John awoke, still lying in the devastated tent. It was morning, or at least very early afternoon. His concept of time had been destroyed, along with his head, his hands, and his ribs, apparently. He moved with some difficulty, and his senses were blurred. Sticking a finger in both of his eyes, and wriggling them about, brought forth a crust of dried blood. He rubbed his palm across his forehead, and felt a large lump there. Blood had also dried, as it ran in rivulets from his nose. Spitting on the floor, in an attempt to get rid of the metallic taste in his mouth, produced a globule of blood from his mouth. He tried to shake his head, to clear the mugginess that clouded his mind, but he almost fell over with the pain of doing so. He looked down at his knife and rifle, lying at his feet. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, there was a strap that ran from the end of the barrel to the end of the butt stock, and sheathed the knife.
The fancy clothes that Stockbridge had lent him were ripped to tatters. His shirt no longer possessed one half of its cloth, the right side, and his chest, arm and abdomen were bare. The left side held a long gash, as if fingernails had been drawn down them. His pants were both ripped up the seams, and both had bloodstained and ragged knees, where he had dragged his legs along the floor, obviously sometime during the fight of the night before. His boots were relatively intact. The laces had come undone, but that was easily fixable, obviously they were of a good quality. He knelt to tie them, and gouts of pain through his knees, his thighs, his shoulders, his neck, his lower back, even his arse, slammed into his nervous system. He convoluted on the floor, and bit back a scream. Lying contorted on the floor, he managed to edge his feet close enough towards him to tie the laces.
To say he was covered in blood was an understatement. He only dimly remembered what had taken place the night before, but a headless corpse and a backless corpse lying in the tent with him gave him the impression that it must have been bloody work. His boots were pooled with blood, so much so that they squelched when he eventually managed to stand up again. Long, thick streaks ran down his trousers, or rather up his trousers, as if he had killed something below him, and its viscera had sprayed upwards. The side of his chest without a shirt was stained a dark brown, the mud and the blood mixing to produce a daub of gore. The left side of the shirt had gone from a sheen black, to a dirty purple, the colour making John's eyes ache.
He stripped the rest of the shirt off, but the effect underneath was the same. The blood had soaked through, and coated his skin, dying it the nasty brown colour. He could not look at his face, or his closely cropped hair, but he knew the sight would not be a pretty one.
He stumbled out of the tent, walking still a problem for him. The village was deserted. He looked first one way down the street, and then it's opposite. Mhotep's tent was a smoulder of ash, his expensive furs burnt into nothing. Another tent has caught fire, but this too had burnt away, leaving only scant few metal shapes inside. And bones. The heat must have been so intense inside the tent that people that had taken refuge inside had been burnt until their flesh, and their life, were nothing but steam in the wasteland.
However, it did add to the smell. Bodies littered the place like they had fallen from the sky. Some were Black Lotus, most were tribals. There were a few of the traders that John had never had a chance to meet. He felt a slight emotion for them, but nothing compared to what he knew he would feel if he were to traverse to his own tent. The thought of even attempting to go back into the carnage, much of which he wrought, and all of which was caused because of him, sickened him to the core. Instead he went further down in the opposite direction, closer to the original entrance to the village, through which he had passed through not a week before.
He saw a small congregation gathering at the foot of the hill. He attempted to move quicker to get towards it, but the damage he had done to his body halted him from doing so. He was consigned to hobbling down the hill. He began to make out figures, small shapes, slowly converging into people. He could not tell which faction they belonged to. He turned to picture the whole village behind him. It was wreckage. Tents had been knocked over, set on fire, or otherwise mauled. Hardly any were left standing. Smoked gave the whole village an umbrella of sadness, it spoke of Paradise Lost.
The thought made John chuckle, but he didn't know why. It was a morbid feeling.
He turned back, and saw that many of the people at the bottom of the hill had spotted him. One was a huge man, and he began to advance on John. John tried to scan for black tattoos, but he couldn't find any of them. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Stern…stern features staring back at him.
However, his relaxation evaded him when the look on Stern's face did not fade.
"You come with us. Now"
"Calm down, my friend. What is wrong?"
"Dead or damned. Everyone is dead or damned." The frightening intelligence in the words Stern spoke spooked John.
"Is Mhotep down there?"
"Follow me."
In silence, they descended down to the bottom of the hill. There, a small group of surprisingly heavily armed tribals waited for them. Obviously, they had scavenged weapons from the bodies of the raiders, and the traders, alike. There were many women in the group, and they seemed the most hostile. The men almost skulked compared to the enthusiasm with which the women grappled with their weapons. Almira raised a shotgun to John's chest.
"Stop there." She was clever, keeping him more than 15 feet away from her. Too far for him to do anything about it, but close enough for his chest to be turned inside out by the shotgun round.
"What is this all about Almira." Tears welled in her eyes.
"Mhotep is taken, they burnt his wife, and scattered the bones of Mikhail to the wasteland. They have taken many people from our village. None of this started before you came to the village, this must be your fault. You will help us get them back, or you will die where you stand."
John contemplated confessing that yes, it was all his fault, but he thought it would not help his situation, and could actually adversely affect it. Better to stay silent, he thought.
"I will help you, but you need to think about what you are doing. Do you even know where the Black Lotus camp is?"
"Stern…extracted that information from one of the prisoners."
"May I talk with him?"
"He… expired. They all did."
These villagers, these tribals, a community of the wasteland, had massacred unarmed Black Lotus raiders. The feeling made John sick. But then the black Lotus had massacred unarmed tribals. Who was morally in the right? This was something he needed think on when he had more time, and less head injuries.
"And how do you, a rabble of women and young boys," John pointed at a tribal with a gangly frame, surprised to find that it was Samson, the boy that had helped him out only a few days earlier. He was older than John himself. "and one or two real warriors is going to stand up against the better trained and better equipped Black Lotus."
"Because the Moon and the Stars are on our side."
Their superstitious religion made them irrational in the face of death.
"The Moon and the Stars can stop bullets and spears?" Stern's voice bellowed.
"Be careful Heretic, blasphemy is punishable by death."
Quite.
"Okay, calm down Stern. I will help you, but I am injured from last night's fight, I need to rest first. You cannot expect me to fight in this situation."
"We do not care for your needs Trader. We only require your gun arm. Nothing is broken, so you can fight."
John was about to question her, and counter that he did in fact think that he had broken a rib or two, but he did not think it was prudent.
"I can barely walk. Give me a few days rest, I will go with you then."
"The man is a coward. He is of no use to us, shoot him Almira."
The crowd began to turn on him. More shoots and cries rang out. John needed to think fast, from the back of his mind, words came to his tongue.
"Cowardice! Let he who has no cowardice cast the first stone."
The crowd shuffled their feet. The ploy had worked, obviously, they had their own guilt.
"Stern, shoot him Stern. Show him a real man."
Shit, he had forgotten about him.
"I will not kill him. Cowards are below me"
John let out a sigh of relief at Stern's lofty ideals.
"This has nothing to do with cowardice, or guilt, or anger. We all made mistakes over the course of the last few days. You have all lost friends and lovers, and brothers, and sisters, and fathers and mothers. You must have a vortex inside of you that swells with hate for the Black Lotus. Suddenly, you find more weapons in you hands than you could have dreamed off, and revenge is the first thing on your mind. A strong arm," John pointed at Stern "is not enough. You will need more than your own virtue and a small numbers of rifles, and even less warriors to defeat the Black Lotus. You need a plan, you need to think logically. If you fight in anger, you will surely lose. What will that do to the memory of those that you have lost, if you waste your life on charging down a heavily defended position? Stay a while, breath deep breaths. When you are calm, if revenge is still on your mind, then I will surely help you. Together we will smite them, and then your vengeance can be sated."
The speech seemed to have worked, and the crowd shuffled its feet even more. Then, another small voice from the back piped up. John was beginning to hate them.
"They have taken my wife and my only child. And you would have us sit on our arses and twiddle our thumbs?"
The mention of the prisoners bridled the crowd to action once more.
"We do not need his help. We have them above on our side, who needs the help of an ignorant waste-lander." Stern's calm voice cut above the rising din.
"Fine then. Let this coward go, and we will fight them ourselves."
Roars of approval swept through the crowd, and they began to make preparations to set off. John laid a hand on Stern's shoulder.
"You will not return from this foolish endeavour Stern."
"This I have to do, for my own people. They have Mhotep; I wouldn't expect you to understand waste-lander. I have no choice."
"Then I will see you in the next life my friend."
Stern clasped John's outstretched hand.
"You are no coward John Trader. I have reckoned your body count from last night."
The comment was obviously meant as a compliment, but it only furthered John's grimace, and added to his bad mood. Not only had he caused most of a village to die, or become enslaved, he had failed to prevent the rest of the village from doing so. How many more had to die, and still he had no answers.
"Stern, before you go, answer me one thing. You go from periods of intelligence to periods of," John tried to put it tactfully "not intelligence." He failed. Utterly.
Stern winked at him.
"Come with us Trader, I will explain."
"I am sorry, I cannot do that."
"Then I will tell you in the next life." His voice bellowed, "Let us bring holy fury on the Black Lotus."
The crowd roared with his message.
John sat on the floor, for quite some time. He watched the procession eagerly, and enthusiastically go into the wasteland, to certain death. He shook his head, and walked around the village, finding the small stream that served as the water source. He did not want to pollute the precious water by cleansing himself, but he felt that it wouldn't be in use again for a long time to keep.
As he knelt, and after the pain had dissipated, he began to think.
The Black Lotus had called him an abomination. They thought he was some type of laboratory experiment Mercy had been so eager to protect him at all costs from any hurt. Adam had injected him with something that made him something totally inhuman. Stockbridge seemed to have an inkling of what was going on, but he was in no position to explain it to him now. Silica had wanted to abduct him, and had been willing to kill a Niagara knight to do it. Adam had called him 'one of them'. Valour had called him a demon, and been scared of him, both times he had seen him. And then he had disappeared. He kept having flashes of memories, and bouts of speech and combat, that were wholly disproportionate to his experiences. And one of the Black Lotus had mentioned something about Librarians, and that they had been in the village.
He tried to put things in order, tried to find some sense in any of it. He had lost everyone that he held dear to him. Perhaps Stern would find Sunset, but that was unlikely. Dignity was probably dead in the village, and John couldn't bring himself to search through the wreckage to find his body. Valour was probably dead, killed in the firefight last night. Had he anything left to work with.
Sitting naked beside the stream, he had decided to discard his clothes, in an effort to find new ones, his pale skin was beginning to burn in the intense daylight. He tried to recollect conversations he had had with people. Silica had said she would meet up with him in the marketplace, and then had come back that very night to kidnap him. Adam had said there were a lot of opportunities in marketplace. Even Stockbridge had said he would want to accompany John there. Perhaps he could find a Niagara knight there, and explain his story to him, to try and get a better answer. Or perhaps it was worth trying to contact the Black Lotus, their 'Great Reaver' seemed to want to talk to him so desperately.
Something niggled at the back of his consciousness. Something Silica had said. About Marketplace, but he couldn't remember. He tried to recollect that first night in the bar. They were talking about their reasons for going into the waste-land. She had said how the travellers helped people, though John had seen how easily they dropped that virtue, but she had also mentioned something else.
It clicked in his brain. They had spoken of Noble. The very reason John had embarked on this quest in the first place. She said that she had heard something about him in Marketplace. That he had passed through the village not long before John had gotten there, that he was starved and close to death, but the village had recuperated him and sent him on his way, that they told him to go to Marketplace so that he could find what he sought. That settled it, John would travel to Marketplace.
He dusted himself off, and went to the village. He felt bad digging through the belonging of other people, but it was out of necessity. He took clothes, food, ammunition, a crude map in the remains of the bar of the local area and a few pieces of metal he could use to trade, putting them in a bag he found in Almira's tent.
Lastly, he went to pay respect to his dead comrades before he left. Mercy, Justice, Veracity, Shroud. Those bodies he found. Valour was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Dignity. John found this strange, but when he had finished, and the day was ended, he rested to sleep. In the bright rosiness of early dawn, he began his long journey.
