Tallah

By noontime Sil had to use another bag of ink-nettle to replenish herself. Vergil worked the entire morning and his efforts dragged on her. She strained under the sapping effects of the cursed helmet but still refused to pass it over to Tallah. With good weather, they’d probably be in Valen before she succumbed to nettle-sickness.

Vergil had chopped his way through the entire pile of wood at Miriam’s, the neighbour’s and, at Sil’s instructions, also worked his way through most of Ammie’s stockpile. He drew some odd stares, but people there seemed used to adventurers passing through their little hamlet.

Getting him to wear the sheepskin coat and trousers had been an exercise in frustration and much cussing on Tallah’s part. Either the possessing ghost despised clothes or it was being wilful out of pure spite. Threats of immolation were made, promptly ignored, and then attempted to be put into practice.

“She wasn’t kidding,” Sil said, shivering in a midday light snowfall. The world shimmered white as Winter rolled implacably down the mountains. She leaned on her staff, now wrapped in a thick woollen covering purchased with some difficulty from Ammie. The woman had kept insisting on gifting it away.

Ambling up the dirt road was an old, shambling mule-drawn cart. Its wooden wheels creaked and rattled, and metal jugs in the open bed jingled under their canvas. The driver had a cover draped over his shoulders, his breath steaming in the crisp air.

“I feel as if I’m visiting a bad museum piece. I sometimes forget these places still exist. I used to get rides down into Solstice in one of these when I was a girl,” Tallah reminisced. “Never liked the smell of horse.”

Cliff’s Edge was a small community of scattered homesteads. They reared livestock and sold the excess produce, and not much else happened there as far as Sil could gather. Sheep bleated in their enclosures and goats screamed in horrifying near-human voices. The rest was the eerie silence of the high hills.

How do they even stay sane out here? She did not voice the question. She tried to put the caves out of her mind. They remained far beneath them, hidden, unguarded. Open.

She took a few steps through the snow to warm up and hide restless nervousness. Looming above, the mountains were a constant reminder that she’d be all to glad to leave behind.

Ammie came out to meet the cart with two large metal jugs. She talked to the would-be coachman and pointed to the two waiting by the muddy road. Amus nodded as she explained.

“My tits are freezing,” Tallah groaned. She kept trying to scratch under her eye patch, despite Sil’s protestations.

“At least you have the hat,” Sil replied, shaking melting snow out of her hair. “Why, precisely, don’t I have cold weather gear?”

“Because we’re idiots.” Tallah blew into her hands. The temperature had dropped even more since morning.

Why she wasn’t infusing herself to keep warm was worrying Sil more than she wanted to admit just then.

Watching the cart amble towards them felt like waiting for an iceberg to shift. It rattled up the road with the patience of millennia.

“No,” Sil said with more than a little malice, “could it be because a certain someone ignored me when I asked for us to stop for necessities before we headed into the hills?”

Tallah shrugged.

“We had food. Don’t blame this on me. It wasn’t supposed to take up our entire Fall.”

Sil did not even crack a smile.

“If you get frostbite anywhere nasty, I won’t be treating it. Maybe next time you’ll listen to me for once,” she grumbled as the cart rattled to a stop in front of them.

“Good day, Your Graces,” the cart’s driver said, unmoving under his canvas. He pretended with very little skill not to have overheard the conversation.

“Good day, sir.” Sil smiled at him, though her teeth chattered in the cold. “Would it be possible for us to accompany you back to Valen?”

“Aye, Ammie told me.” The man in the cart pushed the cover off his shoulders and climbed off his perch with a nimbleness that belied his age. His beard hung down to his trousers. He rounded the cart and prepared two spots for them among his load of cheeses and milk jugs. Ammie came by and handed him a bundle of blankets.

“You dears take care now. If you's ever in these parts again, do come visit. Bring us some news of the big city, aye?”

She helped Amus set up a comfortable spot for them for the long, slow trek.

It wasn’t the most dignified way of travel. It wasn’t even quick or comfortable. But it beat walking or trying to transfer closer via portal. If Valen’s Illum Hearth sent them here, there would be very little chance that it would choose another destination if Sil tried again.

Well… bugger.

They settled in, got comfortable and soon saw the last of Cliff’s Edge’s scattered thatch-roofed huts shrinking away as the road sloped down into the valleys.

Vergil walked. If he minded the chill, he didn’t show it. The long trek gave the two channellers ample time to study and discuss him.

“I’m going to take apart that helmet after we drop off its contents at the Sisters,” Sil mused, nestled against Tallah, talking in a low voice. “And Anna’s wand. I’m looking forward to dissecting her enchantments. There were interesting things happening when you fought.”

“You picked it up?” Tallah asked, eye closed against the bright snow-covered landscape.

“Grabbed it off the last doll you blasted. Nearly lost my head for it. Hope it was worth it.”

Tallah yawned and nestled into Sil’s side for warmth, Anna gone from her attention.

“Baaah!” she mock bleated and chuckled. “We end our hunt in the back of a cart. Like sheep. You’re even dressed like one.” She dozed off, chuckling, before Sil had properly picked her expletives.

On the descent from the hills grazing land turned into flat farmland, pockmarked by farmsteads among empty tilled fields. Snowfall from the mountains turned to sleet and soon to rain. Miasmas of burned straw and dung wafted up to them as they passed through the quiet countryside.

Tallah slept fitfully and woke often even in her exhausted state. Sil held her so her sudden cries wouldn’t spook the cart driver, though she was sure he feigned his ignorance.

Village after village rolled by in the relentless rain. Scatterings of homes across naked hills. Groves of hidden hovels in narrow gorges. They huddled under the tarp as Amus’s cart stopped and he picked up his deliveries from folk that, more often than not, wouldn’t spare them a glance.

They spent the night in a dry and warm barn close to the road in a final village before the hills levelled down. The driver opted to sleep in the cart, under his tarp.

Sil switched the illum siphon to Tallah after all. Resting would be impossible with the constant draw of the helmet and the sorceress could keep the effect going for much longer without help if she wasn’t exerting herself. In her state, Tallah wouldn’t use her abilities to their proper extent for a good, long while. A passive draw was manageable. It only made her sleepy.

Closer to Valen, the dark held little of the terror it commanded in the mountains. Patrols passed by in the night. Boisterous adventurers on their sorties. Armed men astride from the Citadel, still on their routes in spite of the weather. Sil heard them in the depths of night, grumbling, sharing short barks of laughter or cusses.

Closer to Valen, ratmen and chimeric horrors seemed… well, distant nightmares that only clung on to the shadows of Sil’s imagination.

Still, she slept little.

They returned to the road at first light. The cart rattled on, rain fell, Vergil splashed through the cold mud behind the cart, sullen but still muttering.

Tallah fell in and out of consciousness. Sil stroked her hair under the tarp and otherwise enjoyed the grey scenery as it crawled by.

She felt herself light, disassociated from reality, drifting back to herself as Valen’s walls drew closer by the hour. Anna’s caves and her monsters faded in Winter’s cold light.