Shadowy figures loomed over me. I could hear their rough breathing and smell the oily leather of their well-worn cloaks. The clang of weaponry sounded above me as the blades swung from their backs. I closed my eyes and prepared for the worst.
A match struck. I could smell the sulfur in the air, and through my closed eyelids I saw the flicker of an orange flame. I opened my eyes, and found myself surprised to see the outline of a long cigar, the tip glowing deep orange as a seemingly bodiless hand lit it. The shadowed figure took long deep drags from the cigar and puffed smoke into the dark sky, the smell of tobacco wafting through the air.
“Well, well, well,” spoke the dark figure, his voice deep and friendly, almost jovial. “Look who we have here.”
“Where are you going to take us?” I asked, pleading into the blackness.
The shadowed figure took a long pull from the cigar and his exhale sounded almost celebratory. He leaned down and as he looked me in the eyes, the tip of the cigar illuminated his face, light dancing across his thick rusty-auburn beard. His patched fur cloak swept over me as he leaned in to speak.
“Home, lad.” said Tabor, a broad smile lighting up his face
We all sat around the roaring, crackling campfire. Dreya huddled close to me, one of the Tabor’s fur cloaks wrapped over her shoulders. My wrists and ankles still ached from the Dampeners, and I could see Kenzi massaging his wrists and rubbing at his legs every now and again.
On the other side of the fire Tabor and Rausch sat with large hunks of skewered meat, laughing merrily as they rocked on a large fallen tree stump. Farther away, his silhouette outlined against the trees in the pale starlight, Griska stood guard. Every couple of seconds he’d turn around and flash an annoyed look at the boisterous men.
“So I tell Vikash,” said Tabor, laughing, telling the story for what felt like the eighteenth time that evening, “I tell him we’ll round up a search party, hunt you guys down, and bring you back to village—”
“And I just jumped right in!” exclaimed Rausch, pulling his skewer out of the flames, brandishing it like a sword. “I’ll bring them back, dead or alive!”
“No, we need the gold!” Tabor said mockingly, imitating Vikash, and the two of them burst into fits of laughter. Rausch brought the meat up to his mouth and took a large tear of it with his teeth, chewing on it merrily. “And that Citadel Guard, you could practically see the boy’s tail between his legs when he came back!”
Tabor stood up and held his hands out, drooping them like paws, and made loud whimpering noises. Rausch roared with laughter.
“And now here we are,” Tabor said, his laughter fading as he took deep breaths to regain his composure, “huddled up with our little runaways. How’re the wrists, lad?” Tabor turned to Kenzi, concern clear even on his smiling face.
“You know,” Kenzi said, still rubbing his wrists, which pulsed a faint white whenever he stretched out his fingers and pulled them back into fists, “you could have said something instead of hurling those damn ropes at us. Those hurt, you know.”
“He’s got a point,” I said, my wrists and ankles still stinging.
Rausch shook his head. “You never would have believed us,” he said, poking his now empty skewer into the fire.
“We’ve been doing this for a long time, lad,” Tabor said, his palms facing the flames. “Ever since I arrived in Freedland. For every three of four Conduits that Vikash manages to send back to the Citadel, I try my best to help a few escape.”
“And about a quarter of those guards never make it back home,” Rausch said, a menacing look in his eyes as he looked up at us from behind the flames. “I mean, the quiet guy is a pretty big help with that.” He nodded up the hill at Griska, who maintained his silent watch.
I wouldn’t have believed it.
Not a damn word.
And even at this point, I still wasn’t sure that I did.
But here we were with these three unsuspecting new allies, gathered around a warm fire, waiting.
We tore hungrily into the food Rausch had prepared on the roaring fire. After days of dried fruits and overly salted jerky, the fresh produce and roasted meat were nothing less than a feast.
“How long have you been doing this exactly?” Dreya asked, gazing at the burly men through the fire.
Rausch looked at Tabor, and Tabor shrugged.
“I’ve been at it only two years . . . three?” Rausch said, questioningly. “Three, I’m sure. It all started my second year I’d been with the Freedmen in that blasted village. I saw one of the Citadel Guards . . . he initiated the Act of Extraction on a Conduit, right in front of me. Some of the other Freedmen were there too.” He shook his head, eyes closed, wincing. “A lot of the men in the hall cheered and laughed as the guy’s . . . ,” he looked at Tabor, “what was his name? There are so many, I forget someti—"
“Hulse.” Tabor said, softly interjecting.
“Ah,” Rausch said, remembering, nodding his head, “yes. Hulse. Tabor had him lined up to be freed, but Vikash had some sort of back alley deal going on. Was going to sell the guy to the Citadel a day early. Hulse started panicking in the middle of the hall, breaks free of these old ropes he was tied up with. Tabor’s trying to calm him down, it just isn’t working.”
“You gotta’ understand,” Tabor said softly again, the jovial nature he was displaying earlier completely washed away at the thought of this memory, “he thought he was going home. I shouldn’t have told him what we had planned.”
At this, Rausch places a hand on Tabor’s knee and gives him a little shake, smiling softly. “You tried your best.” Tabor nods softly and fixes his eyes on the fire, the orange and red flames lighting up in his glassy eyes.
“So the Citadel Guards come crashing in,” Rausch continued, “and Hulse just unleashes. Starts hurling these orbs of energy. You ever see when lightning balls up from the sky and gets close to the ground, when it’s really hot out?”
I hadn’t, but I had a good idea of what it might look like.
“It was like that, but colored this unnatural deep violet. The Guards screamed and jumped this way and that, the spheres exploding with fuzzy blasts of lightning. Anyhow, it was mayhem, the Citadel Guards screaming and dashing off, cowards that they are.”
“Except for this one man,” Rausch said this, a frown on his face. “He just stood there, resolute, no fear. Just looked straight ahead at Hulse as he hurled these . . . these spheres of death in all directions.”
“This man,” he continued, “he just strolled right up to Hulse and clamped his hand around his neck. Blew my mind.”
“So what happened?” Kenzi asked, his voice rippling with fear. “What’s this Act of Retraction, or whatever?”
“Extraction,” said Rausch, shaking his head. “It um . . . it drains a Conduit of all their power.”
There was a pause that hung in the air awkwardly.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“It’s true,” Rausch said, continuing. “Fatal too.”
“So this Citadel Guard,” Rausch continued, “grabbed the guy by the neck and hoists him into the air.”
“There’s this thing,” Rausch gestured with his hands, moving one hand up the length of his arm and formed a claw, “it just shot out of his cloak, almost like a second hand, but . . .” He struggled and looked at Tabor, who only shook his head. “It was a golden machine. There were all these pistons and gears jutting out from the side as it extended out of his cloak and up the length of his hand. It gripped itself around his throat with a sharp snap, and he just stared at him, his eyes so fixated. So focused.”
Rausch rubbed his forehead.
“And then there was the screaming, the machine just pulling the Magic out of the guy in these thick wisps of black smoke. Came out of his ears, mouth, even out of his eyes. It was—”
“That’s enough,” Tabor said, gesturing softly at him to stop talking.
“What?” Kenzi said, protesting. “No, I want to hear this.”
“I said that’s enough!” Tabor boomed, and leaped to his feet, his eyes locked on the fire. Rausch reached a hand out toward him, and Tabor jerked away, turning sharply toward Griska and joining him in his silent gazing at the countryside.
In the silence that followed, I mulled over the story and our situation. I tried to focus on the dirt, on the soil under me. On the fire. On the stones. Anything that had some connection to the earth or the plants . . . something that might have a connection to what had happened in the Freedmen Village or back in Frosthaven. Why couldn’t I harness it now? What had unleashed it earlier, and what did I have to do to get that back?