by Deck Davis
The rod was jagged at the end and dyed red by blood. When it had been sticking out of him it had seemed huge, but now he saw that it was less than the span of his hand. All of this for just a little piece of wood.
Sitting up now, Jakub spoke another spellword. This was a sweeter noise, the spellword short and almost sing-song in the way it sounded. Light burst from his soul necklace, carrying the scent of honey with it. The light sought his wound like a bee scenting pollen, swirling around it once, twice, before seeping in.
Essence Remaining: [ ]
Necromancy EXP Gained!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIII ]
The relief was immediate and immeasurable. A shock of healing joy that almost bordered on delirium, it felt so good.
Jakub sank back like an opium fiend after a hit and he stared at the darkened Sun Toil sky as the healing mist stroked his wound and his mind, and he felt himself float a little.
“How beautiful it is, Ben,” he said, aware that his voice sounded strange, drawn out. “A star-filled sky above a desert of death. Can you imagine a more wonderful place? Look at the way the jackals watch me from a distance, waiting for me to die so they can feast on whatever’s left of me.”
This jolted him upright, and the movement sent splinters of pain through his stomach.
He let the pain ebb away, mostly ignored, and he stared at the darkening distance.
Jackals?
He looked for them. He stared hard, but as much as he tried, he couldn’t see in detail what his brain had just displayed to him seconds earlier. Even so, he was sure he’d seen them.
Jackals meant meat. It meant an animal of a large size could survive out here. If jackals lived in Toil, then he could too.
But he couldn’t see them now, and a stabbing thought told him that he never really had. It was just the opium-like effect of Health Harvest playing tricks with his mind. Even so, the new adrenaline pumping through him was enough to make him want to get moving. He pressed his tattoo on his wrist.
Show map, he commanded.
Light spun in front of him until it formed a map in the air, shining pale white in the growing darkness.
It made him feel sick to look at it. This wasn’t his map; Jakub had never visited Toil before, so he’d spent a few hours with Gunar’s paper map. That was a curled-up ream of paper with Toil drawn on it, and Gunar treated as if it were the most precious thing in the queendom. Jakub had copied the paper map to his own glyphline-powered one.
The map cantered around a giant landmass. Mostly featureless, with only markings here and there of places in the desert that Gunar thought noteworthy. A range of hills. A grouping of rocks. The ruins of an old semi-permanent trader outpost.
Then, way, way across, was the settlement of New Sanzance, the target of Gunar’s convoy. A red dot flashed on the map, showing Jakub’s position within it. He was in the middle, miles away from Sanzance, and even further away from the rest of the queendom in the west.
He’d need to decide which to aim for, eventually. Which direction did he set out in? But that was a question for another day. First, he had survival needs to meet.
Pressing his tattoo again, his priority list floated in front of him.
Priority #1; get the dead, heavy-as-hell animal off me.
#2 – Get to shelter
#3 – Find water
#4 – Scavenge Food
#5 – Search for the convoy
He looked at his priority list, satisfied in the order of things. He wanted to search for the convoy now. He ached to see another face, to know that he wasn’t alone out here, but flashes of the accident were coming back to him, and he remembered that it wasn’t one accident but three.
He remembered burst of lightning, the swirl of dust storms converging. Not just a sense of horror but lashings of it that made his soul shake.
How could anyone have survived that? The only reason he had was that he’d driven the cart full of isopropoil to safety so that it didn’t blow the entire convoy to the moon. He remembered steering the cart far enough away and then diving off it and getting far enough away that he didn’t get caught in the blast.
Before he could even think of finding the convoy, he needed to make sure he was in a fit state. Dehydration was the most likely thing to kill him in Toil, but he figured he was good for now.
Before he worried about dying of thirst, he had to figure how to deal with the Toil night.
While Toil was hotter than a dragon fire-fueled oven in a demon’s bakery during the day, at night it was a place of deepest cold, where even the flames of a bonfire would struggle to banish it.
It would be the winds that killed him tonight. Those creeping winds of the worst cold, ones that embraced you and wouldn’t leave until you were shaking and turning blue.
He was only wearing his trousers and shirt, having left his robes and overcoat in a cart before Toil decided to punish Gunar and his people. There was nothing in his inventory he could wear against the cold.
The quarter bottle of Ames’ Firelick Liquor would warm him for a little while. Hell, the last time he’d taken a shot of it he almost coughed up his own burning gullet. But warmth from alcohol was as fleeting as it was illusory, and in reality, it would make his body temperature plummet.
No, he needed real cover from the winds, and judging by how much the sun had set, and the premature rise of the moon on the horizon, he had maybe an hour before the worst of the night started to set in.
Jakub licked his finger and held it in the air. It was a few seconds before the right side of his skin felt cool, which meant the winds were blowing from the east.
At least he knew where to head for shelter. The problem was, one feature of Toil was its utter featurelessness. This wasn’t a place built for survival of anything but the most resilient of creatures. Lizards, carrion birds, deathstalker scorpions.
Be like the deathstalker, he told himself.
He needed to find something to block the easterly winds, which mean he’d need to walk around and find a group of cacti, a pile of rocks. Anything. But, the last thing he wanted was to start forgetting where things were, because it might be important later.
Bringing up his map, Jakub centered it on where he was standing and gave a mental command.
Map Marker added – ‘Wake-up site’
With his bearings saved, Jakub started walking north in search of shelter from the deadly winds.
CHAPTER 8
He couldn’t believe his luck - he couldn’t believe how bad it was. After walking across the desert for an hour, he had come up short on finding a shelter.
The only benefit from his wandering was that he’d collected a pumpkin-sized tumbleweed. After that he stopped every time he saw something interesting, eventually collecting a handful of dry brush and weeds. He stuffed these into his shirt pockets, with the artificery of the material allowing him to store things bigger than should have been possible. Tailor-artificers really were the greatest people in the queendom.
Items added to inventory: tumbleweed, dry brush
Item group created: Fire materials
Flint, tumbleweed, and brush can be used in the creation of fire
Before that, he’d had to struggle with something he’d always taken for granted; getting to his feet. It turned out that having a dead bison press down on your legs and cut off the blood flow wasn’t conducive to walking, and the swirl of purple and yellow bruises all over his thighs and shins made every movement an exercise in pain management.
With his waist sore but healed, Jakub had pressed down on the ground with his hands and tried to push himself to his feet, but he kept buckling. He was sure that if he just got to his feet then he could try and walk it off, and that walking and getting the blood flowing in his legs could only help. It was getting to his feet that was the problem.
After the firth attempt, he tried another tack. “Ben,” he said. “Come here a second.”
The bison trundled over to him, stopping when he w
as standing directly over him so that Jakub was looking up at the bison’s belly. He was going to have to be more precise in his commands. The thing was a puppet, after all. Not dead, but not alive.
“Back away a step.”
He hooked his arm around Ben’s neck and kept a tight grip, and then braced himself.
“Back away five steps.”
Holding onto Ben as the bison backed up, Jakub was pulled to his feet. He gritted his teeth and braced against the pain and through a sheer act of will remained standing whilst holding onto the animal.
When the ache subsidized he risked a step. Then another. Each one came easier, and he began to feel the accompanying pain as just a dull side effect of each step. There, but only hovering in the back reaches of his sensory experience.
“Thanks, Ben,” he told his only friend.
Though he was on his feet, his going was slow. Jakub kept his map open and headed north, hoping this way he would find shelter against the growing winds, and maybe stumble across whatever was left of the convoy.
It was strange walking across Toil when it was night-time. Gunar made them all journey through the evenings when the sun cooled, but he let them rest when night kicked in and the desert started to freeze. After dark, the caravaners usually lit a fire and stayed up chatting, joking, and singing until one by one they all rejoined their families in their wagons.
Alone, the utter silence of the desert was oppressive. Jakub heard his steps loud on the ground, and he wished he could mute them. It seemed like they were too loud, that they might wake something up and call out to things that waited in the darkness.
It felt like he was walking in some new, unknown world, that he was the only man who lived here, who had ever lived here, and only had his thoughts to console himself.
Being in Toil had done wonders for his sense of positivity and optimism.
He couldn’t walk as fast as he would have liked because of the pain, and he kept having to stop and rest. He knew that if he sat down he might not be able to summon the will to stand again, so he would lean on Ben, feeling how cold the bison was, but thankful that he was there with him.
He marked things of interest along the way. He still held out hope that some of the trader convoy had survived, but a thought was lurking in his mind, and he knew he’d have to face up to it. There was a decent prospect that he might have to walk hundreds of miles if he had any hope of getting to safety.
If that was the case, he’d need every provision he could find if he wanted to survive. Every source of water, of nutrition, of shelter. Anything that could be useful.
After what he judged was three miles of stumbling over the desert, he made only two markings on his map.
Map marker added – animal tracks. Antelopes? Coyotes? Further investigation needed. Possible source of food, water.
Map marker added – Climbable rock formation (shaped like a giant’s thumb) Climb up in daylight and get a view of the area.
After heading three miles north, Jakub began to feel more disheartened with each step. The sky was much darker now and the stars shone brighter than Jakub had ever seen. He guessed it was the remoteness of Toil that made the sky stand out so much. Not even in the jungles of the Killeshi lands, which the queendom had failed to colonize, had he seen such a pure sky. It made him feel small. A speck laboring under a watchful expanse of black.
With the darkness came the winds. Jakub had never felt so cold in his life, and he’d grown up living in a traveling community. He knew what it was like to be cold. Hells, until the age of eight, he’d never fallen asleep under a roof.
Out here in Sun Toil, it wasn’t just cold. This was a primordial kind of cold. An ancient kind that felt less like weather and more like a living being that crept out when the world turned black and the desert darkness spread out like a never-ending ocean.
Only the previous night, Jakub had spent the night wearing all his clothes, his robes, his overcoat, and had wedged himself inside a sleeping bag. He’d shared a cart with five other people, and even with his layers and their collective body heat, there was still a nip in the air.
This was like walking through invisible waves of the purest ice. Like black ice hanging in the air, clinging to him, and it wasn’t even the fullest part of the night yet. Worse was to come.
This was when he started to worry. He’d gone north expecting to find somewhere to shelter. A cactus wide enough that he could sit against it and block the wind. Even a giant boulder that he could squeeze under and share with the desert insects would have worked.
But no. He’d found nothing. Now the easterly winds were sucking the air from his mouth before he got a chance to breathe it, and he’d started to feel numb in his toes.
The only thing he could think to do was to use Ben. He’d have to lie down, since if he commanded the bison to lie down and then sat against him, his shoulders and head would be exposed. But if he lay down next to his dead friend he would have a wind block of sorts.
That still left him exposed. It meant that although the winds wouldn’t reach him, he’d still be cold. And if he drifted to sleep and slept until daybreak, he could wake up to find himself baking in the sun.
No, he needed something with protection to his sides and above, if he could find it.
He walked another mile. His legs begged for a break. The desert made sounds around him. Rather, it was the creatures of the desert, be they insects, birds, or maybe even mammals that called this place home. He imagined that they all knew he was there. That they viewed him as a stranger, as an invader, and that without the protection of the caravan, of other humans, he was vulnerable. That was another reason he needed a shelter that was more secure than a cactus or a rock.
Beginning to feel the effects of thirst, Jakub knew he needed to start conserving what water there was in his body. It could be days before he found more.
The only liquid he had was the quarter of Ames’ Firelick, but not only did it taste like someone had wrung the sun like a wet rag and bottled the drops, but alcohol would dehydrate him.
He considered emptying the Firelick and peeing into the bottle. There was no shame in it. He might not tell the story around the dinner table if he made it out of Toil, but at least it was liquid, and it might give him an extra day or two to find a water source.
Then again, he was hesitant to waste the Firelick. The stuff was meant to be drunk in quarter-shots, and there was a good reason for that. Firelick was 70% alcohol, which could be enough to make it flammable. Without much in the way of fire sources, he didn’t want to, almost literally, piss away a good source of flammable liquid.
Forget it. He needed to worry about shelter first and think about water second.
Just like that, his brain followed his command. You want to worry about shelter? Fine. Your request has been granted.
The worry hit like a tsunami, and it was only by picturing himself freezing to death and then imagining his corpse staying in the desert, unfound and unclaimed perhaps forever, that he spurred himself on.
He walked for another grueling mile, pushing through the pain that flared up in his shins and thigh, through the throbbing in his almost-healed waist, through his tight throat that felt like someone was rubbing two pieces of sandpaper inside it when he breathed.
Again, there was nothing. It was a strange feeling; when he was with the caravan and they were journeying up to a hundred miles each day, it seemed like they were always passing rock formations. Now that he needed one, Toil had become miserly with them, hiding its precious boulders from him.
He had decided to curl up next to Ben and hope that he could shiver his way to daybreak when he spotted something ahead of him.
It was difficult to see much now that the sun had fully set. Everything was black, and sometimes it felt strange to walk ahead into such impenetrable darkness. He couldn’t even see the ground, and this made him dizzy, as though he were about to put his feet down into an oil-black ocean that would swallow him up.
As
his eyes adjusted, he realized something interesting; that he still couldn’t see a gods-damned thing.
Despite this, he noticed that though everything was black, something ahead of him was darker than the rest of the landscape. Getting closer, Jakub felt the tiredness and worry wash off him.
Just a few hundred paces in front of him, the land swelled upward to create a rock formation that looked like a church belfry. A bottom mouth-shaped part was hollow, creating a cave inside the rock.
Smiling for the first time that day, Jakub crossed an item from his priority list.
Priority #1; get the dead, heavy-as-hell animal off me.
#2 – Get to shelter
#3 – Find water
#4 – Scavenge Food
#5 – Search for the convoy
His natural caution made him hold off from running toward the cave. In his short time since leaving Queen Patience’s Magic Academy Jakub had been pursued by cannibals, had a fellow necromancer try to kill him, and battled numerous pain-in-the-arse giant insects.
Oh, and a demented mage, a torturer, and a psychotic necromancer trio had tried to kidnap him so they could flay his skin and steal his magic.
He was probably a little less trusting these days than he used to be.
With this in mind, he first added the location of the cave to his map, nothing that although it felt like he’d walked for hours, he hadn’t made much progress beyond his wake-up site.
Map marker added – rock cave (that might save my life)
He skirted west around the rock, never taking his eyes from it. He waited for thirty minutes. He would have waited longer but every gust of wind felt like a ton of ice had been dumped down his shirt, and the cold was making his legs ache.
Moving all the way around the cave until he was on the other side, he again watched it, holding out for as long as he could.
