§132 Iredale II (Patreon)

Cadmius arrived in a farmer's wagon, with two more behind him, all equipped with large wheels and high suspensions. Taylor dropped the screen and let themselves be seen as the wagons neared. In the mock battles, basic stealth was a requirement for healers and strong magicians. Otherwise, they could be eliminated at the outset of the engagement. Here, he was using it to stay out of sight and out of mind from the prince.

"Barely saw you folks, even up close."

"That sounds like a humble way to say you could see us," Taylor complained. He had to crane his neck to where the ex-paladin perched on the driver's seat. "Thanks for showing up. But, for future reference, don't bring imperials into my business. I know you meant well, but it's complicated for me. There's a whole weird dance we have to go through."

A voice he recognized joined in. "Hi, Taylor. Remember me?" A young woman in a healer's attire stood up from where she rode in the wagon: Mariella. He was shocked to see her until he realized that her presence made sense. There likely wasn't another healer in the kingdom who had handled as many corrupted injuries and maladies as she had.

"Her name is Mary," Cadmius said with emphasis.

"I remember. I'd like to compare notes on some of these cases."

Mariella stood there, waiting for something. Taylor waited for her to come down from the wagon, wondering why she didn't move. Cadmius tilted his head from Taylor to Mariella, expectantly. If it were a message, it was one Taylor failed to decipher.

"Aren't you going to help me down?"

"Why do you need help? You can see your feet just fine in that outfit. You didn't wear heels to a battlefield, did you? Because that would damage my good opinion of you."

"Don't waste your time," said another voice, as Meltissa appeared behind the princess. "He was never properly socialized as a child. My fault, I suppose."

Cadmius hopped to the ground and started helping everyone down from the wagon's bed. To be fair, there was a ladder to negotiate. Even some of the men needed a hand.

"What have you tried so far?" Taylor asked as soon as Mariella was firmly on the ground. "I don't want to duplicate failed treatments."

"The corruption spreads if you don't purify them. But the corruption comes back if you don't remove the source. Look for a wound where a mana beast's spine penetrated the patient, then search around the wound for splinters. It can be tricky to find them all. Once you've done that, you can purify them in the usual way, and they'll become stable. But they don't wake up. We're just waiting and hoping right now, and trying to keep them fed."

"Have you isolated the poison?"

"Poison? We haven't detected any poison."

"Have you noticed that the mana congregates around certain areas of the brain and some other organs?"

"I have. But it's purged by the purification."

"The mana is purged, but I think it's leaving something behind, a substance that binds itself to the organs and keeps them from functioning the way they should. The magic that put it there is gone, but the substance remains."

"Like a shaping," she understood, "or a permanent transformation. The body might recover on its own over time. We can't know unless we wait."

"We should take a few of the deceased with us," Taylor suggested, "remove the bits that are altered, and see if an expert in poison can identify the cause. If we can find one."

"We have such a person with us. One of the civilian healers specializes in poisons." She looked to the sky, measuring the remaining daylight. "You should collect the samples here. It isn't ideal, but you can't do it in the clinic. Most healers object to cutting up bodies for parts. We're supposed to keep people whole, not fillet them."

"But your expert won't mind?"

"I doubt it. He's an odd one. Very dedicated." Her tone could have meant anything, up to and including milder forms of madness.

Taylor procured samples while the crew ferried survivors to the town. With over a hundred survivors and only three wagons, each one had to make multiple trips. A few civilians came out to look, too. Most were Iredale townfolk. There was a scholar interested in monsters. Another was a medical researcher. A team of five clerks visited the dead civilians, took notes on their possessions and identifying traits, and sketched faces. Families would need to be found. As a record of each one was made, their bodies were laid on a pyre.

"The miners came from far ends of the empire, looking for work," Cadmius said, "only to end up like this. Some of their families will never know what happened to them."

Spirits processed the monsters for materials, but there wasn't much to take. The wolves gave up a few good skins, and the entwood was worthwhile, but there was little else of interest. Most of the animals hadn't been monstrified for very long. The dead tamers, being mana beasts, left behind mana stones. They were gray, sickly lumps so full of corrupted mana that Taylor purified each one as they were found. The resulting stones were smaller than his thumb.

Taylor laid his anonymous donor bodies onto the pyre, carefully stitched up to hide the bits he'd taken. On a battlefield, every body had to be cremated: people in one pile and monsters in another. Handling them properly made a difference. It both prevented disease and gave necromancers less free material to work with. There was also a problem with those who died suddenly and violently and didn't move on: their anima could remain in their bodies and spontaneously become undead. It was unusual, but a large enough battle always left lingering trouble behind if it wasn't cleaned properly.

One of the civilian hangers-on was a dwarf with a spirit companion. He wandered around, asking questions and penning observations into his notebook. "My name is Jax," he said when he reached Taylor, working at the pyre, "and this is Akoto. We write for Arcaic Times."

"Taylor," he said.

"Also known as Dux Twilight." His eyes shone eagerly.

"I know your work. What was with that illustration of Wen-Silvain and me? It looked nothing like us."

"That was my editor's doing. Can I ask you some questions?"

"Now is not a good time, Jax."

"It's an easy one, I promise."

"You can ask."

"Is it true you're building a secret volcano lair in Mount Uroda?"

"It's a town, not a lair. And it's not a secret. Everything else about that statement is correct." He interrupted the dwarf before he could ask any follow-up questions about Uroda. "It's going to take a while. I'll invite you over once it's habitable."

Jax nodded and made notes. The mischaracterization of Mt. Uroda was likely a tactic to prompt a response, and a good one at that. After he was done writing, Jax didn't leave, but watched Taylor's summoned spirits with particular interest. Most of his army was disbanded, but he had kept a couple of dozen around to help with the cleanup.

Taylor sighed and took the bait, too curious to resist. "What is it, Jax?"

"I notice your army is well-armed."

"It's an army," Taylor shrugged. "They're supposed to have weapons." He walked away before Jax could follow up. Most spirits had gear made out of leather, bone, and bronze. If summoners wanted them to have better equipment, they armed the spirits when they arrived. When the spirits disbanded, the mortal gear got left behind. Taylor could get around that because he could pass in and out of Twilight, carrying goods between the worlds.

He didn't need people asking how his spirits arrived fully equipped. If Jax were smart, and if Akoto were able to nudge him in the right direction, he would stop investigating that line of thought. The spirits didn't want it known that the worlds of Twilight and Aarden were so permeable. And, they absolutely didn't want random mortals visiting. Nothing good would come of that.

As the sun touched the horizon, the living gathered around the pyre of the dead. Taylor led the group in a ritual prayer to Death, asking her to take them all into her Embrace and, in time, usher them into new lives. He was relieved when the gods didn't fetch him into their gray realm to chat. Lately, they'd been less insistent that he spend time with them, and he preferred it that way. The price they paid to bring him to Aarden was the lives of innocent children, a fact that would never sit well with him. It made his title of Divine Envoy feel a lot less shiny.

He lit the fire with magic and kept it fed with extra oxygen with wind magic, and added a little of his own power to the fire. With the armies disbanded, he had more than enough mana to maintain an intense heat. By the time the fire burned down to its last cinder, night had fallen. Taylor chose to walk to the town to deliver his samples with only Saria to keep him company. He found the poison specialist, an older man with salt-and-pepper hair and a healer's cloak stained faintly green.

"Where's Mary?"

"Mary? Asleep," he said, already examining the intact sections of brain Taylor had recovered. "Your theory is fascinating. I'll let you know if I find anything."

"You should rest, too," said Saria. "Come on, let's find an empty house. I'll watch over you."

"It's strange having someone guard me while I sleep."

"It would be stranger not to, at this point."

They found an empty hut with a sound roof, swept it out with magic, and Taylor laid out a camp cot from his satchel. He barely got a blanket over himself before he was fast asleep.

"Look who finally shows up for work," oozed Simon. "I was beginning to think you had made it your life's mission to cause chaos without doing anything about the mess."

"Nice to see you too, Simon. I take it some of today's souls are from the battle?"

"A great many of them, in fact. Since our work site is so near, today's lesson will be soulwalking on your own. Try not to get lost. The last thing I need is another thing to find." Simon vanished.

The soul-catcher was a poor teacher overall. He expected Taylor to understand things that were never adequately explained and to do things without learning intermediate steps. He had tried to pay attention whenever Simon whisked him from place to place, but the godling (if that's what he was) never explained how he found the souls he was seeking.

Taylor's best guess was that the in-between was mutable according to Simon's wishes. The Other Place was like that, too, shaping itself around Taylor's wants even while he wasn't paying attention. Navigating the gods' grey realm was similar. He had once dropped in on Nokomis's private library just because he wanted to.

He picked a direction, down in this case, and walked, intending to reach the nearest abandoned soul. In three steps, he was among fifty of them. Each stood where they had fallen, confused about their surroundings. Looking at each other, the idea slowly dawned on them that they were dead, and then faded under the certainty they had been alive scarcely moments before.

The dead didn't speak, but they felt plenty. Taylor had never been among so many of them, and he was unprepared for their collective strength. Each emotion burned bright and brief before fading into befuddlement.

Unfair.

It's over.

Revenge.

My family.

C'cora's gate bloomed nearby. Taylor grasped the nearest soul. It was one of those consumed with how unfair their situation was: enslaved without warning, then killed by allies, dead without any say in the matter. The emotions ran in a loop, stuck in their last moments of life.

Every end is a new beginning, he emoted to the soul. With a careful twist and pull, it came unmoored from its spot and drifted toward C'cora's gate on its own. He worked that way for quite a long time, loosening souls from where they stood, handing one after another through the gate. Their emotional noise lessened as his work progressed. None of them gave him much trouble, for which he was grateful. A few needed a firmer shove. One tried to run, but was easily caught.

Simon didn't return after the field was clean, not even to sneer at him. So, after C'cora left, Taylor pulled himself back to his body.

He woke in partial light to the smell of warm food insufficiently seasoned, and the sound of boxes being loaded onto coaches. Saria lounged in a cot nearby, refining a mana stone they'd taken during the previous day's battle. She was getting quite good. After an hour or so, she would have a stone that was a third smaller but worth three times as much.

"What's the word?"

"Refugees are coming down from the hills. It seems they went into hiding when the mine lord started conscripting people for his army. Most of the battalion is going up there. A defensive group and most of the healing staff are staying here."

"There's a mine lord?"

"A Mine Lord," she nodded. "It's been a while since anyone claimed that title. Strange that he only digs for iron."

"Noted. Sounds like Cadmius was right about there being a boss monster."

"How did things go last night?"

"The people who died as slaves needed help. Whatever the tamers do to them leaves them stuck. Simon showed up long enough to be a snot and then left me to work alone."

The door to their house swung open, and one of Bolan's aides, a captain, stood beyond.  "Is the princess here?"

"I just woke up. I haven't seen anyone."

"Was she here last night?" demanded the aide.

"No," he laughed. "Not unless she snuck in while I was sleeping. Why would you even look here?" He glanced at Saria.

"No wayward princesses here," she confirmed

The aide left to continue his search elsewhere, leaving the door open.

"I'm going home," yawned Saria. "Call the other three if you need something."

"Thanks for last night."

Halfway into her water form, Saria was nodding while she disbanded.

Taylor put the cots away, ate breakfast from his satchel, and offered his services to the medics. As his healing skills weren't known or trusted by the IEF, he was confined to treating civilians. The rescued slaves were catatonic, but at least they didn't fuss while they were examined. As refugees arrived, they brought injuries with them. It wasn't taxing work, magically speaking, and it felt good to help put people together instead of finding ways to kill or maim them. Secretly, Taylor couldn't help but try to balance yesterday's deaths against today's good deeds.