by Deck Davis
Damn.
Otherwise, he could use his dagger to cut through the bison to free himself, but it’d take the best part of the night, maybe even all the next day to saw through a full bison carcass using his dagger. Not only would he cover himself in blood and guts, and possibly attract toil-lusks hungry for protein, but he would render the animal corpse completely useless.
He needed something else. Something that didn’t involve phantom trees or energy he didn’t have or gallons of bison blood.
He pushed his inventory items off his chest and onto the ground beside him. He’d repack them later.
Right now, he needed another solution.
CHAPTER 7
Jakub had a drunk’s dry mouth and thumping headache, but with none of the sense of having a good time. He swallowed, and his spit seemed to dink-dink-dink down his throat like a rock tumbling off a cliff. His lips were cracked, splitting on the bottom, and his waist and legs throbbed with pain.
But at least he had decided.
The longer he waited, the more his body would use up what little liquid remained inside it. The more danger there was of toil-lusks finding him, or of any of the other venomous Sun Toil critters coming to investigate the hapless necromancer lying on the ground.
If the caravan was still out there, if they had assumed him dead and carried on with their journey, he couldn’t let them get too far away. If he could catch up to what remained of Gunar’s party, then he had a way out of Sun Toil. Alone, he had as much chance of surviving the desert as a flea leaping into a volcano.
That was thinking ahead, and right now Jakub had the present to deal with. That present being a wound in his torso and a giant bison on his legs, one of which was starting to turn purple.
Holding his soul necklace, he focused on the animal and spoke the spellword of Reanimate. It was strange, hearing his voice in a desert that had been quiet for hours. Almost like he’d broken the silence with forbidden sounds.
Threads of light spun out from the necklace, crossing the air and wrapping around the bison like hands of light. They seeped into the animal through every orifice, finding ways through its eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, and rectum.
Essence remaining: [II ]
The bison stirred. A kick of a hind leg. A faint snort.
Jakub braced himself for the pain now, not knowing what to expect when the bison fully reanimated and its weight left his legs. He didn’t want pain, but he hoped for it, because pain meant sensation, it meant he might have some control over his legs. Numbness was the enemy.
The bison kicked out. A dagger of agony shot through his thighs. Sweet, hot agony. It gave him hope that if he could feel something, maybe the damage to his legs wasn’t as bad as he thought.
Necromancy EXP Gained!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIII ]
The bison blinked. Its nostrils flared but that was more out of instinct than anything, because the beast didn't need air now. This showed in its eyes; dull, lifeless, lacking the shine that showed on the stare of living creatures.
“Get up,” he told it.
The animal, now an animated puppet under his command, struggled to its feet. It lost balance on its front right leg, and Jakub’s breath caught, and he tried to move before it crashed down on him, but could only shuffle back a few centimeters.
Righting itself, the bison stood up fully. Its hide was coarse and short, more skin than hair really, but it was no ordinary bison. Gunar bought beasts bred for desert work, ones accustomed to pulling heavy loads in burning heat. There was a branding on its thigh, a reddened ‘GH-7’, but no sign of any wounds.
It would have been a fearsome animal in life if handled wrongly. A bison could crush a man’s skull without much effort. A few weeks earlier, Jakub had revived a Great Dane dog that had chased a squirrel onto a path, only to get caught under the hooves of a bison-driven wagon.
Where the bison had been under Gunar’s control in life, so this was under Jakub’s in death. There was nothing to fear from it now, and he’d need to rely on its strength.
“Back away a few steps,” he said.
The bison’s feet thumped on the ground as it gave Jakub some space. Just like that, his legs felt a little lighter.
He was free!
The gratitude he felt now was peculiar, and he would have been at a loss to explain how it felt. He guessed the only way a person could appreciate how it felt to be free of the weight of a dead bison on their legs, would be to lie on the ground with a dead bison on their legs…and then be free of it.
His sense of triumph was short-lived as pain ripped through him. It was as though the beast’s weight on him had been holding the pain down, and this was like whipping away the cover and letting it run free. It was enough to knock the air out of him.
Breathe, he told himself. And then he stopped just telling himself to breathe and did it, and found that actually breathing was much better than telling yourself to do it.
As the pain ebbed, Jakub focused on his new bison friend. “Back away a few more steps,” he told it.
It snorted and took four steps backward, leaving space between them.
Jakub held his soul necklace now and checked the essence.
Soul Necklace
Essence Remaining: [II ]
Using his Reanimate spell had drained as much essence as he’d expected, but it still cast darkness in him to see his necklace so empty, the same way a hunter might feel dread when he reached to his quiver and swiped thin air. The meager amount of essence left room for one more spell. Something low-level.
It left enough essence for one cast of Health Harvest to heal a single wound. That wasn’t too reassuring when Jakub had at least two wounds, and he didn’t want to decide between stopping a potential infection in his torso, and being able to use his legs.
Time to check them, see the damage, and then prioritize. Did he heal whatever harm had been done to them, or did he focus on the injury on his waist?
Removing the wooden rod without casting Health Harvest afterward would leave him open to blood loss and infection. But then, if his legs were too battered for him to walk on them, he’d die here on the ground.
Did he want to face the end in a gangrene-induced delirium caused by the wound, or a thirst-induced delirium courtesy of not being able to move from here to find water?
Such an appealing decision to make. Was it his birthday?
But maybe there was a third option.
Usually, when he cast Health Harvest, he would direct it to a specific injury and concentrate the healing there.
Maybe if he concentrated on his waist and legs as he cast it, the healing light would divide itself. It would be diluted, spreading over a much larger surface area than usual. That’d make it weaker, but it would help both his torso and legs.
Then again, what if the wounds were so bad that a diluted health harvest spell healed neither satisfactorily? He’d still be stuck here. In a little less pain, but still stuck.
Time heals all wounds, he told himself. Except for the really bad ones. Time won’t do shit for those.
It was time to see what damage his legs had taken. That meant carefully sitting up as far as he could without pain stabbing at him from all angles. He unbuttoned his trousers and carefully shimmied them down so he could see his thighs.
His stomach churned. “Look away, Ben,” he told his bison friend. “You don’t need to see this.”
The cosmos of bruises on right thigh looked like the sky on a clear night, the kind of night where a man could see distant galaxies of color if he looked hard enough for long enough. A swirl of purple with an inner yellow. Sensitive, as if even looking at the bruise was enough to make his nerves start yelling.
His left thigh had the same splodge of color but smaller, having taken less of the weight. Now that he’d seen the damage to his thighs Jakub become more aware of it, and his right leg began to throb.
“A bruise never killed anyone,” he told Ben. “I’ll live. Sorry, don’t m
ean to rub it in.”
His legs weren’t broken and as bad as his bruises looked, they would heal on their own. It meant that once he dealt with his torso he could get to his feet and start to walk, and that’d help with his circulation, too.
The cold seeped through him now. It wasn’t just the fading of the sun; this was his shock response growing roots, getting stronger. It helped him make his decision.
The last dregs of his essence were useless if he could barely move. He needed to fix himself, and then he could try and track the caravan.
He eyed the rod sticking from him, and he winced. Taking out his dagger, he put the hilt between his teeth and bit down to hold it in place.
Now he touched the rod. He felt nothing, but that wouldn’t last long. Even the numbness of shock couldn’t protect him from what he needed to do next.
Every instinct in him told him to close his eyes, but he couldn’t. He stared at the rod, at his hand around it.
And then he pulled.
A galaxy of pain exploded in him. It traveled through him from nerve to nerve, until it reached its skull and he felt it as a rush so strong that all he could do was breathe, breathe, breathe to stop passing out.
He spat out the dagger. Saliva flew from his lips. Had he been anywhere but the most desolate place in the queendom, the cry he gave would have made passers-by think a dragon was dying.
His dizziness slackened its grip. He wiped his lips on the crook of his arm. He held the rod in his left hand, and his grip must have been tighter than he realized because he held it so strongly that it had left red marks on his palm.
The rod was jagged at the end and dyed red by blood. When it had been sticking out of him it had seemed huge, but now he saw that it was less than the span of his hand. All of this for just a little piece of wood.
Sitting up now, Jakub spoke another spellword. This was a sweeter noise, the spellword short and almost sing-song in the way it sounded. Light burst from his soul necklace, carrying the scent of honey with it. The light sought his wound like a bee scenting pollen, swirling around it once, twice, before seeping in.
Essence Remaining: [ ]
Necromancy EXP Gained!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIII ]
The relief was immediate and immeasurable. A shock of healing joy that almost bordered on delirium, it felt so good.
Jakub sank back like an opium fiend after a hit and he stared at the darkened Sun Toil sky as the healing mist stroked his wound and his mind, and he felt himself float a little.
“How beautiful it is, Ben,” he said, aware that his voice sounded strange, drawn out. “A star-filled sky above a desert of death. Can you imagine a more wonderful place? Look at the way the jackals watch me from a distance, waiting for me to die so they can feast on whatever’s left of me.”
This jolted him upright, and the movement sent splinters of pain through his stomach.
He let the pain ebb away, mostly ignored, and he stared at the darkening distance.
Jackals?
He looked for them. He stared hard, but as much as he tried, he couldn’t see in detail what his brain had just displayed to him seconds earlier. Even so, he was sure he’d seen them.
Jackals meant meat. It meant an animal of a large size could survive out here. If jackals lived in Toil, then he could too.
But he couldn’t see them now, and a stabbing thought told him that he never really had. It was just the opium-like effect of Health Harvest playing tricks with his mind. Even so, the new adrenaline pumping through him was enough to make him want to get moving. He pressed his tattoo on his wrist.
Show map, he commanded.
Light spun in front of him until it formed a map in the air, shining pale white in the growing darkness.
It made him feel sick to look at it. This wasn’t his map; Jakub had never visited Toil before, so he’d spent a few hours with Gunar’s paper map. That was a curled-up ream of paper with Toil drawn on it, and Gunar treated as if it were the most precious thing in the queendom. Jakub had copied the paper map to his own glyphline-powered one.
The map cantered around a giant landmass. Mostly featureless, with only markings here and there of places in the desert that Gunar thought noteworthy. A range of hills. A grouping of rocks. The ruins of an old semi-permanent trader outpost.
Then, way, way across, was the settlement of New Sanzance, the target of Gunar’s convoy. A red dot flashed on the map, showing Jakub’s position within it. He was in the middle, miles away from Sanzance, and even further away from the rest of the queendom in the west.
He’d need to decide which to aim for, eventually. Which direction did he set out in? But that was a question for another day. First, he had survival needs to meet.
Pressing his tattoo again, his priority list floated in front of him.
Priority #1; get the dead, heavy-as-hell animal off me.
#2 – Get to shelter
#3 – Find water
#4 – Scavenge Food
#5 – Search for the convoy
He looked at his priority list, satisfied in the order of things. He wanted to search for the convoy now. He ached to see another face, to know that he wasn’t alone out here, but flashes of the accident were coming back to him, and he remembered that it wasn’t one accident but three.
He remembered burst of lightning, the swirl of dust storms converging. Not just a sense of horror but lashings of it that made his soul shake.
How could anyone have survived that? The only reason he had was that he’d driven the cart full of isopropoil to safety so that it didn’t blow the entire convoy to the moon. He remembered steering the cart far enough away and then diving off it and getting far enough away that he didn’t get caught in the blast.
Before he could even think of finding the convoy, he needed to make sure he was in a fit state. Dehydration was the most likely thing to kill him in Toil, but he figured he was good for now.
Before he worried about dying of thirst, he had to figure how to deal with the Toil night.
While Toil was hotter than a dragon fire-fueled oven in a demon’s bakery during the day, at night it was a place of deepest cold, where even the flames of a bonfire would struggle to banish it.
It would be the winds that killed him tonight. Those creeping winds of the worst cold, ones that embraced you and wouldn’t leave until you were shaking and turning blue.
He was only wearing his trousers and shirt, having left his robes and overcoat in a cart before Toil decided to punish Gunar and his people. There was nothing in his inventory he could wear against the cold.
The quarter bottle of Ames’ Firelick Liquor would warm him for a little while. Hell, the last time he’d taken a shot of it he almost coughed up his own burning gullet. But warmth from alcohol was as fleeting as it was illusory, and in reality, it would make his body temperature plummet.
No, he needed real cover from the winds, and judging by how much the sun had set, and the premature rise of the moon on the horizon, he had maybe an hour before the worst of the night started to set in.
Jakub licked his finger and held it in the air. It was a few seconds before the right side of his skin felt cool, which meant the winds were blowing from the east.
At least he knew where to head for shelter. The problem was, one feature of Toil was its utter featurelessness. This wasn’t a place built for survival of anything but the most resilient of creatures. Lizards, carrion birds, deathstalker scorpions.
Be like the deathstalker, he told himself.
He needed to find something to block the easterly winds, which mean he’d need to walk around and find a group of cacti, a pile of rocks. Anything. But, the last thing he wanted was to start forgetting where things were, because it might be important later.
Bringing up his map, Jakub centered it on where he was standing and gave a mental command.
Map Marker added – ‘Wake-up site’
With his bearings saved, Jakub started walking north in search of sh
elter from the deadly winds.
CHAPTER 8
He couldn’t believe his luck - he couldn’t believe how bad it was. After walking across the desert for an hour, he had come up short on finding a shelter.
The only benefit from his wandering was that he’d collected a pumpkin-sized tumbleweed. After that he stopped every time he saw something interesting, eventually collecting a handful of dry brush and weeds. He stuffed these into his shirt pockets, with the artificery of the material allowing him to store things bigger than should have been possible. Tailor-artificers really were the greatest people in the queendom.
Items added to inventory: tumbleweed, dry brush
Item group created: Fire materials
Flint, tumbleweed, and brush can be used in the creation of fire
Before that, he’d had to struggle with something he’d always taken for granted; getting to his feet. It turned out that having a dead bison press down on your legs and cut off the blood flow wasn’t conducive to walking, and the swirl of purple and yellow bruises all over his thighs and shins made every movement an exercise in pain management.
With his waist sore but healed, Jakub had pressed down on the ground with his hands and tried to push himself to his feet, but he kept buckling. He was sure that if he just got to his feet then he could try and walk it off, and that walking and getting the blood flowing in his legs could only help. It was getting to his feet that was the problem.
After the firth attempt, he tried another tack. “Ben,” he said. “Come here a second.”
The bison trundled over to him, stopping when he was standing directly over him so that Jakub was looking up at the bison’s belly. He was going to have to be more precise in his commands. The thing was a puppet, after all. Not dead, but not alive.
