"Babusyne vidro!"
"What is the screeching northerner excited about now," the elf snarls, swiping at the snow crusted to her eyebrows.
After packing their few belongings onto their back, Hro Long-Finger had exited their rough wilderness hut — half invisible for drifted snow and strategically encouraged scrub — without a word, and left in the company of the foreign lunatics. On their way out, they had pulled up a small platform of sticks dug into the floor, reached down to a preciously hoarded mechanism in the small hole beneath, half a sandglass weighing down the end of a handspan-length balance beam; at the far end, three rune-stamped blocks held out of alignment, two of them affixed to a buried bulk, the third, sandwiched between them, attached to the balance and levered up a little out of line.
Hro twisted the sandglass so it ratcheted bulb-up, sand spilling out into the bottom of the shallow hole, continually lightening the mechanism over the course of its single time-measure; the beam infinitesimally tilting, sandglass upward, centre block downward into alignment.
The runic fire-spark is very close to magic, but Eisgriff's metal-mining toil benefits the Czars so much that it provides a certain protection to specialised mining-wise, so long as that stays confined and jealously proprietary.
Some quarter-hour away along the trail, the stolen mining explosive's unwarned obliteration of the evidence of Hro's habitation sent the elf leaping and hissing, assassin's knife in hand; cementing a certain attitude of mutual fuming between them, which the Ryssa lady seems to find gently amusing, if anything.
Hro is no longer entirely sure which of them is the worse lunatic.
"I am screeching about that," Hro snarls back, jabbing a pointing finger across the tundra at a dark speck in the distance. Something, possibly someone, crossing the snows. Incautiously conspicuous, and therefore an agent of the Czars.
In all the open cold wild of the north, it is here, this close to them, and seems headed in roughly a direction to converge with them.
Already the foreigners have doomed Hro, who grips their spear regretfully hard and tells themself it's too late, and the only mercy they can now bargain for lies in throwing themself at the feet of the Czar and begging them to rid the north of these lunatics who have dragged Hro along with their madness.
The elf scowls across the snow in evident dark distrust, which is almost enough to fleetingly soften Hro toward her. "Is it one of the wizards?" she demands, which is enough to cure Hro.
They let out the air in their lungs in a long, disparaging sibilance. "The Czars have their own concerns. There are three orders of people in the north — the Czars, the people in the mud; and in between, lifted from the mud enough to brandish a stick over the rest, the Czars' hands. That will be a hand." They pause, marinating the next syllables in the proper contempt. "You are an insignificance."
"For now," the elf threatens, baring teeth at Hro, who shudders at the prospect it might be true.
Yes, better to throw the lunatics to a Czar's unmercy now.
Hro risks a glance at the paladin and shudders again, tasting metallic dread on the back of their tongue; the Ryssa lady, who unlike the elf seems to know the north a little, understand the Czars a little, still watches the approaching speck with nothing more than calm, alert interest.
Lev rides across the wilderness snows on the back of the steed provided by Czar Zubiv. It was a roaming aurochs, once; the top of its head long since sawn off, the bodily workings scooped out, and terrible sorcerous things done to it. The brass rim of the sawn skull-hole gleams dully in the cold sunlight; a jagged water-blue crystal juts out, intertwined with twirly copper pipes and obsidian rods. From the glowing holes that once housed eyes, fitful rainbows dance over the snow.
Its gait is stiff and jerky, the unnaturally preserved bulk of its body is an unyielding seat, and the ache in Lev's back is rivalled only by the soreness of his buttock-muscles. He hates the thing. He'd hate it even if he hadn't been told to ride it.
One must not disobey one's Czar.
It's something like a relief, then — a break in the endless jolting journey, perhaps an excuse to dismount for a while — to espy travellers. He wrestles the ungainly steering in their direction, waits until they seem within shouting distance, and bellows, "Hoy! You are commanded to halt!"
They already have, naturally, but being the hand of a Czar carries the weight of necessary form: of demand and command. And so he approaches them in their compliance, and gawps a little at the sight of two foreigners before he remembers that he is the majesty delegated of Czar Zubiv, and the majesty delegated of Czar Zubiv had better not be seen to react to foreigners any way but with deserving contempt and demand for grovelling tribute.
Instead, the shorter one speaks first, in tones of distinctly disgruntled disrespect, not even addressing Lev himself.
"They made a cow worse, Ryssa," she says, and her taller companion muffles what sounds like a laugh.
He's going to have nightmares about this one, Lev thinks dismally, pulling the wizard's arm-length Punishment Stick from its steer-side holster. "Czar Zubiv commands repentance for your insolence!" he shouts, pointing the stick at the short one, trying to remember the correct combination of delicate, elaborate levers crusted all around the thing to press.
She looks up at him without appreciable fear, eyes narrowing; with a thrill of terror of his own, he mashes a handful of keys and lets the stick thrum with chastising power.
