Gregor The Cripple

"The station? Uh, northwards, I'd place it. A few miles. But you're better off not to bother." The speaker paused to look up at the mounted wizard who had engaged him in road-side interrogatory. He briefly absorbed the general air of menace inherent to the mean mien of the other, and hurried to continue in explanation without needing any prompt.

"The shunters' union've declared a strike. Week-long, or so they plan. Nation wide, too. Apparently, the engineers've halted in solidarity. Opportunistic solidarity, I imagine. So the trains can't run. Of course…" he added after a beat of no response, "they aren't exactly a nation-wide organisation, or so say the papers. They're certainly here, though, and the papers are odd, lately."

The steady bleed of distaste into Gregor's expression gave the well-dressed man cause to keep speaking, feeling as if he needed urgently to place mental distance between himself and the source of the wizard's agitation.

"And certainly, uh, it's all rather selfish, to disturb the business of so many for so long. I mean, the railways are a national institution. My business is contracts, and-" It was at this point that Gregor and Mildred began to discuss between themselves, riding off without a further word or glace.

"It's rather incredible that transport is interrupted the moment we're set to receive assistance." Remarked Mildred with squinted eyes and a cold tone, giving vent to her own building distaste, then the words of the notary filtered more fully through the mechanisms of her mental translation, and she switched tracks with a blink. "Have you any idea what a shunter does?"

"No clue. Bookstore?"

She shrug-nodded, fiddling idly with a folded piece of paper. "…I know what I just said, but could this actually have been orchestrated to target us? I mean, the timing is phenomenal, but, setting aside whether or not our enemy can actually do something like this, are we really so important?"

Thinking as they rode, only mostly directionless, Gregor made his determination. "Organised civil disruption isn't uncommon in the Republic-"

"As ever."

"-However, you probably are that important, so, for the sake of prudence, assume that this actually is a measure to delay us."

She raised a brow, finding it difficult to trace his reasoning. "I am neither my aunt nor my father," she stated.

"No, you are Mildred." said Gregor, as if that were a sufficient summation of her worth. "Your proximity to them and to me makes you exactly the kind of person who is likely to be or to become important."

Mildred didn't exactly agree, but, seeing that the topic would be useless to litigate, she set it aside and continued in a different direction.

"Well, assuming that we are worth the trouble, I don't like what that kind of reach would suggest," she said, "even beyond the immediate fact that we've been hobbled."

Taking a moment to lean back in his saddle, Gregor began to stoke his chin. It made his ribs twinge sharply, but the appearance of wizardly contemplation was worth the discomfort.

"Your aunt claimed to be deeply entrenched here. If this delay is intentional, the enemy is likely the same. She might have been warning him very specifically that she knows they are the same, and that his influence in that regard does not eclipse the influence of her empire."

Mildred herself settling into a pregnant pause, she looked out at the people swarming amongst the streets and structures of the city. All of them were part of a complex ecosystem of wants and needs and likes and dislikes, driven to action by culture and commerce, which were both sometimes the same thing and could both very conceivably be used as tools to coax and to herd the masses of minds that venerated them.

Subtle concern creased her brow.

"That would actually be more worrying, because comparison of influence should not be possible between aunt Auria and anyone else. They shouldn't even be close, but apparently our enemies need to be told that they are."

The subject gave Gregor thoughts about the ways and means of a foe with power over opinion.

He hadn't considered it before, but it would be very easy to paint him as some kind of public menace, and thereby cause local authority (or mobs) to target him entirely autonomously, which was an angle to the conflict that lay far outside the regular bounds of his business. It was entirely too political for him, but not for the Worldeater, apparently.

Usually, his work was more direct. Murders to be committed, magic to be done, monsters to be slain, and occasionally, Mildreds to be protected through the commission of all of the aforementioned.

All of the typical acts of wizards are hard and definite, not soft and subtle, and never did wizards really need to consider things like 'indirect overtures of public opinion', beyond complying with the relevant wishes of an employer, who was always the one to weather the fallout once people inevitably became unhappy with something the wizard had been paid to do. And in those cases, it was entirely the fault of the employer for giving insufficient thought to the political outcomes of the task they had asked the wizard to preform. The time Kaius had been hired to kill a dragon came to mind.

Even when wizards are engaged in political conflicts, it is always to solve problems in very nonpolitical ways, so to Gregor, the problems that could arise from the Worldeater's influence were novel. However, if things were developing in that direction, he would adapt. He would not be an insufficient protector.

As they spoke, Mildred grasped gently the first page of the newspaper, folded neatly and held in her lap, ready to accommodate her frequent glances. In the short few hours since the message had been delivered, reading it had become an idle occupation, sometimes in whole, sometimes in part, and not because she had any trouble remembering what it said, but for the simple pleasure of her august aunt's words. It was now a relic of comfort; a treasure to be kept safe beside the photograph of herself and Gregor.

"She warned them. Do you think it will matter?"

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"To them, you might be worth the risk. You probably are worth the risk. Though, that depends entirely upon their motivations."

Responding to the implied question, Mildred shook her head. "It doesn't make any sense to me. None at all."

Considering that Mildred's pursuit had spanned most of a century and involved the rather opaque machinations of fate, it was seeming more and more likely to Gregor that the precise reasons for her worth might not actually exist yet, or that perhaps the pursuit was the goal in some strange, far-reaching way.

"Thankfully," she continued, holding up the paper so that she might theatrically quote its contents, "I have a rather capable helper, and will soon be delivered to my aunt, intact and happy."

Gregor's scandalous response was pure reflex, and earned him no reply.

"You're intact?"

***

They might have attempted to commandeer a train, or to find a crew willing to participate in the rebellious endeavour of a piloting a privately chartered locomotive on the national railways during the downtime of the strike, which was anti-government enough of an escapade that it probably wouldn't have been hard to find volunteers, but a cursory contemplation shuttered these ambitions.

Primarily, the problem was the danger inherent to travelling by train during a complete railway shutdown, being that a railway is a complex system with many moving parts currently rendered immobile.

Secondarily, the shutdown might not be complete, and if it was, a tertiary problem was that it might not stay that way, so no matter the reality of the situation, they wouldn't have any sure way of knowing if there were other trains on the track. It might work out, but it also might not. Furthermore, the last train ride hadn't gone very well.

Thus, knowing better than to stay put and wait to see whether their enemies or their allies could find them first, they proceeded as they always had, and set out by road.

In general, the message in the paper had changed little about the ultimate path of the journey; they still went west. But more immediately, they trended a little north, aiming to hit the capital and the capital's embassy, and from there charter a riverboat seaward.

If assistance found them before then, all the better. Gregor didn't consider it unlikely, for, if the powerful enemy possessed the rare utility of divination, why not the powerful ally too?

Pleasantly, now that they were deeper into the Republic and no longer tramping around in the middle of nowhere, Gregor and Mildred found the roads to be greatly improved.

The main thoroughfares were gravelled and graded decently, with cobbles in important intersections and other areas of high traffic. Indicating, likely, that these major arteries of travel were maintained by the state, rather than by the local authority, who seemed to be the wardens of the lesser roads – the more rural of which were unpleasant and only mostly passable, and would normally be best avoided by travellers for the sake of alacrity.

However, Gregor and Mildred were not travelling under normal conditions.

Now, the stations were closed, and the roads once again played host to the feet of a nation – a purpose for which they were no longer comfortably sufficient.

The world was simply more populous now than in Mildred's time, back when roads had been the only option for travel. In the interceding years, there had arisen no need to modernise, because the railways had developed to bear the greater share of the load. A dependence had formed. With them now nonfunctional, all of the people and goods that they would regularly transport had no choice but to return to less convenient methods, and under the influx, the roads had grown more crowded than ever before.

They weren't wide enough, with room only for a single two-horse coach or cart to pass at once in each direction, and the economic niche that had formed around the needs of travellers in transit was unable to accommodate the travellers in new quantity.

Road-side coaching inns and waystations were crammed to capacity and prices for rooms in boarding houses and hostels in half-way towns had risen to staggering heights, seeming almost to have been set by raising the figure progressively until reaching the absolute maximum that people were willing to pay, and then leaving it there. It was a whole new paradigm of competitive pricing.

Farriers and horsemongers were unable to meet the sudden demand, and all the coaches that existed seemed to have been deployed at once to carry the glut of passengers left stranded by the strike, to say nothing of the cargo.

Thus, the previously expeditious and well-maintained main roads became unfathomably cluttered and inconvenient.

In comparison, the shoddy rural roads and circuitous scenic pathways remained little-trodden, both for the fact of their uncertain conditions – sure to be made worse by increased use – and for the fact that the main roads went directly to whichever town or city might be nearest, and from there to another. Non-local people who travelled them always knew where they were bound to arrive, and for most, the nearest town or city likely was their destination. For others, it meant a much more comfortable midway point than whatever unknown place the rural roads might take them.

For Gregor and Mildred, however, comfort was beneath consideration. They craved speed, and the clogged arteries of the nation in withdrawal were slowing them down.

With a general idea of where in the country they were, and with west-by-northwest as their heading, they set off across the hard dirt of a local road with the intention to play things by ear and by signpost-reckoning, and to abandon roads altogether and cut across country if the land didn't look too mean.

If the Golden Queen's warning was heeded, all was well, but if not, the danger would mount by the moment. For, though assistance was coming, the closer they drew to safety, the greater the enemy's urgency was likely to become.

For now, speed was vital.

***

"…I might be."

Gregor looked up from his grimoire, setting eyes upon fire-lighted Mildred. "What?"

"Oh, nothing." She responded, maintaining her very straightest face and not glancing away from the newest of her few possessions, a just-purchased tome, titled 'A Manual of Applied Mechanics'. Apparently, reading a good book was all she'd needed to finally mend her dampened mood, which had been steadily returning to equilibrium after receiving her aunt's message.

"By the way, it says in here that a rigid body can experience material deformation under sufficient load."

"I… am aware?"

"That's good."

Day had barely dimmed to dusk when the world began growing gradually more lively.

Grasses and bushes around the camp started to rustle with animal disturbance, at first in the regular way; infrequent and beneath notice, but soon, the rustlings and little scratches and scrapes were all around, and the pair were very soon standing to look out into their darkening surrounds. Dozens of twin specks of reflected firelight stared back at them, and then came the squeaking.

Tentative at first, raspy eeks and chirps arose from every direction in chorus, high and low and close.

Jolting to alertness, Randolph scurried out from the warmth of Gregor's robe to stand up tall upon his shoulder, sniffing at the air and squeaking for himself, possibly in reply or reproach, or in whatever other fashion rats might communicate.

As answer, a horde emerged from the dark.