Untitled Fantasy Project – Chapter Five

Astrid poked Pykah, but he just groaned and rolled away from her. She had never seen another mage and she had wanted to talk to him, but he could spare no concentration when he was working he had said, and now that he wasn’t working he seemed to be unconscious. Astrid hoped this would not always be the case, she needed someone to talk to and Kahotlo had vanished the moment he returned to the ship with that Lythaz girl.

Though she was curious about the girl Astrid had ignored her as she had been ignored. She didn’t actually care enough to stray from Pykah’s side in case he woke up before he had to get back to work.

A young woman sat beside Astrid and stretched out on the deck as if trying to soak up the sun, which was firmly hidden behind the clouds and likely would be for the next five moons.

“He’s alright, you know,” the woman said after a minute or so of silence. “Just wears himself out.”

“I know,” Astrid said. “He uses so much power, why doesn’t he pace himself better?”

The woman managed to shrug while lying flat on the deck. “He gets paid to get us to riverside fast, when the river widens out he does better since he doesn’t have to push so hard, but we barely move up this stretch without his putting so much into it.”

“How much does he get paid?” Astrid asked, mostly out of boredom.

The woman shrugged again. “No one tells me, I’m just a labourer.”

“How long have you been on the barge?”

“Close to a year now, this’ll be my twenty-fourth run.”

There was a gasp from Astrid’s other side and she turned to see Pykah in largely the same position as the woman, eyes open. “Did I miss anything?” he asked, deep voice reverberating through the deck.

“Not really,” the woman on Astrid’s other side sat up to smile at the mage. “You right, dear?”

“I’m fine, Caz, though I’m not getting up for at least half an hour. How far’d I get us?”

Caz looked around. “Couple of K out of Stony Bay,” she said. “We’re poling up for now, maybe you should go back to sleep?”

“If I go back to sleep I’ll be out a couple of hours at least, Arnette’ll be pissed.” The mage seemed to notice Astrid for the first time since he’d woken. “Girly, you wanted to talk to me, didn’t you?”

“I did, about magic.”

“Fair warning though, bloodline magic is very different from what goes on around this place,” the man warned. “I met a mage a couple years back, not a Zar damned clue how he did it.”

Astrid felt her disappointment on her face.

“I’ll tell you the trick with magic, though, any magic,” the man continued, voice reassuring. “Practice and patience. Magic, especially the kind you lot have around here, is unique to each person, you’re not going to find someone to teach you how to use your magic. The key is practice, and probably not doing what I do.” Pykah did the same prone shrug that Caz had demonstrated earlier.

Astrid did her best not to let her disappointment show on her face, the notion of practice being the only thing she could do just upset her further. She didn’t want to use her magic, she wanted it gone. She never wanted to wake up in an inferno again, never wanted her dreams of fire to come true again. She wanted the power gone, she didn’t want to use it.

“Sorry that I can’t be more helpful,” Pykah said, misreading Astrid’s reaction.

“He’s not actually very useful,” Caz informed the girl with a grin.

“Quiet you,” Pykah replied, grinning himself. “And get over here.”

There was Astrid’s cue to leave, she’d always been made uncomfortable by intimacy of any kind. Though that left her with nothing to do. She’d fairly managed to explore the barge while she was loading the vessel and so looking around held little appeal.

She was sitting on the edge of the barge, feet dangling over the side, when someone joined her. Astrid looked to find the Lythaz girl giving her a considering look.

“I am Dalylia,” the girl informed her.

“Astrid.”

That was the extent of their conversation for nearly an hour, during which time the polers stopped work and Pykah started propelling the ship again. Upon glancing in that direction Astrid found Caz sitting in the massive mage’s lap, staring vacantly into the sky, her expression almost the opposite of Pykah’s intense concentration.

“Arnette told me that that man is propelling the ship,” Dalylia said, startling Astrid. “But magic is not real, is it?”

Astrid looked at the girl with proper surprise. “Of course magic’s real,” she replied. “What’re you talking about?”

The girl considered her. “There is no magic where I come from, no gods or magical beings,” Dalylia admitted. “Magic is not real.”

Untitled Fantasy Project – Chapter Four

“I just would have preferred that you tell me beforehand,” Dalylia told the captain, hoisting a pack that had been run up from the ship onto her shoulders. “I did not expect to be staying here very long.”

“It will not be so long,” Herania reassured her. “It should only take a month to get to the Castle, less if there is a barge.”

“That cannot be correct.” Dalylia checked her crossbow for the millionth time. “It must take at least a week to get to Lakeside, and many times that to the Castle.”

“Most of the river barges employ Uun bloodline skippers,” Herania did his meaningless shrug. “We will be back here in six months.”

Dalylia’s heart sank. Not only would she be by herself in a strange land, but Herania wasn’t waiting for her. Even if the captain’s calculations of how long it would take were low, as she suspected, she would still have to wait months for his return.

“What does ‘Oon bloodline’ mean?” Dalylia asked, trying to cover her disappointment.

The brothers looked at each other as Herania groped for words, then the captain shrugged. “Uun bloodline are magic…” he paused and used the Engulian word. “Mages.”

Somehow Delylia found that even more shocking than being sent on this unexpected errand. She had heard of the mages of Engul, beings with incredible power. But that was the key word, ‘incredible’. “Magic is not real,” she pointed out reasonably.

“I thought so too, when I was young and fresh out of Lythazine,” the captain shrugged again, a helpless shrug. “You have to see it to believe it, I think, we will talk about it when we see each other again. Until then you need to get to the river bays.”

Dalylia knew a dismissal when she heard one. She checked her crossbow again and pushed the door to their room open. A boy who was clearly not Engulian or Lythaz leant against the wall across from the door, apparently nodding off. He had exceptionally pale skin, even for someone living in Engul, large eyes which were almost completely black, and long, pitch dark hair tied above his head. His nose was flat and broad and his lips thin and pale.

The boy yawned mightily. “Are you Dalylia?” he asked in an accent Dalylia did not recognise.

She nodded.

“Good. Come with me, captain whatsherface wants me to take you down the bays or something.” He yawned again. “Fair warning though, sun comes up I am gone, can’t stand the bastard, ya know?” With that he turned and started walking.

He was roughly the same height as Dalylia, though clearly a bit younger, but he walked so fast that Dalylia almost had to jog at times to keep up. It seemed almost like he glided though the lightening darkness.

The sun was just brightening the horizon when they reached the river bays. What distinguished the bays from the piers was apparently just their location and size. While the docks were set up to take the massive boats that came with traders, all the river bays were the exact size necessary to fit a river barge.

Everything seemed to brighten for just a moment, then the boy who had led Dalylia to the bays leapt about four metres up and onto the deck of the closest river barge, where he collapsed into the arms of a young man who looked about two and a half metres tall.

“Ah, you made it!” The booming voice of captain Arnette sounded from the deck. “We’re almost ready to go, come aboard.”

There were two gangplanks onto the barge, one just wide enough for one person and one significantly wider. The wider plank was currently being run up and down by about ten Engulians of various ages, loading the barge.

It took about half an hour for the barge to set off, by which time the sun was properly up and the boy who had guided Dalylia was nowhere to be seen. The giant who the boy had collapsed on sat by the rudder, expression intense, and sitting not far from him was the odd red haired girl in her massive hide coat.

Dalylia decided to ignore them both and find out what she should be doing.

Arnette shrugged. “Nothing for us to do while Pykah is working,” she said, nodding in the direction of the skipper.

“What is he doing?” Dalylia asked. The man seemed to barely be moving at all.

Arnette gave her an odd look before understanding dawned in the captain’s eyes. “You don’t have magic in Lythazine, do you?” she asked. “Boy’s propelling the ship is what he’s doing, Uun bloodline are good with water.”

Dalylia didn’t believe the woman, but she didn’t say anything. Instead she decided to look around the ship to try to work out what it was that was actually powering the apparently self-propelling vessel. They were going against the current, which came down from the northern peak of Engul, so there had to be something fairly powerful propelling the ship so quickly.

Two hours of searching turned up nothing.

“I heard that there was no magic in Lythazine,” a familiar male voice informed Dalylia.

She turned to see the boy from earlier, looking much more awake. “Magic isn’t real,” Dalylia told him, surely he was young enough to have not accepted the superstition completely.

He smiled an exceptionally condescending smile. “Not where you’re from,” he replied. “Just like your magic isn’t real where I came from. A crossbow is a figment of foreigners’ imaginations, a firestarter some madman’s dream. We’re from different places, you and I. The difference is that you don’t see what is in front of you.”

With that the boy seemed to melt into the shadows.

As Dalylia was climbing out of the cargo hold there was a jolt that almost knocked her over. Emerging into the cloud-filtered sunlight she saw the skipper lying flat beside the rudder, the red-haired girl sitting beside him watching the clouds calmly. The boat seemed to have stopped propelling itself.

“Polers!”

The shout almost deafened Dalylia, coming as it did from over her shoulder, where captain Arnette was standing. Four burly looking men and women jogged to the back of the barge and took up spectacularly long wooden poles, which they plunged into the water.

“You can’t row up the river,” Arnette confided. “Not wide enough. It’s slow going when we have to pole, but Pykah will be back up in an hour at most and we’ll be alright. The river widens further up and he passes out less.”