74 - Pitters and Bushies

Raghnall let his reins go, bringing his bird to an abrupt halt.  He rose in his saddle, looking up into the sky.  They were less than a week away from Viltaria now, and the roads were more and more often in the open, terraformed valleys, so they had no sheltering rock over their heads.  “Amir.”

“Yes, Naser?”  Dukir urged his bird up to the Emir-al’s flank and stopped it.

The Emir-al pointed with his bird-goad at the acrid green flashes against the pale blue sky.  “Those are bush dragons, aren’t they?”

“Aye, Naser, not common this far inland.”

“They tend to follow sand pitters don’t they?”

“Aye that.  They don’t like growin’ dirt, Naser.  Really rare here, but they do like to eat human things.”  Those winged sons of crotch itch cause so much damage in Lainz we’ve got to step up the spread of our biomass, drive them all back into the deep sand.  Or get more water to drown them all.

“We have any ammunition for them?”

“Two packs, Naser, one crossbow rigged to fling it.”  As you well know, since you packed that with your own hands this morning.

“So let us go see if we can be good treaty partners to Milar, hmm?  That mess appears to be in our way, anyway.”

“Aye, ‘ser.” Dukir snapped the first packet of urine-filled pellets loose and thumbed the first into the tube on the crossbow.  The pellets would shatter on the scales of either bush dragons or sand pitters, hissing and bubbling holes in their armour.  Either that or you got luckier than a Gregori and hit them in the face and the thing would go squalling off to rub its face in the nearest acid sand it could find.

The birds were already acting up, probably able to smell the bushies on the wind. They were able to force them up the hill to the edge of the valley’s rim so they could see what was going on, before they were forced to tether the birds and go on foot. As they got down, the Emir-al pulled out his sling and slotted a pellet into it, at the ready.

“Let us take it carefully my Amir, hmmm?” He said and signaled for the lowest approach.

“Naser.”  A hotspur young officer not wanting to charge in screaming his war-cry?  Surely the water flows in the desert today.

It was very different crawling on one’s belly when there was so much growing there.  Human green vegetation seemed to have almost as many sharp bits as the Rock’s plants, though their sap didn’t tend to burn skin. Dukir raised his head over a clump of grass to see what had drawn the bushies.

Across the valley a young Milar postal courier clung to his bird, both of them with dried bloody streaks on their legs. clinging to a spire of tsingy poking up on the edge of a field.  The rest of his string of birds were lying dead, their packs of letters askew.  Their corpses were scattered across the field, not moving except to twitch as pitters pulled feathers or flesh out from underneath.  Both the boy and the riding bird were bloody as clotted bites broke open when they moved and he had his sword in his fist keeping the bushies off as the bird clung hard to the rock face higher than the pitters could climb.

The field had obviously been infested by sand pitters, but what was appalling was the road had been dug into as well. The boy had tried to skirt the obvious pock-marks and found out the hard way that the infestation had spread into the dirt.  “Hey!  Help!  Somebody!  Is there anybody in earshot? Help!”  His voice was tired and rough, his arm sagging unless a bushie dove at him.  There obviously had not been any traffic along this road for quite some time.

The Emir-al stood up.  “Hang on, boy!  We’ll get you out of there!”  His Milari was passable enough, Dukir thought as he got to his own feet.

“Oh, thank the ancestors!” The boy’s face lit up, he could see that all the way across the field.

“Amir, stamp out a path for us, would you?  I’ll keep the dragons off.”

It wasn’t a hard fight.  Just a tedious chore.  Popping a piss pellet with his thumb, into the hole, following up with  a splash of water from his bottle had the  pitters come boiling out of their hidey holes one at a time so he could stomp them into acid slush.  He heard a screech a time or two over his head, knew the Emir-al had hit a bush dragon, keeping the flock off him.

Dukir was running out of pellets and water, and was seriously considering unlacing his trousers by the time he’d stomped out a landing space for the postal courier and his bird, with some decent bites clipped out of his boots.  The kid hit the ground and if it weren’t likely that his rescuer had missed a pit, might have gone down to kiss the dirt, even full of piss.  “Ancestors bless you, Nasers,” he said in passable Lainz.