But for now, the trip from Council Bluffs and the Boyers Chute rail spur north would take time.
Sioux City was a long journey by wagon, even one as modern in steam gears as her box wagon was. Modern, but the old markings of her father's profession still were there, the dispensary window, the slide out sides to open for work space and allow the bed to be used. The old metal stands her mother designed, rusty though they were, still worked. She wished she had the skill and touch to do one thing her mother's kin had refused after her college days and apprenticeship had ended, and make the hex signs again, as were once on it. Then again, one of those who had found her had given her several warnings, both in the days after the massacre, and just before she headed west on the rails.
"Avoid stirring up trouble, Elissa. The land is a powder keg, waiting for a match. The tribes are upset over the mining they feel forced to do in the Sacred Hills, not to mention there are rumors of several Necromancers practicing their arts in the area, not all of whom are known by face and name. I recommend coming slowly, in some disguise that will not stir up the old trouble, as well as the new ones I must face. I do not say this to discourage you from coming, for the fiery girl I knew before must surely get her answers at least. In fact, I look forward to seeing and talking to you again. Sincerely, Abraham Lincoln, Ambassador to the Cheyenne and Lakota nations."
Anything that would make the boldest of presidents, the man who had freed the slaves of the south, and offered a treaty to the plains tribes to help win the war, had to be dangerous. So Elisa decided to show her friend and rescuer that she had learned many things in the years of studying and family politics foisted upon her by fate. Her mother had never been found, in those awful days, but her family had not approved of any more than her own journey. None had come searching for her, thus the family name was not connected, as far as she knew, with the massacre or her father.
The wagon had taken some explanations already, the lie she found coming to her tongue most easily made sense. She purchased it from a family caring for a girl near her age who was deathly afraid of open places and native peoples. Bound inside the Necormancer factories of Akron forever, was how she spoke of that girl. When she spoke, which she tried to avoid.
By the time she reached Missouri Valley, in Iowa state, Elisa knew the wagon, while a tool, was not the one she needed coming in. Luckily the limner in town was skilled in designs of all kinds, including marking her wagon as a Necromancer's despite the design being that of an Alchemist.
"Pah, out here, we use what we can. Folks care not a wits about who designs it, as much as if it works." He talked to her as he worked the wooden walls with grit and blocks to remove the last stains of the old paint job, smoothing the grains again that had broken or popped as they weathered in the back lots of Akron for so long. "No, if you can make it work for you, that is all that matters out here, Miss. Trust me on that. Hans Olafson will not set you wrong on the important stuff. Now, picking a spouse? THAT I leave to the wife, she did good picking me, or so she says."
The man never stopped, talking all the time, yet his hands moved constantly as well. Each series of strokes had a purpose, just like each move her mother had made in digging up beasts to reanimate, and her father's deft touches in mixing herbs, oils, and powders to make the medicines they had sold to get by on. That was the mark of a craftsman, she longingly thought, to be able to do the job perfectly, without thinking about it.
With every step she took about the town, after leaving the master to his craft claiming to need last minute supplies, a feeling she had too often in the past returned, a brief moment of perfect peace, settling on her shoulders with a touch so like the way her father’s hands lain there before the massacre. The touch was firm, real this time, yet still, there was no one there. Not even a glow in the air. That the limner’s wife was a medium, complete with a seance and reading room as part of her tea shop had to be what caused the feeling. She had heard of the power of suggestion in some lectures she had attended for filling out her curriculum as required by the graybeards to get her degrees.
Shopping was needed, she found, when one small store proved to be the source for many local herbs her father’s recipes called for. The ones involving food, not healing. Those were things, combined with more tea, some sugar and many different preserves, that made life on plains and worse places tolerable. Each store she stopped by had something she needed, some tiny thing, and soon the baskets were both full, and being slid inside the wagon, one side finished in sanding, and working on the backside.
“What markings you need this wagon set for, Miss? I have good supplies, but some colors I am low on, and might have to send down to the Bluffs for.”
“I am an industrial necromancer, mining and farming specialties. But I have been known to work as a tinker smith if a town needs one. I would like some hex signs, not just for my field, but the ones to scare off certain less educated folk.”
That got her a chuckle. “Yes, that might be needed, more for our kind than the natives I would say.” More work was done as Elisa neatened up the supplies the shaking had moved even just hair breadths, checking a side door to ensure the bins of pig iron were not in the way if the side needed opening for more work.
“Shame to see such a wagon let go. Guess back that way folks no longer use them?” It was an honest question in these parts, where tools were used for generations, and many of the wagons that the locals or their ancestors had traveled west in were still in use, else where if not locally. But it was a question she did not wish to answer swiftly or directly.
Stashing her recent purchases via a door made for such egress, Elisa answered. “Only the traveling tinkers still use these carts, most alchemists have their own shops. Some get bought by the wandering folk, but many sit hidden in the brush until one looks for what caused the mess in the fields.”
“Waste. Good market from them here. A person could make money bringing them out, specially if they fix up the gears and pistons as I see you did. Mighty fine work, seen its like only once before, many years ago, touching up a paint job.” He paused for a period in his talking, working gently around the corners. “This wagon here I saw, not many figured it out yet. Did the sanding for my pa who painted it. You got it from that girl as got away from the White River Massacre. The one that they still looking for the killers from.”
Elisa halted on heading back to the street to get more supplies. “Perhaps,” a whisper was all she could manage.
The man’s hand began to move fast again. “Think you should visit my wife again. She has some tricks for hiding face marks. Them scars, while you may be a Necromancer smith who builds beasts, well, they are not fresh as they should be. She can show you to hide them or make them look more recent. The Missus’ idea, just so you know. She thinks you may want to be less known.”
Elisa was shocked. Back east, folks would not look out for one another any more, even kin folk were often tossed beneath the carriage wheels, so to say, when money or influence were involved. This was something she had either forgot, or never noticed being young. Then again, her attempts to help others frustrated the family more than anything else she’d done in Ohio.
“Thank you,” was all she managed to say, but took his advice to seek his wife for learning makeup.
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