This was the experience of traveling in convoy under Footfield—the Griid-train.

Our journey to Dodge would take us first to Kansas City, to facilitate the merchants in our formation.

This journey, from Boston to Kansas City, would take most of two months by conventional means. Most states maintained a road system, but the state of these roads varied wildly by city. In my own home, the roads around the city were in good condition. These roads were the arteries for local trade. Good roads meant a healthy system of market towns, easier troop movements, and happy lords. But further from the city, the roads became decidedly less road-like. Boston had long struggled to gain Flows; her wealth was in substantial recession, and she could neither afford the men to work the roads nor the Order to send machinery.

Movement between cities was inconsistent. The clans of Pittsburgh were said to maintain no roads at all, preferring to march cross-country to make it difficult for invaders to move easily. Green Bay, with its strange communalist society, never had a shortage of manpower and was obsessive about the routes around its city.

But the wilds were far vaster than the settled parts of the world. Almost any journey between two cities, save perhaps for the populated stretches of the East and West coasts, involved crossing untamed lands. This was the slowest part of travel. The rough ground broke axles, forced detours, and the broken landscapes harbored brigands. Fiends were often feared but rarely seen.

Thus, the Griidlord’s greatest value was seen by many as their ability to use the Footfield to move men and goods great distances at great speeds. The journey we were making, which would take a man on horseback at least 50 days, we could achieve in two or three. Almost as importantly, no brigand band would dare assault a convoy bearing a Griidlord.

I was in the infancy of my powers as a Griidlord. Don’t mistake my struggles with fiends for incompetence—a big enough fiend could challenge any Griidlord. But common men? I would be death to men armed with steel. I was an army unto myself.

The speed with which goods could move enabled the trade of items that would otherwise spoil. We could send seafood from our city to distant places, and fresh fruits could be brought to our cold lands.

Chowwick rarely complained as we marched. It didn’t seem to be his way. I understood that the work of the Griid-train was dreaded by suits for its boredom, its tedium, for the time it took away from other pursuits. This was one of the reasons Griidlords could amass such incredible fortunes. That, of course, and the amazing value of the Flows they gathered for their cities.

For me, I couldn’t imagine complaining about traveling like this—at least, not then. The landscape around me melted and changed. Farmland became wild plains, wild plains became forested hills, and forested hills transformed into marshland. Everywhere I looked, I saw colors and creatures that made me cherish SIGHT all the more. Herds of deer lifted their heads and bounded away as we passed. Huge flocks of tiny, dazzling birds lifted from the grass like a cloud as we sped toward them. The quaintness of isolated villages and farming settlements intrigued me—places where the people might live their whole lives without ever once experiencing high Order or seeing tech work.

As the sun began to dip toward the horizon on that first day, the shadows stretched longer, and the light grew duller and more orange. Chowwick, jogging beside me, said, "We’ll camp soon."

I barely heard him. For hours, I had been lost in the display that sped past me. I turned my head. "What? Sorry, I—"

He smiled and said, "Don’t worry about it, lad. I remember my first time as well. It gets old, fuck does it get old, but it is a wonder. And when it’s the first time you’ve experienced the wonder and not the thousandth, I can imagine how distracting it is. When I won the suit, I’d never been anywhere except my family’s estates, the city itself, and the routes in between. Well, there might have been a few visits to neighboring estates, but I’d sure as shit never seen the wilds."

I said, "Me neither, I’ve never seen the likes of that."

Chowwick said, "Oh, but you must have been on a train like this before."

I said, "How’s that?"

Chowwick said, "When you came to Boston? When your daddy set up shop here."

I frowned. He was talking as though this was common knowledge, as though I should know what he was talking about. "I… I don’t think I know what you mean. I’ve… I’ve always lived in Boston…"

Chowwick chortled. "You just don’t remember. Let me think a minute, when did your daddy come to Boston? The whole of our world knew about it pretty fast when he did. The money he brought with him caught the attention of everyone. The fact that he was so rich and widowed made him the talk, and target, of every lord with a struggling bank balance and a spare daughter."

I could imagine the nobles considering pawning off a second or third daughter on a commoner with such a fortune. Enough of them were struggling badly enough that they might consider the shame a fair trade to save their flailing estates.

Chowwick said, "It would have to have been around ten years ago. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Could it have been fifteen? Time gets strange for you when you live the suit. You’ll see. Years mean nothing when you’ve lived enough of them and know that you’ll live so many more. I remember being in the city and watching them build that big fuckin' house of yours. The fortune it must have cost to buy that plot. It already had a fine house on it, but it mustn’t have been grand enough for Sempronius. He tore it down and put up a home twice as grand and twice as tall."

I was at a loss for words. "You’re telling me I’m not actually from Boston?"

How could I not have known this? Ten or fifteen years ago would have been around the time I fell ill with the sickness that had laid waste to my brain. I remembered little of the time before it. I had been able to form memories during the illness, but the time before was lost.

Chowwick laughed again. "Shit, I didn’t mean to drop a bombshell like that on you! You talk like a city boy, you sound like a fancy Bostonian, but no, lad, you’re not from the city. I assumed you knew that. Sempronius played his cards close to his chest; he never told anyone much about where he came from. Only fueled more interest in him, really. I always assumed you came from out West, far out West."

"The West?" I asked.

Chowwick said, "Aye, I thought that’d make sense. Most folks do. Your name, lad—Tiberius? And your daddy’s, Sempronius? Those are West Coast names. Western Empire names. Everyone out there seems to be something-ius. Cassius, Lucius, you know."

I stared into the distance, feeling my mind wander. I thought of the brief and fragmented memories I had of my childhood. The dirt streets, the little house. I had never considered that those memories could be from anywhere other than Boston, or perhaps an outlying village. I had always assumed that Father’s business had started in Boston, that we had gone from the village to the townhouse. Mother had died somewhere in between, obviously. Hadn’t Father told me that? Or had I just made up my own version of the story?

An image came to my mind, as hazy and indistinct as all the others. Riding in a wagon. A landscape so incredibly flat it seemed impossible. The land stretched away in every direction, with an uninterrupted view all the way to the horizon. I had a sense of being frightened, confused. I think I had been very small. I think I remember crying. But in that vast flatness, I saw strange pillars of rock rising from the ground as the wagon rolled by. They were startling—columns of jagged stone soaring up from a ground that was nothing but flatness and grass everywhere.

Chowwick seemed to grow concerned. He could see me gazing unfocused into the distance.

He said, "Shit, lad, I thought you knew all of that. I didn’t mean to be troubling you."

I just stared vacantly, my mouth moving without involving my brain. "What else don’t I know?"