by Deck Davis
Taking the rattlesnake skin from his inventory, he stretched it out as much as he could. It was rubbery and tried to spring back into place, and his muscles weren’t at their best, but his need to drink from this hole boosted him with strength, and he pulled and twisted the skin until it was wider.
Placing it in the hole, he made sure to cover the base and sides so no sand showed, and then he prodded the skin with his dagger to pierce a hole in the side.
Water spurted through now. Trickles of it like dew running down rock. Jakub waited for the skin to fill with the desperation of a street dog waiting outside a butcher’s shop for scraps.
When it filled halfway he couldn’t contain himself, and he drank the water. It tasted acrid, but it was refreshing. Half a skin was about two mouthfuls, and when that bounty hit his stomach it was a charge of energy set off inside him.
Already he could feel the moisture rush around his body, oiling him from the inside, airing him out, blasting life into the barren veins and organs that had barely kept him alive.
Jakub waited for it to fill again. “Ben, get down here,” he called to his bison friend. Then he stroked his snake friend. “Thanks, Sam.”
Sand displaced as the bison trundled down the dune, and Jakub bent over his hole to stop the sand from getting into his water.
When the skin filled completely he drank four mouthfuls of water and then he waited again, and he did this another eight times. He passed the day there, in the shadow of the dune, watching his water hole like it was an ancient shrine and he and the bison and snake were the only devouts for miles around.
After marking it on his map he felt hydrated enough to eat, so he had a handful of agave seeds and the rest of his agave flowers. It was a meal so light he barely felt it on his stomach. He could see a few cacti in the distance, but he wasn’t so sure they were worth the walk just yet.
It’d take a day to plot a course to reach them all, and he’d do that if he had to, but he needed something else. His body was crying out for substance. For meat. With the water and the shade of the dune, it was time to think a little bigger, because the better he could feed his body, the more it would serve him.
As the desert began to darken Jakub washed his face, cleaning the raw wounds caused by his fall. He wet his armpits, chest, and the back of his neck, and it made him dream of plunging into the sea and swimming for miles. He drank a few more skinfulls of water and then he lay back against Ben, and he draped the fur over himself.
It was night now, and Jakub had a plan for the night; he planned to sleep. But for a necromancer with the beginnings of a reanimated menagerie, sleep didn’t mean doing nothing. His beasts would toil even as he swam in his dreams.
“Sam, I want you to hunt tonight,” he said. “Bring me anything I can eat.”
As his snake slithered away, Jakub closed his eyes. Refreshed, somewhat sheltered, and with the hope of food waiting for him in the morning, he slept easier than he had since waking up with a bison on his legs.
CHAPTER 23
Two desert spiders as big as his hand, their legs coiled up and bellies bloated with young. Looking at them made him feel like their babies were crawling all over his skin. Sam had killed them, but Jakub felt like they might spring back to life at any moment. Like his presence as a necromancer might be enough to make these creatures stir from the dead without him even saying a spellword.
“This wasn’t what I had in mind,” he said, “But thanks, Sam.”
The snake had spent all night on the hunt. He had brought a hangradoo rat, too, crushing its head to kill it and leaving the meat for Jakub to eat. There were perhaps two mouthfuls there, but it’d have to do because he couldn’t bring himself to eat the spiders yet. In fact, the spiders looked like they could eat him. He wasn’t stupid enough to abandon them, but it’d take a few more hours of hunger before he was ready to figure out how to eat his own worst nightmare.
He was sitting with his dagger in his hand and rat on the ground, when he saw movement in the distance.
It was a wagon that he thought might have been a mirage until it got closer and closer, and soon he could see it in detail and he knew it wasn’t one of Gunar’s wagons.
As much as the idea of human contact made him want to run toward the wagon, he held back. There were few reasons for a man to come to Sun Toil, and they weren’t good. The only settlement that waited at the end was New Sanzance, and Gunar was the only man to trade there, which was how he made his fortune.
A man might take a long route, cutting through Toil to avoid trouble on the road outside it, but this wagon was too deep into Toil for that.
So, being not a trader, he could only think this wagon was a dark omen. He remembered something Gunar had told him about how brigands would travel into Toil to bury corpses they didn’t want to leave on the road for passersby to find.
Jakub marked the location of the water hole on the map. He collected water in the snakeskin and then wrapped it up and put it in his fur inventory bag. He widened the hole with his fingers and put his fur in and then buried it with the upturned sand and patted it down so it looked natural. The only thing he kept was his dagger, which he tucked between his boots and trousers.
“Ben, close your eyes and appear dead,” he told his friends. “Sam, whatever happens here, I want you to follow me at a safe distance. Ben, you stay here.”
When the wagon got closer Jakub saw the driver, a woman with her hair hacked short by a dagger’s kiss. She had protected her chest with brown leathers, and the leather glistened white with alchemical paste so the sun didn’t seep into the material.
Her bare arms showed a pattern work of purposefully made burn scars; swirls and circles and triangles all a deep, angry red. Where Jakub’s tattoos were gouged by ink, this woman had forged hers by fire.
The wagon was pulled by two horses, both of them weary and with good reason, because Jakub knew from Gunar’s long fireside explanations how better-suited bison were for pulling wagons in the desert. The canvas covering the wagon was black, again a poor choice of color for the climate. Gunar told Jakub he’d made the same mistake once. That one day it had gotten so hot that he’d seen a black wagon roof draw enough of the sun’s rays to set on fire.
Jakub touched his dagger for reassurance and he waited for the wagon to draw up. It was useless to run because the water had oiled him on the inside but it wasn’t magic. Of course, he did possess the magic that would heal him, but his soul necklace felt light and he didn’t want to waste the precious essence on himself.
He would just tell the woman the truth. There was nothing to hide about him traveling with Gunar and his company. The trick would be gauging the woman and seeing what she had to hide.
When the wagon had almost reached him, Jakub had one last thought. He spoke his spellword of Essence Grab and focused on the kangaroo rat.
Essence Received!
Essence Remaining: [IIII ]
The rat had gained him an extra bar of essence, though no advancement toward leveling his necromancy. Even so, the extra bar made him feel a little better because there was no telling when he might need it.
The horses caught him by surprise, halting with a wheeze and stomp of their feet just ten meters away. Their coats were unhealthy, the hair weak and splitting. The poor animals weren’t used to the sun and weren’t being cared for enough to bear it. Now that it was close, it was obvious that the wagon had been given more attention than the beasts pulling it. The wheels were oiled, the wood had no splinters in sight. All the canvas roping was double tied and not a hook missed.
The woman folded the reins over the driver’s seat. Jakub waited for her to hail him, but she didn’t. She stared at him, and Jakub stared back because his mentor Instructor Kortho had long ago taught him that when someone stared you out, you either met it or you looked away, and that moment would decide what kind of man you were.
She was the first to break, and Jakub felt a minor victory in that. He knew it was pathetic but wins we
re rare out here and you took what you could. He never thought that digging a hole in the ground and drinking desert water out of a snakeskin would count as one of the happiest times in his life, but that was the state of things now. His life was different.
The woman spoke to someone unseen behind her. “We got any spare twos-and-twos?”
“Think so, why?” called a voice in reply from inside the wagon.
“You aren’t going to believe this.”
CHAPTER 24
Two men emerged from the back of the wagon. Ragged beards and mean-set eyes, skin smeared white with alchemical paste and swords hanging from their belts. They were on him before he could draw his dagger, pointing their weapons at his throat.
“Think he’s one of the traders?”
“Must be.”
“Up,” one of them told him, and both men dragged him to his feet before giving him a chance, and they marched him to the wagon and threw him in the back like he weighed less than a butterfly’s whisper.
They climbed up after him and made him sit down, and it was there he learned what the twos-and-twos were that the woman made them get. They were twin sets of manacles, rusted and time-worn.
One of the men put a cloth sack over his head and Jakub could smell the nutmeg or cinnamon that had once been in it. He felt the cool metal of a manacle around his wrist, and all of this had happened so quickly that he hadn’t had time to process his danger, but his instincts fired now.
“Sam,” he said.
“Huh?” answered a man.
“Sam, up. Kill one of them.”
“This one’s got sun on his brain,” said a man.
But then Jakub heard a rustle and a man made a sudden step toward him.
“Snake!” he said and Jakub heard a thump as he dove off the wagon.
The other man was too slow, and he could do nothing but scream. Blinded by the cloth sack, Jakub could only imagine the image before him of a reanimated snake biting a man.
He removed the cloth sack and saw one man lying on the wagon floor with a snake biting him again and again, tearing his skin and bringing out the blood. His skin had already bloated like rotten beef as the last dregs of Sam’s venom swum into his flesh.
Jakub reached for the man’s sword but it stuck on the loop on his belt, and now the other man showed his face at the wagon opening. Blood smeared his temple from where he’d fallen out of it.
He started to climb up. Jakub tugged at the sword but it wouldn’t move.
He took his dagger from his boots and as the man climbed up he plunged it into his neck, feeling the blade stick at the gristle and bone but he pressed harder, as hard as his newly-watered body would let him, and when he took the blade out the man slumped back off the wagon, out of sight.
He heard movement from outside from the driver’s carriage. Moving purely on survival instincts, Jakub looked at the snake-bitten man and he stabbed him five times in the neck until there was no skin left, just torn flesh with blood pooling in it.
He spoke the spell word of Essence Grab and focused on the man.
Essence Received!
Essence Remaining: [IIIIIIII ]
Necromancy EXP gained!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ]
He was interrupted before he could harvest all the man’s essence when the woman appeared at the wagon opening. She held a hot oil whip in her hand. The handle was made from brown cow leather but the whip itself was a floating coil of hot liquid, the oil held into its whip shape and kept warm by artificery, but it would lash against his skin when she struck it.
“Fire and stone,” she said. “You’re a stubborn one. Thought you were half-dead. Do you want to see your kin? They’re all waiting for you back at camp.”
“My kin?”
“Yeah. We got ‘em waiting for you. Well-fed, cozy. Hips even gave them his personal wagon.” She lowered the oil whip. “I’ll take you to them.”
Jakub’s ears had always been attuned to lies because he’d grown up with them. Even the most practiced deceivers got a strange edge to their tone when they lied, as if the lie lined their throats and warped the sounds of their voice. Hers was only slight. She was a good liar, so good he wanted desperately to believe her and to see who had survived from the caravan.
Remembering the twos-and-twos and cinnamon head sack, Jakub stabbed his dagger into the tarpaulin in front of him. He cut a line down it and then pulled it back and stepped through the slit, like a grown man breaching a birth canal.
“Thunder and rock!” shouted the woman. “Hips is just goin’ to have to settle for your corpse.”
After a cracking sound came a smell, hot and tarry. A spot of hot oil hit the back of his neck just before the hairline, the rest of the whip missing him as he cleared his breach in the wagon tarpaulin and found himself at the front, in the driver’s seat.
With the stench of oil came a burning smell, and he felt heat behind him. Jakub grabbed the reins next to him and he whipped them and the horses snorted but didn’t move, seeming to know the man holding their bonds wasn’t their master.
The woman was beside him now, oil whip still in her hand, the coil trailing on the ground. Smoke began to twist upward to the gods, smoke signals with no message and nobody to deliver it to even if there was.
He’d ridden horses before but never driven a cart, and he was about to learn the skill under pressure.
The woman raised her oil whip. “Salt and brimstone, you’re goin’ta make me kill you, aren’t ya? And I really, really don’t want’ta. I swore off that sort of thing years ago.”
He pushed the woman off the wagon and he raised the reins and lashed them down. This time the horse on the left, sandy as the desert and with rippling muscles all over its body, trotted. The horse beside it followed suit and the wheels whined through first use, but soon the cart was carrying him forward, kicking up more and more dust as it went over the sand.
The woman shouted behind him. Things about fire and thunder, stone and oil. Threats.
Jakub focused only ahead, to the distant north that was a sea of sand. The horses seemed to struggle in it. In places, they planted their hooves so hard they sunk. They weren’t used to it, so the cart must have come from another direction, one where the ground sand broke back into rock. That would be easier going.
Once he was far enough away, he stopped. He had a cart, and he had more essence but his items were way back at the dune, buried in the water hole. Ben was there, too, and Jakub found himself missing him.
He wondered if he should go back and get his things and maybe hitch Ben to the cart and have him pull it. While he was going that way, swing by and kill the woman.
The thought to murder her was so quick, so easily had, it surprised him.
That kind of practicality was a shadow of his past, of marks made on his stream of consciousness by the instructors of the academy. It showed the dent marks where they’d chiseled his thoughts to mold them. Maybe it was what he needed out here, where everything was in competition and remorse was a route to the grave.
He’d made up his mind to run her down using the cart and then look around for the tracks that she and her men had made to get here, so he could see how much truth lay in what she’d told him.
Raising the reigns, something gave him pause. Movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention, and when he looked east he felt his breath leave his chest in one gust.
He dropped the reins and let them flop over the driver carriage, where the sandy horse lazily flicked his tail against them.
The movement was a desert bear charging from the direction of the resting sun.
Lumpy, not a beast of pure strength but a skin sack of muscle and fat with old bones rattling inside that somehow combined to let it sprint. He could tell its age even a hundred wagon-lengths away because its fur was missing in patches, whether through the war of time or wars from Toil survival.
Its run was quick but lumbering, as though pain hit the bear with every ot
her step.
The woman turned too late, she raised her oil whip too late, and when the bear was on her the whip fell from her hands and she was battered and bitten and torn by teeth and claws.
Her weak shouts died as soon as she didn’t have a throat to make them through, and when she was limp on the ground the bear was on her, gorging on her skin and her flesh until her blood soaked into his fur and made a paint over his chest and face and nose, and Jakub was sure he could see the bear’s teeth now, a jagged row of knives covered red that appeared and disappeared each time it tore fresh strips from her.
After just minutes she wasn’t a woman. You couldn’t call her that anymore after the bear had feasted on her body.
CHAPTER 25
While the bear gorged, Jakub drove the wagon north. With every mile, the horses grew used to his presence, and after what he judged to be nearly two dozen miles he let them slow into a trot, and then to a stop. Standing on the driver cart he looked around and saw waves of sand everywhere, rising in places and sinking in others. Cacti popped up here and there, waving at him with the promise of food.
And there was no sign of any damn bears.
He climbed through his canvas slit back into the wagon. The man with the punctured throat had bled every drop in his body onto the wood, staining it so much that the dried blood looked like varnish. Jakub drained the rest of the essence from him.
Essence Received!
Essence Remaining: [IIIIIIIIII ]
Necromancy EXP Received!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ]
Missing his inventory bag made him feel vulnerable even if there wasn’t much he could use in it. Luckily, the wagon had a bounty. Jakub checked the dead man’s pockets and he checked a lidded crate in the corner of the wagon and he looked in a saddlebag hanging by its strap on the driver’s deck. Once he’d looked at all the things he pressed his thumb tattoo and let a spiral of smoke form in front of him, displaying the itemized inventory.
