by Deck Davis
Only when they spotted easy prey would they try for meat. They could live without much protein, but would never pass up a chance for it. Above all, they were creatures of the moment. They ate until they were full, and then they left. Even their acid spit couldn’t break down teeth and bone.
The conclusion Jakub drew from this was that the lusks couldn’t have removed every trace of the hundred or so men, women, and children of the caravan.
The secondary conclusion he drew was that he needed to get the hell off the ground before the lusks found space in their bellies and once again breached the cracked ground, where they would find him as rather easy prey, given that he had a dead bison crushing his legs.
Sometimes it was hard to prioritize what to do. Other times it was easy.
Jakub pressed the glyphline tattoo on his wrist. “Priority one,” he said, and words began to form in the air as he spoke them.
Priority #1; get the dead, heavy-as-hell animal off me.
CHAPTER 5
A cold feeling settled over him, each shiver sent tremors of pain through his body. It was shock setting in. It had to be.
He buttoned the parts of his shirt that he could move without disturbing the rod sticking out of his waist. He rolled his sleeves down to his wrists. It was about as effective a shield against the chill as wearing a paper hat in a hurricane.
Time was tumbling away from him now. He’d seen what shock could do to a person, and he was worried. Though it was meant as a defense mechanism, it often hindered more than it helped, and if left to spread it could render a person in a trance-like state, shivering, not able to move. Out here, that’d be as effective a death sentence as putting a crossbow to his head and firing.
Time to see what he could do to get out of this.
Moving his legs didn’t work. Either the bison had been on them so long it had cut off blood flow and made him lose all sensation, or it had landed on him with such force that it had crushed his bones and paralyzed him, and right now his body was feeding him lovely spoonful’s of shock response to spare him from the pain.
If both legs were broken, he was fucked. Although through his necromancy he could cast a healing spell, his magic was fueled by soul essence, and he was limited to how much essence he could hold at one time.
As a level 1 journeyman, he couldn’t hold anywhere near the essence a master could. That was why Jakub took jobs reviving animals, and not people. He was far, far away from being able to resurrect a person.
Even so, his Health Harvest healing spell was the only thing stopping him from panicking. He had the wooden rod-end sticking out of his belly, and indeterminate damage to his legs. He might be able to heal all of it or none of it. But there was a chance.
Other spells that might get him out of this. His Major Beast Resurrection, which used to be Minor Beast Resurrection but had leveled up when he became a journeyman, would let him bring the bison back to life. If he did that, it would surely get up from his legs.
Two problems there.
One, resurrection was like waking someone up by dumping ice water over their heads, but magnified to an unthinkable degree. Anyone or anything brought back from the dead suffered a period of confusion at first. It made them dangerous, unpredictable.
The last thing he needed was to bring this thing back, find that he still couldn’t move, then lay helpless as it went mad and trampled his skull into a much flatter shape than was advisable.
Secondly, Major Beast resurrection was a major essence drain, and essence was precious. If he used it, he might not have enough essence to use for other spells.
He had to check. His essence was stored in his soul necklace, and just a glance would tell him how much essence he had. But what if it was hardly any? What if he had barely enough for a single spell?
He almost didn’t want to look.
That was a logic fallacy, though. Not looking at his soul necklace didn’t mean he was spared the danger. If his essence was low, then it was low whether he looked at it or not. So better to look and to know, then to live in ignorance with a dead bison straddling his thighs and part of a cart sticking out from his gut.
Jakub carefully unbuttoned his shirt, flinching at the tremors of pain that sprang from his stomach every time he moved too much. They hit him in waves, one after another, each as fresh as the last. It reminded him of when he’d gotten his glyphline tattoos on his wrist; pain that never seemed to end, yet was strangely bearable if you just stopped being such a coward about it.
Wanting to save face despite being alone, Jakub pushed his pain back. He bore it like a necromancer should.
Yeah. That ought to impress all the people around here in the remotest part of the queendom.
Finally, feeling inside his shirt, he touched metal. Bringing his soul necklace out, he looked at it. A flinch of fear crossed his chest like the touch of a ghost. Which, for a necromancer, was a likely possibility most of the time.
This particular flinch was from the pathetic amount of essence trapped in his soul necklace.
Soul Necklace
Essence: [IIIII ]
It was a fifth of the way full. For necromancers, as in life, everything was relative. If a master necromancer had a fifth of his necklace full, it would be plenty. Enough to resurrect a dozen bison, to seal the wounds of fifty cuts.
For a journeyman, it was enough to make Jakub feel sick again. If it weren’t for his empty stomach and the vice grip he kept on his mind, using his academy training to stop seeds of panic blooming, he would have.
That was one advantage a necromancer had over other mage disciplines. Given that by definition, a necromancer would spend a lot of time with corpses, it was likely he or she would see things that would send a normal person’s mind into panic. That wasn’t advisable for a guy whose occupation centered around death.
Imagine a necromancer who panicked when he saw a corpse. Imagine how impractical that would be, for him to get shaky or scared while mourners looked on, desperate for him to bring back their loved one. Imagine a necromancer huddled in a corner while angry relatives waited for their loved ones to be resurrected. Not a great look for a mancer.
Jakub remembered his training and he forced calmness on himself, stopped panic turning into tidal waves and changed them into little tremors gently lapping onto the shores on his mind, washing little litters of logic upon the beach.
Come on, logic, he willed. Give me a reason-based hug.
He had some essence. Not a lot, but some. If he used it right, cast the right spell, he could at least get onto his feet.
So, the most immediate problems; the bison on his legs, the wooden rod in his side.
His brain honed on the rod. It was wedged deep into his flesh, and he wanted to get it out, but that was an instinctual response, and one he needed to tell to get the hell out of there.
His Health Harvest spell could heal the wound in his side. He had enough essence to power that spell, but there was no point yet. If he cast it on himself now, the spell would heal his wound while the wood was stuck inside him, and then he’d never get it out. He didn’t want to live his life with a foot-long piece of wood sticking out of his belly.
At the same time, he couldn’t take it out yet. For one, though he was no surgeon, he guessed it would hurt quite a lot. As famished and dehydrated as he was, the pain might be too much, and his body might pass out in shock. He couldn’t afford to lose more time to unconsciousness.
Secondly, the rod might have hit an artery. Its presence in his flesh might be the very thing keeping him alive, and pulling it out could let his blood gush over him. That would be bad. He had to leave it in until he had something to stop blood loss.
That left the bison as the priority. It was pinning him in place, and of all the places in the queendom that it was dangerous to get stuck under a bison in, Sun Toil was the worst.
It was evening now. Soon, night would descend upon Sun Toil, and it would bring a devastating cold with it. Even if Jakub survived the fre
ezing night while trapped under the bison, he would be greeted by the morning sun, which would get hotter and hotter, cooking him and the bison alike. Dehydrating him, shriveling his skin.
He needed to get the damn thing off him.
He couldn’t move his legs to shift it, and though his body was toned through the academy weapons training students of all disciplines had to practice, he wasn’t strong enough to shove the animal off him.
If physical force weren’t enough, then magical force might be. He could cast Major Beast Resurrection. The bison would rise from the dead, resurrected and wholly alive again. Assuming it didn’t crush him, he’d be free.
But casting that would sap all his essence, and he’d have none left for Health Harvest, which meant that although he wouldn’t be trapped, he’d have no essence left to heal his wounds.
Damn it. His head began to pound with the pressure of deciding. Then, as his skull throbbed, he felt something flutter across his forehead. He watched as a butterfly looped in front of him. A deep, brilliant blue with jagged yellow bolts on its wings.
“Sammus,” he said, and he wondered what had become of the boy who had named him, and a great pity stirred inside him.
But maybe Sammus was a sign. He knew another spell, of course. When he had risen to the journeyman rank, Jakub had learned the Reanimate spell.
Where Major Beast Resurrection restored an animal from the dead and made it just as alive as it had been before, Reanimate was different. It gave it life, of a sort, but not in a conscious way; the animal would become a meat puppet with no mind of its own, only able to do whatever Jakub commanded.
Given the limitations of Reanimate, it cost much less essence to cast. He could use it, command the bison to get off him, and still have essence left for Health Harvest.
Not only that, but the bison would be wholly under his command. It would be half-dead, yet still able to move. It could become his pack animal, without the added burden of needing to eat or drink, and it would never tire under the Toil sun. The poor beast would do whatever Jakub commanded. If he told it to, it would walk for miles and miles, stopping only when its tendons and muscles wore away to dust. He could even ride it. It’d be slow as hell, but if his legs were pulverized…
It was the only way, right? It had to be. Then again…
If he could find a way to get the animal’s dead weight off him without using magic, not only would that leave all his essence intact, but he could drain more essence from the bison itself. After all, necromancers gained their power from draining essence from the dead, and a bison would give him a decent bounty.
If he used Reanimate, the bison’s essence would leave it. He couldn’t reanimate it and then drain essence, nor could he drain essence and then reanimate it. One or the other.
He briefly considered waiting for a smaller creature to approach, killing it, and then reanimating it. After that, he could somehow write a message and then send his new beast across the desert to find someone who could help. The problem there was that there were no other creatures nearby, and he had nothing to write with.
Not only that, but he doubted a smaller animal would make it all the way across Toil without a larger predator catching it. Then his essence would have been wasted. No, that idea was as unpractical as it was fanciful.
He either reanimated the bison and used it as a pack animal, spending some of his essence to do it. Or he got the damn thing off his legs and then took all its essence from it, saving it for later use. Essence would be precious out here. He might need every shred of it he could find to heal himself.
CHAPTER 6
Evening stalked him like a tiger on the hunt, catching up to him quicker than he expected.
Although he was glad that the sun was retreating, dread slithered through him. There was nothing out here. No mana lamps, no torch glows, nothing. Just endless darkness that got thicker by the minute. Silence broken only by sinister sounds that could have been miles away, could have been feet away. Sun Toil was hell for people, but some creatures thrived here.
The thing that worried Jakub most was the not knowing. The idea of perfect darkness that would soon mask everything, that things could crawl, slither or fly toward him with no warning.
Maybe there was a warning system he could use, though. Its name was Ludwig.
Ludwig was his bound creature; a hound with a heart softer than melted butter, who just happened to be a semi-demonic entity who lived in the land between life and death. No big deal; every necromancer had one.
Jakub could summon Ludwig. As a Greylands entity, the physical world would not affect Ludwig. He wouldn’t feel the heat of the day or the cold of the night. Nothing, save fellow demonic entities, could hurt him. He could roam for miles without tiring. He could scout for Jakub, find the rest of the caravan if any of them had survived. They might have gathered together and set out to try and escape Sun Toil, understandably believing Jakub to be dead.
Not only would Ludwig be a scout for Jakub, but there was something else. Jakub could use the company. He wanted his best friend here.
It seemed like a great idea, but something was anchoring him down. A big anchor made of crap.
It cost essence to summon Ludwig, and he was a constant essence drain while he was here. It would deplete his soul necklace in less than an hour, with no guarantee Ludwig would find help before it did. If he didn’t, Jakub would have wasted his essence on nothing, and he’d be in the same position except without even the few options he had now.
That meant no company for Jakub. No comforting appearance of his friend.
Lacking a friend, he decided to name the bison currently trapping him in place. He named him Ben.
“Please to meet you, Ben,” he said, and the weakness of his voice worried him. “Be a friend and get up, will you? No? Okay, let’s see if I can help this along.”
After thinking about it, he’d decided to keep Reanimate as his second option. Although a pack animal would be useful, he needed to make sure he could cast Health Harvest on all his wounds. No point getting the bison off him if his legs were so pulverized he couldn’t walk.
That meant shifting almost half a ton of dead weight off his legs, when he was already weak from vomiting and dehydration and the piece of wood sticking out of his stomach.
At first glance, he had nothing to work with, but mages are a curious breed of people. It was a truth known commonly through the queendom that mages - and necromancers in particular - love pockets. Any scrap of clothing was real estate ripe for a pocket, and it was said you could tell a mage was coming a mile away from the jingle and rattle of all his pocket crap when he walked.
Maybe that was why mages didn’t make very good thieves.
In any case, Jakub had pockets. Not as many as he’d hoped; he’d brought his necromancer robes and coat with him on the trip through Sun Toil, but they were stored in his case in one of the disappearing wagons.
Damn it. Not only had taking off his robes and coat robbed him of his necromancer look – rolled-up sleeves and sweat made him look more like a farmer than practitioner of dead magic – but most of these random pockets were sewn into those garments.
All he had now was his shirt and his trouser pockets, and Ben was currently making his trouser pockets inaccessible.
He had eight pockets sewn into his shirt. That sounded like a lot to most people. One breast pocket was standard. Maybe two; one on each breast.
Jakub had used every part of his shirt to make a pocket while still keeping it light, and it was honestly a feat of magic that the tailor he’d paid to do it had done so well. Then again…it was a feat of magic. The tailor was an artificer, adept at weaving harmless magic into ordinary things. Jakub was so thankful to him that he could have kissed the guy if he was here.
He searched them now, emptying each pocket in turn. There was one on each breast, one on either side near his hips, and four sewn into the inside of the shirt. After unbuttoning his shirt and checking the inside pockets, he put all
his items on his now-naked chest and left his shirt unfastened.
Pressing a tattoo on his wrist, his glyphlines cataloged the items and displayed them as a list in front of him.
Inventory
Steel Twine
A coil of twine, barely thicker than thread. Flexible as normal thread, yet strengthened with steel.
Heat-Leave-Me Salve [5% full]
A yellow-colored cream in a metal tin. Just a thin application can protect skin from the sun
Iron Dagger
A hand-length dagger with an iron blade and wooden hilt
Iron Chest Key
A key from Jakub’s personal chest in his room at the academy
Tales of the Wind Caller
A short anthology of stories about Argus, The Wind Caller
Vagrant Blade
A magical sword that turns the holder into a vagrant. Repeated and prolonged uses can permanently alter a person’s appearance.
Bracelet of Rest
A magic bracelet that makes the user feel rested no matter how long it has been since sleeping. Wearing the bracelet builds up a sleep debt that must be paid when removed.
¼ Bottle Ames’ Firelick Liquor
Flint
Magnesium Flakes
10 gold coins
24 silver coins
103 bronze coins
Seeing his inventory didn’t fill him with rays of sunlight. Besides, he was sure to get more than enough sunlight unless he found a way out of the thousands of miles wide desert.
The only things that could help now were the steel twine and his dagger. With his twine he could tie part of it around the bison’s body and part around a tree, making a crude hoist. Easy! He just needed a tree. And the ability to stand up.
