Chapter 36: Moving north

Beyond where Kira sat lay a landscape of similar low hills forming many interlocking valleys, along which glistening rivers snaked, and peaks where snow still lay. It was a pretty view that would have helped entice anyone in its direction, thought Kira, and the apparent lack of people would help their progress. The rise that they were stood on now was bare-topped, having had its woodlands removed to fuel the growth of Ostermark, and the way down its flank looked far steeper than the way up had been and was covered with areas of exposed stone. There may have even been a quarry in one or two places at one time, and this was might have been where the stone for the palace had been taken from.

Having waited for a full minute, his patience began to wear thin. They had to get moving. Because of their tags, it would not matter how well they hid - they would always be found. Their only defence was pure distance. Forcing himself to turn back for a moment, he told Aura, "Come on, we need to go to get a head start on any pursuers." and she nodded, so he turned back and started leading the way down towards the encroaching valley floor.

"You won't lose those pursuers with your marks," exclaimed Cat, happily running alongside them and jumping, sometimes above their heads, from boulder to boulder, his tail flapping aimlessly behind him.

"I was actually going to ask you about that," Kira said, "Is there any way that we can remove them?"

"Nope," replied Cat, "But, according to Gretyl, a couple days north of here is a small village, and a person lives there that can remove them, a manipulator."

"Not northwest," wondered Kira, pained by the idea of having to change directions so soon.

"It's close enough to being northwest, and we won't ever be free until the marks are gone." chimed in Aura and he supposed that she was right, so the two followed Cat's directions.

The way down to the valley floor turned out to be quite an easy one, despite the endlessly skidding stones, but getting up the side of the next hill along turned out to be more difficult. Rather than endlessly repeating the process of going up, then down and up again, Kira asked Cat if he could find any better way to go, and they settled into following a more meandering path along the valley floors.

This was no longer going as the crow flies, but it was faster because it was only slightly further, and they didn't have to do nearly so much climbing. This route took them alongside many gurgling streams, where they hopped along the embankments to avoid the densely packed woodland that had now engulfed them. The streams were deep and fast-flowing, bolstered by the melting of snow from further up the hills, and they contained water that looked so clear Kira might have sworn that you could drink freely from it even as blackfish scuttled through them.

They did not stop for lunch because Kira suspected that the apprentices he had knocked out would have woken up by now, and so the chase was on. His chances seemed slim, running from the whole of Krinestadt, with barely half a day's worth of head start. However, he knew that he had to get northwest, no matter how bad things seemed, because, well he didn't know why; he just thought that he had to.

And this was why they ended up eating as they walked, except for Cat, who refused to eat anything, and Kira worried about the boy's apparent lack of an appetite based on how thin he was. Putting more thought into it, he wondered if how thin he was mattered at all, given that he was a shapeshifter and might have been as fat as a pig plumped up for the slaughter and just hiding it from embarrassment.

Through the morning, Cat had mainly been flying ahead as a hawk-like bird trying to scout out a route but, now that he had identified one, he walked alongside them and, trying to take his own and Aura's mind off the walking, Kira sprung his next question onto him. "Is there any problem with putting conditions on yourself? For example, I might want to put on a condition forcing me to only kill people that I knew were evil."

"Conditions are dangerous, don't you know? They can make you stronger if you limit the uses of your powers, your idea for one would not, but they can also kill you if you forget about them. Plus, if you try and make a condition that is too focused, you'll kill yourself doing that because, well, I don't exactly know why I've just seen it happen. I suppose it's a bit like trying to push something through an ever tighter funnel – eventually, it'll break." replied Cat whilst both members of his audience listened intently.

Hearing all of this, Kira decided against placing any conditions on himself at that point, perhaps because some part of him realized that he could not trust himself, at least not any longer, to see what was wrong or right in a person.

Turning to him, Aura asked, "Mind telling me about how manipulations work?"

Supposing that he could do little else but oblige, he did so as they scrambled up a steep rocky incline alongside a small stream that sent several unappreciated gifts their way in the form of splashes of freezing water that they could have all done without. Given that this new conversation hardly involved him, and making use of the freedom afforded to him by his ability, Cat transformed back into a bird and flew off once more, leaving all of his stuff in a neat little pile for Kira to carry. That evening he returned to settle down and sleep with them on a sheltered ledge that clung to the bottom of one of the sides of a ravine that the water had carved out for itself.

As none of them had brought any sleeping bags or blankets with them, it was going to be a very cold night. To try and capitalize on whatever heat there may have been, all sense of personal privacy was lost, and they slept together in a pile with Cat somehow ending up stretched across both Aura and Kira in the most uncomfortable manner imaginable to man. However, it seemed to do little to bother him.

None of them had slept much but it seemed that, when they had slept, they had slept a little too well because, awake again, Cat pointed out the drying remains of a wet footprint on the opposite bank of the river that had most definitely not been caused by them. If it hadn't been for the time of year, it would have gone - evaporated - overnight, but as it was, it remained there shiningly obvious.

Their initial panic became had they lost any of their supplies? Which they hadn't and so, if it had belonged to a thief, it had belonged to a most strange one, and if it had belonged to any pursuers from Ostermark, then why were they still seemingly free? Cat looked down at it for a while as Kira and Aura prepared for the day of trekking ahead before flying off once more and returning only half an hour later after the other pair had finished their breakfasts to announce that no person was nearby.

Kira believed him because a manipulator ought to be able to make out any intelligent being's aura from a good distance and concluded that they may have just been paranoid enough to misinterpret an innocent patch of wetness.

After that, they set off and Cat, once again, refused to eat anything of theirs. The boy didn't seem to be losing any weight despite the tough exercise and lack of calories, but he was reluctant to explain why this was. Eventually, Kira gave up pursuing the topic as getting northwest took priority. This was the one thing that he could be sure of.

Later that second day, Cat was forced to report back some more ominous news from his incessant scouting. A couple of hours' walk ahead was a small bandit camp. This seemed to be quite unusual because banditry was meant to be a lot less common within Krinestadt, but he knew that they were in a very open area of the country and away from any major roads or settlements. They were also skirting on the border of Krinestadt's control and so, thinking about it, bandits setting up there, not quite inside of any countries actual borders, seemed reasonable enough. The problem came from the camp being right on the easiest route north, a steep valley between two mountains that would be difficult to cross.

This seemed to worry Aura a bit, and she asked Kira, "Are we going to have to go straight through their camp then?"

This was odd, he thought, the objective was to go north, and they were in the way so what other consideration was there? So, he replied to her, "Cat and I are manipulators, so a small group of bandits shouldn't be too difficult to get past, and we don't even have to kill them if we don't want to."

Hearing this, she smiled a bit to ask, "Is there anything that I can be doing and are you sure that you can't just make me into a manipulator as you were saying that they do in Krinestadt?"

Kira had indeed mentioned how the most common way of becoming a manipulator was to have an existing manipulator make you aware of your own aura, and he briefly considered attempting it under Cat's watchful eyes. However, he decided against the idea as it seemed to be far too dangerous. "It's very dangerous," he told her then, "And I don't have any practise doing it, so I would probably end up killing you, which isn't something that either of us should want."

"So I'll have to let you two do all the work?" she moaned.

"I guess so." was all that he could think of to reply with.

The middle of the day, excluding a break for a quiet lunch, was spent hiking up the base of the mountain to the left side of the bandit camp so that, with Cat's directions, they would hopefully be able to approach it entirely unnoticed. It wasn't going to be easy though, because they would have to break their way through whilst worrying about Aura. Not just that, but what could they do with the bandits themselves? Without any real reason, killing them seemed to go against all of the reasons why he wanted to be a manipulator in the first place, but leaving them alive created a problem behind them. This meant that he did, for the first time, consider killing people in cold blood to keep going on his way north.

Cat seemed to be fine with the idea of killing people, so it was left to Aura to find a solution to their conundrum. Eventually, she did: "We're expecting people to be coming after us now, right?" she asked.

"Yes," the two responded in unison, wondering where she was going with this.

"Ok, then why don't we leave them alive by just knocking them out, like you said that you could, because our pursuers will have to come through here too, and so we want the bandits to be alive to delay them."

As any reason, no matter how convoluted, for not killing people became a good one, they all accepted her plan and edged along the tree line, at the base of the sloping terrain, until the base came into view. It was impossible to avoid because of how cliffs sprang up from either side of it, meaning that an unenviable route involving a lot of climbing would have to be taken to go around it.

The occupants had even built two palisades, facing outwards, across the whole of the valley floor to create a protected area for their huts and to stop anyone sneaking past them. Inside, Kira counted eleven huts but could only see a maximum of fifteen people. That seemed to be a very low number for such a sophisticated settlement, but if the rest were out on a raid, and they seemed to be as there were no horses present, then this would be a perfect opportunity for them to break past it.

Fifteen, wondered Kira, between him and Cat he was confident that they could take them out now that he was getting stronger, and he thought that Cat might even have been able to deal with them on his own, given that he had been a manipulator for much longer than himself. Approaching the walls with confidence, Kira and Cat had climbed up and onto its walkway and were helping Aura up when the alarm was raised by a bandit man who spotted them. Hoping that the enemy had no manipulators, they had no choice but to fight. Cat looked back at Kira questioningly as the bandits gathered and organized, and Kira nodded to him. Smiling menacingly, Cat then disappeared further into the base, leaving Kira to look after Aura as he did most of the work.

On the ramparts, Kira only faced five opponents that could only access him one at a time. The first was a tall and slender man who drew a messer, essentially a long knife used as a single-handed sword, and tried thrusting it at him. Over his time training as a manipulator, Kira had noticed something new about the people around him when he fought them, they either were getting slower or he, more likely, was getting faster. This allowed him to entirely step past the messer and to pull on their outstretched arm, making them overbalance and fall from the walkway.

Stepping forwards dealing with the next man was equally easy because he found that he could simply grab their blade with his aura protected hand and yank it off them to stab back at their chest. Although remembering that he shouldn't be killing them, he called off this attack. Instead, he used the pommel, and his higher speed, to knock them and the following people out

During this time, he had been aware of what Cat was doing from the occasional shouts and clangs of metal from across the rest of the camp, but these had stopped, and Cat returned shortly later, probably having had to take the time to get dressed again after changing into some animals. "You didn't kill anyone?" Aura questioned him, joining the two of them down within the camp.

"Nope," said Cat, "But you'll want to see what they are keeping here." and he led them to a central clearing where some tarpaulin had been pulled over a mound of stuff. Drawing it back revealed a haul of all sorts of stolen items ranging from golden trinkets to a cat statue with one arm that moved up and down to wave at its owner, or even a vest of mail. "They were probably using this as a depot to distribute what they stole from the west to Krinestadt," continued Cat.

The amount of wealth on display, all of it being stolen, was astonishing, and the pile came close to reaching Kira in height, but there wasn't the time to overthink it. As none of it seemed very useful, they set off once again, armed with a bit more money that they found lying around and two sleeping bags that Cat had discovered inside one of the little huts.

This made the night a lot more bearable than the last and, with his own personal heater taking the form of Cat sleeping on top of him within his bag, Kira got to sleep quickly, exhausted by the day. Following a track worn clear by the bandits, progress became faster, and he truly believed that his destination was reachable even if he had no clue what it was. According to Cat, they were now only two days from where they would find this person capable of removing their marks, which would help them escape from pursuit once their direction changed to be more westerly.

Their path then took them up and along the side of a steep ledge with a drop of more than one hundred feet on their left, leading to another river below. This track was not entirely perilous, though, as it had been made wide enough for carts to pass, and they were able to edge along the opposite side with one hand on the sheer cliff situated there.

Even with something to hold on to, slipping was common, but at least anyone following them, particularly on horseback, would struggle, thought Kira as he forced himself to keep going. Despite the discomfort, the view alone made it worth it as they were now coming to the end of the hills and could see down the valley and right out into the plains and occasional woodlands that sat before them. As far as the eye could see, these stretched on before joining with the sky at the horizon, and Kira thought he saw a town, their destination, nestled down there too.

When he took a moment-long stop to allow Aura to catch him up, he had to admit that she had done a good job at keeping up with him so far, despite having lived for so long in the palace. Looking back to watch her approach, he glimpsed something at the edge of his vision. Turning slightly to make it fully visible, Kira saw that it was composed of a small, white ball that hovered six feet off the ground, roughly level with his eyes. When it drifted around to face him, he saw that it had a face of its own with tiny black eyes and a flat line for a mouth just beneath them.

Kira did not feel like telling Aura and Cat about what he saw, as they did not seem to react to its presence, and he thought that maybe that meant it was normal for this thing to be there. Silently, after a bit of encouragement from Aura, who had now passed him by, he continued on his way, and the floating ball followed after him, face first, always wearing the same expression. Ghost, because Kira instinctively knew that that was his name, eventually said, "Hi."

And Kira responded with, "Hi." right back and, whilst he did not say it out loud but instead had spoken within his mind, Ghost seemed satisfied with his response, and it sped off around a corner in the road.

Cat also disappeared around the bend, and a moment later, an eagle flew back the way they had come, and Kira was left to again carry Cat's clothes for him. He didn't watch the bird as it circled, flew higher and then disappeared off behind the clouds because he was busy following the directions of Ghost, who had found a way down to the bottom of the cliff on his left side. The route did involve a bit of climbing over boulders and scrambling under dripping archways of rocks, but it soon got them to where they needed to go just in time for Cat to return, who got dressed behind a tree whilst Aura and Kira waited for him. This process only took the boy a moment, but it still frustrated Kira because it delayed his journey north whilst Ghost pressured him to continue.

Excited, Cat rejoined the group and explained how there had been a fight at the bandit camp because their raiding party had returned just as a group from Ostermark had arrived there. Apparently, at least a couple of the pursuing group was dead. This meant that there were around twenty left, but it did raise a few questions, such as how did the group kill around forty bandits and only lose two? This concern was raised by Aura, and then it was quickly answered because the only way that it made sense was if the enemy had a manipulator. This was probably quite obvious as the manipulator from the palace would need to travel with them to direct them towards the escaped slaves.

This news meant that the people from Krinestadt were more than a day behind, and Kira assumed that they would be slower than he had been over the mountain path as they had only got down so quickly thanks to Friendly Ghost's route. This concept gratified him slightly as he thought about how good a friend Ghost was to help them keep ahead of any pursuit.

What happened next did not serve to cultivate the same feeling within him towards Cat and Aura who, probably just slowing him down anyway, seemed to both want to continue directly north instead of north-west outside of the hills. Eventually, he agreed to go with them and reluctantly followed after them under the promise that the enemy would no longer be able to track him. But he remained sceptical about whether or not this was possible, and Ghost did not seem to like delaying turning more to the west either.

As they walked, given that Kira was talking less, holding complete conversations with Ghost in his head about the most hilarious things, Aura tried talking with Cat asking him about the limitations of his ability. Some part of Kira was probably quite interested in this too, and so his own secret conversation fell silent to wait for Cat's response, "I can't turn myself into anything bigger than my normal form, this form." Came the answer as Cat walked alongside them, still looking like a demi-human boy.

"You'll always appear like a child as a consequence of your ability then?" questioned Aura.

"It's not really a consequence of my ability, but yes."

After this reply, Aura tried getting more out of him about what he actually meant but, Cat was not having any of it and stayed silent, occasionally rebuking some of the more ridiculous ideas for an explanation. That night, again sleeping alongside Cat, when Kira closed his eyes, he could still see Ghost.

Having left the hills behind, progress became easier, and it looked as though they would reach the town, where Cat assured them this manipulator would be found the following day. This was just as well because, whilst they did have a decent lead over the people following them, their pursuers would probably speed up and start to close the distance on horseback once they also got down from the rough terrain. Knowing this, Kira guessed that they would only have a few hours in the settlement before they had to move on or risk being stuck in it when many angry people, including manipulators, arrived from Krinestadt.