Chapter 244 - To Zhighua

On the 241st Loop, Ibrahim met Mirian in Mahatan as she finished her routine of opening the gates. By then, both of them had acquired fresh traveling clothes and supplies. There would be no research effort in Torrviol, which simplified matters.

“Let’s go over the rules again,” Mirian said. She started ticking them off on her fingers. “No killing Gabriel.” She ticked off another finger. “Second rule: you aren’t allowed to kill Gabriel.” And a third finger: “Also, don’t kill Gabriel.”

Ibrahim snorted. “Even if he’s annoying?”

“Especially if he’s annoying.”

“You really want him slithering about in the dirt near us?”

“He’s smart, and he can help us get a feel for Akanan operations in the country.”

The dervish kept his eyes forward as he talked, never really looking at Mirian, but keeping his gaze on the people around them. “So you’ve said. I say, all it’s doing is offering up more dens for him to pilfer eggs from.”

“You’re really committed to the snake metaphor.”

That got a slight smile out of Ibrahim. Despite his sharp exterior, she could feel that he’d calmed slightly. Found at least some peace, despite his wife still dying at the beginning of each cycle.

“Besides, there will be four of us keeping an eye on him,” Mirian said, gesturing to a cloaked man and a stern-looking woman waiting for them at the gate. Her father, going by Atrah, and Song Jei.

“I still want to know what you offered the necromancer.”

“A new book of poetry,” she said.

Ibrahim gave her a startled look. “What?”

“Not really. Atrah, good to see you. You have the supplies?”

“As requested,” her father said coldly. This time, she’d been able to prepare him more extensively for his role. Having another set of eyes she could trust would be invaluable. She was particularly interested in what the other two Prophets might say behind her back.

The four of them traveling must have been a funny sight. While Ibrahim assumed a dual-form of Last Breath and Lone Pine and sprinted over the desert, Mirian and Gaius flew above him, taking turns lifting Jei along with them. Mirian had offered to carry Ibrahim too, but the Persaman warlord had far too much pride to even consider it, so she let the matter drop. Mirian practiced several necromancy spells on any myrvites that approached, with her father giving her tips.

Several hours later, they slowed down as they approached Alatishad, Mirian and her father landing, while Ibrahim changed clothes, discarding his sweat-soaked ones by the side of the road. Ibrahim made no attempt to cover himself while he did this, which led Jei to blush furiously and stare intently at a nearby sand dune. Ibrahim seemed not to notice. He looked as happy as Mirian had ever seen him.

“Nothing like running with the wind,” he said.

Alatishad was a large city, second only to Urubandar. Like most Persaman cities, it had a look of diminished glory to it. There were old walls and the ruins of houses outside the newer walls, washed up in sand. There was a ruined fortress, the stone walls half-pillaged for easy sandstone. The bright paints decorating the Isheer Sanctuaries were faded, and even the palaces had places where the stone was cracked or the sand and wind had pitted parts of the exteriors. Gaius scoffed at the worn roads. “These have to be the original ones. I don’t think they’ve been repaired since the Triarchy collapsed.”

From what he’d told her, most of Alatishad had been abandoned for centuries after the collapse, the city contracting into a small bastion that sat on the Setarab River, before finally expanding back out again as the population recovered and trade with Zhighua was reestablished. Then, fossilized myrvite had become a much-desired resource, and with the proliferation of spell engines used to help ward myrvites away from the farmlands, the city had grown again until it was nearly the same size as during its height under the Triarchy, then shrunk again as ships became the primary method of trade to Zhighua and the overland route through the Land of Spires became more disused.

They met Gabriel by one of the trading docks over by the south bank of the river. A trade caravan from Zhighua had just arrived, full of goods, but also refugees from the civil war. Gabriel was talking to the leaders of the caravan in halting Gulwenen, then gave up and switched to Adamic. Mirian had warned the other Prophet that Ibrahim was going to be joining them, so it wasn’t a surprise, but she also knew he wasn’t happy about it.

Here, Mirian got her first look at the group they’d be traveling with. Eximontar couldn’t be used on the route because they were too tempting a morsel for the predatory myrvites, so less magical packbeasts were used. The short and stout marusaurs resembled something between a tropical bird and a lizard. They had snub noses, green and white feathers along their frills, and were nearly impossible to rile up. They ate just about anything, including jungle plants that were poisonous to most creatures. Marusaurs were also, however, slow, and the same nonchalance that made them impossible to spook made them equally impossible to rush. Caravans through the Jiandzhi gave up speed for stealth.

As Gabriel caught sight of the group approaching, his gaze locked on Ibrahim. For a moment, they stared at each other. Ibrahim looked like a bull ready to charge, Gabriel, like a cat that wasn’t sure if he should fight or run.

Then, Ibrahim gave a snort of derision and looked away.

“This is going to go great, by the way,” Gabriel said cheerfully.

“The more power we can bring to bear, the better our chances. I don’t like wasting time,” Mirian said.

Gabriel shrugged. “We’ve got plenty of it to waste. Did you bring the wine? I’m noting you all have suspiciously small travelers’ packs. Perhaps you stored it in the fourth dimension next to your spellbook?”

Mirian opened up one of the sections of her traveler’s pack and pulled out a single bottle of wine.

“That’s all I brought, and you only get it on condition of good behavior.”

“My good behavior!? Just one bottle!? I’m always well behaved. It’s that brute you need to keep an eye on.”

“The only way we’ll learn to work together is through practice,” Mirian said. “The only way we’ll deepen bonds of trust is through working together.”

Gabriel shook his head sadly, but he took the bottle and said something in Gulwenen that she didn’t quite catch. One of the Zhighuan merchants perked up, suddenly looking very interested. Mirian watched as Gabriel handed it over to the man. Mirian knew enough Gulwenen now to know the merchant was thanking him profusely.

Wait, is that why he wanted them? She’d thought he was going to try to drink them all. Gabriel turned and gave her a wink, then went back to chatting with the merchant.

Song Jei came and stood by Mirian. The professor had been mostly quiet through the journey. She always withdrew when she was out of her element. “These are the people you need to save Enteria with?” she asked quietly.

“Yeah,” Mirian said. “No, I don’t know what the Ominian was thinking either.”

***

The merchant, whose name was Han Feng, turned out to be in charge of the caravan, and was a veteran who had made the journey through the Jiandzhi hundreds of times. His face had a youthful look to it, with only a few wrinkles by his eyes, and his gait still had a spring in it. Only a few strands of gray hair betrayed his actual age.

It took a few days for the caravan to finish unloading and loading its cargo, wait for another merchant group that would be joining them, and then finally start moving back south. With most of the trade now being done by sea, it was only high-value goods that used the land-route; things like dyes, distilled magichemicals, bolts of silk, exotic spices, and conduit crystals. Each marusaur could carry about a hundred pounds of goods comfortably.

“This caravan makes it the farthest of any of the one’s I’ve tried, and Han Feng knows this route better than Ibrahim knows how to fuck rats,” Gabriel said. Then, quieter, he said, “By now, the attacks along the route have already begun, but nobody knows it yet. A few survivors of one of the attacks make it north by the 18th and start warning people, but they’re not the first group to be attacked, and certainly not the last. Most caravans don’t have survivors. As best I can tell, the attacks start around the 8th of Solem. Not enough time to make it through the whole route, believe me, I tried, and got eaten for my troubles. Ever been eaten before?”

“Yes,” Mirian said, though it was more ‘torn apart by greater labyrinthine horrors’ than actually consumed. She figured it probably felt about the same.

“Oh. Anyways, I’m sure your wonderful leyline detector will help us figure out why they’re all in a frenzy, and do nothing to help us actually do anything about. I thought I’d built my own detector right, but I don’t think it actually worked. Kept giving weird readings.”

Mirian had assembled a leyline detector as they waited to depart. The pieces were now being carried along in the saddlebags of one of the marusaurs. She’d also upgraded several of the enchantments on the saddlebags to lower their ability to be sensed by hostile myrvites, with her father advising her on part of the process. One of the enchantments collected particles from the marusaurs that predators could smell, while another masked heat energy. Those, she simply made more efficient. Her new addition was an enchantment that hid the soul-energy of both the beasts and anyone nearby, using a set of bindings to create a widely dispersed field. Using tribonded sequences, she could maintain the enchantment with regular injections of mana. It would take a lot of mana, but a lot less than a fight. Feng had been fascinated as he watched her work, and asked how much she’d cost to hire full time. She’d just shaken her head.

The first three days of travel were across desert, then high desert as the road wound up a series of cliffs. There, the myrvite attacks were almost nonexistent, as the local hunters were happy to come out and track down any drakes or manticores that had been spotted and turn a tidy profit on their parts. They passed over old stone bridges, also dating back from the Triarchy, moving over scenic canyons and past gorgeous waterfalls that cascaded down from the mountains to go fill the Setarab river.

Once they’d gotten high enough, the road began to snake through one of the smaller canyons, paralleling the stream. Mirian caught a glimpse of old plinths that had once had glyphs carved on them. There were other symbols as well that Mirian didn’t recognize. Some of the logograms looked like Old Adamic script, while others looked Gulwenen to her.

“New Viaterrian,” her father said. “Or at least, that’s what scholars are calling it now. Well, they were calling it that about a hundred years ago, I sure hope they haven’t changed it. Always annoying when scholars decide to rename something when the old name was perfectly good. These are just basic instructions to travelers about the nature of the route, warnings about what hazards there might be, and so forth. For example, that one says, ‘Travel not this road before or after a great rain.’ The one we passed back there said, ‘Beware the magic life.’ Myra Vitae. That word goes on to become ‘myrvite,’ which we still use.”

“Interesting,” Mirian said.

The fifth day of travel, they stopped for the night beneath an overhang that had been reinforced with stone pillars. The whole caravan gathered itself up, Feng pulling out animal feed to keep the marusaurs happy. On the canyon wall was a whole conversation in New Viaterrian, though erosion had cut through most of the symbols. There was an active enchantment on the plinth. Mirian made Ibrahim try to charge it, which he failed to do even after a half hour. Finally, she just charged it herself.

“Your link with the arcane catalyst keeps breaking,” she said. “It’s not like a dervish stance where once you’ve directed the currents, the soul mostly flows on its own. You have to maintain a hold on it. The mana flows are similar, in that once a spell is started, it takes less effort to continue casting, but your hold on the arcane catalyst must be absolute.”

“I see,” Ibrahim said, clearly annoyed, but trying to hide it.

Mirian instructed Ibrahim on arcane magic a bit longer, then they broke for dinner. Here, Mirian was getting her first taste of Zhighuan food. Most people were eating a rice porridge flavored with dried fish and spices. Gabriel, having sufficiently bribed Feng with the wine earlier, made sure they had finer fare. The caravan’s chef fed them roasted goat and a cooked vegetable medley all topped with a delicious red curry. She still preferred the dishes of Arriroba, but she could appreciate that Zhighuans at least knew how to properly use spices.

Ibrahim absolutely inhaled his bowl. One moment, it was full, and then Mirian looked away for less than a minute and it was gone and he was politely asking for a second portion. Then, the second bowl of goat curry vanished, and the chef, glaring at him, served him porridge. Mirian was impressed. She was used to being the person who ate fastest, but here, she was clearly outclassed.

“I still think we should have gone on our own,” he said as they sat around an enchanted cooking stone that was slowly pulsing out heat. “The caravan is too slow.”

“Han Feng will teach us the routes, shelters, and sanctuary fortresses. Once we know the route and have some experience fighting the myrvites, then we won’t need the caravan.”

“The snake knows the route.”

“Not very well. He’s only made it to the halfway point of Sanctuary Road. He mostly gathered what he knows from chatting up drivers and interviewing survivors.”

“Cowardly,” Ibrahim said.

“Yes, a little,” Mirian had to agree. Gabriel was at one of the cooking stones on the other side of the camp, occasionally glancing their way. “He needs to learn to fight properly.”

“He won’t. Snakes are ambush predators. When he fights, it will be with venom.”

Mirian scoffed. “Does the venom represent poisoned words, recruiting others, or is it literal?”

“Yes,” Ibrahim said, but he didn’t smile.

“Do you want to talk about what happened between the two of you?”

“No,” he said.

“Very well. Do you need a moment to digest, or can you show me more of those dervish stances?”

He stood, now grinning. “Let us train.” 

***

The next day, they snaked their way through the canyon for a few more hours before they finally got to the first of the caves. If Professor Holvatti had been with them, he’d have no doubt been beside himself and launched into a long description of the fascinating reason the caves had formed, and perhaps related the topography to the limestone caves in Palendurio. As it was, Mirian just knew there were a lot of caves in the region, and that had something to do with the colossal stone pillars and extreme verticality of the Jiandzhi.

Earthshaper mages had shaped a long staircase that cut through the canyon wall, rising up first to avoid a flooding river from drowning the passage, then dipping back down. The cave route took them beneath the base of one of the mountains. Immediately, Mirian felt the change of the air. In only a few hundred feet, they’d gone from the dry, relentless heat of the Persaman desert to the cold humidity of the caves.

Several of the caravaneers had light charms which illuminated their passage through the caves. The charms were essentially a light wand, just in a necklace, and with an especially weak catalyst. Most of the marusaur handlers weren’t proper mages, but they could use basic spells and charge an enchantment. None of the caravans bothered with much in the way of defense. There was only one other mage with this caravan, and she was more for utility than combat. There were several rifles hanging from the packs of the marusaurs, but that was a last resort. Myrvite attacks were to be avoided. If they were in a fight, several things had already gone wrong.

Generations of travelers and mages had helped worn a path through the limestone caves, but most of what they were traveling through was natural. Huge stalactites and stalagmites were everywhere, and here, the marusaurs proved their worth, being able to navigate the slopes, climb over boulders, and slink through the narrow passages. Nothing with wheels stood a chance at making it through.

That night, they made camp inside one of the larger caverns. Over the years, travelers resting there had shaped the larger stalagmites into stools and chairs. The ones that weren’t damp were quite comfortable to sit on. Several enchantments had been carved into lumps of flowstone so that they acted like lanterns once charged, giving the place a cozy glow.

Mirian trained with Ibrahim again. Now that they were in the caves, the carvaneers spent the evening hunting an edible kind of cave newt found in the underground rivers there. Mirian tried it, and decided it must be an acquired taste.

Her father continued to pretend to eat for the benefit of the merchants. When he took a bowl, he usually waited until no one was paying attention, then vaporized it and replaced the substance with an illusion that he then ‘ate.’ However, after noticing Ibrahim’s appetite, he was now surreptitiously passing his food to the dervish. The chef was just happy that the necromancer was only taking one. Ibrahim was happy to have a fourth serving.

As the light spells dimmed and they settled onto their bedrolls for the night, Mirian checked on Gabriel.

“He won’t talk about your shared history. Would knowing it help?”

“What’s done is done. If he’d rather bury it, good. So would I. I’m a different man now. I’m free of the puppet strings I once danced on, and I’ll never be collared again.”

She nodded. “Ibrahim’s a lot more consistent with his metaphors than you are.”

Gabriel shrugged. “Sometimes, you have to play darts with the cards you’re dealt. No sense overturning the board when you find a scorpion in your shoe.”

 Mirian snorted, suppressing a laugh. “Tomorrow’s the big day.”

The former spy let out a big sigh. “Sure is. If it looks like I’m going to get eaten, I’m offing myself. You ready for those things?”

“We’ll see.”

When she checked in with Jei, she was sitting alone. Several of the other Zhighuan merchants had tried to make conversation with her, but she’d maintained a polite silence until they got the hint.

“Are you doing okay?” she asked her old professor quietly.

“I will… be fine.”

“You’re not eager to go home, are you?”

“My feelings are complicated. You have more important things to worry about.”

Mirian gave her a sad smile. “So many cycles. I wish…”

“It can’t be. So do not worry.” Jei thought she knew, at least. Best let it lie.

***

The next morning, they packed up camp, then started winding up through the caves. As they approached the exit, Mirian felt the wave of humidity hit her first, then the heat. The caravaneers cut their light charms, leaving only the emerald light of the cave exit in front of them.

They emerged into the jungle. The green was everywhere, overwhelming. The towering trees dripped with vines, their trunks covered in moss and ivy. The forest floor was carpeted in ferns and bushes. The sounds of the jungle were more overwhelming than even Tlaxhuaco, the chorus of insects and animal cries coming in waves.

Now, they’d properly entered the only place on Enteria more dangerous than the open ocean.

The Jiandzhi awaited.