The Very Incredible Adventures of Majur

Majur walked through the field of broken glass like a ghost, her reflection fractured and splintered by the crystal shards that dotted this region. She ignored them, for the most part; the sparkling crystal was useless for arrowheads (she’d tried, but they shattered against any reasonably made armor), and her iron-toed boots kept her feet safe.

A dog barked somewhere up ahead. Majur ducked behind an outcropping and began to inch forward, sliding her bone-white mask down over her face. The lenses clicked and whirred, happy to serve their purpose, and Majur’s vision went a dull green. Shapes began to define themselves; blue and yellow and red, each marked with a mystic rune. That one meant a small animal, like a dog. Those two were human. And that one…

Majur stifled a groan. That one meant a construct. She could hear its joints clicking and whirring as it stomped closer to her hiding place. She pulled her crossbow from the leather sling on her back, loaded a bolt, and spun up to fire.

The construct was a cyclopean monster, iron and brass plates nailed over a humanoid form with broad shoulders and a neckless, lumpen head. Its single lensed eye focused on her just in time to see the crossbow bolt coming at it. The bolt, crafted specially of deep-iron at great expense, went straight through the construct’s eye, head, brain core, and sacred parchment before exiting through the back of its skull. Majur caught a brief glimpse of the bandits reaching for guns before she ducked back down to reload.

“Come out,” said one—Erikl? The bandits she had been hired to kill were Korvian brothers named Erikl and Kirill— “Come out and we’ll shoot you quick.”

“Stay there and we’ll find you, gut you, and leave you for the glassbeetles,” said the other brother, who was both taller and hairier.

Majur smirked, elbowing her way along the ground. They still thought she was near the smoldering wreck of the construct. She crawled behind another crystal spike and opened one of her belt-pouches, pulling out a metal object the size of a grapefruit. She struck a match with her fingernail, lit the fuse, and threw.

“Got you—Hey, she’s gone!” said Erikl, peering down behind the rock where Majur had been. He spun around, only to see his brother get hit in the head with something. Kirill went down as if poleaxed, the still smoldering bomb on the ground next to him.

The brothers didn’t even have time to curse before the explosive went off.

Majur winced as the sound echoed off the crystalline formations around her, and scratched the dog’s head. It panted.
“Job well done,” she said.

“Who approacheth the glorious walls of Dyarbak?” came a stentorian cry from the eponymous walls, which Majur judged decidedly less glorious and more ramshackle. “Speak now and prove yourself a friend, or face the Dyarbakian Guard!”

“It’s me, Majur,” said Majur. “I left from this very gate not two hours ago. Do you not recognize me?”

“It’s traditional to ask,” said the voice from above in a rather more petulant voice. “All right, open the gates. She can come in.” There was a screeching, groaning sound of iron scraping along the worn stone of the road, overlaid with the low snarls of the lizards chained to the windlass. Majur walked under the low archway and into the city.

Dyarbak: a cramped, bustling border town on the edge of the glass fields. Rusted walls dragged together from sheets of iron and brass, each standing twenty feet high and topped with mounted guns, cannon, and ballistae. The streets, narrow and cramped, studded with hatches and manholes leading into underground shelters, every corner occupied by a coughing beggar afflicted by some nameless disease. The people—Korvians, fork-tongued Glyssians, Fhel, Rurikids, Hakobins, and dozens of other nameless mutants and aberrations—crowded around Majur, offering her rats-on-a-stick, magic charms, gunsights, and all manner of other gewgaws and trinkets for varying prices. Majur ignored them all and shoved her way towards the Factor’s palace, a rusted heap that towered over all the rusted heaps that made up the city.

In the square in front of the palace, market was in full swing, including an execution and a demonstration of sorcerous power from one of the Dyarbaki sorcerers. Majur stopped to listen to the litany of crimes the Fhel nomad had allegedly committed, and clicked her tongue as he struggled and choked his last on the hangman’s rope. She thought it highly unlikely that he had done even a quarter of the crimes he was charged with, but the Factor of Dyarbak was notably corrupt. She wondered who the poor man had angered before heading on past the sorcerous exhibition.

She scoffed silently at the rubes and gawkers who surrounded the swirling sand-creature the sorcerer had summoned. No substitute for a good sword, she thought. Can’t trust it not to turn on you.

Majur had never cared for sorcerers, and the Dyarbaki sandspeakers, with their smearing of wet clay and ugly tattered robes, were no exception. She made her way out of the market square and into the blessed shade of the Factor’s palace grounds.

“Ah, Miss Majur,” said the Factor’s assistant, offering her a cup of local wine. “I trust you are here to collect your bounty?”

“That’s right,” said Majur, looking around the room. It was nice; the Factor’s assistant collected ancient idols and artifacts, and kept them in carefully reassembled stained-glass cases. Every wall was pockmarked with small windows to allow breeze in but block as much sun as possible.

“And you’re sure you won’t take off the mask? It did so unsettle the Factor last time.”

“I’m afraid it’s necessary for my health,” lied Majur. “It guards me against an evil spirit that I was cursed with by a previous bounty.”

“Well, far be it from me to expose you to supernatural retribution,” said the Factor’s assistant. He smiled greasily, revealing that his teeth were entirely false and etched with arcane golden symbols. “Especially when ordinary retribution is so close at hand.” He snapped his fingers and the door burst open, revealing two Rurikid toughs—short, wide-bodied men in steel cuirasses and with brass knuckles on their hands. They only came up to Majur’s shoulders, but they were solid muscle.

“Don’t move, ma’am,” said one. “We got you dead to rights.”

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Majur, you are a woman of business. And recently, one piece of business you undertook was the killing of a close personal friend of the Factor’s.” The Factor’s assistant spread his hands wide and smirked.

“Oh, good,” said Majur. She raised her hands above her head and let the toughs shackle her.

Later, in the rank stone-walled dungeons below the Factor’s palace, she thanked her lucky stars that they hadn’t been overly thorough in searching her. Hidden in the sole of her boot was a set of lockpicks. The cell door’s lock was simple, and Majur had it undone in a matter of minutes, her brow set with concentration.  There was a guard in the hall, holding a spear and whistling tunelessly. He opened his mouth to shout, his eyes widening in surprise, and Majur kicked him in the stomach.

“I know it’s hot down here,” she said, striding past him towards the untidy pile of her stuff that sat in one corner of the guardroom, “but if I were you, I would consider wearing armor.”

Mask on. Crossbow loaded. Hand crossbow loaded and clipped to her bandolier. Pouch of bombs on one side of the belt, canteen and sword on the other. Majur walked up the stairs just as the guard recovered his breath enough to shout.

“Escape! Help! Escape!”

The Rurikid toughs from before came rushing down the stairs, followed by three other members of the Dyarbakian Guard. Majur tripped the first one, ducked under a clumsy punch from the next, hit him in the elbow, and shoved his knuckles into the brickwork of the wall. A spear jabbed past her, and she grabbed the haft and pushed, sending the next one of the guards stumbling backward. She sidestepped another jab from a scar-faced Korvian woman and shoved the last guard down into her.

“Shouldn’t have tried to stop me,” she said, looking down at the pile of groaning bodies at the bottom of the stairs. That done, she set off through the narrow corridors of the Factor’s palace in search of his assistant.

The palace was a kicked anthill, in more ways than one; the red and black livery of the guards and the sand everywhere certainly added to the image. Majur ducked through side passages and servant’s quarters, heading towards the center of the palace while staying out of sight.

It seemed that word of her escape had spread, and when she arrived at the Factor’s assistant’s room, there were no less than four hulking mercenaries in front of it: three more Rurikids, identical in bullet-headedness and square-jawedness, and one axe-dragging lizard, her scales and fanged mouth out of place here in an otherwise human settlement. Majur ducked back behind the corner, out of sight, and began to prepare.
“I don’t think she comes,” rumbled the lizard as Majur began to screw a bomb onto the tip of one of her bolts.

“You’re probably right,” said one of the Rurikids. “Still, the boss wants us here, and who are we to disagree with the words that come from on high?” He rolled his eyes. “The old fool’s as paranoid as his master.”

“Oh, fuck,” said another, who had just seen Majur step around the corner, crossbow raised and the fuse already smoldering. She fired.

After the dust from the explosion settled, Majur walked past the unconscious bodies of the mercenaries and into the office. The Factor’s assistant was there, a look of surprise on his face. A splinter of the hardwood door had pierced his torso, right through his white silk wrap.

“Serves you right,” she said, and began looking around to see if any of his rune-etched teeth had survived the explosion.

“Come out, Majur! We have you surrounded!” Someone yelled from the hallway outside. Majur left off her search and waved a hand in front of the door. Six crossbow bolts thudded into the back wall of the room, narrowly missing her hand.

“Don’t think so,” she said, and dived through a window.

“Excuse me,” said Maarto, a sergeant in the Dyarbaki guard and a Glyssian expatriate, his arms covered in writhing tattoos of snakes. “Have you seen a woman wearing a bone mask? Something like this.” He held up a drawing one of prison guards had made.

The young woman in front of him—a typical Hakobin, brown skinned with a great curly bush of black hair and an easy smile—looked the picture up and down thoughtfully and shrugged.

“Can’t say I have,” said Majur, her mask (and the rest of her armament) hidden safely under a poncho she’d stolen from the back of a merchant’s wagon.

Maarto sighed. “Thank you for your time,” he said, and walked off in the other direction. Majur turned back to the Fhel caravan host she’d been talking to.

“How much did you say it would be for passage?”

The long train of wagons began to crawl through the desert, grunting, straining scaled beasts pulling six-wheeled wagons full of salted meat and brass wreckage. Fhel priestesses danced alongside, smearing blue paint for good luck and green for wealth along the sides of the great beasts. Outriders on horses kicked their mounts into gallops and sped off to watch the road, and Dyarbak dwindled into the distance, its bronze and iron walls no prison for Majur.

“The glass desert never suited me anyway,” said Majur to the caravan leader, a spindly-limbed Fhel with one creaking mechanical arm. A swarm of dirt imps crawled up and down his arm, cackling, jabbering, and occasionally applying oil to its critical joints. “Where did you say you were going again?”

“Fhel plains,” he said. “On the home circuit.”

“Sounds grand,” she said, and closed her eyes. “Wake me when we stop.” Majur pulled the mask down and tapped the side, letting it know that it was time to sleep. Her vision went dark as the lenses closed.