No Strings Attached - Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Five

55th Day of Spring - Year 1758 of the Golden Era

Shorefarm, Yellowfield, Draya Calyrex

“Oi!” a man called out.

Viridian glanced up. She’d only just exited Tomas’s shop. The smith had been working on their short swords for the last few hours and had repaired their pikes as well. It was interesting to watch him work. The others in the room, the young Maguses, were quick to leave, but she and her companions stayed and kept Tomas company as he worked.

She had done a little work herself. Their gambesons had all gained a few cuts, and she put the sewing kit she’d gotten to good use closing those up. It was hard. Her fingers were solid, and had no give to squeeze onto a needle.

Tomas, meanwhile, had removed the heads of their pikes from their wooden shafts and heated them up, then tapped them straighter after letting them sit in his forge until red. Then he’d quenched the spearheads in oil that contained, according to him, a tiny drop of pure dragon’s blood. The oil had been with him for a long time, and its potency was likely nothing special, but he said that every bit helped.

After that, the smith had sat down at a grinding wheel and resharpened both their pikes and swords before placing them in an oven to temper. The swords had come out of the process with no handles, but that was fine. Tomas set to work making new handles for the swords, but not before he sharpened the blades and points of their pikes.

They left unarmed, which bothered Viridian a little and Carnel a lot, but Tomas said that it would take him the rest of the day to create handles for their swords and refit the spearheads of their pikes back onto their hafts. Besides, one of their hafts was cracked and needed replacing in any case.

Viridian set all of that aside as she turned to the person who’d called out to them.

It was one of the sailors. A broad-shouldered man in a ratty looking coat. He waved them down. “You lot are the mage’s puppets, yeah?” he asked. 

“Yes,” Viridian said. Was it not obvious?

“Yeah, you lot are supposed to scout and the like, yeah?” the man asked. He rubbed at his nose with a knuckle. 

“We are,” Lazur said. “Is something the matter? We are busy.”

“Oh. Well, sorry, but some of the boys saw something down the road.” He pointed up the hill where the lighthouse sat. Turning, Viridian was able to spy a few people on the uppermost platform of the tower. The lighthouse was shut down still, its light extinguished for the moment, but the men at the top at little flags on poles and they were waving them in a pattern that she had no way to decipher.

“What are they saying?” she asked. The string of signals moved from spelling out single letters in quick succession to moving through a few practiced patterns that Viridian puzzled out as specific words, though she didn’t have a clue as to what they were.

The sailor squinted up as well. “Carriage. North east. Unidentified. Not-human.” He shrugged. “That’s all we’ve gotten. The boys up there have a spyglass, but it’s nothing special, and there’s a persistent fog around these parts.”

“Is it danger?” Viridian asked.

“Now’s a bad time not to have a sword,” Carnel muttered.

“Could be,” the man said. “We’re not leaving the town. ‘N fact, we don’t wanna leave sight of the ocean if we can avoid it. This place is cursed.”

He wasn’t entirely wrong, Viridian thought. “We should go and see, then,” she said. “Can you run to the ship and fetch three pikes? Ours are being repaired.”

“I can do you one better,” the man said. He darted off, then after shouting to some of the others on guard duty, they ran over, one of them carrying both a trio of pikes and a handful of axes with leather sheaths over their heads. “Here ya go,” he said.

Viridian took one of the axes and hefted it. It felt heavy, with a shaft nearly as long as her arm span protected on the sides by metal langets. The head was sharp on one side, and had a tapered spike on the other.

“I like these,” Carnel said as she swung the axe around.

“We don’t have training with axes,” Lazur said.

“We barely have training with swords or spears,” Carnel pointed out. “But this is easy. Hit them with this bit.” She pointed to the business end of the axe.

“Thank you,” Viridian said to the sailor.

He nodded. “Bring all that back, or the quartermaster’s gonna have our hides.”

Viridian and her companions set out soon after. There was little better to do, and they needed to head out of the town in any case. Lazur wanted to test her new spell, and Carnel wanted to kill things. She supposed that she wanted to stay and help Tomas or work on their gambesons some more, but she lacked tools and materials and wouldn’t mind a little more essence herself.

They got onto the road and started towards Shorefarm. The main town wasn’t all that far away, but if whatever the watchers on the lighthouse had seen was within spyglass range, then she imagined it wasn’t too far from where they were.

It still took a solid twenty minutes of walking before they heard anything strange.

Something was moving on the road with frequent squeaks and clinks and clanks and the jingle of small brass bells. Someone was speaking as well, though it was too far and too low to be heard.

“Off the road?” Lazur asked.

“Yes,” Viridian said. 

They found a space without much of a ditch next to the road where a few bushes would provide them with adequate cover, and all three of them crouched down and made themselves small, pikes and axes ready at hand.

They waited even as a carriage rounded the next corner ahead of the road.

Viridian couldn’t help but want to clean the glass of her eyes as she took in the carriage. It seemed entirely out of place.

The carriage was pulled by a large horse, one made of overlapping wooden panels, with spring-mounted legs and a carved horse-head face caved in on one side as though it had been struck by a heavy hammer. 

The carriage itself was no more normal. It was covered in garishly coloured cloth. Bright pinks, blues, and yellows, as well as some startling greens. The bottom half was all wood, and the underside seemed normal for a carriage. Wheels and axles, a simple leaf-spring suspension. The upper half was like a tent, with only a small bench for someone to sit in behind the horse. The carriage’s side was designed to look like the front of a home, with brightly coloured curtains over tiny windows and a wide set of double doors that were rattling with every jarring motion of the carriage.

“What is that?” Carnel asked.

“Maybe it’s friendly?” Viridian asked.

The carriage was moving strangely, likely due to how one of its rear wheels was turning with a hard wobble that shook the entire thing.

Then the voice they’d heard earlier spoke up once more. “Oh. Lost lost lost! I am so very very very lost! Oh, big big big horse, where are we? Where is the circus master? Where are the clowns? Who will bring smiles and smiles and smiles? Not I! Not I! Most certainly not I all alone!”

Lazur reached over and slowly pushed Viridian up. “Go talk to it,” she said.

Viridian eyed Lazur, then the strange carriage wobbling its way along the road.

She supposed that it was better her than Carnel.

Setting her axe down--where Carnel plucked it soon after--she stood up, then moved up onto the street and back a few steps with only her pike by her side. “Halt!” she called out.

The carriage rolled on for a moment, then two long reins, covered in jingling bells, tugged back around the horse’s neck and something clunked into place. The horse stopped moving entirely, and its foreleg dug into the road until the carriage came to a stop.

“Hello? Hello? Hello, who’s there?” the person within the carriage asked.

“I am Viridian,” Viridian said. “Of Magus Maldrak’s... entourage. You are approaching an area we protect. Who are you?” she asked.

The carriage shook. “Wh-who who who am I?” A small door behind the carriage’s bench opened, and out came the top half of a rather strange figure. A person with a wooden torso but a porcelain face painted in colours to match the rest of the carriage. “I am Mister Three! But my friends call me The Third Cart from the Front! Proud member of the Automata circus!” The strange figure then spoke a lot faster for a moment. “Funded by the family Goldfilius’s kind and honourable contributions, as well as a small but respectable donation from the Merchant’s Guild of Viremontis and a proud partnership with the Yellowfields Depertment of Bread and Circuses!”

Their eyes, not so different from Viridian’s, locked onto her.

“Have you never heard of us?”

***