NOVEL NEXT Chapter 147: Whiteout
In this flat and featureless land, the settlements could be seen for leagues around.
A band of two dozen had happened upon the empty winter encampment. They'd spied the tent, and the strange cocoon that was left of Enkidu, and ventured a day out of their usual travel path to investigate.
Jelena had dozed off with Calaf in her arms, once the fire died. Only a paltry bunk and cot protected them from the harsh elements. She'd awoken to a commotion outside, and a delirious Calaf whose condition was only worsening.
"Wait here," she whispered, and kissed Calaf on the forehead.
Confident her gravely injured beau wasn't going anywhere, Jelena prepped her last remaining weapons—twin knives—and ventured outside the tent.
Five figures in thick furs surrounded Enkidu's 'coffin', spears out. It was a curious oddity. Perhaps five people on the continent had encountered something like this and lived to tell about it.
"Hey! Hey! Don't touch that thing. Don't even get close!" Jelena warned.
The figures turned, their faces hidden behind masks with thin slits for eye holes. Still, they seemed to understand the warning. One by one, they backed off. Away from the cocoon, and away from Jelena as well.
She hadn't had time to don her eyepatch and so caught movement in her 'bad' eye. Another dozen figures waited behind the tent, at Jelena's back. Spears and strange, spiked clubs were out but not held threateningly.
"Southerner tent. No good here," came the muffled voice of one of the masked men. "These plains, the winter camp. Fell-beasts dwell under the ice, near a vent. Easy to fish. In summer, better to hunt fell-walrus near the coast."
"You can understand me?" Jelena raised her good eyebrow.
She could most certainly understand them well enough to have a conversation.
Three figures in puffed-up animal fur-coats poked their heads into the tent.
"He's injured," Jelena said. "Do you have healers?"
"At Home-Barrow," said one of the nomads. "Long ride. Let us take you."
Jelena sighed. Much like her, these nomads were unbranded. The chances their camp would have anyone able to repair Calaf's Brand outright were slim. Still, denying medical service on Calaf's behalf at this point would mean the Paladin's death.
"Take us." Jelena nodded.
And so, the pair wound up in a great land-ship. Where these winter nomads got the material for this contraption, Jelena did not yet know. But they had a team of dire-dogs pulling the skiff along the plains.
"So this is where Zilara's from," Jelena mused to herself.
This piqued the interest of one of the nomads.
"The heiress from the cursed and holy bloodline? You have word of her?"
Jelena nodded. By the Menu, I can recognize most of their words. There's got to be a story there.
"Zilara? She's… well, she's been captured by a particularly fearsome church bishop."
The nomads all began nodding. "Yes, yes. Long have we feared this when she went to the churchlands."
"You knew her, eh?" Jelena asked.
She was back in her eyepatch. The nomads cast strange looks on her scoured, cloudy left eye. The marked Brand no doubt intimidated the locals. Calaf's arm Brand was mercifully hidden.
"The cursed and holy bloodline are our elders."
Jelena gulped. "Culled?"
"Aye, so there's only one among the tribe who can spread the blood-curse," said a nomad. "They have the power to control the world with their strange Interface. But if left unchecked, the whole tribe will be marked. It's happened before. This way, only the chosen line is bless-cursed."
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
"I… see." Jelena scratched at her eyepatch. Talking about the Brands often made her own ruined eye itch.
The summer hunting grounds were readily visible from a full day's travel away. Jelena spied cookfires wafting up into the overcast clouds.
The sled continued through the night, with the team trading the dogs out for a fresh set to make the final leg of the journey. Along the way, some nomadic field medics attended to Calaf's blood-soaked bandages. They pulled out some familiar-looking berries…
"Wait, are those nihilberries?" Jelena asked. "Surely you're not going to feed them to him."
The rare Riverglen Nihilberry was near-instantly fatal. Adding these to his diet was perhaps the only way to make Calaf's condition worse! Jelena's fears were allayed, however, when these nomads instead started mashing the berries into paste.
"Handfuls of these painkiller berries grow in crevices. Pockets of heat, away from the wind," one of the band's leaders explained. "Mash them up, they numb pain when applied to the skin."
Jelena nodded understandably as the nomads applied the paste to the wounds under Calaf's bandages. Her imperiled beau ceased tossing and turning past that point, and the skiff was smooth sailing through to the summer encampment.
Three nomads immediately carried Calaf into a medicine tent.
"It will be some time before preparations are complete," said one of the face-obscured nomads.
"If anything drastic is needed, I want to be there," Jelena said.
The nomads reassured her, they'd let her know, and she had mostly-free rein of the 'summer settlement'. At least the exterior, there were a few tents they blocked off. Home-Barrow, they called it.
Structures were all thick tents and lean-tos made of thick cold-adapted animal pelts. The Home-Barrow was within sight of a frozen-over ocean, and received a slight moderating coastal breeze. While the traveling nomads moved about in full, heavy furs, their civilians wore warm but less extensive attire around town. These clothes took the form of bright displays in primary colors, particularly red. Heat was well-insulated within the tents, though these were the only places Jelena was not yet allowed to enter.
Even the civilians often wore strange headgear. Visors, masks, all with narrow slits over the eyes. Looking out over the ice floes north of town, Jelena swiftly discovered why. The sheer glare of the sun off this sea of ice blinded her good eye. She found, with some experimentation, that her 'bad' eye could still sense movement in these whiteout conditions.
Suffice it to say, Jelena could not reasonably make use of these snowblind visors with her eyepatch affixed. She resolved to grin and bear it.
Everyone at Home-Barrow had a role. Jelena approached a stand where some smoked dire-salmon sat drying, attended to by a set of three women in bright red and blue dresses and matching thick pants.
"Good day," Jelena began. She avoided a wave, unsure what such a gesture would mean to these winter nomads.
"Godia!" said one of the women, with a smile.
It's so close to the Menu script, Jelena thought.
"Your tongue—speech, rather," the relic thief continued, talking slowly. "It's… very similar to mine."
"Aye, Acim's tongue!" said one of the women. "Brought by the first elder and adapted to our own."
Jelena's lips pursed as she nodded in understanding. She was nearly a decade out of date in her church education, but she didn't need to be current to instantly recognize the name Acim. It was one of the holy twins, born of Cleric Mia and the dead Paladin Roland. The twin who had not inherited the throne upon the Demon Lord's Fall and the title of archpope.
Deep in the grand cathedral at the demonhead, Jelena and Calaf's outlaw posse had discovered a clue as to the fate of this forsaken twin. This lesser of the holy twins had been exiled, cast out after being savaged by the favored offspring. Exiled precisely because they were not as strong as their sibling, they were cast out to the inhospitable north.
Acim had, in time, fallen in with the local nomads. Menucraft would be useful to anyone in these sparse environs.
"That would explain the mutual intelligibility," Jelena said, thumb and pointer finger on her chin.
It had long been noted by church scholars that the text-based nature of the Menu and its Interface solidified language. Idioms, the definitions of individual words… Being able to pull up an ineffable Menu and read statuses that remained static through the ages arrested linguistic drift. This same effect likely tied official church-script and Acim's pidgin together, to a degree.
"Acim's family line…" Jelena began.
"Married daughter of the chief," one of the women nodded.
"Became the first elder," clarified the other.
"The holy child is gone," said the third woman. "Traveled to the south to learn the origin of her powers."
"That's… Zilara," Jelena said. "I understand."
Traveled south, discovered by Joan, used to try and counterbalance church power… and eventually fell in with a certain stunningly beautiful outlaw with a knack for collecting disparate posse members from all walks of life.
"Parents died while she was away," said one of the women as she skinned a dire-fish. "No elders left in the line."
Tightly controlling the Branded bloodline meant this was always a risk.
"I'll… get her back," Jelena promised.
Pained moans came from the medical tent.
"It's time," said a nomad. "Our healing is different than the Menu-ways you may know of, as well as your non-Menu healing arts. We use local materials, yes?"
Jelena put a hand on her hip. "Non-Menu healing arts have atrophied down south. I'm something of a nomad myself, but I'm sure my knowledge of the desert hardly helps here."
Desert nomads of Japella had settled down around a watering hole several generations ago. Still, they were only recently converted to the Menu.
This sparse environment, however, did not sit well with Jelena's sensibilities. Already her lips were chapped something awful. She'd prefer the desert any day.
"We have to move quickly. Prevent the rot," said the nomad.
"Allow me to help, however I can," Jelena said.
The nomads ushered her into the tent, where Calaf's Branded left arm was pinned down by a dire-walrus bone splint. Jelena knew what was happening. The nihilberry paste was not going to block the pain for long.
Calaf lay sprawled out, another bone-gag in his mouth, blocking his tongue. Unconscious, unable to opt-in. Jelena looked at Calaf's sorry state and exhaled, lips angling down into a frown.
"Do it," she said with a groan.