Sunset stared at the scorched stave, and concentrated. She let a little trickle of fire form just over the surface of what had once been a dew-soaked deadfall, avoiding contact with the now-dried-out stick. Her five previous attempts to pick it up had left the stick a discolored mottled grey and black, but at least it wasn't smoldering anymore.
Sunset couldn't even blame the distraction of an endless stream of Dothraki moving down the ancient Valyrian highway behind her. The riders and their chattel moved, ceaselessly. Wheeled, hoofed, and on foot, the chattel moved rapidly eastwards down the ancient roadway, carts rolling over that peculiar, sometimes seamless stonework, while the riders themselves flitted through the surrounding forest, darting here and there, like sheep-dogs harrying the flock home. The heavy limbs of the trees overhead deadened the sound of the rolling, rolling, rolling wheels, taking what would have been a cacophony in the open air, and rendering that great sound into a nearly subsonic rumbling non-silence. She could hear it in her haunches and her cannons, like distant thunder felt in the horn rather than the ear. This was the sound of the main body of the khalasar in motion, and it was leaving.
That had been the main theme of the khal's council, the impossibility of the khalasar remaining for any long period of time inside the great forests, sitting still, devouring their fodder. Well, that, and the thumping drum of vengeance which beat a constant rhythm in the hearts of the khal's lajaki, but you could not feed horses vengeance, nor would reputation and blood keep the meat on their steeds' haunches.
The khalasar was separating, splitting into two bodies: the larger, more heavily burdened 'herding khalasar', and a leaner, smaller 'fighting khalasar'. A fighting khalasar, the true khalasar - this was what they needed if Khal Drogo wished to reply to the insult given him by these Ramsons, these deadly-dangerous Qohorik sorcerer-cultists. The Qohorik hostage had a great deal to say about these Ramsons, but Sunset thought they had nothing to prove that these villains existed, aside from Ruper Volk's voluble protestations of general Qohorik innocence, and the rebellious and treacherous nature of these people.
Sunset turned to thinking about the Qohorik, and their place in the world of the Dothraki, as she gained a grip on her burnt stick, barely scorching it at all, now.
Sunset knew far too little about the Qohorik, and this was because the riders of Khal Drogo’s khalasar and their dependants knew too little about that strange people, too. The Black Goat's favored city-state lay at the crossroads of the east, across most of the trade routes that ran through the territories under Dothraki domination, down the Qhoyne into the heart of the continent, northwards towards Norvos and the other northern Free Cities, south into the Ghiscari marches, all those exotic cities and nations eastward beyond the vast Dothraki Sea… Qohor was at the same time hidden deep in this forest, and straddled the inland trade of a continent. Almost by default, they seem to have fallen into a sort of trade mastership, for the Dothraki's idea of trade was devoid of anything resembling system or profit, and left such matters to those enterprising and cautiously obsequious tributaries who dared travel in the lands under their control.
From what Sunset was beginning to understand, Khal Drogo's khalasar was not at all typical of the average khalasar in this regard. Jhiqui had let something drop today, which explained so many things to the unicorn. There were hordes barely worth the name, independent little groupings barely greater than a herd, scattered across the length and breadth of this 'Dothraki Sea' which Sunset had yet to have laid eyes upon. And these pocket khalasar did nothing but move restlessly back and forth across the length of the Dothraki Sea, glorying in the freedom of the open grasslands, while they lent their protection to convoys of stonehousemen traders hither and yon. Convoys who lavished ‘gifts’ and supplies upon their protectors and escorts. These riders who spent their time herding men, lived well by this practice, and their non-employers who gave these convoy-Dothraki so much for their non-service protection, profited greatly from the symbiosis. These mixed hordlets of Dothraki riders and Qohorik traders hauled the trade of a continent across the vast empty interior, carrying glasswork and finished goods out of the western Valyrian cities eastward, silks out of Yi Ti, spices out of Qarth, furs from Qohor and the Ibbenese north.
But these herding Dothraki were held in some contempt by the fighting khalasari, the lajaki, the hard-riders and that breed of ruthless killer who naturally flocked to leaders like Khal Drogo, the merciless, the victorious, the undefeated. Sunset played with her scorched stick, and watched the khalasar break itself in two, and saw a glimpse of the khalasar within the khalasar, the sharp-clawed thing hidden within the vast bulk of the unwieldy beast. Like a hermit-crab emerging from her shell to do battle in the open sea.
Ruper Volk had, indeed, much to say about the villains whose ashes mixed with those of their Dothraki victims. That they had been exiled from the city, that they were some some sort of heretical cult, or a disfavored religious order, or - Sunset wasn't exactly sure. The Qohorik religion struck her as barbarous even for carnivorous hominids, a melange of blood sacrifice, worship of what sounded like a standard forest-monster, and more sacrifice.
Volk had seemed oddly proud of his descent from a long line of self-sacrificers, of having a - was it a great-great-uncle or a great-uncle? An ancestor, at any rate, voluntarily given to the smoking altar. A peculiar point of pride, the possibility that you might have been murdered for your god in your youth, that your own children in their turn subject to the priests' knives and flensing-hooks.
Sunset thought about the dead Qohorik, and the living one, as traffic streamed beside her down that crowded Valyrian highway. Was he trustworthy, this Lieutenant Volk?
And as Sunset twirled her blackened stick in her mostly-restrained new field, thinking of Ruper Volk, it was as if she’d conjured him from the thin air, for here he was, right in front of her again, How had he gotten away from his minders?
"Ah, Milady Sunset, there you are," the Qohorik said cheerfully as he picked his way through a bit of brush between Sunset and the traffic on the highway. "I would talk further with you. The more I think of what happened before the khal and his court, the more questions I have!"
"Lieutenant Volk, you are a prisoner of the khal, you have no right to answers. Where are the riders who are supposed to have you under guard?"
"Oh, they're around here… somewhere." The Qohorik stroked his thin, spotty mustachios and chin-tuft, half-grown like the man himself. Did he think it make him look wise or imposing? "An impressive mess, isn't it? Much bigger fuss than anything I've ever had experience with, you know! Oh, we've got lots of Unsullied, but they're not big on large-unit parading, the Unsullied. They have nothing to prove in Qohor, everyone knows they're the lethal best. They're not like the clan militias, gathering together in their useless fineries and long flashy blades, swaggering before the gates of the city or in their respective clan-holds for the children and the women and the crofters. And there's no clan in all of Qohor that can raise a rabble anything like this, a true khalasar on the march! Enormous and terrible - I love it! I almost wish I could ride east with you, and see a bit of the continent in Khal Drogo's train. Observe as he sacks some woggy towns. I hear talk of Lhazar, maybe, or perhaps something out beyond the Krazaaj Zasqa?"
Sunset looked at the lieutenant-hostage, and lidded her eyes in disgust. "You wish to see murder, and rape, and pillage? Is there something wrong with you, Ruper Volk?"
"Well, yes, and why not? Just another word for 'glory', is it not?" The Qohorik hesitated, and then crouched down beside the unicorn, getting on her level. "I wasn't sure what to think of the reports when I heard them as we got ready to escort this khalasar. The captains were so busy, it almost fell into the gaps and was forgotten about, but our witchy friends at the council show that somebody didn't forget about it."
"Forget about what, Ruper Volk?"
"The sacred animal! The one-horned goat that the Dothraki were bringing back to the Sea. Fiery like the fire, glorious like the sun! A messenger from the Black Goat, or some sort of satire by R'hllor, a blasphemy by the light-bringers. A Skagosi unicorn painted orange by some prankster? You, Milady Sunset."
Wait, what?
"A what unicorn? What's 'Skagosi'?"
"Oh, some barbaric race from the other side of the Shivering Sea, cannibals or somesuch. They're always described as riding about on shaggy, horrible horses, ill-tempered with a single horn. Heretics sometimes travel far overseas, to search for these legendary beasts, just because some say they're not horses, but deformed goats. There's a few skulls hung in some of the clan mansions in the city, and some of the clans have supposed unicorn-hides tied to their trees. Not generally pride of place, because as far as I've ever seen, they just look like sheep pelts. Blasted large sheep pelts, mind you, but nothing godlike or too odd."
Volk paused to eye Sunset, and Sunset's horn.
"You know, your head looks nothing like the unicorn skull I saw in the Hoat hall. The Skagosi unicorn horn looks more like someone crafted a Dothraki arakh from bone and gristle. Your protuberance barely looks savage at all, like my pinkie finger."
Sunset dropped her stick, and set the ends of his mustachios on fire.
Just a bit, only to teach the Qohorik some manners. She waited patiently while he danced around in a panic, spasming as he batted at the smoking ends of his facial hair. Eventually, he extinguished his burning whiskers, and turned, apprehensively, back to the orange unicorn.
"Lieutenant Volk, do I have your attention now? I have questions for you, now. Firstly, do they say these Skagosi unicorns speak?"
"N-no, milady. As far as I've ever heard, they're just beasts, and beasts of burden at that."
"So, not magical?"
"Oh, what's not magical, if you have a sorcerer on hand to make something of it? I hear stories about ground unicorn horn being a reagent for this, or a material component for that. I think the magesmiths might have a use for it? Not sure of the details, they tend to be close-mouthed about how exactly they do their magic. A killing secret, smith's guild forging magic, don't you know."
Sunset frowned in thought. "And you've never been to this Skagosa?"
"Skagos, milady, and no, of course not. Do I look like an Ibbenese rover to you? They're a set of winter-blasted rocks far out to the west, off the northern coast of Westeros. I thought I saw an Andal wandering around earlier, why don't you ask him? He had a northern look about him."
Ser Jorah. Yes, Sunset would definitely do that.
Sunset's eyes were drawn to a confrontation on the road, a rider screaming at some zafra with a rattle-trap cart threatening to drop a wheel on the road. When she had a moment. They were, after all, in the middle of something.
"A distraction. I should be concentrating on your… what did you call them?"
"Ramsons! The heretical Ramsons! Not true Qohorik at all, I told the khal all about it!"
"Lieutenant Volk, what 'true Qohorik' consists of, and does not, is a matter entirely for you Qohorik. Who or what exactly is a Ramson?"
"Brethren of the Scion of the True Lord's Get, as they name themselves. Sons of the Black Goat, if you're being polite in their presence. Ramsons to everyone else. They claim to be the true and original faith, but everybody else hates them. They were always insulting, and weird, and disrupted the sacrificial ceremonies more times than I care to think about. But they were still basically a part of the faith.
"Until about - hrm, maybe a generation or two ago? They started getting peculiar and shadowy. I believe that the rumor was… something along the lines of some of them returning from Asshai and brought dark heresies with them? I don't know, I haven't made a study of the weirder schismatics."
Sunset pondered what a practitioner of a religion that sacrificed their children to something that sounded like Grogar the Undying crossed with the Nightmare would consider 'weird.' And then she thought of the dead Dothraki reaching out with his icy grip, and shuddered.
Fair enough.
"OK, so, they're weird Qohorik." Sunset couldn't resist just one eye-roll at the idea. "And they're probably forted up at this island to the south of us?"
"After the business with the Lyseni, the Ramsons were forced out of the city. I think I heard that they retreated to the Jokor clanhold, this island on the middle Qhoyne, about halfway to the ruins of Ar Noy."
"And Khal Drogo's advisors are sending the fighting naquikhasar off to the south on a witch-hunt on the basis of what you think you remember is the hiding-place where these sorcerers you think are our ice-and-bone-casting magical murderers came from? Maybe?" Sunset felt the fire of her new-found magic burning like fury behind her horn, and had to consciously restrain herself from letting it out into the world again to scorch the hide of this cheeky ape.
"Yes, yes! Positive! Fairly positive! I'm mostly positive that the Ramsons are on Jokosh Island! That's the only clan that every really bought into their doctrine, and most of the Ramsons come from those families. It's this strange rambling complex, built on the ruins of an old Rhoynish temple or something like that. I've never been there - the Volk never had any traffic with those Jokor lunatics!"
"And what have the Volk had traffic with, Ruper Volk? What kind of clan do you come from, that you're being so helpful and open with the barbarians of the Dothraki Sea?"
"Ah, Milady Sunset, I am a Volk of the Clan Volk, a proud lineage who have mastered the eastern hunting ranges of the upper Vol since the days of the founding! We control all the forests around the great Road eastwards into the Sea, which is why I know my Dothraki, and probably why the captains of the western gates assigned me and my Unsullied to be your escorts on your sojourn through Qohor. It's a beautiful country, the Upper Vol Ranges! The song of the lemurs echoes through woods, and the elk give good hunting, and the sunlight glows in the upper boughs like the Goat's promise of heaven on-"
Sunset stopped the Qohorik's paean to home with a raised hoof. She regretted asking.
"OK, fine. Jokosh Island?"
"I don't know, Milady Sunset. It's an island, it's in the main channel of the Qhoyne. Well, I suppose, it divides a side-channel from the main, but I'm not river Qohorik, don't ask me about navigation and the river-trade."
Sunset looked at a knot of five Dothraki as they rushed by, low in the saddle. The riders of the east might have made their life upon something called a Sea, but from what Sunset had heard, there was nothing of the ocean or sea-water to be found in the Dothraki Sea, and everyone said that the riders were almost allergic to open water.
"How wide are these channels? How do you get to and from this island?"
"Oh, Milady Sunset, the khal's men have been talking of nothing else! Please, I'm tired of the subject. Be assured, they're fully aware of the problem. And I came to you to talk about something else, or else I'll go mad! Please, where did you come from?"
And so Sunset, her mind boiling with questions about magic and Westerosi unicorns and Ramson sorcerers, absent-mindedly lied to the Qohorik about where she'd come from. She dusted off one of the stories about transformed princesses and legendary creatures of magic and wonder, and let her mouth run on autopilot while she thought about the little clues and facts the callow Lieutenant had gifted her.
Are there more like me here? Did the hunters who captured me know to bind my horn because they had experience with these unicorns of Skagos? Is there a colony of ponies like me out there somewhere?