Children of The Underground

Chapter 2: Welcome to The Zone

While the carriage brought Drazhek and Misha to the city's gate, Drazhek looked out the window one last time, at the city of Vladigorsk.

    The city lay couched in the foothills around The Bald Mountains. He gazed at the copper, onion-domed cupolas and alabaster spires of The Church of Svarog and Perun, the sprawl of buildings, stone and wooden houses painted bright, pastel colors. He passed market square, wide as a meadow with a statue of Mednagora's mythic symbol, The Mistress of The Copper Mountain. Lastly, he gazed at The Vladigorsk Kremlin, the walled fortress holding the city's government, towering over the rest of the city. The Kremlin's walls were a low, thick hexagon.  Rectangular towers with pyramidal tops dotted each vertex. Within the walls was the city government itself, white, boxy buildings with domed and tented roofs.

    He then looked inside the carriage, first down at the hardened leather jerkin he wore, and the rucksack propped beside him, then at Misha, who was studying a yellowed paper rag of a map. Drazhek's partner was dressed much like she was on their first meeting, but instead of a pistol, there was a stocky blunderbuss strapped to her hip, the muzzle flared outwards like a trumpet. On her lap were an assortment of baubles: some cross between a compass and a pocket watch, a leather mask with tiny glass eyeholes and some flattened canister attached to a muzzle, and lastly a crossbow the size of a pistol. Drazhek thought it much too small to hit anything but sparrows with, but noticed that on the crossbow's bowstring was a leather cup, like that on a slingshot.

    The carriage stopped at the city gates, and guards walked to the window to examine them. Drazhek tried to pass them off with as innocent of a face as possible. After all, they were leaving through the northern gates. Not the southern gates to Mediprestol or even the western gates to Polyegrad, but the northern gates. The gates that headed to the Bald Mountains themselves. 

    "Good morning," said one of the guards, a pudgy man in a red tunic and a brass-colored orichalc cuirasse and helmet. In his hands was a rifled musket with a bayonet affixed to the muzzle. "Heading off to the zone, I see."

    Misha glanced at them, gave some cursory greeting, and then told the carriage driver to keep moving. The guards let them be. Drazhek got Misha's attention and pointed at the knick-knacks strewn around her.

    "What's all that junk you have with you?" he asked, pointing to the items on her lap. "It looks like thaumaturgy." Misha put a finger to her lips.

    "That's because it is." she replied.

    "I know it is. But how did you get it? Usually, swag like that requires a large purse, a special license or both. And I don't think you have any of those."

    "Through connections. The kind of connections that would be better left unsaid." Misha's tone was stern enough that Drazhek dropped the subject. "Anyway, you'll carry them for me. And  if you have to, you'll carry your own weight with this." Misha handed him a a hatchet, and then a blunderbuss identical to her own. He strapped both weapons to his pack, then took the fistful of paper bullet cartridges Misha handed him. They felt lumpy and firm. Buckshot he thought. Ten pistol-caliber bullets wrapped together, fired all at once with a single shot. Misha's really not messing around

The carriage came to an abrupt halt. They had arrived.   

    "We're here. The driver said flatly. "Pay up,"

    Drazhek gathered his equipment and stepped out of the carriage. The door opened to the side of some byroad by the edge of a forest as thick as sheep's wool. The blackish green of the forest's canopy contrasted with the adjacent yellow-green meadow. The highway, a tan, dusty dirt road acted as the boundary between the forest and the field. Between safety and danger. between darkness and light.