Roads
931 A.O.P.
One
SOREN
Soren kicked dirt over the smoldering embers of the pyre he’d been monitoring for the last few hours. Revenants took forever to burn, and he couldn’t move on until the dead were ashes, but stars, he was hungry. He hated eating around burning bodies.
“Damned bogs,” Soren muttered, squinting at the murky pool of water that had filled a fissure in the land some ways past the pyre.
He’d thought thevasilyetruled over by the House of Kimathi in the northwest of Solaria had been cleared of bogs the other year, but apparently not. Either the maps were wrong—which he doubted, because no warden worth their pistols or blades would falsify the borders—or, if this couldn’t be attributed to a spring thunderstorm, parts of the water table had breached the surface within the last year.
Either way, it was a headache. Fens and bogs, found in the plains that stretched halfway across the continent, were spore incubators. Soren wasn’t equipped to drain one alone, and he clicked his tongue against his teeth in frustration.
He’d been assigned a western border this year, one that should’ve been easy enough to map. Like any warden, he traveled with only what could fit on his velocycle. Filtration and purification machines were too large and bulky to haul around the Southern Plains alone. Which meant he had nothing to fix the problem spread out before him.
Soren wiped sweat off his brow, getting back to the business of burying the pyre. He didn’t fancy trying to outride a grass-fed wildfire. That was a death sentence, and even that sort of heat wouldn’t burn off bog water. Once he finished covering the embers and stomping down the dirt, Soren retreated to his velocycle.
He preferred the streamlined frame of his velocycle, with its heavy-tread wheels, compact engine, and durability, over a motor carriage or truck. Considering the terrain he needed to reach in his travels, it was easier to ride a velocycle. His was made with dark metal, with none of the chrome and ridiculous accessories found on city vehicles owned by members of high society.
Soren dug through the storage compartment located behind the second seat, set above the back wheel, until he came up with the map book and a pen. Soren settled on the ground and uncapped the pen with his teeth, flipping through pages until he located the section he needed.
He was a two-day ride from Bellingham, closer to that border city than Solaria’s capital. The field markers he’d passed matched up with what was on the map well enough as he pinpointed his position, muttering under his breath as he did the calculations in his head. He tapped a finger against the gridded paper and hummed thoughtfully.
Ensuring cities were free of contamination and setting up a resupply station was one of the easier assignments a warden could get. Soren wouldn’t know. Those kinds of assignments were given to older wardens who had earned something of a break after years mapping the borders. At twenty, Soren had a couple more decades, if he was lucky and survived, before he got a plum job like that. This was only his third year traveling the borders and poison fields alone, and the wardens’ governor had sent him into Solaria each time.
Soren didn’t mind the pollen that hung in the breeze blowing across the Southern Plains so much as he minded traveling through the heat in his field leathers. The plains were hot and muggy, even in Sixth Month at the height of spring, and sweat made his skin itch beneath his clothes. But comfort wasn’t a part of a warden’s life, so he made do.
Soren marked the spot on the map of cleansed land to indicate where the poison fields had returned. He’d have to send a telegram to the Warden’s Island at the next town large enough to have a relay station to ensure there’d be enough time to send a team to drain the bog and cleanse the land. The winter snows never reached this far south, but summer storms did. If the bog overflowed, the poisoned water would spread, and they’d never hear the end of it from the Solarian Senate.
Soren used his finger to trace the black line that ran close to the spot he’d just marked for the poison fields. He raised his head and stared at the remains of the dead. Revenants were always drawn to the living, and while there weren’t any way stations or villages nearby according to the map, there was a railroad.
He sighed tiredly. “I’ll need to check that out.”
The bog was out of the way, but not out of the way enough that debt slaves, probably fleeing Daijal, had found it and died there. The water was too poisonous to drink directly from the land like this without filters and purifiers, portable or otherwise, but people desperate for hydration wouldn’t care. So they’d died, and the spores had taken over to send the revenants searching for the living.
If there were more than just the three revenants he’d killed and burned, if they made it to the railroads, that would be a problem. City walls could keep out the dead, but spores were contaminants no one wanted to unintentionally bring inside any abode, and those didn’t need bodies if they hitched a ride on a steam train.
Soren stood and tucked the map book away before retrieving a small, cloth-lined and padded box from the compartment. Inside were glass vials that would hold the water and soil samples he needed from the area as undisputed proof of poisoned land. The level of toxicity would help guide the neutralization plans. He gathered his samples and labeled each one thoroughly before putting everything away and locking the compartment again.
After double-checking that the embers were contained and that he wouldn’t accidentally start a wildfire during his third year as a full warden, Soren threw a leg over his velocycle and settled into the seat. He rolled his shoulders, adjusting the weight of the blade strapped to his back before reaching for his helmet. The thin metal plates were leather lined, and the strap that kept it in place fit snug beneath his chin.
The helmet, like his short sword, was standard-issued to wardens, along with his pistols and short-barreled rifle. Guns were good for distance, but one could run out of bullets, and close quarters needed something a little sharper to keep revenants at bay. He reached up and touched the pommel, gloved fingers tracing the beveled edge of the clarion crystal there, catching on the tiny lock on the side.
The central space inside the hilt was used to store different vials of poison, each one capable of being dispensed out of holes in the cross guards to coat the blade. The poison incapacitated revenants long enough to keep the dead from walking any farther than where they dropped. It was also a good weapon against any of the dangerous wild fauna that roamed the land.
Domesticated animals were carefully guarded, always tested for contamination, and were never allowed to graze unattended. Their wild counterparts were vicious and dangerous, and Soren had more than one scar from encountering them on his travels. Smaller animals tended to ignore humans for the most part.
Soren remembered when he was younger and had gone through the exposure needed to become mostly immune to the poison in the land that seeped into everything. Years of agony back then with alchemist intervention meant what would kill almost anyone else barely bothered him these days.
No one traveling the railroads would have that immunity, though, and revenants never cared about machines. He kicked the stand up and twisted the knob to start the engine. The grinding sound of pistons and gears startled some small animals that went darting away through the grass.
Soren pulled his goggles down over his eyes and pointed his front wheel west. The heavy tread of the velocycle’s tires ate up ground as he rode toward the railroad tracks that were several miles away.
The whistling of the wind was a loud, familiar sound, the only company Soren kept when he traveled the poison lands to map the borders. Being a warden was lonely, dirty work, but it kept the world safe. It was an honor, every wardens’ governor always said, to be tithed. Mostly, Soren thought it was a slow way to die, and maybe that was why he’d been taken to them all those years ago.
The memory was a distant thing in his mind, fifteen years buried, and the time before that was nothing of note in his head. It had to be.
