Displaced

Chapter 13

"We made it?" Sofie gasped with disbelief as the group looked down upon the rocky wasteland known as the Deadlands, the border between Kutrad and Eterium. "We made it! Oh thank god, we made it." Tears of relief began to drip from her eyes.

It had taken another seventeen days of travel, several battles, and one very unlucky run-in with local wildlife, but they had finally made their way out of that accursed country. Against all expectations, their initial plan to use Olenset to mask their trail had actually mostly worked. They still faced the occasional ambush and couldn't go near any settlements, but they'd been able to breathe again.

They had made it. No more arrows from the trees above. No more attackers hiding in the foliage, ready to leap out when they wandered by. The Deadlands had their own issues, but those couldn't be worse than what they'd already been through.

"Okay Sofie, listen up," Arlette said as she took the other woman aside. The young woman had returned to her strange version of normal after a few days, thankfully, and was back to being the nuisance they were used to. "Things are going to be different from now on, so we're going to have to do things differently as well. The Deadlands are the primary route for smugglers who are trying to avoid paying for a permit to move their wares between Kutrad and Gustil, and there's nothing that Eterians hate more than not being paid. There's going to be patrols all over the area looking for people sneaking through, and we're about to sneak through."

"Couldn't we just buy a permit?" Sofie asked, looking at the large sacks of coin on the three mercenaries, each packed and tied tight to prevent any audible jingling. "You seem to have a lot of money from all the people that you've killed."

"No, this is nowhere near enough. This is only bounty hunter money. What we would need is merchant money, and we're not even close enough to being that rich. Besides, we'll need some of this to pay to enter Begale."

"What's in Begale?"

"Jaquet says that he has family there, some part of his clan that crossed over a generation before he was born."

"After what happened before, that seems like a terrible idea."

"This is different. Droajans take clan stuff incredibly seriously. They prioritize the clan over all else. It's the biggest reason that they're a loose confederation of city states instead of a more cohesive country. Each city has its clans and they're always fighting with clans from other cities over one stupid thing or another, holding grudges for slights from three hundred years ago. If there's a family from the Delon clan here, we can trust them to keep us safe for a bit.

"But we're getting off topic here. The original point I was trying to make is that before any of that can happen, we need to make it through the Deadlands without getting caught by the patrols, and to do that we're going to need to travel differently than we were before. That place is nothing but rocks, salt, and more rocks. The whole thing is almost a giant maze of crags, canyons, and crevices, and it's easy to get lost so we have to stick together. We're going to need to move fast, but more importantly we're going to need to move quietly. Sound travels in the Deadlands a lot farther than you'd think. It echoes of all the walls. Any excess noises will give us away even if we're obscured by a rock or hiding in a canyon. So from this point on, we don't talk unless we absolutely have to, and only whisper at that. Understood?"

"Understood," replied Sofie. "Do you think that more hunters are going to follow us?"

"Only the most committed, I would think. They'd have to buy permits or risk sneaking through like we are, and that's at the risk of... uh..."

"Five years imprisonment for the first offense, twenty for the second, execution for the third," Basilli chimed in.

"Wow, that's terrible," Sofie said.