Chapter 11
Don't shower.
Shiro woke up to several very unpleasant sensations at once.
One was the cramped feeling, coupled with a rattling motion, as if he were crammed inside a box being pushed over uneven ground.
The last thing, and easily the first he noticed as he came back to his senses, was the noise, a commotion he realized, looking around, was coming from the wagon they were riding in.
Right, they were on the road. Had been since they'd left camp at the abandoned tower the night before, from the look of it.
He stirred, careful not to wake the girl sharing the wagon with him.
Crammed in among crates full of guns was Chaska, who'd fallen asleep against his shoulder, probably not by choice, but given how they were seated at the back of the wagon, her only options had been to lean on her injured left side or lean right, onto his shoulder.
He'd started to notice a soreness there and shifted his hand to ease it, when he noticed something he could not ignore.
"This..." He reached down immediately to confirm it, and yes, he got the confirmation he was looking for. "Holy shit!"
He stood up, waking Chaska, whose eyes snapped open as if she'd been under attack. Under normal circumstances he'd have felt bad about that, but right now he couldn't bring himself to. "It's happening!"
"What?" she grogHeadbirdy rubbed her eyes.
"It's fucking happening! Let's gooooo!" he celebrated, with more enthusiasm than he remembered ever having felt.
She looked at him in utter confusion. She just didn't get it. Fine by him. Leaping out of the moving wagon, he went looking for the one person likely to understand his joy, running alongside the moving procession until he reached the front, where he found the catgirl sisters, Anya and Vanya.
The younger sister, holding the reins, noticed him first, but it was Anya who greeted him. "Cauli—Shiro. I heard you fell asleep back there, hope you had a goo—"
"It's hard!" he blurted out.
"Hard? What's har—Oh. It is?"
"Yeah, it's hard now. Like, really," he said, holding up his fingers to give her a rough estimate. "It's longer too. Told you I was a grower."
"That's... good news, I suppose."
Of course it was good news. Given how unresponsive it had been the day before, despite every stimulus that should have gotten more than a shrug out of it, he'd started worrying it was just over for him, like he'd caught some incurable condition and any doctor he saw would just tell him amputation was the only option.
This wasn't just good news. This was tremendous news.
"Could we stop?" he asked. "For a bit."
"Why?" she asked, frowning.
"I'm going to need some alone time, if you don—huh?" Something made him stop mid-sentence, and he glanced down at his pants, where the warmth, the reassuring stiffness, was already receding back to its base state.
"Hey, what's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost. Is it still…you know?"
He couldn't bring himself to look at her. When he finally did, his shoulders had slumped, and he shook his head slowly, miserably. "No," he muttered, his voice dropping into a dull, defeated whisper. "It's gone. It went down."
"If it could rise once, surely it can do it again, right?"
"That," he said, considering it, "that must be true."
"There's no reason to despair th—oh, we might be able to stop for a while, Shiro," she cut herself, pointing ahead to a road, an actual road, a proper highway, unlike the uneven terrain they'd been riding over. On it was a convoy of several wagons much like their own.
"Anya," Vanya said, peering ahead, "I think that's Maiq's caravan."
"I think so too," Anya confirmed. "Well, Shiro, it looks like you'll be getting what you asked for soon enough."
Just as she said, the two convoys met and paused, a pause Shiro used immediately to confirm a dreading fear.
It wasn't just his imagination. Whether he skimmed the magazine he was, of course, still carrying, or read it with the most self-inserting focus he could manage, there was no reaction from it whatsoever, like the day before.
"Why, dammit! Why?!"
The real tragedy wasn't that his tent refused to rise.
It was that he was still fully capable of feeling horny.
Mentally, he was as responsive as any healthy man, maybe more so.
The magazines had done something to him, same as his time with Anya.
His mind was firing on all cylinders. His body just stayed stubbornly offline.
Could this be what that famous author meant when he wrote I must scream but I have no mouth? he thought bitterly.
"You alright?" Shiro heard someone calling. "I heard you shouting from over th—"
Shiro turned to find Chaska approaching. "Are you... are you crying?!"
He tucked the magazine back into the bundle he'd been carrying it in and wiped his eyes before standing up. "No."
"Tears are literally rolling down your cheeks."
"That's not true," he denied, walking past her toward the convoy, specifically toward the caravan's leader, who was at that moment chatting with Anya.
As he approached, he caught her saying to the man, "There he is, the man we were just talking about.
Master Shiro, this is Maiq, a fellow merchant of mine. "
"Maiq, this is Master Shiro."
"Nice to meet you," Shiro said, offering a bow, trying to be as respectful as possible given what Anya intended to trade with this man.
"Nice to meet you too, friend," the tall, dark-skinned man greeted back, a little awkwardly, which made Shiro realize a handshake would probably have been the better call. The bow clearly wasn't part of the man's culture.
Speaking of the man, if Shiro had ever tried to picture a wealthy spice merchant, this was exactly it, down to the last detail.
He wore a rich velvet coat of deep crimson with fine gold embroidery along the cuffs, and a faint scent of crushed saffron and rare cardamom seemed to drift off his clothes.
"And over here, Master Shiro's friend—"
"Chaska," the girl introduced herself from behind him, stepping up to his side.
"Quite the unique group you've brought together here, Anya. Almost like you deliberately gathered three foreign-looking people. An Arad like myself, a continentalist like him, and an Andoe," he said, studying Chaska.
"Are people like us actually rare in this region?" Shiro asked, curious both for himself and about Chaska's people which stirred nothing from his memory.
"You're not from this region, are you?"
Maybe. Maybe not. Shiro didn't have an answer for that.
"You're an actual foreigner. Which means she is too. Which means she's not just an Andoe, but an actual fundamentalist."
He'd already managed to unlock the knowledge that continentalist meant someone from the neighboring landmass, referred to simply as the other continent, self-explanatory enough. But Andoe, or fundamentalist Andoe, meant nothing to him. Cautiously, he asked, "Would that be a problem, if she were?"
"It would not," Anya answered. "He's already accepted my offer, so he'll be taking the two of you into the city of Eudeussac."
The man looked like he was about to protest, but let out a sigh instead.
"I did give my word. But I don't think it's unreasonable of me to expect this one to at least get rid of those tattoos before we enter the city.
The last thing I want is a reputation for smuggling terrorists into a peaceful city. "
Shiro was still a little lost on what this was about, so he glanced at Chaska, whose expression made her position categorically clear.
He leaned in and whispered, "We've got two options here.
Either we do this and ride in a possibly comfortable wagon, or we go on foot, which means at least a full day of unrelenting marching under a merciless sun.
" She gave him a stubborn look first. "Come on.
Do it for my sake, okay?" It took some more pleading before she finally, begrudgingly, relented.
"Perfect," Anya beamed, turning back to business with Maiq. Once that was settled, she pulled Shiro aside for a moment. He'd been hoping it was to tell him she'd miss him. Instead, it was just to make sure she'd be able to reach him in the city.
"Don't leave the city without letting me know, through Maiq and his people. I'll have my smiths look into your bullet as soon as—why are you looking at me like that?"
"I was hoping you pulled me aside to tell me how much you'd miss me. Turns out it was only about my gun. Was that the only thing that interested you about me?"
"That was the first thing that fascinated me about you," she said, deepening his already sad mood, "but you know, my little cauliflower, that doesn't mean it was the only thing. Turns out there's a lot more interesting about you." She lifted his chin with a finger.
Ever the sensitive man, Shiro smiled at the gesture. "There's plenty more to discover, I promise."
"I don’t doubt that. Which is exactly why I want you to stay reachable."
"Promise, I'll be reachable," he declared, raising a hand.
"Good boy," she said, handing him a coin-filled pouch.
With that, she left to rejoin her caravan, which had been waiting for her.
Soon it vanished into the horizon while the caravan he'd now joined got moving again.
Once Chaska's tattoo had been removed, the two of them were allowed to share a wagon with Maiq.
Unlike the one Anya had assigned them, this one left them fully exposed to open air, air Shiro predicted would turn brutal by midday, watching Maiq and his driver steer the horses from the very back of a wooden wagon.