by Deck Davis
Ask anyone who has traveled through a desert and they’d agree on something; there was nothing to see. For Jakub, it meant that he walked for hours and hours across rocks and dirt and sand, and the landscape around change so little it wasn’t a stretch to think he’d just imagined walking. That he was still asleep in his shelter, dreaming of walking instead of actually doing it.
His body wanted to help him. It wanted to make him feel sure he’d walked as much as he though. Aching legs. Heat trembling over his skin; not burning it because he was covered, but making him itch, breaking sweat from his puckered pores. His mouth sounded like an ancient door hinge turning when he opened his mouth wide, so great was his thirst.
When the sun was more of a bleeding of orange light than a covering, when the sky darkened and brought its cold gusts, the ground began to change. Checking his map, Jakub was impressed.
“We covered fifteen miles today,” he told Ben.
His sense of achievement soured when he realized that represented more miles without finding water, food, or signs of the caravan. If his luck didn’t change soon he wouldn’t need luck anymore, because luck was something that mortal men hope for, and afterlives were luckless.
His headache was back now. Something beat inside his skull like it was a man trapped in there, beating on cell walls and begging for water. Jakub knew that the pear fruits had done little but prolong his thirst. He was falling down the slope, and the steepest drop was sure to come. If he didn’t find a food water source tomorrow, he would be too weak. Then, there was nothing to do but let the desert claim him.
Pushing on to find shelter for the night, Jakub crossed into a changing of the guard where the desert was concerned. The rocky plains of the south gave way to more sand. Way, way ahead of him it even rose into dunes, soft and curved like butter rising into waves as a knife cuts through it. He passed Equipoint Rock. It was way east of him but no less visible, standing like a sentinel so it could keep watch over the land around it.
Jakub thought to head to it and climb the rock to get a view of the desert, but distances were webs of lies here. What looked a mile away could be ten, and Jakub was too tired, too thirsty, too hungry to be lied to. If every man was filled with life force, Jakub was empty. Wine drips at the bottom of a spent barrel.
Every few steps he scanned the horizon. He prayed to see the glitter of fading sunlight on the surface of a water pool. Then, when the sun finally set, he prayed for the twinkle of starlight, again on the surface of a water pool.
He didn’t find it.
The sky was a canvas of pure black, with constellations of stars tucked tight together in sparkling packets. Jakub hadn’t found shelter. For hours, his sore knees and swollen feet cried for him to stop but he kept telling them just ten paces more. Let me just see the horizon. There might be shelter.
He’d climbed on Ben’s back an hour earlier. The bison was built for pulling, not carrying, and their going was so slow that stars overtook them when they cut arcs through the tarry sky, and Jakub’s head bobbed up and down with the rhythm of Ben’s plodding feet.
Ten paces more became twenty, forty, a hundred, and they carried on deep into the night and the wind became a chill became a gale became what felt like an ice storm. As much as it was easier to ride Ben, it would quadruple his traveling time. It was a luxury he’d have to give up.
If tears had formed in Jakub’s eyes then, they would have crystallized in their dryness. But a man trained in death learned not to fear it. Even so, he saw it coming. He felt it with every dry gulp that brought pain in his throat. In every throb inside his skull.
He wore the coyote fur around his shoulders to stop the wind snaking down his shirt collar. He tucked his shirt into his trousers and stuffed the front with bison hair. Even that wasn’t enough, because the wind attacked his legs, made them feel so heavy that if he fell off Ben, he doubted he would get back up.
It was too dark now. Shelter could be waiting twenty meters away and he’d go right past it. Time to stop.
“Woah, Ben,” he said.
His friend halted. Jakub tried to climb off him with grace, but grace depended on muscle control which depended on energy, and Jakub fell off the bison and hit the ground, smashing his face into the sand. Small mercies, at least. The dunes were softer than rock.
“Lie down,” he told Ben.
The bison settled onto the sand. Jakub squeezed up beside him. Ben’s flesh was cold now. Not rotting; at least reanimation slowed that process. But he was cold. And as freezing as he was, Jakub lay right beside him as close as he could get and he was thankful for Ben blocking the wind and he felt a tenderness toward him now, knowing that the animal had saved his life just as Jakub had robbed him of his afterlife.
He spread the fur over his legs as best he could manage and he tried to adjust it to cover him whole, but it was too short. Either his legs or his head would feel the cold tonight. Knowing how much he’d need his legs, he let them have the fur.
Awaking from a nightmare, Jakub sat up and shouted through cracked lips, but the sound came out as a moan that even a mouse would struggle to hear. The sun was on him now, cascading down the dunes around him. Ben, dutiful, loyal Ben, was laying down, his weight firmly pressed into the sand and making its mark.
Jakub wished the morning had brought him renewed energy, but no. Perhaps if man could draw nourishment from the sun like a leaf would, then he would have loved the golden rays of daytime.
Instead, though it was still early and the sun hadn’t worked itself up to full powers yet, its presence was a reminder that he was completely, irrecoverably, absolutely fucked.
Water. That was the key. He felt if he could find nourishment for his barren insides, then he could carry on and take care of his other needs.
But he couldn’t just keep walking. That wouldn’t get him far at all. He needed a direction to head in, not a blind path. Where would he find water in the desert?
With so little moisture left in his body, he decided to stay out of the sun and think about his problem. Lacking cover, he had Ben stand up, and he crawled underneath him so that the bison’s belly protected him from the sun. Despite knowing the sun would damage Ben’s skin, it wouldn’t hurt him, and it was the best he could do.
Next, he tried to remember everything he’d learned in the academy and from Gunar. The academy’s survival training for its field mages was basic; since a necromancer could conceivably travel anywhere in the queendom, their survival guides focused on this, with lessons such as: rule one: find water, food, shelter.
Gunar, the sand-seasoned trader, had spared him much worthier words. Jakub raked his mind now and tried to collect them. What had Gunar said about water?
“Water’s as rare as a whore in a monastery. Canyons and valleys are your best bet. They’re cooler, and they have little potholes and ridges where water collects and the sun might not get its greedy golden teeth on it.”
There was nary a canyon as far as Jakub could look, just dune after dune, with the sandy hills rising high further north, taller than the tallest tree and making his calves hurt just to think about scaling them.
He was thinking about this wrong. So had Gunar. Gunar had talked about canyons and water ridges and the importance of getting to them before the sun did, because Gunar believed that Toil was a place of death. The trader traveled back and forth out of it year on year and he saw it as nothing but an obstacle to be conquered.
That was an easy attitude to fall into when you traveled with wagons of food and water, when you removed the risks of Toil one by one so that you never really heard its pulse, never felt the life force that throbbed in the air, that drifted along the dunes and made sand softly trickle.
Jakub was beginning to understand. Toil was a system like any other. It had life and death, the tools that a necromancer used to cast his rod. Things survived in Toil; things rarely seen by the eyes of men. Foxes that skittered and scampered and lived years and eons from the glow of civilized lamplight. Bears,
coyotes, hares that lived beyond the reach of man’s world.
Once he got over the fact that it was an inhospitable place to man, that a person wasn’t meant to find joy here, he began to see that Sun Toil swarmed with life. And life was life was life, no matter where or when it existed, and life needed the same things no matter which creature lived it.
The animals that lived in Toil would need water.
That was the understanding that came to him then, hunched into a near fetal position under his dead bison. It seemed so obvious a thought that it was almost as nourishing to his body as having water itself.
It was a long, long day after that. It seemed like the sun was burning its reserves longer and brighter than usual just out of spite, knowing that Jakub had to shelter from it under Ben and couldn’t go acting on his idea until the temperature began to dip.
He slept in fits, snatching minutes at a time. These naps were always broken by one thing; dreams of water. Drinking it. Washing in an ice-cool cove. Swimming in it; finding a sea and floating out into nothingness.
He always woke to a sea of a different kind. Hot and dry and yellow, sitting way above him in the sky and giving his skin a rash whenever it breathed its rays on him. His throat was like sand. His lips felt dry enough to fall off.
When he was awake, he began to have strange thoughts. He heard his father’s voice calling to him, asking where he was. Jakub hadn’t heard that voice since he was a kid, but he recognized it. The weirdest thing was that the voice sounded older, as if his brain had aged it to make the hallucination more realistic.
Later, as he dozed in and out of consciousness, he saw the academy right in front of him. Close enough that he could have hit it with a rock. A glimmering building of sky-touching turrets and an intricately carved façade. It was empty. Dark windows, untended grass around it, yellow and dead.
Later, both his father and the academy were gone, and he was glad to be rid of one but found himself wishing for the other.
Finally, the evening started to come, and Jakub felt a faint chill in the air. He climbed from under Ben, stretched his legs until he rid himself of an aching pain in his knees, and then he packed away his fur and slung his makeshift fur bag around Ben’s neck. He set off north-east first since he didn’t want to go back on himself, nor did he want to tackle the giant dune in the north yet. He didn’t have the energy to conquer that.
Tonight wasn’t about travel. It was about finding water, and he would cut a circle in this area, he decided. He began his walking arc, heading northeast and scanning the ground and the horizon. Up and down he brought his gaze, usually landing on sand or sky, dirt or cloud. There wasn’t much else for a man’s eyes to see.
His first few finds weren’t what he needed. The body of a black-tailed jackrabbit, preserved by its burial under a dune and unearthed now as the breeze labored to sweep the sand away. The skeleton of a rat or a squirrel, he didn’t know which, but it didn’t matter because bones wouldn’t find him water. Though, Jakub did pick at them and take a few of the sharper bones, decided you never knew when you needed a skewer.
Item received: Rat bones
He rested after four hours. It was getting too dark now, the black swarming in the sky like millions of flies, only with the swirl of the wind instead of a buzz. He’d made a mistake today. He should have forced himself to rise in the morning when it was cool, searched until midday, and then rested and searched again at night. If only the idea had come to him.
He feared the chill of night as much as the heat of day, but he was becoming a little more practiced in finding places to sleep. After testing the wind with a wet finger, Jakub strayed to the base of a dune.
He made Ben lie down and then he tucked himself close to his friend and he draped the fur, now ratty and marked with dust, over himself. The bison and the sand dune held the wind back from him, and he slept.
The sun rose and set on his seventh and eighth days, giving Jakub nothing and taking everything he had. He searched as long as he could, gaining six hours on day seven, seven hours on day eight.
He felt different when the morning sun of day nine met his eyes. He felt empty. Devoid of soul, nothing inside him to make him go. Thinking about getting up for another say of fruitless travel seemed impossible, and actually getting up even more so.
He could smell death lurking, but he wasn’t ready to go with it yet. A necromancer was a great prize for Death, and that was why death never rushed things. He did it properly, waiting for his chance. You rarely heard of a necromancer dying near Dispolis, because Death knew that was close enough for his body to be taken to the academy, where a master necromancer might resurrect him.
But out here, where the jackrabbits and kit foxes and the rats and the squirrels had no idea what an academy was, much less where it was?
Out here was the perfect place for a necromancer to die.
If Jakub died out here, there wasn’t a moon’s chance that a master necromancer could make it here to claim his body and perform a resurrection. Right now, Jakub was a prize beyond reckoning for Death.
He wouldn’t let him have it yet. Lacking the strength to get up, he hooked his arm around Ben’s neck.
“Stand up,” he told him, keeping as strong a grip as he could. As Ben straightened so did Jakub, and he leaned on his friend and hoped standing would let his blood rush to his legs and let him stay up for a while.
He looked around. His vision was foggy, as though the burning, wavy horizon was close for him to grab it. He blinked once, twice, and his vision rightened for a minute or two, but not longer. Just as his eyes were struggling so was his mind, and his thoughts were sluggish now.
Hooking his arm around Ben he walked, human and bison matching steps, Ben going slowly enough that Jakub could let him bear his weight. Every walk in the desert seemed slow because everything looked the same but this walk seemed slower than the rest. Held back by his fatigue, Jakub took the steps of a life-weary old man, and each one felt like one more toward death.
He passed rock piles that his mind tricked him into believing had been placed in certain shapes by human hands. He never saw the hands that placed them.
Next, he saw cacti with their leaves plump and ridged. He cut one, tore it, and sucked at the insides but they weren’t as succulent on his tongue as he hoped.
The sun watched him on his march of death. It was still early for it, it wasn’t ready to blast the desert with its true heat yet, and he felt it watch him walk, then stumble, then almost crawl his way through the desert.
When thoughts of giving up were less a cloud in his head and more a storm that darkened everything else, Jakub spotted something. Something in the distance.
It looked like a coil of leather, spotted black and thick like butcher’s sausage meat. It almost blended into the sand, given away only by a slightly darker hue. The longer Jakub watched, the surer he was that this was what he needed.
He watched it curl in on itself into a tight ball, and then straighten out, straighten up, look around with its head barely larger than a stone, eyes like raisins, twisted tongue trembling.
A snake.
The last snake he’d caught was too engorged on meat to move, and it was easy for Ben to crush it. This one would be too quick, and crushing its brain was the opposite of what he needed this time. Crushing its head would make Jakub’s spells useless.
Seeing the snake had already accomplished one thing in his mind; he felt renewed energy rush through him. Whether it was a phantom feeling made by a brain on the very of death he didn’t know, but he stood upright for what might be the last time, and he breathed through cracked lips, and he felt sunlight shine on skin dryer than the desert ground itself.
“Stay here,” he told Ben, though his bison wasn’t likely to wander off.
Jakub approached the snake with dagger and fur. Arcing right, he added more steps to his approaching and it put him behind the snake.
Now he was careful. Every time it moved, he flinched.
He stopped. He felt his pulse pound in his ears. Knowing this was his last chance made every coiling and uncoiling and every slither a potential sign of death.
If the snake fled, he’d never catch it. If it rushed him, it would kill him.
He gained ground. He reached it and threw his fur over it. Summoning his last bout of energy, he rushed the snake and grabbed it its body through the fur, holding it a few inches below the head and pinching it tight as it hissed and spat and tried to go for his face.
He cut its neck with his dagger. Blood came out in a spurt. Thick, stinking, spitting all over his hands.
The snake thrashed, nearly broke his grip, but he held on until it was too weak, and until his hands and sleeve made him look like he’d slaughtered a dozen men and the desert ground was wet for the first time in a long time with a red rainfall. It was so tempting to lift the snake to his mouth and slurp as the last drops of blood came out but he held back, unsure if its blood was poisonous.
Knowing that a snake’s head was still dangerous even when it looked dead, Jakub flung the snake away from him and waited. Its eyes looked no different in death than they had in life. Squinting, smaller than bronze coins, blacker than tar.
The way its body blended near-perfectly against the desert was a reminder that it belonged here and Jakub didn’t, yet the snake was the first of the two of them to die. How fair was that? That its evolution, that the honing of its body and insides over thousands of years were attuned to Toil, but Jakub was the one to live.
As he watched, a buzzard swooped overhead. Jakub walked closer to his snake to protect it in case the buzzard wanted easy meat. Way behind, Ben lay on the ground, staring. He blinked. As a reanimated creature, he wouldn’t feel the need to do that. It was just an echo of his former instincts.
Finally, Jakub judged it was safe, though he still hung back; he’d heard of snakes biting even in death. Some kind of motor reaction. He took out his sword and prodded its head, he put the blade in its mouth and heard the metal tink against its fangs. Nothing.
