Excerpt from "Crossing to the Shadows", a tale never finished

(note: The short story appearing next week here, called "Exile's Road" came from this work, I am sharing the other sections of the opening chapters, including the follow-on chapters after "Exile's" to the blog on timed drops, 3 to 4 a day, over the next week.)

>>Warning<< This is a raw, first draft section. Just sharing to show where, had I been allowed, my writings were headed. 

"We became too good at herding the wagons across the desert."

Those words, from his twin sister's mouth, made Salius wince. Nothing could be said to refute the claim. Their success bred the arrogance of the last decades leading to this moment.

"You and I carried the clan up this mountain. How can we prevent the fall, sister?"

Long silence was not the answer desired. No other rose over hissing sand grains in the glass between them.

Charts lay on the table, marked with the many trade routes once used by Gens Urias and the Roshens of humani. Some lost to disasters, priced out of others. Only the great rounds still gave them any funds. Journeys pioneered in the dark of the shadow of Athalan, already growing once more in size as it faded from hemisphere to crescent. Crosses marked ships lost, stars indicated caravans swallowed in mystery. Red circles showing contracts stolen and markets no longer exclusive to the gens glared angrily, accusing him of the misdeeds leading to this moment.

"We cannot. The Matron over-extended us setting up those fools to compete on the sea lanes. At best, we can still operate here, but there will be no return to the Insulae for us. Ever. Eternal exile for the debts made in our name as a clan." Contempt dripped from Villia's voice.

Clinking bells warned them someone approached. Until they knew who it was, neither spoke. Information created wealth, letting secrets slip paved roads leading to the current crisis. Servillia Saliana covered papers fast with her Hartuli board.

"News, Mercator." A voice without, known to both, broke the silence.

Villia took command, as she often did. "Enter, Jarthuna."

"Ave, Mercatrix. Poor news I bear. Three more try the shadow's fortune now. Cavus and two fools tossed by you."

This made Salius look at his overseer sharply. Rattling beads mixed with scents of stained leather to remind him his right hand was human as well. "Which fools?"

Stretching for a moment, welcoming magically cooled air, Jarthuna kept his information silent. His dark brown eyes searched for shadows on canvas walls, before releasing words. "Kindras sister's son on west path, Brule against us, Mercator." He bowed to Villia. "Sorry, Mercatrix. I could not convince my kin to abstain."

"Regret it not, Jarthuna. That comes as no surprise, nor is he a fool." She stood, brushing back golden hair off pointed ears marking her elven blood. "Scet is merely desperate. I bespoke his woman today so I expected it."

Light from the sky light slits glinted from the beads on his breast, making wings of the eagle there seem to move for the elven merchants. "Scet understood his injury cost him work." Salius glanced skyward. "No, Brule the Beast will be our problem. He hates us for casting him out. He will cut prices to steal contracts."

"He already speaks war." Jarthuna took a seat at the table. "Fool I name him, Fool he remains. Named place he attack. Sunrise of Mesas." Tanned hands marked by many scars moved the diving board. "He steal grain delivery to West House, so we cut amid Mesas." Fingers traced paths and places on the maps.

"You assume he will attack Salius' train. I say he will strike me." Villia pointed out several ambush points along her route, following the southern fringe of desert.

Smiling without showing teeth, Jarthun continued. "I checked two more things. He take contracts to north. Oh, Custos send riders with you and Kindras on missions, so carry food enough to feed both groups." Elven faces lit up with that news.

Villia thought out angles faster; "Brule would not dare face a caravan with even a few seasoned Custos riders. Let alone two companies being discharged." Her smile proved toothy, showing her diamond incisor, a vanity.

Now Jarthun laughed. "Made sure Brule heard same, from troops going home."

More grins, shared while moving towards the entry. Grins of relief.

Laughing, the Servillia left to arrange the extra provisions and wagons for her caravan. To be provided at a steep profit. It was good to remind those going into business to learn more before taking on their teachers.

As the sun rode along series of peaks to the south, heart ranges of the greatest mountains in the world, the men stood together, staring out over the river plain below, where the camps were laid out. Jzhan, the light of the world, moved from one peak to the next as they watched the wagons and corrals being filled.

"Jarthun, I have crossed and circled this desert more times than I can count. Led caravans across the sands in the shadow ten times. But this time, both trips must work. The extra money from Villia's train will keep us from banishment. One misstep, either trip, and we are through."

His overseer smiled, not looking at his master. "I do what I can. I will ask the Kenrath to watch over us." Lifting eyes to the deep aqua sky, the human stopped smiling. "Still, good idea to be safe. Add more guards. Will see if I can find some, and more cargo."

Long after Jarthun passed down to town, Decimus Urius Servilius Salius stood, watching the flow of commerce on river and trails. Few departures, save by couriers or swift boats. More arrivals, not to mention dust clouds showing additional seekers of safety coming.

"Safe, Jarthun?" He asked the air, knowing no answer would rise. "No, this crossing of the shadow feels different. The beasts from beyond I know and deal with. The beasts of banks and former allies? Those I fear to never comprehend."

Shaking his head, he thought about the costs of extra guards, beasts and provisions. Those would tax them to the point of losing even the routes here. "I see the hands of the Parcae in all. Their left hands."

He spent the day thinking ways to thwart the ill luck a sinister hand dealt.

"Golems of Steam, Steel, and Bone" Chapter 2 - Again, first raw draft is offered.

Thirteen, despite the dark connotation on the number by superstition, seemed an appropriate number of years to Elisa Feldarov to come back to find those who had taken her family from her. Years back in Ohio with her mother's family may have built her into a premier Necromancer Smith, but the hole in her heart still bled for those lost here in this land she returned to. There would be no following the Loup up to the Hills from the rails for the newly tasseled doctor. This time she would take the more dangerous path north from Fort Gavins to the Pierre Crossing, then south and west to the Badlands. From there, after she had procured some items, she would work south to the city on the rapids.

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.

Next Project of Poems and Words

So, with "Words from the Pipe & Under the Hat" just needing some format work to head to e-book, I am already pondering the next such project, which I feel should have a strong reflection on the time I spent homeless the last few years. Considering telling tales amid the poems, and dealing with the issues around those stuck in the ruts of homelessness and joblessness. Working title, as I tinker with this idea, is "Tales and Verse from the Curbs & Under Various Bridges", which seems to fit, and yet not fit.

Not set in stone, or convinced it can be done in the respectful way that is needed to both convey the issues and yet give hope of resolving some of them.

Then again, who better than one who has walked in those moccasins to tell the tales and dreams of such?