It should have come as no surprise to Rose when their shoddy ship ran out of fuel, but somehow it did. The captain sat them all down the night before and said, in his most embarrassed voice, “Folks, it seems as if we have been a little bit … swindled.” This led to some confused looks from the passengers, but he clarified quickly. “We got to the bottom of our coal reserves, and they were full of scrap metal. Obviously, we’ll be reporting the seller, but for the time being, we’ll run out of fuel soon.”
There was, of course, a hew and cry. But as there were fewer than twenty people sitting there, it wasn’t as loud as it might have been. The captain raised his hands for silence, but he had to try twice before he got it. “Right, right! I know, I get it! Okay, so here’s what we’ll do. There’s a slip dock that we ought to hit for tomorrow. A platform with parts and fuel comes by this way weekly, and we haven’t passed it yet, so at worst we’ll have to spend two or three days there before we can buy more coal. You will all, of course, be compensated for the time wasted and you have my personal apologies…”
Rose didn’t stay to listen to the rest. The angry folks screaming at the Captain was nothing to do with her. Two days might make or break her path, but there was nothing to be done. She needed to make a plan and account for the lost time was all. Of course, Emrys found her a few minutes later. She had made her way to the small bedroom they shared, even if that was mostly theoretical because he went to bed after her and woke up before her. He entered silently and began to pack his things up. He was tossing dirty travel clothes into his travel sack and putting the travel book set back together, tossing the wet ink and putting the ink powder back into the tube that held it. “You getting ready to walk back home, then?”
He didn’t stop packing, but he answered all the same. “No, but we’re close enough, yes? We’re two days outside Thuung. The pass road we were aiming for also passes south of it, so we can pick it up. The little dock we’re aiming for is a place I’ve seen before, on occasion. There’s nothing around it but some empty buildings, but there is a path. No need to wait for a few days there if we can get going early.”
Rose watched him pack a bit more and said, “Well …. huh.” And began to pack her things up as well. “So, what, we’ll just walk the rest of the way, just you and me?”
“I’m sorry that I am not more pleasant company, but yes. Unless you have more friends I don’t know about waiting for us.” He paused for a moment, seemingly to consider that possibility, though Rose knew it wasn’t the case and he surely did as well. She didn’t have friends. Just a teacher, a sister, and a shitty mother – and that third one was debatable anymore. “I need to excuse myself for a bit. I will return to pack the rest of this in a short time, I think.” Emrys cracked the door softly and closed it behind him, leaving Rose to wonder after that weird exchange while she packed her things up.
And so the exchange didn’t make sense to her until about five hours later, when about half the passengers had disembarked at the slip dock – which turned out to be a sad ramshackle dock in the middle of almost nowhere. It looked like the sort of dock that belonged at a house that some backwoods family called “The Holler” and had mostly been home to mold and frogs, but it didn’t fall apart when she’d rolled down it, so it worked. Emrys hadn’t been lying, there were some buildings around that looked mostly abandoned. They looked like once upon a time they had been something like a barn, a store, and maybe a hostel, but they were all empty now. Emrys was shielding his eyes from the mid-afternoon sun and looking at the buildings, eyeing them up like potential dance partners. Eventually he chose the possible former hostel and shoved the door open. He waved Rose over. “I believe that this one has the best bones.” As if buildings had bones. As if Emrys knew a thing about the bones of buildings. But she didn’t much either, so she followed his lead.
The inside was dusty, of course, and filled with every sort of broken thing imaginable. Cups, beds, chairs, tables, even the fireplace was bulging and busted out on one side. Emrys was busying himself with the mattresses that still looked dry (mostly hauling them down from the upstairs, since the downstairs had certainly flooded several times since the place went to shit). And it wasn’t until he was almost done setting up a few beds – was he setting one up for Rose? Nobody asked him to do that, did they? – that Rose about jumped out of her skin.
There was a soft wind making its way through the building through a busted window, but it picked up and began to kick around dust and debris. It became almost a small local dust devil, or a little ball of swirling dust in one area and then, as if that wasn’t fucked up enough, a voice came out of the thing. Rose had no idea what it said. On top of having a voice so thin and airy that it made Emrys sound like a classically trained opera singer, it was spouting a language she didn’t understand. It was like, “huna gosh tuba shaving, envious hut worker” or something.
But Emrys seemed to get it and he smiled. Put his hands together like a prayer to the benevolent gods of the east and said something back to it in that strange language. “Shook ran like I am a dick hole”.
Okay, that wasn’t it, but it was in the same village as it.
Anyway, as soon as he said that the little ball of wind settled down and everything went quiet again. Rose just stared at him; eyes wide, not quite sure how to begin saying “what the fuck was that” with a loud enough voice to accommodate her mood. But he saved her the effort. “Days ago, I told you that being an elementalist could be most useful. I am about to prove this point to you. My friend, a small elemental of the air who lives in this area, has gone to scout for me. And as I feared, there are men with weapons headed this way. And so now we know that they come and they do not know that we are aware. They were hoping, I think, to catch us all unawares while we slept here for the night, but now they will not. This is one of the ways in which my training can be helpful.”
He stopped, looking pleased with himself as if he had just given a mini lecture – which Rose guessed he had. She connected the dots. “The fuel. They’re working together.”
“That is my guess, yes.”
“Those fuckers.” And then she smiled a wide smile. “Want to see what my training is good for?”
Turns out, he did. The engagement itself was short. Ten people came over the hill toward the river about three hours after sunset. A blazing light hit the front ranks hard, bright as the day. They’d been in the dark for hours at that point and they basically fell all over themselves, hitting the ground or shielding themselves with their arms, and they were the first hit by the small arms that the crew of the Crystania Fields had managed to scrape together. They were single shot affairs for fending off pirates, which is, to be precise, exactly what they were doing now. Three of them were hit, one badly, but even one of the assholes who wasn’t hit too badly ran off. Seems like she hadn’t signed up for resistance.
The burst of light, of course, had been Rose and she dropped it after the first few shots and sent a blast of violet light through her third eye and right into that asshole’s nuts. It caused a burst of pain to flare in her head, but it was enough to send him down. Also, if she was honest with herself, the look on his gross dirty face as he got hit was pretty fantastic. It was gone in a flash with the light, of course, but Rose remembered and smiled.
That left seven assholes. Rose couldn’t see them very well, which was not ideal. The silver moon was huge and blazing, and the sun moon was still low in the sky, but it did shed some light. Her illuminator eyes never affected her night vision, so she was better off than they were, but it was still chaos and Rose didn’t notice the three alongside of her until after they had seen her. They crept forward with knives and cudgels, their expressions obscured by the dark. She tried to push herself backwards up the hill, but the roots and incline were working against her.
And that was when she learned the other other reason that it’s useful to be an elementalist.
<hadmuhum lil’asfal, la qutl>
Which sounded more like, “hand the moon it’s silly moss cutter”, but Rose wasn’t really paying so much attention. What she DID see was the river rising up behind the three of them. It rose and split itself into sheets. Not only three, but five of them (because Rose later learned that she hadn’t seen two more of them to her right). One moment they were advancing and the next moment they were screaming and being pulled into the river like they were caught in some sort of riptide. Rose could still hear them screaming and gurgling as they were swept downriver. She would later discover that one of the commands the river spirit had been given was “no killing” which she wanted to disapprove of, but honestly, couldn’t bring herself to have any conviction about it. Plus, when she asked Emrys if he was sure the river spirit knew that breathing water would kill them, he didn’t seem too certain.
Seeing their buddies torn into the river, and hearing the captain give the order to reload, the remaining thieves ran off into the night. There was a general cheering from the passengers (most of whom had been hiding in the nearby buildings) and a huge laugh from the direction of the ship. Later, when it became clear that they weren’t coming back, the captain could be heard bragging about how they never could have reloaded in time to get at them, but the thieves certainly didn’t know that.
Rose had given one of them a blast on the ass on the way out just for good measure.
While she watched them flee, Emrys came up alongside her. He looked down at her with a grin on his face. He didn’t have to say anything. “Yeah, okay. That was pretty useful.” He continued to watch her, raising an eyebrow and eventually she said, “Fine, I’ll tell you. But not while the rubes are around. She reached around her neck and removed the necklace with the glowing blue stone.
Emrys grinned wider, taking it from her and looping it back around his own neck. “We leave in the morning, then.”
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