It was a long day on the trail. Morale had taken a hit, and the wagon train needed to make the best time they could while everyone was still in good shape. Most days, they had been going about fifteen miles. Today- eighteen. Mazelton could understand the logic, though. For the last five or six miles, there hadn’t been any water near the trail. Polyclitus had pushed them just far enough to reach a lake. The Auroch and livestock shoved their heads right in, drinking deeply. The “civilized” humans went a little further along the shore before collecting their buckets of water.

The smart people boiled their water before drinking it. Those with a bit of extra money dunked a water purification core on a string into the water, then fished it out again after a few minutes. Then back it went into the family’s core box, with all it’s little aspirational chambers.

Not everyone was smart.

It was a strange evening for Mazelton- he both wanted to be by himself and wanted company, to keep the intrusive thoughts at bay. He split the difference for sitting around the chuck wagon, listening in on the conversations the teamsters were having. It was… ordinary, probably. He really had no idea. When people tried to draw him into conversation, he gave a few words in reply and immediately volleyed back a question. It seemed to work; most people prefer to hear themselves talk.

He got up after an hour or so, and wandered over to Humble Bissette’s wagon. It was a busy night for her, as the families of the dead men were with her. Loranne spotted him coming and quickly intercepted him away from the fire.

“Best to not drop by. They aren’t in the mood to get condolences from strangers, and without a feast or a real celebration…”

“I understand.” Mazelton said.

“You want to take a walk? I am pretty used to hearing Ma comfort widows, but it doesn't ever get fun.”

“Sure.”

They walked without thinking, chatting idly about their first few days on the road, and what they thought might be to come.

“Pa says that the dust is the worst. Cold is bad, but you can dress for cold, same for heat. But dust gets everywhere. We brought a lot of ointment for the plains.”

“Oof. Wish I had thought of that. Axle grease is what I was advised for dust, that and lots of loose clothing you can wrap up in without overheating.”

“Can’t you make something that deals with dust?” Loranne asked with a little smile.

“I can, but only for small amounts of dust in a closed room. For tonnes of dust blowing at you off the trail?” Mazelton shook his head. “Besides, most of the really skillful things polishers make only start with the cores.”

“Oh? Mostly I just see the same few cores. What kind of things are you talking about?”

“Ways to make the wind blow indoors. Ways to generate freezing air or heat, again indoors. Ways to talk across vast distances. Medical tools that project a knife so small that it is invisible, cutting away diseased flesh inside a body without breaking the skin. Need to make a tiny cut to pull out that diseased flesh, of course, and you need another sort of device to see what you are doing under the skin… which is another thing you can do with cores.”

Loranne gaped at him.

“You’re having me on.”

“Nope. My aunt Maleai made medical devices. I saw them in action a few times, and it always impressed me.”

“Big family?”

“Ahahaha. Yeah.”

“How they doing? Worried about you?”

Mazelton didn’t quite know how to answer that. “They are all dead.” Seemed like a mood killer, and then he would have to explain that he was from Old Radler and what happened at Old Radler.

“They don’t worry about me. Sorry, I’m the one who brought up my family, but I really don’t want to talk about them. Moving back onto the core devices thing- basically a core, outside of a polisher, is a thing that pushes out a type of energy. The second trick a polisher learns is how to control that energy, and shape it in useful ways. The third trick is turning that useful energy into other useful things. For example, you can take a light core, put it in a shiny metal box and open and close the lid to signal people far away at night. Same core, but you put a device around it and now you can do something new with it.”

“I can see that. Hey, what’s the first trick?”

“Don’t die.”

Loranne rolled her eyes at that.

“Sure. Hey, is it true that polishers eat heat?”

“Eh? Never heard that one before. Uh, no. Well yes, but not really.”

That got him a good bit of side eye.

“Um. So… we have cores, same as everybody, and they grow when we get exposed to heat, same as everybody, but the difference is that we can do it on purpose. The reason that the myth about polishers living forever exists is because we clean heat out of our bodies so much faster and more completely than non-polishers. We don’t live forever, but we generally don’t get heat related diseases, so we tend to live longer. So in that sense, we “eat heat,” because we will take heat in deliberately. But not in the sense of replacing food, if that makes sense.”

“I guess. But why absorb heat in the first place? Do you do spells with it?”

Now it was Mazelton’s turn to give Loranne side eye. She was an adult. A young, if grown, woman. Asking about spells.

“We can’t do magic, Loranne, or at least no more than anyone else.”

“You use invisible fire to make things happen. What do you call it?”

Huh.

“A job? I guess if you want to call it spells… sort of? Think of it like this- there is a big rock in the field. You want to move the rock over next to your house, but it’s a big, lumpy, heavy rock. Too big to carry. So you decide you want to roll it. But it’s a big, lumpy rock. So you use your tools to round it out some, enough so that you can roll it home without making it useless for what you want to do with it when you get there. That’s polishing. We take in more heat and build up our cores so we can swing our tools harder for longer.”

“Do you have ranks?”

“Ranks… of being a polisher?”

“Yeah, like a master blacksmith or journeyman greensmith.”

“Nah. You are or you aren’t.”

“But how do people know if you can do the work?”

“Because you do it, or not?”

“But for the people that don’t know you?”

Mazelton had moved from side eye to just puzzled staring.

“I am not following you.”

“If someone is a Master Blacksmith, you know they are really good. So shouldn’t there be something like that for polishers? Like, maybe they can craft cores up to a certain level, or they have so much heat in their core, or something?”

Mazelton had the sudden image of the results of some burgher coming up and demanding to measure Father’s core before commissioning his work.

“You would need at least six good sized buckets.”

“Eh?”

“Sorry, I lost the thread for a moment there. Ah, I do believe that some civilizations have tried something similar, and I think the Gondolfi Alliance had a sort of master-apprentice system. Most states have some kind of licensing system, you know, pass a test and pay a fee to be an official polisher, that kind of thing.”

“No polisher academies? No Polishers of the sixth circle?”

“I really have to ask- where are you getting all this from?”

“Books! We had a good sized library back home, from some little remnant cache outside of town. Had a few farming tools and a whole bunch of books. Mostly fiction. Looks like it was some farmer’s legacy.”

Mazelton nodded. They weren’t common, but they did turn up from time to time. Prospectors loved and hated them, because finding them was essentially random. Usually it was nothing too valuable, but what counted for valuable changed all the time.

“I did go to the clan’s school. It wasn’t an academy, it was just a school. Usual school things happened. Classes, homework, exercise.”

“Lucky. I didn’t get to go to school much. Mostly Ma and Pa taught us at home.”

They had reached the lake. The wind ruffled the waters, so the moon was just a long smear on the surface. Still, it was pretty and peaceful, nestled in all the green.

The next morning presented a small dilemma for Mazelton. Breakfast was porridge, again, and it was likely to be porridge most days. He had developed a taste for sumac over the winter, and it did season the painfully bland porridge nicely, BUT. He only had so much of it, and who knows if sumac grew around New Scandi? Salt, sure, salted porridge was just fine. But again, he only had so much salt. The question then- learn to eat it plain, or try the hot sauce route?

He chose hot sauce. Plain was just awful.

Hot sauce proved to be a qualified success. It did stop the porridge from tasting like plain porridge. Balanced against that was the way the flavors of the porridge and hot sauce mixed in unhappy harmony. Sort of fruity and sour and starchy and bland all at once. And spicy, of course, but as hot sauces went, it was pretty mild. Or maybe that was just the porridge?

Mazelton poked his bowl with his spoon resentfully. Four months of porridge for breakfast. Awful. Filling, but awful.

Duane, that mad lad, just ate it straight. Mazelton resolved not to hold it against him, then congratulated himself on his maturity.

The wagons rolled out and along, much as they had the night before. The trees weren’t quite so dense here, with bare patches of reddish brown earth and gravel rising and falling under the green. They passed alongside a bewildering number of ponds and lakes, connected by small, shallow rivers and streams the auroch could carelessly splash through. It was… nice, for the people with insect barriers, anyway.

Nice, of course, is generally a synonym for boring. And it was getting boring. There are only so many times you can be moved by the magic of a dense stand of trees, lit by the sun reflecting on a lake. Three times, apparently, and really, the third time was more a courtesy “Nice,” than a genuine artistic throb. Generally he would get drunk, or high, or do art (sometimes while drunk or high) or even read a book if he got bored. None of those options were really available while they were moving. Even in his comparatively comfortable wagon, trying to paint or carve while in motion was a losing bet, and he got motion sick the one time he tried to read.

Mazelton had a sudden horrible realization. Talking. People chatted with each other for four months. All day, every day, chat, chat, chat. They kept wanting to mix with people because it was a new source of chat. Why had nobody warned him?! Oh Father Sun, a lot of these bastards couldn’t read. HE would be the entertainment every time he went to charge their cores and purify their water. He looked at the nearest stand of trees, calculating his odds of successful escape.

A rather sore and tired Mazelton set up his beloved tent that evening. He tried walking alongside the caravan as a way to change things up. The good news was that the exercise seemed to do both his mood and digestion some good. The bad news was that boring things remained boring, and now his feet hurt, as did his legs and back.

Lunch time was a precious memory, a scant hour of blessed reading. Tonight, he resolved to sketch his dream home on Plot Twelve.

He propped the plot attached to the deed in front of him on his little travel desk, his light core shining with a pleasant diffuse light overhead. The plot was not quite square, a bit longer than it was wide with a curve in at the top where the river made it’s bend.

There wasn’t anything like a beach, but he could imagine steps being cut down into the river. Maybe put in a little dock? Five steps down to the river. Ah, but what about Plot Ten and Danae? She had suggested a road running the edge of her property onto the edge of his, but that didn’t really fit with where he wanted the house. Let’s see.

His original idea was to situate the house on the bluff overlooking the bend in the river. But. What if he stuck it in the eastern edge of the plot facing west, getting a long view of the river AND the bend? But it would mean losing a lot of ambient heat and limiting the free sunlight- a big loss that far north. He doodled, rubbed away and doodled some more. He couldn’t square the circle. He needed the light and heat. Oh well, back to the bluff.

Okay, stick the house two ken back from the lip of the ridge because erosion is a thing. Outhouse (he shuddered) goes inland a bit but I will be dead and buried if I can’t put in a covered walk between the house and there. Not with the amount of snow Danae says they get. Thatch or tree bark or something.

The house sketch mutated wildly. Sometimes it was a boxy, one room cottage. Then it was a neat little four room home. Then it was an oddly sprawling creature, rooms arranged along the curve of the river and a second floor with a polishing suite and a master bedroom.

“I wish I had some Kelly grass! That would make amazing thatch.” Mazelton heard himself and rested his head on the table, laughing quietly. The camp sounded like it had quieted down for the night. If the house fever had him this bad, maybe he should go to bed too.

Could he get tile? Were tile roofs a thing this far north? Ooh, or slate? No, no, to bed!

The morning drums rudely woke Mazelton. He didn’t remember most of what he was dreaming, but he seemed to remember lying on soft grass with his head in Danae’s lap. The scattered drawings were a mess of smudges and overlapping lines, half thought out notes and irrelevant doodles. He didn’t have unlimited paper, even though he made a point of stocking up before they left. Maybe he could buy or trade for a slate somewhere, and do his sketching on that.

Some of the sketches looked good, though. He liked the meandering little path to the cottage with it’s keyhole gardens. Lots of fruits and nuts.

Breakfast presented it’s usual challenges.

“Been meaning to ask you- why hot sauce in porridge? I tried it yesterday, and I can’t say it was great.”

Polyclitus smiled with one of the purest expressions of joy Mazelton had yet seen him wear.

“Because you have the wrong hot sauce. In fact, I am the ONLY person in the northern half of this continent with the right hot sauce!”

Polyclitus whipped out a glass bottle, carefully wrapped in thick wool. The red sauce within was shockingly vivid, bordering on tangerine with lots of tiny bubbles trapped inside. The stopper was a soft cork of some type Mazelton didn’t recognize, held in place with wires. It came out with a distinct pop.

“You may try a dab. Because I like you.”

Mazelton offered the inside of his wrist, but was sternly refused.

“Best not to get it on your skin. Spoon.”

Mazelton offered the spoon, less certain now. With immense ceremony, Polyclitus dispensed a single, glowing, almost vibrating, teardrop of hot sauce onto the spoon. Mazelton received it with a small bow, and licked the spoon.

It snapped his head back like it smacked him in the mouth. Fruit, orangey and carroty, with a sweet tangy peppery flavor cut with a strong dose of lactic acid. The fermented funk provided a bass note to the sharp, sunny treble of the peppers and rising up out of that deep came the heat. Oh did the heat come! Rolling up his tongue, coating the inside of his lips and sliding down his throat, the heat spread like a forest fire and left a deep coal bed behind. His eyes watered, like his tears could extinguish the heat, but they couldn’t. Nothing could. His world was fruity, carroty, sunny fire.

Mazelton could hear the teamsters laughing.

“Straight up the Mud Dragon River, all the way from Tabbac Island! A secret blend of five peppers and three vegetables, fermented under the strict supervision of the Tabbac Island AgroClade. Widely acknowledged as the best and most sovereign remedy against droopsy, mange, the flux and the drying up of the loins, not to mention supreme in flavor and with a mellow, lasting heat. I had to run a Caravan through a typhoon and across an entire flooded delta, saving three villages from certain starvation, to earn the right to purchase a single case of it a year.”

Polyclitus wiped a small tear from the corner of his eye.

“Truly, the righteous are rewarded for their good deeds. Aah! My suffering was worth it. Truly worth it.”

“Delightful.” Mazelton wheezed.

“Now don’t think you can just enjoy that whenever! That’s a special treat for you.” Polyclitus waved him away. “Just use it as a reference the next time you buy hot sauce, now that you know what the good stuff tastes like.”

Plain porridge never tasted so good as it did that morning.