by Deck Davis
The second question was, should he just sleep here? Maybe with Ben blocking the wind, and if he kept the fire fed…
He didn’t get to finish the thought. A shape flew at him from the darkness, a shape of fur and teeth and snarls, and it crashed into him and pinned him with its weight and then snapped at his face.
Its spit splattered his cheeks and he could smell its dank fur.
Jakub moved his face side to side as an utter terror took hold of him, and he desperately tried to avoid its snapping jaws.
Survival thoughts hit him like arrow bolts one by one; not full ideas but fragments, the best his brain could make up in the split second.
Fire. Dagger? Blade. Punch! Dagger…
He reached out with his right hand for his dagger but couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel much because of the numbness that the fire had barely taken the edge off. But after a few seconds of grasping blindly a sudden pain flared in his hand, and he realized he’d put his numb hand into the fire.
The coyote finally timed its snap right and caught his face, clamping down on his nose and then tearing. The explosion of pain was like nothing he’d never felt.
It made him feel dizzy, his stomach lurched, the world spun around him.
He felt his own hot, wet blood on his cheeks.
Jaws snapped toward him again. Jakub dove right, rolling over the fire. As the coyote followed he grabbed his dagger from the ground.
He didn’t know if he could even use it. He was barely conscious, the pain stinging so much it threatened to make him pass out. He blinked through it, felt something wet around his eyes and didn’t know if it was tears from the pain or blood from his nose.
Holding the dagger so tight that he felt it this time, he held in all the pain, all the fear, and he watched his enemy and he concentrated on its movements, trying to guess which direction it would leap to.
The coyote jumped. Jakub rolled. He moved out of the way, hoping he’d chosen rightly, and then he pushed himself to his knees.
He was looking at the back of the coyote. He’d dived the right way. Wasting no time, he leaped forward and collapsed onto it, smashing it to the ground with his weight, and then he raised his dagger and plunged it into the coyote’s neck again and again until his arm was so tired that he had to let it fall.
That done, Jakub slid off the coyote and collapsed onto his back and closed his eyes.
He allowed himself just a few seconds of respite before he wiped away the wetness from his eyes and looked at his finger and saw no blood. When he touched his nose, not only did pain shoot through him, but his finger came away red.
Now wasn’t the time to process that. Instead, he fed more tumbleweed to the fire. Decisions had to be made now. Lots of them, and it was hard to know where to start.
He began with surviving the night. Even if he hadn’t already been exhausted, his fight had taken the last of his energy. It must have been past midnight now, and he judged that he just needed to brave the cold for six hours until dawn broke.
Ben, who had sat impassively through the fight after lacking orders from Jakub, was lying on the ground and blocking the wind.
Jakub gripped the coyote by its legs and pulled it next to Ben and then positioned it at an angle, forming a double-sided barrier for him.
After feeding more tumbleweed to the fire, Jakub wedged himself between the dead coyote and once-dead bison and he watched the fire for a while as the last dregs of his adrenaline left him and exhaustion overtook every inch of his body and carried him to sleep.
CHAPTER 16
He awoke to the sun burning his face. It was the daytime now. Not dawn, not sunrise, but daytime, and the sun was shining angrily on Toil.
It was a light that hated life. Hated people, plants, even the dirt on the ground and all the microbial beasts that just wanted to live in it and be left alone. It made the desert look almost pure white, like the burning chemicals alchemists shielded their eyes from.
He didn’t recognize the area around him. A crack ran through the ground not far away. It wasn’t wide. A lonely knee-high cactus stood rigid in the distance. There were no carts. No people. Jakub didn’t even care for just that one moment, because his pain was too much to let him.
He thought the pain was his nose, but he quickly realized that all his face was stinging. He didn’t have a mirror to check, but it was easy to guess what had happened; he had been so ravaged and so exhausted that he’d slept longer than he’d intended, and the Toil sun had scorched his skin.
When he was traveling with Gunar they all combated this using an alchemical solution they rubbed on their skin, but Jakub didn’t have any, and it was only after entertaining some of the caravan kids by reanimating butterflies that one of their mother’s took pity on him and gave him an almost-empty tin.
He needed to fix that. Either find the caravan and get lucky and find some usable paste or work out another way to protect his skin. It wasn’t just a matter of comfort, but necessity. Gunar had told him about men who’d caught the sun so badly they couldn’t blink without feeling the agony of an inferno in their eyes.
He still had the jar of heat-leave-me salve, but it was only 5% full, and that would give him protection for a day, maybe two. If he could find water he could dilute it. Lowering the quality would worsen the protection, but it might extend the salve for a few days longer.
Touching his tattoo, Jakub added this to 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
#6 – Protect skin from sun
The next thing he touched was his nose, which he regretted immediately. The coyote had torn a chunk from it, and even thinking about that made him feel sick. If his belly hadn’t been empty, he would have retched his guts out onto the dirt. He couldn’t even assess the damage properly; lacking a mirror, the only thing he could do was to touch it, and each touch sent agony through him.
He didn’t have any essence after reanimating Ben and healing his torso wound, which meant that he couldn’t heal his nose that way. Maybe he wouldn’t have done that even with a full necklace of essence; there were much better uses for it, and his nose wound wasn’t fatal.
Much more pressing was the utter tiredness that weighed so heavy that it was hard to stand up, even after a night’s sleep. It could only have been hunger and dehydration.
That was his priority; nourish his body so he had the energy for everything else.
He looked at Ben now, and he was beginning to regret his choice in reanimating him. Reanimating the bison meant that though he could use his body, Ben was still dead. He wouldn’t rot like a normal cadaver, but nor could he eat or drink to nourish, and his body couldn’t repair itself. After a while, Ben’s skin would lose moisture, his muscles would wear away.
Jakub was still sure that Ben would be useful both as a pack animal and something to ride when he was especially tired. And sheltering beside Ben to escape the wind had saved his life last night. But now Jakub eyed his bison friend and couldn’t help but wonder how delicious he would taste.
Oh well; too late for that. If he ever, ever made it out of here, he’d go to the nearest tavern and order the biggest, juiciest steak he’d ever seen.
This brought him to a decision he needed to make about the coyote. Its corpse was on the ground, a gallon of blood dried around its neck fur, its eyes lacking the glow from the night before and looking more like stones.
Jakub felt a twisting in his gut, and he knew this feeling was his fault.
Back in the academy, necromancers were trained to be completely emotionless about death. It was essential because a necromancer couldn’t perform his work if seeing a corpse brought tears to his eyes.
After graduating from the academy, after dealing with the death of his mentor, after losing friends, Jakub had decided that he couldn’t live like that
. He couldn’t be around death and feel nothing for it; it wasn’t human. So, he had worked to untie the bonds the academy had put on his feelings. It had been tough, but little by little he had learned to feel empathy.
This brought a conflicted feeling in him now as he stared at the coyote. Only one of them could have lived last night; even the coyote would say that if he could talk. That didn’t make it easy to see such a beautiful animal, a product of the land of which Jakub was an intruder, dead.
That was his problem, he knew. There was once a day he could have looked at the coyote impassively. If he wanted to feel empathy and be more human, then he had to accept the times that didn’t feel good.
To settle his feelings, Jakub dwelled on the choice lying dead on the ground in front of him. His options were simple, yet impossible. Either he drained essence from the coyote to fill some of his soul necklace for later spell use, or he butchered the coyote for its meat and fur.
He couldn’t do both; draining the essence now would spoil the meat. Butchering it would cause its essence to seep into the ether without letting Jakub drain it.
If he drained the essence, he was gambling on being able to find food. Soon. Today, actually. He could physically survive for, what, 20 days without food? But come day 19 when his stomach had shriveled to the size of a nut and his body had almost consumed itself, 20 days wouldn’t seem so long. Clinging on to life didn’t help if he was too weak to seek water, to get out of the sun, to find shelter before nightfall.
It was unlikely he’d kill another animal like the coyote, and it might be his only chance to get essence. If he had essence he could summon Ludwig, who could travel the plains much faster than Jakub and find shelter for him.
There was a chance that the nearest shelter was hundreds of miles away. There might be very few chances to eat along the way. He might summon Ludwig, learn the location of shelter, only to find he’d need a wagon and half-dozen bison to get there.
But the things that Ludwig could find for him…
Damn it. He had to take a chance. No point lying about it, either; it was a chance that excited him.
Touching his Soul Harvest glyphline tattoo, Jakub spoke the spell word of Essence Grab, and he sucked the life essence from the coyote.
Necromancy EXP Gained!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIII ]
It would be impossible to explain to a non-magic user how it felt for a necromancer to get essence from the dead. The closest might be if someone was intensely hungry and then given a buffet of succulent dishes to gorge on. Every gust of essence was food hitting an empty belly, except there was no digestion; the feeling of nourishment was instantaneous.
When Jakub looked at his soul necklace, he was shocked.
Essence Remaining: [IIIIIIII ]
The coyote filled his necklace way more than he’d expected, giving him half the essence that a human would.
The weighting of essence was as much a murky subject now as it had been centuries ago when the three original necromancers created the art, but there was a popular school of thought; most master necromancers believed that essence gained depended on the power, experience, and deeds of the corpse you drew from.
A coyote shouldn’t have given him that much. It was strong, sure, but there were plenty of bigger beasts that would have given him less. Nor did it look particularly old, so he couldn’t vouch for its experience. That led him to one conclusion; that this coyote, in its animalistic way, had led somewhat of a noble life.
It didn’t make sense. Animals didn’t have a sense of morality. They lived for survival and sure as all hells didn’t accomplish deeds the way a person might.
Then again, what about a dog who died defending his master? Stories abounded of things like that. Maybe animals had more nobility than he had thought.
He looked at the animal again, this time with a sense of sadness. It looked the same as it had minutes earlier, except its essence was gone now. He had robbed it of a chance to go to the afterlife.
Sentimentality was a value he couldn’t afford out here. He shut it off like a leaking tap, though drips got through and he did his best to ignore the sound.
He spent the next hour skinning the coyote. It was tough, messy work. A master hunter would have been disgusted at the way he parted it from its fur, but Jakub only had a week’s worth of hunting lessons from years ago in the academy to draw from. Those weren’t official lessons but ones he got from someone he met in the academy grounds, so his hunting education wasn’t thorough.
As messy as it was, this left him with a coyote pelt that, once he cleaned it off, he could wear over his shoulders or use as a blanket when the nighttime winds came.
Item Received: Coyote pelt [Poor]
The poor coyote was furless. A raw, bloody mess covering in desert dust. There was no point taking its meat since draining its essence had spoiled it. Nor was there any question of giving it a burial to try and cure his stabbing sentimentality toward it. He didn’t have a shovel, nor the energy to use it.
Instead, Jakub took his Tales of the Wind Caller book, and he skimmed through until he found a passage in a chapter titled A Death Died Honorably. It was just a four-line poem:
When the time has come,
When the years have passed,
When battle is done,
You walk one last path.
He tore this page out and lifted the coyote’s paw and put the page under it, and he hoped that an animal like that, one used to making live-or-die choices in Sun Toil, would understand.
With his essence and his new fur, Jakub felt a little better, but he still had a lot to do. There was no telling how many nights he’d have to spend out here, and he didn’t think he would live through another one like the last. He needed nourishment.
Touching his Death Sense tattoo, Jakub spoke his favorite spellword of them all; Summon Bound.
The ground a few paces ahead of him began to glimmer. It looked unreal, wavy like the horizon on a hot day. A portal of light took form. It was weak at first but with snaps and bangs that cast off the scent of spent essence, and the light grew stronger and stronger until it was churning with energy.
A form leaped out of it, sailing ten feet into the air and then landing with grace, before inexplicably losing its balance and stumbling, then looking side to side to see if anyone had seen it.
Jakub felt the grin spread wide across his face. It was uncontrollable. Even the best day could be improved by seeing his best friend but now, when he was tired and hungry and lonely, he felt himself well up.
“Jakub!” cried a voice.
And then the animal was charging at him, paws pounding on the dirt, tail swishing side to side in ecstasy.
Jakub braced for impact, but when Ludwig crashed into him his weak muscles gave way and he fell on his back, and he was powerless to stop Ludwig slurping his bristly tongue over his face.
“Ludwig…I…can’t…breathe,” he said as he tried to avoid the licks. “Give me a second.”
Ludwig stepped back from him and sat on his haunches. He might have been almost the size of a lion, but he looked like a normal dog then, sitting patiently with his tail going side to side, his eyes wide and wet and fixed on Jakub.
Recovered, Jakub got to his feet and he hugged Ludwig tight, smelling his fur, appreciating that he could even do this. Until recently, Ludwig’s form had been purely spectral, unable to touch the physical world. When Jakub had advanced to journeyman necromancer, his Summon Bound spell leveled up, and it made Ludwig’s presence in the world stronger.
“Where’ve you been?” said Ludwig. “It’s been decades! You look so, so different, Jakub. So much older. You really should start taking care of yourself. I haven’t seen you in…”
“Two weeks,” said Jakub.
“Where are we? We came out here to play?”
“I wish, my friend.”
Ludwig’s eyes narrowed. “You look hurt.” Then he looked around and he saw the flayed coyote. “Poor thing. What h
appened?”
“It’s a long story to tell, and I don’t have much time to tell it. The longer you stay, the more essence it will use.”
“Jakub, if you’re hurt you need to tell me!”
It was true that Ludwig’s presence would cost essence the longer he stayed. He had spent two bars of his new essence bringing him here, and his necklace would empty if he let Ludwig spend the whole day in Toil. As much as he needed his friend’s company, he couldn’t afford that.
Equally, he knew that Ludwig’s concern for Jakub bordered on psychotic. He was quite neurotic, especially for a summoned demon, and he wouldn’t be able to focus unless he was sure Jakub was safe. Ludwig’s lack of focus meant more essence spent.
Jakub spent the next few minutes relaying his predicament as efficiently as he could. He was quite proud of how concise it came out considering that his skull was throbbing.
When he was finished, Ludwig looked around, taking in the vast sweep of desert. The seriousness in his eyes made Jakub confident that his friend understood his predicament. Ludwig looked at him thoughtfully.
“I suppose this means we can’t play.”
“I’d sell my soul to any demon in any afterlife to be back in the academy grounds throwing a pigskin for you to chase,” said Jakub.
“A necromancer really shouldn’t mention selling his soul. We need to get moving. How far to home?”
“Hundreds of miles. Thousands, maybe. I can hardly think straight.”
“What? You’ll never walk that!”
“I’m focusing on today, and then tomorrow. I’ll take each mile as I come to it, Lud. I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything,” said Ludwig, his tail no longer swishing.
“I need food, water, shelter. I want you to circle the perimeter, maybe ten miles each direction. That’s probably about as far as I can manage right now. I need you to mark on my map anything I can sleep in, drink, or eat.”
“Anything? You’re usually choosy about your food…”
