BT IV - Chapter 15

Micah bit his lower lip, letting the cool wind whip at his face.  Snow filled the mountain pass, only marred by a line of footprints where the advance team had scouted ahead.  On either side of the valley, mountains jutted above them, their peaks obscured by clouds.

“I didn’t know that the gods let the world grow this cold,” Leeka chattered.  “I appreciate the fur cloak Micah, but the next time you decide that it’s time for a vacation, I’d prefer someplace more temperate.”

He glanced back at the shivering woman and smiled.  Trevor was beside her, hopping up and down in the waist deep snow to keep warm.  Behind the two of them were the columns of troops.  Drekt led 40 of the Silver Wolves most skilled blessed while a beleaguered looking imperial lieutenant trudged along with 30 or so scouts.  Somewhere, hidden in the blowing snow and trees, Ravi and Telivern scouted along their flanks, looking for ambushes or hidden dungeons that might have been missed by the advance team.

“Next time you go on a vacation with Micah,” Trevor chimed in, “try to make sure it’s just you and him too.  I don’t mind playing the third wheel, but the rest of our new friends are a bit of a drag.”

“What are the three of you yapping about!”  Micah winced as the scout captain shouted at them.  He was the only person in both columns on a horse, and the animal was clearly struggling with the heavy snow as he rode toward them.

“Baron,” Micah replied, not bothering to nod his head.  He had tried to warn the man that mounts and the logistics that went with them would make the scouting expedition more difficult, but Baron Adrian Harris would have none of it.  Now the poor animal was suffering for the man’s mulishness.

He had no way of knowing if the prickly nobleman was always as short-sighted as he was tempered, or if the encounter in the ballroom had somehow marked Micah as a target.  Regardless, he was already sick of the idiot by the time their group reached the edge of the desert and began ascending into the Timrak Mountains that marked the border between Sandrovok and Pereston.

“The Empress was quite specific,” the noble snapped back, digging his spurs into his horse’s heaving sides to urge it forward.  “We are co-commanders of this expedition.  I am in charge of the scouting element, and your… irregulars will handle any monsters or guards we come across.  You’ve already violated my orders by bringing those two magical beasts along.  Now you’re off on your own conspiring with the rest of your lackeys?  If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you were trying to defect to back to Pereston!”

He spit into the snow before scowling at Micah and continuing.

“If you were born on foreign soil, your loyalty will always lie elsewhere.  There’s nothing tying you to Sandrovok, and this is a mission for patriots.  My great great grandfather bled for our sands, and I’ll gladly do the same.  Honestly, I’d respect you more if you were still fighting for Pereston.  At least then you’d have some honor rather than a two-bit mercenary and turncoat.”

Micah bit back a sigh as a headache began to set in.  The baron was practically red in the face, and it had little to do with the frigid dry winds that plagued the mountain pass.  It seemed every action he took elicited an eruption from his ‘co-commander.’  At this point, he would have preferred if the Empress had sent him on a mission to fight another greater daemon.  He’d prefer a reality warping stygian terror to another word from the pompous ass.

“Captain Harris,” Micah began, trying his hardest to keep his voice under control.

“Baron,” Adrian corrected him, sniffing as he said the word.  “My title is Baron.”

“Adrian,” Micah replied, feeling a little warmth enter his cold extremities as he saw the man stiffen.  “Do you know why I left Pereston?  It’s a bit of an open secret.  I don’t advertise it, but a decent number of people know.  I’m sure the Empress was able to uncover the reason and put it in my dossier.”

“I didn’t see that in your file.”  The Baron was fumbling now, hesitant as he realized that he might have overlooked something.

“I got in a fight with a nobleman’s son and killed him,” Micah responded, shifting his gaze to where Ravi and Telivern were exiting the forests that choked the mountainsides on either edge of the pass.  “Specifically Baron Hurdon, the guy that is currently rising in prominence in Pereston.  He sent assassins after me.  A Royal Knight to be specific.  I killed enough of them that he stopped.  I’m not exactly on good terms with Pereston at the moment.  The only reason they aren’t screaming for my blood is that I’ve made it clear that they will need to commit a substantial force if they even want a shot at killing me.”

“Also,” he continued, turning his attention back to Adrian and tossing a wintry smile in the mounted man’s direction.  “I don’t take well to people pounding their chest and blustering with assumed authority.  I could hollow you out with a single spell and use you as a puppet for the rest of the trip.  It would be a headache when I got back to Sandrovok, but I’m sure the Empress would forgive me once she has a chance to verify the information I’ve passed on to her.”

Adrian stiffened.  He sputtered, searching for and failing to find the words for a response.

“Could you really turn him into a puppet?”  Trevor asked.  “I’ve never seen you do that before.  That sounds like a neat skill.  Maybe you should give it a shot?”

“Probably,” Micah answered.  “It’s something I saw in one of the old ritual books, and only recently do I think that I’ve hit the levels needed to try and pull it off.  It involves cracking someone’s chest open while they’re still alive and planting a root in them.  Then, you perform a ritual using their life force as a sacrifice and the root to replace the victim’s nervous system.  They don’t have any memories, can’t use blessings and are restricted to about half of their original physical stats, but it was a method Dakkora used to infiltrate spies into the armies of the Chosen that pursued her.”

“You’re a ritualist?” The nobleman stuttered out the question.  His eyes were wide now, frantically looking for the rest of his scouts.  “Ritual magic is strictly regulated in Sandrovok.  If you summon a daemon you’ll be branded an outlaw-”

“Relax,” Micah cut him off, waving a hand dismissively.  “My summoning days are long over.  There are good reasons for those laws and I respect them.  Most of my ritual work these days is either research or enchanting.  If you leave me alone and let me focus on the mission, I don’t think there’ll be much of a need for me to research.  As much as I do want to figure out the puppet ritual, it would be a headache to explain to the Empress why your eyes became green and why you need to consume live animals to stay alive.”

Ravi padded over, her large paws serving as snow shoes and keeping her from becoming mired in the deep snow of the pass.  Behind her, Telivern walked primly over the snow as well, flapping its wings to prevent it from sinking through.

The panther buried her head in Micah’s shoulder.  He pulled off a glove reaching up to run his fingers through her fur.

“Papa!” Ravi’s childlike voice chirped in his head.  “We found a village.  No people.  Very quiet.Follow Ravi. Show show.”

“Sure thing,” he replied, scratching her briefly behind the ears before putting his glove back on.  “Lead the way.”

She galloped away, flapping her wings at the end of each leap to prevent herself from breaking through the icy crust of the snow.  As Micah set off after her, he made note of her course.  Ravi was traveling further into the pass, well on the Pereston side of the border, but at the same time, she was making for the treeline.  Not exactly where Micah would expect to find a village, but still, there weren’t supposed to be any people living in the barren snow-choked mountains anyway.

“Where are you going?” Adrian asked.  His voice was shrill and insistent.  It was clear that the man was almost panicking, but at a very minimum he was much more polite than before.  “The scouts haven’t reported back yet and we haven’t sent anyone into the woods.  For all you know there are monsters or spies in there.”

Micah rolled his eyes.  Having the man fear him was an improvement, but it didn’t change the underlying fact that the Baron was incompetent.  Honestly, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the Empress had saddled him with the fool as a test, to see how far Micah’s patience could stretch.

“What if there are spies in the forest?”  Micah questioned back.  “I thought you said that only local smugglers and fur trappers knew about this route.  If there were any chance whatsoever that we would run into enemy agents, it’s obvious that we should have deployed scouts to cover our flanks looking for any signs of an outpost.  Of course, I would have done that if someone hadn’t objected to me sending anyone but the animals into the trees.”

“Follow me or don’t,” he continued with a grunt.  “Ravi spotted something and I’m going to check it out.  If there are monsters, I’ll kill them, but I don’t want to hear you complaining about me ‘interfering with your authority’ for exploring without you.”

“I, well,” Adrian stammered.  “I think I will guard the main column.  I don’t know when the advance scouts that are exploring the Pereston mouth of the pass will be reporting back so it’s probably for the best if I wait here for them.”

“Suit yourself,” Micah replied.  “Trevor, Leeka, follow me.  Let’s see what Ravi managed to dig up.”

The three of them trudged through the snow.  Micah led the way, using his unreasonably high body attribute to break a path for Leeka and Trevor.  Like the rest of the journey, it wasn’t hard so much as annoying.  Even the best oil-soaked parka let a little snow through, and that snow invariably melted.  Worse, the coat itself retained heat just fine, but that didn’t do much to protect Micah’s face and arms.

By the time he caught up to where Ravi sat perched on the branch of a huge pine tree, his face was numb and chapped while the rest of his body was warm and soaked.  Nothing dangerous, but once again MIcah wished he was back in the steady heat of Sandrovok’s deserts.

Ravi’s tail flicked, pointing like a hand to Micah’s left.  There, nestled in a copse of fir trees, was a wooden wall.  It was twenty five paces long and about three high, enough to dissuade bandits or bears, but not anything in the face of a full on attack.

Still, the rough hewn door in the center of the log barrier was intact and Micah didn’t see any signs of claws or blades in the wood.  If it weren’t for the lack of smoke and dead silence from the palisade, Micah wouldn’t have any reason to believe that something was wrong.

Mouthing a couple words, he cast Flight.  Hopping out of the snow and soaring over the wall.  Ravi followed him, leaping into the air and flapping her dark wings.  A second or two later, he landed inside the barrier with a frown on his face.

It was a small settlement.  There was barely room for the eight log cabins wedged inside.  One of the buildings was clearly a smokehouse where strips of boar meat were hanging untouched from poles.  Another was a store room.  There were some scratches where the settlers had tried to dig a cellar, but ultimately the combination of permafrost and tough limestone had defeated their efforts.  That one room building was stacked high with traps and pelts.  Fox, ermine, elk, and even a couple boar.  Whoever had lived here had been busy.

The remaining cabins were dwellings, and all six of them were empty.  Their beds were made, their fireplaces were cold, and their wash buckets were all frozen solid.

Micah frowned as he walked over to the front door.  He lifted the piece of timber barring it shut and pulled only to find the door stuck.  It took him two more tries before it opened with a crack, Micah’s strength literally ripping it from its improvised hinges.

He took one step out, waving Leek and Trevor over.  For the next twenty minutes, they searched the outpost with Micah.  Other than noticing a concealed chest with a couple of hunting bows and quivers in it, neither of them could turn up anything.

Finally, the three of them gave up, retiring to one of the cabins where Micah began feeding kindling from a pile into the fireplace.  Before long, the room was filled with the crackle and timed warmth of a new fire.

“I don’t like it, Micah,” Leeka said, sitting in the cabin’s only chair.  Behind her, Trevor was leaning back in the bed, enjoying the soft quilt made of animal fur.  “There should have been either people or sign of some attack.  It isn’t normal for six people to just disappear like this.”

“Even if they went to town,” Micah replied, brushing some residual snow off of a log before feeding it into the growing fire, “they would have brought their fur and traps with them.  Those are valuable commodities.  Given how much work went into securing them, I can’t imagine the trappers giving them up willingly.”

“It’s not like they were out of food either,” Trevor chimed in.  “They had enough dried meat in the smokehouse to last the entire winter.  Maybe they were chased off by a monster or a predator, but we haven’t really seen signs of anything like that nearby.  I doubt Ravi would miss the scent of anything capable of scaring the six of them off.”

As if on cue, there was a thump on the roof, followed a second later by the scrabble of claws as the panther tried and failed to catch herself before slipping and falling into the snow of the outpost courtyard.

None of them smiled at Ravi’s antics.  Rather all three of them broodingly stared at the fire as Micah pushed another branch in.

Finally, Leeka spoke the words that were on all of their minds.

“Micah, the door was barred from the inside.  Nothing broke in, and the trappers didn’t leave by the gate.  Whatever took them, it’s like they just disappeared into the snow.”