by Deck Davis
There was none of Pup’s scent in the air. Bear didn’t catch the smell of much anymore. The things that once made him so strong were dying one by one. First his smell, now his eyes were growing weaker. His strength was soon to die, too. He knew he was getting slower, and with every sun and moon, his paws felt heavier.
With no smell to follow, Bear paced around the shelter and found marks in the dust. Good; the wind hadn’t carried Pup’s paw tracks away yet. Bear could follow them but he had to do it soon and do it fast before the desert tried to hide Pup’s prints from him.
He looked all around him and saw the two claw-shaped mountains one side of the world, and on his other side was a ridge that had once been full of water. Lots and lots of it. Bear missed it. Pup’s smell came from the direction of these ridges, and as long as he kept these on each side of him he wouldn’t lose his friend.
Checking his friend’s paw tracks on the ground one last time, bear roared up into the sky ‘don’t worry pup, Bear’s coming for you!’
“Two horses can’t pull a wagon of twenty people. That’s a fact,” said Marleya. She wore a shirt that exposed her shoulders and part of her chest, and she was rubbing alchemical heat salve on her exposed skin.
Forget that it smelled like goat crap eaten by a cow and then crapped out again; watching her rub the ointment all over was hypnotic.
Hips had to force himself not to look. It wasn’t fair to stare, because he wouldn’t look at any of his other crew like that. Ponytail Bob was rubbing the salve on his back arch just above his arse right now, and Hips didn’t feel the need to stare at him.
Instead, he looked away from Marleya. He looked at the half-dozen tents a few paces away, the fabric wind-battered and green and entirely inappropriate for the climate. Hips had bought them at a discount from a unit of the queen’s army who had just lost all but eight of their men in a skirmish with the Killeshi.
He was lucky to have found them. One morning, when the sparrows sang their morning tunes, word came down that the unit was being disbanded, not rebuilt, and Hips happened to be nearby. He got tents and provisions at a beggar’s price, and he’d strutted around with a smile on his face that day. Pity that the queen’s army built their tents to shelter from rain and snow, not wind and tropical heat. Now, after nights in the desert, the tents looked ready to rip apart.
Not to be reminded of his poor purchase he looked at Marleya again, and he felt a warm glow in his stomach. To counter it, he grabbed a whiskey bottle from Stern Hugh who was walking by, and he swigged the liquid back until lit burned his throat.
“Hey,” said Hugh.
“I’m invoking the captain’s code,” said Hips. “This whiskey might be poisoned, and I won’t let my men get hurt.”
Hugh muttered under his breath and walked off, leaving Hips alone with the bottle.
I’m not in love with Marleya, Hips told himself. I’m just a guy who hasn’t known the touch of a woman in two hundred and thirty-eight days and six hours.
It was only when he really concentrated that Marleya’s words found their target, and he felt panic rise.
“Two horses…You’re right, that won’t work with our cargo. Can we pull a few horses off some of our guys’ wagons?”
“For a while. But we always pair two horses to a wagon, and if you pull one then you’ll overwork the other, and they’ll drop. Then the guys will have to pull their own wagons, because we can’t leave them on account of freezing to death at night.”
Hips rubbed his hand through his hair, and it felt thin. Too thin. He was definitely losing it. Suddenly, the wind felt too strong, like it would start plucking his remaining hairs away.
“Then we either lose cargo, or we lose men,” he said.
“Cargo is a fine way to talk about them if it makes you feel better that we bunch them up so tight,” said Marleya, “But when you talk about their lives, we have to drop the word cargo. I signed up for slavery, not murder, and there’s a moral difference.”
“Honey, there’s no difference. Go ask some of the cargo we’ve processed in the last few years whether they’d prefer slavery or death.”
“All the same, we can’t…hang on a fucking second, Hips. You said we lose cargo, or we lose men, didn’t you?”
Hips knew she’d get prickly about this. “Our options are leave here with cargo, leave here with nothing, die here…or some of us make it out with cargo and our lives. Everyone knew the risks when they came here, Marleya.”
“I can’t watch you kill our own men. I don’t want to believe I’ve given five years of my life to the kind of man who would do that.”
The words stabbed at Hips, more so because he could see they were true. He saw disgust in Marleya’s eyes. The feeling was so ripe he could taste it on his tongue, and he wanted to spit it out.
“Then we’ll sort through the cargo. Find the old and the sick, and we’ll spare them from having to travel through Toil. We’ll do it humanely. This will be better for the rest of them.”
Marleya was quiet then. Hips hoped he said the right things, but it was always hard to tell, given that he almost entirely lacked a moral compass and thus didn’t know what was good or bad. Sometimes he just had to fire an arrow blind and hope he struck the target.
But it wasn’t Marleya who spoke first. Instead, it was one of the cargo in the nearby wagon, peering out from a gap where the tarpaulin didn’t reach.
Gunar had been in worse situations than this.
At least the slavers lit fires at night and they fed them and they even gave them mugs of heated whiskey to share. They kept as joyous atmosphere as they could, following the example of Hips, their leader, who was always laughing, singing, dancing. It helped because it distracted the kids in the prison cart.
Yes, this was nothing like some of the pits of darkest hell he’d been in. Once, way before his Toil days, he’d been traveling into Bishkark, and the ultra-orthodox Karkers had accused him of smuggling anti-religious propaganda into their state. They stripped him, searched every cavity, and locked him up in a pitch-black cell filled with roaches and spiders, and Gunar spent weeks listening to the scuttles coming from places he couldn’t see.
He’d take a cage like this over his past imprisonments, and just like he’d gotten out of those, he’d find a way out of this. He had to, he couldn’t cope with feeling responsible, and he couldn’t stomach the way Helena ignored him. She’d barely looked his way for hours now.
To pass the time he watched the slavers carefully, and he noted silly decisions they had made. Like their tents, for one. They looked like they belonged to a damn army or something. Completely unsuited for the heat. Sure, they kept the winds at bay, but every second they were exposed to such harsh sunlight, the fabric was weakening.
The slavers, too, were gorging on their whiskey and beer. In a place where the sun was so hot it could suck the marrow from your bones, that was stupid. His people always said Gunar was being too harsh by only allowing them to drink alcohol when they reached Equipoint Rock, but he did it to keep them safe. Alcohol dried a man out from the inside, and this was a place where that could kill.
As buffoonish as these people were, they were still their captors, and Gunar and his people were still prisoners.
It was down to him. Not just finding a way out of this for what remained of his people, but the blame for it happening in the first place.
Sure, they were all adults. Or, in the case of the children, they had their responsible adults make their decisions for them. And they followed Gunar not through love but because he paid the most. They had weighed the gold versus the risks and made their choice.
But there were things that Gunar hadn’t said. Like how he’d heard of the storm oracle’s reputation before he hired him, and he’d gone ahead anyway. And how for years now, every Toil trip had been riskier than the last. More casualties, more storms, almost like the desert was starting to resent Gunar and would show this against anyone who traveled with him.
When the st
orms had died and the slavers wagons suddenly appeared, Gunar had thought they were saved. That a miracle had been bestowed, and friendly faces had come to carry them out of Toil.
After the slavers subdued and captured them, Gunar fell into a silence. Even Helena couldn’t coax him out of it, and Lords, had she tried. Nicely, first. Then with her patented directedness.
Gunar had been deep in thought. Questions and memories accumulated over the years churned in his mind, and it was as though this imprisonment was the first chance he’d gotten to lay them all out and see them for what they were. It had been a grim business. It always is when a man really gets to know his own mind. Soon, though, Gunar found himself looking at a simple truth.
It was his fault this had happened because he’d always treated his caravaners as if they were inventory. No, not inventory. Tools. But if he was the one to get them out of it, the scales would balance out.
“Hey,” said Gunar, trying for all the world to keep the fear out of his voice. Fear was a disease, and it’d spread through the rest of his people until they lost their minds. And twenty-something people, all crammed together in a space like this…it could get brutal.
The slaver looked his way. At first glance, Gunar saw evil in the man’s eyes, but the longer he looked, the more he realized that wasn’t there. Gunar was projecting the evil based on the evil things the man had done, but the man himself didn’t look like a demon. He had a sharp jaw and a receding hairline that he’d tried to cover up artful combing, and the other, smaller details that told Gunar a lot. Calluses on his hands. Pale skin either unused to the sun or heavily guarded against it. A good posture, a leader’s way of keeping his head high, shoulders straight.
Gunar didn’t bother hiding the disgust he felt for the man. No point; he was no actor, and the feeling would transmit in his words and his eyes. He decided to play this honestly.
“You don’t need to talk about killing us. I know a way to get your horses back,” he said.
The slaver managed to look embarrassed. Imagine that; after Gunar and some of the others had abandoned the caravan and fled from the storm, the slaver and his band of bastards had been waiting. Gunar greeted them as saviors, and he found them to be slavers.
And this one was awkward when Gunar talked about killing.
The slaver came closer, and Gunar could see his muscles. He was late thirties but well-conditioned. His skin glistened in spots where he hadn’t rubbed alchemical salve into it properly. That told him something; that the slaver was about as prepared for Toil travel as Gunar thought he had been.
“Better you don’t listen to our conversations,” said the slaver. “It’s impolite, and you might hear things you don’t want to.”
“You’ve lost some horses, yes?” said Gunar.
“One to heatstroke. Another poor mare came down with influenza so strong it must have been demonic, and it tore through the others. Managed to isolate the sickness and stop it wiping ‘em all out.”
“You don’t bring horses to Toil,” said Gunar. “Anywhere else, horses are the better animal for pulling. Out here it’s bison.”
“Thanks,” said the slaver. “Just let me pull a few bison from my arse and we’ll be looking pretty. Sorry, I’m being sarcastic, ain’t I? What I should have said is, let me just waltz back in time so I can take your advice into account.”
“If horses are what you’ve got, then horses are what you’ve got. You haven’t butchered their corpses yet, have you?”
“Why in all the gods’ names would I butcher them?”
Gunar almost sighed, but he managed to keep his feelings internal. The slaver wasn’t as seasoned in toil travel as he thought. “When you’re crawling over the sandy arse of the queendom, frugality is divine. An animal passes from the world, you butcher it for meat. You cut off its fur and you drain as much blood as you can before it coagulates. Course, too late for that with your beasts.”
“We’ve got enough food, and our horses mean something to us, trader. They’re not just sacks of flesh, they’re part of the crew, and we don’t eat crew. You’re telling me that if your wife popped it, you’d butcher her up and parcel her out? Didn’t think so. Anything else you wanna say?”
“What if you could bring them back?” said Gunar.
The slaver’s eyes narrowed to the point of almost closing. Gunar didn’t think he’d ever been looked at with such a mix of disdain and awe. “I enslaved a group of crazies, didn’t I?” the slaver said. “I thought you were traders. Only sane reason a man would lead people into this hellhole. Well, that and to enslave them, of course. Now I’m seeing that you’re crazier than an alchemist with mercury stains on his nostrils.”
Gunar couldn’t argue that point; he was beginning to think he was crazy for coming back to Toil so many times. He hadn’t realized it until now. He thought he was too prepared to fail, but that had been arrogance. Every time he’d put a foot in the desert he’d rolled the dice and hoped fate was in a good mood.
“I was losing bison every time we came into Toil,” he said. “I usually reckoned on a forty to sixty percent loss rate, so I’d bring more bison along to compensate. More bison means bringing more feed, hirin’ more hands to watch them. More money.”
The trader nodded, completely following along. Gunar had won his attention, he could see that in his eyes. At least he was a businessman.
“So,” continued Gunar, “This time, I brought a necromancer along with me. Agreeable fella, if a little insular. You know magic types. Or maybe you don’t; some folks don’t trust things that are impossible done by people who shouldn’t be able to do it.”
It was only a millisecond before understanding crept onto the slaver’s face. That told Gunar something; tricking this one would be difficult. He’d chosen correctly when he decided to show his cards straight. Not only that, but it was impossible to ignore the fact that the woman he’d been talking with had stayed just ten feet away from them, letting him and Gunar talk, but always watching. There was a look of cruelty in her eyes, like the rest of the slavers did this for money but her reasons went deeper.
“You brought a necromancer to resurrect your fallen beasts,” said the slaver. “That didn’t even cross my mind.”
“It took almost a decade to cross mine, and another year to find a mancer who’d join me. This lad’s not long out of the academy, but he ain’t green, I can tell you that much. He’s seen some shit, that’s for sure.”
The slaver grabbed the edge of the tarpaulin and pulled it back and looked at the rest of Gunar’s crew in the wagon. “Where is he?”
“Not here. Before the storm hit, we sent him away on a cart full of explosives. Not as punishment, mind you. We didn’t want it to explode…and what do you know? It exploded. Fate is the sauciest bastard around, isn’t he? There’s a chance he made it, though. Slimmer than a sausage dog’s pecker, but a chance. That’d mean he’s out there. Get to him before the sun cooks him, give him a little water, and maybe he’ll bring back your horses.”
“Not to mention bring a handsome price. Last time I brought my contacts a mage, I didn’t leave the brothel for a whole year. You know what they say; magic flesh is worth its weight in gold. Thanks, trader.”
“Now,” said Gunar. “You can see we’re being cooperative. How’s about you let some of us go? Don’t just send ‘em loose into the desert though, the sun would pucker them up before they’ve walked ten miles. And not me. You can keep me, but the younger folks, the younger families. Drop them when you get to town, let me help pay for another chance.”
The slaver held his gaze, and Gunar saw the depth in his eyes now. They were dark, but not with cruelty. If anything, there was a glimmer in his stare that told him this man could have been something else, something good, if he’d taken a different path. Even with that path fork behind him, his way wasn’t completely dark yet.
“You’ve bought the freedom of one man, one woman, and one child,” said the slaver. “Choose who it is amongst yourselves.”<
br />
Gunar watched the slaver walk away, and he saw the woman approach him. Listening intently, he heard their hushed words.
“You’re letting three of them go? Tell me you’re bullshitting them.”
The slaver shook his head. “I’ll keep my word. The necromancer’s flesh will keep us living like princes, if he’s already dead. There’s a guy who’ll pay for flesh with a kick to it.”
A hand squeezed Gunar’s shoulder, breaking his concentration. Helen was next to him. She’d avoided him for hours, but now she was back by his side and there was something approaching kindness in her eyes. “You did a good thing,” she told him.
Bear had traveled under the glare of the morning sun until Pup’s tracks became strange, moving in circles that became small and smaller. He pushed on until he reached the center of the circle, it was there that he felt the weight of the sky, of the desert, of all of life crash onto his old shoulders.
Blood was splattered all around. It was dried on the ground in great patches. Lots of it, too much to hope that anything good could come now. Even if Bear had hope in his heart, his heart shattered when he saw the lump at the center of the circle.
A bloodied lump. Four paws, a small, long body. No fur. Just left there to cook under the sun.
Bear collapsed to the ground. He wailed and wailed and wailed. He tore at his fur. He thought of his best friend and he despaired, and he wished he could do anything, give anything to have Pup back.
He would have given his own life to the desert so Pup could walk again.
He stayed there all morning and he wept until he was dry. The sun cast warning rays down at him, heating his fur, burning the skin under the bald patches that had begun to form recently. Bear felt it scorch him but he stayed there with one paw resting on Pup’s raw body. He waited in a daze, staring into the distance until he began to imagine that he would see Pup emerge from the distance just as he had so many times before after coming back from the hunt.
