Chương 11: The Road to Solara

The road didn't care that someone was waiting for him at the end of it. It just lay there, running south, empty both ways, and three hundred kilometers stayed three hundred kilometers whether a thing knew you were coming or not.

"Someone's waiting for me," Kaito said.

"In Solara. The silver box said so. And you didn't see the silver box."

"No," Sable said.

"I didn't. And I would dearly love to sit down and work out why a class with no ceiling and a quest I can't see both turned up inside the same ten minutes. But not while you're standing in the open on the worst road in the kingdom with three silver and a knife you bought off a fence post." A pause.

"Walk first. Existential dread second." He walked. It didn't take long to learn what she meant by worst road. He passed a burned-out wagon by midday, the wood gone to charcoal, the wheels stripped, no bodies, which was somehow worse than bodies. He passed a roadside shrine with the offerings still sitting on it that nobody had dared come back for.

Twice he got off the road into the trees because he heard horses, and both times he was glad he had, because the men who rode by weren't soldiers and weren't merchants and sat their saddles like they owned the country, which, out here, Sable said, they more or less did.

"You can't do three hundred kilometers of this alone," she said, after the second lot of riders.

"You'll starve, or you'll get robbed, or you'll get unlucky, and the last one only has to happen once. You need a caravan. Numbers, walls, other people for the bad luck to land on instead of you. Find one going your way and make yourself useful enough to ride along." He found one the next morning. It was stopped at a watering place where the road crossed a slow brown river. Eight wagons, a string of mules, maybe twenty people, half of them merchants and half of them hired blades who looked the part.

They were watering the animals and arguing about something, and they went quiet and watchful the second he stepped out of the treeline, every hand drifting toward something sharp. He stopped a good way off, held his empty hands out, and let them look.

"The smart play here is boring," Sable murmured.

"You're a Wanderer with a low grey class and a cheap knife. You want to guard caravans because you're broke and you're nobody. Don't be interesting. Interesting gets remembered." A big man came out to meet him halfway. Forties, grey in his beard, a good sword worn like he'd used it. The caravan master, by the way the others let him do the talking.

"You're alone," the man said. It wasn't a greeting.

"Nobody's alone out here on purpose. Which are you — running from something, or working for something?"

"Broke," Kaito said.

"Heading to Solara. I'd rather get there with you than die on the road by myself. I can hold a knife and I don't eat much." The man looked him over, slow, and something in the answer must have landed right, because the worst of the wariness went out of his shoulders.

"Bram," he said. He didn't offer a hand.

"I've lost two guards to the country between here and the city and I'm short, and a body that can stand a watch is a body that can stand a watch. Passage to Solara for your blade and your watches. You eat what we eat. You do what I say when I say it." His eyes hardened.

"And you stay clear of the third wagon. You don't look in it, you don't ask about it, you don't go near it after dark. That one's not your business and it's not going to become your business. We clear?"

"Clear," Kaito said.

'There it is,' he thought. The third wagon was covered. Heavy canvas lashed down tight over a frame, no gap to see through, and it rode in the middle of the train where it was hardest to get at. Two of the merchants were never far from it. They took turns walking beside it, they didn't talk much, and when the wheels went over rough ground and the wagon lurched, both of them flinched and looked at it, and one of them put a hand flat on the canvas like he was steadying something that didn't want to be steady.

It wasn't trade goods. Kaito didn't know much about hauling freight, but he knew what he was watching, and it wasn't that. You don't watch grain. You don't put a hand on a load of cloth to keep it calm. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"What's in the wagon," he asked Sable, low, walking his stretch of the line.

"I don't know," she said.

"And before you ask, no, I can't tell from here, and I don't love that. I can usually feel the shape of a thing through the System if I get close enough. People, beasts, worked goods — they all sit in the world a particular way." A pause.

"That wagon sits wrong. There's something in it the System isn't holding the way it holds everything else. That's all I've got, and it's already more than I want." Kaito kept his eyes forward and his pace boring, the way she'd told him. But he let his sight drift sideways onto the third wagon, just once, the way he'd learned to look at the seams of things. The canvas was just canvas. The frame was just wood.

But there was a thread of red worked all through the middle of it, low and dull, the same broken red he'd seen in the bridge and the bog and his own dungeon — and it was moving. Not much. A slow curl, in and out, in and out, in time with something. In time with breathing.

'It's alive,' he thought.

'Whatever's in there, it's alive, and it's broken the way the wolves were broken. It's half out of the world.' He looked forward again before either merchant caught him at it. In the afternoon the riders came back. He counted six of them, out on the ridge to the east, pacing the caravan at a distance. Not closing. Just keeping level with it for the better part of an hour. The hired blades saw them too.

Without a word from Bram the guards drifted out to the edge of the train, loosened their swords in the sheaths, and got loud and obvious about it, and the merchants pulled the wagons in tighter, and the third wagon got pulled tightest of all, hauled into the dead center with bodies packed around it on every side.

"They're counting heads," Sable said.

"Working out whether we're worth the blood. Stand where they can see you and try to look like a man who's killed people. It's the cheapest defense there is." Kaito stood where they could see him. He must have looked like enough of a problem, or the caravan did, because near dusk the six riders turned their horses and went back over the ridge the way they'd come, and the whole train let out one long breath together.

"That's this time," Bram said, passing him.

"There's always a next time." They made camp at dusk in a hollow off the road, the wagons drawn into a rough ring, the fires kept low. At the fire he tried it sideways on the guard beside him, a lean woman working a notch out of her sword.

"That third wagon," he said, easy as he could.

"What are we hauling that needs two nursemaids?" She didn't look up from the blade.

"You're new, so I'll say it the once, friendly. Don't."

"I'm only—""I've run this road four times," she said.

"Every run there's a wagon nobody talks about, and every run Bram tells us the same thing, and every run we don't ask, we get paid, and we go home." She stopped. She looked into the fire instead of at him.

"The runs where somebody asked, they didn't all go home. So. We don't ask." And that was the end of it. Bram put Kaito on the middle watch, which meant he sat awake with his cheap knife across his knees while the camp slept around him and he watched the dark for riders, the way he'd been told. He was not told to watch the third wagon. He watched it anyway. For a long time nothing happened. The fires burned down. The mules shifted and settled.

Then, somewhere in the deepest part of the night, the canvas on the third wagon moved. Not in the wind. There wasn't any wind. It bulged out slow from the inside, pushed by something pressing against it, then sank back, then bulged again lower down, the thing in there shifting how it lay. The whole wagon rocked once on its axle, gently. And the red in Kaito's sight, the dull curl he'd watched breathing all day, sped up.

Across the camp, two of the merchants who were supposed to be asleep sat up at the same moment, fast and silent, already awake, already waiting for it. They went to the wagon without a word. One started murmuring at the canvas, low, the kind of voice you use on a frightened animal or a frightened child, words Kaito couldn't catch. The other stood back a pace with a long knife held ready — and the knife wasn't pointed out at the dark, at the country, at the riders Kaito had been set there to watch for.

It was pointed in. At the wagon. At whatever was inside it. The bulging stopped. The murmuring went on a while, softer, and then it stopped too, and the two merchants stood over their quiet cargo a long minute, and then they went back to their blankets and lay down and pretended to sleep. Kaito sat very still with his knife across his knees and his heart going hard, and he did not pretend anything.

"Sable," he breathed, barely a sound at all.

"They've got it on a leash. Whatever's in there, they're not delivering it. They're keeping it from getting out. And it's awake now, and it knows we're here."

"I heard," Sable said, very quietly.

"Kaito. Whatever that is, you do not open that wagon, you do not touch that wagon, and at first light tomorrow you find a reason to be on a different road to Solara than this one."

"You think it's that bad."

"A man points a knife at his own cargo for exactly one reason," she said.

"Now sit your watch. Keep your eyes on the dark like a good boring nobody. And pray to whatever you've still got that it stays in the box until morning." He sat his watch. He kept his eyes on the dark. Behind him, slow and patient, the canvas on the third wagon began, very gently, to move again.