Chapter Twenty-Eight - Numero

Charlotte leaned over the map and squinted down the middle of it. There wasn’t much detail. It was a map of most of the country, so the space between Five Peaks and Six Hills wasn’t all that great.

“This is useless,” she said as she looked up.

The carriage she and Dreamer had taken was rumbling along one of the better maintained roads that connected most bigger towns and cities together. That meant that for all that the road was bumpy and rough, it was still cobbled and well-maintained, with a cleared ditch on the side and potholes recently refilled with gravel to make the path a bit less cumbersome to travel.

They had left Five Peaks in the morning, and it was nearing the early evening. She wasn’t sure how much longer they’d have to travel before they got to Six Hills, and the older gentleman driving their cart didn’t seem all that talkative.

Which left either asking Dreamer, or some of the other passengers.

They didn’t have the coin to rent a carriage all to themselves, which meant that they were sharing the ride with a few others. An older lady who was knitting with an ease and speed that suggested long practice, and a pair of gentlemen in finer clothes that Charlotte labelled as businessmen. The last was an older guy wearing some armour over a gambeson and with a big, clanking pack at his feet.

“Um, forgive me for asking,” Charlotte said into the silence. A few heads turned her way, either from the books they were reading or from staring out of windows. Dreamer looked away from the lady next to her’s knitting needles. “We’re heading over to Six Hills, but we’ve never been there before. Do you think we’ll be arriving before nightfall?”

“By a few hours, at least,” The younger of the two businessmen asked. He smiled at Charlotte, his whiskery mustache twitching up. “Are you visiting family?”

“Not quite, no,” Charlotte said. She didn’t want to give away the reason for the visit if she could avoid it.

“We’re going to buy a winter solstice gift for Abigail,” Dreamer said.

“Winter Solstice?” the man repeated. “That’s not for... well, more than half a year. Do you mean the Summer Solstice, maybe?”

Dreamer looked around towards Charlotte. “There’s a summer one too? Is there one in the other seasons? Wait, how many seasons are there?”

“Four seasons, sweetie, and there are only two solstices. One in summer, one in winter. The longest and shortest day of the year, respectively. The Winter Solstice is spent with family and friends, and during the Summer Solstice there’s a great big festival.”

“Bah, I remember when I was young. The festival was a grand thing,” the old woman muttered. “All the pretty dames, dressed to perfection like mid-summer flowers, and all the beaus chasing after them like rabbits in season. That was before the Inquisition, mind. Back in my day a little bit of sun worship didn’t bother anyone.”

Charlotte had to stop herself from cringing back, and the others in the carriage weren’t so restrained in their looks of distaste. Mentioning religion like that was a bit of a faux-pas, and a good way to have the inquisition poking around one’s business. Then again, she figured the older lady was at that age where people stopped caring all that much about the opinion of others.

“Why would you worship a sun?” Dreamer asked. “That’s stupid. It’s just a lot of plasma holding itself together because it’s so fat.”

“You know what suns are?” Charlotte asked.

“Yeah, tasty,” Dreamer said. “I don’t know why mortals would want to worship one, it’s hardly alive. It makes more sense when they worship ideas, or like, the planet’s magic or even a tadpole. Maybe they’d give you something for worshiping them, at least.”

“Right, right,” Charlotte said. She started patting Dreamer on the head, which led to the girl leaning into her side, and also stopped her from talking. The Inquisition didn’t like using the term 'heresy,’ because of its religious connotations, but that’s what Dreamer was spewing. “So, uh, what’s Six Hills like?”

“It’s a nice enough place,” one of the businessmen said. “The hills have a few clay processing factories. They make a lot of earthenware that’s shipped back to Five Peaks. Lots of pottery as well.”

“Plenty of artists live there,” the other businessmen said. “The less cerebral arts. Crafting, painting, pottery-making. Some of the things they produce are quite nice, and can fetch a good price elsewhere, if you can manage to transport them far enough without breaking them.”

The adventurer-looking guy glanced up. “Safe place. For the most part. Roads are well patrolled around the town. Not the safest though.”

“Any problems lately?” Charlotte asked him. She didn’t care much for pottery.

“Nothing official,” he said. “But there have been people going missing lately. Kids, mostly.”

“Oh,” Charlotte said.

“I think there were three missing children, it’s hardly anything to be worried about,” the younger businessman said. He smiled at Charlotte in a way he probably thought was reassuring. It really wasn’t.

“Five,” the adventurer corrected. “You two watch out while you’re around town,” he said with a nod towards Dreamer.

Charlotte nodded. Though really, she doubted anything could really harm the girl.

“Just a few goblins or the like causing trouble,” the businessman said.

The old woman sniffed. “They know better than to sneak into a town. And they’re noisy besides. A clan of the bastards wouldn’t last a week before the guard rooted them out. Got to be something else. Something more nefarious.”

“Now, now, that’s just superstition talking,” the businessman said. “Though, that might not be bad for business, I suppose.”

“Right,” Charlotte said. “Right.”

She was beginning to wonder what kind of trouble they were travelling to.

***