Seeker of the Four Winds: A Galatia Novel (10 page)

“We need a magic slayer pronto,” Hogard said.
“My brain feels like it’s being eaten away by termites.”

“Magic slayers are a dying breed,” Loyl said,
glancing nervously at the trail ahead. “Finding one isn’t going to
be easy.”

“Daylight’s burning,” Hogard said, heavily
and slowly as if speaking required great effort. “And so’s my
head.”

Nobody said anything as they broke camp and
left for Blue Junction.

(Josephine Rose Albright)

A cloud of dirt billowed behind the Red
Squad as their horses pounded the road, slowing only when the first
house came into view. The outside was made of unpainted lengths of
wood weathered gray, a few small windows, and a stone chimney went
up the side. The roof was sod and a rock sidewalk led up to the
front door from the main road. There was a corral with a couple of
cows—only they had a single horn in the middle of their heads.

“Hey, look,” Josie said.
“Instead of unicorns, this place has uni
cows
. Isn’t that
hilarious?”

The only one who laughed was Lindsey,
sounding a little loopy. “Good one, Josie.” Was that sarcasm? It
didn’t seem like it, so was she trying to work past the animosity
between them or was the fever just making her nuts?

Over the course of the day, the blisters
spread slowly over everyone except for Lars and Josie, but the
black goo had done a blitzkrieg over Hogard’s face. The flies
congregated over his dirty fur and broken skin. When he’d slap at
them, they’d fly away in a swirling buzz, but return to land on the
exact same spot a second later.

While the others waited in the distance, out
of sight, Josie and Lars were elected to go to the door of the
nearest house because they were the only ones without a rash.

“You peddlers?” the man asked hopefully.

“Uh, no, kind sir,” Josie said carefully,
repeating the words Prince Loyl advised her to use. “We have come
from out of town to visit a friend of mine and I’m afraid we are
quite lost. Although we are in no need of his service, he’s in the
business of magic slaying, so we were wondering if you would point
us in his general direction?”

The man slammed the door in their faces and
yelled, “Get off of my property!”

They were run off the next three farms in a
similar fashion.

“Why does everyone hate magic slayers so
much?” Josie asked the prince.

“It’s not the magic slayers they hate, it’s
the magic slayers’ customers. Nobody wants to be in the company of
someone suffering the effects of a malicious spell for fear of
inciting the wrath of the one who cast it.”

“I thought magic was outlawed centuries ago.
How does anybody even know about it?”

“Similar to certain drugs in America just
before the plague,” Dante explained. “Magic here is illegal, but
there’s always going to be the equivalent of meth labs hidden in
the backwoods and addicts shooting up in dark alleys.”

“I see,” Josie said, glancing at Hogard, who
was now too ill to swat away the flies partying on his wasting
horn. The rest of the squad didn’t look well either. Their sullen
faces were ashen and worn with fatigue. As evening fell, they were
still far from the town, but they had no choice excpet to bed down
for the night in the outlying farmlands. Josie and Lars, still
unaffected by the curse, did most of the camp duties. The others
were reluctant to eat much, but they had developed an unquenchable
thirst. Lars went down to the stream three times to refill all the
canteens.

Hogard snored only intermittently, and
farted less than once per hour, prompting Lars and Josie to get up
several times in the night to make sure he was still alive. Josie
watched Lars place a foot on the Bulwark’s rump, giving it a
shake.

“Sorry to disappoint ya, I’m not dead yet,”
the Bulwark grumbled irritably. “Now leave me alone before I bash
ya.”

A snicker escaped Josie as she watched Lars
leap out of the way of Hogard’s clumsy blow, knocking over the
empty cooking tripod. It was a relief to see that the Bulwark still
had spunk.

The next morning was a miserable gray day
full of spotty rain showers. Loyl commented that rugged mountain
paths had been hacked out of the mountain by pick axes during a
terrible war between the Bulwarks and Regalans centuries earlier,
before the existence of the Western Alliance, before the treaty of
First Rights.

Ahead, the scarred path was littered with
boulders. The horses were understandably reluctant to climb up, but
the descent was far worse. Chunky granite slabs glistened like
black ice all the way down to the river at the valley floor.

“The bridge to Blue River Junction lies just
beyond those trees, on the opposite river bank,” Loyl said. As they
descended, Josie fell woefully behind the others, but Lars waited
for her to catch up.

“Hurry it up,” Lindsey said. “Daylight’s
burning!”

“I can’t help that Buckwheat’s slow.”

“Don’t blame your horse,” Dante called up to
her, voice echoing over the mountain. “You’re just scared and
holding him back.”

“I’m not scared, just smart, I know my
limitations.”

“But you don’t know your horse’s
limitations,” Rolf said. “Buckwheat grew up in mountain country.
The ground isn’t muddy, there’s no loose gravel. This is a good
time to learn.”

Looking further down the path, she realized
the Bulwark was slumped against his horse’s neck, barely able to
stay in the saddle. If he could go down the mountain in such a
state, perhaps she was being selfish. Taking a deep breath, she
steeled her nerves.

“The key is to stay balanced in the saddle,”
Rolf called up from below. “Don’t let your nose go beyond the
saddle horn. Try to keep your body vertically aligned with the
trees. Let Buckwheat pick the path,”

Lars was closest to her, about twenty
degrees to her left, thirty feet further down the slope. He glanced
up at her with an encouraging smile. Buckwheat carried her down,
laborious step by laborious step, but it wasn’t nearly as
terrifying as it had looked from the top.

“You guys were right,” she called down to the
others. “It’s not as bad as…”

The sound of snapping stone cut through the
air.

The world seemed to tilt.

A slab the size of a kitchen table had
broken loose beneath Buckwheat’s hooves. As it crumbled forward, he
struggled for footing to no avail. Her hip slammed into the ground.
Buckwheat slid toward Lars headfirst, with Josie’s foot trapped in
a stirrup.

“Watch out!” she tried to warn Lars, but
there was nothing he could do. She felt Buckwheat slam into Bolt.
Imagining Lars being crushed between them filled her with horror.
Oh, god, please let him survive!

The rocks slid mercilessly beneath her back
as Buckwheat’s weight pulled her down the mountainside, shredding
her army jacket to the chainmail beneath. Horse and rider gathered
speed as they headed straight for the rapids. Josie’s screams mixed
with the roar of the water. Momentum carried them over the edge of
the cliffs the river had cut in the mountain rift like a kid off
the end of a slide. She and Buckwheat hovered high above the water
for a split second, just before they plummeted.

It felt like smacking pavement.

The current gripped her body and zipped her
down the river. Not knowing how to swim, staying with the horse was
her only chance—that was if he didn’t kick her to death first.

She pawed at the water in a frantic effort
to keep her head above the surface. Call upon the charisma! But she
had never been able to call upon its strength except by accident,
during some kind of crisis.

“Don’t fail me now, charisma!” she
glubbed.

Using the saddle horn to pull her head and
shoulders out of the water, she struggled to get her tangled foot
out of the stirrup. The saddle was slipping under Buckwheat’s
belly, pulling her beneath the surface again.

I can do this,
she told herself, fighting the panic.
O
pen the Excito Fortitudo.

Picturing a valve next to her heart opening,
and energy pouring into it, spreading through her veins, she
realized that power had been building behind it like water against
a dam, brought on by the threat to her life. Warmth flowed through
her chest into her limbs. As the gateway within opened wider, not
only did she feel oddly empowered, her mind had never been so
clear.

With a single kick, she
ripped the stirrup from the leather. Clinging to the horse’s mane,
she managed to fling an arm out of the water, grab onto a wad of
Buckwheat’s mane, and pull her head above the surface. Her
belongings, including
Riddle of
Steel
in its watertight freezer bag, were
floating away down the river. The horse shook his head, snorting
water out of his nose. Her grip loosened. She clawed at him, her
only lifeline, but he slipped away. Never had she felt more
defeated than the moment she watched Buckwheat pull himself onto a
muddy bank without her.

Her eyes caught a glimpse of a black ball
bobbing along in the distance. An arm came up out of the water.
Wait, it was someone’s head.

“L-Lars!”

She tried to yell out his name again, but all
she managed was a glub, glup, blup as river water splashed into her
mouth. Where they would end up, was anybody’s guess.

(Michael Penn)

Most council meetings centered on city
planning. Josie’s mother, Veronica Albright, usually took over the
whole affair, which was okay with me. I didn’t have a lot to
contribute anyway. Years ago, just after the plague, but before the
last remnants of humanity moved underground, she had lived down the
road from my adoptive parents, Red the First and Elizabeth. I was a
child then, while she was a grown-up. The years that had
transformed me into a graying middle-aged man had barely touched
Veronica. Although she was nearly seventy, her face was that of a
thirty-five-year-old. So were her energy levels, but emotionally
she related more to the old folks. To this day Veronica remained
best pals with my mother.

Whenever I saw her, I thought of her youngest
daughter and the Red Squad. Only a handful of people knew the true
reason behind their departure. Red was keeping it a secret to avoid
raising hopes only to dash them. That the squad had gone in search
of the missing half of the Blood Map was high on the list of
speculation, but like any true politician, Red refused to confirm
or deny anything. After a while, people moved on to other topics,
such as the completion of the port and the Western Alliance’s
continued threats against our choice of real estate. In the
meantime, we kept building a city.

The day the first wave of Bulwark craftsman
arrived, all of Galatia came out to meet them. The new arrivals
were taken by surprise by the cheering crowds lining the street,
proffering food and handshakes. Despite their gruff exteriors,
Mother had read in their thoughts that they were totally loving the
attention. Once our guest laborers settled into their temporary
camp, the Bulwarks became a regular sight around Galatia. They
weren’t the friendly sort, but they worked hard to finish the port
and took great pride in their work.

In turn, Red paid them well, and the word
spread, attracting some of the best craftsman Future Earth had to
offer, along with the riffraff and the slackers. Most of the dead
weight drifted away of their own accord, but sometimes they needed
a shove out of town, which made it clear that Galatia needed to
establish visible law enforcement. The problem was that our police
chief and many of his officers had died in the evacuation from the
bunker, leaving us lacking in qualified law enforcement
personnel.

My brother Barrett’s position as head of the
recycling plant, essential in a self-sustaining underground
facility, was obsolete here, but during his ten years on Future
Earth as leader of his own settlement, he had earned a new skill
set. Some argued that such a man deserved to be in a position of
authority. Organized, dedicated, physically strong and
knowledgeable about this age we had landed in—the council voted
Barrett in as head of the police department. Lars’s father, Dr.
Simon Steelsun, was vehemently opposed, but he was in the
minority.

Sheriff
Barrett Fade immediately
appointed a deputy—our other brother, Bryce. Over the next few
weeks they interviewed dozens of men and women interested in law
enforcement postitions. In a months time, Galatia had twelve
officers in its new police department. Fortunately, they didn’t
have a lot to do beyond crowd control during Red’s weekly public
meetings.

Their toughest assignment so far had been
dealing with our foreign guests. Though taciturn with those not of
their own race, the Bulwarks loved to party with their own kind.
Sheriff Barrett and his officers were sometimes called late at
night to ask them to tone down it down. There were a few tense
incidents, but for the most part, the new Chief of Police handled
the Bulwarks beautifully.

Outside of our borders, the western kingdoms
were in the throes of a down economy, so craftsmen from all over
the West were trickling into our new nation, eager for work, each
with their own area of expertise. Bulwarks on foundation and
masonry. Deermas at woodworking, and when it came to large wagon
loads of lumber, they could out-pull the horses when needed.

As for the Commoners, they were willing to
work any job, and blended in well with the Galatians. I talked to
them about anything and everything, but Red reminded me in private
to stay on guard, saying that they’d report everything they had
seen and heard to their leaders upon returning to their homelands.
Some of the humanoids seemed genuinely sad about our inevitable
loss of the lands we claimed, but most didn’t care about the
politics of Galatia, or our future, as long as they got paid.