The steam-powered ship huffed and puffed, and soon enough the shores of Neul were but a little speck of dirt on the pristine horizon behind Ted. He gave none of his precious mental energy to that wretched city. This was as much a well-deserved holiday as it was a business trip. He was not about to let Neul ruin his day.
The anxiety-inducing feeling of the sunlight whipping his brain into submission was much less bearable than his sea legs, after all, he knew what flying felt like and being on the waves was not considerably more radical to his sense of balance. The ship was fast. They made port in a harbor just east of the lumberjack lands that were completely a part of Sennas, and what Ted saw in the city shocked him.
These people were not mutants. They weren't even ugly, rather, he saw lots of people with similar features to Madorn's striking darkness, and on the other hand, fair beauty was represented as well.
This was a rather beautiful place.
Straw was utilized casually in the architecture. The houses were small, but there were so few big families for some reason that this did not seem to be causing any problems to the populace. What mattered to Ted was the absence of visibly poor or addicted people – next to zero homeless poor sods from what he could see, and this worried him.
He had to spin a proper tale to get to speak with someone in charge. This was not a big deal. Westerners were superstitious, even if they were less primitive than they were thought to be. They still blessed their cattle with the smoke of thirteen different herbs. Gods only knew where that number came from. It had been so ever since the war, and these bastards had not even taken part to it on the same level as Raelians, for example.
It was a weird place. Ted had no idea where the wealth here came from. Perhaps it was lumber.
They still had to find a place to stay, but due to some kind of a festival taking place in the city, they had to travel for thirty minutes on the outskirts to find an inn that was not full to the brim with customers.
The weather was hot, and the sun was hiding, the winds favorable for any and all festivities involving getting wasted and dehydrated in the great outdoors.
The fields opened up just outside the windows of their rooms, ripe and embellished with specks of fresh green, the food was good, the ale was even better.
It was the ultimate subtropical countryside, idyllic in its backwardness, charming in its twisted simplicity.
There were strange ritual masks on the walls of the inn and Ted never got an answer to any questions about their real meaning.
In the dead of the night, Eknie knocked on his door.
"Ted, either we really should not be here or then we have to be here, I don't know which way it is. There's a ritual going on near the smoking booth outside."
"Don't be such a total wuss, Eknie," Ted chastised the woman, rubbing his eyes vigorously. "I saw no smoking booth outside. I have been smoking wherever I please."
"There is one, Ted, and no one's really using it. You have to see this. I saw them carry a man, I think he was dead, but he could have been merely unconscious."
Now cor Ted Tobias was properly invested in the outcome of a midnight smoke break. They tiptoed around the building and came to a secluded spot – and just before the man wearing a ritual mask could see them, Eknie stopped Ted and nudged him to stay hidden.
A hen got its throat cut and its blood spilled all over the grass. There was indeed a dead man on the ground, protected by white sheets that looked as expensive as Ted's finest meck.
The ritual had already begun. There was a quiet sound of drums and an instrument that Ted did not recognize.
The player held it close to her mouth, moving it in synchronicity with the drums and providing a melody to the horrible scene.
There were candles, too, black candles with the blackest wax, and when even those went out, there was a tremor in the body that was not supposed to move at all, not with that gaping hole in its belly.
Ted bit his lips. This could be useful to him as an occultist.
The deadrousing secrets were not gone. There were still those who practiced the forbidden arts, but this ritual was different from what Ted thought it would have been.
The chicken blood was a really nice touch.
Ted waited for something else to happen.
Little by little, the man on the ground got up, trembling, making whimpering sounds that gave the image of him fearing the masked deadrouser more than he feared death itself. He got all the way up on his own two legs, still shuddering like a dry leaf in a strong wind, but he did not seem to be able to go on much further. He looked at his new lord and master, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the pale moonlight.
"Why…"
At least the western dialect was easy to understand, even if it was a bit too wide and sleazy for Ted to like it.
"Why did you wake me up? I don't want to."
The absolute bone-freezing terror in the voice of the dead man left little room for suspicion.
There was indeed something more terrifying than death or dying, it was not being allowed to be dead.
The guttural voice of the masked deadrouser replied with haste.
"I need to know who is the secret benefactor of your will."
"Please…don't hurt her!" the dead man moaned.
Ted thought he saw something glimmer in the eyes of the corpse, perhaps it was tears, perhaps it was whatever liquids eyeballs turned to during the putrefaction process.
"Oh, so…it is a she. That narrows it down to three people. That is good," the ominous masked fellow said.