BECMI Chapter 196 – The Culm Before the Storm

It took a few hours, but with taking much of the weight load off the wagons, we made it over twenty miles before noon. With Caravan Magic, the mules and horses weren’t even that tired. The riders traveling with us were overjoyed and caught between wariness of what we could do and definitely enjoying what we were doing.Rolling up on the city and the people traveling the broken, aged road as it rose like new out of the ground was sufficient to make them grin madly with all the attention, too. They’d be getting many a free drink out of it.

I pulled up before the gates to the city, sagging things that had definitely seen better days. The haphazard walls looked like one charge of some ogres and they’d fall over, having definitely seen some recent action.

The guards there were gaping like everyone else as the other students and I floated up on Disks, wagons up off the ground with their wheels dangling. A whole bunch of riders were trailing after us, having seen what was going on and wondering just where all of this was going.

The guards were Siricilans, I noted their olive skin and swarthy features with prominent noses, dark eyes and hair, at contrast with their fairer-skinned and red to brown-haired Hellenar subjects.

I, of course, was neither.

I hove to a stop in front of the gates, the guards there staring as the mud and dirt of the road heaved up and turned itself over, and rings of bricks spread out from me with dizzying speed, such that a couple of the watchers up above on the walls almost fell over the edge trying to follow the magic.

“Are you going to make me pay the toll?” I asked in just that voice.

The more Brown of the two opened his mouth, looked at me, closed it, and then mutely shook his head. ᴛʜɪs ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ɪs ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ʙʏ ????????????????????~????????????????~????????????

“The Lady Edge and students from Zanzyr, passing through.” I flicked my hand as his log-in book, and the scribe there fairly jumped as glowing letters lit up the page there and filled in everyone’s names. “Is Sir Horn about? I’m supposed to meet him here.”

Every local’s jaw dropped, and they all gaped at me. “You, you know Sir Horn, my lady?” the Siricilan guard rallied with something between dread and awe.

“We became acquainted in the Bleaklands messing around with a dragon. Or two. Or more. Where can I find him, guardsman?” I asked, again in the tone that indicated status as ‘ribbit’ might be forthcoming.

He caved like a good order-taker used to knuckling under to nobility. “Sir Horn has been staying at the Greenrun when in town, Lady Edge! He should be there now with his men!”

“And where is this Greenrun, guardsman?” I asked without moving.

“D-down the street to the central plaza, take the south street, about four buildings down! You can’t miss the sign!” he explained hurriedly.

I raised my hand, lowered it, and all the floating wagons behind me rattled and creaked as they settled down on their wheels, to the dismay of the beasts pulling them. The underneath them spun out from beneath in a whirl of black skulls and red roses, stacked up behind Chekwort’s broad back, and we moved forward again, nobody smiling smugly, nopers.

Nobody saw Duum up above. Flying monsters and towns tend not to go well together, in the madly panicking villagers kind of way.

The wagons had to go through their own check, and they definitely had stories to blab and talk about as we headed into the city.

I eyed everything around me, charting and analyzing as normal.

This place had been ruined and rebuilt several times, it could be seen in the different styles of stones, their placement, and the styles of buildings differing here and there. The Imperial style was evident among some of the newer buildings, with clean stone foundations and a liking for statuary and stone embellishments here and there, sparse on the outside. The native style was evident on a lot of buildings that had definitely seen some burning and destruction, preferring more framing woodwork and carvings than working with stone, higher and steeper roofs, and lower foundations.

Both of them didn’t have much in the way of paving, the paths to the homes and the landings might be simple stone, but that was as far as it went… and of course there was still the problem of whenever people used beasts to pull weight, they had to deal with the waste.

Well, whatever.

I still had the granite slate with my Earth Rune in my hand, held down to the side. The others could see it, knew I was using it even as we continued on past the gates and into the city, and with every tap of upon the ground, the stones around us shifted and obeyed me.

Pointedly, I was fixing the roads and what remained of a very poor sewage system. Among other things, that meant straightening up the yards and the houses, which meandered into one another and were laid out like idiot jump-claimers were behind everything, nobody giving a damn for what the town had looked like in the past or would in the future, just claim and throw something up and that’s how it was going to be.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Whole houses spun and re-oriented, foundations and cellars alike. Streets shifted, buildings moved, yards lined up, and suddenly this rough, rutted, graveled road that was trying to imitate a wild spaghetti noodle had suddenly straightened out, the houses were all lined up on their sides, there was some uniform spread between said houses, and the road leading into the center of the town was pretty much straight, level, and it was now made of fused cobblestones, not pea gravel shoved into dirt and dried horsecrap.

The pipes underneath would help with water runoff during rain, too, and if I happened to reinforce a bunch of cellars so they wouldn’t be leaking, well, I was a nice person, even if these people were kinda dumb.

“Y’think they’ll even have a fountain here, Izzi?” the Mick asked, like the others refusing to be impressed by the stuff moving around us as we moved at the speed of a stroll into the town, ignoring the gaping of the locals to just keep moving and study everything.

“They do, and it doesn’t really work. Catches leaves and flies and drowns them in rainwater, or so the merchants said over the fires,” Izzi noted back, he and the Mick getting on pretty well. Izzi’s childhood heroes were warriors, not mages, after all.

“This Sir Horn sounds like a knight o’ some sort?” the Mick asked lazily.

“Well, he’s not technically noble or anything, especially in his homeland, and if you look far enough back in almost any human’s bloodline, one of their ancestors is almost bound to be noble, so that doesn’t indicate much, either,” I replied back to him. “But his family has a pretty long line of martial service in one form or another, just not to the current forces claiming the governance of this area.”

“Ah, the Archduke. A fact I’m betting he’s got quite the mixed feelings toward, a would-be knight running about making a spectacle of himself!” Izzi exclaimed enthusiastically.

“Quite true.” And given I wasn’t big on stupid conquerors remaining in power, it probably meant there were going to be changes coming in the rather near future. The Archduke’s position was won on the point of a sword, and he didn’t really have anything beyond that. Certainly no love was lost between him and those he ruled, and those who had come here only made the situation worse.

It was what it was.

We came into the middle of the town fairly quickly, the plaza actually half-paved with stones jutting out here and there unevenly, the fountain askew, what had probably been carved birds knocked off the top of it, and basically it was full of leaves that had become dirt which had become weeds and it was a broken ugly mess of stone with stuff growing all over it that nobody had bothered to clean up because Not My Responsibility.

Right-o.

Radiating out from me, stone and earth shifted, smoothed, polished itself up, and drove away the wear and tear of centuries to restore itself. The fountain shuddered, and the grime and dirt upon it, and the mold, mushrooms, and weeds growing there, were sucked down into and past the stone and vanished in seconds as the fountain was rebuilt in its tiers, complete with statues of a rearing horse, a boar, and a bear at the top. The gaping natives of the town stared in disbelief as there was a gurgle and guttering, and then pure water began to gush out the top of the white-streaked grayish marble there, falling down through the heads of wolves into the lower basins, pure and clear and ready to drink.

I didn’t even look at it, letting the stone seem to work itself as I swept past what I was fixing up. Houses groaned and creaked alarmingly as they shifted and slid, buildings re-oriented, re-centered, squared off around the plaza, and suddenly the middle of the town actually looked somewhat rounded again, like it probably had four hundred years ago or something.

The main street to the south almost didn’t look like one, winding like it was. But that was fine, as the flash of a sign showing a trail along a green hillside was plenty obvious down that way, along with enough of a yard maintained by goats nibbling away at it to actually call itself such a thing visible from this distance.

I headed that way, ignoring the calls and cries of alarm and wonder rising all about as their town was rebuilt up from the stone into something it might just have looked like a damn long time ago.

Now this southern road or trail was undergoing the same thing, some of the buildings swaying alarmingly as they were shifted out of the way or into the way as appropriate, straightening out the road and making it look like a proper street instead of an alley someone might get mugged in, and the dirt and the grime vanished into a straightening and strengthening of the street.

“Ye’re going to create quite the splash while doing this, m’Lady,” the Mick noted as we closed in on a larger building with rather more windows, the carvings and ornamentation well-maintained if not spotless. “Ye planning on continuing it all the way to the capital?” he inquired.

“Not particularly, no.” Given that would be near a hundred miles of travel and take me several days I didn’t want to bother spending on such a task.

“Pity the Archduke!” Izzi muttered for a moment. “You know, Lady Edge, the drovers there were gossiping about Sir Horn!” he hinted enthusiastically.

“I can’t imagine why they would bother to speak about such an insecure and feckless individual. Do go on.”

Everyone smirked at the untruth in that statement. “He’s been making quite the splash since he came back home after missing for some years. Been riding about being a proper nuisance to a lot of things that should have a sword stuck in them and stirring up folks what aren’t happy with such proper behavior and all.”

“He always was a bit high-minded. Ambitious, one might even say, believing in a better day ahead and similar unrealistic ideas,” I agreed blandly.

“Aye. Also, he cleared a castle to the east o’ undead and vampires, then basically closed it up and left it empty and broken behind him. Folks say the whole keep was reduced to just mounds of stone and a pit in the ground when he was done!” The better not to become the base of bandits, orcs, or more undead, naturally.

“Efficient,” I agreed, as we came up on the Greenrun, which looked to be an inn and tavern of rather more open design than a certain building of my acquaintance (and ownership). There were a dozen warhorses in the stabling area outside, clearly visible. Obviously Sir Horn wasn’t using the place for a base, especially since Sim Nine, Ninez, was helping him out with all the spell support he needed to do his job with great energy and enthusiasm, and I received regular reports from them.