by Deck Davis
Hips suppressed a grin and tiptoed amongst the sleeping forms again until he reached a thinner, longer form separated ten feet from the rest. He’d only taken a few steps toward it when the form bolted upright, launched at him, and Hips felt the cool edge of a blade against his throat.
“Salvatore,” said Eyan, eyes milk-white with no iris. He breathed in relief. “It’s you.”
“Who’d you think it was? A Killeshi warband? This is why none of the guys’ll bunk near you. You’re like a bear trap in human flesh.”
“Instincts are woven into a man, or they aren’t instincts at all, Salvatore,” said Eyan. “You can no more unpick them than you can fish the black from the night sky.”
Hips nodded. “My dad kept horses, you know. And he used to go in the morning to feed them, and one of them kept trying to buck him in its sleep. Kicked its back legs out with enough force to crush a diamond nutsack. So he started feeding it diluted poppy in its evening hay. No more risk of getting his chest caved in.”
“Salvatore, all the poison in the world could run through my system and find nothing to nourish it, nothing to cling to.”
“And your poison resisting abilities are eclipsed only by your modesty,” said Hips, and he moved closer to his good friend. “Listen, Eyan. Marleya hasn’t come back yet. I told her I didn’t want her spending the night in the dunes. I wanted her to come back if they didn’t find anything by evening.”
“A place like this has a way of disrespecting wants. We shouldn’t have come.”
Eyan said this with a sudden change in tone that chilled Hips. He felt the words sink deep to his marrow and lie against his bones. On feeling this, Hips did want almost every man does when faced with a fear he can’t or doesn’t want to comprehend. He ignored it.
Instead, he thought about Marleya somewhere out there in the desert, and he had half a mind to send a few men out on horseback to find her. But no, they couldn’t spare the men or the horses.
They couldn’t wait here for her, either. Their water supplies wouldn’t last forever, and if they stayed here longer than planned and ran short, Hips would have to keep morale in check by taking water from the slaves and giving it to his men. If slaves started dying of thirst, what was the point in all of this?
Damn it. He hated thinking of her all the way out there, but what could he do?
“Marleya knows what she’s doing, doesn’t she?” he said.
Eyan reached out and put his hand heavy on Hips’ shoulder and squeezed. “She’ll be fine, Salvatore.”
Gunar’s night vision grew stronger and stronger even as his body got weaker. He knew it was important to sleep, but he didn’t think he deserved the mercy of dreams when he’d gotten his people captured by slavers.
So, while his pathetic band of survivors got their rightful rest, he stayed awake. He lay down so he didn’t alert the slavers but he positioned himself so he could see them. Study them. Wait for weaknesses, see what they did in the night.
Tonight, the leader was hopping from blanket to blanket like a gods-damned ballerina. Gunar always thought he was good at getting the measure of a man; you had to be when recruiting folks who you’d need to trust for miles and miles of travel into the harshest land in the queendom. But Hips kept slipping from his measure, and Gunar didn’t know about him yet. Every instinct he had told him he was a good man, but how the hell could that be possible?
The woman was the one he distrusted. Gunar had seen plenty of cruel stares in his life, and hers turned his stomach juices to an icy slush. Walking around camp with burning coals in her eye sockets and that damned oil whip by her side. When she was afoot, Gunar had told his folks to pretend the ground was the most interesting thing they’d ever seen.
That was why tonight had seemed a good night for something. He didn’t know what, but something. The woman was gone, and she’d taken a couple of slavers with her.
“A man can’t think if he doesn’t sleep,” said a voice, and Gunar felt a weight rest on his shoulder and he felt cool breath on his cheek.
He felt gratitude beyond anything else in his life that the storms and lightning and lusks had spared him and Helena and Beate, though he knew he didn’t deserve it. A fair world would have let Helena and their daughter live and claimed Gunar’s soul for what he’d led his people into.
“I’ll sleep when we’re out of Toil, free, and kissing the grass of the queendom.”
“People are worried about you, darling. They still look to you to lead them, and they see what this is doing to you. They hear you muttering to yourself.”
“Muttering?”
“Talking about sentries and oil whips.”
“I was thinking of how to escape. I didn’t realize I was saying it aloud.”
“That’s because you haven’t slept. You’re more use to us when you don’t have headsickness.”
“I’m no good to any of them, Helena. I promised them gold for a couple of months of tough travel and look how that turned out. Might come a time when the folks the storm claimed are the lucky ones.”
“If you believe that then you aren’t my husband. You’re a miserable, woe-be-me arse who’s wearing his skin.”
“I don’t see a way out. I’ve been thinking of ways. Anything. But I just don’t see how. I thought maybe the storm oracle has magic he hasn’t told us about, but that sack of shit hasn’t said a word since they pulled us out of the storm.”
“Shock affects people in different ways. Some might say staying up all night and not sleeping is one of its many arrows.”
Gunar ran his hand through his hair. He swore it felt thinner than even days earlier. “I gave up the mancer, too. I could have let them think he was dead. And then maybe he’d have got out of Toil and told someone what happened. But I gave him up, and for what? They took the information, gave us a couple of days of nicer food, and that was that.”
“Did you really think they would let us go? For all your talk about judging characters, you tend to look for the light even when it’s pitch black.”
Gunar nodded. “I was desperate. Thought the mancer’s life would be worth more than all of ours, and they’d let us go.”
“Worth more?”
“You know what I mean. Fetch a better price. A guy with essence or mana or whatever the hell they call it in his veins.”
“Well, we got a few nicer meals out of it, and that perked up spirits. Besides, the mancer probably died first. You sent them looking for a spirit, and now they’re three people weaker. So, my love, what are we going to do with that?”
Helena’s words were like goose fat on burned skin, and as much as they dulled the hurt, he could still feel it. If he was going to do this for anyone, it’d be her. To show her that he led them into their bonds, but he would get them out.
And it was then, as he felt her breath on his cheek, as the bitter winds screeched around them, that inspiration came to him.
He knew he needed to sleep to give himself the best chance of catching it, and so he lay back and he let Helena guide his head to her shoulder and he closed his eyes.
Morning came and the slavers were still three people short. Hips had barely slept a second, and he felt hungry as he walked through the camp and smelled the pork rinds cooking in flashes of fire in metal pans, and the steam rising from bowls of sweetened oats cooked in cow’s milk.
Harri, the stable boy from Tofsteed who’d been accused of stealing silverware from Duke West’s kitchen drawers, was hard at work. Hips had bought his slave rights but had decided Harri would be worth more tending their horses in Toil, and he was proved right by how early the lad rose and how late he went to sleep. Now he was sitting on an upturned bucket with a horse leg on his lap, fishing stones and gravel from its shoe.
Eyan was over at the edge of camp sitting cross-legged, hands on his lap, eyes shut. He was as naked as a babe and his skin was ghost white with alchemical paste, and Hips had learned no manner of remonstrations or rebukes would get him to wear clothes while he ‘
focused his life energy.’
Hips had yet to see a use of all this life energy he accumulated each morning, but Eyan was one of his oldest crew members, and besides, saving Hips’ life ten years ago had bought him as much focusing time as he pleased. Eyan nicknamed Hips Savior, but they had saved each other. They were equals now.
Hips walked through the clatter of pans, the spit of fire, the hum of chat mixed with laughter, jokes, and soft song. Gums flapping about tiredness, sleep, and the lack of beautiful women. Every second or third man asked their captain to sit and eat some grits or oats with them but as hungry as he was, his appetite came in flashes and worry for Marleya wouldn’t let him eat.
He reached a wagon parked on the leftmost edge of camp and hopped onto the driver’s seat and then up onto the roof in two moves. At least he still had his agility. There he sat and he could see one full spectrum of Toil, as vast as it was featureless, like what he imagined one of the more gruesome afterlives to look like.
Watching the horizon as the sun rose, reached its zenith, and then began to set again, Hips couldn’t pretend that this was normal. Marleya should have been back by now.
He hopped off the wagon as the crew were packing up blankets, starting fires, and butcher Jon was cutting some of the foxes, rats, and voles that their scouts had hunted. Hips took the longest piss of his life, aiming at a crack in the dry ground and trying to send his water deep into the dirt so maybe it’d nourish something down there and sprout a piss plant in decades to come that would bear his name.
Then he approached his men and women and stood before them, and he spoke through a dry throat and cracked lips.
“We’re going to have to go,” he told them. “Marleya will find us.”
CHAPTER 27
One day in Toil was much like the one before it and the one sure to follow, and Jakub spent two of these in driver’s seat of the cart where he’d gotten to know his two horses quite well and had formed something of a bond with them.
Albin and Olin, he called them, after the heroes in a series of adventure books he used to read back in his early days in the academy when he didn’t fit in, and the ink on the pages was the portal to a world of escape. Albin – the horse version - was older and had an even temper, but his brother Olin was stronger, even if it took a harsh word or two to get him to listen.
He followed whatever tracks he could find, retracing the journey of this same cart over the desert, over plains of sand longer than a man’s imagination, squeezing through a valley of blood-orange colored rock that rose thirty feet into the air, taking a winding route through a mausoleum of dead shrubbery that seemed to have crystalized so it looked like a sculpture garden.
Jakub had the luxury of shelter and water now, since there was a rolled-up tarpaulin with fishhooks and wire thread in it that meant it could be pulled out over the driver’s seat and would stay straight, shielding him from the sun. He found success with the water stone, and the first time it led him to a water hole he sat in amazement, wondering at the level of artificery skill needed to make it.
Then he dug like a madman to find a water trickle, and he used a piece of cut wagon canvas to block the sand and fill the hole with water, which he then drank until his stomach said, “give me a rest!” and he filled up some of the empty jars.
As well as that, he stopped whenever he saw carrion on the ground, which was rare, and he tried to draw essence from them. Most were down to their bones and he knew you couldn’t draw essence from a sack of bones because they’d been dead too long, but the desert was teaching him a new motto to live by: try something once, be thankful a hundred times. You never knew what would work.
Early morning on the second day he’d woke with a hunger that felt different. It didn’t feel like a survival hunger, it felt like a normal man’s hunger, and he wanted to satisfy it. He pictured a fire, skewer, and meat slowly cooking and releasing its vapors into the sky, and there’d be a jar or pan under it collecting juices.
The problem was that no sooner had he spotted a tasty vermin or lizard skittering over the sand, legs akimbo and eyes darting up down left right or predators, then it was gone.
The would-be skewered meat heard his horses stop and wheeze, heard the wheels of the cart crunch over sand and stone and stop, and they knew the finger of death was pointing at their vermin arses, and their Toil survival instincts kicked in. Life was one long sprint away from death here.
The hand of the pale reaper himself closed upon everything every day, but when it opened its hands again it could be a stage magician’s trick, and the soul it closed upon was gone, having used its experience to live for another sun.
He had to content himself with something he was getting sick of; more cacti. Sure, there was a variety in types of cacti, and in the parts of it he ate. At night he lit a fire and he even tried grilling cactus leaves and fruits, hoping that charring it and giving it a smoky taste and burned texture might trick his brain into thinking it was the same as the over-cooked academy meat, but it didn’t work.
At least his belly was satisfied, though, even if his taste buds were threatening strike action.
So Jakub spent the day following tracks, gathering water, foraging cacti, and trying to draw essence from any carrion he saw on the desert ground.
At night he’d reflect on his progress because thinking that he was inching nearer and nearer to revival was the only thing that filling the hole inside him that kept getting bigger and deeper like something was gnawing it.
So he’d lay in the wagon with the cloth flaps open so he could see the stars birthing and dying in twinkles of pure white, and he’d press his thumb tattoo so that it cast smoky words in front of him and reminded him what he’d accomplished.
Casting it for the last two days of riding, foraging, and essence gathering, it made for quick reading:
Inventory
Jar of water x6
Burlap sack [Contents: Dried Beans]
Burlap sack [Contents: Grain]
Coin purse [2 gold, 4 silver, 11 bronze]
Dagger
A dagger with an iron blade and handle wrapped with dried pigskin
Essence Remaining: [IIIIIIIIIII ]
Necromancer EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ]
It was late afternoon a few days after getting the cart when he saw shapes in the far, far distance.
“Woah,” he saw, pulling sharply on the reins.
Albin stopped immediately, while Olin stubbornly took a few more paces, telling Jakub that he’d only stop on his own terms.
The shapes were so far away that they lay in the horizon where the sun seemed to warp the light, and they looked like ink bleeding over yellow paper. But Jakub was becoming used to the colors of Toil, and there was an overwhelming theme to its ground, rocks, and sand.
Yellow. Every gods-damned thing was yellow. Maybe a cactus would be green-yellow, and yeah, the sky was blue. But everything else was yellow.
The shapes in the distance were white and brown, and he guessed they must be wagons.
He had to play this right. Get too close and they’d spot him, and the last thing he wanted to do was ride right up to the slavers in the wagon he’d taken from their dead crew.
Leaning forward and stroking Olin to try and win the younger horse’s trust, he eyed the distance. “That’s gotta be, what, three miles? Five? Hard to tell out here, everything runs so straight.”
He decided it was better to dismount and then cut an arc around the shapes so they didn’t see him approach. They were bound to have spotters, and Jakub didn’t want to creep into their field of vision. He had a nasty feeling that if a band of desert slavers saw him, things might not end too well.
This meant leaving the wagon, but he didn’t want to just abandon it in plain sight. Needing to hide it, he cut south-east for half a mile to a rock formation he’d seen, where four finger-like stones were high enough and had a big enough gap in the middle to hide the wagon and horses. Jakub untied the canvas on top of t
he wagon and he arranged this on top of the rock tips so that the center was covered and Olin and Albin were in shade. He opened cloth sack of grain and two jars of water and left these where they could get to them.
“I won’t be long,” he told them, and then set out, once again walking away with regret at leaving some of his only friends in Toil.
Two hours later he was close enough to make them out in detail. It was getting darker now, and he could feel the kiss of the wind on the back of his neck where his shirt didn’t cover all his skin. He didn’t want to stay here long; just enough to get the lay of things, and then he’d head back to Olin and Albin.
They were slavers, alright. They were smoking, sitting, cooking, laughing, and talking. Must have had a dozen wagons, all told, and enough horses to pull them. Half were parked so the driver’s seat faced into the desert, and these looked in different directions like points on a compass, and there were scouts sitting in the seats watching the horizon for movement.
Jakub had ground grit and stones under his boots and slapped the dust all over his shirt, trousers, face, hair so that he was camouflaged against the ground. He was but one man and he was still a giant’s stone throw away, and he didn’t worry about the spotters. Besides, the one facing his direction, meaning he had a whole hundred or so miles of the horizon to look at, had a wide-brimmed hat over his face.
Honestly, they didn’t look like a mean bunch. He wondered if he’d got this wrong. Misheard something. But in his head, he heard the crack of a whip and he saw the molten coils of oil in the woman’s hand, and a tool like that could only come from slavers. The wagon he’d taken from them looked like the ones parked in a circle around the camp.
Sweeping his gaze from left to right through camp, Jakub saw what he’d hoped for and dreaded. A fenced wagon in the middle of camp, set in a circular shape.
Inside the fence was a huddle of forlorn shapes all grouped together. Knees drew up against chests, heads hung low. Others staring out into the distance much like the camp spotters, except they scanned the horizon not for danger but for rescue. Dust clung to their faces, clothes, and hair. One, a man that Jakub tried for all the world to recognize but couldn’t, wore only half a shirt, with part of it burned away and the edges charred black, a sure sign of a dry lightning strike.
