Rasque, Tarasque: Chapter 8 (Free with Sign Up)
Perhaps she was not the world's greatest fighter or hunter, but she could bridge impossible distances. Fleta just needed a plan. She already knew the general direction of the Valcot camp from Terrel, but how would she find them?
The jungle was a fury of speed and motion to Fleta's eyes. Greens and browns streaked past her like a rain of javelins. Her feet sank into the loam and exploded forward, leaving tracks of long, deep trenches. She was untouchable, her gift of speed shrinking the sprawling, gargantuan wilderness into minutes and seconds. Perhaps she was not the world's greatest fighter or hunter, but she could bridge impossible distances. With her speed, she had compressed several weeks of exploring and tracking into a handful of days. She also had a day of personal training with Shaw. Fleta just needed a plan. She needed to think, and if she could plan while half-drowned in the shadow of the tarasque, she could figure out how to find the other orders. She already knew the general direction of the Valcot camp from Terrel, but how would she find them?
Examine the trees for marks of climbing. That might work if the tracks were only a couple of days old, but even then, Fleta was not nearly as good at spotting new growth as Shaw was. She might run right past them. What did she know about the Valcots?
Fleta didn't know much. She had seen them at the opening ceremonies of the Proving. Their Paragon, Valcot, was the Paragon of genius and invention. Many gifted of Valcot were scholars who locked themselves in temples or monasteries and wrote treatises. But the group of Valcots that came to the proving would be the more practical sort: inventors that equipped themselves and their swornmen with ingenious weapons and devices. Still, they weren't known for their fighting, and they liked to be prepared. Fleta was willing to bet that they wouldn't wander around; they would stay in one place and build defenses. Traps maybe? If so, all she had to do was crisscross the jungle in their direction and be faster than whatever trap she sprung. Assuming they put traps all around their camp, she could spring a few of them and triangulate their location.
The plan was simple, but hours later, she found herself panting and stretching without a sign of the Valcots or any other order. Doubt began to creep into her head. Was she too oblivious to spring a trap, even accidentally? Was she in the wrong part of the woods? Maybe they disappeared, too, and she should look for another order. If this were an exercise with Shaw back home before the Proving, she would have debated with herself endlessly and switched strategy several times. But what had her teachers said? She needed to focus. So she focused and began running again with heavy, sore legs. Soon enough, they had a momentum all their own.
Half an hour later, running through damp earth blanketed with moldering leaves, the earth collapsed below her, but her momentum carried her to the far edge of the yawning pit, where she skidded to a stop. A few weak branches covered in leaves had caved into a yawning pit, maybe 20 or 30 feet in diameter. The bottom of the pit was lined with sharpened stakes, and a couple of beasts lay rotting on them. The pit must have been covered again after the last beast fell in. A good sign.
Fleta could wait by the trap for someone to come and check it. Who knew how long that might take? Now that she was hot on their trail, she could probably circle out and find the next ones fairly quickly. How far away from their camp would they put these traps? If they were too far away, they'd be useless. Maybe a half-mile tops? If she spiraled out to a mile radius, she could probably stumble into more. She scrambled up a new tree and lashed a simple cross shape together out of branches and vines to mark the spot. The edifice was wobbly and bobbed with the branch, but it was big enough that she could see it a mile away.
About two-thirds of a mile away, Fleta felt the snap of a rope around her foot, but she was already racing past a nearby tree as it closed. Fleta grabbed the tree as the rope closed around the toe of her boot. She wiggled her foot, wincing as the rope slid off her bruised toes, almost taking her boot. How had Fleta even sprung that trap? Was someone watching her? She dashed up the tree and followed the rope to a counterweight that had fallen with the tug of an improvised pressure plate. Simple enough, but the balance of the thing, made entirely of jungle materials with woven vines for rope, was very skillful. Alright, She had two points potentially on a circle around their camp. She climbed up a tree to mark the second spot.
All she needed was the third. This she found even before she sprang it: a trip wire, again woven from well-camouflaged vines but thinner, attached to a thicker knotted rope that held back a large, sharpened log. Tug on the tripwire, the knot loosed, and the log swung from its hiding place under a large fern and along the path of the tripwire into the intruder. It was more elaborate than Fleta could make on the fly, but it did seem beneath the Valcot's reputation. Perhaps even they were getting tired and desperate.
Fleta scrambled up a tree and looked at her markers. A Valcot would do the math, but Fleta just eyeballed it, because she was fast enough she could run a half-mile across the waving leaves before the birds got her. Assuming the Valcots had either killed or scared off most animals in nearby branches, the danger should be minimal. So she took off across the canopy, shouting, "Valcot Order! Valcots!" as large birds, and perhaps a flying lizard, began a booming, echoing shriek. When she reached about dead center of the triangle formed by her markers, a gruff voice cried: "Shut up! Are you crazy? Stop it, or we'll all be eaten!"
Fleta was very pleased with herself.
The camp of the Valcot order was both miraculous and disappointing. Every material detail of their camp was finer in quality than the Thorgarick camp, down to the ropes of their netting, which were lighter, thinner, and stronger. Instead of laying out bedrolls directly on the netting, they had hammocks of thin, stretching cords. The fabric of their bedrolls, packs, and coats was thinner and better waterproofed than the heavy, waxy canvas of Fleta's people. Fleta surreptitiously wiped an index finger along an exposed pack; the fabric was almost as soft and smooth as fine silk. At four corners of the camp, they had what appeared to be small ballistae mounted on branches with automated loading and winching mechanisms. From the stories, Fleta had no doubt that the large crossbows would shoot farther and be more accurate than anything from the Thorgarick hometown of Lyntre.
What gave Fleta, however, was that she saw nothing in the camp to take down the Tarasque, save friends from malicious flora, or open the gate. Her face fell as the Valcot champion led her through the camp toward a tent. His tall, skinny back was turned to her anyway. He is eyes were dark brown, almost inky wells. Though he looked only a handful of years older than Fleta, his almost black hair was prematurely graying. Aside from introducing himself and guiding Fleta towards a tent for a more formal discussion, he did not seem overly interested in her or the men and women of the camp.
Bertram's unconcern was reflected in the discipline of the camp itself; the soldiers and swornmen were chattier and slouchier than the Thorgarick camp. Perhaps they relied too much on their ballistae turrets and traps and too little on discipline. Although Terrel was overbearing, he made sure that the Thorgarick women and men were attentive and ready to move at the drop of a hat.
One thing Terrel and Bertram shared, however, was privilege and a desire for privacy. As they neared a tent stretched on telescoping poles, Bertram entered without a pause or invitation. Fleta slunk in after him. The tent had a rug thrown over the netting below, which provided more stability than Fleta expected. Prodding it with her unbruised toes, she found it was ribbed with thin slats to create a flatter and more stable surface. A thin, folding table stood off to one side, strewn with tools and springs and gears. Opposite was an unmade bedroll that Fleta noticed with a flush of embarrassment. Before them were a handful of cushions. Bertram stared at the table, lost in thought, before remembering where he was and throwing himself onto a cushion. Fleta sat carefully, facing Bertram on the farthest cushion.
"So?" Bertram asked.
"So what?" Fleta countered.
"So why are you here?" He punctuated his question with a short, precise wave of the hand.
"Why? Are you—have you seen the tarasque? Haven't you noticed anything? Do you have any Gate seeds?" Fleta rushed and stumbled over her words, thrown off by Betram's apparent apathy.
"Are you the ones who took our seeds?" Bertram asked, his mouth flat, his eyebrows raised only the smallest amount in mild curiosity. "Come to gloat? That's not very sporting."
"No, I didn't take your seeds!" Fleta blushed with frustration, which only frustrated her more. "Do you have any idea of what's going on?"
"Well, it appears that the target of this year's Proving—the traditional largest beast—is about twenty times larger than any previous Proving. And someone is playing Umbrache and stealing seeds. Quite the conundrum. I suppose, then, that you've given up, and you're asking for help?" He sniffed, and his lip curled into a sardonic half-smile.
"Excuse me? You've been holed up in your camp for what, five days?" Fleta shouted. "What was the longest proving before this, a week? The size of the tarasque, the seeds, being stuck... how many things have to go wrong for you to take this seriously? Is this just a game to you?"
"I'm working on—"
"Shut up! You're playing with spare parts." Bertram started to stand up in protest, about to retort, but Fleta rose without pausing her tirade. "I don't suppose you know that the scouts who watch the Proving disappeared. Or that the High Skald of Thorgarick came with a dozen men as a search party, and they've all disappeared." Here, Fleta caught her breath, her eyes widening in realization. "I forgot about Bernia. I can't believe I forgot. Maybe she's..."
Bertram ignored Fleta's final concern. He was already lost in calculation. "If the scouts are gone and High Skald Thorgarick took the available duru seeds, then there aren't any Gate seeds within a week's round trip of Lyntre. And that's if one of the other orders took off immediately to Garaton. They might easily wait a day, spend another debating what to do, and leave on the third. When did the Skald come through?"
"I don't know... two days ago?"
"Then maybe we have as many as nine days before someone can bring us the seeds to return." Bertram pursed his lips. "We've survived with minimal casualties for 6 days. It's... doable."
"Yes, but if you wait here for nine days, you won't be at the gate when they come. And..."
"...And if someone could steal our seeds, they could sabotage us in other ways." He slowly nodded, his frown deepening into large wrinkles on his narrow face. "I... see what you mean. Do you have any idea of who is behind this all?"
Fleta paused. "The High Skald's party was attacked by animals in an unusually coordinated effort. Our Scout Master thought it was a sign that someone had trapped and released the beasts in a deliberate attack. I have not seen them myself, but..." Fleta looked to the side and blinked away the building tears. "I saw my friend dragged into the earth by vines and tree roots."
"Mother of Hersuf," Bertram muttered. "That's some sorcery."
"Shaw thought it might be a native group; they know how to move unseen and use the plants and animals."
"A reasonable conclusion." Bertram nodded. "So, after this shocking news, we're back to my original question. Why are you hear? What do you want?"
"I want," Fleta looked him in the eye and folded her arms, trying to look as confident as possible. "I want to gather up all the orders, find my missing people, and fortify the Gate until someone can come through and open it."
"Your people are—literally—in the ground," Bertram said. "The more we move, the more men and women I lose. Counter-proposal: you find the other orders, and we head straight to the gate to fortify it."
"Splitting up hasn't done the Thorgarick group any favors. If you come with me, you'll have my help," Fleta replied.
"My scouts did say you were fast. Even faster than I had heard." Bertram's eyes stared at some distant, invisible calculations. "I saw you alone at the ceremony. Did you really enter the Proving alone, with no team?"
"Yes, I was last."
"And can you fight?"
"I can't kill the Tarasque, but I escaped it once and drove it off another time."
"Really?" Surprise showed on his face for the first time in the conversation. "Wait, say it again," His eyes narrowed into a piercing stare, searching her face.
"I, Fleta Thorgarick, swear by the gift of my Paragon that I escaped the tarasque once and drove it off once."
"Well, the superstitious oaths were completely unnecessary, but your face is honest enough. There is a problem, however."
"What?"
"The tarasque has only been seen twice. If it was chasing you both times, either you are the most Mett-cursed champion, or you attract the tarasque. You may be more trouble than you're worth."
"I... I..." Fleta stuttered. Of course, she felt like everything was somehow her fault. She also hoped, somewhere deep down, that people would tell her it wasn't. Like Alexei. Her loss for words was so obvious even Bertram noticed.
"Buck up," Bertram said, putting a hand on her soldier. "I suppose I can use that to our advantage. If it appears again, are you willing to run in the opposite direction of my people?"
"Um... sure?"
"Shouldn't be too much of an issue for a couple of days, anyway," Bertram said with his perpetual confidence and smirk. "Creature that size must require enormous energy. It only seems active for a few minutes every few days. At least from our vast experience with it." He sighed in mock humility. "Two times is hardly enough to be sure of the pattern, but we work with what we've got."
"Great, so we'll look for the other orders together?"
"Yes," Bertram replied with a sigh. "We'll start tomorrow. The afternoon grows late, and I would not like to move at night."
Watching the takedown of the camp was like watching a mob of grousing sprites make everything disappear. Although the small group of 8 men and women, plus Bertram, moved with no haste, they would have been packed long before any of the Thorgarick soldiers. All of their equipment rolled or folded up in seconds. Even the ballistae were quickly dissembled, folded, and packed. The net that served as the platform for the camp itself was the mechanism by which the Valcot camp ascended and descended the trees. A captain shouted a warning, and everyone hooked their arms and feet to the netting. Then, the captain detached one side of the netting, carefully lowering the net with a gear and pulley. The team then climbed down the netting and collected on a branch. They attached the bottom of the net to this branch, while a person in a harness unattached the top. The netting fell down. The former bottom of the net became the new top, ready for the camp to descend to the next branch.
Before leaving, Bertram and Fleta had consulted about the other orders. It hadn't been a large Proving. Of the major Paragon orders, only Thorgarick, Valcot, Baltir, and Undora participated. The order of Mett had argued that this year was inauspicious and attempted to have it postponed. They were scorned at the time, but they would be vindicated. Asenor, Hersuf, and Ursil did not frequently participate. And Luthfen, to their embarrassment, had not had a suitable champion. Most minor orders never participated; few had the resources or champions with appropriate gifts. The one exception was Koratuk. The order of hunters and warriors took pride in participating and bristled when others grouped them with the other "minor" orders or as a lesser version of the Thorgarick order.
All this meant that Bertram and Undora were looking for only three camps: Baltir, Karatuk, and Undora. Given the difficulty of accomplishing anything in the Jungle, Fleta worried that they would not actually survive long enough to find all three camps. Bertram, despite his objections, was more optimistic, "With Thorgarick and Valcot, we're almost halfway to our goal. And we're the better half, anyway." Fleta suspected that there wasn't much Bertram took seriously. The men and women of the Valcot camp seemed to resent this; they muttered, complained, and sniped at Bertram's cheery orders, none of which he acknowledged.
While a poor leader, Bertram was a fantastic tactical partner. He had or improvised a number of tools that made travel and search faster and easier. Some were familiar, like spyglasses and mapping implements. Some devices were stranger, like the 1000-foot, ultra-light cord with metal, cuplike ear- and mouthpieces. It conducted vibrations across the 1000-foot cord to the earpiece precisely enough to transmit a sort of pulse-based communication reliable from the treetops to the ground. As a device, it appeared moronically simple. However, Fleta couldn't fathom how the Valcots had developed a cord that could reliably transmit spoken vibrations 1,000 feet. Bertram nattered about an ultra-thin, wires alloy in an insulating sheath of some fabric specially designed to amplify waves of the wire's frequency, but it might as well have been sorcery to Fleta.
All Fleta cared about was that she could cover vast amounts of area on foot without ever having to climb to the tree tops to figure out her position relative to other landmarks. Of course, the Valcot camp was many times slower than Fleta, but they could make up in breadth what they lacked in forward speed. Fleta searched in wide patterns to the northeast and southwest as they traveled northwest. The Valcots searched the center, with a pair of scouts in the canopy and three pairs on the ground around Bertram. Bertram's directions on search patterns and accurate mapping allowed the group to be certain of what they had and had not searched. Fleta, on her own, would likely have lost time double back, missed spots, or—realistically—both.
Perhaps most crucially, the Valcots had a series of compasses activated by a whistle by a high-pitched whistle. The whistle was inaudible to humans... and to the ears of most animals. The compass contained incredibly fine mechanisms that were sensitive to these inaudible sounds. The amplified the vibrations back towards their origin, spinning a delicate needle toward the source of the noise. They had a range of about 5 miles. Apparently, this is what Terrel had been trying to use to find the Valcots, but the camp had been too far away. Bertram made liberal use of it to call Fleta back to the main body of scouts when an animal attack was imminent. The first time Fleta saw the compass spin, she rushed to the group, lancing a gigantic beast with a tree branch at full tilt. The Valcot marksmen finished off the enormous, stunned bear creature. For a moment, the camp cheered. Another moment later, they remembered where they were and put some distance between themselves and the bear's corpse. Moral seemed much improved after that.
The camp that night was in much higher spirits than the night before. Fleta had dinner with the soldiers and swornmen while Bertram retreated to his tent.
One of the soldiers, Lorens, offered her the soup with a generous extra ladle. She actually reminded Fleta of Bernia, if Bernia had longer hair and ever smiled. That thought sent a pang of guilt through Fleta. She said a silent prayer to Thorgarick to give Bernia strength. We're coming, Fleta thought, just hold out. She refused to think about the odds of Bernia's survival.
Lorens waved a hand into Fleta's distant state. "Hullo! Here's a bowl for the heroine of the day."
"Thanks." Fleta smiled. "It seems like you've been stuck at your camp for almost a week. I bet it feels good to be moving."
"Klar, it feels good. And terrifying," Lorens said. "But it is better to be terrified on your feet than on your ass. Although we weren't stuck, no. As Bertram said, we weren't doing nothing. He was working on a solution, and we were guarding his scrawny tush."
"Yeah, but if the problem he was working on was slaying the Tarasque, I think he could sit in his tent a fortnight without figuring it out."
"He's a sharp one. And he was trying," Lorens handled the pot and ladle to another soldier and walked with Fleta to a quieter and more private spot. "The problem was, building something to trap or kill a beast 20 times bigger than expected means 20 times more materials and 20 times more men or 20 times as many days on it. Days we couldn't afford to spend exposed buildin' out in the Jungle."
"I hear a lot of grumbling," Fleta said. "But you seem to respect Bertram."
"He's a piece of work, but you get used to that with the Valcot gifted. Most are more concerned with books and theorems than people. Bertram is actually one of the more approachable ones. Part of the reason he came. Necessity is the spark of invention, he says, so he volunteered to be the champion. Helps him make a few things, like those compasses or that dangling tree signal, that could help future Provings or even folks back home."
"Is that so?"
"Well, I know one of your own folks carries a sword forged by our very own Ecke. The design was from a previous Proving, a completely whimsical thing. Scheide, the champion, noticed that it was incredibly difficult to slay large beasts with a normal sword. Not enough weight to cut deep into these monstrosities. So, he designed a heavier sword. Problem was, it was so heavy, no one would be able to use it. That's til Alber came along. You skald sent Ecke an order for a special sword, and he spent a month watching Alber fight and testing him. Then he made that beast of a weapon." Lorens paused for Fleta's response, but she was silent. "All the Valcots that cared about the Proving, which is not most of us, were abuzz. We were wondering if Alber would show up with his sword. Half were grumbling that Thorgarick would be using our own tools against us. The other half wanted to see it in action. How is Alber?"
"Dead," Fleta said. "He came with the High Skald."
"I'm sorry." The two stared at the soup bubbling on a portable stove, whisps of steam rising like ghosts in the pale, yellow light of the Valcot fireless lamps. "If I had booze, I'd raise a toast to Alber and to Kord and Jutta—our fallen."
They finished their soup in silence.
The next day, they found the Undora camp. Or what was left of it, along with the Karatuks.
One of the scouts combing the canopy found the Undora camp by smell, but even before the canopy scouts lowered the talking cord, the soldiers and scouts on the ground felt something off. There was a darkness around the entire area, a foreboding deepness to the shadows. The hand of a fallen soldier peaked under large piles of fresh fallen leaves, shaken from the tree. A two-headed jungle cat the size of a wagon was already sprouting mushrooms. The canopy scouts lowered the signal device and, in their pulse language, communicated that the camp was found and the cost appeared to be clear. The Valcots shifted nervously at the thought of climbing to inspect the wreckage.
Fleta felt a chill dread raise the hairs on her neck and settle into her bones with an ache. However, she figured she could face a few corpses if she could face the tarasque. Fleta volunteered to join the scouts first, giving the soldiers below more time to steel themselves. She climbed but with deliberate caution, relying on a Valcot-made, self-winding grappling hook. As she approached the netting of the camp, she could see corpses of men and chimerical beasts hanging on the net and branch. The corpses were old enough to stink, but the stench was freshly pungent and heavy.
The grizzly scene was horrible, and it was impossible not to look. Fleta saw the corpse of a soldier hacking at a snake that had coiled around his ribs, crushing them. The snake had not let go in death. A rodent the size of two bulls had keeled over, spears protruding from his back like porcupine quills. All around, soldiers and scouts lay with oversized claw- and bitemarks, with limbs torn off. Swarms of insects infested some of the corpses closer to the trees.
The only survivors were the Undora champion, curled in a large owl burrow, and a Karatuk soldier who had hidden with her. The champion, what was her name? Fleta cursed herself for being so self-concerned at the ceremony that she didn't learn the names of the other champions. Fleta wanted to call the champion's name and tell her she would be okay. Instead, the Karatuk saw her and nodded. He stood up, out of the shadows of their hole, and onto the branch. He had a square jaw, shaggy hair, and deep, purple bags around his eyes. He gently tapped the Undora girl— woman, really. She was older than Fleta. The man didn't, or couldn't speak.
"Um, I'm Fleta Thorgarick," Fleta said. "Those two over there, Gertrude and Mihai, are Valcots. The rest of their camp, including champion Bertram, are below. We'll get you back to the Gate safe."
While Fleta led the battle-shocked Karatuk and Undora down the tree, the scouts scavenged supplies. The Undoras were experts in medicines, among other things. All of their battle-enhancing elixirs had been used. Medicine and food were still plentiful, for the dead had no use for either.
