“Thank you for the water,” I said, bowing ever so slightly from the waist and hoping that it wasn't a cultural faux pas. To my immense surprise, he laughed quietly, telling me to think nothing of it. He had a deep voice, and a thick enough accent that I couldn’t quite tell if Midgardian was his first language or not.

  “You looked like you needed it,” he said. “In fact, you look like you need a great deal more than water.” He looked me over, and then raised his head and did the same for everyone else. “You all look like shit.”

  Ouch. Most people might have found a slightly more delicate way to put that, but as I would learn, theirs wasn’t a culture that saw much use in mincing their words. Also, he wasn’t wrong. None of us had really eaten or drunk properly in at least a day, we were all exhausted, coated in dust and grime, and in various states of injury. As he went on to inform me, I’d apparently picked up a black eye and split eyebrow. When I got a chance to examine myself later, I found that I was a nice mosaic of bruises.

  The rest of the Centaurs relaxed further, putting their weapons away and crowding in a bit closer. They were still quite intimidating, but only because of their physique, not their actions.

  “So,” he continued, “who are you, and what are you doing out here?” His question was directed at all of us, but the other two apparently weren’t going to answer, leaving me on the spot. Bastards.

  “Um…” Strong start there, me. “I’m Indy,” I waved weakly, and cringed internally. “That’s Tove, that’s Nalfis,” I pointed the two out in turn, and they also waved. “And that’s Alf,” I added. He didn’t wave, probably because he was still passed out. “We’re recovering,” I explained in answer to his other question.

  “I can see that,” he said. “And what might you be recovering from, exactly?”

  I pointed behind me, at the ominous dome of impenetrable darkness. He arched an eyebrow in response.

  “Really?” He sounded disbelieving. To be fair, if I’d known what was in there before I’d gone in, I’d probably be disbelieving as well. It was not a place that was friendly to the concept of being alive. I just nodded in response, and he studied us all again. “Impressive, supposing it’s true,” he decided. I just shrugged. He stared at me. “And do you ever speak if you don’t have to?”

  I shook my head.

  Nalfis’s voice piped up from behind me. “They don’t”, he said, “but I do. Who might you be?” The Centaur laughed.

  “A fair question, since your companion here introduced all of you.” He bowed (Hel yeah, I’m safe), “My name is Siyon, and I, or we-” he gestured to all the others, “are of the Tribe of Dun Fola.” The name rang a bell, but not enough of one for me to think harder about it.

  “The Tribe of Dun Fola?” Tove repeated. “Not of the Khan’s Horde?”

  “Certainly not,” he said, frowning slightly. “Why; have you some business with ‘His Majesty’?” The disdain he put into those last two words was obvious, and scathing. He clearly was not someone with a high opinion of Khan Rotun, but it wasn’t quite enough for us to start confessing we were only here in the first place to assassinate him, nor that we were planning to seek his aid.

  “Oh, I just didn’t know there were multiple Centaur Tribes,” Tove deflected. “We don’t learn much about your people from outside the plains, so I guess I assumed you were all part of one ‘kingdom’.”

  “I see,” Siyon said, relaxing a bit. “To answer the unspoken question, it is certainly true that Khan Rotun controls by far the largest single assembly of our people, probably comprising a majority of Centaurs overall. But it is by no means the only one,” he explained, before adding in a low tone “much as he might wish otherwise.” It seemed clear that the Khan wouldn’t be adding the Tribe of Dun Fola to his ‘assembly’ as long as Siyon had anything to say about it.

  “So, are you the leader of your Tribe?” Nalfis asked. “Is this all of you here?” Siyon chuckled, explaining that he was neither in charge, nor was this everyone – by a long shot. This led to a slew of further questions from Nalfis. Who was in charge then, if not Siyon? How many of the Tribe are there; where do you all live; what is it like; and so on and so forth. Siyon or some of the other Centaurs answered with patience, indulging Nalfis who was listening with rapt attention.

  Nalfis asked his questions considerately and politely, and with all the charm I’d ultimately come to know him for; but he nevertheless asked them incessantly. He’s a storyteller at heart, and more than anything else, he lusted for anything that would make a good story. The chance to learn about a scarcely-known society, and all of its own history and stories, was all he could ask for. Metaphorically, anyway. In a literal sense, he asked a great many questions indeed. For their part, the Centaurs were also quite happy to answer him. I think they were enjoying having someone take an interest in them and not immediately write them off as uncivilised brutes. The word ‘Tribes’ didn’t have the same baggage then as it does now, but some people who thought they were more “advanced” (but were really just stupid dickheads) still tried to paint Centaurs as ‘primitive’, or ‘savage’. It seemed like those terms were often applied to any nomadic people, I guess for the crime of wanting to move every so often?

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  I feel like I should note that for some reason those same dickheads never seemed to use those words to the faces of any ‘primitives’. I guess their sense of superiority wavered for some reason when they were confronted with a Centaur or a Hálfj?tunn (a nomadic, tribal people who lived on the highest slopes of the Skoldur Mountains, and were often thought of as the best craftspeople in Midgard. Also, the name means ‘half giant’). Can’t imagine why.

  Regardless of how fascinated Nalfis was, Siyon did finally manage to get his own question in, dragging us back to the matter at hand.

  “I made a mistake in asking my first questions,” he said, “when I asked what you are doing. A mistake which Indy here seems to have capitalised on.” I chuckled nervously, and he shot me a slightly exasperated paternal look – the one that says ‘you weren’t meant to have done that, and I wish you hadn’t, but I’m sort of impressed you managed to pull it off’ – which told me I’d been caught out. “So, having established that you are currently recovering, and for the sake of avoiding any ‘linguistic ambiguity’,” (air quotes hadn’t been invented then, but if they had then he’d have used them) “would you please explain what led you to the Plains of Denofell in the first instance, how and why you ended up in the city itself, and what you are going to do after you have recovered?” He thought for a moment, and then added “Or, rather, what do you intend to do?” Fuck, I thought, there goes our tiny window of pedantry to avoid answering.

  I feel like I should clarify, it wasn’t my intention to deceive or mislead Siyon, and I don’t really try to do that in general. For one thing, it’s that my pedantry knows no boundaries at all, and I love exploiting flaws in people’s language, or interpreting things entirely literally, purely because I can. I’m a huge fan of answering ‘yes’ to questions phrased with an “or”. Mainly though, I’m just a very private person at heart, and I don’t believe in randomly volunteering information. Likewise, I try to respect the privacy of other people outside of exceptional circumstances (which I felt like Alf, Tove, and Nalfis had fallen into by now). However, I will say that the complete opposite is true for history. There’s no such thing as privacy if you’re dead, and I will do whatever I can to dig up the past, literally and figuratively. The deeper you bury something, the more you simply advertise that it’s worth having.

  You can ignore me rambling about my social philosophy for now. I decided to let either Nalfis or Tove answer the first question at the very least, since I’d come in for different reasons than the other three, and therefore represented only ? of the motive. Tove took on the role of ‘explainer’ because she was a bit more concise than Nalfis, and it meant I didn’t have to speak. I’m generous like that.

  It was still a bit of a delicate one to explain. Whether or not Siyon and the rest of his tribe were fans of the Khan, there’s a world of difference between “I’d rather keep our independence from him” and “I’d really like to see him murdered”. Also, admitting you’ve come to an area just so you can commit murder is rarely a good way to make friends. Yes, I was slowly starting to consider them to be my friends even though that was how Alf had introduced them all to me, but I think that our relationship had really come about in spite of that fact, not because of it.

  “Well,” Tove began, “to start with how and why we ended up in the city, it was definitely a mistake-slash-accident in both cases. This is going to sound super-weird, but we were inside a huge, ancient, walking suit of armour, and when we were in its head, it exploded, and we landed in the city. The fact that it exploded and where it landed were not deliberate choices on our parts.”

  “Do you mean to say that you were inside that flaming metal meteorite that crashed into the city yesterday?” one of the nearby Centaurs asked, incredulously. She was one of the few who weren’t armed, and seemed a fair amount older than the others. Her long hair was a vivid silver-white, tied in one long braid down her back, and she had a light roan coat over her otherwise dark flanks. Her eyes were locked on Tove, face set in an expression of scepticism.

  “Uh, yes.” Tove answered. “But it wouldn’t technically have been a meteorite, since it was-”

  “I know it wasn’t a meteorite,” the Centaur-lady (Centuarina? Centauress?) snapped, “but there aren’t many good words to describe large objects falling out of the sky.” She shook her head. “And you survived that, apparently unscathed?”

  “OK well first, point conceded on the meteorite thing. I just take the night sky and all that very seriously and I didn’t want…” she trailed off, clearly noticing the impatience building. “Secondly, it really hurt when we woke up and I think we are all very bruised, and thirdly there was a lot of padding that sort of… emerged when we were going to impact, apparently. I wasn’t really aware of what was going on at the time though.

  “We noticed there were these shadow-people gathering around the head, so obviously we had to get out of there. We ran for it, tried to find the edge of the city and got attacked by, like, hundreds more of those things. We were so close to the edge when they caught Alf, and pretty much drained the life from him. Indy managed to get him out-”

  “By making an explosion which threw him out of the darkness,” I explained, jumping in now to avoid the inevitable question afterwards.

  “-then we passed out from exhaustion, and when we woke up, you guys were here.” Her piece said, we waited in silence while Siyon looked like he was in deep thought.

  He turned towards the white-haired woman who’d spoken before. “What do you make of it, Tamira?” She strode forwards, studying each of us in turn as she walked up beside Siyon. It was an intense look that she fixed us with, and I had to resist the urge to break eye contact. Eventually she sighed, judgement complete.

  “I don’t think they’re lying,” she decided (yay). “It’s certainly not the whole truth (boo), but as unbelievable as it seems, it doesn’t seem like it’s a falsehood.” She nodded in Alf’s direction. “His current state at least seems to support their tale. On that point, does he need any further help?” Her face softened slightly, a hint of genuine concern breaking through.

  “I don’t think so,” Tove replied. “I did what I could, so for now he just needs lots of rest and then probably lots of food when he wakes up.” She shot me and Nalfis a glance, silently reminding us that ‘lots of food’ wasn’t something we had; so we’d better not make the Centaurs angry if we wanted any help.

  Thanks as always for reading, and see y'all in the next chapter :)