Chapter 37 – The Clocksmith and The Quiet Road

Tel dangled his feet off the back of the wagon, the dirt road passing beneath, and six other wagons trailing behind. It was nice not to have to walk. Even after his big words back at Doctor Pain’s clinic four days before, he’d barely made it until they set up camp before practically passing out. Finding out they’d be traveling by wagons after that had practically been a miracle.

He looked at the pair of horses directly in front of him, and amended his thought that it was two miracles. Riding was definitely not his forte.

Shara, on the other hand…

“Are we theeeeeeere yet?” she asked from where she leaned against the side of the wagon beside him.

“We don’t even know where there is,” Tel said, but reached into the pack on his other side and pulled out a small, wrapped package. The sound of the paper crinkling made Shara open one of her closed eyes, and he held the meat pie out to her.

Her hand lifted out towards the food, but paused as she glared at him. “You know, I’m not a pet or something, right?”

“Oh, so you don’t want this?” Tel asked, moving to re-wrap the pie.

“Didn’t say that at all,” she said, her hand moving lightning fast to snag the food before Tel could retract it.

Tel chuckled and crumpled up the paper, then tossed it in his pack. They’d found some time that first night for Tel to borrow her watch and grab a few things out of his… dimensional baggy… but had also agreed it was best if he used his magic as little as possible. Doctor Pain had likely shared the fact he was a sorcerer, but other than Shara, none of them knew the specifics of his magic.

He buckled the pack back up instead of answering, a small kernel of guilt twisting in his gut. It wasn’t that he was hiding anything from her – it just hadn’t come up. That was all.

“Where do you think we’re going, anyway?” Tel asked to change the topic and get his mind off the voice rattling around in his head. It’d gotten… louder… since his episode in the enclave.

“Somewhere near the sea, from the direction we’re headed,” Shara said, licking the tips of her fingers, the food already gone.

“Is there anything out this way?”

“Nothing major,” Shara said. “I think we’re close to the Okenlock River though, which means some fishing villages. Maybe the enclave is hidden in one of them?”

“But we’re not going to an enclave, right?” Tel said. “We’re going to another portal.”

“Yeah… and something about that doesn’t add up,” Shara said. “Not that I can add.”

“What doesn’t?” Tel asked.

Shara leaned over the back of the wagon slightly and pointed down.

Tel looked where she indicated, but nothing stood out, so he looked back at her.

“We’re on a road,” she said. “This portal, it’s been lost for years, right? If that’s the case, there shouldn’t be a road going to it.”

“That’s correct,” another voice said, and Neela rode up next to their wagon with a small nod in greeting.

“Hey, you’re not dead,” Shara said.

“Not for lack of the Tailcoats trying,” Neela said grimly. “The enclave is lost though. And more then a few of our friends.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tel said, the memory of blood and screams from his enclave flashing in his mind, and the door creaking open.

Tel shook his head. He couldn’t agree with the voice this time. Even if he’d wanted to, no lone person could’ve changed what’d happened.

A shiver ran up Tel’s spine, silver flashing behind the closed door as something stepped closer.

No, no, no! Tel forced his attention away from the things inside his head and onto Neela and Shara, picking up the conversion midway through.

“…and we’ll leave the road at that point. It’s a bit tough going without the wagons, but most of the heavy stuff has already been moved. We should be able to move quickly.”

“What will you do with the horses and wagons?” Tel asked, focusing on the small puzzle to distract him.

“They’ll keep going to Okenfort, to be sold or held for when we need them next. We’ll use barges to get supplies in the meantime,” Neela explained.

“You finally going to tell us where we’re going?” Shara asked. “I mean, exactly where we’re going.”

“I guess it’s about time. I heard what you did back at the enclave, both of you, so if anybody had any doubts about which side you were on, I’d say they’re gone,” Neela said. “You’ve heard of the Lost Isles?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Shara said flatly, and Neela shook her head. “This just gets better and better.”

“The… Lost Isles?” Tel asked. Sure, the name sounded a bit ominous, but…

“Right. You didn’t even know where the Okenlock River is, did you?” Shara said. “You want to tell him, or should I?” Shara asked Neela.

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“Why don’t you explain it? I need to go check on a few things. Glad to see you’re both still with us, and we’ll talk more when we leave the wagons,” Neela said, then her horse trotted ahead of the wagon.

“You really don’t know what the Lost Isles are?” Shara asked, and Tel just shook his head.

“Geography doesn’t really interest me,” he said.

“It’s as much a – what do you call it? – an urban legend as anything else. Which, now that I think about it, makes a lot of sense…” Shara trailed off.

“Why does it make sense?” Tel prompted when she didn’t seem to be continuing on her own.

“Near the mouth of the Okenlock River, where it meets the sea, there is a group of small islands along the coast. Around there, the Okenlock is apparently really fast, lots of rocks and rapids, and ends in a huge waterfall before it joins with the sea, so it’s not used that far along for trade or anything anyway,” Shara said.

“If we know where the isles are, why are they called the Lost Isles?” Tel asked.

“Because it’s not the isles that are lost, it’s everything that goes near them,” Shara said.

“Name is a bit of a misnomer then…” Tel grumbled, but Shara gave him a scowl, so he swallowed the rest of his complaint. “And it makes sense because…? Ah, you think people are getting turned into more of those monsters.”

“After what we saw in the forest, yeah,” Shara said. “Still, there’s something I don’t get though.”

“What’s that?” Tel asked, pulling his feet up and sitting cross-legged on the wagon bed so he could look at Shara without twisting his neck the whole time.

“How many of those monsters would you say we saw in that building in the woods? And on the way there?” Shara asked.

“Sixty-eight,” Tel said, and small chaos butterfly blooming to life at his words.

“That… didn’t seem like a guess,” Shara noted as her eyes tracked the butterfly until it vanished. “Anyway, I don’t really know if that’s a big number or not, but it sure seemed like a lot in that room. And, with that many of those things, and how dangerous they were, why didn’t we hear anything about them outside the forest?

“And the Lost Isles have been around for a long time. A really long time. If people have been getting changed into monsters the whole time, what have they been doing? Tea parties?” Shara asked with a shrug.

“Maybe they can’t travel far from the portal?” Tel suggested, but it was a good question, and he found himself looking past Shara at the trees scrolling by while he considered it.

The monsters in the woods had to have been gathering people who’d wandered nearby to take back to the portal and grow their numbers, like the corpse they’d seen transform. But it was true, Gravelburg wasn’t far, if they’d strayed even a bit, they would’ve had thousands of more potential converts. Were they just worried the sorcerers and soldiers in the town could’ve stopped them?

No, they couldn’t have been. Shara and Anad had barely been keeping up with them, and even then, the creatures had been very hard to kill. If they’d rushed the town in numbers, or even picked at the edges at night, they could’ve done some real damage.

So, they had to have been constrained by the forest. Connected to the portal and the source of their power. He opened his mouth to tell Shara just that, but…

Tel’s mouth snapped shut. The Voice had a point. If they did rely on the portal for constant power, there would’ve been a connection he could see or feel. There wasn’t. Which meant there was another reason for them to be there. A reason… or a plan.

“Shara, I think they – the monsters – might’ve been ordered to stay hidden in the forest,” Tel said, turning his attention from the trees back to the woman seated across from him. Except she wasn’t looking at him; her attention was firmly on something behind him. “Shara, what is it?” he asked, a shiver running up his spine.

“Somebody is shadowing us in the woods,” she said quietly.

“Tailcoats?” Tel asked, but grabbed his pack and brought it closer to himself.

“If it was, do you think they’d be watching us from the trees?” she asked, eyes trailing left and right as if she were looking for something. “Maybe Regulars keeping an eye on us until the Tailcoats get here?”

“You’re sure we’re being followed?” Tel asked.

Shara tsk’d. “Yeah. I saw something before Neela rode up, but figured it was my imagination, or maybe a deer or something getting startled by us rolling along.”

“But?” Tel asked, glancing back at the drivers of the wagon behind them. The two men were just chatting, nothing out of the ordinary, as the wagon rumbled peacefully along.

“But, it’s been twice more I feel like I’ve seen something, more than one something, moving just beyond the leaves. Whoever is out there is stalking us. I guess it would have to be Regulars, right? Or… bandits, maybe? Are there even bandits along this road? Ones willing to take on this many people.”

“Well, there’s one way to find out,” Tel said, reaching into his pack and pulling out a pair of grapefruit-sized metal balls, along with two gauntlets very similar to the ones he’d used to control the APPs.

“You finally going to tell me what those are?” Shara asked, glancing at the metal in Tel’s hand before turning her attention back to the woods. “And, for the record, I’m trying really hard not to make a comment about you playing with your balls again.”

“You just did,” Tel pointed out flatly, but Shara being snarky was a good sign. She was focused when she got like that, but not worried.

“These are one of the most useful things I have,” Tel said, answering both Shara and the Voice at the same time.

“Are they going to explode?”

“No. They don’t have any weapons,” Tel explained, slipping the gauntlets into place, and noticed the two men seated on the wagon behind them had stopped talking. Ah, Clocksmiths like him. They’d get a kick out of this.

“If they aren’t weapons, how are they going to help us?”

Tel put the two spheres on the wagon floor between him and Shara, then held out his hands and made a few quick gestures with his fingers. Like with the APPs, the small flicks and taps initiated the spheres’ systems, internal gears whirring to bridge the connection with the gauntlets, and immediately started feeding them information.

As soon as Tel’s eyes took in the measurements, pink butterflies burst to life and then circled the spheres, flattening as they went to form spinning rings around the metal.

“These were used for surveillance during the Escalation War,” Tel said. “Even though they look quite plain, they are actually Eighth Generation constructs. Some of the most advanced devices ever created.”

“Shiny metal balls with glowing pink rings were used to spy on people? I feel like they missed the mark there,” Shara said

“You may want to look again,” Tel said, pressing both of his thumbs inward, and the two spheres on the floor between them vanished as Shara did a double-take and the two men in the wagon behind gasped.

“What the…? Where…?” she asked.

“Invisible. Even I can’t see them,” Tel said, though the readings on the gauntlets and… huh… the thin lines of chaos connecting the spheres told him where they were. “Now, let’s see what’s following us,” he added, a few more taps from his fingers sending the spheres up into the air above the wagon.

Information and readings scrolled across the plates on the back of Tel’s forearms, and he quickly tapped out his fingers to recalibrate. “That can’t be right,” he muttered, but the readings weren’t lying.

Oh no.

“Shara, it’s not Regulars, its…” Tel started at the same time a Twitcher burst out of the woods to appear on the seat of the wagon behind Tel and Shara. It didn’t even seem to move, one second it was just standing beside the two surprised men, and then the next its spiked arm was through the sides of both their heads, holding them up like some kind of macabre meat on a stick.

“Shit!” Shara said, leaping to her feet, and her cudgel appearing in her hand as if by magic. “What’s one of those doing here?”

“It’s not just one,” Tel said, the bushes along the road bursting as dozens of the monsters leapt at the caravan.