(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 46

The forest seemed to go on forever. Aldric had gone in deep with the interrogation that had pointed to, among other, this time and place, and the most surprisingly vital bits of survival information were the tiny tidbits about experiencing it all. The key was to look at the sky right above the treetops. It had yet to yield anything useful.
Somewhere in the growth, the fake Tarik was likely being torn apart by animals. He didn't getf back up from the final blow with the branch, and showed no signs of life, but it seemed pretty clear that he was all biological, even when ignoring the problems surrounding non-biological things and time travel. If he had survived it, the cracked skull injury was convincing and he had ways of holding his breath and hiding his heartbeat for an impressively long time. His body never did grow cold, but then again, the air was warm and moist. Very warm, and very moist. Even with nothing on but the old jumpsuit, and with it ventilated nicely by the slits meant for releasing heat after time travel arrival, it felt like being cooked slowly. Or, perhaps more accurately, being steamed alive like some health food vegetable dish.
Daylight was starting to vanish, too! Whoever Fake Tarik had reported back to, they quite clearly wanted to know about The Embassy and the places and ages its agents visited. The question of why still lurked out there, but it seemed unlikely that they had aimed the time machine at a completely different place and time. Making it closer to nighttime was actually pretty clever. It made splitting up a bad idea, because that would leave everybody alone when the dark settled. Of course, so did killing the other guy, but every plan had its flaws.
As the first streaks of red slithered across the sky, warning of night to come, the whole idea of looking at treetops finally paid off! Above the lower trees to the right, a flat, horizontal line split the bottom tip of what could be seen of the sky. It was easy to miss, looking a bit like just some steam rising from the dense forest, but when studied carefully, it was clear that it was something else entirely. It was a wall.
"It's nearly impossible to walk more than an hour without seeing the tip of a wall above the treeline."
That was what Aldric had deduced from the interrogation data. The one word that had become increasingly a cause of worry during that walk in the forest was the word "nearly". This was uncharted land. The Embassy had no footing here, none at all. Had everything gone according to the original plan, the thirtieth or so jump would have been made with the help of some rickety rogue outfit operating out of some stoneage colony, hiding away from 28417 in cave systems much deeper than those underneath Klaus' pirate fort. Every jump for millenia before that one would have been made in similar ways, in fact. This was so far off the reservation for The Embassy that even the existence of the reservation became a matter of myth, so to speak.
Perhaps it was the renewed enthusiasm, or perhaps it was just the lack of having to constantly check the treeline, but getting to the wall seemed like a quicker affair than first expected. And when it came into clearer view, it was with all the majesty that could be expected from something of its magnitude! It seemed to be not so much a wall in the forest as a wall in the world, the endless width and height feeling as if it cut the world in half, the part inside and the forest outside. The interrogation had revealed information about the walled cities, but seeing even this one wall up close brought the abstract idea of it into a frightening, very real light!
There was no gate. The stone wall stretched deep into the forest in both directions, disappearing amongst the tall trees. Vines and even less adventurous plants grhew along it like cracks in the stone itself, and they particularly grew around actual cracks, giving them more to hold onto. In spots here and there, they could be seen growing into and through the wall, finding an old gap so narrow that only the delicate form of their tiny green fingers could creep through. An old wall, this section perhaps left unchecked for decades or even centuries. The tall trees and dense growth nearby suggested nobody had been in that particular spot for ages.
Walking the length of the wall made it clear that the spot was not a freak coincidence, either. The simple act of following the wall was constantly made near impossible by the dense foliage, trees all but clinging to the wall, and small once in some cases sprouting from cracks that seemed to have been first made worse by other plants growing in them without restraint. This seemed somehow wrong, like some ominous warning about either the plant or the wall. The interrogation data claimed that the walls were guarded ferociously, that if a wall was not cleared by hand or fire and patrolled, it was cluttered by merchants or others wanting to service the people inside without ever going in. Even a short piece of wall in such a sad state was a direct contradiction of that. It should not exist. But apparently, it did.
Judging by the rapidly setting sun, this was the north side of the wall, sunlight now starting to die in the west, to the right when facing the wall. The air was getting colder, too. In the red and purple light, flowers could be seen closing their petals up for the night, conserving warmth to stay alive. The false Tarik had never given a clear idea what season his masters had aimed the time machine for, but the state of plantlife suggested early autumn. The night would not be freezing, but it would be a chill. And with the odd plants around, it was anyone's guess what wildlife would come prowling after dark!
With the last beams of sunlight starting to fade, the gate finally came into sight! As the wall, it was massive, reaching up so far that it might well have been just another section of wall from just looking at it. The hinges were what gave it away, though, large protruding mechanisms of wood and metal. The gate itself, its enormous door, was equally made from a heavy wood, with metal fittings running its full edge to strengthen it. Looking up the side of the entire thing made the world seem to warp, the sheer scale of it pushing hard against the brain's perception of reality. There was a limit to the reach of human depth perception, a limit that made looking up at a skyscraper from nearby a bit of a mental ordeal, when the brain was forced to switch back and forth between seeing a full, three dimensional building at the bottom, and a strangely flattened matte painting at the more distant top, with no easy division between them along the surface of the building. This door gave that same sensation, but at the same time, it was a door. The brain was not used to having problems fitting a simple door into its handling of vision.
With that headache in full roar, it was hard to truly study the gate, but in the end, a crack could be seen in the dying light. It was just below the lowest hinge, likely a slab of stone worn down by years of opening and closing of the gate, and now brought to break by the unknown number of years it hard been left to fall apart on its own. It wasn't that high up, in all honesty, and plants, even a small tree, ran the edge of the wall by the door, leading right up to it. Had it not been so dark, climbing it would be fairly easy. But it was dark. The climb was not easy. And once by the crack, squeezing through it made a painful finale to a straining effort. What was inside the crack was impossible to say. Daylight had ended.

Daylight came back with no real fanfare. Tiny beams of light could be seen in the dusty air inside the wall, one of the biggest sneaking through the crack by the hinge. Other, smaller beams of light shone through tiny cracks elsewhere, the entire stone structure looking like a worn curtain.
The floor was wood. Old wood. It had to have once been very good wood, and very good craftsmanship, or it would have fallen apart over the years. A second or third floor, raised from the ground, running much of the length of the wall, but inside of it. Thick stone on both sides were what anyone from the outside would see. The wall was not just a wall, it had room inside it, likely once built for guards or even for storing goods near the gates. Old torches hung on the walls, looking dry enough to either flare into ash or simply fall apart at the mere thought of lighting them. It was a well known way to build a defensive wall, but the size set this wall apart. The inner spaces could be a castle onto themselves, which ample room for any number of people.
Now, though, it had all fallen apart. The floor felt as if it was about to splinter just from the pressure of getting up from it. The rough surface felt like driftwood against the palms, and it looked like broken pieces put together on nothing but a whim.
On the bright side, the cracks allowing light in made the place easier to navigate. It had dark spots, for sure, but there was light enough, on floor enough, that walking around became perfectly safe. At least, as long as the wood never snapped and plummetted down, taking any fool standing on it with it down!
One door was nearby. There were doubtlessly more around, but this first one, while locked, was in such a poor state that it took only a hard push to make the piece around the lock splinter into almost nothing, just bits of rotten wood shattering on the floor. And as the now truly broken door swung out, sunlight flooded in. Morning had clearly passed, leaving early noon to warm the landscape. Green stretched as far as the eye could see, even here on the iside of the mighty wall. Grasses had grown tall and wild, weeds and vines battling for living space amongst it. There were disappointingly few trees, making it possible to see far and wide, in stark contrast to the rampant forest in the other side of the wall. The outside of the wall. It was a bizarre concept, but from what the interrogation had found about this age, walls like this one were, in fact, roughly round. They encased an area, inside which people could live. The exact purpose of the walls had never come up, nor had what they protected against. But somewhere in the distance, the other side of the giant wall kept out another forest, or something else. A ring too big for the human eye to comprehend, running tall and thick into the distance.
Right outside the door, the wall had a raised floor, stone tiles no doubt laid on wood that still survived beneath them. Looking along the wall, each level, each floor, of the wall had its own terrace, so to speak, making the whole thing look like a wide stairway for giants! Smaller stairs, some of stone and some of wood, could be seen in various spots, connecting a terrace to another below or above. The wooden ones, again, looked in poor condition, but the stone ones made getting down to ground level an easy walk.
The quiet was remarkable, and honestly, a bit unnerving. Large animals likely had no way to cross the wall, leaving only birds to fly over or small woodland creatures to crawl over it or through the many cracks. But something had once lived in there. Beyond the grass were buildings, small ones, but large enough to spot, especially while walking down a wall as massive as this one. But the quiet of the place only served to cement the one thing that stood out about it: It was quiet! Not a sound of life nearby, or in the distance. No faint voices of people calling out to one another, not the sound of things moving in streets. Nothing. It was a desolate place.
Breakfast was provided by berries on bushes on the way to the buildings. Wild grain did grow in many places, but eating it from the stalk seemed less than appetizing, and it seemed less filling, as well. And the berries were plentiful, which was a bit surprising! Haphazardly scattered clusters of bushes offered berries of many kinds, so the risk of eating any that had a poison in them was less, simply because there was no need to eat more than a few of each. It was in no way a perfect strategy, but it was a strategy, and in the silence, a growling stomach was a loud distraction.
Up close, the buildings looked to be in as pitiful a state as the wall itself. Wooden beams in and between the houses had rotted almost, or entirely, through, and stones had eroded and started to slip, several of them ripping out their particular house wall along the way. Old pots lay shattered in the cobblestone streets, their shards dulled over long periods of time. Nobody had lived in this place for a very long time.
On the walk towards one large building, raised on a hill that seemed almost deliberately placed at the center of the dead town, the wind started to pick up. Perhaps it was simply the raised position, so far from the sheltering wall, but it seemed like the wind itself wanted to surround the building. Huge pillars, nearly all in surprisingly good condition, held a stone roof above a similar stone pathway, leading the last bit to the entrance of the building. A town hall, a temple, a mansion, a museum, it could be anything. Anything but unimportant, judging by its appearance. On the pillars were stone tablets, each on a small pedestal of its own. Writing on them had faded into nearly nothing, at least on those that had not broken apart entirely and crumbled. What little text could still be clearly seen was not in any recognizable alphabet.
"Hello? Anybody here?"
At the mouth of the bulding, each word echoed inside of it, over and over again. It could perhaps be called a doorway, but there definitely was no door, only more stone walls, stone obviously being the only thing that had survived long enough to still be around. There could have been a thousand intricate wooden parts in the building's youth, but they would all have fallen apart and the dust been blown away in the time that the place had stood empty. Decades no longer seemed like a satisfactory timeframe. The place had to have been abandonned for centuries.
In the rising midday light, the shadows cast through the long, rectangular holes above that constituted windows looked like an alternate arrangement of what was really inside. Statues, roughly twice the natural height of a person, stood lining the inner walls, looking like the guardian figures of gods or kings that nobody was there to remember any longer. The shadows, on the other hand, made them look like they were fighting or partying with one another. It was impossible to tell if that was by accident or some weird intention.
The same could not be said for the voices! It took a little while, but as the wind outside became more a faint background sound, they could be heard. Another strange language to throw on the pile, incomprehensible words in short but clearly complicated sentences. More than one voice, as well! In the foreign tongue, it was hard to know if they were having a whispered conversation, or merely talking over one another! But much more than that, it was hard to know if they were a threat!
The outside, bathed in sunlight, suddenly looked less peaceful. The voices showed no sign of following, but sneaking out had seemed to be wise, in hopes that they never noticed anything. Turning to look at the dilapidated town, it suddenly looked less like an abandoned ruin, and more like a ghost town! The difference was semantics, but the words suddenly seemed to very much paint the scene. Ghost town. A town of ghosts.
"Asaikeye!"
The word, or phrase, came out of nowhere! Yelled more than spoken, it sounded like an order, but what it ordered was impossible to know. The voice clearly didn't care. One more step, and it broke the sound of the wind as a swoosh went by and a spear, coming from nothing, planted itself in the ground nearby.
"Asaikeye!" the voice repeated.
"I don't know what that means!"
The voice did not answer. Then again, nor did it repeat itself. All that could be heard was, once again, the wind.
The spear still swayed nearby, the metal head buried in the dirt of what had to once have been a small city garden. Withering weeds were all that now grew in the dirt, even they barely able to force any life out of a soil that nobody had likely tended to in generations. The weeds, of course, were not the interesting part. The spear was. The metal head of it was ornate, the color hinting at some variant of bronze, with intricate lines and symbols along the worn and slightly dented edge. The wooden body of the spear, however, seemed to be nothing but the one stick most nearly straight that someone had been able to find in the forest outside. One item, two parts, each looking to be from very different sources!
"Aki... Akakshi... #*@! it, I don't know!"
The voice still said nothing. It was hard to say if it was gone or simply quiet, but it said nothing.
"Show yourself! I'm not here to..."
All it took was one step. One step towards the spear, planning to pick it up. Whether it was the step alone or that it was towards the spear was unclear, but seemingly from thin air, another spear cut through the air, this one hitting stone and, failing to impale it, fell to the ground with a clattering noise.
"Asaikeye! Asa asa!"
"Asshole to you, too! Show yourself!"
Nobody showed themselves. Not by face, at least. Instead, out of the blue, something snuck up and everything went dark. The smell was like old, damp clothes, thick and warm, but it was overshadowed by the feeling of the cloth not just going over the head, but then wrapping around the throat! Strong hands, not from just one person. They were everywhere, touching, grabbing, holding! Locking arms and hands, covering the cloth that was already covering eyes and mouth! But amidst it all, there was one more thing that could be felt. A body. A physical body, grabbing from behind. Someone was there!
They expected a struggle, a fight over the tightness of the cloth, a fight around the throat to preserve the right to breathe. They were wrong. A rapid step to the side was all it really took. The tip of a foot bumped the heel as it moved. A target. The heel went down, hard, catching the tip, and someone screamed! The hands holding the cloth loosened slightly, for just a moment, and it was more than enough. All it took was swinging a fist backward, with a rough guess from what little was known about the unseen attacker. The fist met flesh, and the flesh buckled around it. A groin, perhaps just the kidneys. Someone screamed out in pain.
With a moment of even looser cloth, ripping it away entirely finally worked! There was a spectacle of voices and grunts as the many hands seemed to stumble over each other to either getf away or get through and reestablish control. All of them failed.
"Who are y..."
A single fist came out of nothing, swinging for the head. It was a close dodge, but retribution was swift and the short, stocky man that had thrown the punch completely lost his balance as his forward knee took the hit!
"Imtaie!" yelled someone, safe to say not the same voice as before. "Imtaie!" agreed another. Four people, none of them very imposing, nearly stumbled over one another to get away!
"Yeah, imtaie! Imtaie!!"
Surprisingly, screaming that word was enough to make the last one, the man taken down by his knee, look with angry worry and then tuck tail and run.
Ragged clothes, old decorations, leather that seemed to not quite fit. Scroungers. They ran quickly as soon as they no longer had each other to trip over, jumping on and over walls with agility, and they clearly knew their surroundings. Squatters, likely.
But they left one spear, the one stuck amongst the weeds. The other had been taken before they lost their grip on the cloth, before they were beaten into running. Someone had been quick while the others were struggling, perhaps. This one, though, they had apparently not had time to fetch. It pulled out of the ground with a faint metal ringing, like a tuning fork hit gently. The weight of it was remarkably balanced, considering the poor quality of the wooden body.
"Got your spear, #*@!ers! Come out so I can hand it back to you!"
The sound of the wind was now interrupted by scuffling noises from many parts of the ruins. Shadows seemed to dart across empty streets, the mind playing tricks on the eyes and making every odd shape look as if it might be a living thing, trying its best to hide in the dusty streets. Few of them were, or at least so it seemed.
Then, one of them stepped into the near noon light, standing atop a crumbling building two stories tall.The figure itself was a man, normal height, which made him a bit taller than the ones that had attacked and run away. Like the others, though, he wore faded and worn down clothes, mostly muddled grey and brown, covered in and old leather vest, smaller leather pads tied to his limbs.
"You want your spear back, asswipe? Point first, or would you like to come and ta..."
He lifted his hand,looking completely indifferent to any threat or insult. The moment he did, the spear began to tug, hard, in his direction. At the third tug, it slipped through the fingers and spun in the air like a wheel with only two spokes. Not showing the slightest sign that he cared about the thing flying at him, the man simply held out his hand and caught it in the air. It even had its point still aimed, ready to be thrown. And yet, for some reason, it wasn't.
"Umumaie. Kamope tui," the man said with a piercing, yet deep voice. Waiting a few seconds after the short speech, he simply stepped down some staircase hidden from view, disappearing out of sight.
"I don't...." Suddenly, there was no one, again. The wind was all that could be heard. "For #*@!'s sake, moron, I don't know what you're saying."
The remark wasn't really aimed at anyone. It was low, merely muttered in frustration, frustration that they likely would never understand it, anyway.
"Kaiehe," came the voice again, now from within a building near where the man had disappeared from sight. It was his voice, but all that could be seen was a shadow passing by the window of the old house. Still, the way his voice carried, it seemed very much to ask to follow.
The old door of the house, wooden and rotted, nearly came off when opened! Inside, dust on the floor was like a thick carpet, albeit one that dissolved into the air at the moment it was touched or even nearly so. The windows let in enough light through their empty holes that most of the inside of the place was visible, but little more than that. Little piles littered the floor, piles of wooden bits that looked like they had survived a little better than the wood that was used to build with. They looked like pieces for some game, like domino or wooden playing cards. Dust, however, had sunken into every crack, coloring them a dull grey when picked up. Even shaking one did not break it free of the dust.
"Where are..."
They didn't understand. It was a frustrating fact that required constant reminding. The man's back was visible down a narrow stone hallway that ran from the house and the houses around it, gathering together the lot of them like some backdoor culdesac. The hallway was indeed also open into what might once have been a small courtyard, with the sad remnants of what might have been a fountain. Now, it was nothing but dust, vines and weeds that enjoyed the place.
It was a short walk before the man turned through another door, into what would likely be another house. As he did, he turned his head slightly to look, his eyes carrying some weird, skeptically resentful expression as they made the traditional toe-to-head gaze. Whatever he was doing, he seemed conflicted about it, holding back some kind of anger.
It was, indeed, another house. This one, though, had been cleaned. Thick carpets, themselves as old but cleaned as the house, covered much of the floor, and through another doorway, on a small pile of similar carpets, sat a man. A very old man, his beard looking as if it had copied the strategy of the vones and weeds, to simply spread in every direction. It went down his chest, below the middle of his stomach, and out to the sides, joining with his hair to run over and down his shoulders. All of it white as snow, with the exception of a few,perhaps youthful, lines of light grey woven in here and there.
The younegrh man with the spear said something to him, a sentence much longer than any he had previously used. During the rapidfire stream of words, he pointed back a few times, his voice shiftig to a soft, growling complaint. Even without the actual words, it was easy to understand whom he was talking about.
"Elaile ikaie," said the old man, his voice so weak it was nearly gone. His waving gestures made it clear that he was offering the carpets in front of him as a place to sit, hopefully a place to rest. There was no guarantee that he meant it so kindly, of course.
Sitting down and looking into the face that was nearly hidden under the heavy hooded robe he wore, it was hard to even see his eyes. His hair seemed perfectly normal, even if it was uusually long and flowing, merging into the beard seamlessly. But his eyebrows were so bushy it felt unnatural, like some artist's way of exaggerating an old man's age. Only as he leaned forward did the eyes, a piercing, faded blue, shine through.
"Numkuva," he said, in a soft a kind-sounding voice. "Numkuva pemenle."
"Uhm, numkova to you, too."
There was an odd smell in the room, thick and pungent, like raspberry jam that had recently gone bad. The scent seemed to flow through the room, not stay in one place, like a swirling mist. When it dipped and became less forceful, the air simply smelled wet. And yet, it was as dry as a desert in there.
"Numkuva," the old man repeated, sounding very certain that it would make sense. "Numkuva pemenle."
It was still noon outside. The sun stood high in the sky, shadows increasingly flat and short. The sky had been entirely clear, not a whisp of cloud to be seen. And yet, through the empty window near the ceiling of the house, the light seemed to dim.
"Numkuva," he said again, his voice sounding so similar every time that it could have been a recording, lips just moving to make it seem like speech. "Numkuva stranger."
"Look, I'm sorry, but I... wait, what?"
It was getting a bit hard to see clearly, as if thick clouds had covered the sun. The man with the spear, the one who showed the way to this old man, stood at the opposite end of the room, and the room seemed to have gotten just a little bigger. His arms were folded in a very determined kind of body language, and his face wore a gentle frown. He was not happy, not happy about what was happening, but he knew not to speak up. Maybe.
"Numkuva,"  the old man said again. His voice was the same, but it was starting to feel, not sound but feel, stronger, more forceful, more penetrating, like a soft voice through powerful headphones. "Numkuva stranger."
"Okay, I heard that!"
For whatever reason, standing up was impossibly hard, as if gravity itself had quadrupled without warning. Pushing against the floor to stand up felt like gripping hot coals, and the mere try made it hard to breathe, as if those hot coals sent scolding smoke into the air and into the lungs!
"What did you do? What did you do to me?!"
None of them reacted, not even the slightest. They seemed to not even hear a word.
"Numkuva," the man repeated, the unchanged voice sounding like a thunderstorm. "Welcome, stranger."
Like lights suddenly turned on, everything returned to what it was meant to be! Sunlight illminated the small house clearly, everything felt the proper weight. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Which made tumbling to the floor and clutching the nearest, old carpet feel that much more humiliating.
"Wait, you speak? I mean, you speak my language?"
"No," the old man said very tersely.
A laugh rang out, but not from him. The spearman, instead, was caught in a giggle in his corner of the sparse house.
"You just said welcome, stranger. I #*@!ing heard it!"
The man's utter lack of movement, or even signs of emotions, was becoming an annoyance. It seemed to mock the very idea of being frustrated with him,which in turn made him even more frustrating!
"Then what did you say?!"
"Nothing," he said even before the question had finished. "In your head. Words in your head."
"You're speaking in my head?"
"Yes. No words, just thoughts. No language."
In the tense silence that followed, even the spearman stopped smiling, perhaps worried about the sudden quiet.
"Words in your head are stronger with spoken words," the old man added. He was clearly moving his lips, but like some bad foreign movie, the lips did not match the words, at all.
"You understand my words, but through my head, not my mouth?"
"Yes," he answered.
With balance regained, standing up made the spearman cautiously reach around himself to put a hand on what looked like a long knife or very small sword. The old man made no movement, looking barely even alive. When nothing more happened, the spearman sllowly moved his hand away from the weapon.
"What is this place? Who are you people?"
Finally, the old man showed signs of life, turning his head ever so slightly to catch a sideways glance at the spearman. He muttered something soft and slow to him, and the spearman answered in a short sentence. Their language made no sense now, perhaps because they were speaking only to one another.
"Are you a spy for horses?" the old man then asked, 
"Am I what? No, I'm not a spy for anyone. Especially not horses! Are there even horses inside the wall?"
With a slow but notably steady hand, the old man made a line on the floor in fron tof his pile of carpets, a line of very green sand. It curved, the line, little bumps on it and the sand spread unevenly, but in a way that seemed on purpose. When he finished, he gave a faint sign to the spearman, who then took a small candle that had been burning in the room, burning so faint that its light had never been remotely noticeable. With a drip of hot wax, he made the green sand sputter and ignite, burning slowly and sending a new smell into the air, one more like fresh, very sharp lemon, and salt water.
"Horses are on the hunt," the old man said, his voice now sounding frighteningly determined! "They hunt us, they hunt the skills, they hunt for the ones who worship metal."
As he spoke, there was a sense of weird flashes. Not in the air, but somehow still there, in the room. Flashes of strangely armored riders on heavy horses, and a brief sense of death. Screams filled the room, but not as sound. They seemed like memories. Someone else's memories, but memories nonetheless.
"Horses. You mean riders, horsemen. Horsemen are hunting you..."
"Yes," he answered, his voice now back to its normal monotone. "They hunt the skill."
"The skill?"
With his fingers, he drew scribbles in the green sand, which had now all but burned away, turning a more muddled, dark shade of green, and black.
"The skill," he repeated, drawing over and over in the now barely recognizable line of sand. Then he raised his hand up and gently ran it from the middle of his forehead to the middle of his nose. The now sticky, dark green sand clung desperately to his skin, looking like quickly peeling facepaint.
"Ah, the skill. The stuff you just did. Got it."
Magic. He meant magic. Or whatever the hell he was doing.

In the early afternoon sun, the place looked less wild than it had in the morning. This could have been psychological, of course, just knowing that there were people living there somehow making everything appear less chaotic and abandoned. Or it could be that the view from the top of the two-story building that the spearman, who apparently bore the name Donlarn, had chosen as an improvised outlook post. The landscape, completely devoid of the large trees that filled the surrounding forest, looked almlost flat from that perch.
"Iyun ponna lap," Donlarn said, pointing off in the distance with an odd sound of caual disdain in his voice. The horsemen were out there, that much was clear even without understanding the individual words. The old man, who seemed to go by the name Skillwalker, had managed to give a pretty detailed account of what was going on, the connection across language growing stronger with every sentence exchanged. Bandits, essentially, roaming between the mighty walls, preying on stragglers and unprepared merchants. Each wall, all one hundred of them, was made to withstand attacks far more savage than a pack of raiding bandits, but they had traced the Skillwalker and his small entourage, including Donlarn, to the abandoned wall. Now, while the Skillwalker and his people were simply trying to find a place to live after being chased out of another wall for things that were a bit hard to understand, the bandits wanted a place to fortify and rule. They had a camp near the south gate, where they had managed to break through the wooden gate enough to force very young horses through. The few that survived grew up inside the wall. They had done so for a few years, building a fine little herd, and breeding them for battle. A battle Donlarn, even without understanding his language, made it very clear he did not like to think of.
For now, though, there were no signs of them. No signs of horses, or their riders. They had struck three days ago but laid low since then, their tactics apparently being to be unpredictable, except for the predictable fact that they would, at some point, strike again.
Donlarn was holding his spear, standing very rigidly on the wooden roof, looking like a palace guard of some sort. The roof had been fixed not that long ago, that much was obvious, and Donlarn and the others probably had something to do with that. How they got fresh wood was never mentioned, but the wall clearly had holes, and these people clearly were resourceful!
"What's with the spear?"
Asking made very little sense, on the face of it. He had no idea what the words meant. But pointing and sounding like a question was, sometimes, enough.
"How did you... you know..."
Even if words had been useful, explaining the whole spear return flip was a bit odd to do. He seemed to understand, though, raising an eyebrow skeptically as he visibly wondered whether or not to reward the question and its many gestures with an answer.
"Houklen," he simply said, pointing back down. Houklen. It didn't actually mean Skillwalker, but it seemed to be a nickname for him. Donlarn then pointed to the bronze tip of the spear, tracing the ornament lines with his finger. "Eusuminai," he added. The meaning was somehow clear, even if the word seemed impossible to translate. The Skillwalker had done something to the metal tip of the spear, and now, people like Donlarn could call it back like a welltrained dog. It still felt mentally jarring to think of it that way, but basically, magic.
The Skillwalker had spoken about those things, about what he insisted on calling "skill". How it was his training over decades that let him change and shape natural energies. How those energies could be forced together to become light, how they could tamper with a person's mind, how they could be made to move things, even at someone else's command. Again, it was easy to just call it magic. But a lot of it sounded very much like Fifth Force stuff. It was a world apart from Happy Marla's intangible spirits running errands for her, but the similarities were there. It wasn't hard to imagine invisible, living energies racing through the air to push against the metal tip of a spear like that, perhaps unable to truly grab it and wave it around, but with a million nudges make it tumble through the air in that hazardous way Donlarn had learned to catch it.
"I was sent here by someone's mind being interrogated."
Donlarn understood nothing of that, but it somehow felt nice to just tell him, nonetheless.
"Hunting across time to understand what scares things I don't even understand myself. At least, not yet."
He looked over, ignoring for a minute the horizon he had so relentlessly scanned. It was written in every fold in his face that he wanted to understand, that it frustrated him to not be a part of the conversation, even one that one-sided. Quite surprisingly, however, he instead reached around to his other side and pulled out a knife. Flipping it over in his hand, he offered its handle.
"No thanks. Weapons aren't really my thing. I always end up hurting myself more than anyone else."
Less surprisingly, he didn't react to that rejection, most ikely because he had no idea his offer was being rejected. He simply stayed there, hand stretched out, the handle of the knife pointed forward. It was an old piece, a weapon that he had most likely grabbed from some fallen foe, or gotten for very little at a market. The handle had been redone, fresh leather straps wrapped around it, but even that looked to be a while ago. The blade had rusty spots on it, and the small crossbar did, too, especially where the blade intersected it. It was unlikely he thought of the knife as a gift. He just wanted to offer some defensive means. It seemed easier to just take it than to argue.
"So is this... houklen? It's magic?"
He got the question. Either that, or something else made him laugh and do the wavy little thing both he and the Skillwalker did when others would have shaken their heads. No houklen. No magic. Just a knife. He even, perhaps as a joke, gestured how to stick a knife into someone to make them hurt. He clearly found that instruction to be the most funny thing of all.
It was a bit before anything happened. Donlarn had made no attempt to hide that others were posted elsewhere to keep an eye out, but he was not trusting enough to say where, even in his foreign language. The Skillwalker had, for the time being, set aside any fear of a horseman spy, but Donlarn was clearly not a man to take that chance. When the sound of rocks being banged together rhythmically could be heard amongst the many dilapidated houses, however, he instantly looked to several places that would have to be other outlooks. Whatever he saw, he turned his eyes immediately to a direction that he had not been scouting over before!
"Rusaikmen," Donlarn said, very nearly gritting his teeth as he did. Waving his hands in the air, the spear looking like it might poke his own eye out by accident, he showed his left hand move around the right arm and continue away. "Rusaikmen!" Remember. Remember the plan.
Why they had laid that plan was unclear, to say the least. They could not possibly have been just waiting for someone to show up and help them, not for as long as they seemed to have been camped in the old city ruins. It was not a complicated plan, as such, just a matter of getting to another walled city that the Skillwalker described and give a certain person a certain piece of wood. It was a piece like those that were found in scattered piles here and there around the ruins, clumsy bits of currency that, according to them, beggars would exchange for food in most of the walled cities. Not money, as such. Money was metal coins, and Donlarn had shown a handful of copper ones, and been very sensitive when he showed one of silver that hung in a chain around his neck, stuffed inside the leather armor. He had tried to explain its significance, but the Skillwalker's conveyance of that had been a bit hard to understand. It was not just a more valuable coin, that was the only thing that was perfectly clear. It meant something else. But the wooden tokens were seen as worthless to all but beggars, something that people simply handed out to them out of pity, or to get them to go away. Nobody would steal or even care about them. That made them the perfect medium for a secret message. All they needed was a carrier. Why they had no one else for the task, they did not say.
Far away, in the direction that Donlarn had clearly seen someone pointing, little dots were forming. Any casual onlooker might have dismissed them as animals grazing, or some rock formation. But there were no animals that large inside the wall, and carefully watching them revealed that they were moving. Not much, not charging or fleeing or trying to run some distant flank on the ruins. Just pacing amngst themselves, like wolves watching their prey from afar.
"Rusaikmen," Donlarn repeated, doing the hand around the arm motion again.
"Yes, yes, rusaikmen, I know. I didn't forget, just... take it easy."
"Yes yes rusaikmen," he said back, leaving no hint as to what he thought he was actually saying. His eyes quickly scanned the edge of the ruin city, and he pointed to a cluster of rocks that stuck out of the ground, a crack in the surface where one of the local creaks ran through. A hiding spot. And there was no mistaking the gesture that followed. Hurry. Hurry to the hiding spot!
Getting to the spot was easy. The streets of town flowed out from the center in a very predictable manner, and once the streets ended, the land was flat enough to be easily managed on foot. If anything, the fact that the rocks by the creak broke the flat landscape so much made the hiding spot seem less of a sure bet! Like a tree in the desert, the rocks stuck out. Tall grass and a myriad of other growing things helped, but every step closer to the spot was one worry more that it was the most visible place outside the city itself.
And then, there was the wait. Kris had made it perfectly clear that the bulk of any job, and any mission, was waiting, and how it could mess with your mind. What he made less clear was how boring it could be. The sun was still in its early afternoon decline, far from any horizon to measure it by, but the shadows crept slowly across the ground, telling time as clearly as any watch. Donlarn had been kind enough to donate a traveler's lunch, a small leather bag containing strips of meat that he used gestures to show was rabbit or hare. It was unclear if he knew how silly the gestures were. What was not unclear was how well salted the meat was. It took quite a bit of scraping to make it palatable. To make things worse, the strain of time travel had been continuously kicking in, at least when it came to eating. Even if a time traveler's stability at a destination was the best it could be, things were flickering in and out on a subatomic scale. The body had problems aligning things of the past with things of the future, and as the body of one absorbed food of the other, the two had their struggles. Recruits in training alway puked, even on their first trips just hours into the past or future. But even veterans could suffer, when they were stretched far enough from their native time!
It was easy to see, even with the naked eye, that the sun hung a little lower in the afternoon sky when the dots so far away became the shapes of humans and horses. The beasts looked odd, not like horses would commonly look. Too much muscle, too small bodies. Perhaps a different stock of horse, a breed that belonged more in the minus 9000s than in a more modern world. Or perhaps their riders had bred them differently, hoping for a more sturdy beast of battle. If so, something would suggest that they had achieved their goal! More than walked, the beasts lumbered across the open space, flattening grass so thoroughly that even at a distance, the footsteps they left in the tall grass could be seen.
And then, they charged! There was no hesitation, no tactical circling. All they needed was to feel that they were close enough to the ruins, and they let rip, the beasts teraing up the dirt were their heavy hooves trampled! Like a cloud of flying soil and torn grass, they thundered forward, racing for the ruin city like a comet for the ground! Donlarn was impossible to spot, he and the rest hiding well inside the ruins. The horsemen knew they were there, but whether they knew where exactly was hard to tell!
Three spears tore through the air as the horses came in close. Two found a victim, one visibly punching through the chest or at least shoulder of a rider and throwing him to the ground. Those that charged behind him did their best to evade him on the ground, but it was hard to see how well they succeeded.
The other was a rider on the flank. The spear took him in the shoulder, more grazing than penetrating it. Pulled off balance, he turned the horse, moving out of the way of the charge. He slowed to a near halt, trying to calm his horse-beast down. And that was when he looked over! His eyes widened so much that even from afar, the whites of them could be seen. And then, he rode in!
The first instance of panic didn't even feel like a panic at all. Being spotted in the minimalistic hiding spot was one thing, but having some bulging beast and its rider suddenly barreling down just made everything short circuit. It felt unreal, like watching some horror movie with monsters in it!
But then the panic subsided. The beast still charged, the now handicapped rider hanging on with a fury in his eyes as man and beast came closer! And yet, panic trickled away, evaporating into the afternoon air. The handle of Donlarn's old, unimpressive knife felt good, solid, reassuring, fingers wrapping around it as if holding it tighter meant it would make deeper cuts. And when the rider saw that his target was not moving, he clearly suspected that panic had done the hard work for him. He aimed to trample. He wanted the heavy hooves of the horse beast to finish the work! He would be disappointed. But only briefly.
A roll to the left, and the hooves passed by! But the roll was a gamble, it was close, a narrow escape, no more than an arm's length from being a bloodsoaked failure. That arm's length was what the knife was for. Before the hind legs passed, the knife cut through the air, striking the blade against the skin right above the hoof. The beast made a frightening sound, crying out in pain with a strange, high-pitched growl! It rode a bit farther, but it was swaying wildly. The cut was in no way brutal, only just deep enough to break the thick hide on the beast. But neither the beast nor its leg were the real target.
On the beast, saddled across its broad back, the rider was taken by surprise by the sudden sway and roar of the beast! He struggled to hold on, and in the end, failed. With a cry of his own, he fell to the ground, tumbling in between the panicked legs of his steed. The sound of his leg being crushed under the hooves he had planned to trample with, not be trampled by, was a sickening snap, a crunch so quick it barely even sounded like bone shattering. But the pain was real. He screamed as he clutched the leg with the hand that did not already have a shoulder injured by a magical spear.
Not far fromhim, the beast stopped, complaining briefly about its pains before becoming almost restful. It never came back to him, though, instead just leaving him to writhe in the tall grass. Walking up to him was, now, as easy as picking a flower.
"Who are you?"
He looked up, his eyes only  breaking contact for a few fractions of a few seconds to look at the painful leg. He either understood none of the question, or did not want to answer.
Far behind him, the beast now looked fairly calm. Looking back, away from the fight, was a grim reminder of just how far away the wall really was. It was, above all, a horse. It could be useful, even if just for that one ride inside the wall.
Sadly, the rider did not approve. He came out of nothing, waiting until he could go for the back. He was wild, roaring as he attacked, but he was crippled. The next roar came when he felt his leg bent as the foot dragged in the ground, twisting the compound fracture in the bones inside! All it took was a single punch, and he fell to the ground in a pile of sobbing pain. He made one final attempt, pushing himself forward with his good leg, launching himself into the air for a desperate assault! As his body fell on the knife, the weight of his entire body as it bled was overwhelming. Sinking to the ground with him felt like being dragged down into his grave.
He fought against the bleeding for a while, the sticky red life flowing out of him very fast. He didn't die, not then and there, but after a few heavy breaths, his eyes began to become unfocused and he became limp. Still, he was bulky. It took some strength just to roll him off. The weight of him was enough to make breathing hard.
As he plunked down in the grass, everything became quiet enough to hear the sounds of combat in the distance. The riders had clearly found Donlarn and his men. What happened from then on was in the hands of fate. Far away, the sounds of large birds could be heard. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was vultures.
The rider was flat on his back in the grass, his body so close to the rocks that he could easily be pushed to roll off them and into the creak. Whether it would take him anywhere was impossible to say, considering his size and its, well, size. Then again, there was no point to it. He was not moving, and likely never would again, at least not by himself. His cloth underneath leather was already soaking in blood, and he was barely breathing, from the looks of it. That opened up a whole new temptation, though.
It was harrowing, sticking one's hand inside the man's armor. He was still breathing, shallow breaths, so there was still the chance that he would wake. And even unarmed, he was large, a single hand looking big enough to crush a small head! But he never moved.
Hanging from a sturdy string inside the armor were what had to be some personal trinkets. A small bag had a few of the copper coins in it, hanging next to what felt like something woven fromvery coarse hairs, maybe from the horse beast. A good luck charm, a symbol of his faith or the band he rode with, it could be anything. And reaching a bit farthre in...
There was no warning! With a bright flash, the thing shot out a painful bolt of energy, charring the man's flesh along his ribs! But the ribs were not what made the bolt shoot out. This was something else. Something frightfully familiar!
The knife cut through the strings holding together the man's leather armor quite quickly. He had shown no reaction whatsoever to the bolt of energy, making it perfectly clear that his breath was just the body forgetting a few things as he lay there dying. But the stench of his roasted ribs bellowed out as the armor loosened, filling the air with a bitter scent. It was a distasteful blessing, making it easier to ignore the pain in the hand that the bolt had caused.
At a glance, it looked like nothing but a thin stick, wrapped in some string that was either red or had been colored so by his blood. It looked like a child's toy, and a dull one at that. But the energy around it was impossible to mistake.
"Why do you have this? WHY DO YOU HAVE THIS?!"
The man did not react. In all ways but the actual biological ones, he was already dead. He was not going to answer anything.
The stick toy was attached, like the small coin purse, with string to the thicker string he wore like a sash under the armor, a utility belt of sorts. The knife cut the stick from that string quite easily, but picking it up was another challenge entirely. In the end, it took the small pouch of Donlarn's dried meat to hold it, and the meat inside no doubt helped in keeping it from sparking again.
Using the knife to cut off a lock of hair was in no way the standard way to test such things, but with the sounds of combat rising, it seemed the easiest. The lock rested on the rocks, as did a lock of the man's hair a moment later, just for comparison. As the stick passed over his hair, nothing happened, but it never even got close to the other lock before the hair flashed and burst into flames!
"Why do you..."
It made no sense to even think about the question. The man was barely even breathing any longer, and if the stick did not react to him, not even when hung inside his armor, against his body, he was not a time traveler. It was meant for that, only. It was meant to hurt time travelers. Why would a bandit have something for that?
The sound of battle suddenly seemed a lot scarier, even as it disappeared behind the horse beast as it rode towards the wall.