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Chapter 14
Kaugnay na kabanata
OurCasts Chapter 15
Darius rode up to the stelae but did not go past the circle delimiting the Kazanstar crossing. Instead, he shouted until the passer stepped out onto the flat rooftop of the two-story building fifty meters away, and then he shouted some more until he got his question across. Ryou was hanging even further back, trying not to look furtive or guilty. He didn't make out what the passer hollered back. It was when Darius rode back that Ryou learned that all their hurry had been for naught; the Path to Essin was closed, something about the war. The Path to Anwat, the neighboring province, would lead them close enough to make their way to Essin, but could not be traveled for another three days. "At least it isn’t three dozen," said Darius, trying to take it philosophically with only mitigated success. Ryou understood his companion's urgency get back, though he himself wasn't in any hurry use another crossing again. The days of waiting were spent quietly. A forested hill half a kilometer fro
OurCasts Chapter 16
Ryou galloped past three armored men trying to haul a wagon out of a rut. Weapons had been propped up against a nearby stumpy olive tree. The symbol adorning their shields was a crudely painted moon, the same as the one Darius had on his bracers. Assyrian soldiers. But Ryou did not stop. These men didn't have horses, they couldn't help. One of them shouted after him. He couldn't make out if it was a question, an order or a threat over the sound of hooves. As he pushed his horse onward, Ryou methodically analyzed everything he could see. He'd paralleled the river at first, but then the waterway and the path had split, and he'd followed the latter. It led him through a muddy valley surrounded by gentle green hills. The path was getting wider and wider, trampled to three times its previous size by a lot of feet. He spotted more soldiers, two dozen camped near a pond; still no riders. Then a larger gaggle of tents, women among them- no, not what he needed, but he
OurCasts Chapter 17
"Tell me where," said Rand, and then he and Ryou were hurtling through the camp, past tents, men, and horses and heading towards the river. "Th-th-th-" Ryou couldn't even talk for the mad pounding rush, but he pointed in the direction in which he'd arrived. Rand twitched the reins and the horse veered that way, still at a dead run. To either side of them, stern-faced armed men followed their course. After several minutes of full-on gallop, Rand made a gesture. Ryou craned his neck and saw two soldiers from the column of twelve peel away and turn their back to the river as they rode off. A few minutes later, the same happened again. They were spreading out in a search pattern, he realized with sudden relief, they were not only relying on his directions. A good thing; his memory of where he'd left Darius was precise, but in the time elapsed, his friend could have gone anywhere. Or be -... No, Darius was not suicidal. He knew what he was doing. If he made Ryou go on ahe
OurCasts Chapter 18
Ryou woke in an actual bed, or what passed for one here. No larger than a couch, the carved wooden frame had ropes strung across it supporting a cloth pallet, but it was comfortable enough. Rand had informed him in passing that he could make free use of the bed, the tent and everything in it; they'd belonged to some officer of the Assyrian army who died during the first part of the siege. Despite that somewhat morbid provenance, it was much better than sleeping on a bed of bracken wrapped in a blanket. Rand had not taken him right back to the camp on the hill the preceding afternoon. He’d detoured to a small encampment in a copse of olive trees where wagons and tents had been set up in a clearing by a stream. Injured or sick soldiers occupied the pallets under the trees and in every tent . Ryou counted approximately two hundred. Young men and women, sometimes barely children, cared for them. All the attendants wore the same knee-length undyed linen tunics and a serious air a
OurCasts Chapter 19
In the mind's eye, the last hour of the Siege of Essin looked like a Kurosawa's historical movie blended with a Westerner's peplum. Imagination was all Ryou had to rely on. He could hear a deep sustained booming sound that could be felt through the ground; the tromp of feet, the clash of weapons, war cries and screams and possibly cannon fire, all so blended by numbers and distance they formed a homogeneous background noise like an earthquake. But a kilometer away in a dell near the river, Ryou couldn't even see the city's tallest buildings. The rear guard was composed of a few hundred men watching the dam, presumably to stop the defenders from making a sortie to destroy it and drown the troops invading them over the marshy ground where the forked river had flowed. Riders regularly came and went, stopping near a group of three men with plumed helmets. They didn't spread the information on how the day was going, though, so Ryou and the rest of the infantry were left in ignorance to li
OurCasts Chapter 20
In the split second during which reality changed, Ryou remembered the Honda falling a considerable distance through the air last time he'd tried to move through space by cheating his way past the usual three dimensions. And horses did not come equipped with airbags. Oh shit- His horse screamed in panic- but its hooves hit solid surface an instant later. The animal skidded and slid to its rump, legs splaying out until it was almost flat on the ground, at which point Ryou lost whatever support his stirrups gave him and tumbled off. He picked himself up dazedly. Nothing broken this time, though his right side was now as bruised as his left. He panicked for a moment when he realized he'd lost his glasses - but they'd only skidded a little away before fetching up against a fallen tapestry, and were intact when he picked them up. His hand was shaking when he fit them onto his nose, but he immediately felt more centered once the world lost its blurriness. The surface onto which he'd falle
OurCasts Chapter 22
The next day started out wonderfully. Ryou's sleep was not plagued by any more scary visions, which his burgeoning instincts suggested was a good sign. Better yet, he woke up next to Darius, and despite the complexities of his situation here, the pitfalls that might lurk between them, virtual strangers that they still were, Ryou felt a rare and pure moment of happiness as he watched his lover sleep. Sleeping very soundly indeed, one arm thrown up above his head, eyes closed, face relaxed. He'd wrapped his hair in a twist of cloth tied at the nape to avoid having the disks braided into the ends clink against the roll of blanket that served as pillow. With his hair pulled back like that, Darius looked different, younger, and a little less fierce. A dog yipped in the main part of the pavilion, followed by a soft mutter of "Shhh, Zuru." Ryou, who'd glanced around automatically at the noise, jumped as he realized Darius was now sitting up beside him, bleary eyes fixed on the partition gi
OurCasts Chapter 21
The room Ryou fled to was long and narrow, barely two meters wide. Footsteps in the larger space he'd just left prompted him to quickly pull the tapestry back into place like a door. A bit of light still snuck past it to illuminate rows of decorated wooden boxes, the larger ones on the floor, smaller ones lining two long shelves. Sandalwood and dried flowers scented the air, a relief from the charnel stink in the other room which Ryou was getting a little too good at not thinking about...he ditched that train of thought. It looked like he was going to have to reassert his moral compass here in the Outlands rather than in a shrink's office back home, and the result would undoubtedly be different, but one thing was certain: now was not the time to do it. He'd stepped further into the room without thinking. He could barely see the chests anymore. At the far end of the walk-in wardrobe, another curtain was pulled aside, leading to yet another room, but that one was darkened and provided
Pinakabagong kabanata
