The Sea of Ash was brutal terrain. Cold and clouded over year-round, and not a drop of rain in six hundred years. No wind in that expanse shifted the fine grey dust that sat ankle-deep over the rocky, uneven ground. All that moved was the caravan. Three covered wagons drawn by six horses, ploughing a lonely furrow through the desolation.
A splintering crash, and the rear of the frontmost wagon lurched downward, spraying a choking cloud into the horses drawing the second. To the sound of frightened horses and coachmen’s swearing, the train rocked to a halt.
The wagons’ heavy coverings took a good minute to unfasten, and by the time any curious passengers disembarked, the horses were back under control. The first one to do so, a short, bespectacled man in late middle age, addressed the caravan master crouched before the broken wagon through his silk handkerchief.
‘How bad?’
‘Nothing that can’t be bound. It’ll take a few hours.’ He rose, compelling the smaller man to crane his neck. ‘We’re unlikely to have much light by the time it’s done.’
‘Supplies?’
‘Plenty.’ He gestured to the locker that served as the driver’s seat on the second wagon. ‘Leather straps to bind the axle, staples to hold them on. The break wasn’t clean, so splints would do more harm than good.’
Marten von Donnerheim had learned over the thirty years spent at his trade that the fastest and smoothest road through a conversation with an employer of Doctor Herongräss’s character was to reassure them, politely, that you were competent, prepared, and in no need of the meddling hand of some mothbrained bookfucker who can barely tell one end of a horse from the other. Not that the diminutive academic was a bad man, or a vain one. Just another scholar who didn’t fully grasp the limits of his practical knowledge.
The repair was going to be a bastard of a job, truth told. But it was a bastard that he had been expecting since the two crates Herongräss had insisted his own assistants load took three men apiece to haul onto his wagon. It had been at the edge of the Sea, a fortnight into their month-long journey that the doctor’s assistant had admitted the contents of were more than ‘spare dustcoats’, and he’d not gotten any headway finding out what they really contained anytime since. Now that would change. Unloading them before propping up the wagon’s frame would be necessary, and there wouldn’t be much room for evading the question of what could possibly weigh so much, now the party was far away from the city and its threats, real or imagined. Knowing his luck, Marten mused, it would be a new kind of drillhead, or some equally tedious though no doubt academically or commercially sensitive doodad.
Again.
That business with the Emerald mine had seemed so glamourous, at the time. A wry smile slipped out through Marten’s usual stoicism, hidden by the dense weave of his ash-mask. Wouldn’t those bandits have felt stupid, had they escaped sword or noose long enough to find out they died failing to steal what amounted to a glorified pickaxe. Certainly, stupider than he had felt when he realized he’d killed to defend one. Highwaymen were a pestilence on his trade, and he’d killed his first at the age of fourteen. Now pushing fifty, he’d dug and filled more shallow graves than he cared to remember. Not that he sought to kill, but the roads had been getting steadily more dangerous since the war in the west had been flaring up, and once a caravan master gets a reputation for being able to handle himself, bandit and merchant alike show an interest.
Lately though, he was feeling age catch up to him. A few more runs, and there’d be enough squirreled away to buy a stake in a roadside inn and hang up his boots for good. There was one he’d had his eye on for about five years. The Falconer’s Rest, half a day’s ride from Dunhollow. Seeing the city’s lights twinkle in the broad valley below from the window of the upstairs bar, he knew it was the place for him. The smell of tobacco and the tang of strong ale, the heat of the fire and the cool of his tankard. The laughter of the pretty girls a few tables over, and the taste of pigeon pie.
Shaking his head to clear the memory, Marten refocused on the job at hand. There’d be time enough to daydream once they were moving again. Slower than they had before, of course, but that was for the best on this treacherous ground. He kicked at the dirt, petty revenge for the damage it had caused his best wagon. The rock the rear-left wheel must have jumped on skittered away, carving a trench as it landed with a muffled thump several feet away. A little scar in the otherwise featureless desolation.
The lighter pace would be frustrating, but it was lucky the wagon had fallen foul of a hazard hidden in the loose-packed ground, rather than one of the horses. That would truly have been a disaster, and he cursed himself for his previous lack of caution. A broken leg would spell the end of the expedition, and refunding it would put back any hope of strong ale and pigeon pie a good five years.
So Marten would make it work. It’s what he did.
Rainbow Samphire 