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The Broken Lands: Chapter 6
🕑 Added 2021-11-11 07:44:55 +0000 UTCAlmost double the size this time. I said I'd increase chapter size as I got rolling.
xxxxxxxxx Chapter 6
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I’ve always had a good memory, but more importantly, memory is a skill like any other. It can be trained.
With the ever present threat of the damned madkites, children are not let aboveground unattended. But child eyes are the clearest, and there’s too much work to do to let hands and eyes be idle.
So instead we played the Watch It! game.
Big pegboards are set up in a room, on one to four walls. Painted disks are then hung on pegs, usually in grids of about five by four per board. Each disk is about a foot and a half wide, and is painted with white clouds on grey background.
Now, this all takes place underground, so its lit by mage lamps, glowing stones that produce a fair amount of light. The difference is, outdoors there’s always light coming from every direction, except from physical objects or particularly dense rainclouds. In other words, outdoor shadows don’t generally exist. Underground, of course, they do, especially with mage lights, which slowly pulse with ebbs in the local mana flows.
So, the game is played as such. A person, and yes adults play as well, is given a set amount of time to memorize the layout of the cloud disks. Adults get a minute for all four walls, children generally get about a minute per wall, depending on their skill level.
Then they put a bucket on their head, so they can’t see.
Then someone else goes around to the different boards and makes changes. Now, the changes can vary. Generally, either a disk is rotated, multiple disks are rotated, or a tiny piece of parchment is added to a disk that’s almost but not quite the same shade of white as the clouds.
Then the watcher removes the bucket, and has a certain amount of time to spot the changes. Spotting the parchment madkite is the easiest, so long as you have good enough eyes to actually pick it out on the board. But you can’t get cocky, there might be another one, or more, hidden on other disks.
Spotting big disk rotations isn’t bad, but the subtle ones are hard to spot. And it matters if you can spot every disk that was moved or not. Also, the disks themselves can be moved slightly, to a different peg.
Competition being competition, even things like leaving a rag on the floor, or some other outside change can be fair game for a contest between people.
And to keep people playing, and playing to win, there’s prizes. A piece of corn bread, always good. Some dormouse jerky. A boiled egg. A mushroom. Very very rarely there will be something like a knife, or some jewelry. I’ve got an iron hair bead I won once.
Food was really hard to come by for a while when I was younger, after the flood. So first priority on food always went to making sure everyone had enough to not starve.
Enough to not actually starve isn’t nearly enough to not feel like you’re starving, so let me tell you, competitions for an extra snack could get pretty fierce. Even if there wasn’t enough food available for a snack, we still trained for the times we could, and we got really, really good at spotting the slightest change.
And when we were good enough at the games, we could be trusted with aiding the watchguards in watching over the animals.
All of our animals are housed in underground caves. But, other than mushrooms, food doesn’t grow in our caves, and it’s easier to let the animal walk to the food than it is to carry the food to the animal.
When watching the animals, you have to keep an eye on them, to make sure one doesn’t climb one of the stone fences and get into another field, but you also have to watch the sky, and be ready to yell for help from an adult. For protection, I had a shepherd’s crook with a spear point on the bottom, and a cross brace wide enough to block the mouth of a madkite halfway down the shaft. There are decoy traps, as I said, which will hopefully catch any who show up, and the animals are more likely to move and draw their attention than I am. That’s better than losing a person, but the loss of a chicken or goat hurt everyone.
Still, just in case one seems to be going for me, I reverse the spear and set the crook on the ground, hunkering down on the ground and pointing the spear tip at any incoming threat.
It generally works. We’ve never lost a child to a madkite at our hold. But that’s mainly because all our people know how to watch.
To best watch, your eyes need to be moving at all times. Look at the sky. Memorize it. Look to the field. Memorize it. Back to the sky. The clouds are always changing. But is there the distant spot of a creature? No? Memorize the clouds. Back to the field. Are all the mice present? Is one drifting close to a wall? Ever so often, check the walls and hedges. Threats probably will not come from there, but a good watchguard notices everything.
I was told that, when I get older, I’d get good enough at the task to be able to devote some effort to thinking. Remembering things like books or experiences, planning for the future, thinking about magical formulae, and if I got really good, maybe scribbling notes in a book.
But when you’re young, you can’t do that. Watching is your job, and you have to make it your only job, or you might not grow up to do other things. Concentration. Memory. Spot the difference. Look for patterns, or breaks in the pattern.
And I’m good at it.
So, the day that changed my life was a day I was on watch. I was about eleven and three quarters old, and I was so good at Watch It! that I’d been moved to the adult games. I also had Mica by then, and though he had to compete in the games on his own, together nothing got by us.
Binding a familiar was the first first circle spell I managed, just after my eleventh birthday, so we’d been together for less than a year. I’d won a boiled egg that morning, correctly spotting four rotated disks, one moved, and a tiny charcoal mark. I shared it with Mica as we went out to watch the young mice.
A field of carrots had just been harvested, so we had upturned earth and carrot tops all over the place. The chickens had already been over the field, scratching at the dirt and eating bugs and worms, and occasionally bits of greens, but they like bugs better. Next was a swarm of half-grown giant dormice and me. They were all around fifteen to twenty pounds, and like any half grown animal, constantly hungry.
We had goats, too, but they were better at browsing than the dormice, so the more nutritious carrot tops went to the mice. And they swarmed that field like they were starving.
Mica and I hid in the lee of the wall around the field and shared the egg while the dormice enthusiastically munched greens. They also sniffed at the dirt, their better senses of smell and better digging abilities let them find bugs the chickens had missed.
There was plenty of food, more than they could eat in one setting, so the goats would be brought in last to finish the cleanup. Happy dormice are easy to handle. They’re even kind of cute, though I know not to get attached. The vast majority of them are destined to be griffon food. Maybe we’ll get to eat one or two.
Once the dormice were stuffed and starting to spend more time lying on their bellies than eating, I called the adults and we all slowly herded them back to the tunnel down. I stayed up top while they went down to lock up the dormice.
And that’s when I saw it.
Drifting slowly through the sky, just barely in visible range.
I didn’t know what it was, at first. It was green and brown. Lumpy, with something black on one end.
“Mica, go up there and see if you can figure out what that is,” I ordered. “Be careful about getting close, there might be something dangerous hidden on it. Just get a closer look.”
“Okay!” he chirped.
Black is easy to spot in the sky. That’s part of how I noticed the thing. So it wasn’t hard to see my friend fly out to it, though he was small enough to be all but invisible at the distance, which gave me something of an idea of how big it was. I could feel his excitement over our bond.
Mica came flying back, cawing excitedly. “Long black thing held by wood!” he said. “Wood has plants growing on it. Black thing is round and has a circle hole in one end. Made of metal!”
I admit, just based off that description, I didn’t figure out what it was. But virtually nothing native to the sky is black, metal is rare, and circles rarely occur in nature. Whatever it was, I wanted it.
“Good job, Mica!” I praised, keeping my eye on the thing. “Is it going to hit, or is it going to fly past us?”
“Don’t know. Could be close.”
I stood there and watched it for a bit. It was definitely getting nearer, coming in on the wind at an angle. Wind was blowing towards me from the outer edge of the land, relative to where I was. That would be pushing the thing further inland, which meant it should get close to the island as it drifted down relative to me.
I eyed it, trying to figure out where it was likely to go, and decided it wouldn’t naturally hit the land, but it might get close enough in our sky to get grabbed by the gravity of the island.
Unfortunately, Wygriff Hold, the sky island we were on, was pretty flat. And flat land meant a short sky, before the grasp of gravity fell off and it was just floating in air.
I didn’t know if it was going to get close enough.
I ran to the tunnel, but the adults were missing.
And the thing was drifting overhead.
All I could do was grab a coil of rope, something we had lots of, and run after it.
The surface of our skyhold is divided up into fields by stone walls with trees and hedges and tall grass growing along the top. The purpose is to block the wind and keep it from carrying off our soil, but it makes it hard to run in a straight line, too.
I ran as hard as I could, calling for an adult the whole time.
“Thing! There’s a thing in the sky!” I called as I ran.
“Danger?!” someone a field or two over called back.
“No! Not danger! A thing! We have to catch it!”
“What is it?” the man called back, but his voice was getting blocked by the hedgerows.
I ran for all I was worth, trusting the adults to catch up. Mica flew overhead, maybe they would see him.
As I ran, I uncoiled part of the rope. The end was already in a lasso type slipknot, for wrangling ornery goats, so I didn’t have to do anything special to it.
Which was good, because the thing wasn’t getting any lower. In fact, I think the swirling winds over the walls and hedgerows might have been pushing it higher. Wygriff hold island isn’t a circle, or even a square. It’s kind of like a bent tree trunk, less than a thousand yards across in most places, though lengthwise it’s decently long. I only had a couple hundred yards to go before it flew over and out into the wild sky.
“Mica! Carry this rope to it,” I yelled, running as hard as I could through gates, up and along the top of a wall to the highest, closest I could get to it, and throwing several coils of rope as hard as I could into the sky.
Like I said, the local sky of the island is short, no more than fifty feet highest at its peak, and lower than that in some places. I was maybe fifteen feet up, and luck was with both Mica and I, so he was able to catch the rope as it stretched out and pull it into the sky.
Gravity is weird. There’s all sorts of ways of cheating with it, since it works on one side of an invisible border, but not on the other. The coils of rope that went past that limit suddenly lost all their weight, though the length still in local sky pulled on them back. But they still had their momentum, and Mica was pulling with all his might, letting some of the coils out of his grasp to increase his reach.
And he got the loop around the end of the black tube thing, right as the rope stretched taut and yanked me through the hedge.
Scratchy. But I held on.
My weight pulled back on it.
It’s momentum carried it forward.
It had a whole lot more momentum than I had weight. I was dragged behind, much like the time when I was seven and had tried to lead a particularly stubborn billy goat.
I heaved, and I pulled, and I’m sure it was drifting lower. But not fast enough. The only thing left between me and the edge of the island was a thin row of border trees and the final stone wall at the edge.
Part of the problem was that I was being pulled up, at an angle. So my weight counted as even less when it came to digging in and finding traction. I had the strength to hold onto the madkite leather lasso, but I had nothing to brace against. Even Mica was holding on with his feet and flapping hard, trying to help me.
If I hit the wall, I’d either get pulled over the top, or I’d have to let go and lose it. I couldn’t brace against it, it’s just a dry stone wall, not something mortared in place. And it was only meant to stop wind, not anything else.
No, the trees were my only hope. Rather than struggling all the way, getting dragged along the ground behind the thing, I had to run ahead.
So I did.
I stumbled a bit, and then I raced ahead, covering the last forty yards of border field and reaching the trees before the thing passed overhead. Quick as I could, I passed the rope around the biggest of the tree trunks ahead of me, going from right hand, around, and back over from the left, and around again, then over to the tree next to it, and tying a hasty and not particularly great knot.
These were not huge trees. They were oak trees planted when my parents first settled there, making them a bit younger than thirty years old, so they were about six inches thick. Not very big at all, so that’s why I used two.
Next, I used the second full spell I’d ever learned.
Might.
The first step to understanding how to increase your own strength is to know your own strength, and how your body produces it. It’s also a fantastically useful spell when you’re eleven and a wheelbarrow full of rat manure weighs as much as you do, but you still need to get it up the tunnel and out to the compost pit.
Then, I used a trick my brother had shown me. I yanked the slack out of the rope as the object passed over head, braced a foot against the fulcrum tree, and pulled.
Right away, the tree leaned and creaked alarmingly, the soil beneath my feet seeming to rise up. Oaks have a shallow root, so this was one of the worst types to use for this sort of thing. In response, I let some of the leather rope slide through my palms and around the trunk of the tree.
By braking the momentum over time, I stopped the heavy thing from just jerking the whole tree out of the ground and over the edge.
I realized my oversight immediately.
I wasn’t wearing gloves. The rope sliding through my palm burned me immediately. Madkite leather is tough and never rots, but even with the bristly hairs shaved off, it’s still a rough surface. We even use it to polish wood.
So my unprotected palms were in trouble immediately. I couldn’t help it, I screamed.
Actually, it was probably more of a high pitched screech.
But you know what?
I held on.
I fought for every single inch of rope that damned thing took from me, sliding through my hands. Friction burned me, and the rough leather started removing cooked skin. Still I held on.
It wasn’t enough. The rope between the trees grew taut as all of the slack was pulled out of it. Then the trees started leaning. First, the anchor tree leaned over to the fulcrum tree, and that’s when I gave it everything I had left.
I stopped letting the rope slide between my hands, and held on like a vise grip.
So of course, as the anchor tree leaned over, and the rope kept sliding around the trunk of the fulcrum tree, my hands were sucked in between the rope and the trunk.
I was holding the rope underhanded, both palms up, and my left hand went in first. Then my right hand hit the knot tied to the anchor tree, and was pushed in as well, with the tree leaning over and coming up against the one eating my hands.
It pulled both of the young trees completely over, me caught in the middle, and ended up laying on top of the stone wall, with more than half of both of the trees, their entire canopy of leaves, hanging over.
They should have fell on over, pulling me into the sky.
Ah, but that’s the thing. Gravity stops at the edge of the island.
The treetops, hanging in the sky, had nothing pulling on them but the dregs of momentum.
And the tree trunks and roots, with me included, were being pulled down on the island side of the fence.
It stayed.
And dangling at the end of the rope, having swung down to crunch into and bounce slightly off the underside of the island?
Was an UnBroken era warship cannon. When the Breaking happened, there was a powerful warship from another empire in our port. It had been dragged into the sky when the ocean and river flowed over the edge in the hours just after the rest of the world had disappeared.
Not just any canon, either. No, this one was made of steel, unlike our own bronze. Stronger and lighter, compared to our own, though it still weighed about thirteen hundred pounds. And it was magic. It would never misfire. Never explode. Several times per day, its cannonballs could explode with fire to burn an enemy ship, or turn into an veritable lightning storm, zapping everything in range.
It was impossibly valuable.
Sold to and installed on the warship my father served on, it paid not just for the loans and assistance our skyhold needed to recover from the flood years past, it also paid for improvements. More animals, loads of fertilizer and dirt, tools and people to use them.
All it cost was my hands. That’s not the worst trade in the world.
I mean, I still have them. My left is still pretty strong, though I can’t spread my fingers, or open my hand flat. They’re always curled, but my thumb is fine, and I can still open them enough to grab things. I can pick up a bucket, pull a rope, or grab the handle of a shovel or hammer with it just fine. It’s no good at fine control, but I was always right handed anyway.
My right is a little worse in some ways. My right pinkie can’t move on its own anymore, so during the healing, they let it heal attached to my ring finger. The bones running through my palm all broke pretty badly, so that hand is always bent a little, almost like the left, but the bend is mostly in the hand itself. The thumb healed fine, and my index and middle finger work alright. Unfortunately, that’s what killed my plans to be a mage-knight.
A common hand gesture, the pont, is used as an evocation sign in spells. Not the school of magical thought, but the older meaning, to ‘evoke’ an effect. It requires the dominant hand to have the middle and ring finger together, with all other fingers and the thumb spread apart. I can’t do that. There’s others I can’t do as well, but that’s the most commonly used one.
Also, when learning to use most one handed weapons, but most especially the sword, a firm grip strength is of vital importance. And the pinkie finger is incredibly important to the overall grip on a shaft, forming a key point of control. I can’t do that, either. Mine kind of slides around the ring finger its attached to, stretching the flesh between them. And my ring finger is not super strong, either. The joint there is still pretty mangled, here five years later. Too much pressure… hurts.
Actually, both hands hurt often enough, especially when I’m holding onto something with all my might. It’s a common problem when I sleep, I tend to grab onto my blanket, twist it in my grip, and clench with all my might. I usually wake up with my hands aching, having spent all night still struggling to hold onto that damned rope.
So when I snapped awake, face buried in Granarrik’s feathers, the first thing I noticed was that my hands hurt.
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