The Orphan of Saint Olette

Twenty-four

Tensions were as high as ever the next morning. Rin and Shay were at each other's throats once more, and now Aoife and Shay were at odds, though Aoife chose a tactic more familiar to her gender; the silent treatment. She refused to speak to Shay, no matter what he would say to her. He had tried apologising, joking, explaining, all manner of things but to no avail. He would have called her stubborn as an ox, but that wouldn't have helped matters in the slightest.

Though no one wished to voice it, their proximity to Ankora was doing little to help their moods either. Shay had mentioned in passing that the Oracle had told him of her home town, and ever since they had been wary of the place. They had no idea what Oracles were truly capable of, and they weren't at all eager to find out. Especially not Shay, considering his part in liberating the Oracle of her bonds. For all he knew, they'd strap him down and feed him to the dogs for it. Were there even dogs in the East? What if they had even more ravenous beasts? Maker preserve him.

They had hoped to rely on Rin's interest in cartography to come up with a route that did not take them through Ankora, but his knowledge of the East was as vast as his knowledge of mining—next to nothing. Short of crossing the River Aur, which even they could tell had risen far too high in its banks to even dream of crossing, their only options were to traverse Ankora, or risk the uncharted desert that surrounded it. They would all sooner have taken the risk, but as poorly supplied as they were they were unlikely to last more than a few days, even in the middle of winter when the desert was at its least warm. They would have to stop in Ankora, if only to better equip themselves with food and water. Had they already been supplied with something to store it in, they might have risked collecting water from the Aur, muddied as it was from the Medaran goldmine.

As the trio crept into Ankora, they tried to draw attention away from themselves as much as possible. With all their money used up, they would have to resort to stealing to ensure their survival in the desert, but stealing in a town full of Oracles would perhaps be easier said than done. And of course, when they said 'they' would be stealing, in truth they meant Shay. The idea of stealing from a town that might already know of his intentions to steal from them wasn't exactly a comforting one. Unless he got lucky and found another Oracle in search of freedom, there was simply no way around it.

Much like the rest of the world that they had seen, Ankora was something beyond their wildest dreams—something more of a nightmare in this case. Unlike the rest of the world, which chose to build its houses from wood or simple bricks, the buildings in Ankora were comprised entirely of sandstone. Their size and stature betrayed the quaint nature of the place, and gave the town an eerie feel to it, though the trio were already biased in their opinion of the place.

The sandy soil beneath their feet spoke ill of the rest of the desert. They had expected sand akin to something one might find at a beach—not that any member of the party had ever been to the beach—but instead they were presented with something that was neither sand nor dirt, but some fumbling mix of the two. The East was always used to spin tales of elegance and extravagance, but Ankora seemed to be lacking in both. Sandstone walls weren't exactly the stuff of legend, after all.

"Anyone else got a real bad feeling about this place?" Shay asked his fellows, voice barely above a whisper.

Aoife and Rin did not need to speak for Shay to know they felt the same as they tiptoed through the town. For a place that was supposed to be brimming with Oracles, there was hardly anyone in sight. Were they locked up somewhere? Buried underground in a cave somewhere? It just didn't make sense. Surely there had to be townsfolk as well? There was no way it could keep itself governed and fully functioning with just Oracles inhabiting it. How would they obtain money for food? Water? Shay knew they didn't partake of much, thanks to the tales the Oracle had spun him of her childhood, but even small bites were costly when the number of mouths to feed was high.