Badlands
By: Eric Pierce
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Themantle, Writing

The Mantle is a serialized fantasy story. More about it here Table of contents

They struck camp while a full moon looked on. The bare trees black and the ground silver and they like a pair of hooded wraiths haunting a dead place. Because he knew the way, Simeon took the lead. He paused at the dry creek and looked back to find the old man had stopped to gawk at the desolation.

The air still tasted burnt; Simeon wondered if it was possible to scorch the wind.

The bandit’s boot prints had hardened in the mud; tracking them east was not difficult. Free of the need for close study, Simeon watched the shadows that pooled darkly and waited for something to materialize as though from a portal. But nothing emerged to challenge them.

The old man came forward, staff held crosswise in both hands. He was stooped as ever but somehow seemed more in all that midnight glow, eyes bright and sure. He wordlessly stepped past Simeon, taking the lead and reasserting the natural order.

They walked some twenty minutes, pausing at times to gauge their surroundings, to listen to the thin wind rattle the dead trees.

The bandits had camped on a bare shelf of stone open to the sky and ringed by the scrappy remnants of brush. Simeon and the old man watched the camp from behind trees but it was immediately apparent that the bandits were not there.

The old man used the end of his staff to poke at the charred embers within their stone circle. He frowned at the trees beyond. “They have at most a day on us. Probably less. We may catch them before daybreak.”

Simeon wasn’t all that anxious for a reunion. He told himself that this time it would be different. This time they’d have to contend with the old man and his magics. But he felt little better as they re-entered the forest.

They lost the trail sometime after midnight. The boot prints steadily faded until they were simply no more. They stood and looked about and then continued in the same general direction, but after another thirty minutes could no longer be certain they were still on the bandit’s trail. They stopped to rest.

“We must move on,” the old man said, more to himself than Simeon. He was sitting astride a fallen tree and stared unblinking at the ground. “Much as it pains me. We’ve lost too much time already.”

“Master?”

The old man reached out his hand for Simeon’s arm. “We must attend to our errand. Come along boy.”

They veered northeast and by dawn left the eerie still of the burnt forest, entering a hard, hilly country gray with rock. Scraggly weeds clinging to thin soil on the leeward side. Clouds of dust disintegrating as rapidly as they’d coalesced.

They climbed a high mount, hand over hand, and from the summit stood looking in all directions. There was no movement but what the wind made.

Though it’d been a long night, the old man was in favor of pressing on. They napped in the shade of a boulder and climbed down from their rocky perch an hour later.

“Master?” Simeon had been troubled by something and now seemed as good a time as any to seek the old man’s counsel.

“Hmm.”

“The fire – why did it stop listening to my commands?”

“All things have an innate nature. A natural tendency, hmm? You must always remember that. Fire will always want to burn. The wizard who doesn’t consider such things before calling and commanding won’t be a wizard long. As you very nearly discovered yourself.”

Simeon thought on this. “What is the nature of starlight?”

“To shine, coldly. Also a certain degree of aloofness.”

The sightlines were good and the country bleak and empty, so they increasingly moved by daylight. Better to see the uneven footing.

They scaled rocky ascents carpeted in loose stone that shifted underfoot and skipped down the slope, kicking up screens of dust. Camped beside an enormous lake, dark and still in the manner of deep places, the shore a field of broken shale. Nooned in the shade of a peaked obelisk, seamless and polished like black glass. It was over a hundred paces to a side, and the old man tapped it in places with his staff and listened and frowned, and watched it closely while they ate.

Their stores were dwindling and they’d taken to rationing what was left. Each meal they spread everything on a blanket to take a complete accounting. Even though the numbers were never far from mind. Three oatcakes. Four figs. A darkly spotted mushroom they weren’t sure was safe to eat. A carrot, bent and shriveled and knotty as a hag’s finger.

They split a fig and an oatcake and drank water until their bellies were distended. There was no forage to be had in this country, but with its many basins and depressions, there was no shortage of water, at least.

Simeon lay back with his hands behind his head and looked at the sky while the old man scratched numbers in the dirt with the end of his staff and muttered to himself. “We shouldn’t be far now. No way to tell for sure without the talisman, but I think we’re close. I only hope we’re not too late.”

Questions crowded Simeon’s tongue – what would happen after they arrived? Why might it already be too late, and for what? How would they cross the long miles home with no food? But he quickly settled on the one that had been foremost in his mind since the old man had told him they were leaving Shadowmount. The one the old man had refused to answer each time before. But perhaps now that they were close…

“Master? Where are we going?”

The old man had been frowning again at the obelisk. He gave Simeon a careful look. “Where are we going? Or do you mean to ask our purpose? Hmm?”

“I would know both.” It was a bold statement, and he flushed in its aftermath.

The old man’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “Know this, apprentice – a wizard must always be clear of intent, even in seemingly trivial things. Train your mind accordingly or risk the consequences.” He sat back on his elbows and absently wormed his fingers through the gray wisps of his beard. “You must know by now that this is a special errand, fraught as it is with trouble and hardship. Few things would rouse me from home for such a bargain. Few things indeed.

“Two nights before we left, I witnessed a star blaze a fiery path across the sky as it plummeted. Like a sign from the old gods. I put all my powers toward ascertaining the location of its final resting place.” He waved a hand toward the distant northern mountains. “By my reckoning, we are only days away.”

“And then?”

The old man guffawed expansively. “And then? My young ward, stars contain the very essence of magic itself. With just a bit of such material, we could do great things. Very great indeed.”

Simeon thought star metal sounded like an especially fine thing, a first thing surely, and he stood in his excitement. “Well come along then – let’s find this star and be away.”

It was another week before they located the crater but their excitement was immediately dampened.

Someone had beat them to it.