"El Camino," Chapter Three

[This is Chapter Three in an ongoing, improvised prose story. Chapter One; Chapter Two. ]

[ 100% of voters decided that the party would go to the unwelcoming town of Cherry Springs, instead of turning aside, keeping The Traveller safe, and abandoning both their savings and the money owed to them for a job completed. ]

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CHAPTER THREE.

As The Traveller barrelled down the Rust Shelf road, approaching the T-junction ahead, Eyman let their speed drop.

“What are you doing?” Susa snapped through the window. “Why are you slowing down?”

Faris, in the passenger seat, trying to make sense of this unexpected deceleration, began to ask, “did you forget…?” But of course Eyman knew which way to go. Faris looked down the other road, to see if there was anything worth seeing. No, only the dampened earth, dotted with crusty old shrubs and the occasional dejected cactus. He frowned at his brother. “Go straight, go straight.”

Before Eyman had a chance to question this course of action, his fellows had made perfectly clear that they would be returning to Cherry Springs. He felt like a champion idiot for having considered any other option, but tried to hide it. “Maybe you two wanted to switch seats,” he said to cover his foolishness.

“We’re almost there,” said Susa, squinting at the town in the distance. “Just go.” He slid the window shut with a definitive clack.

Eyman went. Between there and the town, he slowed only one other time, when a hare darted toward the road. To avoid running beneath The Traveller’s wheels, the small animal veered in its course, which allowed the pursuing coyote to snatch it in its jaws. In his wing mirror, Eyman watched the limp hare flop as the coyote throttled it like a housekeeper shaking the dust out of a rug. He was not a man who put faith in portents, but that was a sight that would have given a granite boulder the shivers. To Eyman, the skies over Cherry Springs seemed a little darker.

Cherry Springs should have been a ghost town, but even the lowliest ghost had better places to be. You could imagine, decades ago, an enterprising, restless individual—a young man with a thin beard and a dull if enterprising gleam in his eye—listening to a pitch for a place called “Pristine Valley.” Get in early, he would have been told. Once the ghouls are sent back into the north, once the glacial chutes are dammed up so the Misery Fog is restrained, once the Badger Storms are tamed and once someone puts an end to the Hunting Demons of Gruwald the Mad—once all those problems have been solved—and they will be! Do not lose faith; they will be. Then—then!—then it will be The Place To Be.

So someone had come here—not even the nice end of Pristine Valley—set down his pack, and stayed. Despite the inhospitable land, despite The Well Stranglers, he had refused to retreat to the kinder, more generous regions of New Sweetwater. Thanks to some bewildering mental stew of stubbornness, optimism, and idiocy—or perhaps he prayed to the God of The Sunk-Cost Fallacy—the town of Cherry Springs had risen, and it had stayed. 

It wasn’t a nice-looking town, but it was colourful. Each building was painted in distinct hues. Many flew the vivid yellow and orange ensign of the region’s lord (who had probably been the one to promise that some day, eventually, the Crimson Day-Stealer would be killed). All the colour lightened the feeling that this was a town built on a foundation of pressure-treated willpower.

The Traveller rumbled to a stop outside the local Steward’s office, a branch of Alexander Putney & Sons. Susa dismounted, a small pink flag flying from the sword at his side. Eyman had affixed one to his sword, too, as had Faris to the longsword on his back. Before they arrived in town, Eyman had reminded the other two to do it, because that’s what Ranulf would always do. The flags served the purpose of announcing to the townsfolk, “look, I am a weapon, I am not trying to hide, please do not be surprised to see me.” You never wanted people to be surprised to see a weapon. It made them unpredictable.

Susa hoisted onto his shoulder the chest that contained the goblin’s head. Behind the reflections in every window along the main street, curious eyes watched him. A few men had come out to stand importantly on their porches, to puff up their chests as the menacing rumble of The Traveller rattled their windows. Susa wondered what was taking his brothers so long to emerge.

In the front seat of The Traveller, Faris had shown Eyman where, exactly, he had secreted a long dagger beneath his arm. From Faris’ point of view—as well as more generally speaking—this was a wise secret to reveal, because if things went poorly, it benefitted the entire party to know where a secret blade was hidden, especially if the Steward’s office required them to leave their weapons at the door. The pink flags were all well and good—the party would be seen to be playing by the rules—but a little extra preparedness was prudent.

Eyman saw the sense in this. But on the other hand, if Faris was caught out—if the party was caught out—it would make even the poorest situation worse. They were already trying to make it out of town without anyone looking at them too hard. Eyman didn’t want to add one more thing that they needed to hide, especially with the image of the throttled hare haunting his good senses. More than anything, though, he knew that Ranulf would have made Faris leave the dagger behind. Ranulf believed in the pink flags. Ranulf believed it was cowardly to hide weapons. He wouldn’t even have lashed out at Faris for the suggestion, he would have said, “don’t be stupid,” in that way he had of saying things, and Faris would, indeed, have felt stupid.

Eyman wondered if he told his brother, “don’t be stupid,” if it would have the same effect. And he was offended, too. Ranulf had been dead for little more than a day. Shame on Faris to think he could get away with this.

But then, ordinarily, Ranulf would have been the party’s mouthpiece and the other three wouldn’t have to show their faces. Ordinarily, they wouldn’t be expecting open hostility. Ordinarily, there was less need for a secret dagger.

To Be Continued…