Gregor The Cripple

They had entered a land where the ground held a definite tilt. It went up, then down again, then up even more. Up was a general trend, and the trees grew with a slant. The Shard wasn’t close – it still loomed distant and hazy, occluded by cloud and morning fog – but they were already feeling the elevation of the mountain range.

Gregor’s condition was steadily improving. Today, the nausea was absent, and the headache was less intense. In truth, he had no idea how long it had been since he last touched opium, but it was clear that his period of withdrawal was coming to an end and that he was close to becoming a regular cripple again. His rib still ached fiercely, but it made his stump almost unnoticeable in comparison, so he counted that as a boon.

Perhaps the madness was also temporary?

It was a product of both the opium and the failure. The opium was on the way out, but the failure remained. Did he need to overwrite his failure to be sane, or was the damage permanent?

Could a demented mind ever actually heal?

Gregor tried to read as they rode, but Kaius’s studies into the thaumaturgic conductivity of corundum weren’t really doing it for him. His mind was too busy with thoughts of the workings of his mind, which was a confusing ouroboros train of thought.

Abruptly, civilisation began as they crested a ridge and caught sight of the next valley. A river ran in that great cleft of earth, and a little smokey village had made its home there on the banks. It reminded Gregor of Schlechtegegend and reminded Mildred of home, though it wasn’t really much like either.

It was smaller than Schlechtegegend, being more hamlet than village and possessing none of the proper amenities for travellers, and proved to be newer than Mildred’s memory. No matter. Night was distant, and they’d be riding through without stopping. Furthermore, there was only one road, so they had no reason to stop and ask for directions.

Idly, Gregor wondered about the boy with the father-murdering problem, not with significant interest, but he did wonder.

“…Do children often kill their own parents?”

“…No Gregor, that would be horrible.”

“I see.” He had assumed as much.

Well, it wasn’t any of his business.

Down to the hamlet they rode, seeing a few small fields on the way, and Gregor wondered aloud at the local industry. They couldn’t be sustaining themselves with such limited agriculture, so they must trade for food and other necessities.

“Furs.” Mildred suggested, “The place is small enough that a population of hunters would be sustainable.”

Hunters couldn’t work in one place for too long, or they’d kill everything worth killing. To be able to support a village, the village would need to be small, and the hunters would need to move around a lot.

The hamlet might have grown from being something like a base camp for an association of trappers and hunters in the vicinity of their various fur circuits into a convenient settlement where their families could live and where traders and muleteers would know to find them. Many remote settlements had probably formed this way, the pair realised.

As confirmation of their theory, they caught a waft of pelt-stink while trotting down the village, which was a revolting combination of wet dog and rancid blood, though still significantly less offensive than the deeptroll stench.

There were odd looks as they passed through, which was usual. Wizards aren’t common, and Mildred was Mildred. She was exceptionally tall and perfect (in Gregor’s opinion) and carried a large knife and two guns, with a colossal hammer was strapped across her horse’s shoulders. Besides that, the pair were casually discussing the republic’s naval countermeasures against siren attacks, which, by the way, consisted entirely of mapping out siren territories and then doing everything possible to avoid them.

It was absolutely reasonable to find the pair odd.

A whisper rippled through the settlement and heads poked out of hovels to inspect the passing pair. Everyone busy stopped to stare, and everyone idle became busy. The women shuffled the children away, and the few men muttered shiftily to each other.

“Hoy, Wizerd!” Came a call. “Need a room? It’ll come cheap.”

They didn’t, and so they left with eyes on their backs.

“Nice place.” Offered charitable Mildred.

“No it wasn’t.” Denied grouchy Gregor.

***

When they met the toe of the mountain range, the shard was still far off as a stark silhouette against the fallen sun and its amber sky. They then made camp in the woods at mountainfall, reasoning in consideration for their horses that ascent should occur subsequent to rest.

Night thus found Gregor sitting by the fire, dressing his stump. The wound had mostly healed, but not very well.

Paradoxically, the cleaner an initial amputation, the more surgical work is required to close it. Gregor’s hand had been neatly severed, so he had been forced to cut much muscle and a little bone to have enough free skin to pull over the wound and tuck into stitches.

It had healed decently after so many months, but Gregor wasn’t a surgeon. It seeped occasionally and infection was still a legitimate danger. Without the intervention of a healer, he didn’t know if it’d ever really heal.

He slept after changing his bindings, pulling the new cloth tight and laundering the old cloth with a handy spell.

Domestic magic, as it was called derisively by status-concerned mages, was something that only wizards practised openly.

Sorcerers, all of whom are very wealthy, generally see the use of magic for something as low-class as laundry as embarrassing or shameful. Apprentices all generally learn domestic magic, both for personal use and for the utility of their master, but few would ever publicly admit to it.

In this respect and few others, wizards were considered far more wise for their practical lack of social consideration by the mundane masses.

Wise Gregor slept, and Mildred kept watch.

Having finished her technical manual on trains, and having found nothing else of mechanical interest in any of their brief encounters with civilisation, she sat by the fire reading one of Gregor’s books. It was entitled ‘Gracian’s Compendium of Extreme Vegetation’, and the cover bore an illustration of a flower that had teeth instead of petals. Why did it have teeth instead of petals? What could be the point of that? They weren’t sharp fangs, but boxy, square teeth like the ones in the front of her mouth.

Baffled, she began to read, and soon learned that the purpose of the teeth was to attract creatures intelligent enough to wonder what they were for, being that intelligent creatures tend to be both more magical and more nutritious. Once attracted these creatures would then likely succumb to the poison of mycorrhizal fungi that liked to grow in proximity to the flower.

This corpse can then attract scavengers and detritivores, who also often die, leaving a dense accumulation of fertiliser to decompose into the soil above its roots.

Mildred realised that this Gracian fellow’s intention in placing the toothflower on the cover of his book was to leverage its natural attraction mechanism to his own gain. It was to attract readers!

Advertisement, she had learned from Gregor, was quite a common thing to see in every realm of potential commercial success in this bizarre new world.

In her time, literacy and literature hadn’t been common enough for books to be enjoyed by the masses. It was typical that a book would only be sought by people within a certain intellectual niche, and that such people were few enough that word of mouth was sufficient advertisement, and often actually preferable to advertisement on the part of the author. Which might be seen as a tacit admission that the content of the work wasn’t enough to gain the recommendation of its readers.

But as a consequence of mass literacy, the creation and distribution of books had now become a true profession in and of itself, rather than an extension of academic purists as it was in Mildred’s time. If an author wishes to eat, they must now compete to lure in readers, like the flower with its prey.

This was just one of the many incongruences between Mildred’s presupposed knowledge of the way the world was, and the actual state of things. Her acclimatisation was going to be a long and interesting process. Perhaps she should write a book about it, or perhaps she should go on a tour of this new world and write a book about that. Her perspective was sure to be interesting. Marketable, even.

She was sitting up against her pack, with the book laying on her crossed legs and the fire to her right.

The woods weren’t silent by any stretch – there were the animals and the wind, and trees and leaves under the influence of the animals and the wind, but at that moment, when Mildred had just begun contemplate the future, there was a sound.

It was a rustle, which could have meant anything really, but rustle was close and Mildred had enemies.

She’d kept the fire high so that she could read, and its light blinded her to anything that might be revealed by the dull illumination of the moon. There was something in the trees, and so she squinted to find it.

Blood was thundering in her ears as she stared out into the darkness. Minutes passed, though she couldn’t be sure how many, and nothing happened.

She tried to go back to reading, but couldn’t. Thoughts of her enemies were accompanied by thoughts of home, and her stomach churned. She’d seen the shard today, and would stand at its foot before the week ended.

Why hadn’t she asked about her home when they passed through the hunting hamlet? They’d know if her village still held people, and they’d certainly know if there was a dragon nearby. Even if he’d been slumbering this whole time, dragons are rather notable. They’d know. There would be stories.

They would have known, and if she had asked, she would know too. But she didn’t ask, she didn’t even want to ask, and now the uncertainty was more horrible than ever.

Pleasantly interrupting her thoughts, an unkempt man stalked out of the woods with an ancient fowling piece held low toward her. In some act of coordination, four others stepped out around the camp. One went toward Gregor. The first man put his finger to his smirking lips, then out reached toward her.

Mildred didn’t even think, she just ripped Greta’s revolver from its holster and shot him in the gut and then again in the head. He obviously hadn’t been expecting it, and neither had she.

As the others scrambled to violence, a malevolent Gregor woke to quash whatever had roused him.

She watched mutely as the grumpy wizard dismantled her visitors.

One went up in flames which seemed to flow like water. One shot and missed, his gun floating from his hands and beating him to death. Another shot and didn’t miss, but the pellets scattered ineffectually against some invisible plane of force. These pellets were returned to him, which was polite. The last tried to run, but caught a spike of ice to the back of the head.

Mildred kept looking from the gun in her hand to the body at her feet. Blood poured out of the holes she had made. It was dark ooze in the low light, but flickered with the fire.

Damn. Was all she could think.

Abruptly, she keeled over to vomit. Shortly after they first met, she had told Gregor that she’d killed people before. That was mostly a lie. She’d certainly injured people, and maybe some of them had died, but never while she was present. Staring at a corpse of her own creation was a new experience, and it inspired an overwhelming revulsion that she hadn’t expected.

Mildred thought that she was tougher than this. There was nausea when Gregor killed people because that was normal, and gore and blood were naturally disgusting, but nothing like this. Honestly, it was embarrassing, and she wondered what he must think of her.

She dropped the gun and sat on the bare earth, still staring at the corpse. Her hands shook with adrenaline that her body didn’t know was unneeded.

Damn.

Intellectually, she knew that her actions were rational, and that the man was probably going to do something horrible to her. It was perfectly justifiable for Mildred to defend herself.

She had justifiably done something bad, then had the gall to feel terrible about it.

If she felt bad about this, what must Gregor think that she thought about him, who regularly does far worse? Mildred then realised that she felt bad about feeling bad, and felt worse for it. It was all so confusing. She was confused at her own feelings and she hated it. She never wanted to kill anyone ever again.

Gregor was meant to do the horrible things so that she didn’t have to, but here she was fretting half to death about something which she knew was actually quite justified. For this, Mildred then began to resent him a little, which she knew was completely unreasonable.

“I recognise this man.” Said Gregor, who was only distantly aware that Mildred was having a crisis of composure. She didn’t look over.

Was Gregor being considerate by not bringing up her near-catatonic spiral of revulsion, or had he not noticed, or did he simply not care? If he didn’t care, would that make her upset?

Mildred was a bit of a mess. She was close to graduating from ‘crisis of composure’ to ‘having a moment’.

“He was from that village.”

Gregor crouched low over the hunter he’d bludgeoned, rifling through the little pack the man carried. While Mildred sat stewing, he went through the possessions of all the assailants, but found nothing out of the ordinary. These were regular men.

There was no way to know for certain why they had attacked. It was possible that they’d simply been enchanted by Mildred, but he thought that it was far more likely they had been goaded into action by the enemy – part of the harassment Gregor was expecting. They might have been contacted and offered a bounty, or threatened into action.

If they encountered more villages on the way, this would probably repeat.

Gregor moved the bodies away, then sent fretting Mildred to try for some sleep. He extinguished the fire and cast his darkvision spell, waiting. If the whole village was in on it, more would come. He would be ready.