by Deck Davis
Good. As a necromancer, he was confident in pronouncing it dead.
Next, he spoke the spellword of Reanimate, letting his breath fall on the snake and the essence from his necklace bind with them and give them whatever the magic was that let them whisper life into the dead.
Its tail was the first part of it to move. Sam, because that was the name he’d decided to give the reanimated snake, unfurled his tail and straightened out. His beady eyes looked just as dead as before, but his tongue tremored and made a gentle whir-whir sound.
Necromancy EXP gained!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ]
Essence Remaining: [III ]
Sam was a beautiful creature, really, now that Jakub wasn’t worried about getting bitten. As long as the span of both his arms when he stretched out, with skin that could blend into the desert ground perfectly if it weren’t for a slightly darker color. Brown and green spots freckled his body, while his underbelly was a strip of soft, pale skin.
He wondered if Sam still had his venom inside him. He guessed he had; he just wouldn’t produce more, given his new state of death. Still, it was something to think about. If he came across antelope or anything likely to feed him for a while, he could send Sam after it.
For now, he had more important ideas.
“Sam,” he said, his tongue thick in his mouth. His gums and his lips and his inner cheeks were so dry that they rubbed together, and each word hurt. “I need you to show me where you last drank water.”
He followed Sam over desert and dune, beside rock formations shaped like fists bared at the gods, around cracks in the ground that a careless necromancer could easily slip down, though they only went ten or so feet deep. The snake could sliver faster than his step even if Jakub was at his best, so he had to tell Sam, “Slow down. Let me catch up.”
It was all he could do to lean into Ben and let the bison bear most of his weight. He had been avoiding riding him as much as he could; in Ben’s state, his muscles would weaken and tear at some point, and he’d have to abandon him after that. He wanted to keep him around as long as he could.
When he’d walked so long that the sun was burning at its fullest, he stopped.
“Sam, come back a second.”
He faced a leviathan of a sand dune, one that swept up like a tsunami wave ready to crash on a dock on then tear over land and rip apart a village, only the dune didn’t move save for the odds grains of sand displaced by the breeze. The breeze, by the way, that seemed like it took a rest during the day, when he really needed it to cool him.
Jakub didn’t think he could scale the dune, but that was where Sam was headed. He couldn’t go around it, either; this beast of a dune covered the horizon.
He had a choice to make now. He hadn’t seen anything that would serve as a shelter, but he needed to get out of the heat and rest.
At the same time, he was on the brink now. He would have drunk his tears if he could make himself cry. He hadn’t needed to empty his bladder since yesterday afternoon, and even then, it had barely been enough to wet the sand. Resting up now would kill him.
So, he had to go on. Following Sam to the snake’s water source was his only option, and that meant conquering the great dune waiting not far ahead. It meant doing it now, under the full glare of the yellow demon in the sky.
To get ready for it, Jakub used the last of the heat-leave-me-salve that he’d been saving. He spread it over his face, neck, arms, and even rubbed it into his scalp, making his hair a greasy mop. It pained him to see the mental tin empty, but there was no point saving the salve just so someone could find it on his corpse.
Next, he cut the left sleeve off his shirt and he tied it around his head, covering it from the sun. He thought about eating some of the cactus leaves for energy, but eating made dehydration worse.
Then again, could it really get worse?
He was gambling on whatever lay over the dune. He had to. The only other choice was to lay down and die. So, he munched on some of the leaves he’d provisioned, and the momentarily thanks his stomach gave him felt nice.
“Sam, take me to water.”
His snake slivered and his bison trundled, and Jakub followed, and the three of them scaled the dune. It took everything he had to reach the top, and it was there he saw what waited below.
CHAPTER 21
York, the Hunter
“Go wait by the horses,” Patton told the kids. The boy and girl fled outside, slamming the door behind them.
York felt strange being alone with his son. The last time he’d seen Patton he was scrawny. A man, sure, because when you reached sixteen you were a man, but a rakish one. Thin of face and with a stare that would crack a nut. Few skills to boast about, even less gold, but he’d stood in the doorway and told York his news that day.
“I’m leaving to join the Queen’s men. Met a recruiter in town, and they’re taking me on.” For the first time, York had really seen his son as a man.
His ma was the one to ask Patton why he’d made a decision like that. York didn’t ask; York was a different person then. Stubborn as hell and all the worse for it. So mulish he wouldn’t ask his only son why he was leaving home.
He might not have asked, but he got the answer. Patton’s tale of woe; that his hunter father was always away across the queendom. That Patton used to write letters to his father but York never answered them.
“Never got ‘em,” York answered, but that was a lie. He just didn’t even spare his son the effort it’d take to put quill to paper. For that, he’d be sorry until the end of days, even if they were starting to mend their relationship now.
“That doesn’t mean you have to run out on your ma,” York told him. Patton looked at his mother lovingly. “I’m not runnin’ out on anything.” Then he gave York his nutcracker stare. “I’m seeing your sorry arse for the last time. But I’ll be back to see ma. I need to make my own way.”
Patton’s way took him through military training and a year into the Queen’s Eastern Firefields campaign, learning how to be a soldier until he’d finished learning and he was ready to rise in the ranks. He’d never be a general, but the higher-ups reckoned Patton could get a badge or two pinned to his breast.
Then a gods-damned idiot apprentice alchemist had given Patton a powdered kettle drum so they could blow their way through some rubble on a mountain pass. He’d gotten the powder mix wrong, cut the fuse too short, and Patton got his arse blown twenty feet over the mountainside.
He survived with a broken leg and fractured pelvis. Since he hadn’t quite earned officer rank yet they didn’t waste their healer’s mana on him, and they left his breaks to heal the natural way.
Which, of course, meant they healed like hell, and now his leg sang in agony whenever it got too cold.
Patton had left the queen’s service after a year, and he didn’t come home because he didn’t want York to see him crawling back. Instead, he got a job with a tanner. Sweeping his floor, carrying stock to market. That turned into an apprenticeship, and the apprenticeship turned into becoming a full-time tanner, and all the time he spent around the tanner and his family led to Patton marrying the man’s wife.
She was gone now, though. Disease ate away at her at much too young an age. The healers couldn’t say what disease it was, and they were as powerless to heal it as they were to name it.
That left York and Patton with something in common, to York’s mind, and both would have given the last drop of their blood that it wouldn’t be so. York felt like a bastard for even thinking it, but he’d have gone back to the days of being alienated from his son, if it meant that his love could come back. She was everything in his life.
But time only moved one way, and York tried to count his gratitudes. That Patton had come to reconcile. That he had two beautiful, lively grandchildren. That maybe his days wouldn’t be as lonely as he’d thought.
York faced his son now. He saw lots of his mother’s features in him. He never used to have them; he’d grow
n into them and taken on her strong look.
“Have you had thoughts on a house?” he asked. “Gostin village doesn’t have a tanner. And I heard that Bertin the smithy is moving west. You might be able to get his house and studio for a good price, turn it into a tannery.”
Patton scratched his patchy beard. That was another change in his son – he could grow the beginning of a beard now. When did that happen? When he was sixteen, his face was balder than an egg and he couldn’t change that no matter how much growth ointment he bought from the local tinker.
At least York had time to catch up now. To make up.
“I’m not staying,” said Patton.
“I know, I know. This isn’t Dispolis. Open your window at night and you can hear your neighbors sneezing. But city life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and country air is good for young lungs. Still, I suppose Dispolis or Merthe or Red Twyen aren’t too far away. You could send the children on a wagon at weekends. They could come and stay…”
“No, we’re leaving. There’s a ship bound for the Peppen isles. First one to go there in years. I’m taking it.”
“The Peppen isles? It takes months to get there, lad. You’re not thinking this through.”
“Come on, you’re doing it again,” said Patton. “I understand this isn’t what you wanted. But I wanted you to meet your grandkids before we went.”
“People don’t come back from the Peppen isles.”
“I know. We’re going to stay. Everything here reminds me of their ma. When it rains, I remember how she used to take the kids to the lake and watch the frogs. When I walk into town and smell bread, I remember what a gods-damned bad cook she was, and how I always made her laugh when I teased her about it. Nowhere and nothing is safe from memories, Pa, and I need a fresh start. I need to get myself back together for the kids.”
“You didn’t come to make up. You came to say goodbye.”
“Didn’t seem right leaving without it.”
“When I lost…” he started, but he couldn’t say her name. “When I was alone, I stuck it out. I stayed.”
The anger that flinched through Patton’s face now was an old one, one that had hidden under his skin waiting for his guard to slip so it could show. “Don’t start with the guilt. After all those years where you were fucking around Gods-knows-where? Don’t even look at me with those thoughts in your head. If you’ve gotta have them, look at the ground. Fuck! I didn’t come here for this bullshit.”
“I’m just saying that-”
“You’re still headsick, aren’t you? Damn it. You think I can have them around you with this? All the times you’d flip out when I was a kid, I never knew which side of you I was going to see.”
“I never, ever hurt you,” said York.
“Maybe not. But you scared the shit out of me. Scared me so deep that when I signed up and we went to fight the Baelin sympathizers and I went to sleep every night to the sound of mana wands blasting at the caves we were in, I felt better. The sounds were loud enough that I couldn’t think about anything else.”
York realized something then. He realized a truth that had been waving at him all through Patton’s visit; their roles had switched now. For years, York had been the stronger one. Tougher in mind and body.
But Patton wasn’t the rakish kid he used to be, and his mind had been hurt, scabbed, and had formed callouses tougher than diamond-tipped steel. He was the stronger one now, while time was grinding York away like waves against a coastline. His strength was fading. His thoughts coming slower.
That was the way it’d be until finally there was nothing left to slow.
York hugged his grandchildren. He knew he shouldn’t; it would only make it worse because it felt like every hug strengthened their new bond. He tried to trick himself, to pretend that he felt nothing for them or Patton, but he couldn’t. He was a sentimental old idiot.
Patton said his goodbye with a handshake, and York didn’t ask for more. He told his son good luck, and he gave him ten gold, a ceremonial dagger he’d been given from a Killeshi tribe, and a bronze-cast giant stewing pot that Patton’s ma used to cook in. Patton seemed touched at this, and that made it worth it.
Then he watched them put their things on the back of their cart, check the horses were hitched right, and then clamber up onto the driver’s side.
He felt like he was watching ghosts readying to depart. These were his family, but they were spirits, here one second and gone in a blink, leaving his life as untouched as if they’d never been in it at all.
He was an old man with an old house, and man and house were as empty as each other. His boxes and boxes of bones and skulls and horns and hooves. What did they mean now?
Deciding he couldn’t watch them leave, he turned and headed toward his front door. On it, there was a wicker figure of a three-eyed giant, which his wife had nailed in place and York had always hated, but now he wouldn’t remove it for all the gold in the queendom.
Patton was right about that; the people you lost left their marks in the strangest places, and there was nothing you could do to escape them.
As he reached for the door, he heard footsteps behind him. Turning, he saw his grandson rushing at him.
York held out his arms and his grandson hugged him. “See you soon, grandpa.”
“I don’t think so, lad. But let’s keep hope burning while there’s still fuel to feed it.”
“Will you come and visit?”
“The sea’s a rough dancing partner for an old man like me. But here’s something; at night, when the stars are out, look to them. Keep looking until you find one shaped like a ram, and speak to it. It won’t be dark here when it is in the isles, but I’ll wait until it’s night and I’ll speak to the ram as well. If we do it every night, me, you and your sister, who knows? A message might get through.”
“I will,” said the boy.
“Hold on a second,” said York. “I have something for you.”
“Pa! We’ve gotta get going,” yelled Patton.
“One second, lad.”
York went into his house and returned with two things; a giant hollowed-out tusk and a bear claw.
“Is that the claw from the story?” said his grandson.
“It’s yours now. Give the tusk to your sister.”
“Why don’t you go back?”
“Back where?”
“To the desert. You could go back and kill the bear.”
“My boy, he’s a grand beast and I’m an old man.”
“He’s old too.”
“A man hunts for survival. He hunts to feed his family, or he hunts to end the threat on his own life. He doesn’t do it because a beast got the better of him and gave him scars.”
“Then why do you keep all the trophies?”
York thought on that as his last surviving family left him alone in the house he once shared with his wife, a house that wasn’t a home anymore. He watched their horses pull their cart into the distance until they became smaller and smaller, much like the memories of his life that seemed to grow smaller in his mind as he grew old. He was starving. Not through lack of food, but more from starving of life. Perhaps the kid was right.
Before going back inside, York smoked a pipe of tobacco and he watched the distance, as though Patton might turn the wagon around and come back and say he was staying, or maybe he might ask York to go with them. If he had, York would have thought about it. Just for a few seconds to settle his pride. But he’d have said yes.
There was no return. The wagon was gone, and York’s pipe was empty. As he made up his mind to go into the house, something caught his eye. Something not far from his home.
He walked to it and he found it, there where the wagon had been. A bear claw discarded in the mud.
CHAPTER 22
Nothing but sand and dirt and lonely cacti spaced so far apart from each other it would take an hour to get from one to the other. Miles and miles of cruel land with a snake slithering over it, following orders of
his master but not knowing that in following these, it had made his master realize there was no hope.
All this Jakub saw from his perch atop the sand dune. The king of a land nobody else wanted. Sam was leading him to water, but it was so far out of reach that it may as well been waiting in the afterlives with the demons and the gods.
Knowing this, knowing that he’d journeyed this far and the journey was at an end, Jakub’s knees buckled. They’d decided not to support him anymore. There was no point. The last dregs of energy took flight on his last breaths of hope and they both left him at the same time.
He fell, tumbling down the dune like an empty can. He would have broken bones if the sand weren’t so soft, and when he put his hands out to stop his fall they sunk into the dune but didn’t slow him, and then he didn’t have the energy anymore so he stopped trying.
Sand invaded his eyes, mouth, dug deep into his hair, and four rolls later he was at the bottom, defeated and covered in a dusting of yellow sand and with bruises on his arms and face.
But he wasn’t dead.
Sam hadn’t crawled across the landscape, Jakub saw. Sam was here, by his feet, coiled beside a patch of darker sand.
At least it was colder down here in the shade of the dune. If Jakub had known how much protection it would give him, he’d have tumbled down here ages ago.
He touched his face and he felt raw skin, and the sand embedded in it made it sting. He swallowed and his throat felt like two pieces of paper rubbing together.
Upright, he took his dagger from his inventory and he began to dig at the darker patch of sand. Two inches down, the sand felt wet. Another four inches and he saw a trickle of water spurt into the hole he’d made, and it felt like a firework going off in his head, and it set all his body on edge and his nerves were like a metal rod drawing on lightning.
He widened and deepened the hole and saw more spurt through, only to be drained back into the sand before he had a chance to drink it.
