Hand Over Fist

The Protectorate

Cutting through the forest, van Joss quickly led the small group of travelers due west, according to the map they had taken from the Ryon surveyors.  They would go for a day in that direction before heading southwest, towards the Pantor Protectorate.  With any luck, they would penetrate the northern borders of the Protectorate in less than a week.

As it turned out, that estimate was more than generous.  It was only after almost two and a half weeks that the small party finally reached the northern borders of the Protectorate.  It was as van Joss, acting as scout, pressed through a thicket of dense brush that he found himself looking on the telltale marker, a simple stone obelisk, which marked the border itself.  The Protectorate had gone through a great deal of time and effort to make sure all of its borders were marked with the obelisks.  More so than any other Fisted Race.

Van Joss nodded in grim satisfaction.  If they were to turn in either direction and travel along the borderline, it would simply be a matter of time before they ran across a Pantor border garrison.  The Protectorate was almost as fanatical about maintaining their border garrisons, as they were their borders.  But the slender operative didn’t want to encounter the elite Pantor border guards.

Instead he wanted their small party to press deep into the Protectorate itself.  Hopefully, with any luck and not a small amount of skill, they would be able to avoid any major towns and make their way to the Protectorate capital at Ven Devisol.  He grimaced as he turned to quickly make his way back to Longspear and Salina where they waited for him back under cover.

The penetration of Ven Devisol itself would be nothing less than a minor miracle.  Van Joss pondered it the entire way as he backtracked.  As far as he knew, in all his years as an operative for Gideon, nobody had successfully penetrated the hidden Protectorate capital.  And certainly nobody had seen the secretive Directors, who ran the Fisted nation from a fortress in the capital’s heart.  ‘Now things are going to get interesting!’ he mused darkly as he pushed aside a last bit of cover to find Longspear and Salina.

“I’ve found the border,” he announced tersely.  “We need to move, and quickly.  The Protectorate patrols its borders frequently and in force!”

Nodding, Longspear stood and quickly reached out to give Salina a hand up.  Then, after gathering themselves and their gear, they pushed into the dense forest on van Joss’s heels.  As expected, the slender operative led them along a twisting trail, with many difficult and treacherous cutbacks, each designed to throw pursuers off.  Longspear almost smiled as she thought about that, ducking at the last minute to avoid a branch in the face from van Joss in front of her.

It didn’t matter to the slender operative that they had been traveling virtually all alone through the forest these past few days.  Deep in the paranoid reaches of his darkened mind, he felt like they were being followed.  Thus the precautions.  The funny thing about it was that he was almost always right about those feelings.  

Following the thin operative closely and doing what he did, Longspear reckoned they should be able to easily penetrate the border without being detected.  ‘Now, all I hope is that we reach the capital in one piece,’ she thought, pushing through yet another clump of thick foliage.

The obelisk that van Joss had spotted quickly slid by them, partially hidden by the dense forest as they pressed on.  From this point on they would be observing silence, speaking only when absolutely necessary as they continued their breakneck pace.

And so it was almost five days of complete silence between the three before van Joss abruptly pulled them to a halt.  As they crouched at the man’s hand signal, the soft rustling of moving branches and trod upon undergrowth reached their ears.