Rare Reagents

The sun hung low, a pale green hue. It really wasn’t hot in any appreciable way, not nearly the sort of heat emitted by an entity that should go around identifying itself as a member of solar royalty. Maybe it wasn’t a sun, and she was just assuming that. Maybe it was her mistake, to see a round ball of light in the sky above her and just naturally assume- that? That’s gotta be a sun.

But if that was a sun, then what was the endless darkness at her feet, which showed now interest in receding from such radiance? An endless sheet of obsidian? An eternal darkness rising up to consume her for a lifetime of wanton and reckless herbal experimentation and related vice?

She really hoped not, that would be a tremendous dampener on her mood.

Sparks struck on her rumination. Darkness it was beneath her, but it was no sun above her, but the essence of Light. And the green was not of the light, but the Wild that grew between, it was now so very simple to her! She was among the Primal Powers, mentally and spiritually intermingled in a Bastard Nettle induced meditation, as much of the higher forces of creation that she could perceive, even with the higher sense of them she could understand with her own Fae heritage.

She opened her eyes, remembering then that she had a body and thus could do that. Light, Shadow and Wild twisted and swirled together, forming fractals of shapes, sounds, smells, tastes; the world manifested, and in its myriad facets, she was now acutely aware of the Primals’ motions within each.

Then she exhaled, coughed, sputtered. 

Her company with her on the wagon stared at her.

“I’m fine I just,” and then she wheezed and coughed again, gutturally. Her lungs tried escaping and her chest ordered lockdown; her equilibrium was suddenly subject to both gravity and the rolling of a horse drawn carriage. Neither of which she was accustomed to in her current state.

“I took a bit too,” and then her insides attempted to turn outside again.

A kind hand offered Chrysanthemum a waterskin. She emptied it and put the fire out inside her.

She exhaled. And then she inhaled again, and exhaled; there was no respiratory treachery.

“This is a good crop,” she said, declaratively. The trees pulsed with the stuff of the Wild before her eyes, as they rolled down the road. Light, the force of truth and illumination did its will through and between their leaves, dappling bright hughes against the shadows beneath the canopies, the domain of Darkness, the force of obfuscation and sanctuary. And beyond those Three, smaller, stranger things, bits and pieces that could be little more than hiccups in reality, typos in the prose of the world. Yet some were greater, more complete, chaotic spirits and gods-in-waiting born of the mortal worldstuff, but twisted as well: the Wyrd.

Mutt, riding ahead of her, said “you said the same thing yesterday.”

“Need to ensure that’s still the case, daily,” said Chrysanthemum. “Hourly, some seasons. Bastards are a finicky plant.”

“The seedpacks and leaf are known for their shelf life,” Fenn said, quietly beside her, riding with the barrels.

“The magic that grows in them isn’t, it’s just as touchy as any other,” said Chrys, “Its’ finicky, it can go out on you. Then what do you have? A weed that doesn’t even let you see the fibre of the world?”

“That eases restless sleep, pain and fever,” Said Threefinger, squawking suddenly from behind the reins, “prevents nightmares, provokes appetite and is, well, fun with friends.”

“I won’t stand for a crop I grow to be less than all it can be,” Chrys replied, with fire. It was a bad idea, it threw her off her base, and Fenn reached and pulled her upright again.

“Good thing the customers don’t mind,” said Threefinger.

He was right, Chrys knew. It was why she had associated herself with the fuzzy little pragmatist. Threefinger, gremlin mogul, an individual well versed in the worth and cost of things, and how they should be traded. So called because he got his start in his grem-collective with an interest in volatile powders, when his name was still Fivefinger. Fenn had been her longtime assistant, and of a curious nature at that. She never hired him, nor had they ever spoken before the day she found him tending her garden beds on a misty morning. He was rabbit-folk, long eared and placid tempered, and in all the time she had known him, he had never lost the same look, knowing, ethereal, a look that said to her that he was either haunted or holy. He said it had been destiny followed that led him to her garden. She remembered saying “okay?” Then she went back in her house and locked the door until she was sure he was safe.

“Problem is, I don’t think those are customers up ahead,” Mutt said, a low growl rising from her. Mutt wasn’t her real name. It wasn’t even her 3rd false one, more just something she went by because she’d never known her parents, had no clue of her heritage and had yet to be someplace she figured could be her home. What she did know was violence, and Chrysanthemum had commissioned her as chief muscle. When dealing with valuable substances that make the mind, body and spirit go to places beyond conventional perception (and sanity), it Chrys found it paid to have someone on her side that could kill drawing her sword alone.

But the figures she saw weren’t within reach, closer to a quarter-mile ahead of them on their forest road. They stood with masks and cowls, a dozen in all, spears, axes, and the big one standing in back had what looked like a tree bough studded with carpentry nails. Behind them, a bridge over a raging tributary of the Drowned Saints, and two hours of otherwise quiet road to the Market in Quintromo.

They stared.

“They could be puritans,” Chrys said, quietly.

“What about them says they’re into teetotaling?” asked Mutt.

“I have a test, I can check if they’re puritans,” said Threefinger. He reached beneath his seat, and unstrapped his matchlock from it, igniting its match.

“Are puritans bulletproof?” Chrys asked.

“No, but I shall fire one round directly at the head of the man in the front. If God saves him, then, I suppose, more the fool I,” said Threefinger, as he poured a measure of powder down the muzzle.

“Good afternoon!” A voice greeted them from above. They looked and saw a similarly dressed man, wiry, wrapped in patched armour and with a hatchet through the ring on his belt. But the grin he wore had the professional intent of a merchant. The sort of merchant that would see ethics more of an obstacle than a guideline.

“I see you’re going to be employing our bridge, and I am pleased that myself and my friends can be of kind service to you. Which is why they sent me ahead, to negotiate the price of your safe passage.”

“This is cloying,” said Chrysanthemum, still in her stupor, to nobody in general.

“Yes, but you can understand the alternative is more unpleasant. My comrades and I prefer to be ahead of the times when it comes to interpersonal matters.”

“I dislike this talkative man,” said Fenn, flatly, ears drooping. He rarely sampled his own fruits; among their fellowship, he had the least need. 

“Thus…” the man in the tree continued, with a roll of his eyes, “you can further be told that we know what it is that you carry, that we are the type to do our due diligence and foundational work to be the best we can be in our field. We also know that what you carry happens to be worth quite literally thousands of times its weight in silver, so even were we to relieve you of… most of your burden, I would think it could still prove to be a worthwhile trip for you good folks.

“Right,” Mutt said, standing from her seat. “Boss, if it’s no skin off you, I’m going to go make those idiots into furniture. Then I guess I’ll come back and get improvisational with tree-boy.”

“I wouldn’t do that, were I you,” said the armed man in the tree.

“Of course you wouldn’t, fucking look at you,” said Mutt.

“I am too high for this,” Chrys said, standing herself. And then sitting back down, shakily, unsteadily. “It’s apparently just too much to ask to have a day that is sunny and a day where things run smoothly as well.”

She rolled out of the cart, hit the floor of the trail like a stone and found her way to her feet. Her hood flopped back, and the last dregs of her smoke rolled out from under, rising from between the pair twisted horns on her forehead, her Fae debasement. “You,” she pointed to the man in the tree, “get down from there, take me to your men.”

“You,” she pointed to Mutt. “Murder nobody. Right now, I mean.”

“You,” she pointed to Threefinger and his matchlock. “Put that out before it goes off.”

“You,” she pointed to Fenn. “You’re fine, but you could get weirder. Don’t.”

The man sprung down from the tree, landing neatly in front of her. “Capital choice, my good lady. If you’ll walk and talk with me, I think that you’ll find that we’re more reasonable than any common group of cutpurses. We believe in common decency, and service. The violence, we find, can be avoided entirely and made less a threat, more of an indistinct consequence of noncompliance.”

“Do you know what’s in those barrels?”

“You’re coming southward from the Undergrowth, you have a rabbit-farmer riding with you, and you appear to be some sort of fairy-wizard. It, of course, stands to reason, that the produce you’re bringing to market is of some truly extraordinary variety, produce that will be well paid for by those that want to ease the pain of daily existence.”

Chrysanthemum stopped, and the man kept walking. They were easily within earshot of the men now, she could hear them mumbling to each other, indistinct but predatory.

“If you saw powdered mandrake, would you know what to do with it?” she said to him.

He turned, and he stopped. He grinned, and smugness oozed from him. “I think I could figure out with a few tries.”

“And that’s where you’d be a very stupid man,” she said, putting her pipe to her lips and removing a match from the folds of her robes.

“My lady, ignorance is hardly the cause of incivility. We know what your reagents do, there’s only so many ways of administering-”

“They say that when the mandrake is removed from the earth it’s growing in, that if it was grown correctly, that it truly contains the Seventh Essence, that of Abandon, it will scream. It will scream, like a furious dying mortal, with a volume of sound and such evil intent that it will destroy your soul, shred it apart and burn it to fine, ethereal ash, leaving your body a dead but untouched shell.” She took another wad of Nettle leaves and seeds, and packed it into her pipe. “The reality, of course, is less sensational. Mandrake, if you grew it properly, comes out of the ground warm, like a corpse left to cool. It smells of ozone and holding it makes your skin crawl, that’s how you know it has the Seventh in it.”

She pulled a vial from her robes, flakes that were perhaps once white but had dried yellow. The brigands’ big man took a backward step at it; others didn’t seem to take note. She pulled the cork, and the sharp pop echoed through the woods.

With a delicate finger, she tapped a single grain of the gold within onto the nettle in her pipe.

“You see, that’s the secret with mandrake,” she said between clenched teeth and she struck the match and raised it to her pipe. “It’s so damn powerful…”

She inhaled and held. And held. And held. And held.

When her eyes opened, they had dilated to full, black spots. Somewhere within them, a green light was glowing, softly enough for the talkative one of the bandits to make out.

He froze, as she approached him. 

Then she exhaled in his face.

He clutched his eyes and took a backwards step, a second, and a third. Then he stopped, and lurched, first to one side, then the others. And then he sank to his knees, face upturned to the sky, eyes wide, face wide, entire being wide.

He screamed. Once, as loud as he could, until his lungs wrung out. He took a sharp, wheezing breath in, and screamed again, just as loud, for longer. A third time, and a new record, and on and on.

“...it can leave the screaming for others to handle.”

Hisses of “Witch!” and “Fairy sorcery!” came from the men at the bridge. The brought spears to bear, shields interlocked edge to edge and wheeled axes around in readiness. The big man left, taking his nailed bough with him.

“You men thought you were here to rob merchants and take for yourself a few goodly handfuls of ye drogen, make some coin, have a good time. You have no idea what idea of the sort of reagents I deal in, just like you have no idea why someone would willingly take mandrake.”

She pointed upwards. “But that’s a hint.”

Rain began to pit and pat on the leather and gambesons of the bandits. One looked up, gaped, then bid the man next to him do the same.

The thunderhead above them wasn’t there a second ago. It looked ripe. It looked angry.

A fork leapt from it, and blew a crater in the trail with an earsplitting crack and a rain of secondary projectiles. Smoke curled out of it, obscuring the mens’ view of Chrys, but not of the light that shone from her, through it.

They stepped aside. And politely cleared their lead man, who was now working his way down to simply loudly and repeatedly exclaiming “WOW!” in a state of excited senselessness, out of her way.

She whistled. The wagon pulled up behind her. She climbed aboard, falling face first with unsteady feet into Fenn’s knee. “Sorry,” he whispered. “No,” she whispered back, “it’s fine, I’m high as shit.”

She leaned over to the men, now cowering roadside, trying to slap some sense back into their friend. “By the way, if you’re still here?” She beckoned to the cloud. “It will be, too. So fuck off.”

And the four rolled on.

After a while, Mutt said “still think it’d prove more of a point if I handled things my way.”

“Can’t argue that,” Chrys replied. “But it’s not like we’re mercenaries or anything. We just deal in rare reagents.”