Brian Pratt - Fires of prophesy

In the morning, Tinok is gone.

“What do you mean he’s gone?” Jiron exclaims after James gives him the news of Tinok’s disappearance.

“He’s gone,” James tells him again. “Sometime last night, he must’ve saddled a horse and taken off.”

“And no one heard him?” he asks, looking around at everyone.

They all shake their heads indicating they hadn’t.

“We must go after him!” he says.

“No, we shouldn’t,” Delia tells him. She grabs him by the arm and stares him straight in the eye as she continues. “With the wagons we will never be able to catch up with him. And if we abandon them, we lose the reason we’re in the Empire.”

He looks at her in anguish and she says softly, “Let him go, you have more immediate concerns.”

“Like what?” he cries.

Pointing to his sister she says, “Like her.”

Defeated, he nods his head acknowledging she’s right. “Let’s get the horses hitched up and get out of here,” he says miserably. He climbs to the top of one of the nearby hills and turns toward the desert, standing there as he looks out across the rolling, desolate hills. “Tinok!” he yells as his eyes scan the horizon. “Tinok!”

Nothing, dejected at the loss of his friend, he climbs back down and helps the others with getting the caravan ready for the road.

“He’ll be okay,” offers Yorn as he comes up behind him, laying a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah,” adds Scar, “he’s a tough one, he is.”

He turns and looks into the faces of his friends and says, “Thanks.” Then he turns back and finishes saddling his horse.

It’s a somber group that heads down the road this morning. Each remembers the fallen in their own way.

“Remember when Qynn was going up against that sailor who thought he was hot stuff?” Potbelly suddenly says, breaking up the silence.

“Yeah,” Stig replies, chuckling, “the guy thought that Qynn was going to be easy pickings.” Laughing, he continues, “He sure made him respect the quarterstaff that day.”

“I remember,” adds Scar, nodding. Then breaking into a smile, he says, “Remember that tune he would always hum as he was whacking someone to its beat?”

Laughing, Potbelly exclaims, “And how he started doing that stupid dance, making the poor guy even more humiliated!”

Everyone from the pits starts laughing at that, James looks over and can see the beginnings of a grin appear on Jiron’s face.

After several more stories of Qynn’s antics in the pits, the mood is lifted somewhat. Apparently, he had been quite the clown at times.

A little past noon they leave the foothills and are once again in flat desert. The river curves to the south, as does the road and after another two hours they begin approaching another sizeable city. From a fellow traveler on the road they learn its name is Morac.

Even though it’s not getting dark yet, they decide to stop for the night here. Pulling to the northeast of town, they find a suitable spot for a camp and proceed to arrange the wagons and picket the horses for the night.

Delia says to James, “I’m going to take Scar and Potbelly with me to deliver a couple packages. Roland too.”

“Alright,” he says, “just be careful.”

“I will,” she assures him.

Once the others are aboard the wagon, she turns it and begins rolling on into town. In the course of her deliveries, she comes across a temple to Coryntia, The Hooded Lady. If you light a candle in one of her temples after a loved one’s passing, it’s said that she will help them to find their way to the afterlife and not be stranded or lost along the way.

She pulls up to it and tells them, “I’ll just be a moment.” Getting down from the wagon, she goes inside the temple and approaches a table with many candles. Sitting in the middle of the candles is a single silver bowl. Placing a coin into the bowl, she takes a candle and carries it over to where a statue of a veiled woman stands. A couple candles are already lit there at her feet and she lights hers from one of the ones already burning, before placing it alongside them. Kneeling down, she says a prayer for Cassie, that she will find her way.

After several moments, she gets up and turns as she walks back toward the exit. Once outside, she climbs back aboard the wagon and then continues on with her deliveries.

Jiron has been moping around the camp ever since Delia left, hurt that Tinok ran out on him. Tersa comes over to James and asks, “What should we do?”

“About what?”

“About Jiron,” she says as she gestures toward him. “I don’t like seeing him like this.”

“Not much we can do other than just be here for him,” he replies. “He’ll work it out on his own, all we can do is to simply allow him the time to do it.”

“I suppose,” she says, not entirely happy. “But I feel so helpless.”

“I know,” he assures her.

Yorn comes over and joins the conversation, “When the others return, we’re going to take him to get drunk.”

“Why?” she asks.

“To help him forget about things for awhile,” he replies. To James he asks, “You want to come?”

“No, I’m not into that sort of thing,” he tells him.

“Your loss,” he says as he wanders back to the others.

From the wagon where Ezra and Arkie are, they can hear poor little Arkie crying. “He misses her,” Tersa says. “She always played with him after we stopped.”

“We all do,” he admits, “she was special.”

A little while later, when Yorn sees Delia approaching, he grabs Jiron and the pit fighters all head into town. They pause momentarily at the wagon and soon Scar and Potbelly join the group as it continues on its way.

When Delia gets to the camp, she asks James, “Where are they going?”

“To get drunk,” he explains, “at least that’s what Yorn said.”

“Hope they don’t get into any trouble,” she states as she watches them go.

The first place they find is an old tavern with questionable clientele. Walking in, they see the mangiest group of derelicts this side of the gutter. “Perfect!” announces Scar as they sit at a large table off to one side.

A woman with a small beard and a patch over one eye comes up to them and says something that none can understand. Despite the language barrier, they finally make her understand that they want drinks. She brings them over several bottles of a foul smelling concoction that makes their eyes bug out and slightly burns as it goes down.

“Like mother’s milk,” Potbelly squeaks out after downing a large swallow.

“I hope they’re not trying to poison us,” Scar says as the liquid burns its way down to his stomach.

They sit there and drink for awhile, trading tales both true and improbable when a group of tough looking men walk into the tavern. They see them sitting at the table and walk over toward them. When they reach the table, one of them says something belligerently to them, which of course no one understands. Their failure to respond only makes him all the madder.

“What do you suppose is wrong?” Shorty asks.

A man sitting at a table next to theirs says, “You’re sitting at their table and they want you out.”

Jiron looks at the spokesman for the group and he says, “No, you find your own table. This one’s ours.”

Even though he couldn’t understand the words, he understood the meaning behind them. The man suddenly reaches out and grabs Jiron by the shirt as he starts hauling him out of his chair.

Jiron stands up while at the same time swinging his fist with all his strength and connects with the man’s jaw, sending him stumbling backward several feet into his fellows.