by Deck Davis
Ten feet away, a figure in the darkness that spread ice in his veins. It was a coyote. Larger than a fox, smaller than some dogs, but with eyes that seemed to glow in the darkness. Its open mouth made it look like it was laughing at him. That would have been better, but this coyote was silent and it was watching him, its head bowed into hunting position.
Jakub reached for his dagger. He couldn’t feel if he’d picked it up. He had to look, and he saw that it was in his numb grasp.
Now he waited for the animal to rush him. The seconds dragged out, the air crackled with a cold tension that seemed to freeze in the wind and hover all around him.
And then the shape slunk further back into the night, pattering east until he lost it.
He didn’t even allow himself a breath of relief. The coyote would be back. Most animals in Toil faced a daily battle for nutrition, and Jakub was a walking banquet. The animal would return.
There was no way he could fight it. He was simply too tired, too hurt, too cold. He had to make the coyote believe that the fight was too risky.
Back to work. He needed a fire more than ever.
Setting the dagger beside him but within easy reach, he started with the flint and steel again. He struck them once, then dropped the flint. He struck them again and a spark was born, and Jakub’s pulse thrummed, but it died as soon as it left the flint.
He heard steps to his right now. Closer than before. Close enough that he heard the coyote’s breaths, hungry and excited. That was probably his mind conjuring danger to make him hurry. The steps were real, but it couldn’t be close enough to…
A growl by his ear shot a bolt of pure fear through him. In one motion, he dropped the flint and steel and he grabbed the dagger, holding it awkwardly thanks to the cold. He turned to his right in time to see the coyote beside him, teeth bared.
He was too late to avoid them.
It sunk them into Jakub’s arm. The pain was minute; the cold and the adrenaline turned it into more an echo of pain, but enough to make him drop his dagger.
He fought the urge to shake his arm wildly and he picked up the blade with his left hand. He struck outwards with it.
The coyote released him. He couldn’t see where he’d hurt it, but it was enough that it retreated away and into the shadows. Jakub watched its silhouette head to his left before it went just enough into the darkness that the sea of black hid it from him.
Again, he knew it would be back. Animals could sense weakness, and the coyote would have a hunter’s mind. It couldn’t have missed that Jakub was alone and hurt without much to defend himself.
He worked quickly now. The sound of the flint and steel rang again and again. Twice he made sparks that didn’t take, three times he heard footsteps around him, seeming to come from all directions.
He saw a blur in the darkness in his peripheral vision, and he knew he’d have to abandon the fire.
But with three last, desperate hits of the steel, the third made a spark that leaped to the kindling and snapped on it, and a tiny burst of fire flared that to Jakub’s eyes looked like the birth of a minute universe, a spectacle of pure salvation. He fed kindling to the other kindling in an act of fire cannibalism, careful not to smother it.
In seconds the burning was enough that he could smell it. The orange glow was the size of his palm, the heat negligible but it was eating the brush. That was all that mattered.
It must have given the coyote pause. If it had ever seen men in Toil, perhaps Gunar’s people in their yearly journeys through Toil, it would be wary of fire. Jakub hoped that instinct kept it from him now.
Whether it was his imagination or not, he felt warmer, as if it were a bonfire and not just a small flame that the wind could snuff out with one change in direction. He tore tumbleweed into smaller strips and fed these to the fire, growing it. When he judged it had enough strength and fuel to burn unattended for a few seconds, he grabbed the vagrant blade.
The vagrant blade didn’t look special. The craftsmanship was worthy of an apprentice blacksmith, and none of the weapon’s owners had even taken care of the blade. It was better suited for spreading jam than stabbing or cutting.
That didn’t matter, usually. The blade’s strength came from the magic that an artificer had etched deep into the metal. Within this shoddy-looking sword was an old and strange magic, one so curious that Jakub had often wondered why it was ever made. Who had needed the singular effect the blade caused, and why? Jakub would have loved to meet them. He’d ask one question; why did they need a sword that would turn a man into a vagrant?
That was the magic of the vagrant blade. When they held it for more than a moment, it would transform a man’s appearance, right down to his smell.
The last time Jakub had held it, the sword had torn and shrunk his clothes, spread food and mud stains all over them, and added a smell that made even flies avoid him. The magic wrinkled his skin and gave him a yellow pallor, as well as sprouting a beard on his face that wasn’t as well-groomed as the one he had now; this beard was patchy and half-black half grey, the strands wet as though permanently greasy.
Then, the second he dropped the blade, the effect reversed. Its magic was as well made as it was utterly unexplainable.
Now, Jakub didn’t need the blade’s magic. He guessed the coyote would eat him just as happily if he was his current self or a vagrant.
Instead, he opened the bottle of firelick. He had already cut a four-inch strip of cloth from the bottom of his shirt, and he put it against the bottle and upended it. He wiped the wet cloth on the vagrant blade, spreading firelick all over the metal.
Just as he finished, he heard two things. The first was the fire crackling as it ate the last of the tumbleweed.
The second sound made him feel like someone had driven a knife into his gut. It was the sound of footsteps running toward him, getting faster and closer each second.
Adrenaline washed through him, and Jakub acted on instinct. He grabbed the vagrant blade and held the tip of the blade against the dying fire.
With a whoosh, the flame leaped onto the firelick and then ran all the way down it so that the blade was ablaze with a green flame.
The flames wouldn’t last long. He fed another pile of tumbleweed to his fire. Holding the sword in his dominant hand, he stood up now and saw the coyote just eight feet away, close enough that with one leap it would have been on him. If he had kept his back turned just seconds longer, that would have been enough.
He could see its confidence faltering and honestly, he empathized a little. Because what the coyote saw now was a man holding a sword made from heat and flame.
Not only that, but the man was changing into another person in front of its eyes. His hair was changing, his eyes narrowing. And the stink! Maybe that alone would dissuade the animal from trying to eat him. Jakub knew the change in appearance was just the magic of the blade, but the coyote wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.
The coyote retreated a few paces, its eyes never leaving his. He saw doubt in its stare. Its right hind leg shifted. It was ready to flee.
To make sure of it, Jakub raised the sword. He felt the flames on his face, the bright green lames made him feel bolder.
He shouted as savagely as he could. “Come get it, you bastard!” Waving the flaming blade, he took two strides forward.
That did it. The coyote fled, and it was only when he couldn’t see its rump anymore that Jakub relaxed a little. He watched the darkness for five minutes, scanning all around, taking testing steps to see if the animal was lurking. When those five minutes were up he waited for five more, and he stared at the black around him with intense concentration.
The flame on the blade had died, so he walked back to his fire and dropped his sword and he fed more tumbleweed to the fire, saving it just as it was dying.
As his breaths steadied again and the adrenaline left him, a great fatigue overcame him. He wanted sleep more than anything, but questions knocked around his brain. His first one was, how could
a guy be so unlucky that the only shelter he finds is taken by a bear, and then he’s hunted by a coyote?
The second question was, should he just sleep here? Maybe with Ben blocking the wind, and if he kept the fire fed…
He didn’t get to finish the thought. A shape flew at him from the darkness, a shape of fur and teeth and snarls, and it crashed into him and pinned him with its weight and then snapped at his face.
Its spit splattered his cheeks and he could smell its dank fur.
Jakub moved his face side to side as an utter terror took hold of him, and he desperately tried to avoid its snapping jaws.
Survival thoughts hit him like arrow bolts one by one; not full ideas but fragments, the best his brain could make up in the split second.
Fire. Dagger? Blade. Punch! Dagger…
He reached out with his right hand for his dagger but couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel much because of the numbness that the fire had barely taken the edge off. But after a few seconds of grasping blindly a sudden pain flared in his hand, and he realized he’d put his numb hand into the fire.
The coyote finally timed its snap right and caught his face, clamping down on his nose and then tearing. The explosion of pain was like nothing he’d never felt.
It made him feel dizzy, his stomach lurched, the world spun around him.
He felt his own hot, wet blood on his cheeks.
Jaws snapped toward him again. Jakub dove right, rolling over the fire. As the coyote followed he grabbed his dagger from the ground.
He didn’t know if he could even use it. He was barely conscious, the pain stinging so much it threatened to make him pass out. He blinked through it, felt something wet around his eyes and didn’t know if it was tears from the pain or blood from his nose.
Holding the dagger so tight that he felt it this time, he held in all the pain, all the fear, and he watched his enemy and he concentrated on its movements, trying to guess which direction it would leap to.
The coyote jumped. Jakub rolled. He moved out of the way, hoping he’d chosen rightly, and then he pushed himself to his knees.
He was looking at the back of the coyote. He’d dived the right way. Wasting no time, he leaped forward and collapsed onto it, smashing it to the ground with his weight, and then he raised his dagger and plunged it into the coyote’s neck again and again until his arm was so tired that he had to let it fall.
That done, Jakub slid off the coyote and collapsed onto his back and closed his eyes.
He allowed himself just a few seconds of respite before he wiped away the wetness from his eyes and looked at his finger and saw no blood. When he touched his nose, not only did pain shoot through him, but his finger came away red.
Now wasn’t the time to process that. Instead, he fed more tumbleweed to the fire. Decisions had to be made now. Lots of them, and it was hard to know where to start.
He began with surviving the night. Even if he hadn’t already been exhausted, his fight had taken the last of his energy. It must have been past midnight now, and he judged that he just needed to brave the cold for six hours until dawn broke.
Ben, who had sat impassively through the fight after lacking orders from Jakub, was lying on the ground and blocking the wind.
Jakub gripped the coyote by its legs and pulled it next to Ben and then positioned it at an angle, forming a double-sided barrier for him.
After feeding more tumbleweed to the fire, Jakub wedged himself between the dead coyote and once-dead bison and he watched the fire for a while as the last dregs of his adrenaline left him and exhaustion overtook every inch of his body and carried him to sleep.
CHAPTER 16
He awoke to the sun burning his face. It was the daytime now. Not dawn, not sunrise, but daytime, and the sun was shining angrily on Toil.
It was a light that hated life. Hated people, plants, even the dirt on the ground and all the microbial beasts that just wanted to live in it and be left alone. It made the desert look almost pure white, like the burning chemicals alchemists shielded their eyes from.
He didn’t recognize the area around him. A crack ran through the ground not far away. It wasn’t wide. A lonely knee-high cactus stood rigid in the distance. There were no carts. No people. Jakub didn’t even care for just that one moment, because his pain was too much to let him.
He thought the pain was his nose, but he quickly realized that all his face was stinging. He didn’t have a mirror to check, but it was easy to guess what had happened; he had been so ravaged and so exhausted that he’d slept longer than he’d intended, and the Toil sun had scorched his skin.
When he was traveling with Gunar they all combated this using an alchemical solution they rubbed on their skin, but Jakub didn’t have any, and it was only after entertaining some of the caravan kids by reanimating butterflies that one of their mother’s took pity on him and gave him an almost-empty tin.
He needed to fix that. Either find the caravan and get lucky and find some usable paste or work out another way to protect his skin. It wasn’t just a matter of comfort, but necessity. Gunar had told him about men who’d caught the sun so badly they couldn’t blink without feeling the agony of an inferno in their eyes.
He still had the jar of heat-leave-me salve, but it was only 5% full, and that would give him protection for a day, maybe two. If he could find water he could dilute it. Lowering the quality would worsen the protection, but it might extend the salve for a few days longer.
Touching his tattoo, Jakub added this to 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
#6 – Protect skin from sun
The next thing he touched was his nose, which he regretted immediately. The coyote had torn a chunk from it, and even thinking about that made him feel sick. If his belly hadn’t been empty, he would have retched his guts out onto the dirt. He couldn’t even assess the damage properly; lacking a mirror, the only thing he could do was to touch it, and each touch sent agony through him.
He didn’t have any essence after reanimating Ben and healing his torso wound, which meant that he couldn’t heal his nose that way. Maybe he wouldn’t have done that even with a full necklace of essence; there were much better uses for it, and his nose wound wasn’t fatal.
Much more pressing was the utter tiredness that weighed so heavy that it was hard to stand up, even after a night’s sleep. It could only have been hunger and dehydration.
That was his priority; nourish his body so he had the energy for everything else.
He looked at Ben now, and he was beginning to regret his choice in reanimating him. Reanimating the bison meant that though he could use his body, Ben was still dead. He wouldn’t rot like a normal cadaver, but nor could he eat or drink to nourish, and his body couldn’t repair itself. After a while, Ben’s skin would lose moisture, his muscles would wear away.
Jakub was still sure that Ben would be useful both as a pack animal and something to ride when he was especially tired. And sheltering beside Ben to escape the wind had saved his life last night. But now Jakub eyed his bison friend and couldn’t help but wonder how delicious he would taste.
Oh well; too late for that. If he ever, ever made it out of here, he’d go to the nearest tavern and order the biggest, juiciest steak he’d ever seen.
This brought him to a decision he needed to make about the coyote. Its corpse was on the ground, a gallon of blood dried around its neck fur, its eyes lacking the glow from the night before and looking more like stones.
Jakub felt a twisting in his gut, and he knew this feeling was his fault.
Back in the academy, necromancers were trained to be completely emotionless about death. It was essential because a necromancer couldn’t perform his work if seeing a corpse brought tears to his eyes.
After graduating from the academy, after deal
ing with the death of his mentor, after losing friends, Jakub had decided that he couldn’t live like that. He couldn’t be around death and feel nothing for it; it wasn’t human. So, he had worked to untie the bonds the academy had put on his feelings. It had been tough, but little by little he had learned to feel empathy.
This brought a conflicted feeling in him now as he stared at the coyote. Only one of them could have lived last night; even the coyote would say that if he could talk. That didn’t make it easy to see such a beautiful animal, a product of the land of which Jakub was an intruder, dead.
That was his problem, he knew. There was once a day he could have looked at the coyote impassively. If he wanted to feel empathy and be more human, then he had to accept the times that didn’t feel good.
To settle his feelings, Jakub dwelled on the choice lying dead on the ground in front of him. His options were simple, yet impossible. Either he drained essence from the coyote to fill some of his soul necklace for later spell use, or he butchered the coyote for its meat and fur.
He couldn’t do both; draining the essence now would spoil the meat. Butchering it would cause its essence to seep into the ether without letting Jakub drain it.
If he drained the essence, he was gambling on being able to find food. Soon. Today, actually. He could physically survive for, what, 20 days without food? But come day 19 when his stomach had shriveled to the size of a nut and his body had almost consumed itself, 20 days wouldn’t seem so long. Clinging on to life didn’t help if he was too weak to seek water, to get out of the sun, to find shelter before nightfall.
It was unlikely he’d kill another animal like the coyote, and it might be his only chance to get essence. If he had essence he could summon Ludwig, who could travel the plains much faster than Jakub and find shelter for him.
