There was a rush of activity as Gilead and Sara both set about making the old man as comfortable as possible. It was not an effortless task: on top of his advanced age, visible in the liver spots on his arms and the wispy state of his hair, he had also clearly been afflicted with some kind of awful sickness. His skin was red and shiny, as though it had been abraded by sand, and his gums had withered from his teeth. There was a twitchy motion to his eyes, as though he had been afraid for a very, very long time.
Sara set about building a resting place for him, piling all the rags and blankets they had to make something soft enough to cushion his fleshless bones. With Gilead’s incredible strength, he needed not move a muscle to be guided into that resting place.
“Tell me, man, what ails you?” asked Gilead. “I may be able to do something about it.”
“Just hunger and exhaustion,” he said. “Maybe a touch of anemia.”
“And your skin?”
“Oh, yes, that,” he said. “Just some… some burns. It’s really nothing.”
Gilead nodded. “I have a cure for that.”
“Are you a doctor, too, on top of everything else?” asked Sara.
Weirdly, Gilead’s response was to look ashamed. He blushed, scratching the back of his jaw, like he was a schoolchild who’d just been called out for doing something embarrassing.
“My aunt was a wise woman,” he stammered. “She taught me a little of her craft, though really only a fraction of a fraction of it. Burns, I can treat.”
“Oh, thank you,” said the old man. “That would be very nice…”
Gilead leapt to his feet. “Sara, you can take care of him for a few hours, yes? I’ll have to gather some… damnation, wait, I have no horse!”
“What do you need a horse for?”
Sara sighed. “You are not going to smear fox’s fat on this old man because you think it is going to heal his burns.”
“Why not? It has effect, I have seen it with mine own eyes!”
The old man smiled broadly, revealing his misshapen teeth. “Oh, I remember that sort of thing from when I was young. My nanny used to know all sorts of little cures like that. Don’t be so skeptical, lady, let the man use what he knows.”
Gilead shook his head. “But I cannot hunt fox on foot…”
“Well maybe,” said Sara, “if you had a gun instead of spending all your money to find the only sword in Carlisle, you could manage things like that!”
“And I told you that I nist how even to hold a gun, let alone to use it!”
Sara had to shut her eyes for a second just to stifle an oncoming headache. They’d spent hours arguing over it earlier that day, and it wasn’t going to help this old man if they reiterated the same debate.
“You don’t need to know that much about aim to hit a fox,” she said. “Give me five minutes and I’ll show you the basics of how to use mine.”
Gilead stammered again, backing away from Sara by a few steps, before he seemed to come to his senses and relent.
“Very well.”
Sara checked with the old man, ensuring that he was in no imminent danger of dying somehow, then rose and ushered Gilead a little ways from the camp, into a muddy hollow nearby. A good enough shooting range. Then she drew her Glock.
“Now, the first rule of firearms is that they are incredibly destructive weapons. Treat this thing as if it could go off at any time, and make sure that the barrel is pointed at something that won’t cause problems if you put a bullet in it.”
Gilead already looked nervous, and this first piece of information did not put him at ease. Good. At least he wasn’t going to be reckless.
“Now, stand next to me. I’m going to shoot at… that little bush over there, and you’re going to watch carefully what I do.”
Gilead promptly placed himself a full meter from Sara’s right side. She’d only known the man for about eight hours by this point, but already Sara was noticing that he was deeply uncomfortable with even the mere suggestion of physical touch or proximity. Weird, but at least it was better than the opposite, which was what she’d grown used to for most men.
Sara then proceeded to demonstrate every step of the process of firing a pistol, from the proper hand and arm stance, to operating the safety, to trigger discipline, to how best to psychologically prepare oneself for actually firing the thing. Gilead watched with rapt attention, but didn’t ask any questions, which was probably going to be bad. When Sara put three rounds into a palm-sized area of the bush, he flinched, nearly covering his ears.
“Professionals do this with ear protection on!” Sara shouted. “But I was never a professional! I learned because I had to!”
Once the ringing was gone, she held the gun out to Gilead. “Now it’s your turn.”
He took the gun as though it were a chunk of pure arsenic, and managed to hold it up to shoulder-height without pointing it at Sara even once. His stance, however, was atrocious.
“Right, if you try to fire the gun holding it like that, the recoil will send it flying out of your hands. Your joints need to be able to flex to take the impulse.”
She mimed the correct pose, and tried to let Gilead copy her, but it didn’t work out. He couldn’t feel it three-dimensionally, the way that she could.
“Here, let me just…”
Sara took Gilead’s elbow and wrist, nudging them both very slightly with the heels of her palms. The instant they touched, however, she saw Gilead shift, a subtle tension coming to his posture.
“I’m not trying to violate your vow of chastity,” she sighed. “I just want to help you do this right.”
“I never implied any such thing! You said it yourself that you have no such intentions.”
“Then how come you tense up every time I touch you? Now that I think about it, it was happening when you first got injured, too.”
Gilead averted his eyes. “I do not know. Please, lady, you give me no discomfort.”
Sara shook her head. “Whatever. You’re in the right stance now. Memorize this: you’ll want to return to the exact same stance after every shot.”
There were few interruptions after that; they went through all the steps, from lining up the iron sights to how to properly squeeze the trigger, before Gilead finally took a shot. He flinched dramatically, and his form was knocked totally off; but the bullet rustled several of the bush’s leaves.
They tried again, sticking to single shots and slowly guiding Gilead’s aim towards the center, until the gun finally ran dry.
“Right, when the slide locks back like that, it means the gun is out of bullets and you can’t fire any more. Hand it back to me.”
Gilead did so, and Sara replaced the magazine. “This thing holds sixteen shots, which is more than you could possibly need. I don’t want you wasting my bullets, these aren’t easy to come by, so I’m not going to teach you how to reload.” She turned the gun over in her hand and gave it back to him.
“Good luck with the fox hunt. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot or I’ll be mad.”
He nodded, and said some overly-flowery farewell, and marched off into the moorland. Sara had absolutely no idea whether to be hopeful, or to think this was all completely ridiculous; either way, there was an old man who needed her attention.
He hadn’t vomited or had a heart attack or anything during the several minutes during which Sara was gone, as Zahra very proudly informed her. Neither had his state gotten much better. He looked restless, painfully alert to his surroundings. He also hadn’t eaten anything, which Sara quickly worked to rectify, bringing him more water and some of the leftover bacon.
“Oh, delicious, wonderful,” he said, before promptly shoving it into his mouth. Sara imagined that if a feral dog had hands that it would eat much the same way.
“Is there anything else you need, while my friend goes to get treatment for your skin? We… don’t have much, I’m afraid. Travellers.”
Zahra spoke up. “What about my—”
Sara shot her an absolutely venomous glance. There was not enough painkiller to share, not when the old man was still well enough to speak. He waited a few more seconds to see if he was going to learn what Zahra was talking about; when he realized she wasn’t going to finish the sentence, he sighed.
“No, there’s little I could ask for. The rest and comfort you provide is all I need.”
Sara nodded, leaning back onto the soft dirt to wait out the evening. There was little else to do anyway; she’d just given up most of her dinner to the old man. Far off in the distance was a noise that could have been the rolling of thunder, or could have been Gilead attempting to shoot foxes with a Glock 19. In hindsight, Sara wasn’t sure how good of an idea that had been.
But speaking of ideas, she had one. “Are you a Christian?” she asked.
“Yes, of course,” said the old man. Then he furrowed his brow, first at Sara and then at her sister. “Are you?”
Sara flinched. She’d brought up the topic herself, but she’d had enough ignorant fucking westerners acting like she wasn’t a “real Christian” that the question still brought up bad memories. “Of course I am,” she said.
The old man’s lip twitched, but he knew better than to talk back to the woman who’d decided to sit around taking care of him. “I don’t feel like hearing prayers right now. I’ll thank Him when good times come back around, I think.” He paused. “Do you really think God hears us here?”
Sara shrugged. “Personally? I don’t think God listens anywhere. Look at the world and tell me there’s any such thing as miracles. God sits back and He judges. The good go to heaven and the guilty go to hell and that’s the end of it.”
“That’s a little pessimistic, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. Maybe I’m just a bitter old woman at twenty-four. Maybe Pretenders get their powers from God and I’m just not seeing the big picture. Though I’d question some of the people who’re allowed access if that’s the case.”
The old man rolled over onto his side, looking away from Sara. “Is she your daughter?”
“Who, Zahra? No. Sister. My parents were, ah, very active. There were six of us in total; I was the oldest and she was the youngest, but…”
Sara stopped there. The old man mumbled his sympathies, not needing her to say another word in order to complete the picture. That was one nice thing about people from Leedsrealm and some of the other shards, like Halmahera and Namlor, where the germ theory of disease hadn’t quite become popular yet. People had a much better ability to understand the decimation of a family, even if they hadn’t suffered it themselves, if they’d grown up in a place where a plague could sweep through and destroy everything in a matter of weeks. Furati got it as well, a lot of the time, but not always, especially the ones who chose to stay out of the war.
The old man still didn’t fall asleep, but neither did he seem to have any more needs, so when Gilead hadn’t returned after a few more minutes, Sara decided to take care of some more business. The reason she’d picked that particular campsite wasn’t purely for the wind shelter, like she’d told Gilead; it was also because of a particular tree stump she’d seen nearby.
With her knife, she walked over to that stump, and from the rotting wood cut forth a heaping armful of mushrooms. She wasn’t a mushroom gatherer, and had absolutely no idea whether or not they were poisonous, but it wasn’t eating that she intended to use them for.
Mushrooms acquired, Sara spread out her supplies onto the ground, staying close to the old man just in case. A plastic bowl, her knife and a scarred cutting board, an old ceramic chopstick, a potato masher, a lighter, a half-empty bottle of blue food coloring, and several sheets of dirty construction paper were all she needed. With the exception of the bowl and the construction paper, all of this was just symbolic; the process worked like ritual magic, functioning so long as it looked as though it should function.
As she set to work, a tension that Sara hadn’t been consciously aware of slipped away from her like a loose but scratchy robe being sloughed from her shoulders. Years of experience had taught her to compartmentalize, to focus on what was immediately in front of her whenever she was on the move. It was only in moments like this when she could properly ruminate on the events of the last couple of days and plan ahead for the future. Once she was kinetic, Sara would narrow her focus back down to survival and survival alone.
In this case, ruminating on what had happened inevitably meant ruminating on the topic of Gilead du Carbennic. Every other event paled in comparison to that slab of naïve beef slamming headlong into her life.
She finely chopped the mushroom, then put it in the bowl and started mashing. For a little while all was normal, the mushroom reacting as it should; but that changed when she added a single drop of the food coloring. As though realizing from the oddness of her action that it was time for the ordinary rules of reality to be suspended, Sara’s Pretension activated. Over the next minute or so—fast enough to be disturbing but not so fast that Sara could see it happen—the mushrooms dissolved into a pale, homogenous mass. Suddenly she could begin to feel their presence like an extension of her own body, as the ordinary organic matter was transmuted into plastic explosive.
She had thought he was ridiculous at first. Then she had seen the way he fought, realized that there was a real chance he would win any fight they got into. The entirety of that shared lunch, she’d been planning out how to take him down before he could gut her open with his utensils. And then, worse, he’d started talking about protection, going along with her and Zahra so that she could serve out her penance; she chafed at the idea that some white boy with big pecs could decide what she did with her life. Why the hell had she agreed to this, again?
Once the mushroom was all converted, leaving Sara with a bowl full of enough explosive to kill all three of the people present in the camp, then came the hard part. Dividing it up into even blocks. In a kinder universe, Sara would be able to do this with some kind of telekinesis, but her power over explosives did not extend that far.
It had been the promise of protection. Not that she needed a meathead watching over her. But he had seemed so earnest about it that Sara had gotten it in her head that maybe she could turn this to her advantage. Next time they got into a fight, she could make a run for it and leave Gilead to die. She didn’t owe him anything, after all, he’d insisted, and if white boy wanted to die then white boy was going to die.
There was something odd about all of this, though. She’d expected that Gilead, once she’d allowed him into her life, would act as though he was her husband, ordering her around and keeping the threat of violence always hanging over her head. But that hadn’t happened. He’d helped, sharing the load every single time the opportunity arose, and all the while hardly even bringing up the idea that she was under probation. More and more it was sounding like the punishment was more a pretext for the body guarding than the other way around. There was something deeply odd about this man, and Sara couldn’t help but be compelled.
A half a dozen bricks was far from enough to restock her, but even that much could make the difference between life and death if it came down to it. It was a few minutes after that when Gilead finally returned from his expedition, carrying with him the freshly-shot corpse of a fox. He looked like a man who’d just gone tromping around the English countryside for the better part of an hour attempting to hunt foxes with a handgun: dirty, bruised, and with a few scratches on his arms. Without any further ado, he dropped down by the fire and started working.
“Now that all of us are here,” Sara said, “and now that you’ve had a moment to recover, perhaps now would be a good time to talk about what you need our help with?”
The old man nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose so. My name is Victor Gray, the Baron of Northbury. I’ve held this position for, oh, forty years now? But as you might imagine, things have been difficult since the day when the blood sea came.”
Sara suppressed the urge to say something caustic about how hard it must be to live as a 19th century English baron. If nothing else, the shriveled, ruddy, agonized man before her could back up every claim to suffering that came from his mouth.
“One by one, all of the manors of my cousins, uncles, the places where my sisters had gone off to get married, all of them had to return to me, their own homes ruined by bloodfiends or ghouls or rampaging Pretenders. My home became a graveyard, full of the scant remnants of those who had lost everything else. And soon it came to pass that I could no longer sustain them.
“The ghouls attacked relentlessly. They sensed flesh, too many people crammed into too tight a space. We had guns enough for everyone, we slept with them by our bedsides, but they were just too fast, too clever, too tough. One by one I watched as my family was ripped apart and devoured. We were desperate; there weren’t enough guards willing to keep fighting outside of the cities, and not enough coin with which to pay them besides. I would have done anything to save my family… and I did do anything. The one thing that brought damnation and doom upon our family.”
“Would only that there were still knights-errant in the world to bring safety to the abandoned,” Gilead said, slowly adding herbs to his pot of molten fox lard. “A true knight, with his arms and harness, could fight ghouls by the score.”
Northbury lifted himself a short distance off of the blankets, turning to fix Gilead with a curious expression.
“Recent resurrection,” Sara explained, “Apparently he’s one of the knights of the round table. Now, what did you do that brought damnation and doom?"
The old man nodded, closing his eyes. “A handsome guest, he was. We brought him in in spite of everything, just to give him shelter against the ghouls. We gave him food, water, and warnings. He refused to go to sleep at night, which should have been a sign… I got up at midnight to get some fresh air and he was sitting in our drawing room staring at the moon. He talked for a long time about how awful he felt for us, what he felt to see the old aristocracy gone to rot. He said he could make us strong again, let us defend ourselves against the creatures of night.
“We took his offer. Obviously we did: our only option besides was to give up, betray our family honor… though maybe that would have been better than what we did. We drank of… his gift. And it worked! We were strong, capable, faster and more cunning even than the ghouls. We took back what was rightfully ours, scoured the ghouls from the land. Some of my relatives even went off and retook their ancestral lands, joined up with the new government, made something of ourselves!
“But it was a trick. That cunning turned into vicious strife, the speed turned into a violent reflex, the strength into raw violence. Every day we were uglier than the day before, every day we came to shun the light of the sun in favor of secreting ourselves away amidst all our luxuries. I saw the twisting come to us and could do nothing about it… it was already in our blood then, too deeply instantiated to remove. We tore at each other, tore at those around us. The few servants we had fled rather than daring to exist with us for even a single day further.”
“A deal with the devil,” said Gilead. “Such bargains never lead to prosperity; you were a fool to have taken it. You are very lucky that even the most foolish of men still deserve rescue.”
“He may be the devil,” Northbury replied. “Or it may be that he was worse than the devil. He came back a year and a day after first making the offer to explain to us all that his gift was not permanent. We needed it again and again to prevent the gift from turning into a curse, to keep us from degenerating into the worst forms of ourselves. Some of us took the bargain. They went with that fiend to serve him forevermore, and were never seen again. But I and the others couldn’t stomach it. And now… you have to help us. Please, you have to help us.”
Gilead took the pot off the fire, burying it partly in cold dirt as he stirred it to let it solidify once more. “Where is this manor house?”
“It’s to the south-west. I don’t know the full distance, to tell you the truth.”
“South-southwest or south-west proper?”
“The latter, I think.”
Gilead pondered.
“I’m not sure what we can do about a demonic curse,” Sara said. “We’re… fighters, for the most part.” She made sure to look directly at Zahra, ensuring her silence about the true extent of her capabilities.
“My younger self could work miracles. Summon up the devil and I’d have run him through with my lance or banished him back to the lake of fire. But it’s been a very long time since I could do anything like that.” Gilead was unusually quiet given his usual attitude towards the world, and for a second Sara thought he was going to turn the man away.
“We’ll do it.”
And the crazy thing was? Sara didn’t even have the heart to disagree with him.