Spit and Song (Ustlian Tales Book 2)

by Travis M. Riddle

  “‘Hop Along,’” she interrupted.

  “—yeah, ‘Hop Along,’ that one, uh…I think my dad taught me that one. When I was a kid. It’s a drinking song, but ol’ Doro was a heavy drinker too.”

  “I didn’t notice it was a drinking song,” Kali admitted.

  Puk grinned. “It’s not too obvious. There ain’t anything in the lyrics about it, but yeah, it’s sung by teenagers as a sort of drinking game a lot of the time. It’s stupid. It’ll come as no surprise to you that I, uh…sang it a lot in my youth. Long before your time.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” Kali said. “I’m nearly thirty myself. Hardly a blossoming flower these days.”

  “I’m sixty-six.”

  Kali almost blurted out something rude at this revelation. The qarm was so spritely and youthful, she would have wagered he was in his twenties, maybe early thirties. But he was even older than her father.

  “I, uh…” she stammered. “Sorry. My mom described you as a ‘young man’ earlier.”

  Puk couldn’t keep himself from laughing. “Not met too many qarms, have y’all?” She shook her head. It wasn’t often they had qarmish visitors out in the desert. He told her, “Sixty-six is basically middle-aged for us. So I guess I’m no blossoming flower over here neither. Just an old, busted frog.”

  “You look good for your age,” she grinned. “You’ve got my father beat, and I’m sure you’ve noticed the wrinkles on him. And that bald head is not a fashion choice, by the way.”

  Puk rotated on his stool and promptly slapped his belly three times, emitting three loud, wet slaps. “I’d say we’re evenly matched on paunches, though.” He scooted off the rickety wooden stool and landed with a thud.

  “Leaving already?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “A free drink is all I can afford until your daddy pays me for my songs.”

  She wasn’t quite ready to go to bed yet, and she was enjoying the strange qarm’s company. Naturally, the inn had several Atluan guests on any given day, but with her interest in the country recently renewed, she was feeling giddy with the opportunity to chat with someone from there. She wanted to hear everything she could about the place. Its geography, its food, its weather, its sights…

  “I’ll trade you drinks for stories about Atlua,” she offered. “If it’s a really good one, I’ll even pony up for some liquor.”

  The pudgy qarm pondered her offer for only a moment before agreeing. “That sounds like a reasonable trade,” he said, ambling back up onto the stool.

  Kali smiled and told him, “Trades are my specialty. What’ll you have?” She motioned for David to come over again.

  “Just another beer,” Puk said. “I don’t have any really good stories about Atlua.”

  CHAPTER V

  PAY-OUT

  The next morning was a quiet one in Shiar’s Slumber. Kali ate alone downstairs in the dining area, mindlessly gazing into the lobby, watching as guests checked in or out. She had finally worked up a little bit of an appetite, but still her meal was light: some mixed-fruit jam spread across thin bread. It was a typical faif breakfast, much sweeter and lighter than what many other Herrilockians preferred, her father included.

  She did not spot Puk among the morning diners, and she wondered if he was nursing a hangover in his room. The two had haunted the bar for a couple hours, with Kali soaking up any tale he would provide while he soaked up any beer she would buy.

  Her favorite was a story from his youth, back in a marshy village called Trillowan, wherein he and his friends had sought an abandoned house a mile or so out from town, nestled away in the woods somewhere. Rumors circulating amongst Trillowan’s children indicated that the house was, of course, occupied by some type of ghoul. So Puk and his friends dared each other to enter the decrepit building and suss out the truth for themselves.

  Puk, being a self-described coward, never ventured inside, but he told her that most of his friends did. One who had explored on his own ran outside screaming, claiming that he found the ghoul in an upstairs closet, withering away with its skin hanging sallow from its bones, asking the young boy for his flesh.

  Such stories had never been a part of Kali’s childhood. The sparse deserts of her home country gave way to other mythical terrors, like city-devouring leviathans living beneath the sands, as opposed to abandoned haunted houses on the outskirts of towns. The only buildings outside of cities in Herrilock were travelers’ outposts.

  “Did you believe he saw a ghoul?” Kali had asked Puk, fascinated by the town’s urban myth. She couldn’t recall any at all about her own hometown.

  Puk nodded. “At the time, yeah, of course,” he said. “But now? I dunno. I mean, I’ve never seen no ghoul, so maybe they exist or maybe they don’t. But even if they do, that kid was always full of shit, always trying to be the most interesting one. I always talked shit about him for being an attention-seeker. And then I became a musician, so who am I to talk?”

  While she consumed her petite breakfast, Kali wracked her brain for any sort of folktale about Seroo’s Eye that she might regale Puk with later that night.

  All that came to mind was a story she’d once heard of a giant that roamed the Gogol, towering as tall as Seroo’s skull, dragging a club on the ground behind him fashioned from the trunk of a mighty oak tree. Where the giant would have found an oak tree in the desert, she had no idea. Legend had it that if you came upon the giant, who was named Daradossa, he would ask you a question (was it a riddle, or a trivia question, or your opinion on something? Kali never had clarification), and if you answered correctly, Daradossa would kneel down to the ground and extend his massive jaw, allowing you to step inside and choose a piece of treasure that he bafflingly carried around in his mouth. If you answered wrong, then naturally he would smash you with his tree trunk.

  It was an absurd story, not rooted in any kind of reality or logic, but it was all she had. She was disappointed. Why did no ghouls want to haunt the myriad streets of Seroo’s Eye?

  Even if her childhood folktales were a disappointment, her breakfast was not. She finished eating and returned upstairs, heading down the hallway toward the back of the inn, where her family’s cluster of rooms was located. Reminiscing about a fantastical desert creature reminded her that she wanted to do some minor cordol research.

  During the inn’s construction, three rooms had been specifically cordoned off for the Shiar family: a master bedroom for her parents, and a room each for her and her sister. The master bedroom had its own private bathroom, while Kali and Lissia’s rooms were connected by one that they shared.

  Having moved out years ago, the door to Lissia’s room was locked so that guests could not enter, but Kali could easily access it from their shared bathroom. She slipped into her own room, which was a horrific mess, with clothes and objects scattered across the floor and on her bed and misaligned on her shelves. Wishing to further ignore all of those problems, she entered the bathroom and marched through the doorway to her sister’s long-abandoned room.

  Lissia had surely visited home sometime in the past year, but Kali could not recall exactly when that was. Hardly any work in the Repository was urgent, yet she liked to pretend that it was and insisted she had to spend a majority of her time there. It suited Kali just fine. She appreciated her sister’s company, but it was best delivered in small doses.

  If Kali’s room reflected her own current mental state, then Lissia’s reflected hers as well. Kali’s disaster had been left behind before she shot off to Yspleash, while Lissia would never dream of leaving her room in disarray, no matter how long she was planning to be away from it.

  Her bed was perfectly made, her desk was neatly organized and spotless aside from some dust that had settled in her absence, and her bookshelves—of which there were many—were all completely filled, with each book in its proper place, organized by author. It was a system that had never appealed to Kali; the comparatively few books she owned were arranged by spine color, when she bothered to arrange
them.

  Kali groaned at the sight of her sister’s immaculate room, then approached the row of bookshelves that lined the far wall. They nudged up against the bed, positioned by the window that filtered a minimal amount of light into the room. Lamps and candles were a necessity indoors in Seroo’s Eye with the small amount of sunlight that shone through the city’s off-white dome.

  She started with the middle bookshelf for no particular reason, scanning the rows of titles in search of the bestiary she knew Lissia owned. There was no way she had ever been aware of the volume’s author, and even if she somehow had been, the knowledge had long since departed, so the shelves’ organization was lost on her.

  The middle shelf yielded no results, so she backtracked to the shelf at the end of the wall, closest to the locked entry door. Her eyes glazed over plain spines with unexciting titles such as a powder blue book by Avon Brahne titled Your Canary, which was the most dreadfully boring name she had ever heard.

  She finally found what she was looking for on the bottom row of books, a volume entitled The Desert’s Wonders by Artur S. Burosh.

  It was a thick book, full of highly-detailed illustrations done by Mr. Burosh himself, which had enraptured her and her sister when they were children. Neither of them had been especially interested in the animals’ descriptions or behaviors, but they loved flipping through the drawings and attempting to recreate them on their own. Glancing through the index, Kali noted that there was not an entry for giants, nor for Daradossa.

  But the book did contain plenty of information on cordols. Kali turned to the appropriate page and first absorbed the beautiful illustration on the left-hand side.

  In Burosh’s illustration, the cordol was bursting out from the ground, spraying sand everywhere. Its body was wide and cylindrical, with no arms or legs, and a huge, round mouth at the front end. Rows of rounded teeth filled its mouth, more fit for grinding down cactus than rending flesh. They had two tiny eyes on either side of their mouths, which had a translucent protective eyelid covering them so that the animal could see while it burrowed through sand. The illustration was not colored, but she knew that its skin was red and leathery, with rough bristles of hair that Burosh had painstakingly detailed.

  She remembered staring at the drawing endlessly as a young girl, her imagination running wild with thoughts of her riding on the back of the creature as it swam through the desert sands, diving in and out of the dunes.

  Kali tore her attention away from the illustration and began to read the information on the right-side page. Some entries were more detailed than others, depending on the rarity of the creature, but cordols were relatively common, so there was a decent amount written about them.

  She ran her finger down the page’s text, skimming through looking for information about their migration. She found her mind once again fluttering away with childlike daydreams of riding a cordol north through the desert.

  She skipped past their habitat (solely the Gogol Desert), their diet (primarily cactus, sometimes bugs), and their mating rituals (she did not want to know), then finally came to a section on their behavior.

  According to the author, cordols were mostly docile animals unless they felt threatened by a predator. Most other desert animals left them well enough alone, but they were easy prey for a desert tantalus, should they unfortunately stumble upon one. The paragraph was mainly dedicated to describing their demeanor, how they raised their young, and other such things, with a sole sentence about their migration:

  At the height of the summer season, cordols gather in packs and migrate to the northern end of the Gogol, in an effort to avoid being trampled by the lamatka herds that are traveling from the mountains back to the savannah after mating season; during this time, cordols congregate between the coast and the Ribroad, where plant life is more common and predators are scarce.

  So that solved that mystery.

  Kali didn’t know what she had been expecting, but still the answer was mildly underwhelming. They were just moving to get out of the way of something else. Going through the motions, doing it out of necessity. Nothing special pulling them to the coast.

  Before putting the book away, she flipped through the pages, smiling at all the pictures she and Lissia used to obsess over. Even when Kali had begun to drift away from reading while her sister delved deeper into the literary world, The Desert’s Wonders had been the one tome they continued to bond over.

  As she slid the book back into its rightful place on the shelf, after a brief dalliance with the mischievous thought of switching it with another book, Kali inhaled deeply and considered how she would approach telling her parents she was being pulled to the coast.

  She traipsed past her mess of a room again and exited back into the hallway, approaching her parents’ door. Her knuckles were inches from the dark wood when it suddenly swung open and her mother stood there, wide-eyed, staring at what appeared to be her daughter readying to punch her face.

  “Good morning,” Knyla greeted her.

  “Hi,” said Kali, lowering her arm. “Are you and Dad busy?”

  Her mother shook her head and then said, “Your hair looks awful.”

  “Okay. Well, do you have a minute to talk?”

  Knyla’s face scrunched up in concern. Her daughter never just wanted to talk. She could sense it was something important. She moved aside to grant Kali entry to the room.

  Her parents’ room was easily twice the size of her own. A perk of designing your own building was being able to determine precisely how big you wanted your living quarters to be. The place was sparsely furnished, with no more than the bare necessities: a bed, some dressers, a single desk where they could do paperwork. A large painting hung by the window, an abstracted depiction of the moss-covered peaks of the western mountain range. It was an incredibly “Botro Shiar” piece of artwork to display. The man loved landscapes.

  And the man also loved to shave. Kali could hear him in the adjoining bathroom, running the water and shaving the stubble he’d grown overnight. He used to enjoy sporting a modest beard, but lately he had taken to shaving every morning. Personally, Kali was of the opinion that a luscious beard would pair well with her father’s gleaming bald head, so she often teased him for doing his damnedest to look like a baby.

  “Dear! Kallia wants a word,” Knyla called to him. He popped into the doorway with a patch of white foam still lathered on his left cheek.

  “Good morning!” he greeted his daughter. “I’ll be done in a second.” He then whisked himself away again.

  Knyla sat in the chair at their desk and motioned for Kali to make herself comfortable on the bed. She obliged, sitting at the foot of it, sinking down into the soft mattress and white sheets.

  Her father emerged less than a minute later, his cheeks smooth and tan, and he smiled at the two women. “So, what are we all gathered here to discuss?” he asked jovially. Much less suspicious than his wife.

  “Well…” she began. She couldn’t place what was making her nervous about the conversation. It wasn’t as if she was planning to permanently move to Atlua. She simply wanted to start traveling there for work, and perhaps in doing so finally earn enough money to strike out on her own. That was a reasonable desire for somebody to possess. Surely her parents were eager for her to finally move out of the inn and quit mooching off their hospitality.

  She sighed. It would be fine. She just had to start.

  “I’m wanting to travel to Atlua for a while,” she finally said. “I want to try trading over there. It’ll cost a bit of money, but I think I could really turn a nice profit. Don’t you think they’d be interested in some of our goods? Stuff that they don’t have over there, like duragas?” Her parents were perking up, nodding and smiling along to her explanation. “I could spend a few weeks or a month or two over there, and then I could come back with a bunch of Atluan stuff to sell over here. Just go back and forth, you know? I’m making okay money now, but…it really could be so much more. I could maybe finally get
out of your hair.”

  “Oh, you’re not in our hair,” said Botro reassuringly.

  “Your father’s right. He doesn’t even have any hair to be in,” Knyla teased. He shot her a smirk.

  Kali nodded. “I know, I know, but I feel like I am. I want my own place. I want to be more successful. I’m not quite sure yet how I’m gonna raise the money to get a ticket over there, but I’m working on it.”

  Her father opened his mouth to speak, and she immediately knew what he was going to say. “We’d be happy to pay for a ticket over there,” he said.

  “No way,” she refused, shaking her head. “I appreciate it, but I really should do this on my own.”

  “It’s really fine,” said Botro. “Think of it as a loan. You can repay us when you get back.”

  But she shook her head again. “I’d prefer paying my own way. Thank you, though, really.”

  “Okay,” Botro conceded. He then asked, “When are you planning on embarking on this voyage?”

  “I’m not sure,” she shrugged. “Like I said, I need the money first.”

  Botro smiled and told her, “Well, until then, we’re happy to see you home.”

  She smiled back.

  With their talk out of the way, the Shiars got to work while Kali headed downstairs and out the door. She walked through the city, smiling at others as she passed them by on their way to work, to visit friends or family, to shop, to get a bite to eat. Seroo’s Eye was one of the oldest cities in Herrilock, and its population was fairly diverse, though most centripts stayed closer to the mountains or coastline and there weren’t a ton of faifs, either. The skull’s shielding was ideal for every other race, protecting them from the harsh sun’s rays and heat, but faifs thrived on that. They quite literally needed it to live.