grinding rough some herbal ingredients. Tomorrow Lena would begin her training with the production of finer fractions, or powders.

Good question - what do they use to cut nails here? And do they cut their nails at all?

Lena lowered her head and hid her face in her hands. She had cried many times before, but this time the tears flowed on their own, uncontrollably, in a steady stream. When you have to go all the time, and people try to kill you all the time, there's no time to be sad. Now Lena was relatively safe, and the awareness of what had happened swept over her like a tsunami.

We're not in Kansas anymore. But you can't ride a tornado out of here. There are no roads or secret trails. And she was unlikely ever to return home. Parents, friends, home, a decorative fireplace, rapiers, an expensive diary, favorite clothes, a movie tablet, and old Eric Clapton CDs - all left behind.

Lena sobbed bitterly and hopelessly, wrapping her arms around herself and rocking on the bed. Clearly aware that Elena Klimova, her favorite daughter, a diligent student, just a wonderful girl, was disappearing here and now. Apparently, forever. And tomorrow, a woman named Hel will begin her struggle to survive in this damned world.

A door creaked open. In the darkness behind it, two yellow-green lights lit up. They were oval, elongated vertically, so it looked as if someone had actually lit two witch candles in the void. And between them was darkness. The lights moved forward, and a dark silhouette appeared in their wake. The uninvited shadow made a sound, and Lena involuntarily smiled through her tears. The cat purred. The familiar sound that four-legged and tailed people usually make over a bowl, asking "Why so little?" The shadow moved even farther, and the smile melted away. Lena realized it wasn't a cat.

The animal was very similar to the "cat" that had attacked her the previous morning, only smaller and, as far as I could tell in the weak light, not gray-sandy, but almost black. A clear member of the feline family, which had once separated from a common ancestor, and had gone its own long way.

The creature was the size of a small dog. Its ears reached down to Lena's knee. Its head was flattened, like a reptile's, but its eyes, on the contrary, were large and almost round. And they glowed differently than ordinary cats, with reflected light. The oval pupils seemed to glow with phosphorous lights from within. And after the neck, the body lost its cat-like shape completely, turning into the familiar "stool" - a short and almost square torso with four paws that seemed to be able to move its owner in any direction, regardless of the body's turn.

Two things kept Lena from screaming in horror. The first was that it was unlikely that a real, dangerous predator would be kept in an inhabited place. The second... The girl couldn't explain it in words. The Basilisk exuded the lust to kill, the fury of a hunter ready to revel in fresh blood. This beast, on the other hand, seemed somehow... calm. Wise and contemplative, if you could say so about a wordless animal. However, looking into the greenish eyes, Lena doubted the "animal" as well. It was a strange look. Not animal.

The beast entered the room. It didn't sneak in. It came in. It meowed again, cat-like. In one swift leap, it jumped onto the bed. Lena shuddered, not even frightened. The movement was so impetuous that her eye simply didn't register it. The black body blurred into a wide swath and came together already on the skinny bedspread, more like a frayed curtain.

The beast blinked and yawned, showing long fangs and a split tongue, but Lena still didn't feel threatened at all. Not a bit. On the contrary, the strange creature seemed to spread an atmosphere of calm, peacefulness around itself. She wanted to stroke it, but Lena was not sure that the local cats were accustomed to such caresses. The beast crouched down. At once, it picked up its long paws and sank down on its stomach, wiggling its very short, lynx-like tail. He ducked his head on the girl's knee and pressed his ears to the snake's head. He did not pull back, as cats do before lunging, but dropped to his sides. It seemed that a rumbling would follow, but the animal was silent. It still stared at Lena with a gaze that was not at all animalistic.

At last, the girl made up her mind and very carefully, trying to move her hand as slowly as possible, smoothed her guest along the strongly protruding spine with sharp links of vertebrae. Its fur was short and stiff, like tiny needles, and its skin was dry and hot. The beast seemed to have a temperature of about forty degrees. It must have needed a lot of food, with its size and accelerated metabolism...

Outwardly the beast did not react, but in Lena's soul a firm confidence stirred again - the caress was pleasant to him. The oval pupils dilated, the fire in them took on an orange hue, and the girl felt her fear and despair burn in that ghostly light. The beast seemed to drink away her grief, drying her like an autumn leaf to simple sadness.

"Who are you?" asked Elena quietly.

The guest, of course, did not answer. He only lifted his head and yawned again with a perceptible clang of long, ugly teeth. He covered his big eyes, leaving only narrow slits of yellow fire, like real lanterns. Finally, he purred like a real cat, only very low, so low it seemed that the bones in her leg resonated with a fine vibration. The girl put her hand down on the beast's withers, and the shudder passed all over her hand. Lena felt like she had two days ago when the word "Riadag" had knocked vague images into her memory. Something was happening now, too, something very important. Only she had no way of knowing what it was.

In the meantime, the beast rolled over onto its side and extended its legs across the valley, releasing its claws, which made Lena flinch. It looked strange, as if a typical cat's plastic had been stretched over a completely different construction, and the movement still looked surprisingly natural and fluid. The "cat" finished stretching and then put his paws under his soft, naked belly, tightening and folding them like a spider. He transforms into a dense ball, covered in prickly fur, with only his head protruding. And he seemed to fall asleep.

After waiting a few minutes, Lena carefully moved the beast to the edge of the bed, against the wall. The hot body was much lighter than one would expect for its size. Then she lay down on her own, without undressing, without taking her hands off the warm beast. Memories of home, of family, of friends, of her former world still echoed in her heart with pain, but the sorcerous beast seemed to have blunted the razor-sharpness of her mental torment.

I'm here. I'm here now, the girl thought, and at that moment, she wasn't sure if the thought was entirely her own. It was as if someone had whispered in her ear and given the substance of the word. Genuine meaning and certainty.

I'm here, and so far, it's constant.

I am now, and it is equally constant.

She closed her eyes and, to the sound of the rain interspersed with the cries of the groggy revelers, clutching the hot body of the "cat" to her, began to remember everything Grandpa had told her about medicine.

* * *

The amber liquid in the bottle was very volatile and narcotic when its vapors were inhaled. Especially for this purpose, the bottle had a long, slightly curved neck, which was convenient to insert into the nose. One could also follow the example of the saloon sybarites, drop it on a handkerchief, and gracefully wave it around. But in the Wastelands, people were simple and seldom inclined to aesthetic complication of essences. Here liquid "amber" was often drunk very quickly before the ethereal quintessence of dope dissolved in the air. And be sure to drink it with cold water so the liquid coat the stomach. It was a dangerous thing to do a poorly purified elixir could easily give a daredevil a lifelong tummy ache. The elixir could burn through the wall of the stomach and give a quick but painful death.

However, Venerable Gee's product was always good. Always safe.

The water in the tub cooled off, and the foreman only wiped himself with a wet towel. His muscles ached, but it was a pleasant pain, like after hard work. It did not exhaust you but strengthened the body, rushing blood through the veins and giving joy.

The bottle contained a dose for three, but Santelli gave it to his brothers, sparing himself. The "amber" worked very quickly, and the two beautiful naked bodies were spread out picturesquely on the bed. The brigadier stood silently by the window behind which the elements were raging. He did not want to leave. As always, however, he did not want to leave. It was nice here, clean and cozy. This room was always waiting for him, and though Santelli was well aware that it was (if you dissected feelings to their pure, natural base) just a well-disguised call of greed, it was enough for him. The brigadier had learned too long ago and too well that life was stingy with good things, and even a good illusion of anything was better than nothing at all.

It was always hard to leave here. And today, especially.

Sighing heavily, just like Venerable Gee did the last time, Santelli got dressed. The young men were not awake. Their deep, unnatural sleep, full of wonderful dreams, promised to last until morning.

"I once had a real mentor. A very wise, worthy man," Santelli said quietly, smoothing his still-damp hair. "And one day I asked him, 'What is true love?"

"He thought for a long time and finally answered me that real, not ostentatious intimate feeling is always sacrificial. True love is not in a hurry to take but is always ready to give. We are willing to forgive the one we love... ...or those we love, for an insult, a lie... an unkind word behind our backs. Even if the words turn out to be real trouble. But that is the nature of true feeling. It is only in the voluntary sacrifice that feelings are complete and perfect."

Santelli fastened his belt, knotted the loose end with a bronze corner, and adjusted his scabbard and dagger. He looked at the young man. If anyone in his brigade had seen it now, he would have thought for sure he had been replaced by a shapeshifter. There was an ocean of pain in Santelli's eyes, normally cold-attentive and wolfishly dangerous. A genuine, grievous pain pierced the very soul.

"And today I asked myself - is my love for you true? Am I ready to make the sacrifice?"

The brigadier cut the sentence short and was silent for a while. He looked for a long time out the window, behind which the elements were raging, painting the city in all shades of dark blue and black.

I was honest with myself as if Pantocrator were listening to my answer. It was hard, but I asked honestly. And I answered.

Pain and, it seemed, life was leaving Santelli's dark pupils. All that remained was coldness and dead calm. The brigadier walked over to the bed and looked at the lovers, whose blond hair mingled like streams of silver springs. One was smiling serenely in narcotic oblivion, bright blue eyes gleaming through slightly open eyelids. The other, on the contrary, pursed scarlet, swollen lips, which had always delighted the Santels with their smooth, clear lines. It was as if, even in his sleep, the young man was depressed by some hidden sadness.

"Is my love sacrificial?" Santelli repeated the earlier question to himself. "Is it true?"

The brigadier picked up the axe and weighed it in his hand as if he holding it for the first time. And he answered himself.

"No."

The beats were very distinctive, almost imperceptible amidst the noisy merriment that gripped the Heterion at midnight. But Gee's keen ear easily distinguished them from the clinking of bottles, the groggy cries, and the greedy laughter. Just two, short and resounding, as if a woodcutter's axe had struck the soft pillow, shredding both it and the dense, stringy wood of the deck beneath the pillow. The Venerable One grimaced bitterly, pursed his lips, and squinted at the ceiling. He sighed sadly and passed the rosary between his fingers, calculating how much Santelli now owed him.

* * *

Ecumene (No OP/ NO Harem/ No MS/ Isekai)

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