by Deck Davis
There was a chance that the nearest shelter was hundreds of miles away. There might be very few chances to eat along the way. He might summon Ludwig, learn the location of shelter, only to find he’d need a wagon and half-dozen bison to get there.
But the things that Ludwig could find for him…
Damn it. He had to take a chance. No point lying about it, either; it was a chance that excited him.
Touching his Soul Harvest glyphline tattoo, Jakub spoke the spell word of Essence Grab, and he sucked the life essence from the coyote.
Necromancy EXP Gained!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIII ]
It would be impossible to explain to a non-magic user how it felt for a necromancer to get essence from the dead. The closest might be if someone was intensely hungry and then given a buffet of succulent dishes to gorge on. Every gust of essence was food hitting an empty belly, except there was no digestion; the feeling of nourishment was instantaneous.
When Jakub looked at his soul necklace, he was shocked.
Essence Remaining: [IIIIIIII ]
The coyote filled his necklace way more than he’d expected, giving him half the essence that a human would.
The weighting of essence was as much a murky subject now as it had been centuries ago when the three original necromancers created the art, but there was a popular school of thought; most master necromancers believed that essence gained depended on the power, experience, and deeds of the corpse you drew from.
A coyote shouldn’t have given him that much. It was strong, sure, but there were plenty of bigger beasts that would have given him less. Nor did it look particularly old, so he couldn’t vouch for its experience. That led him to one conclusion; that this coyote, in its animalistic way, had led somewhat of a noble life.
It didn’t make sense. Animals didn’t have a sense of morality. They lived for survival and sure as all hells didn’t accomplish deeds the way a person might.
Then again, what about a dog who died defending his master? Stories abounded of things like that. Maybe animals had more nobility than he had thought.
He looked at the animal again, this time with a sense of sadness. It looked the same as it had minutes earlier, except its essence was gone now. He had robbed it of a chance to go to the afterlife.
Sentimentality was a value he couldn’t afford out here. He shut it off like a leaking tap, though drips got through and he did his best to ignore the sound.
He spent the next hour skinning the coyote. It was tough, messy work. A master hunter would have been disgusted at the way he parted it from its fur, but Jakub only had a week’s worth of hunting lessons from years ago in the academy to draw from. Those weren’t official lessons but ones he got from someone he met in the academy grounds, so his hunting education wasn’t thorough.
As messy as it was, this left him with a coyote pelt that, once he cleaned it off, he could wear over his shoulders or use as a blanket when the nighttime winds came.
Item Received: Coyote pelt [Poor]
The poor coyote was furless. A raw, bloody mess covering in desert dust. There was no point taking its meat since draining its essence had spoiled it. Nor was there any question of giving it a burial to try and cure his stabbing sentimentality toward it. He didn’t have a shovel, nor the energy to use it.
Instead, Jakub took his Tales of the Wind Caller book, and he skimmed through until he found a passage in a chapter titled A Death Died Honorably. It was just a four-line poem:
When the time has come,
When the years have passed,
When battle is done,
You walk one last path.
He tore this page out and lifted the coyote’s paw and put the page under it, and he hoped that an animal like that, one used to making live-or-die choices in Sun Toil, would understand.
With his essence and his new fur, Jakub felt a little better, but he still had a lot to do. There was no telling how many nights he’d have to spend out here, and he didn’t think he would live through another one like the last. He needed nourishment.
Touching his Death Sense tattoo, Jakub spoke his favorite spellword of them all; Summon Bound.
The ground a few paces ahead of him began to glimmer. It looked unreal, wavy like the horizon on a hot day. A portal of light took form. It was weak at first but with snaps and bangs that cast off the scent of spent essence, and the light grew stronger and stronger until it was churning with energy.
A form leaped out of it, sailing ten feet into the air and then landing with grace, before inexplicably losing its balance and stumbling, then looking side to side to see if anyone had seen it.
Jakub felt the grin spread wide across his face. It was uncontrollable. Even the best day could be improved by seeing his best friend but now, when he was tired and hungry and lonely, he felt himself well up.
“Jakub!” cried a voice.
And then the animal was charging at him, paws pounding on the dirt, tail swishing side to side in ecstasy.
Jakub braced for impact, but when Ludwig crashed into him his weak muscles gave way and he fell on his back, and he was powerless to stop Ludwig slurping his bristly tongue over his face.
“Ludwig…I…can’t…breathe,” he said as he tried to avoid the licks. “Give me a second.”
Ludwig stepped back from him and sat on his haunches. He might have been almost the size of a lion, but he looked like a normal dog then, sitting patiently with his tail going side to side, his eyes wide and wet and fixed on Jakub.
Recovered, Jakub got to his feet and he hugged Ludwig tight, smelling his fur, appreciating that he could even do this. Until recently, Ludwig’s form had been purely spectral, unable to touch the physical world. When Jakub had advanced to journeyman necromancer, his Summon Bound spell leveled up, and it made Ludwig’s presence in the world stronger.
“Where’ve you been?” said Ludwig. “It’s been decades! You look so, so different, Jakub. So much older. You really should start taking care of yourself. I haven’t seen you in…”
“Two weeks,” said Jakub.
“Where are we? We came out here to play?”
“I wish, my friend.”
Ludwig’s eyes narrowed. “You look hurt.” Then he looked around and he saw the flayed coyote. “Poor thing. What happened?”
“It’s a long story to tell, and I don’t have much time to tell it. The longer you stay, the more essence it will use.”
“Jakub, if you’re hurt you need to tell me!”
It was true that Ludwig’s presence would cost essence the longer he stayed. He had spent two bars of his new essence bringing him here, and his necklace would empty if he let Ludwig spend the whole day in Toil. As much as he needed his friend’s company, he couldn’t afford that.
Equally, he knew that Ludwig’s concern for Jakub bordered on psychotic. He was quite neurotic, especially for a summoned demon, and he wouldn’t be able to focus unless he was sure Jakub was safe. Ludwig’s lack of focus meant more essence spent.
Jakub spent the next few minutes relaying his predicament as efficiently as he could. He was quite proud of how concise it came out considering that his skull was throbbing.
When he was finished, Ludwig looked around, taking in the vast sweep of desert. The seriousness in his eyes made Jakub confident that his friend understood his predicament. Ludwig looked at him thoughtfully.
“I suppose this means we can’t play.”
“I’d sell my soul to any demon in any afterlife to be back in the academy grounds throwing a pigskin for you to chase,” said Jakub.
“A necromancer really shouldn’t mention selling his soul. We need to get moving. How far to home?”
“Hundreds of miles. Thousands, maybe. I can hardly think straight.”
“What? You’ll never walk that!”
“I’m focusing on today, and then tomorrow. I’ll take each mile as I come to it, Lud. I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything,” said Ludwig, his tail n
o longer swishing.
“I need food, water, shelter. I want you to circle the perimeter, maybe ten miles each direction. That’s probably about as far as I can manage right now. I need you to mark on my map anything I can sleep in, drink, or eat.”
“Anything? You’re usually choosy about your food…”
“I’d eat dung if you found an edible pile of it, and I’d complement its maker on their cuisine. Keep an eye out for the caravan, too. I don’t know if anyone made it out but tell me if you see them. Even if you just find wreckage. I’ll take anything I can use. If I get lucky, a wagon will have made it through the storms with its wheels intact.”
Ludwig nodded. “I’ll find everything. Just you see. And…Jakub?”
“Yes?”
Lud nodded at Ben now, who watched their exchange without remark, his stare glassy and unblinking.
“The bison isn’t your new best friend, is he?”
“He’s a friend, but you’re the best,” said Jakub, not wanting to hurt Ben the bison’s feelings.
And then realizing how ridiculous that was.
Ludwig opened his mouth and gave a doggy smile. “I’ll be back before you can say dehydration. Before you can spell it, too,” he added, winking.
With that, Jakub’s friend bounded off, staring across the desert with a speed that Jakub envied. He only wished that Ludwig’s physical presence in the world was just a level higher, and then Jakub could have ridden him around. Still, at least he’d have food soon.
CHAPTER 17
“Here, here, here, and way over there,” said Ludwig, his snout glistening wet as he nodded at various sections of the map.
It was midday now, a particularly unforgiving time in a place like this. It made it seem even more endless than before, and he almost looked back with fondness to night-time when the darkness helped him forget just how big Toil was.
The sun had woken up, stretched its limbs, and it was ready for a full day’s work drying every remaining drop of moisture from every pore on Jakub’s skin. His head felt like it had a brass band beating their drums inside it now, and he could barely concentrate on his map as Ludwig pointed out everything he’d found.
“Jakub?”
“Sorry, Lud. So, you found shelter?” he said. The excitement he felt was much stronger than he made it sound, but he was so tired he couldn’t put it across in his voice.
“Maybe,” said Ludwig. “It’s ten miles away. As far as you told me to search. And it’s small. It’s two rocks that look like giant meatballs and there’s a rock balanced on top that looks a little like a sausage, but I thought you could crawl under and maybe have Ben block the wind from one side. I don’t know what you’ll do with the other side. I’m sorry, Jakub. I did bad, didn’t I?”
Jakub rubbed Ludwig’s head, feeling his rough fur between his fingers. Ludwig pressed his head against his palm.
“You did great, Lud. No sign of the caravan?”
“Nothing. Could they be hiding?”
“You can’t hide twenty wagons, eighty bison, and over a hundred people. I knew that dust storms could be bad, but…”
“Were there any mages there? Someone who could open a portal or something?”
“A storm oracle, but he’d struggle to open a milk jar. No, Lud. We got hit by two dust storms. When a bitch of a dust storm gets fast enough, it eats through everything in its path. Stone, wood, steel. You sure you didn’t see anything? Not even any wreckage?”
“I might have missed small things, but you told me how quick I need to be.”
“I did. What about water? Tell me there’s an oasis waiting for me to suck it dry.”
Ludwig’s eyes narrowed now. It was rare that Ludwig’s optimism failed him but when it did, Jakub knew things were bad. Right now, the look on his friend’s face sent flutters of nerves through him.
“There’s nothing, is there?” he said.
“Nothing that I could find,” answered Ludwig. “And I tried really, really hard.”
“Okay, bud. You did great, okay? You might have just saved my life. But I’m going to have to-”
Ludwig’s eyes were serious now. Stern, even. His tail hung between his legs. “Don’t send me back. I can’t go back to the Greylands knowing you’re up here alone. I’ll worry and pace and I won’t be able to rest.”
“You know I have to. I lost another couple of essence bars while you were gone, and that leaves me with four. I’ll need the rest of it.”
“Ben gets to stay, and I don’t?”
“Ben doesn’t cost me essence to keep. Besides, you wouldn’t want to be like him, trust me. His existence isn’t…full.”
Ludwig nodded. “You promise me you’ll get out of Toil?”
Jakub never made promises he couldn’t keep. It was something that instructors drilled into every necromancer, because their job often involved having grieving parents, sons, daughters, husbands trying to extract promises from you. A necromancer quickly learned that you never promised to do something, you only promised to do your best.
But since graduating from the academy, Jakub was learning that a large part of his necromancy training had been training him how to hide. How to hide from emotions, from feelings, from being human. There was nothing inherently wrong with that; his training had kept him alive more than once.
He figured that sometimes it was better to go against his training if your reason was good enough. His reason now was that he couldn’t let his friend worry.
“I’ll get out of here,” he told Ludwig. “And as soon as I do, I’ll summon you.”
Ludwig approached Jakub and then reared up and put his paws on his shoulders. Even at semi-physical presence, Jakub felt his legs begin to buckle. “Take care, Ludwig,” he said. “See you soon.”
“Promise?”
Jakub nodded.
“Well, be careful. You’re clever when you try to be,” said Ludwig.
He spoke his word of unbinding, and a portal opened on the ground. Ludwig wanted to resist it, but its draw was too great, and he was sucked down, down into it until the portal devoured him completely.
Jakub watched the spot on the ground where his friend had just stood, and he felt the complete emptiness of the desert, and he had never felt more alone.
“Ben, come here a second.”
The bison dutifully trundled over to him and stood by his side. Jakub leaned on him as he studied the map. “We’ve got a lot of walking to do today,” he said.
He set off on a northern course. He planned to head to the shelter Ludwig had found. It didn’t sound great but lacking other options, it would have to do. He’d have to make diversions along the way to try and gather some of the things that Ludwig had found, so he’d be cutting it fine.
He hoped to reach the shelter by nightfall so that he had time to make it warm and comfortable, but the diversion was essential. There was no point making it there just to waste away.
That was how Jakub found himself spending all afternoon and most of the evening doing things he’d never imagined he’d have to resort to. It was messy work, it was hard work, but it was survival.
For food, Ludwig had marked some interesting spots on his map. The first was a rattlesnake that he’d found just a mile north.
By the time Jakub got there, the snake hadn’t moved far, and there was good reason for that. It had found shade beside a knee-high rock with a slight overhang. It was bloated to the point it couldn’t move, and he supposed it was in the process of digesting a meal.
Thinking about what was in the snake’s stomach made his belly tighten, and he couldn’t believe he was envious of the mouse or hare or whatever desert creature was swimming in its juices.
At first, he wondered how to get near to it without getting bitten. He wasn’t the most agile of people when he was in his best shape, and right now he had the coordination of a drunken ox. Even a rattlesnake in the middle of digestion could still flick its head and bite him deep, and there were no alchemists or healers out here
who could help him with the venom.
He considered using the long reach of his vagrant blade to strike it, but the risk was too high.
Next, he thought about throwing the coyote fur onto it and then striking it while it was blinded, but there was still a chance it could bite through the fur.
Just as he was out of ideas and was considering taking the risk of using the fur, inspiration hit him hotter than the Toil sun.
“Ben,” he said. The bison turned its attention to him. “I have a job for you, pal. It’s not a nice one.”
And it wasn’t, but at least it wasn’t dangerous. Jakub didn’t even need to get closer to the rattler; he stayed twenty feet away and watched as Ben carried out his orders.
The bison stomped across the desert, heading straight for the snake. When the rattler noticed its new company its rattle shook furiously, and Jakub could hear it even from his faraway spot. Though too full of undigested meat to stretch high and threaten Ben, the rattler still looked ferocious, and Jakub was glad he hadn’t gone over himself.
Ben, however, didn’t care. How could he? He had died once already, and his reanimated state didn’t let him have feelings like fear. Neither did it let him succumb to pain or venom. As the rattler struck him, Ben lifted his leg and stomped on it once, twice, and then a third time, squashing the snake’s head into a pulp.
Jakub approached it. “Once more for luck,” he told Ben, and the Bison flattened the snake’s skull once more.
With the snake dead, it was time to turn it into food. He’d never harvested snake meat before, but he hoped the process was like skinning other animals. Using his dagger, he made a slit from its pulped head to its tail and then unraveled its skin.
Next, he had to separate the skin from the meat, and this turned out to be tougher than he thought. He had to hold the meat with one hand and pull the skin with the other, like pulling a very tight pair of trousers off his legs. This left the meat, guts, and organs.
Playing it safe, Jakub cut away everything that didn’t look like meat. He was going to leave them on the ground for whatever carrion lived in the desert, but that gave him an idea.
