by Deck Davis
Bear reached the camp of men just as the old ones broke from the ground. He stayed there on all fours, barely in reach of the spots of hot light that were eating the men’s things, their skin orange and red and yellow and crackling like the clouds before lightning.
Whether it was hot light or some kind of animal the men could usually control it and use it to cook flesh, but today the hot light was wild, spreading itself across the camp, sometimes jumping onto men who got too close, and the air filled with the smell of hair burning in the sun, and the deep stench of blood.
If Bear wasn’t still full of lizard blood this would have sent him into a frenzy.
The frenzy of this evening belonged only to the old ones. The ones that had lived under this land long before Bear, and who left their marks by parting the very ground itself, and who he had learned to be careful of.
Thinking of this made his side hurt, as though a long-healed scar was opened afresh, and he remembered the time that an ancient one had broken from the ground near a watering hole and tried to take him deep under the soil.
So he knew enough to realize that he could sit and wait and let the old ones leap back and forth, tearing the men apart. As he did, he watched men sink to their knees and try to hold their bellies in place with their hands even as blood seeped out.
He heard screams that sounded like pups screeching for their mothers, but these came from the throats of men. He heard rushes of wind as the old ones darted across camp like shadows.
Were any of these men the ones who had hurt Pup? Or were they all the ones? If one man had done it, and the rest belonged to his pack, should he punish them all?
He felt that if he watched and waited, the old ones would leave nothing for him. He almost made his mind to charge, when he stopped.
Sniffing the air, he couldn’t believe it.
One smell drifted free of the stench of hot light and delicious stink of blood. It was the smell of a man, but one he recognized, one that stirred in his gut and made his paw throb where he’d lost a claw.
Sure enough, a man walked around the edges of the camp. Tall, big like Bear, but also old like him. Whiskers turning the color of the clouds, skin sagging and marked by many suns.
Bear felt anger brew hot in his belly, as if someone had put the lizard blood in his gut under hot light and then let it slosh around. At the same time, he felt something else, a sharp feeling. Pictures came to his mind, ones of the last time Bear had seen this man.
Cub had been alive then. The first cub, the cub of his flesh.
Bear’s mind was burning with hot light then, and it spread so fast that he couldn’t control it anymore and pictures of cub mixed with the sight of this man now, old as he was, walking around the camp with a weapon in front of him that bear recognized, not scared by the lusks or the screaming.
He let out a deep, low growl that shook through his skin and fur, and then he charged, feeling like a young, strong bear again, feeling the dirt break under the crash of his feet, his gaze set on the man and his old skin and knowing how easily it would tear.
The man turned just as he reached him, and he leveled the weapon that had once hurt him so deeply, but he was too late. Bear was on him already.
Gunar had lived through his throat being cut and through losing pints of blood. Helena had seen it herself, she’d watched him stand and break the wagon lock.
And then he’d fallen again, just like that, as if some mystical energy had given him one last chance to save them, and then abandoned him. Grief was pressing at her not just in her head but all through her body, as though every nerve ending in every limb shook with the loss. The very last thing to do now was to surrender to it. Not now, not with Beate and everyone else in anger.
Someone grabbed Helena’s wrist and squeezed so hard that it hurt. It was Beate, the scared little girl who’d just seen slaver cut her father’s throat open, who had seen lusks breach the soil once and now again.
Could a young mind recover from two horrors like that? She had to hope that a child’s mind was like a child’s body, and that it would heal better than an older person’s.
That wouldn’t matter if they died tonight. The slavers hadn’t harmed them until this evening – don’t think about Gunar, she told herself – but the lusks wouldn’t be so cautious. The lusks didn’t care if damaging them brought their value down.
So Helena remembered something her father told her. He was a lieutenant in the king’s army, returned by the time it became the queen’s.
The cautious man thinks before he acts and he sees his prize slip from his grasp. The prudent man acts and opens his fist when it is full.
Her father might not have spoken to her ever since she married Gunar, but his words would help her now.
She squeezed Beat’s hand. “Give me a minute.”
“Will we be okay?”
“I don’t know yet.”
An older woman crawled from the back of the wagon. It was Bina, ‘Fat’ Rhett’s wife. Fat Rhett had been torn in two by a lusk, rendering his nickname not only cruel but inaccurate, and Bina had barely spoken a word since then.
Now, unlike the others who huddled together and sat with their knees draw against their chests and mumbled to themselves, she looked fearless. Was that the way it worked? When the worst happened, nothing else could touch you? Helena didn’t feel like that yet. She could feel her emotions throbbing, held back only by her need to keep Beate safe.
“Here, girl,” said Bina, and drew Beate close and stroked her hair. She glanced at Helena and arched her right eyebrow, and Helena understood.
So now Helena took in the mayhem of the camp. The lusks moved like shadows, if you took your gaze off them they were gone and would only signal their appearance when selecting their next target and then chomping their great jaws around them and tearing arms from shoulders, heads from necks, sending out a spray of blood that looked oil black in the night-time.
The bonfire had died on the ground but the flaming logs scattered by the lusks had lit the slavers’ wagons, and canvas burned in the night like the wicker men that people who lived in the lower-south mountains set aflame outside their houses to ward away demons.
As the fire ate through canvas and tarpaulin it sent thick plumes of smoke up, which the wind then took hold of and spread through camp, and the men and women not looking for weapons or somewhere to hide would stagger, high on the fumes, and then sink to their knees and cough their guts out.
One man retched, vomited, and then cleared tears from his eye, only to see that he’d vomited on the lusk-ruined corpse of his comrade. He fell forward them, falling onto his dead friend, and he cried.
Another slaver strode through the camp butt-naked, his skin oiled and rippling with muscle. He held his hands in the air, spreading his arms wide.
“Salvatore, sie alormo!” he bellowed, and energy seemed to tremble around him then. It pulsated, as though it was a force ready to be unleashed.
“Eyan!” cried a voice. “Watch out!”
But the warning came too late, and before the naked man got a chance to use his energy, a lusk leaped on him and bit his head clean off.
Helena did her best to ignore everything she saw, heard, and smelled, and she looked for escape. The fire had ruined the slavers’ wagons, but the caged wagon she was in was undamaged. She just needed horses to pull it, and then they could leave here.
Wait. They’d need supplies, too. Food and water at the least, or they’d just be fleeing one death only to ride into another, slower one.
She gave one last look to Beate and Bina. “Stay here. I won’t be long.”
Without waiting for an answer she hopped off the wagon. At first, her legs hurt and felt weak, and after days of only getting to stand up so slavers could escort her to urinate, it was hard to get her muscles to answer.
She only took a step when a column of fire rushed at her. She ducked and fell onto her arse, only to see a slaver, madness written on his face, with a flaming piece of wood,
swinging it at everything that moved near him in case it was a lusk.
Helena backed away and then got up and made an arc around him. She fixed her sight on the slaver wagons, especially on the outermost one that was barely aflame now, and might have salvageable supplies inside.
Keeping to the shadows, keeping low, she made her way around camp. Halfway there a growl – no, a roar – rose into the air, the fury in it enough to chill her blood.
Lusks didn’t roar. What in all the Toil gods’ names had been sent to hurt them now?
It didn’t matter, there was no time. She carried on until she reached the wagon.
With the rest of them ablaze the light here was blinding, the heat searing, and Helena could barely stand it. She felt like it would melt her clothes to her body. She managed just a few seconds there before she had to retreat to where the breeze was cold enough.
Damn it all to the afterlives. She couldn’t leave without supplies, because she’d be leading her people to a death ride. But the longer they stayed, the more chance the lusks worked their way through the slavers and then focused on the easier prey in the prisoner wagon.
So she ran to the wagon, opened the tarpaulin, and she found a crate of water pigskins, all full. The heat from the other wagons blasted her now, so hot that it made her eyeballs hurt. She opened one pigskin and emptied it over her head, dousing herself.
That done, she lifted the crate of skins and set it on the ground, and she hefted a box of grains, seed, and bean sacks down too. They were too heavy to carry together, but after two trips they would be ready. She would take four of the horses tied to the rocks near camp, and then hitch them to the wagon.
This could work. Horses, water, food. Escape might be possible. And then, miles away in the light of day she could explain to Beate that Gunar wasn’t coming back. That…
“Going somewhere?” said a voice. “It’s rude to leave without saying goodbye to your host.”
Helena had no time to answer before she felt something cold and sharp stab into her.
Jakub found safety in the shadows and he tried to get the balance of things before deciding who to help, who to kill, and who it was too late to do either to.
The longer he watched the more the horror turned from a creeping feeling to an intoxicating one, like burning oil poured into his soul and left to cool so it clogged him up. He watched men flailing on the ground, some pressing wounds on their stomachs to stop their insides plopping onto the ground. Slavers standing back to back, faces set in terror, slashing their swords at anything that moved their away.
Some slavers had fled now, heading away from camp in all directions. The fiery wagons on the outer reaches of camp lit their escape, and Jakub saw the fleeing folks fall one by one as lusk-shaped shadows crashed into them.
But it was through watching this that Jakub began to feel worry stir in him. Worry turned to fear, and it almost turned to panic before he got hold of it.
His lusk wasn’t the only one terrorizing camp. There was another, larger one, one that Jakub couldn’t control. Had Len tunneled into it net and woken it? Had Jakub allowed this greater lusk to breach?
It meant that he had to help the caravaners escape right now. Most of the wagons were already destroyed by flames, but the one holding the caravaners was far enough away to escape the fire. Now he just needed to find horses to hitch to it.
As he swept his gaze around camp, he thought he saw horses hitched to rocks in the north, some ways away. But then something else drew his attention.
A mass of fur not far to his left. It was a bear, the one he’d seen charge into the oil-whip woman in what seemed like weeks ago.
The bear was on the ground, pinning a man underneath it and snapping with its jaws and slashing with its paws in a frenzy of violence. Jakub knew the poor bastard was beyond saving.
Then something happened.
The man raised his right arm. He held something in his hand, though Jakub couldn’t see what at first. Light gathered around whatever it was, and by the time it built to a sphere and then exploded, Jakub understood.
The crack of the bolt wand met with the stench of burning mana. An explosion rocked the bear back, sending him flying feet away and then crashing to the ground. Jakub stared in astonishment as the man slowly got to his feet and then turned his head so that the flame caught his face.
Jakub couldn’t believe it. It was York, the hunter he’d met all those years ago.
Seeing a familiar face, even one from distant memories, broke something in him. He felt tears press against his eyelids, trying to come out. He held them back and he started toward York.
A shape crashed into the hunter. A growling lump of fur, claws, and teeth, attacking the man with a fury Jakub had never seen before. It raised its claws again and again, tearing into his flesh as though it were digging a hole in the ground.
Jakub felt his instincts fire. He focused on camp now, on the corpses strewn all over it, and he drained the essence from them one after another until his soul necklace filled.
Then he sprinted to the bear. Up close the beast seemed bigger than was possible, and the utter fury with which it carved York open scared Jakub deep, deep to the core of his being, stirring a primal fear that made his brain work differently, sending thoughts of just fleeing and leaving everyone behind. To save himself, not York, not the caravaners.
Jakub remembered his academy training. He dredged those lessons up, heaving them from the waters of his mind like a sailor lifting an anchor, and he brought those lessons up to deck and remembered the words of his mentors like Kortho and Irvine, and how a necromancer could use death, could respect it, but must never fear it.
Emboldened, Jakub reached out and placed two hands on the bear’s shoulder, and he felt his corruption leak out from his as Wilting Touch spread from palms to fur.
The bear’s fur turned grey and brittle and it began to fall out in clumps, until Jakub was gripping bare skin. The skin reddened and tuned a nasty shade of green, forming welts and letting off a stench of rot and pus and blood.
The bear struck out with its right paw, hitting Jakub in the face and jolting his brain loose.
He staggered in a daze then, with the echo of what sounded like bells sounding again and again in his skull. Blood leaked from his nose, and his vision dimmed so much that he could only barely make out the bear rearing up high in front of him.
He drew his sword again, but he could barely grip it and it fell to the ground. So he pulled his dagger from his sheath, and again the bear’s strike had been so powerful that Jakub could barely control himself, and he dropped the dagger.
Finally, his legs gave way and he fell to his knees.
The bear took two great strides to stand in front of him, and Jakub, for the first time, saw death not as a necromancer, safe and removed in the audience, but as a player in its theatre.
His vision cleared enough for him to look the beast in the eyes and meet death without shying away.
A bolt speared through the bear’s throat. Blood burst out and covered Jakub’s face and went in his mouth so he could taste it on his tongue.
Behind it, a few feet away, stood York. Holding a crossbow in his hands, but drenched in blood and staggering and gasping, ready to drop.
The bear spun around, choking, and it crashed toward the hunter holding the crossbow. When it was on him it tore at him with its paws one last time, and both fell to the ground together and then were still.
He wiped the blood from his eyes. He picked up his sword and crossed to the hunter and bear. Neither of them was moving now, and the way they died made it look like they were embracing, and Jakub felt sorry for them both.
Now he faced the camp and the wagon, and his heart almost burst when he saw the biggest lusk charge straight into the cage and tip it onto its side, making the caravaners inside tumble onto their backs. The lusk bit at the bars, ripping them apart like matchsticks so it could get to the people inside.
Helena fell back against
the wagon. The pain was sharp and shallow, the knife only cutting an inch before she escaped it. She could feel her blood wet against her shirt, but for now, she worried not about the wound or even the knife, but the man holding it.
She stared at her husband’s killer, at his face that was brutish and feminine at the same time, at the slaver mark etched deep into his right forearm, at the daggers he held in each hand that caught the glint of the flames and seemed to sparkle.
Would he kill her there and then, rather than let her go? With most of his men dead, was thoughts of her value on his mind anymore?
“Grab the water and grain,” he told her. “We’ll take the cage wagon. Bastard lusk has tipped it, but we can get it right. I’ll draw the thing away but I need you to get everything ready.”
Words hid from her for a second.
Not much earlier, this man had cut her husband’s throat and was going to sell Helena and her daughter into slavery. Now he was helping her escape?
She understood him then. He was a practical man above all else. Gunar had led them into Toil year after year, even knowing the risks, doing it because it was the only way he saw to support them as he wanted. Hips Maguire was taking risks of his own, doing things he knew were wrong because it was the only way he could see. This, helping her escape, was pure practicality.
She nodded at him. “The grain crate is stuck. Hand me something to cut it free.”
Hips passed her the dagger from his right hand, and Helena took it and reached over to the grain sacks.
“Which way will we go?” she said.
“East. There’s a gully three hundred miles that leads out of Toil and onto the border of the Killeshi lands. I’d avoid it normally, but we’re beyond that.”
“Three hundred miles east. Got it,” she said.
And then she turned in an arc, catching Hips with the dagger and shoving it into his throat, cutting through skin and tendon and forcing herself not to falter when she could feel the resistance from the gristle in his neck.
