Chapter 36: The Rebel Soldiers

The next few days took them further into the Lowlands. There were no major cities here, according to Nydra, and Silver Crag – the one where Miro had initially made his escape to start his career as a blacksmith’s apprentice – was about as large as they would get. On the evening of the day following their encounter with the burnt-out mill, they could make out the Deep Scar Mountains themselves on the eastern horizon, impossibly big in Miro’s eyes, though their foothills were still fifty miles away. They knew they were getting closer to what they were chasing after – looks of apprehension were all over the faces of the villagers and townsfolk they encountered. There was not an obvious trail of destruction, but these were people who had once experienced war, had gotten used to peace, and were clearly distressed at the prospect of change. With every distrustful face he encountered, Miro’s hands itched more and more to find those responsible.

He got his wish on the third day. It was morning, and the sun was almost at its peak, shining through a thin layer of overcast that seemed to be a permanent fixture in the Lowlands, when a merchant passed them head-on, carrying behind him a cart full of cabbages.

“Oh no, I wouldn’t go in that direction if I was you,” the stocky gray-haired man said before looking them up and down, “Oh no, but maybe you will do. Me? Too much trouble. No thank you.” And with that, he carried on without looking back.

“There goes quite the poet,” Nydra said, watching the merchant walk at a brisk pace away from them. “But something tells me this means that direction is exactly where we need to go.”

“Agreed,” Peteri said and they continued towards the town the cabbage merchant had come from – a collection of two and three-story houses running in parallel strips along the sides of a rocky pass, the only break in these stony hills for what seemed like miles in either direction.

They heard the soldiers before they saw any of them. Approaching the entrance to the pass, they identified them by their laughter, unmistakably not a joyful laugh or even a drunken one, but the hard edge of a cruel laugh at someone who was powerless against you.

The four of them passed a structure on the side of the main road that looked like it may have been a toll house, but there was no one attending it. Inside the town, the rockface on either side of them was nearly fifty feet high, which plunged a lot of this town, with its stone and brick buildings, into perpetual twilight. Up ahead, they saw two soldiers exit a building carrying a woman under her arms and then push her roughly to the stone-paved street, so they ducked into a narrow alleyway between buildings before they were seen.

“We’ll need to get a closer look at them without getting spotted,” Nydra said, peering around the corner.

“I’ll go,” Miro offered. He lived in the same house with another yellow health bar for years, so how bad could it have been?

“No, absolutely not,” Nydra said.

“Are you serious?” Miro asked. “Have you guys looked at yourself? You look like that one person the King’s army would send to take care of an enemy singlehandedly. You look like you’re about to steal their souls to pay for some dark magic. And you got that weird half-not-there thing going on that just unsettles people.” Peteri considered this last remark and then nodded in agreement. “So I’m going, because I could walk through that town and with that many better marks to pick on, they’ll hardly pay me any attention. And if they do, I’ll fireball them in the face and you’ll come rescue me.”

There were a lot of things going on at once behind Nydra’s eyes as she mulled this over, standing between Miro and the exit to the alley where they were hiding. “Fine, Miro, you can take to the streets. Peteri, you follow along the rooftops. Keep an eye on Miro and see what you can spot, too.”

“Uh, no, you can’t do that,” Miro interjected without hesitation, prompting a raised eyebrow from not just Nydra, “They’ve got at least two of them up there. I saw them when they came in.” What he’d seen was a couple of yellow health bars visible just above the roof tiles that otherwise concealed the scouts. “Would I put my own skin on the line walking in there if I thought Peteri could just do it himself?” Again, the old archer nodded, though his smile grew.

“Alright, but please, be careful,” Nydra said and stepped aside, clearing the way for Miro.

With his way now unimpeded, some of the courage left Miro’s body on the next exhale, but not enough to keep him from stepping out into the open. “Good luck,” he heard Hima say behind him, not without a little sarcasm. Yet, somehow, it had meant something.

Despite the relative narrowness of the street, and the looming cliffsides on either side of him, Miro felt entirely exposed and in the open. He reached out and checked his mana levels – not fully replenished since his morning training, but enough to cause a distraction in a pinch. He tried to walk through town casually, as if nothing was troubling him and he had nothing to worry about.

It turned out that this was the opposite of what he needed to do to blend in and he managed to figure it out before he was found out. The ones in this town that were allowed to go about their business, the ones that weren’t immediately hassled by the rebel soldiers, had all looked like Miro felt – trembling, eyes to the ground, silent prayers in the hopes of not being noticed nevertheless broadcast loudly.

Miro followed suit, and even with his lowered head he could keep an eye on the rooftops, finding that the first two scouts were all there were as far as aerial cover was concerned and Peteri could have probably come with him. There was no use in playing ‘what ifs,’ however; this was his mission alone and he was too deep into it to turn back.

Nothing had been set ablaze here, but the general account from the village with the burnt-out mill was consistent with what he was seeing in this town. A woman soldier stood outside a store next to an older man with a pointed white beard and knobby fingers, sorting through the handful of coins in her open palm.

“Well you must not be a very good tailor then if that’s all you’ve got,” she said, and smacked him upside the head, causing the old man to retreat back in the store as the soldier pocketed the money.

This was the story all along this street – hassled merchants lost their savings while passersby walked briskly and kept their trips short. These rebels though did not look like what he was expecting. Not that he thought they would look as ragtag as the bandits of the high road, but certainly not the well-equipped and even well-groomed soldiers that invaded this town. It made him suspect that it was less likely than initially assumed that he would complete his mission without being spotted; that they were savvy enough to see right through him.