Every minute that passed without Errod yelling at me was torture.

I was sure he wanted to. He'd said he wanted to go with Matlyn just in case, and I had insisted on going instead. And then I'd gotten distracted by someone with a Coelestis agent pin and followed them around, while Matlyn was kidnapped right under my nose - probably she'd been in the crate they kept smacking and laughing about. As the icing on this shit cake, I watched as they left with our moskar which meant I couldn't even follow them into the desert. If I'd let Errod go, he could have kicked all their asses - or at the very least sent his hand off to warn the rest of us.

Instead he was being very calm, and very serious, and it was pissing me off. I was fighting the urge to yell at him instead, even though that was ridiculous. How dare he not wait at the stables, they wouldn't have taken the moskar if he'd been there! It was stupid, of course he wasn't going to stand in a place he didn't belong, reeking of moskar shit. I was gone forever, and he knew I could find him with the fate threads, and anything I could criticize him for applied to me but way worse.

And yet, I had to keep fighting the urge to get super defensive and pissy.

The stable boy knew he was in deep shit, and had already sent the other employee running off to find the owner. There were a few other mounts in the stables, though of course they all already belonged to other travelers. I was thinking of stealing them anyway, if someone didn't get here soon. I wasn't thrilled with my options; two of the four moskar looked like they might die of old age between the stables and the gate, and one was shockingly obese in a way that made me worry it was some sort of parasitic infection or something. There was a big hairy pack animal that looked like a giant boar and was very obviously not doing well in the heat, two donkey-like things, and a strange pile of leather that seemed to be breathing - I couldn't tell anything about it other than the fact that it had lots of excess skin and was laying down.

"Maybe... the one healthy-looking moskar, or... if we got a wagon..."

The owner arrived, bursting in still cursing under his breath in Erathi. I saw him glance us over, with his eyes lingering on our nose rings and Errod's sword. "Honored guests! I am terribly sorry that we have all been victims of this terrible crime, and I will endeavor to make things right as quickly as possible."

Errod, surprisingly, took the lead. "We need new mounts immediately. Not any of the ones here."

The man winced. "Ah, of course, and I would be happy to gift you my personal moskar, but they are currently rented out to a merchant group and will not be back for several days. The owner of some of the moskar here is, I know, looking to sell and I would of course cover the cost..."

"Let me guess," Errod said in a clipped tone, "not the one that looks like it could actually survive a journey across the desert?"

"... No. Not that one. I apologize, but there was recently an incident in Hanglescart - they raise moskar of several varieties, for food or labor - and they lost an entire herd that was marked for sale. They put out word that more were needed, and they were buying at a more than fair price in order to meet their contracts, yes? Most of the moskar in town were sold to them, the offer was too good. I kept my personal team because I rent them out, and for other purposes we use estoa."

From his gesture at the stalls, estoa were clearly the donkey things. As we all processed this, he continued. "I could get you a wagon, and the estoa could pull it. They are... quite slow... and they need more water than moskar, but they are reliable beasts. Your other options... This large creature, I don't know its name but it does not belong in the desert, and the azela... it will not pull a cart, it will not suffer more than two riders, and the moskar are scared of them."

I looked again at the big heap of leather that was, supposedly, a living creature and I was suddenly very curious why moskar would be afraid of them. "Okay, but surely someone else in town has moskar."

"Yes, but those that were willing to sell did so already. I will send my stablehands to ask around, but it will not be fast or cheap." Catching the look on my face, he hastily added, "I can help with the price, of course."

Errod looked thoughtful. "They've been gone for hours already, but the wagon you described couldn't be moving that fast. If we take the old moskar and the two estoa we could see how fast they are, and with us only being a few hours behind we could possibly even try hurrying on foot."

The stable owner sucked his teeth, clearly of the opinion that that would be a stupid move. This whole situation was stupid, though. What a fucking ridiculous problem for us to be having. I owned an airship and could travel to other planes of existence. Katrin had what was almost certainly the Clockmaker's spellbook, Errod had a very powerful magic sword and a glove full of ghosts, human Calliope... well, she could curse people and was generally a badass, though in the moment that felt like maybe a downgrade from the wild magic.

And we couldn't deal with having some fucking mounts stolen.

Katrin sighed. "Okay, that's it. All three of you, out. Go. I'm going to deal with this, without watching everyone scowl while they try to decide who to be mad at. This is a logistics and organization issue, which is what I'm good at. Get some lunch somewhere."

Mildly stunned, I thought about arguing and then realized the other two were already leaving. Well...okay, I guess. I followed them outside, and we all stood there in the sun for a moment. "I didn't feel like I was scowling."

Calliope laughed. "You both had thunderstorms over your faces. I may have also been making a face, but for me it was impatience."

Errod just gazed off into the distance. "This is all my fault," he said.

"Oh, come on. It's clearly my fault, so the only way it could be your fault is if you think you should have stopped me or something."

He shook his head. "No, it was reasonable to follow someone who had that silver pin. But I should have gone as well, or asked one of the others to go with you. Nobody should have been alone."

"Or," Calliope said, "you're both idiots. This is just a thing that happened. We track them down, we kill everyone - fine, yes, everyone but Matlyn and possibly her sister - and we continue with our mission."

She hadn't mentioned Grunkle as one of the people we wouldn't kill. Did he still not have access to the Behemoth's abilities? He'd implied he could figure that out, eventually, but if he'd done it there's no way he would have been captured. They couldn't have even put a Dumine lock on him, since he'd said the Behemoth's Dumine was inside his body. Still, I didn't think he'd betrayed us; not only was there no reason to believe he had any association to Coelestis, I also hadn't seen him when they were leaving. Most likely, he was crammed in a crate right now.

We did, in fact, end up going and eating lunch. It felt wrong, like we should have been charging out into the desert to fight those motherfuckers, but... well, I was also hungry. As we ate, people would occasionally hurry past us, to or from the stables. Katrin appeared to be causing a commotion. "Hey Errod," I said, "why am I getting the feeling that we should have kept Katrin with us when we went to Good Charl? Something tells me the airship improvements would have been done by now."

"I've been counting," he said, "and I think that last person was the sixth one - not counting duplicates. What do you suppose she's doing, to have people rushing back and forth?"

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I assumed she was paying them, either in money or mana. Out here in the middle of nowhere, she could probably make a lot of friends just by charging up mana capacitors. The concerning thing, for me, is that with all this activity I still hadn't seen any mounts going by. I really didn't want to head out there on the geriatric moskar. Someone did finally walk past with an animal, but it was some sort of hideous centipede thing in a cage - and it wasn't big enough to carry even one of us. Still, they headed right for the stables.

Katrin joined us about half an hour later, looking like she was exhausted. "It's taken care of," she said, "we'll catch up to them by this time tomorrow. We're going to stay here tonight, and leave at first light in the morning. The saddles won't be ready until late tonight, we can't use the ones that we had on the moskar. They left by the North gate, so I've been assuming that they're headed out into the desert, but I was hoping Connie could target Matlyn with a fate thread - a temporary one is fine - so we can confirm the direction."

I wanted to ask about what we were riding, if not moskar - she'd kind of rushed past that - but she was right that I should check where Matlyn was. I turned on my threadsight, and made a generic fate thread while concentrating on Matlyn. I saw it snap tight, off to the North, and then - lacking any further purpose - it fell apart. "Yeah," I said, "she's alive and to the North of us, so..."

I trailed off, looking at Katrin with threadsight. She had a curse on her, as did Errod. Fuck. I started to untangle them as best I could, but was concentrating so hard I forgot to tell them what I was doing; still, my focus was obvious and so they just quietly started getting ready for a fight. Katrin began talking again, a teeny bit too loud and casual, while Errod loosened his sword and shifted so he would be able to stand quickly. Calliope blatantly pulled out a knife, and started trimming her nails with it.

I got the one on Katrin unraveled and started working on Errod, but as I was doing that one attached itself to Calliope. Ah, shit. This was an ongoing attack. I wasn't sure exactly what mojo human Calliope had, but it clearly included some awareness of curses or probability stuff because I saw her sit up a little straighter as soon as she got tagged. I nodded at her, and kept working on Errod.

"Across the street," she muttered under her breath, "in that vacant building. Last window before the alley. I do not know what curse was just put on me, but if they are cursing all of us they may be preparing to fight - otherwise they would use a stronger curse on just one of us at a time, slowly picking us off."

I wasn't sure about that, I could think of reasons to curse everyone even if you weren't about to throw down, but it didn't matter. We were, absolutely, about to fight. Errod's curse came undone, and when I went to start on the last one I saw it already collapsing as Katrin stared at the approximate area it was in. I knew she couldn't see them directly, but with her mana abilities she could probably sense it somehow once she was looking for it. I was assuming she was using mana control to either starve it or break it apart.

We stood up, doing our best to look like we were just done eating lunch. The dueling Calliopes nailed it, obviously, and despite Errod not being a great liar he did a great job. Katrin, meanwhile, was working so hard to not look at where the Sahrger were that it felt a touch obvious. We stepped out into the street, and I started a conversation about which inn we should get rooms at.

With that distraction ongoing, I used divination to sneak over to the building. The street was narrow enough that it was in range, and I poked my head through the wall to find two Sahrger crouched by the window. There was no glass, just an old ratty curtain that they could easily twitch aside to watch us. Like most Sahrger, they were short, pale, and wiry. These ones were both probably just over five feet, and no matter how much I stared at them I couldn't decide if they were male or female.

Unlike almost all of the Sahrger I'd seen, they were wearing matching outfits - plain brown pants and poncho-like tops, with bandoliers. The bandoliers had not only some knives, but all sorts of odd objects; vials of liquid, a bundle of feathers, an intricately carved metal rod. They were like utility belts for witchy shit.

One was peeking out the window at us and sneering, and once again I saw that they either had multiple canines or had sharpened some of their teeth, though others were still flat. Overall, they were weird-looking and moved like feral animals. And I kinda liked it. I was probably going to kill them, sure, but I also sort of wanted one of them to pin me against a wall. It wasn't something I thought about often, so it caught me off guard a bit.

They had pulled out weapons, and from what I could tell of their positioning they were planning on jumping through the empty window frame at us. "Here we go," I whispered to the others, "Katrin, close the window for me."

The Sahrger lunged, slamming directly into the shield Katrin had put in place and bouncing off. They were up almost instantly, and to their credit they quickly changed plans and bolted for the back of the building. The poor bastards knew they'd lost the element of surprise, but couldn't possibly understand just how fucked they were. Calliope had "cursed" Errod to hit the next enemy he attacked, which wasn't a guarantee of anything but was a nice bonus when you were about to throw a sword at someone. As he swung it the blade was weightless, but the instant it left his hand it had not just the normal heft of a sword - that was maybe three or four pounds at best - but a metaphysical density like a giant block of tungsten. It flew straight as an arrow through the window, a Sahrger, and an interior wall.

The other Sahrger leapt to the side, unsure what was happening, and turned to run to the furthest side of the building - which was where I was already headed. I reached the alleyway as they burst through a door, and we both attacked each other instantly. The Sahrger was faster than me, I had to admit - without being able to watch things from Ematse where I could do slow motion there's no way I could have pulled off an attack on someone I didn't know was there an instant before. It was very impressive, but sadly for the fey I had more warning, having been watching through the wall as I ran.

I ducked low as I threw my knife, and while it was stopped by a shield enchantment these were the throwing knives that were made specifically to counter that sort of thing. The enchantment triggered, and it dug into the Sahrger's shoulder. Meanwhile, the vial they'd thrown at me shattered behind me and let out an enormous red cloud, far bigger than I could have expected from the amount of liquid. I was sure it had some terrifying effect, but the street had been clear so it was unlikely any townsfolk got caught in the blast.

The Sahrger was running, and the way I'd ducked while entering the alley had slowed me down a little, but I wasn't too worried. Sure enough, the Sahrger turned the corner and immediately backpedaled as Calliope charged, iron blade in hand. The fey pulled another item out, a mana crystal covered by a metal lattice, and a ripple shot out from around them. Calliope's iron knife was ripped out of her hand and flung away, and I felt every bit of ferrous metal on me wrench backwards, causing me to fall on my ass.

Lightning hit the Sahrger - clearly Katrin was catching up - but it fizzled out as it touched them. Calliope tackled them, but with amazing speed they punched her in the kidneys and headbutted her face, throwing her off. I got another knife out but missed, and then as the Sahrger attempted to run a wave of force threw them and Calliope against the wall. I heard Katrin yelling an apology, but I doubted Calliope would hold a grudge - she would rather get bounced off a building than let a Sahrger get away.

I was back on my feet and charging and Errod was close behind me, having recovered his sword. The Sahrger jumped up and began climbing the wall despite it having no visible handholds, but Calliope got their ankle and hung on while I threw another knife - this time burying it right in the back of their neck. The Sahrger dropped in a heap, one last reflexive curse flying out at me but falling apart before it could attach.

"Holy shit," I said, "that one had all sorts of tricks."

Calliope nodded. "You have angered them. These were just scouts, you will have more coming after you now. We should be prepared to fight at least a dozen at a time, all with the same resources these ones had. It was good that we eliminated the first Sahrger immediately in such an unexpected way, otherwise one likely would have escaped."

Katrin was looting the body, surprisingly, and Calliope huddled down to help her sort through the objects. I waved Errod over, and we went back into the building to get everything off of the other one who was... in a pretty terrifying state. They'd been slammed into a wall by Errod's thrown sword, and it had then continued right through them which caused most of their insides to end up on the outside. I was impressed, but I could already see Errod mentally vowing to never do it again.

I suspected he would, though, if it was important enough - and anyway, that sword of his was always going to be devastating. This attack was messier, sure, but he'd cut Sahrger clean in half the last time we fought them. Being the less squeamish one I waved Errod away and did the looting myself, and then headed back to the alley after glancing out the window at the street. There were a few people gathered, clearly waiting to see what the commotion had been, but overall things had happened so quickly that nobody seemed sure it had even been a fight. We'd have to let someone know, but with the general attitude everyone had towards Sahrger I didn't think we'd be in trouble.

When I got back to the alley, Katrin and Calliope had their heads together and were examining the device that had made that strange magnetic pulse. Calliope looked up at me and I saw a glint of madness in her eyes, but far more terrifying was the fact that Katrin seemed every bit as excited. "Hey," she said, "we need to see if this town has a blacksmith."

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