Tarka is unable to evade them completely, and suffers a cut on one of his legs.

He grimaces in pain.

[THE PRICE OF PROGRESS.]

"Dyva, this is within your ability to heal, correct?"

"Yeah, should be!" 

The boar being dead, or at least no longer moving, Dyva will rush forward to cast a healing spell on Tarka. It will be sufficient - the wound will glow with golden light, and then close. 

"Ah. Thank you."

"So, uh, we survived our first fight. Yay?"

"It would have been easier had we seen the boar coming from farther away. Or heard it."

"Yeah, I have magic for calming animals, but it doesn't really work if they've already attacked you, most things are really insistent about finishing fights already in progress."

"Anyone know how to butcher a pig?" 

"I have to admit, that is really not something my life has prepared me for. I think the tenderloin is located along the back half of the spine, near the pelvis. That's probably the main piece of meat we want to grab."

"We cannot take most of this with us. Just the ivory and some meat, I think. I would rather not bother with the hide, given..."

He gestures towards the extensive cuts and still-burning hair.

"I guess I'll have to figure things out from first principles, then. Can't be any harder than fleshcrafting, I've had a bit of practice at that, when one of my relatives needed a spare pair of hands."  

Dyva sets to work bleeding the pig, extracting internal organs, removing skin, cutting out the ivory, etc. It's not perfect, but nothing about boar-meat makes it particularly delicate. 

"Does someone want to start a fire? We can do a big cookup, eat some of what we can't carry now?"  

Sida helps with the butchery. She has nearly zero experience with dead bodies of any species, but she has read a few anatomy books lately, and a lot of curiosity about how the pieces fit together in practice. You can read all you like, but you never really know what something is going to look like until you cut it open.

Tarka gets to work building a fire.

Then a meal will be had! Roast pork for everyone! It is extremely gamey, but otherwise pretty good. Dyva will break out stored condiments to eat it with. Some of the leftovers can be wrapped up and stored for future lunches, it'll last a while in this cold weather. 

"I kinda want to try carving one of these tusks but I don't know how valuable they are, or if it's worth taking that out of my share."

"They're probably not worth that much until they start to get really big. I'm fine if you take one!" She glances at Tarka, expecting him to be the stickler over treasure distribution. 

He shrugs.

"Alright then. I've got a few ideas..."

The party resume travel, making good pace along the road, staying at the inns regularly dotted along it, and mostly avoiding trouble. The river-valley they move through slowly slopes up into the mountains, and the forests that sit on the slopes beyond the fields slowly transition from bare-branched mixed forests to evergreen pines, and eventually this slope is too much for the gentle slope of the river, so there is a lock. It's a grand old thing, made of snow-white stone that's quite unlike the grey-and-green rock that's local to the city of the fallen tower. In places, the lock has been repair with wood or that local stone, but where they haven't been replaced, the stones have been worn smooth by the ages, the footprints of two thousand years left as marks in stone stairs. This is the first, and smallest, of the locks that give the kingdom of locks it's name. 

The lock is accompanied by a rise in the level of the entire bottom of the river-valley, as rice-terraces have been cut to match it. The road becomes a long switch-back, promising a long and tedious process of turning the carriage and chivvying the oxen to get it up to the top of the lock, there the land can continue more-or-less level for a while longer. Some enterprising sorts have set up stalls up and down the road, and at the top and bottom of the lock, selling refreshments, trinkets, and additional teamsters to the travellers.  

"How old is this?"

The vendors are happy to exposit to travellers about their local wonders. 

"They say it predates the fall itself! Now, I don't know about that, but it absolutely was here in the first records of the old empire exploring this far north, and who could have built such a wonder but the ancients themselves?" 

"Um, it would take a long time, but it's not actually that complicated. Seems kinda weird to say it wouldn't be possible for anyone else to build something like this. Dyva, am I missing something?"

"It's really expensive to do something like this, especially with non-local stone. Like *really* expensive. I'm not well-studied on what exactly the dark era dwarf-kings were up to around here, but I'll bet they were much more focused on survival than expanding the economic reach of their holds. Also this is the smallest and least impressive of the locks, so they say?" 

The vendor looks a little bit put out, but agrees that this lock, as impressive as it is, has nothing on the ones in the mountains proper. 

"Yeah, I suppose the system as a whole could get to be pretty costly, and it would take a long time to repay the investment." Sigh. "Everything's fucked up, I guess."

"The world of today is not the world of a millennia ago! Some modern powers could afford infrastructure projects on this scale today, but only the big ones and we're not in a big one." 

"What's fucked up is that there isn't enough of a financial system or enough long-term stability for the money to go where it's needed most. Well, that's what's implied from what you're telling me."

"That is certainly true! Though also I think generally the people with the money would disagree with you about where it is needed most, most of the time?"