“They took her,” Mama Berthold wept as I finished placing the last bandage on Paw Berthold’s wounds. He’d be down a few days, maybe a week, but he’d be laid up the entire time.
“Sweet little Mayabelle?” I asked and she nodded miserably.
The Bertholds were good people. Farmers who made their plot with a handful of other families in the Wind River Territory. They always had some spare food and a place to home your mount for the night for travelers. They didn’t deserve this.
“Tell me about them. The ones who took Mayabelle.”
The Territories -that is what people generally call them- are overlapping pockets of reality. The more arcane minded might call them ‘interconnected demiplanes’, and those with a more natural philosophical training would say something about ‘liminal spaces’. Some are tiny, little more than a meadow or a mountain pass, others so large their edges have yet been found. In some Territories people ride Raptors and rely on ‘Brontos as beasts of burden, in others you’ll find that herds of Diremares dominate the lands (imagine a draft horse combined with a T-Rex and you’re almost right). Those who live in the Territories call them various descriptive and ontological names. E.g. “The Red Steppes,” “Great Eagles’ Mountain,” “The Evernight Glades,” “Banners Hold” and so on.
The kidnappers were ex-Westos soldiers who’d turned to banditry after The War ended. The Berthold’s had offered them some food and fodder for their ‘mares out of common courtesy, trading for stories and rumors from outside Wind River. Later that evening the bandits had returned with sour intent, beaten Paw Berthold and kidnapped young Mayabelle. She had been a child the last time I had been by this way, but she was a maiden now. A temptation too great for hungry men without a nation to marshall them.
The bandits had left tracks that Heelnipper could easily follow, leading to the edge of the Wind River Territory and seemingly stopped at the edge of a forest. There was a Way here, and not one of the normal ones into or out of Wind River. I dismounted from Heelnipper and poked around until I felt the edge of the hidden Way.
Wayfinding is difficult to explain to those without the Gift. Each Wayfinder does it a little differently. For myself, I’ll feel something out of place. In this case it was the smell: the air suddenly smelled differently. Rather than the pine and mossy grounds of Wind River, I smelled sandstone and dryness. That was my clue to how this particular Way works.
The New World was colonized by refugees, pilgrims and explorers who braved the great ocean west of the Old World for the promise of freedom and opportunity. What they discovered was that while the eastern parts of the New World were static, the farther west you went the … stranger the land got. If there’s a west coast to this continent, nobody’s claimed to have found it yet, but plenty have set out to and have never returned. Some Territories could be walked to and between easily enough, and well-established trails and roads were established. Other Territories required more esoteric means to traverse, known as Ways. Finding and using rare Ways what Wayfarers have the gift for.
Opening the Way was simple once I knew the clue: I found the sandstones that lay next to each other that were out of place in the Wind River Territory. They were oblate round rocks. The larger one had a scratched flat space upon its top and the smaller was flat on the bottom. Stacking the smaller one on the larger triggered the Way. The air between two great trees shimmered, and rocky canyon lands could be seen beyond the veil between Territories.
People of all kinds, colors and creeds live in the Territories. They mostly live peacefully in their chosen Territories, but banditry, tribal rivalry and other common human frictions abound. A decade ago the Great War ended, and nothing approaching the size and scope of that conflict has happened since. Some Territories still bear the scars of that vast and terrible conflict.
The various Peoples of the Territories often have magical gifts. There are Shamans who talk to the spirits of the land; Elementalists who bend forces of fire, earth, air and water; Arcanists who perform highly esoteric magic rituals; Shifters who can turn into animals. Just to name a few. Wayfarers have the gift of finding the Ways between Territories.
I didn’t recognize the Territory beyond, but it was like many other canyonlands I had visited before. Grunner muttered in his Old World tongue something annoyed about sand. When I looked at him, he shrugged his huge shoulders and said in common with his thick Deutchlander accent: “I hate sand in my boots.”
Red Feather, our tracker friend, chuckled. “Don’t worry about sand, my big friend” he said, spurring his mount forward, “Watch for snakes instead! They like sleeping in warm boots at night.”
Grunner spurred his mount to follow, growling aloud: “Then let’s not take all day to do this.”
We rode into the canyonlands.
It is also an age of technological advancement and industrialization: steam and lighting engines power vehicles and factories, gunpowder and zapcaps empower firearms like revolvers and chain-rifles (chained lighting that is); telegraph lines and babbage machines connect one end of a Territory to the other with nearly instant communication, but couriers are still needed between Territories.
The bandits were camped in a cul-de-sac offshoot of the winding canyons. Grunner and I lay on the top of the rocky walls surrounding their encampment, watching from above. A lone eagle soared overhead, circling. It had been morning when we entered the canyonlands, and now night was not long off. The bandits had posted no sentries, no guards at the entrance to their hiding place. They clearly had great confidence in the difficulty of finding this Territory, let alone their little corner among the rocks. But there were more of them than I expected. The bunch that had assaulted the Bertholds had been but a small raiding party. There was probably a whole platoon down there.
The eagle glid down somewhere behind us, but it was Red Feather who quietly snuck up to join us. “Many fighting men. They corral their horses in the back of the canyon. The only tent that is guarded is in the middle. The girl is probably there,” he reported.
I nodded. We needed a plan, and I had a few ideas brewing.
“Grunner, get that electric rifle of yours. Setup up here and be ready to cover us. Red Feather, you and I are going to sneak into the camp, cause a diversion - I’m thinking a stampede off their horses- free the girl and then we all get the hell out of here.”
They both nodded.
“Good. Let’s get going.”
No comments:
Post a Comment