Seeker of the Four Winds: A Galatia Novel Read online

  “Candy!” Josie and Lindsey squealed in unison. How long had it been since they had anything sweet other than fruit? Lars’s mouth watered in anticipation.

  The prince sniffed, the bridge of his nose furrowing in contemplation. “I detect strawberries, lembombas, sugar cane, and calow wax, but there’s a bitter ingredient I don’t recognize.”

  “I don’t care.” Lindsey held out a palm. “Hand them over.”

  “Better to be unsatisfied than sick.” He tossed the candy into the fire, much to the young people’s dismay.

  A moment later, the fire sizzled. Smoke formed into a blue toadstool, which changed into a red flower, then to a yellow bird, followed by a pink human skull, and then to the head of a black bull with blazing orange eyes.

  “Whoa!” Lars stumbled backwards.

  Hogard’s war hammer was out in a flash, but the blaze returned to normal ten seconds later. Prince Loyl jiggled the rest of the bag’s contents into his hand. Small polished bones. Black feathers, and a silver ring.

  “Great Thunder,” Hogard said, running his hands along his horns, counting the decorative bangles. “Gimme that.” He snatched the ring out of Loyl’s grasp. “Won this boast ring at the Battle of Brigalow. How’d it end up here?”

  “Give it to me,” Lindsey said. “And I will tell you.”

  Hogard growled and held it away from her grasp.

  “Let Miss Burning take a look,” Loyl encouraged. “She has The Rewind.”

  “What the thunder is a rewind?”

  “If she can touch object, she can read its history,” he explained when he noticed the others’ confusion.

  “No way.” Josie’s jaw dropped.

  “Yeah way,” Lindsey said coyly. “It’s a charisma. I can see images from the past as if they’re playing one of those old sixteen-millimeter filmstrips. Everything plays backwards—hence, the name. Why do you think I went along on the last mission with Doctor Steelsun? And why do you think I’m along now?”

  Josie folded her arms and seemed peeved for some reason. Was it jealously? If so, the feeling wasn’t strong enough for Lars to pick up on it.

  “No sarcastic response—Josie?” Lindsey teased. “You never could handle the fact that someone might be more talented than you in some way.” She opened her hand and the Bulwark gently set his ring in her palm. “The Charisma Focus Committee said I’m the only one they’ve found who can do this. They even let me name it myself.”

  “I can tell.” Josie replied with the usual vitriol, but Lindsey ignored her.

  “I can read inorganic or dead objects, but nothing that’s still alive. On the last mission into Sliven territory, I discovered that certain types of spells interfere with making imprints, so its not one hundred percent reliable.”

  “And here I thought the mayor sent you along for your shooting skills,” Lars said, while Josie scowled. “So how come you didn’t do the Rewind thing on the part of the Blood Map my father has?”

  “I did, but think about it. Once the map was torn in two, each piece going its separate way, their histories became independent from each other. That means I can’t see the history of the missing half without touching it. Duh.”

  “Considering that the Seeker will lead us to the map,” Josie added with a look of disdain, “your rewind seems a little pointless.”

  “Let me phrase this in a way you’ll be sure to understand: the mayor didn’t want to put all of his eggs in one basket. Especially a crazy basket like you.”

  Josie rolled her eyes.

  “A weird thing about the map is that your fingerprints stay behind in the form of pink dots. Dr. Steelsun says it’s a side effect of the map’s ability to read a person’s blood. The prints fade away after a short while, but that’s how he knew we had the real thing—not a forgery.”

  “Did your charisma show you who was in the battle where the map was ripped in half?” Lars asked. “If we can narrow down the army, perhaps the map is in that army’s nation.”

  “Miss Burning has already been through a vigorous line of questioning back in Galatia,” Loyl butted in. “Please allow her to concentrate on the ring.”

  She held the ring between her palms while she closed her eyes. After a few minutes, her body began to sway. When her eyes popped open, she immediately looked for Josie.

  “What?” Josie asked testily.

  “You’re okay.” She grinned. “He tried to...you know, but ran out of time.” Josie closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, grateful for the information.

  “None of you guys’s business,” Josie added before any of the men could ask the obvious question.

  “Now onto the more pressing matter.” Lindsey continued to concentrate. “A segment of time is inaccessible, covered with gray fog—a spell was cast.”

  A look of concern crossed the prince’s face, while Dante pressed impatiently, “Tell us about the accessible parts.”

  “Remember the day we didn’t wake up until noon and Hogard said an intruder had been in camp?” Everybody nodded. “That naked man wasn’t a figment of Josie’s imagination. He poofed into our campsite and shot all of us with his darts. Then he went straight for the Seeker of the Four Winds, only taking it from Josie’s wrist didn’t turn out to be so easy. He ran about searching our camp for something to cut it off. He ran out of time, and poof, he was gone.”

  “Great thunder,” Hogard said, his watery eyes searching the edges of the clearing in concern. “Sounds like a guldarn warlock.”

  “Did you see the dog?” Josie asked.

  “Just a shadow in the shape of a dog.”

  “Told you.”

  “What would a magic user want with Hogard’s boast ring?” Loyl posed the question more to himself than anyone else.

  “It looked like he took it as an afterthought,” Lindsey replied. “But that’s not important—what matters is that I recognized his face.” Eyesbrows went up. Breaths were held in expectation of the big reveal. “It was Barrett Fade’s friend. Oh, what’s his name? You know who I’m talking about—black hair, copper eyes, super-hot, but a total freak show.”

  “You mean magic balloon animal guy?” Josie asked.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “Magus Mull,” Dante said his name as if it were a curse word. “I should have guessed.”

  Chapter Ten

  (Josephine Rose Albright)

  Trees with weeping red fronds covered by daisy-like flowers swayed in the distance. When Josie suggested the fronds would make lovely necklaces, Dante and Rolf laughed.

  “Strangling Url, they call it,” Dante informed her. “Pick the fronds and it will leave a rash ten times worse than poison ivy. Sleep near the trees and you’ll wake up with fronds up your nose and down any other orifice they can reach. Once they burrow in, they’re hell to remove. Awful stuff.”

  “There’s so much to learn about this world,” Josie said, feeling the forest had gone from beautiful to sinister in the space of Dante’s explanation.

  Just then, Hogard gave a horrendous fart.

  Even the horses seemed to glare in the Bulwark’s direction as they twisted their ears back, flared their nostrils and curled their upper lips, causing Josie to chuckle, until the wind blew his stench to her nose. She tried to breathe through her mouth but that just made things worse; she could taste his funk. When she turned to tell him a thing or two, her mouth froze in place. Hogard’s usual irritated expression had been replaced by exhaustion.

  “Are you feeling okay?” she called back to him, only to be ignored.

  The entire squad was getting strafed by insects, but not nearly as mercilessly as the Bulwark. As the day progressed, flies tornadoed around his head, making him swat and swear at them. Part of it was Hogard’s own darn fault for being so stinky.

  The Seeker continued to lead the Red Team though thick vegetation and slurpy mud. Rolf worried that one of the horses would get stuck in the viscous brown slop. Burrs had worked their way into Josie’s socks, and the mosqu
ito repellent had worn off them all.

  Supplies were running low, but Loyl said they would have enough to last them until Blue River Junction, only three days away. When the prince had promised they could sit at a table, enjoying properly prepared food and maybe even a piece of Blue Junction’s famous honey pie, a sense of sweet relief spilled through Josie. Soon the squad would be sleeping indoors on elevated beds and clean sheets. Their clothes would be properly cleaned and so would their bodies. The horses would be groomed by someone else and sleep in the stables. It would be two days of rest and relaxation for everyone. Hurrah!

  Throughout the day, signs of civilization began to appear. A dirt walking path wound down a steep hill through a young forest of fir trees to a field of stubble and bales of hay. Or was it straw? Josie didn’t know the difference. But crops meant a farm, which meant a house, and maybe even a town.

  “Civilization,” Josie celebrated, “here we come!”

  The sun rose higher, and as the trees disappeared to give way for more farmland, it beat down hard with the heat of Indian Summer. Tough ole Hogard said he had a headache and was feeling right poorly. They finally came upon a lonely spreading oak in the middle of a field. A pumpkin color had spread over half of its jagged leaves signaling the arrival of fall. Loyl ordered everyone to take a breather under its welcoming shade.

  As they sat around relaxing in the soft green grass beneath the tree, Josie watched as Lindsey gingerly picked at the wicked white blisters in the center of her palms.

  “You’re holding the reins too tight,” Rolf told her.

  “I swear, I’m not.”

  “What else could it be?” Rolf said, an edge of sarcasm in his voice. “It’s not like you’ve been holding anything else recently.”

  Loyl turned his hands over to look at his own palms. “That’s strange—I have blisters, too.” His face twisted in concern. “Everybody check your hands.”

  “Poison sumac?” Dante questioned, setting down the berries he was eating for his dessert to look at his own hands. “Not just on my palms, but between my fingers.”

  “Me too,” Rolf said. “It’s a rash of some kind.”

  “Got’m on my hands. And I think I feel some on my head,” Hogard said, touching the area around his right horn.

  “Mind if I take a look?” Lars asked. The Bulwark bowed his head and Lars parted his his shaggy fur. “Once upon a time, my Dad had me on the pre-med route, but...” He trailed off. The skin around Hogard’s horn had putrefied to gelatinous gray goo. Lars gagged. Hogard didn’t see his reaction, but the others had. Now everybody was looking at Hogard with deepened concern.

  “What do you see?” Hogard said worriedly.

  “An infection of some kind. How’s that headache?” Lars asked.

  “The worst I’ve ever head.”

  “Any other symptoms?”

  “Dry mouth and my guts hurt. I feel all wiggly—like spiders are inside my skin.”

  “Me too,” Lindsey said in alarm, holding her stomach.

  Loyl’s ears twitched. He showed his hand to Lars for a checkup. The center blister on one of his palms had gray edges, similar to Hogard’s horn.

  “Smack,” Josie hit her forehead in emphasis. “I know how everybody caught the rash. Hogard’s ring. I was the only one who didn’t touch it. And look at the places on your body that are infected.”

  “Right where we touched the ring,” Dante said. “Son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Poor Hogard,” Lindsey said. “He’s been wearing the ring on his horn all of this time. No wonder he’s sicker than the rest of us.”

  “I touched it,” Lars pointed out. “And I don’t have the rash.”

  “Count yourself lucky. This rash has black magic written all over it.” Loyl said.

  “We need a magic slayer pronto,” Hogard said. “My brain feels like it’s being eaten away by termites.”

  “Magic slayers are a dying breed,” Loyl said, glancing nervously at the trail ahead. “Finding one isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Daylight’s burning,” Hogard said, heavily and slowly as if speaking required great effort. “And so’s my head.”

  Nobody said anything as they broke camp and left for Blue Junction.

  Chapter Eleven

  (Josephine Rose Albright)

  A cloud of dirt billowed behind the Red Squad as their horses pounded the road, slowing only when the first house came into view. The outside was made of unpainted lengths of wood weathered gray, a few small windows, and a stone chimney went up the side. The roof was sod and a rock sidewalk led up to the front door from the main road. There was a corral with a couple of cows—only they had a single horn in the middle of their heads.

  “Hey, look,” Josie said. “Instead of unicorns, this place has unicows. Isn’t that hilarious?”

  The only one who laughed was Lindsey, sounding a little loopy. “Good one, Josie.” Was that sarcasm? It didn’t seem like it, so was she trying to work past the animosity between them or was the fever just making her nuts?

  Over the course of the day, the blisters spread slowly over everyone except for Lars and Josie, but the black goo had done a blitzkrieg over Hogard’s face. The flies congregated over his dirty fur and broken skin. When he’d slap at them, they’d fly away in a swirling buzz, but return to land on the exact same spot a second later.

  While the others waited in the distance, out of sight, Josie and Lars were elected to go to the door of the nearest house because they were the only ones without a rash.

  “You peddlers?” the man asked hopefully.

  “Uh, no, kind sir,” Josie said carefully, repeating the words Prince Loyl advised her to use. “We have come from out of town to visit a friend of mine and I’m afraid we are quite lost. Although we are in no need of his service, he’s in the business of magic slaying, so we were wondering if you would point us in his general direction?”

  The man slammed the door in their faces and yelled, “Get off of my property!”

  They were run off the next three farms in a similar fashion.

  “Why does everyone hate magic slayers so much?” Josie asked the prince.

  “It’s not the magic slayers they hate, it’s the magic slayers’ customers. Nobody wants to be in the company of someone suffering the effects of a malicious spell for fear of inciting the wrath of the one who cast it.”

  “I thought magic was outlawed centuries ago. How does anybody even know about it?”

  “Similar to certain drugs in America just before the plague,” Dante explained. “Magic here is illegal, but there’s always going to be the equivalent of meth labs hidden in the backwoods and addicts shooting up in dark alleys.”

  “I see,” Josie said, glancing at Hogard, who was now too ill to swat away the flies partying on his wasting horn. The rest of the squad didn’t look well either. Their sullen faces were ashen and worn with fatigue. As evening fell, they were still far from the town, but they had no choice excpet to bed down for the night in the outlying farmlands. Josie and Lars, still unaffected by the curse, did most of the camp duties. The others were reluctant to eat much, but they had developed an unquenchable thirst. Lars went down to the stream three times to refill all the canteens.

  Hogard snored only intermittently, and farted less than once per hour, prompting Lars and Josie to get up several times in the night to make sure he was still alive. Josie watched Lars place a foot on the Bulwark’s rump, giving it a shake.

  “Sorry to disappoint ya, I’m not dead yet,” the Bulwark grumbled irritably. “Now leave me alone before I bash ya.”

  A snicker escaped Josie as she watched Lars leap out of the way of Hogard’s clumsy blow, knocking over the empty cooking tripod. It was a relief to see that the Bulwark still had spunk.

  The next morning was a miserable gray day full of spotty rain showers. Loyl commented that rugged mountain paths had been hacked out of the mountain by pick axes during a terrible war between the Bulwarks and Regalans centuries earlier, before
the existence of the Western Alliance, before the treaty of First Rights.

  Ahead, the scarred path was littered with boulders. The horses were understandably reluctant to climb up, but the descent was far worse. Chunky granite slabs glistened like black ice all the way down to the river at the valley floor.

  “The bridge to Blue River Junction lies just beyond those trees, on the opposite river bank,” Loyl said. As they descended, Josie fell woefully behind the others, but Lars waited for her to catch up.

  “Hurry it up,” Lindsey said. “Daylight’s burning!”

  “I can’t help that Buckwheat’s slow.”

  “Don’t blame your horse,” Dante called up to her, voice echoing over the mountain. “You’re just scared and holding him back.”

  “I’m not scared, just smart, I know my limitations.”

  “But you don’t know your horse’s limitations,” Rolf said. “Buckwheat grew up in mountain country. The ground isn’t muddy, there’s no loose gravel. This is a good time to learn.”

  Looking further down the path, she realized the Bulwark was slumped against his horse’s neck, barely able to stay in the saddle. If he could go down the mountain in such a state, perhaps she was being selfish. Taking a deep breath, she steeled her nerves.

  “The key is to stay balanced in the saddle,” Rolf called up from below. “Don’t let your nose go beyond the saddle horn. Try to keep your body vertically aligned with the trees. Let Buckwheat pick the path,”

  Lars was closest to her, about twenty degrees to her left, thirty feet further down the slope. He glanced up at her with an encouraging smile. Buckwheat carried her down, laborious step by laborious step, but it wasn’t nearly as terrifying as it had looked from the top.

  “You guys were right,” she called down to the others. “It’s not as bad as…”

  The sound of snapping stone cut through the air.