The Taleweaver

Mountain pass, part three

Sitting around a campfire. But for the madness earlier Arthur could almost have believed himself exchanging exaggerations with the tourists he guided over thirty years earlier. Almost, but no tourist had been a two meter tall monster.

He smirked at the memories. So young then, guiding the rich and the famous, long before he became one himself. Some of them he remembered with vehemence, and the last few days had convinced him Gring ghara Khat, or that was as close as he came to pronounce her name, certainly didn't play the part of a monster the way some of the tourists had. He liked her company, liked her ways and how she taught him to relax when she wove the strands of magic around him allowing him to talk with the others. It wasn't the way he once thought of a woman but the way a man might grow fond of an acquaintance becoming a friend. There was of course something inhuman about her, but anything else would have been impossible for someone who was obviously born a predator.

He sat with a small box in his lap and a manual in his left hand, trying to read it in the flickering light from the flames. Soon he'd put the manual away and start cleaning his gun. The people who once equipped him with the weapon were adamant about that. Never, ever use the gun without cleaning it afterward. Not unless you were absolutely positive you had fingers to spare.

Sure requires more work than the mace Harbend bought me, but that one hasn't seen any work.

Once more he shuddered at the memories of what had passed nor even an hour earlier, and in an attempt to dispel those thought he bent over his manual. Reading the last passage to make sure he understood what he was supposed to do he picked the weapon up. It was warm in his hands, smooth and shiny except for the handle formed to give him a better grip. The handle also held the biochip grown from his own cells.

A mixed blessing. He couldn't lend the weapon to anyone else. It wouldn't function in the hands of another. There was still violence and theft of course, but mostly in the form of fistfights and outright piracy; two extremes surviving any change to human society, and the occasional small scale war. Humanity defined herself by wars, but at least the Federation never got involved with its disgusting capacity to destroy any opposition. Wars these days were confined to the petty states declining to be part of the Terran Federation.

Arthur dismantled the gun in silence. A silence he knew he would have to break. They were waiting for an explanation, and he had a question as well, but for now he was happy with the calm lasting since they set camp after the ambush. It took longer to clean the gun than he'd expected. He knew it could be done in a couple of minutes, but he hadn't handled one for decades.

Then he was finished and there was no longer an excuse for him to stay mute. He looked through the flames in search for a face he knew would be there, patiently waiting. One of the women from Ri Khi, a medic of sorts.

"How is she?"

"She will recover. She will be fine."

"You're certain?"

"I am a magehealer. I may not be as skilled as some, but she was not badly hurt. It looked worse than it was. Bruises mostly and a bad cut to her scalp. Bleeds a lot."

He gave the woman a stern look.

"And a broken arm," she admitted. "It will heal. Two days, no more, and you shall fail to see there has ever been any damage."

He shuddered. Chaijrild's arm hadn't been broken. It had been crushed between the teeth of a lizard before the female escort captain killed it. Two days was amazing though, almost... He suddenly laughed. Not almost. It was magic. Magic instead of science, or, if his suspicions were correct, mere science to those invested with the powers and magic to all the rest. In a way very much the same as home. Arthur shrugged the amusing thought away.