"Well," Connie said as she wandered back to the rest of the group, "we have a minor problem."

We'd been traveling all morning, and had stopped for a break while Connie and Sige went over to some merchants to ask about gossip. "They said that there's some kind of checkpoint they had to go through, everything got searched. Sounds like they're probably looking for us."

This wasn't a shock, but we hadn't talked about what the plan would be. "Cyne, or Sige too - can we duck onto another plane to get past the checkpoint?"

I'd asked something similar earlier in the day when chatting with the two of them, and they had given slightly different answers. Cyne was specifically in the transportation business, and while that often meant people taking a tour of the other planes or trying to get some specific resource that could only be found there it also could involve people using the other planes as a shortcut. Sige, meanwhile, had far less extensive experience with the planes and mostly just popped in and out of Itzele - though he'd been to many others, including Nusos which was the only plane we'd for sure need to go through.

Cyne adjusted his glasses, and pulled out a folded piece of paper that he examined while he spoke. "We could, though using the other planes as a shortcut only works in certain circumstances. Itzele is too easy, if they're serious about the checkpoints they'll have someone cross over and watch the roads there as well. Many of the other planes can only be exited at the same point you entered. Nusos is an option, as you surely know since it is a path you plan on taking later in our journey, but it is easy to get lost or waylaid unless you know a good destination room in the city you're traveling to. I believe the wards keep you from exiting into the upper areas of the necropolis, and I wouldn't want to try targeting the deep tunnels."

Sige nodded. "Yeah, what he said. We could go around though, skip through Nusos to some shitty little town somewhere far away and then travel to the necropolis from there. But the wagons probably wouldn't fit, and we could end up way too far out of our way if we don't know where the fuck we're going. Heregie is fucking hard to navigate. We're not equipped right for Hudai, that would be a fucking disaster. Wrong day for the trickier ones. Nine months before Arrapidae is open, that's the only one that's really perfect for travel."

Mila looked up from a rock she was slowly turning into a tiny model of a house. "Can't we go through the jungle? You're a U'rmun aren't you?"

Sige looked embarrassed. "Naw. Uh. Doesn't work that way. It's like how humans with Dumines can't use wild magic, right? Well other races lose any natural magic they had if they get one, though if you take the right ones to re-create the same powers you have a little more natural skill at it. But uh... fucking assholes back in my town decided that if you leave and get a Dumine you're banished - not that I could navigate that fucking jungle anyway without spatial magic."

This wasn't news to me - well, the banishment part was but not the rest. I'd asked Katrin quietly, away from the rest of the group, because I couldn't decide if Sige was a different species or if he was a human that had gotten someone with enhancement magic to make him look like that. It seemed a lot of the planes had humanoids that were probably distant relatives of humans but had lived in that one plane so long they had adapted in strange ways.

Sige came from Uihene, which was a giant jungle filled with ruins and murderous plants. But it had some sort of strange spatial magic going on, so you could walk in a straight line and end up right back where you started. The U'rmun grew up in this and had natural magic that let them navigate the jungle - or prevent others from doing so. They rarely left, so Sige was a bit of an anomaly. Since people didn't often come across U'rmun, or for that matter most of the people that were native to other planes, I had been warned to take any information about them with a grain of salt.

Aestrid walked over to join in the conversation, still wearing a silk dress like the one I'd first seen her in. Despite being the muscle for this job, she didn't seem to feel a need for armor. It had rained briefly in the morning while she was walking alongside the wagon and she hadn't gotten a single drop on her, so clearly she did have armor of a sort - presumably a force field. "We can fight our way through, though I suppose that would offend Cyne's delicate sensibilities. Speaking of, Cyne, I think I saw the wagon roll over an ant earlier and since you were sitting up front wouldn't that make you responsible for its death? I saw some thorn bushes back there if you want to flog yourself."

Cyne nodded at her and smiled, not rising to the taunt. There had been a few similar comments or jokes, though none that I had heard said directly to Cyne. Connie walked over to Aestrid and whispered something in her ear - Aestrid went stone-faced and then nodded, and when Connie stepped away she mumbled a weak apology. Knowing her, a threat would have just made her bristle - so my guess was that Connie had reminded her that Cyne was the less replaceable one or something. "Well. Jokes aside, we could just try to sneak past and fight them if needed. It depends on how many there are, what they would do to you if you're caught, things like that."

Connie gestured at me, a little 'go ahead' motion. She'd warned me that she would make me take the lead somewhat on this trip. "Well. I know you've all been trying to figure out if we're criminals or deserters or... whatever." With Cyne's odd gift for detecting lies and my limited knowledge of politics I wanted to keep things simple and mostly true. "We lent some assistance, primarily information, to the Eldred Empire. They want to keep us there, both because they hope in an emergency there may be something else we could help with and because they worry that forces from Halenvar might try to kidnap us if we're caught out in the open. So... starting a fight at a checkpoint will tell everyone involved where we are even if we get away. We would need to, I don't know, trip the checkpoint but then go somewhere in a totally different direction to throw them off - and I'm guessing we don't want to spend that kind of time and energy."

Aestrid rolled her eyes, and for a moment I thought it was directed at me. "Ugh, it was Hammersmith wasn't it? This is why I didn't let them sign me up for the military. She's fanatical, and she genuinely can't understand why someone might not want to dedicate their lives to helping the Eldred Empire. I'm glad she's on our side, but she can't see that sometimes she makes people not want to help out because they don't want to find themselves signed up for a ten year commitment. Fine, okay, I agree that pushing through the checkpoint could be bad. So I think we're back to the planar travel idea, especially since there are two qualified people here - three if Katrin knows anything but I'm guessing she doesn't. What if we wait until we're close to the checkpoint so we don't have to be in Heregie long? I can deal with tunnels of living meat for a few miles."

Cyne looked back at his chart. "The problem is the lack of direct passages, and the absence of magnetic North. It's simply too easy to get turned around while trying to find a path to where you're going, and staying there too long risks infection. There's one other place we could try, but any price for passing through would need to be paid by Connie and Callie. Xeyul is fairly easy to reach, and could allow us to travel directly to the necropolis thereby avoiding checkpoints and throwing anyone that may be tracking you off of our trail. Dealing with the Sahrger is risky, but only to the leader of the group so long as you specify safe travel for all of us."

Sige shook his head, looking less like he was disagreeing and more that he was just surprised to hear Cyne suggest this course of action. Mila looked up from her stone house and said "I know Errod and Katrin are old enough to be setting out on their own but they're still young, would they be safe? Sahrger steal children, you know."

Connie pulled me aside and switched to English. "Okay so this is not a bad plan, but... Sahrger... well, picture fairy folk and you're not going to be far off. They live in these beautiful palaces made from living trees, and spend all day holding parties and things. They're simultaneously chaotic and all about rules, so they'll do whatever they want on a whim but then turn around and say that since you used the wrong fork at dinner you have to be their slave for a year and a day or whatever. Rules are a game to them, they make up rules for each other to follow. As guests we'd be exempt from the worst of it, but we would have to ask for passage very carefully. It's like the old jokes about wording a wish from a genie wrong and having your head turned into an orange or something."

"What kind of cost is Cyne talking about? Is it just that we have to be good guests and offer them a housewarming gift or something?"

"We should absolutely do that, yeah, but that's not the real cost. They're really good at curses. If they say 'I hope you trip and fall down the stairs tomorrow' then you'll probably do exactly that. There are ways to unravel curses before they can trigger, but we don't have people with mana manipulation here. Could be something in Katrin's book but she's still trying to figure that out and I wouldn't want to count on it. So if we ask for safe passage, we would want to make sure they answer us in the way we want - they like to slip little things in there. There are stories about them stealing people's names or firstborn or whatever, but I don't think that actually happens. I don't know. Probably not as a random curse anyway."

I was trying to work on myself, ever since Katrin talked to me in the bath that night. It had been stupid to run off and burn a building down, and if I kept acting like that I was going to get myself killed. Back on Earth it had been running away to live in abandoned buildings or shoplifting things I didn't need or - that one time - living in someone's attic for a week without them knowing. Here things were different. I wasn't risking getting thrown back into the group home, or even having to run away from some scary guy on the street. There were monsters, and magic users, and all sorts of things I didn't understand. But at the same time, I felt healthier and more alive than I ever had even with people trying to kill me - some part of me was desperate for this kind of adventure.

Katrin had been disappointed when she heard I'd ducked off into another plane with Sige. On the one hand I didn't need to worry about the opinion of some girl that I'd met less than a month ago and who was like three years younger than me. On the other hand, she felt more like a friend than most people I'd met in my life and seemed to really care about me. She reminded me of Bill in that way - he'd said a lot of the same stuff as my other case workers, but I'd gotten more of a feeling that he gave a shit on a personal level. So I was going to do the mature thing. "No. No, it's too risky. I'll do it if everyone else agrees, unanimously, but that's it. Otherwise we should do something where the risks are more... calculated. Send some of them through the checkpoint in the wagon, have a couple of us sneak one at a time through the shadow world or whatever since that checkpoint will probably be a bit more sparse."

We headed back to the rest of the group, and let them know our decision. Katrin smiled at me, probably aware that my initial impulse had been to run off to fairy land. I had dreamed of traveling to a magical world of fairies when I was little, though granted these ones sounded like dicks. To be fair, most older fairy stories involved them being things you didn't want to mess with. Little sociopaths that you left out milk for not as a gift but in the way you might pay a mobster for 'insurance'. Still, seeing a land of the fey would be a big checkmark on my bucket list.

We all packed up and got moving again, and after about fifteen minutes Aestrid climbed up onto the seat next to me and Katrin. "Hello ladies. Tell me, do any of you have ranged weapons?"

"My spells aren't very good for ranged attacks yet, I'd say my effective range is probably sixty feet. Errod has a bow, though he's not great with it."

"That's what I thought. And Sige is a wrestler, of all things. Well. Just wanted you to know there's a Segozertze circling above us. Almost certainly a spy from Halenvar. Do with that knowledge what you will."

She slid into the back of the cart and laid down, getting comfortable among the bags like she was planning on taking a nap. I looked straight up, and sure enough. One of those fucking bat-bear things.

"If Telen comes himself, we're fucked. I don't think he can teleport right to us, I think he needs one of those rug things if it's somewhere he's not familiar with, but... you know, probably there was more than one of those guys. They wouldn't just be circling for no reason."

Katrin sighed, flipping through her spellbook. "Most likely there was another that left for reinforcements who knows how long ago. And they might have a teleportation receiver for Telen. I can try to find a spell to kill this thing with, but... it might not work and even if it does it won't change that they found us."

"Well I tried. I tried to do the more normal, respectable plan. But it looks like we're going to make a deal with the fair folk."