TIME July 26th LOCATION The South Gate, Chuza, then the open road
BACKGROUND:
Sanchez was dead, Griffiths and Pitr were gone to sea, and Asquith had a lead on one of his own missing brothers – DikDik, chasing an astrological curiosity into the ruins of Borthanza, on the far southern edge of a stretch of jungle everyone just calls Green Hell.
The Agents geared up to go after him.
WHAT HAPPENED
Sam sent them off with slagma injections against disease and a request – plant and water samples, if the opportunity arose.
John Kraven caught them again on the way out, still chasing an interview for “Chuza Converse”; this time Raven actually said yes, for whenever they got back.
Asquith’s own parting gift was stranger than Sam’s.
He emptied a snuff box, cut his own thumb over it, and let the blood drip in until the grit already sitting inside unfurled into tiny mites, swimming through it. A murmured word shaped the swarm into the outline of a tree – the same one stamped on the Agents’ own amulets.
Speak his name to it, he told them, and it would know who they were; it would just need feeding on the road, on whatever blood was spare.
The carriage ride south was a novelty for about three days – open country, no perps to process, letters of introduction from Asquith smoothing the way to fresh horses and a roof most nights.
Then the roads roughened, the towns thinned into villages, and villages into nothing much at all.
Military patrols in black and red became the only other travellers on the road.
Evenings brought a sky full of stars undimmed by any city light – beautiful, and a little humbling, and eventually just one more reminder of how far from Chuza they’d come.
Two weeks in, riding a rocky track through a gorge, a horse’s scream and a man’s cut through the quiet ahead of them – a rider down, his mount already eviscerated, a huge cat raking him where he’d fallen.
Ash and Krusha moved in with fire and steel; the cat locked its jaws into Krusha and wouldn’t let go until Ash’s touch sent a jolt of lightning through its whole body and dropped it for good.
The wounded man turned out to be a thief, caught by a band of Fekratt tribesmen who arrived at a gallop moments later – horse and water stolen, by their account, and theirs to deal with.
They kept a wary ten feet of distance throughout, checking the Agents and the thief alike for signs of something they called ‘Bachia’ before agreeing to take the prisoner, the cat carcass, and the promise of a fire and food for the night.
Camp entry came with its own ritual first – every scout, and then every Agent in turn, stripped and inspected for the marks of ‘Bachia’ before anyone was allowed past the cattle line. Whatever it actually was, the tribe wanted no part of it.
Cleared, the Fekratt camp went up around them with an efficiency that made the Agents feel entirely useless standing by – yurts raised, cattle penned behind acacia thorn, a huge shared meal underway inside the hour.
The tribe’s chieftain – an old, leathery man they came to know only as VoidArr – greeted them himself, spitting square in Krusha’s face as the highest mark of trust the tribe had to offer, water being that precious where they came from.
Krusha took it without flinching, which seemed to please VoidArr more than words could have.
Ash and Raven got the gentler version, reserved for elders and women: a warrior spits into his own hand first, before offering it to be shaken.
That evening’s ceremony for the captured thief was nothing like a Chuza execution – no jeering, no crowd baying for it, just a slow drum and a tribe that turned its collective back on him as he was walked to a wagon wheel and bled out for the tribe’s use, the blood worked into a thick, curdled drink shared as a mark of welcome.
Krusha drank his without complaint.
Ash and Raven did not manage the same.
A meteor shower lit up the sky that night over the birth of a child in the camp – welcomed, in Fekratt custom, with curses and insults rather than praise, on the theory that praising a baby only curses it.
VoidArr offered Krusha the seer’s company for the night as a mark of the same favour; Krusha accepted.
Before the tribe broke camp the next morning, the seer – an old woman with circular tattoos across her face, chained to a spool the whole night through – took Krusha’s hand, sniffed it, and read something in it that she didn’t offer to explain further.
“You will meet him or her three times. You have already met them once. Each time you will receive what you are looking for. The third time will be the last.”
the Fekratt seer, to Krusha
VoidArr saw them off himself – two fingers held up at the rising sun for good, five for bad, then a small gourd of the same blood-milk pressed into each of their hands as a parting gift.
The tribe raised their arms as one and called out together – “We Fekratt!” – before scattering to horses and wagons that hadn’t looked remotely ready to move a minute before.
Within the hour there was no trace they had ever camped there at all, cattle, wagons and all gone – a level of tidiness that put every gathering the Agents had ever had to police back in Chuza to shame.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- The seer’s prophecy – a meeting, three times, with someone already met once. Who, and when?
- The road ahead leads toward Green Hell and the ruined observatory of Borthanza, chasing DikDik.