by Deck Davis
“Back away a step.”
He hooked his arm around Ben’s neck and kept a tight grip, and then braced himself.
“Back away five steps.”
Holding onto Ben as the bison backed up, Jakub was pulled to his feet. He gritted his teeth and braced against the pain and through a sheer act of will remained standing whilst holding onto the animal.
When the ache subsidized he risked a step. Then another. Each one came easier, and he began to feel the accompanying pain as just a dull side effect of each step. There, but only hovering in the back reaches of his sensory experience.
“Thanks, Ben,” he told his only friend.
Though he was on his feet, his going was slow. Jakub kept his map open and headed north, hoping this way he would find shelter against the growing winds, and maybe stumble across whatever was left of the convoy.
It was strange walking across Toil when it was night-time. Gunar made them all journey through the evenings when the sun cooled, but he let them rest when night kicked in and the desert started to freeze. After dark, the caravaners usually lit a fire and stayed up chatting, joking, and singing until one by one they all rejoined their families in their wagons.
Alone, the utter silence of the desert was oppressive. Jakub heard his steps loud on the ground, and he wished he could mute them. It seemed like they were too loud, that they might wake something up and call out to things that waited in the darkness.
It felt like he was walking in some new, unknown world, that he was the only man who lived here, who had ever lived here, and only had his thoughts to console himself.
Being in Toil had done wonders for his sense of positivity and optimism.
He couldn’t walk as fast as he would have liked because of the pain, and he kept having to stop and rest. He knew that if he sat down he might not be able to summon the will to stand again, so he would lean on Ben, feeling how cold the bison was, but thankful that he was there with him.
He marked things of interest along the way. He still held out hope that some of the trader convoy had survived, but a thought was lurking in his mind, and he knew he’d have to face up to it. There was a decent prospect that he might have to walk hundreds of miles if he had any hope of getting to safety.
If that was the case, he’d need every provision he could find if he wanted to survive. Every source of water, of nutrition, of shelter. Anything that could be useful.
After what he judged was three miles of stumbling over the desert, he made only two markings on his map.
Map marker added – animal tracks. Antelopes? Coyotes? Further investigation needed. Possible source of food, water.
Map marker added – Climbable rock formation (shaped like a giant’s thumb) Climb up in daylight and get a view of the area.
After heading three miles north, Jakub began to feel more disheartened with each step. The sky was much darker now and the stars shone brighter than Jakub had ever seen. He guessed it was the remoteness of Toil that made the sky stand out so much. Not even in the jungles of the Killeshi lands, which the queendom had failed to colonize, had he seen such a pure sky. It made him feel small. A speck laboring under a watchful expanse of black.
With the darkness came the winds. Jakub had never felt so cold in his life, and he’d grown up living in a traveling community. He knew what it was like to be cold. Hells, until the age of eight, he’d never fallen asleep under a roof.
Out here in Sun Toil, it wasn’t just cold. This was a primordial kind of cold. An ancient kind that felt less like weather and more like a living being that crept out when the world turned black and the desert darkness spread out like a never-ending ocean.
Only the previous night, Jakub had spent the night wearing all his clothes, his robes, his overcoat, and had wedged himself inside a sleeping bag. He’d shared a cart with five other people, and even with his layers and their collective body heat, there was still a nip in the air.
This was like walking through invisible waves of the purest ice. Like black ice hanging in the air, clinging to him, and it wasn’t even the fullest part of the night yet. Worse was to come.
This was when he started to worry. He’d gone north expecting to find somewhere to shelter. A cactus wide enough that he could sit against it and block the wind. Even a giant boulder that he could squeeze under and share with the desert insects would have worked.
But no. He’d found nothing. Now the easterly winds were sucking the air from his mouth before he got a chance to breathe it, and he’d started to feel numb in his toes.
The only thing he could think to do was to use Ben. He’d have to lie down, since if he commanded the bison to lie down and then sat against him, his shoulders and head would be exposed. But if he lay down next to his dead friend he would have a wind block of sorts.
That still left him exposed. It meant that although the winds wouldn’t reach him, he’d still be cold. And if he drifted to sleep and slept until daybreak, he could wake up to find himself baking in the sun.
No, he needed something with protection to his sides and above, if he could find it.
He walked another mile. His legs begged for a break. The desert made sounds around him. Rather, it was the creatures of the desert, be they insects, birds, or maybe even mammals that called this place home. He imagined that they all knew he was there. That they viewed him as a stranger, as an invader, and that without the protection of the caravan, of other humans, he was vulnerable. That was another reason he needed a shelter that was more secure than a cactus or a rock.
Beginning to feel the effects of thirst, Jakub knew he needed to start conserving what water there was in his body. It could be days before he found more.
The only liquid he had was the quarter of Ames’ Firelick, but not only did it taste like someone had wrung the sun like a wet rag and bottled the drops, but alcohol would dehydrate him.
He considered emptying the Firelick and peeing into the bottle. There was no shame in it. He might not tell the story around the dinner table if he made it out of Toil, but at least it was liquid, and it might give him an extra day or two to find a water source.
Then again, he was hesitant to waste the Firelick. The stuff was meant to be drunk in quarter-shots, and there was a good reason for that. Firelick was 70% alcohol, which could be enough to make it flammable. Without much in the way of fire sources, he didn’t want to, almost literally, piss away a good source of flammable liquid.
Forget it. He needed to worry about shelter first and think about water second.
Just like that, his brain followed his command. You want to worry about shelter? Fine. Your request has been granted.
The worry hit like a tsunami, and it was only by picturing himself freezing to death and then imagining his corpse staying in the desert, unfound and unclaimed perhaps forever, that he spurred himself on.
He walked for another grueling mile, pushing through the pain that flared up in his shins and thigh, through the throbbing in his almost-healed waist, through his tight throat that felt like someone was rubbing two pieces of sandpaper inside it when he breathed.
Again, there was nothing. It was a strange feeling; when he was with the caravan and they were journeying up to a hundred miles each day, it seemed like they were always passing rock formations. Now that he needed one, Toil had become miserly with them, hiding its precious boulders from him.
He had decided to curl up next to Ben and hope that he could shiver his way to daybreak when he spotted something ahead of him.
It was difficult to see much now that the sun had fully set. Everything was black, and sometimes it felt strange to walk ahead into such impenetrable darkness. He couldn’t even see the ground, and this made him dizzy, as though he were about to put his feet down into an oil-black ocean that would swallow him up.
As his eyes adjusted, he realized something interesting; that he still couldn’t see a gods-damned thing.
Despite this, he noticed that though everything was black, something ahead
of him was darker than the rest of the landscape. Getting closer, Jakub felt the tiredness and worry wash off him.
Just a few hundred paces in front of him, the land swelled upward to create a rock formation that looked like a church belfry. A bottom mouth-shaped part was hollow, creating a cave inside the rock.
Smiling for the first time that day, Jakub crossed an item from his priority list.
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
His natural caution made him hold off from running toward the cave. In his short time since leaving Queen Patience’s Magic Academy Jakub had been pursued by cannibals, had a fellow necromancer try to kill him, and battled numerous pain-in-the-arse giant insects.
Oh, and a demented mage, a torturer, and a psychotic necromancer trio had tried to kidnap him so they could flay his skin and steal his magic.
He was probably a little less trusting these days than he used to be.
With this in mind, he first added the location of the cave to his map, nothing that although it felt like he’d walked for hours, he hadn’t made much progress beyond his wake-up site.
Map marker added – rock cave (that might save my life)
He skirted west around the rock, never taking his eyes from it. He waited for thirty minutes. He would have waited longer but every gust of wind felt like a ton of ice had been dumped down his shirt, and the cold was making his legs ache.
Moving all the way around the cave until he was on the other side, he again watched it, holding out for as long as he could.
“I think we found what we’re looking for,” he told Ben. “Stay here and guard my stuff.”
He left the bison and his inventory bag a few hundred yards from the cave in case he needed to make a quick escape. Then, holding just his dagger, he headed toward the rock.
The desert was strangely quiet now. The weird nocturnal cries and hisses and far-away animal screams were gone, and only the wind could be heard, giving a ghostly howl as it tried its best to bring his body temperature down to a fatal level.
As Jakub reached the cave entrance, he heard something else.
He froze. His nerves fired, his pulse beat with the dizzying rhythm of a drum at a drunken barn dance.
Footsteps sounded from inside the cave.
CHAPTER 9
Billy ‘Hips’ Maguire
The sudden hush made Hips suspicious. He was a man of limited emotional response, and his repertoire consisted of only one way of acting when faced with his feelings. Be it happiness, feeling a little down or, like now, suspicious, he responded the only way he knew how; he drew Magdalena from her sheath.
The blade left her home with a satisfying schwing sound. Out here, out in Sun Toil, the moonlight was perfect, and it shone perfectly on Magdalena, over the curve in her blade that was like a woman arching her back, over the etchings on the metal that resembled tiny tattoos.
As beautiful as she was, seeing her made Hips sad. Magdalena had a twin blade. She had been forged as a sibling, inseparable from her brother Marcus, who was just as beautiful, just as sharp. Hips had been forced to part with Marcus. It was the only way to raise the funds for this operation, and he just prayed that he wouldn’t spend his years regretting it.
Holding Magdalena gave Hips the confidence he’d always lacked growing up. Men who knew Hips would have laughed until their eyes watered if you suggested he wasn’t born that way, but Hips knew the truth.
He had learned his swagger when he was twelve and fled his abusive parents and traveled out of Dispolis and then east, surviving on the road until he met a traveling bard troupe who took him in and taught him how to tease sweet sounds from a lute. Those four years were the happiest he’d ever had, but ultimately, he’d always known that bard life wasn’t for him. He sought something a little more…dangerous.
That was how Hips Maguire found himself in Sun Toil with a band of unscrupulous folks, ones who right now were standing all around him and had suddenly stopped talking all at once.
The sudden quiet made every danger instinct in his body scream out, but he tried not to make it show.
Holding Magdalena, Hips looked at the bonfire-lit faces around him. He saw old faces, new ones. Men who’d spent thousands of nights like these in places like this and were as comfortable as cows on grass, and some of the younger faces, faces that looked like Hips’ face had once looked. Teens – boys and girls, because Hips knew that there were some outlaw jobs only a girl could do – who’d lived in houses like his and with parents like his, who wore bruises when other kids wore smiles, who would have been ready to climb up to the moon if got them out of their home.
The idea was that the old hands would teach the newer ones how to live in this world. Just like every master bard had to learn his first chord, so every slaver had to learn his trade from nothing. And while it might not be the most moral of professions, Hips knew he was giving these teens a chance, and he’d long ago decided fuck everyone else. He only looked after him and his own.
Now, his own were quiet. Too quiet. The crackling of the bonfire punctuated this, and Hips saw the orange and red flicker over Magdalena’s blade, and wondered if he would have to use her on his own people.
“If you’ve got treachery on your mind,” he finally said, “Best you spit it out now. Treachery is poison, and you won’t like the taste. Me and my gal here can purge it from you,” he said, holding her up.
All his men knew what he and Magdalena had done over the years. Some of them had heard it, some had seen it. Few knew why she was so special to him.
“Salvator,” said Eyan. Salvator was Eyan’s nickname for Hips, and in his native tongue, it meant savior. It had always made Hips uncomfortable, even if it was true that he’d helped Eyan escape his abusive four mothers and fathers. The concept of quadruple parenting worked for the Spyre people, but not in Eyan’s case.
“I don’t like the edge to your voice,” said Hips. “There’s something in it I’ve never heard. You're planning something.”
“You're a quiet man, Salvatore. You act like every word is like stabbing a hole in your purse.”
“Now we’re coming to it. It’s because we’re in Toil, aye? The sun has melted your brain. I know that some of you had misgivings about this place, but I gave each one of you a choice. I told you about the caravan. I explained the plan, and you chose to come.”
“Hips,” said Marleya. She had barely made a whisper before approaching and then there she was, a woman made from as much pure beauty and she was venom. The things Hips had seen her do…even as a slaver, it gave him pause.
His thoughts took him back to the wife whose husband Marleya had seduced in a tavern. How, when the wife discovered it and marched to their camp to confront them, Marleya had used her oil-whip and lashed the woman to within inches from death, scarring her with hot, black scratches. The look of horror on the husband’s face still stuck in Hips’ mind.
But then she could be kind, too. Once, after selling a dozen slaves to a Baelin warship, Marleya had given half of her cut of the gold to a rundown orphanage in Queensbrook. Hips suspected that she had spent her own younger years in places like that.
For all her cruelty and her reckless pursuit of whatever pleasures her whims demanded, consequences seemed to shirk her. The woman was indestructible. She’d once taken three crossbow bolts to the gut and, after she lived through the fever and a healer closed her wounds, she had demanded a glass, a whiskey bottle, and enough opium to put a troll to sleep.
Yeah, if death ever came for Marleya, it’d come as a blur. It’d have to catch her unaware, appearing as some terrible force out of nowhere too quick for her to see it.
He was glad of it, too. She was Hips’ long-serving crew member and his oldest friend. He had met her in a forest thirteen leagues from Dispolis, and like him, she was foraging to stay alive.
>
They had first met when they were both strays, chancing upon each other at a particularly dense berry bush patch. The two teens had fought like hell over the turf. Hips was used to fights, having grown up under the swing of a fist, but this girl had taken him to the seven hells and back.
By then end, neither of them could truly overpower the other, and they decided on a more logical course of action; to share the berries.
After that, they shared journeys, and before long they were traveling together as friends. Hips wouldn’t say he was in love with Marleya. He wasn’t as pathetic as that.
No, it was simply a case that whenever he looked at her chestnut, saucer-wide eyes, he felt like he was floating into the cosmos above, carried away on the breath of a goddess so that he might see the world through the lens of eons gone by. That’s all.
One day he’d probably try to tell her that, and when the words went through Hips’ brain they’d come out of his mouth as “Marleya, why have we never fucked?”
Maybe he’d never get to say them. Not if she was in on this mutiny, if that’s what it was.
“Marleya,” he said. “You're part of this too?”
He fully suspected a plot now. Every outlaw gang, no matter what their chosen area of criminality, faced this at some point; there always came a time where the members thought their lives would improve if they overthrew their leader.
He just never thought Marleya would help them tie the noose. It filled him with a deep sadness he hadn’t felt since leaving his parents’ home. That day was a strange mix of freedom and pity, but this felt worse.
“I’m afraid so,” Marleya said. “I wasn’t only in on it…come on, Hips. You know me now. I planned this.”
Hips stood up, ready to kill but knowing he wouldn’t relish a single second of the act. “Treason runs in a man’s blood. It’s a survival instinct, sure enough, and I don’t blame any of you for harboring it. I brought you out here. Feels like a place that’d boil your blood to dust. But we got what we came for, didn’t we?”
