Chapter 14 — Misfit

It was difficult to converse with Mictlan while they walked back across the plains, which Ness thought was probably for the best— Mira did not seem to be in any mood for conversation. The three walked single file, back the way Mira and Ness had just come. They had a long walk ahead of them, and Ness was extremely unenthusiastic about it.

Ness’s legs burned with fatigue and she felt bone-deep weariness from the hours spent running. When they finally stopped for lunch, in the shade of a small copse of trees alongside an idyllic babbling brook, Ness collapsed into a pile of leaves at the base of the tree, unsure whether she would be able to stand back up again any time soon.

“Mictlan, be a dear and hunt something for us.”

Mira’s voice had an angry edge to it, but Mictlan seemed not to notice. Ness was not sure if he simply did not pick it up with his lip reading; or if he was merely letting Mira vent her anger at him.

He carried a simple sling for the purpose, and while even Ness could see he was no great master with it, he had been good enough with it to catch a hare or some squab on prior days.

((I can. It will take an hour. Long time.))

“Maybe if we hadn’t run for two hours to chase your trail and then walked another four to make up for it, we’d have the energy to keep moving.”

((As you say,)) he signed back.

He unwound his sling from around his upper arm, and collected a few smooth stones from the riverbed to use with it, then walked off into the distance, vaguely back toward the forest.

Mira dropped to the ground beside Ness; sorceress equally as drained as her familiar.

“We’re heading straight for Terok; no garrison stop this time. I need to be relaxing in a bathhouse yesterday.”

“How much farther is it?”

Mira squinted west toward the distant mountain peaks, and then glanced back the way they had come, at the smudge of dense forest visible in the distance there.

“A day and a half. I’ll be in the tender mercies of a bath attendant by nightfall tomorrow, if we keep moving today.”

Ness and Mira sighed in beleaguered unison at the thought of more walking; Ness laughed at the accidental synchronization.

“Are we really going to do this?” Ness asked.

“Keep walking?” Mira tilted her head at the woman.

“No.”

“Rob the treasury of the possibly undead mad king, who raised an entire army to defend it?”

Ness sighed, and gave Mira a bland, wearied look in reply.

“I can’t leave a blood token floating around, Ness.”

“…and it’s linked to me too and you can’t do anything about it without me. I know. I just…”

She had no idea what she just. She just wanted to go home.

“Do you have a plan, at least?”

Mira frowned, staring off into the distance for a moment before answering.

“I can call in a couple favors. Talk to an old … friend. She does this kind of work. And… You and I, we are powerful. We have that advantage.”

“Couldn’t we just.. teleport? Open another portal, like the one that brought me here?”

“That kind of magic takes a lot of skill, and you need someone at both ends working at the same time to create a stable portal. That’s very hard over long distances.”

“I’m guessing your portal to my world wasn’t stable.”

Mira laughed; it was not a happy sound.

“I think we’re both lucky to be alive.”

“I’m still not entirely sure I am. Are you going to be able to get me home? At the end of all of this?”

Mira was silent again, staring down at the dirt and trampled plants beneath her feet.

“I’m going to try. I promise. Earnestly try. I… I don’t know.”

They both fell silent, then. Ness felt suddenly stricken with grief; she had the sinking feeling she wouldn’t ever see her friends again; that she wouldn’t ever touch a computer again. Perhaps worst of all, that she would never drink coffee again.

They stayed that way until Mictlan returned, the better part of an hour later. Ness may have drifted off into a light slumber.

Mictlan kindled a small cook fire, and despite Ness’s discomfort at watching him clean and prepare a dead hare for cooking, the meat — even before it was crackling over the fire — smelled delicious to her enhanced nose, and she was ravenous from all of the exercise that day. She wasn’t sure she had ever eaten rabbit before, and was sure she had never had it spit-roasted over an open fire.

She rated it in the top three meals of her life.

An afternoon of walking and a night sleeping in the rough passed uneventfully. Ness was nervous and excited to see what passed for a city in this world; and this energy helped mute the waking soreness in her hips and thighs. They had been walking for what felt like weeks at that point, and her body was starting to become accustomed to it; she felt better that morning than she had any right to expect.

Around noon, they met a road; Ness was surprised at its construction. She had expected dirt or uneven cobblestones, and while it was no freshly-paved eight lane highway, she was surprised by how broad and flat it was, easily two or three cars wide.

“They create the stones with sorcery,” Mira explained. “It’s boring, tedious work, but it’s safe. And you get to sleep in your own bed at the end of the day.”

At that moment, Ness thought Mira might have preferred stone cutting to adventuring.

“Wow.. that makes sense, I guess. We have machines that can do that sort of thing, in my world. Do.. do you know what machines are?”

Mira gave Ness a look that was difficult to decipher, but which Ness read as Of course I know what machines are, you idiot. Mira didn’t say the idiot part out loud, which Ness thought was great progress. A few more days of walking and they would be best friends.

“Okay, okay. Yeah. Mostly our roads are asphalt, or concrete. They’re…” Ness realized she knew very little about how asphalt or concrete worked. “Liquids that turn into stone.”

“And you say your world has no magic.”

Ness was trying to figure out how to ask if Mira had heard of chemistry, when they crested a small hillock. A shallow valley unrolled in front of them, with the pale grey trade road wending its way down through it. A broad river ran through the valley, miles away; and Ness got her first look at Terok, built along the river.

“Oh goddess,” Ness exclaimed. “It looks so.. modern?”

Mira gave her a strange look.

“It’s Terok. What else would it be?”

Ness was too embarrassed to explain that she had expected stone huts with mud floors and thatched roofs. At a distance and with their elevated viewpoint, she could see what really looked like a full-blown city, including that the center was dominated by what she could only describe as a skyscraper, a tower that must have been mostly glass by the way it glittered in the light.

Roads wider than the trade road radiated out from that tower, dividing the city up into eighths. There were no other buildings as tall as the tower, and Ness could not make out much about the architecture from the distance, but the roofs were colorful, and she supposed they must have been tile, lead, or copper; and there were verdant green spaces scattered throughout, breaking up the dense urban center.

She could make out the irregular outlines of farmland spreading out around the urban center, blanketing most of the valley along the trade road. Just barely, she could see another road — or the same road — stretching up and out of the valley on the other side; to some other city, she had no doubt.

“What’s the skyscraper?”

“Sky scraper?” Mira tilted her head, looking at Ness, and then back toward Terok. “Oh. I get it. Cute. No, I guess you wouldn’t know,” she replied, cryptically, and resumed walking.

“Okay, okay, whatever. What is it?”

“Terok — like most cities — is built below a wellspring. It’s … like you, a conduit of magical power. But naturally occurring.”

“Okay.. wellspring.. got it…”

“It’s too much power for any spell worker to handle, so they built attenuation towers. The wellspring is.. hm.. it’s hard to explain. It’s up, and the magic comes down. The tower is like a stack of iron rings.”

Mira tapped the iron bracers around her wrists together for the sake of illustration.

“…The lowest levels are schools for the newest learners, where the least amount of magic is. As you climb higher up the tower, the flow grows stronger and stronger. No spell worker alive can work magic above the halfway point in Terok; at least not twice.”

“Cool. That’s so cool.. wow. Okay. It’s like a real city.”

The continued down the trade road into the valley; its meanderings and the windbreaks between farms soon obscured Terok from sight, but Ness still occasionally caught a glimpse of the glittering tower through a gap.

“You said you had a friend that can help us, right?”

“…Right. A friend.” Mira sounded doubtful about the word choice.

“What does that mean?”

“We’re… friendly.”

“Mira…?”

“I dated her for a while.”

“We’re going to ask your ex for help? Wait, you said ‘her’…”

“What, do you not approve? Is your world so backwards about love?”

“Oh. No. It’s not that. I approve. I very much approve. Believe me. But.. your ex? That you’re still friends with? You useless fucking lesbian?”