In The Valley of the Treaclers

In The Valley of the Treaclers
“There! Do you see it? Some three hundred metres or so to the southwest?”
I looked across the valley to where Verhasia was pointing, at a temple on a hillside swathed with wispily-stalked, lilac-and-indigo, three-headed plants. These were known as Treaclers. They were immensely rare in our kingdom and could only ever be found in the most remote valleys, if you were very very fortunate. The plants were usually picked, their thousands of lissom, wafty stamens dried up and crumbled, and the powder used as a cure-all for known diseases, injuries, afflictions and ailments.
A few years before, as a sixteen year old, I had stood outside the town hall and seen a skinny, long haired young traveller of around 18 with the whole world at his feet, just back from a trip to some far-flung shores, who was standing on the steps of the main bank with his bowl of ground-up Treacler Stamens and sprinkling it on a number of patients. Each paid him 50 pounds for his treatment, which was really very simple. I watched in wonder as a stump grew back into a hand, as a seriously nasty case of leprosy vanished like the early morning mist at rush hour, as a veteran with only one surviving limb was suddenly sprouting like a tree and leaping around like an acrobat. I had so much admiration for him, the wonder he had brought upon our society with his discoveries, and my lustrous teenage soul desired greatly to be his lover, as handsome as he looked then, although I cared not for his newfound wealth.
For a short time, he became famous, rich and popular. He made so much money from his miracle powder that he was able to make any social connections that he required. In the end, he became a rather sad shadow of what he had been. I remember seeing him one day several years later, grown bloated and still dining out on what he had achieved in the past. Where once his kudos and influence had been nation-wide, now he was a sad joke surrounded only by hangers-on and wealth-seekers, his paunch grown beyond all previous memory, his face bloated and reddened by drugs, booze and success. His early vigour had inspired me to seek to become an adventurer when I got older, just as his later plight was a constant reminder to strive to always keep walking onwards, never stand still.
For years people from our lands have subsequently been trying to find more Treaclers. For the most part, the powder was found very very occasionally on the black market. A dose suitable for re-growing an amputated arm could be bought from the scumbag Varhars (a truly ugly and vicious race, part human, part donkey, who ran most of the drug, sex and pornography trade in my town) on Keraddi Street, on very rare occasions, for around 50,000 pounds.
Verhasia was my old school friend and fellow human. She had grown up in the tropical south and moved to my more temperate town at the age of eleven. While adventuring, scouting for herbs and treasures, slaying Vicious Creatures and so on were all mostly still seen as the provenance of men, well, Verhasia and I, we were so famous that everyone knew us, everyone wanted to be our friend. The men all wanted us, and so frequently failed in their drunken attempts to charm us that they frequently assumed that we were lovers, which was generally either a flight of fantasy or a sad explanation for their own failure, but in truth a lack of understanding of the fact that we were simply too preoccupied with our only love, which was adventuring, travel and the road.
“Well,” Verhasia said, “I make it your turn.”
I looked at her, the way she so often managed to smile in a manner which was at once mischevious and accusatory.
“I went into the caves of Alp-You to retrieve the harp of golamander,” she said, “That paid for our house on the seafront. I got the treasure of King Hil the Fifth from the snatches of the evil metal maze which protected it. All you did was guard the entrance. I’m in credit, my dear. You go and get the plants.”
The truth was, as much as people thought we were inseparable, near-sisters or even lovers, we tended to argue a lot, bicker, and had come close to fractious separation on innumerable occasions. We needed each other; it was a friendship of convenience more than anything. Each of us would be nothing without the other, and we both knew it.
“OK,” I said, “You stay here and watch the hillside, I’ll go and collect the stamens. It looks a very impressive haul. Honey, we’re going to be even richer than before. Who do you reckon is guarding them?”
She smiled, nodding knowingly, saying nothing
I made my way through the clutter of dead Jilandertree stumps that lined the hillside. They were the most valued and precious trees in our kingdom, and I noted the way they had been brutally hacked down, cleared without a second’s thought; clearly the Treacler farmer had been planning a huge, ambitious expansion of his little empire.
But the latter point irked me so. From the expanses of the plants I had seen from up high, this was no ordinary operation, and it might well involve some very sketchy people.
I marched through the decapitated forest carefully checking left to right as I did so, my eyes peeled for Sythian horsemen gangsters, who I knew roamed these parts freely, or for Elvan assassins, distinctive in their red and black cloaks. None emerged, and all was silence.
And then I heard it as I got nearer… a sound as which very few people had ever even heard, that of thousands and thousands of Treacler plants blowing gently in the wind. The plants, you see, in many ways resemble musical instruments than any conventional member of the plant kingdom. The stamens of a single plant are like thousands of finely tuned violin strings, each producing a unique, individually incredible sound which when blended with the millions of others all around it, resembles aural paradise.
I stopped, dead in my tracks, a few metres from the purply-blue hill I had been approaching, forgetting my purpose, why I was there… the only thing which mattered any more was the music. I sat down, crossing my legs, placing my backpack on the ground and casting my belt to one side.
“Entrancing, isn’t it?” a voice came to my right as I leant back, propping myself up by my arms and gently swaying.
I looked up to see who had spoken. Standing before me was the largest, darkest Scythian Horse I had ever seen, its eyes sunken and pale, its six legs shoed in the most elegant manner in gold and lithantium-embossed spirals, although lacking a rider. That was unusual. The Horses and their Riders were almost never separated. Individually, one was always just an ordinary six-legged talking horse, while the other was just a bog standard human. But when the Scythans were riding their horses, they combined into something quite awe-inspiring, terrifying even. Ten Scythan horseback riders had, in the past, taken down entire mechanical armies from the North Western continent, destroying machines which only wizardry or an act of god could reasonably be expected to combat.
“You here alone?” the horse asked, snarling now.
“Yeah,” I said, “Why?”
“She’s not gonna like it, mate,” he replied, “You thinking of stealing our crops?”
My mind was already entranced, and it was becoming ever more truthful.
“To be honest with you,” I replied, “I had been…”
The horse eyed me, gathering its top right hand hoof up slowly, as if pondering its next move, but then it looked over its left hand shoulder. I was too entranced by the music to see a large angloid male, his skin metallic and grey from the living metal he was formed out of, his four arms clutching two pairs of semi automatic crossbows, which were loaded with black azamus darts. I’d been shot with those before.
He walked towards me, the darts aimed carefully at my head. When he reached his horse’s side, his six legs went through a familiar insectoid motion, arching downwards and then propelling him atop his horse. From there, he continued to aim the black pointed darts at me.
I knew there would be no escape, even if I had managed to escape the bewitching entrancement of the music, but I had to try to fight, try to break out of it. I reached for my sword, but as I did so, he pressed the metallic trigger on his crossbow, and I felt nothing more.
Being under the spell of an azamus dart is horrendous. Your body freezes up and goes numb, but after twenty minutes your mind reawakens, except that it no longer remembers quite who or what you are.