“Well, I didn’t figure it reasonable at first, but now I reckon it’s damned likely,” Ilbei said. “Ya done pointed some of it out at first, where ya got a creek named for them filthy things, and that feller back there swears he seen three of em. Ya count in that them other miners back at Cedar Wood thinks harpy curses are so likely that they play their first hand at ruffs with the harpy queen wild, well, then it seems these folks up here got harpies on the mind. Ya know as well as I do that these sorts of folks is superstitious, but ya also know most of them stories don’t grow that big a bramble without no roots.”
Jasper shuddered. “I knew it. I should have brought more scrolls for disease.”
“You’re the most nervous little man I ever saw,” Meggins said, and the way he said it sounded as if he’d wanted to say it for some time now. “You’re like that yappy little ankle-biter dog my aunt in Crown City has got. Eyes bugging out in fright at anything at all, shaking like a palsy and pissing itself for fear of everything.”
Jasper seemed unfazed by the analogy. “A reasonable degree of trepidation is to be expected from one who reads. Fear is the logical outcome of having an abundance of information and the intelligence to make connections between that information and potential realities.”
Meggins laughed. “You’ve got a better chance of getting eaten by sand dragons out here than you do getting sickened by harpy spit.”
Kaige turned to Meggins at that comment with the question rising in radiant wrinkles upon his brow. “Sand dragons?” he asked. “Up here, this far off the desert?”
Meggins gave a twisting sort of grin to Jasper and turned back toward the big man in front of him. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “We’re not that far off, and sand dragons love it up here. It’s still plenty hot enough for them, and they can scratch their bellies on all this scrub.” He rustled the blue-green leaves of a nearby manzanita bush to prove it. “Plus, they love eating all these wild apples everywhere. Cleans their teeth and gives them a place to hide. That’s why these apple trees are so dangerous to be among. A man can get scooped up and eaten just as quick as a whip. Never see it coming.”
The question wrinkling Kaige’s forehead squirmed toward doubt. He looked about, all around them, back down the slope in particular, where he could see over the brush and trees. The manzanita and scrub oak didn’t grow much more than man high, and even the oldest of the apple trees weren’t more than three or four spans tall at most, and only a few of those in sight. “But where would they hide?” he finally asked.
Jasper started to say something, but Meggins spun back and silenced him with a glare, pointing at him menacingly. He turned back to Kaige and said, “They hide in the apple trees.”
Kaige’s face might have caved entirely in on itself in his confusion had not the skull bones beneath kept it all in place. Clearly, the prospect of an enormous sand dragon hiding out here in the apple trees was simply beyond believing. “But that doesn’t make no sense.”
“Their testicles are red,” Meggins said, putting on a professorial tone like the one Jasper used almost constantly.
“Their what?”
“Their berries, the boys in the bag. All red like apples. So are their toenails. It all gets mixed in amongst the apple boughs and they blend right in.”
Kaige’s face was absolute vacancy, his expression contorting as he marveled the unspoken question: “Could it possibly be true?”
“Look here, Kaige,” Meggins said. “Have you ever seen a sand dragon in an apple tree?”
Kaige shook his head that he had not.
“So you see, it works.”
“But that’s not even reasona—” Jasper cut in, but once more Meggins spun and silenced him. This time he twitched his finger back and forth a little bit.
No, no
, it clearly said.
Kaige, on the other hand, looked as if he’d just discovered something incredible and new. And dangerous. He turned back around and swept his eyes across the undergrowth, up the hill and down. “And here I wasn’t even looking for them,” he said. “Sergeant Spadebreaker, sir, you ought to tell a man before you put him on point.”
Ilbei gave Meggins a scouring look. “Now look what ya done.”
Meggins laughed for almost a full half hour as Jasper went through a long and painfully detailed explanation of the nature of dragons, habitat and simple scale. By the time Meggins was done laughing, and Jasper had finally convinced Kaige that Meggins was “perpetrating inaccuracies for the clear purpose of mean humor,” they’d come to another hut.
This one, better built than the last, if barely, occupied a low rise between Harpy Creek and a narrow little rivulet barely a half pace across. The smaller flow ran down out of the hills from the southwest, though it did not appear on the map. There was no one to be seen in the immediate vicinity, and by the silence, it seemed as if the hut was unoccupied. Ilbei called out anyway. “Halloo. Anybody home up there?”
Nobody answered.
Ilbei moved up the gentle slope to the hut, and, cresting it, saw the remains of two people on the other side, their skeletons picked clean but for hair and a few of the tougher ligaments, and both lying out in the open by the remnants of a long-dead campfire.
“Stay back,” Ilbei warned. The three men behind him froze. Kaige and Meggins drew their weapons as Ilbei approached the camp with his pickaxe in hand. He pulled back the door of the small plank cabin and looked inside, but soon determined it was clear. He went around back and looked under a tarp that covered a stack of firewood and a few barrels filled with native copper and green chunks of malachite. Most of the barrels were full.
He came back around to the front of the cabin. “Check the trees,” he ordered, sending Kaige and Meggins into the brush on either side. Their movements could be heard as they poked into the brush with weapons and called for anyone hiding to “come out or die.”
Ilbei, in the meantime, looked around the bodies and saw what he’d dreaded he might see: large vulture tracks, three-toed impressions like a trident, each of the thick toes as long as his dagger. The tracks were everywhere, all around the fire and crossing over each other around the skeletons. He went back and checked the cabin to see if there were any inside, dusty prints to match those around the bodies. There were none. Nor were there any near the barrels and the firewood.
Kaige and Meggins returned, declaring the area clear. Meggins saw the harpy tracks straight away. “Damn,” was all he said.
“Damn is right,” Ilbei said.
“Damn what?” Jasper looked more than a little worried as he asked.
“Seems they really do have harpies
and
bandits to worry about,” Meggins replied.
“Weren’t no bandits what done it,” Ilbei said. “Barrels back there are full of ore. If there was bandits here, they’d have taken some.”
“It doesn’t seem reasonable that anyone would steal copper anyway,” Jasper said. “Why would anyone risk, well, us, sent by the Queen, for what little profit there is to be had? It doesn’t make economic sense, even for a criminal, not this far from anywhere.”
Ilbei nodded. “I expect you’re more right than wrong with that, but weren’t no way to tell. Whoever done these fellers weren’t after it, that’s sure. Makin this a feedin opportunity.”
“How many do you think there were?” Meggins asked, stooping near the fire and looking at the tracks as Ilbei had done before him. “I’m thinking there were maybe three.”
“I’d guess the same,” Ilbei said. “Makin that feller downstream spot on.”
“So what do we do now, Sarge?” Kaige asked. “Jasper already said he don’t have nothing for harpy disease.”
“We’ll check the rest of the miners up the creek to the source, if’n there are any, then head back and see what Major says. Hopefully it will be somethin what makes sense.”
Kaige grimaced. “But what about the craze? I don’t want no craze.”
“You’ve had it since birth,” Meggins said, attempting levity. It failed. Even he didn’t laugh.
“You won’t contract anything from them straight away,” Jasper said. “It’s not a magical affliction, you know. There’s no instant onset of symptoms. You simply run the risk of exposure to all the standard diseases expected around unwashed bodies, offal, human excrement, decaying flesh and those sorts of ailments that perpetuate themselves in brothels, particularly in those found along the Decline in Murdoc Bay, Blanks Quarter in Leekant and some of the darker parts of Crown City where especially nasty varieties abound.”
“Well, I feel much better about it now,” Meggins said, making no attempt to disguise the sarcasm in his voice. “Don’t you, Kaige? Sarge?”
Ilbei ignored it, studying Jasper for a moment instead. The young magician looked back at him steadily, with such open innocence, such unaffected surety, that Ilbei decided the lad likely knew what he was talking about. Ilbei had never heard anything about harpies using magic either, though the truth was, he’d never had reason to ask. Harpies, like yetis, ettins and giant scorpions, were known to exist in mountainous regions and high foothills. They were seen often enough, killed often enough or found dead often enough to keep their existence from becoming myth, but just often enough and not one bit more. They were more the stuff of campfire stories to frighten city folks and small children than realities for grown men to worry over much. Much.
However, Ilbei was not the sort to throw caution into the campfire based on long odds, and given what they’d found, it didn’t seem the odds were so long as he’d thought they were only a few hours before. It was only with the assurance of the young mage, who seemed so well read on the nature of the threat, that he decided to keep his people moving upstream. Onward they went, though this time with grim hearts and a quiet sobriety uncharacteristic of the first part of the day—excepting Jasper, who, having been somewhat pouty earlier, now seemed to appreciate being taken seriously for once. He, in the absence of that dark mood, once again began to pronounce the names of certain flora as they came across them, extolling the various properties therein: what made this weed useful as a reagent, this bit of moss perfect for a poultice and a healing salve, or this little leaf ground up in a recipe for bitter or for sweet.
Over the course of the next two hours, they found five more small camps, all of them abandoned. Given the skeletal condition of the last miners they’d found, the vacancies were either a blessing or just more bad news. There were no more harpy tracks, however, nor were there bodies to be found, so there was some hope that the miners had simply grown weary of such a dismal, scarce existence and moved on.
Another half hour beyond the last of the individual camps, the climb had begun to grow steeper, and the flanking slopes that shaped the path of the creek began to become pinched and steep themselves, carving out a long, wide gully. At this point, the grass and scrub oaks that had been growing along the edges of the high-water line for most of the trip gave way to scraggly pines that seemed to cling to the gravelly soil in desperation. More than a few thrust out from nearly vertical inclines, and in places nothing grew at all. The creek was much louder there.
They found the source of the creek, just as the miner had told them it would be, or nearly so, as he’d failed to mention it originated from an opening some twenty feet up a nearly sheer incline, spewing out of a hole that looked as if someone had come along and tried to tap the ridgeline halfway up like an ale keg. Judging from the loose shale that banked and heaped itself along the lower parts, where the scrappy pines took on a horizontal growing strategy, ascent would be a nightmare of shifting rock with edges that would cut like dull, nasty razors. And that was only to get started going up.
Ilbei glanced around again, suspecting that the area had once been the bottom of a large pool. Looking up to where the incline pinched into the mountain itself, a cliff face marking the easternmost portion of the lowest of several steppes, it seemed likely that once, long ago, there would have been a good fifty-span waterfall. Harpy Creek was all that remained of a once significant waterway.
“It smells like vinegar,” he said, upon assessing the area. He tilted his head back and looked up into the hole from which the water spat. “But I damn sure don’t smell anythin like vulture filth blowin out of there.”
Meggins and Kaige took the comment in stride, having been told back in Hast of Ilbei’s olfactory gifts. But Jasper turned a querulous look upon the gray-bearded sergeant with a tilt of his head. “I don’t smell anything.”
“Smellin is my sort of magic, son.”
“So what do you suppose the vinegar is, Sarge?” Meggins made a point of sniffing carefully at the air, which Kaige emulated right after.
“I don’t know. We’ll get up there and have a look right quick.” He swiveled his head and saw Jasper staring up at the hole, sniffing the air as Meggins and Kaige were. “Jasper, since you’re the skinniest of the lot, see if’n ya can get up there and have a look inside. Careful now, that shale will slide on ya and slice ya up like a heap of dragon’s teeth.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. It’d be the work of half a day to open that wide enough fer me or Kaige to get through, and we might even have to grease Meggins up to make him fit, even if’n there was one of them potameides inside, flirtin and makin sweet promises. That means it’s you what goes. So get along now.”
“Get along and what?” Jasper gasped.