Chapter 6

The next morning started almost the same as the one before. I remembered faster this time that I wasn’t in my bedroom anymore and rolled to my feet about as sore as I’d ever been. It was a wonder I could sleep at all without the mattress and blankets I was used to. My stomach pulsed with a deep throbbing pain that had nothing to do with hunger, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I just put up with it. Ferrith was already up and had foraged some round red berries to go with my breakfast of fish jerky. He looked loads better. No more round, deep set circles under his eyes, and his skin had a healthy glow to it, even if the dark gray color was still hard to get used to.

While I ate, I watched Ferrith cut open the pursuer beast corpse from the day before. He sawed off the oversized talons with a dagger, then started slicing open the legs and torso to pull out the bones. “What’s with the bones?” I asked as I chewed my meager breakfast. He was throwing them in a bloody pile. This was the first time I’d seen him with any significant amount of his armor removed. He had both sleeves of his blue scale mail stripped off and set in the grass next to him. Digging into the beast’s body to rip the bones out left his arms bloody up to the elbows. I was surprised to see how much lighter the skin of his arms were compared to the dark gray of his face. His arms were sort of what I imagined my own would look like if my skin turned gray and I spent three years lifting weights every day.

“They’re worth a lot of money,” Ferrith explained.

“Just the bones? What are you going to do with the rest of it?”

He pointed to the small pile of talons he’d set aside. “You can get a little money for those, too. They’re sharp, and strong enough to cut through steel.”

“I meant the meat,” I said. “Shouldn’t we take some? No offensive but this fish jerky is pretty bland. I could go for more harpy. That stuff was good.”

“Fish jerky?” Ferrith asked. His eyes went wide. “Oh! You mean the smoked serpent. No, we don’t eat pursuer beast. Their meat is poisonous. At least to rissians. You can probably it eat if you want, since you’re an ogre.”

I shook my head. “No thanks. I’d rather not take my chances.” I neglected to correct him about the ogre thing. If he hadn’t gotten the message by now, he wasn’t going to. “What makes the bones so valuable?”

“Magic lives in the bones of some creatures,” Ferrith answered distractedly. “Pursuer beasts are one of the more potent species, and not many people can kill them and get away alive.”

I thought back to the no less than four ogres we’d sacrificed yesterday to make our escape. “Yeah, I can believe that,” I agreed. I tried to bring up the subject from the night before that I’d never gotten an answer about. “Hey, Ferr,” I said. “I, uh, don’t actually have any money. What kind of money do you rissians have? I’m just asking because I realized how much it would suck if there was a magic cure for cancer and I couldn’t afford it.”

Ferrith chuckled. “There’s as many types of money as there are nations to mint it,” he answered. “We’re in the Kingdom of Kalador right now, so what you’re going to see the most of is the Kalador Cross, but you don’t need to worry about money when it comes to healing. I told you I’d take you to see a priest, and they don’t charge for charity cases like yours.” He seemed to think about that answer for a second, frowning. “Well… they’ll probably want to talk your ear off about how the goddess Marketh can save you and how Branding your skin will damn your soul, but if you’re willing to put up with an hour or so of that they will heal you. I tend to avoid the church as much as possible, but if you need a healer, they’re the best around.”

“Uh, that sounds like a good deal,” I said. “I’d be willing to endure a lot more than a boring lecture for a cure to my cancer. Back in my world some of the treatments we have for it are pretty brutal and almost as likely to kill you as the disease itself. Even as recently as a few decades ago they were even worse than they are now. Doctors would just blast you with radiation and hope the cancer dies before you do.”

Ferrith kept cutting into the beast and pulling out bones while we talked. After he separated a large thigh bone he stopped for a second and wiped his forehead with the back of his forearm. “I don’t know that word,” he said. “Radyay…”

“Radiation,” I supplied. “I’m not surprised. It’s an invisible form of… light, I think. Radiation is… I guess you could say it’s poisonous. It’s complicated and I’m not really an expert, but I know it can kill you and you won’t even know it’s happening.”

“Poisonous… light?” Ferrith repeated. He shook his head. “Sounds like magic to me.”

“It’s not though,” I insisted. “It’s technology!”

Ferrith nodded as he went back to his work. I suspected he wasn't entirely convinced Earth's technology wasn't actually magic, but I could just as easily say the same of Earris's magic actually being an advanced application of technology so I didn’t blame him. I left Ferrith to his work and walked over to the river to relieve myself and wash my face. After now two nights away from home I was starting to feel like a greasy bum. When I returned, Ferrith was flaying the skin from the neck and skull; the last bones to join his pile. I looked over the discarded flesh curiously. It looked so alien. The skin was made of thick scales, and I could see now that the fur grew over and around part of it, but that even the skin that had fur still had scales beneath the fur.

When Ferrith reached the antennae-ear-things on the top of the skull he had to saw at them each for a few seconds to get them to separate. It turned out they were grafted directly to the bone with some kind of durable cartilage that appeared orange in color. “Those long ears aren’t worth anything?” I asked.

Ferrith shrugged. “Everything’s worth something to someone,” he said, “but they’re not worth enough to bother hauling around all day and tracking down a buyer.”

“I guess that’s fair,” I agreed.

Ferrith dropped the skinned skull of the pursuer beast on the pile with the rest of the bones, then wrapped them up and shoved them into the large canvas pack Grog carried around. “Kay,” Ferrith announced, “I just need to wash up and we can go.” He walked over to the bank of the river and started rinsing off. I snatched up the sleeves of his armor for him, which I found surprisingly light. When he was done cleaning himself off I handed them to him. He thanked me somewhat awkwardly, then ordered Grog to carry me, and his other ogre to carry the canvas pack. I felt a little less guilty having Grog carry me knowing he wasn’t also hauling around a pack nearly as heavy as I was.

As soon as Ferrith got his armor’s sleeve tied back on we took off. I asked about the gutted corpse we were leaving on the side of the road but he insisted scavengers would take care of it. I didn’t know enough to say if he was just being lazy or not, so I didn’t press the issue. Ferrith led our procession, with the two ogres carrying me and the canvas pack full of his supplies just behind. I felt a bit like dead weight still being carried after all this time, but I wasn’t about to volunteer to walk barefoot just to feel less useless. Even if I’d been willing to cut up my feet trying, the pace Ferrith maintained was too intense for me to keep up with on my own.

It was looking to be another sunny day, and this time the wide river we were following provided a cooling breeze. The South side of the river showed the first signs of habitation I’d seen since arriving in this world, with a few plots of land that looked like they’d either been tilled to plant crops or fenced in to contain strange herding animals that looked like long-necked pigs. That same mountain range I’d noticed before was sprawling to the North, the river was—something was wrong. The ogre carrying Ferrith’s pack… it wasn’t the same one that had carried him out of the forest the night before when we fled from the pursuer beasts. I was sure of it. For one thing, its belly bulged out far less, and for another its skin was several shades darker red.