Redd and the Wyld: Chapter 1

The sun stood high in the sky as the two men crawled up the side of the abatement carefully. They moved slowly, careful not to raise up any dust. They made an odd pair, a man in animal furs and brown jerkin pants with a man in a fine red cape and broad-brimmed red hat, in the Cibolan fashion. The man in the furs, older than the other by at least twenty years, pulled out a telescope and handed it to the other man, all the while motioning for him down low to keep the far side covered lest the gleam attract the guards.
         The man in red nodded, and kept one hand over the far side while he surveyed. A valley came into view on the far side of the border between Cibolan and Parsian lands. A troop of guards stood implacably out front of an opening in the mountains. He took in their purple coats and ridiculous winged conical helmets and swore. Royals: the guards of the Parsian court, hard men and all incorruptible.
         A scream drew his attention down. He swiveled, and a man came into view, struggling while two Royals dragged him up a flight of stairs. A gallows. He couldn't hear what the man was saying, but he didn't think he was discussing places to stay for the night with the two hefty fellows. His struggles did him no good. Within five minutes they hanged him.  He kicked one last time, and the body was still. The man in red turned his view down, and noticed a wagon turned over with the floor of the wagon cut out. Right where Redd had stored the canbis plants.
         "Let's go," Redd handed the telescope back to the older man. "It was a good attempt, wasn't it, Josua?" Josua said nothing. Josua rarely said much of anything. They gathered up their horses and rode back along the Cibolan rode.
         It took them a good three hours to get back to their camp, with Redd doing most of the talking. A group of wagons circled around a pit  Four guards in blue capes like Redd's, but their hair black where Redd's was blond, looked up from a dice game. "What's the news?" One of the heavy-set men said.
         "It's like that bard said, Tel, they've got the border blocked." He replied. The man shook his head. The youngest of the group spoke up.
         "What do we do now, Redd?" Marcello was on his first trip out of Cibola. His face lacked the lines, scars, and beards of the others, and a great deal of experience as well.
         "Now, Marcello, we head home," Redd said. "There isn't much else to do."
         "What!" A female voice screamed. Redd whipped his head around. A woman in a fine blue silk dress came stomping towards them. Latrelle del Grotto was more than pretty, her fair, beautiful skin attracting the sellers at the Grand Market in Cibola along with her voice, but right now she wore an ugly scowl as though she wanted to squash everything in sight, Redd first.
         "You listen here, you gutter thief. I paid good money to the Organization to see this cargo through, and I intend to see Panem Dea!" she said, jabbing a finger under his nose. "You are supposed to be the best."
         "The best at chasing off bandits," Redd snapped back. "You expect me to run a gauntlet of veteran soldiers and guard four wagons with nothing more than a few bows and arrows and some spears. Gods, woman, I'm a thief, not a suicide artist!"
         "Veteran soldiers?" Tel scoffed. "These are Parsian soldiers, man. Put up a good fight, and they'll roll over."
         "The only thing I saw them roll over was the wagon," Redd told him, shaking his head. If there was a stereotype or a cliche, Tel believed in them more than the gods. All Tae'Peatians were sneaky, all Westphalians were good with money, and a Parsian would surrender to field mice given half a chance.  "I'd sooner not risk a neck popping for your estimation of men you have never seen. Would you?" Tel shook his head; as good as he was in a bluff, he folded like a ruined cake if you showed him even a hint of a fight. Redd's first encounter with him had been when Tel thought him a dandy customer showing off in the Greased Pig to the common workers and tried to bully him; one knife to the throat, and the man had been all smiles and bows as if they were the oldest friends in the world. He didn't think he could bluff down those Royals as easily.
         She hesitated. "Well, you know about those things. Couldn't you...bribe them or something?" she asked.
         "Wonderful, I've always wanted to see what my guts looked like on the ground," he said dryly. "They're Royals, sworn to crown and law. They'd have their sword through me in two blinks." The Organization had men in almost every nation, in every circle of power or anywhere there was money to be made by flouting the law. The only exceptions seemed to be the Wyld (and gods knew nobody wanted to get near them) and the Parsian Royals, at least for the time being.
         "Wasn't our fault that the King's son got into some canbis with the fae dust on it," Marcello piped up. That had been the bard's tale; the prince had thrown himself from a building one day, screaming about the Wyld coming south, and the Parsians found some of the stuff near a table in his room.
         "No, but we take the burden anyway.  It won't matter for long, though.  The King is not too long for the world, and when he's gone, we'll be back to dealing like we were before." He had seen it before; the fire in a ruler's belly for justice usually lasted as long as the summer season, or until somebody pointed out the futility of stopping something men did willingly.
         "Why don't we think this through after lunch," Tel, the man who had spoken up first suggested. "Nobody's moving either Panem Dea or Cibola before that." Everybody nodded, and they all went to bring out pots and pans.  As they did, Redd desperately racked his brain for a way out of this predicament.
         Latrelle was not the only one who didn't want to go back to Cibola early. This whole mess had started when a merchant tricked Redd with a bag of false coins wrapped around some real ones after he retrieved a stash of jewelry from a Tae'Peatian ship.  If the fact that the ship had been on a set of reefs nearly a mile from shore wasn't bad enough, the ghosts and skeletons on the craft were, each waving a sword or ax and none too happy about being woken up. They had been troubling things for a man who didn't claim the protection of any god to face alone. It had only been when Redd made it back to the Greased Pig after delivering the goods that he discovered he had been the mark rather than the thief.
         In that regard Selene del Gaza made a fatal error. Redd was not some simple thief who would mollify his anger by emptying a bottle then forgetting what had happened.  So when Selene woke the next morning, she found one of her shops had been reduced to a pile on the ground. The only thing left was one of the pendants he had retrieved on a pole, situated right in the center of her shop had been.
         He had been so dead set on revenge that ignored Cenn's please. Later he found out why Cenn had been so worried: Selene was the lover of one of the capos, lords of the Cibolan underworld, and a rather powerful one at that.
         That, Redd reflected, was why he was out here between Cibolan and Parsian lands. Cenn would talk to the capos. Redd was too useful to be killed for this, and Donatellan changed mistresses as easily as other men changed their short pants. Until the capo's temper cooled though, Redd had to get out of the city. Redd smirked to himself. And at least until the other trap I pulled sprang, he thought grimly. He was not a man to leave a deed half done. .
         Ah well, the sewers weren't really all that bad; just keep an oiled rag over your mouth and watch your step. He went over to the group of men, who had crouched down and were eating a lunch of jerked beef and cabbage. Josua stood a few feet away, smoking on his pipe.
         "Josua says they were cracking open the wagons," Tel said, picking meat out of his teeth. He was the roundest of them, but more muscle than fat. A regular Cibolan papa, black curly hair and twig between his teeth, Redd nodded. "So I guess subterfuge is out of the question."
         "You want to risk your neck on it?" Redd asked again. If it weren't for seeing those wagons, Redd might have risked his own without realizing it. They had hollowed the beds of the wagons out, then set the plants up inside them. The Parsians had banned the plant, but they didn't have that much experience in false floors or smuggling techniques, or Redd had told himself. Tel had not been the only one to over- or underestimate people he had not seen. Tel shook his head fervently.
         "What about the sea?" Marcello said. "My father said that they have huge rafts that haul goods from Cibola to Tapia, the Parsian capital. We could hire one of those."
         "And what will we pay them with?" Latrelle asked. "If you think out of my share, you can forget it, boy!"
         "Easy, Latrelle, the boy does not know," Redd told her. "Marcello, we could hire a fleet of rafts, but it would cost us all of these goods," he pointed at the carpets and packs on top, "as well as a good portion of the real merchandise too. And the guards at the other end will want to search our cargo to make sure we paid proper tariffs, and then we'd be right back where we started." Marcello brows furrowed at that.
         Late into the evening they tried thinking of anything and everything to disguise the plants or sneak them around, but to no avail.  It all ended when Redd half jokingly suggested they send back to town for Harold to he could whip up an invisibility spell of some sort. That was a laugh; the Parsians detested magic and set wards all along their borders. Not to mention leaving Harold alone with the canbis was as bad as dumping it; he could put a Roin to shame with his knowledge of intoxicating agents.
         "Is it all that necessary for us to cross the border unseen?" Heads went up. It was Josua. Redd blinked twice; he had never seen the man speak more than a couple of words here or there.  He could teach stones about silence, and the wind made a ruckus compared to him. "Well, yes or no, do we really need to cross Parsia to get to Panem Dea?"
         "Well, no Josua, I suppose we could conjure up a spell to fly us all there," Redd said sarcastically. "Of course we have to cross Parsia; it's the only way to get to Panem Dea in the civilized lands!"
         "There's the trick," Josua said. "Supposing we went north, then east just outside of the border.  The Parsians wouldn't bother us in the mountains." The mountains, which meant the.... "The Wyldlands!" Redd blurted out. "You're suggesting we cross the Wyldlands.  Josua, I never heard you talk before, but if this is what will come out of your mouth, you should have kept it shut, that's insanity!"
         "Is it?" He shrugged. "You were all fired up to get those plants to Panem Dea. What's the one place where the Parsians will not go no matter what?"
         "And did you even think about why they won't go up there?" Redd retorted.  Five hundred years ago the Wyld had come out of their lands, burning and pillaging everything for some reason only known to them.  Jerochaim Kayan, the Westphalian general, had united the Grand Coalition in time to turn them back towards the mountains and where they had come from.  But even with the Wyld fleeing, nobody had wanted to attack them again and risk destroying the remnants of the army, now little more than half it's original strength and with every third man wounded or unable to walk faster than a stride; they sealed up the two large passings with as much stone and mortar as they could find. Only Kayan, enraged beyond belief, had found some pass with a hundred of his crack troops, the Heart Guard, and gone in after them. None had returned from that pass, and nobody wanted to find out what had happened to them after that.
         "Begging your pardon good sir," Latrelle said. "But even assuming they do not mind, are you suggesting we take our pack horses up the mountains. I'm not exactly dressed for the winter." She wore a fine silk dress.
         He smiled. "There is one way around the mountains, through an underpass in the mountain ridge. That leads along a path just in the south of the country, it winds along the border to a pathway, which empties a good three days ride south of Panem Dea."
         Redd thought for a moment. There was no pass under the mountains that he knew of...except for one. The one in which the leader of the Grand Coalition and his Heart Guard had gone through, chasing the Wyld with the purpose of their destruction.
         "Jerochiam's Pass," he said. "You're talking about Jerochiam's pass." Josua nodded.