.
Watching the girl fly along, I was torn between dealing with her directly and just watching to see what she did. Finally, I decided to leave her for the time being and go alert Dilorè.
Unlike the ghostly presence tailing the team’s covered wagon as it rumbled across the plank road spanning a section of boggy ground, I could see through Dilorè’s stealth with no difficulty in my fairy sight. She does look strange, though. It reminds me of movies like Roger Rabbit, where they insert animated characters into live action scenes. Her presence was a substance that didn’t match its surroundings.
Her stealth with respect to natural vision was probably just as effective as our tail. What I could see clearly was the mana making up half her body. It gave her an unreal texture. If I looked closely, I could even see things in the background behind her.
I flew far off to the right, uncloaked, then flew back to slide in next to the stealthed fairy. If anyone could see me, I appeared to be talking to empty air, but there was nobody closer than the wagon in the distance behind us.
“I found her. Her stealth is really strange. What we are sensing is ordinary Wind flight magic, which she’s doing nothing to conceal. But she has almost perfect optical camouflage, and she’s completely concealing any mana or miasma in her body.”
Dilorè was silent for a bit, but I could see her mulling things over. Then she smiled. “Or she has no mana or miasma in her body to conceal in the first place. What you just described could be a mortal magician. An avian beastkin using her wings and innate flight magic while casting the Light magic [Invisibility] spell would look exactly like this.”
It was obvious once she pointed it out, but I had never even seen a bird-woman before. I had only read about them in books. I hadn’t considered the possibility.
And that explained her weird traveling style. A winged mortal can’t hover. In order to travel the speed of our wagon, she either could go on foot and jog to keep up with us, or alternate between flying and walking.
Although it had to be a powerful spell to trick my fairy sight.
“Could a mortal really maintain a spell that long?” I wondered.
“Even a strong [Invisibility] spell takes almost no effort in the daylight,” she answered. “The Light mana is thick and strong, and all the spell is doing is duplicating images from one side of the body to the other. It causes no more drain on one’s pneuma than maintaining a simple [Fairy Light].”
We’re a strangely mismatched pair, Dilorè and I. She’s had over two centuries more time to pick up technical knowledge, but only recently began her effort to become a fairy knight or interact in any way with the mortal world. She knows far more than I about magic and the many species and creatures of Huade, but I have more practical experience. Even though my ‘more experience’ doesn’t actually add up to much compared to a veteran like Serera. We both have huge holes in our knowledge, but in different areas.
“Shall we take her out?” she wondered.
I shook my head. “We don’t necessarily know that she’s doing anything nefarious. She could simply want to hide herself because she’s traveling alone.”
“She’s clearly following us.”
“Solitary travelers often try to stay close to larger groups. One is less likely to meet a robber that way. Or, she might be working for the local lord, keeping an eye on the strangers that come into his territory. The point is, we don’t know why she’s following us.”
“How long do we just leave her alone?”
“We should arrive in Lisrau Castle Town in the early afternoon. Let’s just keep an eye on her until then.”
The traveling speed of the wagon became suddenly slower as we approached our destination, as the road became rougher and acquired switchbacks to climb out of the lengthy valley we had been following. It was more like early evening before we arrived at an unwalled town below a hilltop castle that guarded a mountain pass.
As the road emerged from the forest, the girl stopped tailing us, but she did not fly toward the castle to report, or into the town to find somewhere to stay. She continued flying on her own, passing the town entirely.
Something was off. Evening was here, and it did not seem like there were habitable locations where she was headed. The road beyond the town was even rougher, as well. At the rate at which the quality of road maintenance had been falling, I suspected there wouldn’t be any road at all, not too much further along. What I could see in this direction was likely only for the benefit of local farmers.
The wagon would be easy enough for me to spot later, so I split from the team and continued following her. This apparently dangerous decision on her part, to head off into the wild on her own at night, was really bothering me, and I needed to solve the mystery.
Dilorè was still in the air. As the girl was flying away, I dropped in next to her and said, “She’s continuing on. I’m following to see where she goes.”
“What?! My Lady…”
I was already flying away. And, of course, she could protest, but she had no idea where I was, so she couldn’t follow. I dashed ahead and caught back up to the girl before I lost track of her.
Up here in the mountains, late afternoon turns to dusk early and rapidly, and an increasing cloud cover wasn’t helping things. It was very quickly becoming night already.
I have no problem, flying at night. Vampire sight is good enough to reveal obstacles in time to avoid them, and I get considerable assistance in low light from the fairy side as well. Suffice it to say, both species are well-adapted to dim lighting conditions.
But if this girl was indeed a mortal, it might be different. Different beast-kin species each have their own characteristics. If she were Ceria, a cat-kin, I wouldn’t be worried about whether she could see where she was going. She would also have excellent night vision. But a bird-kin… their characteristics are not based upon owls, you see. They are the kin of eagles, and just as for humans, eagle eyesight deteriorates at night. Which means she couldn’t keep flying at night for long. So why wasn’t she stopping in the town behind us?
Once I caught up to her, I began hearing the answer, because she was talking about it.
I was only seeing an outline, but it was clear from that outline that she was using a talking stone. Either that, or a cellphone, which I assumed wasn’t an option in this world.
Talking stones allow one to engage in a conversation at a distance, but only with one matching stone. You keep one and give the other to your contact. There’s no network, no switching, no numbers, so it isn’t the same as having a telephone system, but while you are flying along and using it, it looks pretty much the same as driving while using your cellphone.
She was talking in a stage whisper into the magic tool, so she clearly had enemies she feared might hear her in the area.
“I can’t make it to the rendezvous. It just isn’t possible anymore. I have at least fifty more miles to go. That would take me a couple hours. I need to fly it in daylight, or they’ll find me with the bats.”
Two hours for fifty miles? Bird-kin clearly flew far slower than my kind. I could manage that distance in a half an hour.
Very faintly, I could hear the other side. “…back to Lisrau…”
“No! I can’t!” she protested. “The Berado tribe is all over that town! They’ll recognize me for sure!”
“… too dangerous…”
“It’s more dangerous in town! I can’t make any more noise. I’m ending the call now!”
She began descending, probably scouting for a safe place to spend the night.
I was seriously torn. This person and her problems clearly had nothing to do with me. I had my own problems, foremost being my kidnapped sister. But could I stand by while she was alone out here by herself? Why was she operating like a fugitive?
Actually, that last issue came with a name I had just heard, and that name made this girl vaguely connected to my business. At least, enough so to cause me to want to stay with her for a bit longer to see if I could learn more.
Because she had spoken an important name.
“The Berado Tribe.”
That was the tribe rumored to have the “new foreign women” in their clutches.
The girl suddenly sped up, flying strangely, and it took me a moment to realize why. She was suddenly having to evade an incoming pair of giant bats. They’re only giant as bats go. They’re fairly small as monsters go, and they’re too low-grade to attack something as large as a human, unless one stumbles upon a colony, where they can use swarming tactics.
But these two creatures were clearly homing right in on her.
Rabid animals don’t work in pairs. The only way these two were going after a human together was if a monster trainer was making them do it. And if a monster trainer was operating bats, they were likely looking specifically for someone using optical camouflage, since Light magic doesn’t mean stink to a creature that uses sound to find its targets.
“Mine are locked on to something!” I heard someone yelling. “Over here!”
I turned my head to see a trio of bird men incoming. They carried weapons, but they weren’t wearing uniforms typical of either constabulary or soldiers. Actually, they had gear similar to the raiders I had stopped from abducting Amelia and her friends before.
Which made sense, if these guys were from a Tabadan tribe. The raiders from that time had been Tabadans as well.
Whooping and laughing, they quickly began circling the area where the bats were concentrating as more of the bats joined in on the harrying effort. It seemed the animals were trained to track targets down and betray their locations rather than directly attack them. They were mostly just getting in the way of the girl.
Shortly, the men unlimbered whips as they continued to circle around the girl, and began using them to harass her, attacking their best guesses for her position. The apparent leader kept yelling things like, “Show yourself!”
Then one of the whips landed a serious injury on her wing and she went spiraling downward with her tormentors in pursuit. I followed, with my conscience yelling at me to step in and help her. I mean, they were directly attacking her, and she didn’t even appear to be armed!
She lost the invisibility spell as she made a somewhat hard landing in a freshly plowed field. The way her wing was hanging, I was pretty sure she had suffered either a serious muscle injury or possibly even a broken bone.
“Trying to sneak through our sky without paying the toll?” the leader jeered at her.
She glared at him. “As if you would let me pay a toll and pass through!”
“It’s our sky, so it’s our choice. So what were you smuggling? Hand it over.”
“This isn’t even your land! This is still Arelia!”
“It’s not our land, but it’s our sky,” he declared. “The weakling lord in this place can’t defend it, so it belongs to us.”
I decided I had heard enough. If he understood that he was operating in foreign territory, then he’d more-or-less just confessed to banditry. I was free to act.
