Tag: the girl and the national treasure

Operating methodologies!

I took another look at the tableaux in front of us. There was a line of trees and shrubs stretching off in both directions, parallel to the road we were on: it looked pretty solid, but the brothers had found a gap. Their corpses were now standing straight in the middle of that gap, and I didn’t think it was a coincidence.

“Did they take anything you really, really need?” I asked Sisk. She glared at me, and I sighed. “They’re standing there, dead, and we don’t know why. That makes going up to them dangerous.” Her glare was fading, but still not quite gone, so I kept going. “If they were still alive, we’d go rescue them, because we’re not monsters. Are those two dead guys worth your precious hide, though?”

Sisk exhaled and nodded. “I hear that. It’s just that they took things from me.”“And if you really need something they took, we can still try to get it. If you don’t? Sorry, but they can stay where they are for right now.” I kept myself from patting her on the back. “I know it sucks to get robbed, but there are times when you can’t take it too personally.”

References to a wider world!

“I’ll remember that. Huh. There’s no rules to this, are there?” She waved around. “What we’re doing, I mean. Back home, I figured it had to be more than just strapping on a sword and looking for loot, but it’s not.” She grinned. “At least the loot is better.”

“Well… kinda, if you know what I mean?” Then I shook my head, because why should she know what I mean? The Marcher lands aren’t what you’d call civilized. I didn’t even know if Sisk could read. “Places have laws about what you can and can’t loot, and the places that don’t still have opinions. And there’s always some things you just know you shouldn’t do.” I jerked my chin towards Mahota. We weren’t whispering, but she was out of earshot if I kept my voice down. “Like screw around with Mahota. I know she told you this isn’t one of the Consortium’s official ops, but she didn’t leave her training behind. When it comes to Hershey agents, the term of art we use in the Free State is ‘starkly dangerous.’ You can trust them to follow through on what they say they’re gonna do, and that cuts both ways.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know how the” — she visibly decided to not use any of the impolite terms — “Hersheyans do. They run pretty roughshod in Ohio. Act like we should be grateful they ain’t the Dominion, either.”

You should be, I thought. We are. Aloud, I said, “Yeah, I hear it’s been pretty bad up there. Not as bad as Michigan, or how rough things are getting in Deseret, but tough.”

Sisk gave me a flat look which made me remember that Kentucky wasn’t always loved in the Ohio river valley, either. “There’s a reason I’m down here and not up there,” she told me, and that put a kibosh on the conversation for a bit. Personally, I don’t think that was fair. It wasn’t like Hershey’s increasing dominion over the Ohio Marchlands was my fault.

Etiquette!

It’s twenty miles from Dorim Iduinath the town to Guantánamo the ghost-haunted garrison, and every damned mosquito in Cuba was lining it. Unfortunately, the old road was still in good shape, too. You see that in ghost-haunted areas: most critters are too smart to stick around places like that, so you won’t get beaver dams or animal dens or tar-eaters or the other things that mess up Old American roads. 

You do get plenty of insects, though. Naturally, none of the ones here touched Mahota at all. They probably didn’t want to fill out the paperwork, I grumbled as I slapped on more unguent. It wasn’t designed for this place, but it was better than nothing.

Then I handed off some more to Sisk. She had been waiting for us when we set out, toting a new-looking adventurer’s pack. Well, you have to start sometime. “Thanks,” she replied. “Those becky bastards went through all my stuff, too.”

“That’s bad form,” I replied. “It’s one thing when you’re dead and hopefully won’t care anyway, but knocking a party member out, then looting them? You don’t do that.”

Curses!

Ah, the best laid schemes of mice and men… something something. It’s from an ancient book, although I don’t know why the Old Americans thought mice schemed. Maybe it’s a mnemonic?

Anyway, the next morning we discovered that every travel bike in Dorim Iduinath had been thoroughly cursed. We only discovered this after a pre-dawn breakfast, which in retrospect had probably been a little too leisurely. Then again, I don’t like getting up early nearly as much as I do staying up late, so it takes a bit to get me going in the morning.

These bikes weren’t going anywhere, though: each bike looked utterly still, magically shimmering with immobility. Mahota bent over one of the ones we had rented, touching it carefully. “The gears feel like they’re all one piece of metal,” she observed. “Can you disrupt the curse?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t know how to undo immobility spells on things. They’re different than spells for people. You could undo it by physically taking the bike apart, but you’ll just snap bits off the bike anyway. This is an elvish town, though.” I waved a hand at the crowd. “Somebody here probably knows a counterspell that’ll work. Eventually, at least.”

“Hrm. If ‘eventually’ means ‘more time than it will take us to walk south,’ Ms. Deckard, then I am afraid that we will be walking.” She flicked a smile at my rueful nod of agreement. “I am reluctant to assume the worst of someone on first meeting,” she went on, “but I find myself wondering if Ms. Sisk was involved in this sabotage.”

“If she was, it didn’t go the way she expected,” I responded, pointing at a stone statue. “That’s her, over there.”

Complications!

We didn’t make it much of a waylay, either. The woman watching us figured out right away that we had ‘made’ her, as the Old Americans used to say. She didn’t do anything stupid, like run away or start swinging, which also seemed promising. Pros may be deadlier in a fight than amateurs, but they don’t start as many.

“I told Etienne not to go up on the roof,” she remarked to us in way of greeting as we reached her table. “Sometimes people look up. — Good evening, Miss Mahota, Ms. Deckard. Care to sit? I’m not here to start a tussle.”

I assessed her as I sat. First, the obvious: a few years younger than me, black hair, green eyes, a face that knew exactly what kind of impact it had on the more impressionable types. She had that kind of complexion that’d be ‘weathered’ when she hit my age, but right now was just ‘healthy.’ I’m not one to ogle on the job, but the body under the leathers was nicely turned out in the right places. The voice, though: that voice had the pure Marcher rasp. That meant she came from the west Ohio country, which absolutely meant that she’d grown up wondering who to mistrust the most: the Universal Dominion, my Kentucky Free State, or Mahota’s Greater Hershey. Personally I’d say the Dominion, but the Marchers don’t always agree. In other words, she was dangerous, and I wasn’t sure yet exactly how.

“Name’s Jane. Jane Sisk, adventurer with no fixed abode. The two gentlemen adventurers about to show up are Etienne and Laurent Hudon. Don’t worry, they speak English.” She saluted us with her wine glass. “Let’s not use Elvish, though. They’re trying hard, but it’s slow going for them.”

Locations!

Dorim Iduinath wasn’t anything to look at, either. It was an elvish town, obviously from the name; but it was weirdly elvish, too. Most places in the Elf-lands, humans and elves are pretty mixed together, down to families. Here? Well, I wouldn’t say I was the only human, but we were looking pretty thin on the ground. I was wondering if there had been a, ah, situation in the past.

Turned out there had been, but not the one I was expecting. The humans had simply left almost as soon as the goltrain line went in. “The original inhabitants were eager to hand this place over to the elves,” Mahota told me as we checked our field packs. “In fact, most of Cuba east of here was empty by then. Dorim Iduinath was the last holdout. The locals were adamant about not abandoning the town.”

I looked around. Dorim Iduinath was the kind of place where you could see the outlines of the big city it used to be. The Old Americans — Old Cubans too, I guess — loved them some rectangular streets, and it was easier to follow those than dig out new roads. If there was one twentieth as many people living here now than then, though, I’d eat somebody else’s hat. “Interesting,” I offered, in lieu of asking Why? “I guess they had some superstition about the base?”

“Not at all,” Mahota told me. “A superstition is when you wrongly believe that an action will have a causal effect on a situation. The original inhabitants were quite plausibly worried that if there were no people here, the ghosts from the Old American garrison would take over the whole area.”

Exposition! Let’s hope none of my assumptions get shot down any time soon.

“As you remarked last night, the Old American fortress at Dorim Iduinath is the most ghost-haunted spot in the Caribbean.” Mahota kept her voice conversational, not that she had to. We had the entire goltrain carriage compartment to ourselves. She had bought up the extra seats, cool as could be, and the conductor had let her. Apparently everybody wanted to go to the big city, not away from it. “The first reliable reports of specters dates back to 2130, with a report of a ghost ship patrolling the approaches to the former naval base there. It was definitely occupied by the living as late as 2142, when the Second Republic managed one last supply run to the remains of the garrison. Reportedly, the survivors were offered the chance to return back to the homeland, but they all chose to stay and occupy the site.”

“Survivors?” I narrowed my eyes. “What was killing them off?”

“Old age. The youngest man in the garrison — and by then they were all men — was in his early sixties. Most of the officers were at least a decade older. They were all adamant about staying, however.” Mahota shrugged. “From the report, the captain chose not to argue the point. The Second Republic was still reeling from the Mutagenic Curses, so it was arguably a kindness to let the garrison die peacefully in the warm sun, with the faces and bodies they were born with.”

“Worse ways to go,” I agreed, grabbing a sandwich from the basket. “So what was the garrison hiding? Something from the First Republic?”

Setting the stakes!

I could tell she meant it. Which meant that either she was crazy (a Hershey agent was worth a lot more alive than a retired mercenary trying to rusticate), or I didn’t know what was going on. Either way, I needed to come up with a smart response, something that showed I was on top of the game, and ready to roll with the punches. The one I settled on was the traditional “Huh?”

“There are better places for explanations,” Mahota informed me as she did that ‘irresistible force’ trick with her hand again, blocking me from reentering the kitchen. “But this area will do for a quick interrogation.”

That gave me a moment of unease until I realized she meant the guy giving his lunch back to the ground — and a somewhat larger one as she blithely pulled him to his feet, then shoved him against the wall. She didn’t crack the bricks doing it, but that was still a lot of upper body strength for one normal-sized gal. Strength enchantments don’t come cheap; then again, if anybody could afford them, it’d be the Hershey Consortium.

“I do not have time to play stupid games, and I care even less about your life than you do,” she informed him, one hand on his chest, and the other loosely gripping his neck. “I only wish to know one thing: was it your cult’s own idea to try to kidnap Ms. Deckard, or did somebody pay you to do so?”

Fight! Fight!

The third mage was slower off the jump than the other two, or just younger, because he actually dodged the knife Mahota somehow managed to slap out of the air, and throw right at his stomach. I mean, he had the same anti-missile spell as the others. The knife was going to miss. Reflexes are reflexes, I guess. You have them, even when you shouldn’t — because while he was still flinching from the knife that couldn’t hurt him, Mahota spun and kicked him full in the face, which absolutely could. 

I ran past him to the alleyway outside, because there was still the asshole who had started all of this. He was a pro, too: some people might have tried to stumble to their feet right away, but he knew all he needed was his hands free to cast. So why waste time? …I’m reconstructing all of this after the fact, you understand. What I experienced then was him throwing a slammy at me.

Like I said, he was a pro. Balls of compressed air are great for stunning people, making them fall down, sometimes even knocking them out. They also don’t tear up the surroundings like fireballs or lightning strikes do, which is great when you’re trying to do a quiet job. Best or worst of all: it’s a ranged spell that can get through a mage’s standard protection. It’s hard to make a magical missile miss when it’s almost as wide as the alley you’re in.

It certainly pushed me back. I’m a pro, too, so my reflexes had me turn sideways into the blast, but I still did some staggering of my own, long enough to let him finish rising. His hands were already knotting themselves to get out a spell of — actually, I didn’t recognize the passes. I did recognize the smell of power being far too recklessly pulled out of the air, and that was bad. The ‘more-reflexive actions needed’ bad.

Yeah, I have a [b]unch of balls in the air this month.

Somebodies, actually. Three more guys, dressed in more hooded cloaks. Mahota spat a word I didn’t recognize, picked up a frying pan, and threw it in one, quick motion. It twirled through the air — and curved away before it could hit the lead guy in the head. This time I knew the swearword Mahota used, because I was saying it myself. These people were mages. Mages. My night out was now officially ruined.

Lead mage was one of the ones who likes to talk. “Run while you can, mosquito,” he sneered at us (thankfully, his Elvish was pure local Cuban, without a hint of the Universal Dominion’s rasp). “You, we don’t need alive.”

Well, when somebody puts it that way, a thoughtful woman takes the hint. I mean, there’s something seriously unnerving about a mage telling you he doesn’t care if you live or die, right? It’s not just me, correct? Mahota wasn’t a thoughtful woman; she had already pulled out twin batons and was stepping in front of me as I scrabbled backward. “You’re not worth looting,” she hissed back at him, and spun to attack.