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Melvin was coming to hate the travel part of this quest. Everything was too far from everything else. They had been traveling on these hava-chaises for hours after leaving Triptoe. So far they had passed grass and a stream and some more grass. There was also a pond where Melvin spent ten minutes convincing Jason not to shoot a deer because he wasn’t about to clean it. And after that, yet more grass.
Maybe the scenic countryside vistas would be more welcome if he had the city to go back to. He missed the suburbs, the concrete, street lamps with powerlines that fed lookalike houses with electricity. That was home.
Maybe he was just irritable because of last night. Before Rich melt-blasted Sentry Triptoe, the robot had worked Melvin over pretty decent. Then the townspeople had come out in droves and their relentless partying and plying him with liquor made for a slow morning start and a cloudy head. Hell, even his breasts were sore and heavy-feeling, probably from the rough night’s rest on that crappy bed.
So now, he just wanted to be there already, wherever there was. What he got was more grass—lush, green and promising to never end on the horizon. It was making his mood dark.
Rich seemed to have had a better night. He barely focused on the view; his eyes had been stuck for hours in his book. That thing was denser than the thick clumps of grass they routinely passed.
A brief visual of Rich crashing his hava-chaise while he was in the middle of turning a page made Melvin smile. He would skid and tumble across the grasses, yelping and cursing all the while.
“Hey guys, check this out,” Rich said, engrossed in his book. “It says here that Kaftar Friese was the first Hierophant. He believed in a principle called ritual equivalence. His theory was a mage could pay for the cost of casting spells physically and mentally before or during, not just after a spell.”
“So?” Melvin asked sourly. The last thing he cared about was Rich’s dumb book.
“So, I have to cast a spell designed by Kaftar Friese on the death creature to trap him,” Rich said, not bothering to look up from his book. “Not only am I casting a spell made by the first Hierophant, but he was working on a whole different way to use magic, like a sort of mystical pay-as-you-go system.”
Crash already, Melvin thought.
Rich didn’t crash. The three of them continued on without incident for another hour. They encountered a stream and Jason called for lunch.
Melvin let out a sigh of relief as he sat on the grass and took off his boots. Butt was sore, legs were sore, breasts were sore... all he wanted was to go back to bed.
“You know, I’m sure wild animals come to this stream to drink,” Jason said. “If we just wait a little while, something’ll get thirsty and I can shoot us some fresh meat for lunch.”
“No! That’s OK!” Melvin cried. Rich was shaking his head emphatically. “Look at our packs,” Melvin said, “we should really eat some of this food before it gets old.”
The packs were full to bulging. The people of Triptoe had bestowed them with all they could carry. Fresh bread from the baker, sweets from the confectioner, dried meat from the butcher who also happened to be the mortician.
Melvin’s pack was especially overstuffed. The town’s women had shown a fondness for him that bordered on mascot adoption. Before his backpack screamed at the seams and forced them to stop, the ladies of Triptoe had stuffed it with a make-up kit, countless silver and gold hoop earrings, bangle bracelets, a necklace of amber-colored stones, and three sundresses. Even though he was essentially wearing a steel bikini, the thought of wielding a double edged bastard sword in a sundress was comical to Melvin.
They rummaged through their packs, pulling out the Triptoe bread and meat, Hierophane cheese and apples. The stream gurgled its water past their picnic to destinations beyond. A gentle breeze stirred, rippling the grass to tickle Melvin’s toes. This was a much-needed break.
Jason fished an ornate bowl out of his pack, one of his rewards for saving the town. He leaned over the stream and dipped the bowl in. After taking a drink, he pulled off his pinky bone and dropped it into the bowl.
“I knew it,” he said, pointing toward where they had been traveling. “I’m starting to feel the direction,” he said with a smile. “In my bones.”
“Good,” Melvin said, “That means we’re getting close, or at least closer. I can’t wait to get this done and get back. I have never wanted a freshly toasted Pop Tart so much in my life.”
“Meh,” Jason said, his mouth half full of bread, “The way I see it, the burbs can wait.”
“Easy for you to say,” Melvin said, cupping a sore breast. “You’re not differently gendered.”
“I’m differently species’ed,” Jason said with a shrug. “But really, gender or race doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m saying. It’s just logic.”
“How is waiting to get back to our real bodies and lives any form of logic?”
“Once we’ve captured the death creature, we’ll have an open invitation to return home,” Jason said. “The Hierophane’s been standing for five hundred years, so it’s not going away any time soon.”
Jason kept going, snacking on meat and cheese between sentences. “Whether this new world of ours is in an alternate universe or a billion light years away or whatever, since time wasn’t a factor in our instantaneous arrival here it’s indicative we’re operating outside our known understanding of time. That means we stand a fifty-fifty chance of returning home at the exact moment of our departure. Granted, if we take our passes back to Earth when we’re old and gray here, there’s a chance we’ll be just as old when we get back. But there’s an equally good chance we’ll return exactly when we left. If that’s the case, we’re throwing away an extra lifetime for nothing. And even if that’s not the case and we’re a week away from the mortuary, at least we had fun over here.”
“Wow,” Melvin said, raising an eyebrow at his best friend. “Looks like you’ve thought this through.”
“Hells yeah,” he said. “Besides, I’m kind of in a different state than I started out in.”
He held up his bone arm and looked at it. “Who knows how this will translate through the pendulum. I know I don’t like the possibilities.”
“Maybe after he finishes that book Rich will be able to cast a real fix for your arm,” Melvin said. He looked at Rich, who had been quiet the whole meal.
He saw the reason. Rich was lying down next to a half-eaten piece of bread, asleep.
Melvin started to nudge him with a toe, but he saw Rich twitch. He was in the middle of a mage-trance. Melvin hoped this time he wouldn’t wake up screaming his head off.
Jason nodded toward Rich. “He’s got it the best of all of us,” he said. “I mean, you saw the way he melted Triptoe. He’s got insane amounts of power, and the only drawback is a bad dream every now and again.”
Melvin looked up at the sky. The clouds were wispy thin, as if they had been lightly dabbed against the blue background with a paintbrush. “Guess our break’s gonna run a bit longer than we thought,” he said.
With his stuffed pack acting as a pillow, Melvin lay down to take a nap while Rich tranced it out. Lying on his back was measurably more comfortable for his sore body. The sound of the stream and the sight of lazy clouds drifting added to the tranquility.
Then his stomach started cramping.
“Oh come on!” Melvin muttered. What the hell was that dried meat they got from Triptoe, strandwolf jerky? His stomach never cramped to a warm maple and brown sugar toaster pastry.
He sat up, annoyed by his body’s refusal to find comfort. Jason was also sitting up, his dancing eyes squinting as he looked at something invisible in the distance.
“I think company’s coming,” he said.
A bolt of panic shot through Melvin. “What do you see?” he asked. Whatever it was, Melvin had already banked on it not being good.
“Aians, it looks like,” Jason muttered. “Hard to make out how many.”
“We should try getting Rich up so we can get out of here,” Melvin said.
“C’mon, you know there’s no waking him up,” Jason said. “Six... seven... looks like eight of them. I’m sure they see us.”
Melvin looked at the horizon. Whatever Jason saw was just a shimmering smudge to Melvin.
“I say we prop Rich up on one of our hava-chaises and cut out of here,” Melvin said.
“And run? We’d look guilty of something,” Jason said nonchalantly, his eyes still on the growing smudge in the distance. “Yep, definitely eight.”
“Doesn’t matter if we look guilty if they don’t catch us,” Melvin said. “I can carry Rich. You grab his pack.”
“No,” Jason said, shaking his head. “These hava-chaises are light craft, built to support one passenger. Your combined weight will slow it to a crawl.”
Jason took his eyes off of the smudges to focus on Melvin. “They’re riding destriers.”
Melvin remembered destriers from a campaign they had run called “Siege of Andalus”. The hardest part was getting through the aian cavalry. They rode the destriers, massive warhorses, big like leftovers from the Jurassic period when everything was supersized.
Melvin could see them himself now. Eight distinct riders, moving at a gallop, and clearly heading straight toward them.
Jason was right. Even with the each of them on their own hava-chaise, it was likely the destriers could still chase them down. In this open country, there was nowhere to run for miles.
“What if they’re bandits?” Melvin asked.
“Why do you think I’m acting so calm?” Jason asked. “You’d better think of something to get mad about.”
Melvin couldn’t think of anything but his own fear. The riders were two football fields away. He could see they were all armed, some with sword pommels protruding from their backs, others with bow and quiver. His hand trembled as he reached behind his back for his sword.
“Don’t draw,” Jason said smoothly. “We’ll run the risk of turning neutral intent into hostile. We’re gonna have to let them make the first move.”
They were now one football field away. They all wore the same black leather with swaths of red fabric. Jason looked at the approaching riders as he talked.
“If they’re bandits, then maybe emptying our wallets will satisfy them.”
Jason gave Melvin a friendly smile and looked his body up and down with his dancing eyes. “If they want something else, then that’s when we may have to get messy.”
Melvin dry-swallowed.
The eight aians were upon them. The riders fanned out to form a circle around them. The massive bulk of the destriers blotted out the view of anything beyond. Now there was no option for escape.
“Ho, brother,” one of the riders said, looking at Jason. “What business brings you to the High Veldt?”
“I should’ve known this was the High Veldt,” Jason said, looking around like he could see through the horses. “Me and my companions are just passing through, brother.”
The rider looked at Melvin and a tranced out Rich. “You keep strange company.”
“These are strange times, are they not?” Jason asked. He kept a smile on his face and his manner calm.
“Indeed,” the rider said. He raised an eyebrow at the hava-chaises. “On what orders of the Hierophane do you come here?”
“Just passing through to lands beyond,” Jason replied.
“I ask because the Hierophane doesn’t have much say here or in lands beyond,” the rider said.
The rider paused and looked Jason over. “Where are your marks?”
Jason looked himself over. “What marks?”
The rider brushed his own neck, indicating the gray skin that looked like scales. He stuck out his tongue and it was forked.
“The Marks of Passing,” the rider said. “You have none.”
Melvin looked at the riders. All of them carried animal features of one kind or another. Two had bug antennae, three had feathers along their necks, and the remaining riders had gills.
One of the feathered riders shook his head in disbelief. “Impossible,” he said.
“Not impossible,” the scaly rider told him. “We may not have believed it, brethren, but the teachings were always clear on this. Here is the proof. We live in the last days of Onus.”
The scaly rider dismounted and approached Jason. “What is your name, markless traveler?”
“I am Cephrin,” Jason said. “Uh, sorry about having no marks.”
The scaly aian held up a hand to dismiss Jason’s words. His hands were as scaly as his neck. “No apologies needed, Cephrin. I am Mors, Knight-Marshall, Armsguard of the High Fane.”
Mors looked at the riders with bug antennae. “Sapr, Restan, send word to the Fane.”
Mors dropped on one knee in front of Jason, who looked down and around as if trying to get a clue as to what was happening.
“Allow me the honor of escorting you to Nasreddin,” Mors said, his head bowed.
“I’d love to see Nasreddin,” Jason said, “but I’m afraid I have business elsewhere.”
Mors looked up at Jason. His tone was deferential, his eyes deadly serious. “You’re the one of prophecy. I’m afraid this isn’t a request.”