Long Winter: Take 2 (1)

When Shamus awoke, the girl’s ropes were shredded and she was gone.

He took a valuable second allowing that realisation to filter through his brain before he was on his feet, the glimmer cloak he had been using as a blanket falling around his feet. His hands smoothly brought the rifle Curtana up from the floor, planting its leather padded stock to his shoulder as the gleaming silver barrel stretched and warmed with eerie light. That fey light illuminated the dank space the two survivors had been using as a shelter for the previous night: an ancient store room or some such whose walls were cracked and flaking, and coated in an invasive moss that ranged from pale greens to livid reds.

Directly across from him lay the poor bed padding they had been able to scrounge, little more than the less brightly coloured mosses and the few axillary items they had had on them before the crash. He stepped over his cloak and examined the shredded length of rope, its ends not frayed by cuts or tears but seared black by a fiendish heat.

“Oh well, that’s just a fine g’morning to the world now ain’t it.” The Rishlander grumbled under his breath, as his eyes sought out the largest crack in the far wall that had been their entrance. Part of it had been cut away, the stone seeming to run from those cuts as something larger and less agile than a person’s slight frame had barged through. The fact it had been able to barge through whilst not waking him up from a light sleep, regardless of his brothers protestations to the contrary, was a worrying thing.

But when one was sleeping in the ruins of a fallen city of Summer, sleeping light was just a sound way to survive the night.

He slipped through the crack in the wall, momentarily aware that he was in a rather defenceless position: unable to fight or defend himself. If something had decided to take issue with his breathing he would have had nought to say on the matter. For a Rishland Overland, member of a group of soldiers made legendary in deed and song, being defenceless was a kick in the fork to one’s pride and ego. But no sooner had the hairs on the back of his neck begun to rise, he was out and into the dark corridor beyond. He donned his cloak, rubbing his fingers over the charms and runes that glowed upon the rifles sides. Yup, professional bad ass with a licence to travel, that was Shamus McDonald: who was having second thoughts about finding a young slip of a woman who had seemed so meek and mild a few days before.

Of course that was before legends turned out to be more truthful than not, and the whole daring escape from the Citadel of Boston and a landing with more crash than not to its name. All in all being a touch…cautious…about a young woman with spooky powers didn’t seem all that daft. Seemed down right prudent.

“Quit ya stallin’ and get ya feet in motion ya great pansy.” Shamus admonished himself, and began to make his way slowly down the corridor he had bravely lead them up the night before. Soaked with a ash laced rain, chilled to the very bone, and with her red locks blackened by soot and water, Makira had looked every inch the damsel. And at that thought Shamus stepped into a new smooth crack in the floor, the water that had begun to pool there sloshing out as he looked down. The fey light of the rifles eagerness illuminated a large Y shaped foot print, its single digit pointed forward with a narrow point to it.

Oh yeah, here there be damsels and distress: except it was not the usual one doing unto the other. Thoughts of having stayed home on the Richland Isle began to circle his mind, instead of following his brother Remas on an old man’s crusade to the Shattered Coast across the sea. So far the folks of the Shattered Coast had tried to kill him, sell him, rob him blind in and in actually try to make him blind. Though in all fairness that last one could be put down to the strength of the swill the Coasties called their ales.

He got to the end of the corridor and found the rope he had tied off the night before, wanting to forgo the climb down on perilous handholds that had been their ascent. And again, across the way on the opposite wall were new hand and foot holes, gouged or burned into the cold stone of the ancient Summer place. He distracted himself by tugging on the rope, ensuring the braided line would not slide free under his weight. With the rifle secured to his hip by a buckle, Shamus went over the edge an d began to slow climb down the line.

The shaft he had discovered the day before was, on the side not riddled with cracks and other structural morbidities, as smooth as polished stone. At first the Rishlander had thought it some sort of metal work, but on the chipped and broken side now caked in angry mosses, the material had a porous and stony complexion. But then again this was a place built upon the wisdom of people born in the Long Summer: people who had been able to raise a building up from the ground itself as nature rose a tree from a seed. Surely turning stone to metal and back again was but the simplest of their tricks, even when they were not present. Of course if the building was doing that all by itself…what else was happening without the oversight of Summer patrons in their abandoned cities?

At the bottom of the shaft was a pool of stagnant water that had gathered and mildewed over the centuries into a thick, swampy consistency. Remembering the florid bouquet from the day before when they had waded across it to climb the broken side of the shaft, Shamus gave himself a little swing on the line and landed his feet on the raised lip of corridor that opened to the shaft.

He landed with a hand pressing Curtana down to the side of his leg to stop it rattling, his other hand still holding the rope to ensure it didn’t swing back and strike the far wall. It was not the first time that silence had been a weapon in his hands, and yet he felt as though he had landed with a marching band on his heels. He stayed his breath for a moment, holding it in case whatever was down here with him had keen ears.

Keen ears, bright red eyes and claws as long as knifes…

“Oh get a grip man.” He hissed under his breath, levelling his shoulders as though he were some noble toft who had found a particular fearsome house spider in the privy “She’s a wee lass who weighs as much as a half bag of spud-”

There was a slow, chittering sound like the ominous cackling of cleaving ice. It was a utterly unnatural and ancient sound.

“-…who is also her mothers daughter. who was the biggest badass since the Great and Fluffy Lord came down and ripped the ground asunder.” He whispered with a hiss, bringing Curtana up to his shoulder again the way a toddler might hold onto a particular blanket “Oh yeah…this is manly and brave.”

He again began to walk slowly along, his wet moving in an oddly circular motion that allowed him to keep Curtana steady against his shoulder. That clacking racket of sound echoed in the air again, this time with more volume and a variation in pitch. It almost sounded like music, if you wanted to ply a court with the sound the devil surely dances a jig to. Up ahead on the right of the corridor was the arch way they had entered through, the only opening they found that had been large enough for them to entre from the outside. Cities like this one, the old and abandoned places the citizens of the Long Summer had called home, were everywhere. Some stood as impossibly vivid reminders of past glories, and jealously guarded their secrets by devouring any and all who wandered into their gleaming halls. Others lounged in the dirt, ruins of a fantastical past that spoke of the gradual but fine grinding of time. In some ways these cities were more dangerous, for their hazards were hidden not in gleaming finery but in crumbling masonry and the various animal tribes that called the mausoleum states their homes. But as he approached that opening, and quickly turned around its corner to face that which he knew stood there, he came face to face with a third hazard of the fallen cities.

A Native.

“Ahh, the soldier.” Spoke the strange being that had turned to look at Shamus, its voice high and piping as though spoken by a quartet of flutes. It waved him forward with four of its arms “She speaks of you in some regard, mild though it may be, but she does not deny you. Come in, come in.”

 Roughly as tall as a man, there were aspects that spoke of a shared symmetry: there were two legs, a torso and a head. There were arms, far more than there should be, but their number was not the issue: from one side the being had a relatively normal looking arm that ended in a club like appendage. From the other side sprouted five limbs, each with multiply joints that made them wave to and fro like the bowed branches of a willow. These did not end in hands, but in a variety of differing grasping or cutting implements.

And as for the face, that looked at Shamus and his raised weapon quizzically, there was no denying a pronounced oddness there. What must have once been a smooth oval of mirrored material was now bent and scratched, part of it shattered and fallen from the right hand side to reveal a flickering frenzy of motion and light behind it like a maddened pile of embers. The rags it was dressed in, the clumps of vegetation that had dried and desiccated upon joints like skin, did not hide a nature that a worldly traveller would spot instantly.

After all, coming across an Iron Person was not something that happened often. And even when it did, there was often a price to be paid.

“You stand on the stoop as though barred by a sheet of glass.” The Iron Persons rising, fluting voice crackled out of the broken oval of a face, and it clacked its five sets of bifurcating limbs together “Come in or go away, but I will not have you gawk. The last gawker who grew my patience long in the tooth was a sorry fellow when last I saw him.”

Frowning, and a touch disarmed by the statement, Shamus nervously edged over the threshold and lowered the rifle slightly. The room they now stood in, and through which Shamus and the girl turned terror had blindly stumbled through the previous evening, was revealed in grey daylight to be a store front of some sort. Half decayed racks and broken stalls filled the small space, making a hazard of any walk without good light, but also leaving a mystery to the items that must once have been sold here.

The Iron Person stood before the enclosed circular counter in the middle of the old shop, and as Shamus edged closer a break in that circle revealed the form of a young woman crouched on her haunches. A mess of red hair, eyes a shade to bright in their blue to steely, she was dressed in a wet looking cloak of many stitched together patches. Pale bear arms appeared out of the cloaks opening, working with a fevered intensity on the glass jar clutched intently before her. He watched, perplexed as her fingers dived into the nearly empty jar, working along the sides and corners of the jar, smearing what remained of the pale green paste around and around until it coating her digits.

Then she removed her fingers from the jar, and sucked on them as though she were a child consuming a jar of honeyed preserves. Her eyes fluttered closed from their feverish darting, and a pleasant and very satisfied purr arose from her. Shamus was close enough now that he was able to see that there were several jars cleaned out by her bare feet, one of which had rolled out of the kiosk and rested close to his foot.

Gingerly he leaned down, trying not to take his eyes off of Makira or the Iron Person, and picked the jar up. It was a lot lighter than he thought it should have been, and the glass had a oddly flexing quality to it like exceptionally tight canvas. He brought the jar up to his nose-

“No-!” someone said, but it was too late. The scent of the jars contents, so hungrily wolfed down by the woman he was charged to protect, had a scent not too far remove from putrid fish. Though to be fair there were hints of rotting apples and open drains, but really it was the mental image of rancid fish heads that sprang to the Rishlander’s mind’s eye. He dry heaved, a heavy croaking retching that made him drop the jar instinctively and back away from it.

Women folk did the strangest things.