by Deck Davis
Patton scratched his patchy beard. That was another change in his son – he could grow the beginning of a beard now. When did that happen? When he was sixteen, his face was balder than an egg and he couldn’t change that no matter how much growth ointment he bought from the local tinker.
At least York had time to catch up now. To make up.
“I’m not staying,” said Patton.
“I know, I know. This isn’t Dispolis. Open your window at night and you can hear your neighbors sneezing. But city life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and country air is good for young lungs. Still, I suppose Dispolis or Merthe or Red Twyen aren’t too far away. You could send the children on a wagon at weekends. They could come and stay…”
“No, we’re leaving. There’s a ship bound for the Peppen isles. First one to go there in years. I’m taking it.”
“The Peppen isles? It takes months to get there, lad. You’re not thinking this through.”
“Come on, you’re doing it again,” said Patton. “I understand this isn’t what you wanted. But I wanted you to meet your grandkids before we went.”
“People don’t come back from the Peppen isles.”
“I know. We’re going to stay. Everything here reminds me of their ma. When it rains, I remember how she used to take the kids to the lake and watch the frogs. When I walk into town and smell bread, I remember what a gods-damned bad cook she was, and how I always made her laugh when I teased her about it. Nowhere and nothing is safe from memories, Pa, and I need a fresh start. I need to get myself back together for the kids.”
“You didn’t come to make up. You came to say goodbye.”
“Didn’t seem right leaving without it.”
“When I lost…” he started, but he couldn’t say her name. “When I was alone, I stuck it out. I stayed.”
The anger that flinched through Patton’s face now was an old one, one that had hidden under his skin waiting for his guard to slip so it could show. “Don’t start with the guilt. After all those years where you were fucking around Gods-knows-where? Don’t even look at me with those thoughts in your head. If you’ve gotta have them, look at the ground. Fuck! I didn’t come here for this bullshit.”
“I’m just saying that-”
“You’re still headsick, aren’t you? Damn it. You think I can have them around you with this? All the times you’d flip out when I was a kid, I never knew which side of you I was going to see.”
“I never, ever hurt you,” said York.
“Maybe not. But you scared the shit out of me. Scared me so deep that when I signed up and we went to fight the Baelin sympathizers and I went to sleep every night to the sound of mana wands blasting at the caves we were in, I felt better. The sounds were loud enough that I couldn’t think about anything else.”
York realized something then. He realized a truth that had been waving at him all through Patton’s visit; their roles had switched now. For years, York had been the stronger one. Tougher in mind and body.
But Patton wasn’t the rakish kid he used to be, and his mind had been hurt, scabbed, and had formed callouses tougher than diamond-tipped steel. He was the stronger one now, while time was grinding York away like waves against a coastline. His strength was fading. His thoughts coming slower.
That was the way it’d be until finally there was nothing left to slow.
York hugged his grandchildren. He knew he shouldn’t; it would only make it worse because it felt like every hug strengthened their new bond. He tried to trick himself, to pretend that he felt nothing for them or Patton, but he couldn’t. He was a sentimental old idiot.
Patton said his goodbye with a handshake, and York didn’t ask for more. He told his son good luck, and he gave him ten gold, a ceremonial dagger he’d been given from a Killeshi tribe, and a bronze-cast giant stewing pot that Patton’s ma used to cook in. Patton seemed touched at this, and that made it worth it.
Then he watched them put their things on the back of their cart, check the horses were hitched right, and then clamber up onto the driver’s side.
He felt like he was watching ghosts readying to depart. These were his family, but they were spirits, here one second and gone in a blink, leaving his life as untouched as if they’d never been in it at all.
He was an old man with an old house, and man and house were as empty as each other. His boxes and boxes of bones and skulls and horns and hooves. What did they mean now?
Deciding he couldn’t watch them leave, he turned and headed toward his front door. On it, there was a wicker figure of a three-eyed giant, which his wife had nailed in place and York had always hated, but now he wouldn’t remove it for all the gold in the queendom.
Patton was right about that; the people you lost left their marks in the strangest places, and there was nothing you could do to escape them.
As he reached for the door, he heard footsteps behind him. Turning, he saw his grandson rushing at him.
York held out his arms and his grandson hugged him. “See you soon, grandpa.”
“I don’t think so, lad. But let’s keep hope burning while there’s still fuel to feed it.”
“Will you come and visit?”
“The sea’s a rough dancing partner for an old man like me. But here’s something; at night, when the stars are out, look to them. Keep looking until you find one shaped like a ram, and speak to it. It won’t be dark here when it is in the isles, but I’ll wait until it’s night and I’ll speak to the ram as well. If we do it every night, me, you and your sister, who knows? A message might get through.”
“I will,” said the boy.
“Hold on a second,” said York. “I have something for you.”
“Pa! We’ve gotta get going,” yelled Patton.
“One second, lad.”
York went into his house and returned with two things; a giant hollowed-out tusk and a bear claw.
“Is that the claw from the story?” said his grandson.
“It’s yours now. Give the tusk to your sister.”
“Why don’t you go back?”
“Back where?”
“To the desert. You could go back and kill the bear.”
“My boy, he’s a grand beast and I’m an old man.”
“He’s old too.”
“A man hunts for survival. He hunts to feed his family, or he hunts to end the threat on his own life. He doesn’t do it because a beast got the better of him and gave him scars.”
“Then why do you keep all the trophies?”
York thought on that as his last surviving family left him alone in the house he once shared with his wife, a house that wasn’t a home anymore. He watched their horses pull their cart into the distance until they became smaller and smaller, much like the memories of his life that seemed to grow smaller in his mind as he grew old. He was starving. Not through lack of food, but more from starving of life. Perhaps the kid was right.
Before going back inside, York smoked a pipe of tobacco and he watched the distance, as though Patton might turn the wagon around and come back and say he was staying, or maybe he might ask York to go with them. If he had, York would have thought about it. Just for a few seconds to settle his pride. But he’d have said yes.
There was no return. The wagon was gone, and York’s pipe was empty. As he made up his mind to go into the house, something caught his eye. Something not far from his home.
He walked to it and he found it, there where the wagon had been. A bear claw discarded in the mud.
CHAPTER 22
Nothing but sand and dirt and lonely cacti spaced so far apart from each other it would take an hour to get from one to the other. Miles and miles of cruel land with a snake slithering over it, following orders of his master but not knowing that in following these, it had made his master realize there was no hope.
All this Jakub saw from his perch atop the sand dune. The king of a land nobody else wanted. Sam was leading him to water, but it was so far out of reach that it may as well
been waiting in the afterlives with the demons and the gods.
Knowing this, knowing that he’d journeyed this far and the journey was at an end, Jakub’s knees buckled. They’d decided not to support him anymore. There was no point. The last dregs of energy took flight on his last breaths of hope and they both left him at the same time.
He fell, tumbling down the dune like an empty can. He would have broken bones if the sand weren’t so soft, and when he put his hands out to stop his fall they sunk into the dune but didn’t slow him, and then he didn’t have the energy anymore so he stopped trying.
Sand invaded his eyes, mouth, dug deep into his hair, and four rolls later he was at the bottom, defeated and covered in a dusting of yellow sand and with bruises on his arms and face.
But he wasn’t dead.
Sam hadn’t crawled across the landscape, Jakub saw. Sam was here, by his feet, coiled beside a patch of darker sand.
At least it was colder down here in the shade of the dune. If Jakub had known how much protection it would give him, he’d have tumbled down here ages ago.
He touched his face and he felt raw skin, and the sand embedded in it made it sting. He swallowed and his throat felt like two pieces of paper rubbing together.
Upright, he took his dagger from his inventory and he began to dig at the darker patch of sand. Two inches down, the sand felt wet. Another four inches and he saw a trickle of water spurt into the hole he’d made, and it felt like a firework going off in his head, and it set all his body on edge and his nerves were like a metal rod drawing on lightning.
He widened and deepened the hole and saw more spurt through, only to be drained back into the sand before he had a chance to drink it.
Taking the rattlesnake skin from his inventory, he stretched it out as much as he could. It was rubbery and tried to spring back into place, and his muscles weren’t at their best, but his need to drink from this hole boosted him with strength, and he pulled and twisted the skin until it was wider.
Placing it in the hole, he made sure to cover the base and sides so no sand showed, and then he prodded the skin with his dagger to pierce a hole in the side.
Water spurted through now. Trickles of it like dew running down rock. Jakub waited for the skin to fill with the desperation of a street dog waiting outside a butcher’s shop for scraps.
When it filled halfway he couldn’t contain himself, and he drank the water. It tasted acrid, but it was refreshing. Half a skin was about two mouthfuls, and when that bounty hit his stomach it was a charge of energy set off inside him.
Already he could feel the moisture rush around his body, oiling him from the inside, airing him out, blasting life into the barren veins and organs that had barely kept him alive.
Jakub waited for it to fill again. “Ben, get down here,” he called to his bison friend. Then he stroked his snake friend. “Thanks, Sam.”
Sand displaced as the bison trundled down the dune, and Jakub bent over his hole to stop the sand from getting into his water.
When the skin filled completely he drank four mouthfuls of water and then he waited again, and he did this another eight times. He passed the day there, in the shadow of the dune, watching his water hole like it was an ancient shrine and he and the bison and snake were the only devouts for miles around.
After marking it on his map he felt hydrated enough to eat, so he had a handful of agave seeds and the rest of his agave flowers. It was a meal so light he barely felt it on his stomach. He could see a few cacti in the distance, but he wasn’t so sure they were worth the walk just yet.
It’d take a day to plot a course to reach them all, and he’d do that if he had to, but he needed something else. His body was crying out for substance. For meat. With the water and the shade of the dune, it was time to think a little bigger, because the better he could feed his body, the more it would serve him.
As the desert began to darken Jakub washed his face, cleaning the raw wounds caused by his fall. He wet his armpits, chest, and the back of his neck, and it made him dream of plunging into the sea and swimming for miles. He drank a few more skinfulls of water and then he lay back against Ben, and he draped the fur over himself.
It was night now, and Jakub had a plan for the night; he planned to sleep. But for a necromancer with the beginnings of a reanimated menagerie, sleep didn’t mean doing nothing. His beasts would toil even as he swam in his dreams.
“Sam, I want you to hunt tonight,” he said. “Bring me anything I can eat.”
As his snake slithered away, Jakub closed his eyes. Refreshed, somewhat sheltered, and with the hope of food waiting for him in the morning, he slept easier than he had since waking up with a bison on his legs.
CHAPTER 23
Two desert spiders as big as his hand, their legs coiled up and bellies bloated with young. Looking at them made him feel like their babies were crawling all over his skin. Sam had killed them, but Jakub felt like they might spring back to life at any moment. Like his presence as a necromancer might be enough to make these creatures stir from the dead without him even saying a spellword.
“This wasn’t what I had in mind,” he said, “But thanks, Sam.”
The snake had spent all night on the hunt. He had brought a hangradoo rat, too, crushing its head to kill it and leaving the meat for Jakub to eat. There were perhaps two mouthfuls there, but it’d have to do because he couldn’t bring himself to eat the spiders yet. In fact, the spiders looked like they could eat him. He wasn’t stupid enough to abandon them, but it’d take a few more hours of hunger before he was ready to figure out how to eat his own worst nightmare.
He was sitting with his dagger in his hand and rat on the ground, when he saw movement in the distance.
It was a wagon that he thought might have been a mirage until it got closer and closer, and soon he could see it in detail and he knew it wasn’t one of Gunar’s wagons.
As much as the idea of human contact made him want to run toward the wagon, he held back. There were few reasons for a man to come to Sun Toil, and they weren’t good. The only settlement that waited at the end was New Sanzance, and Gunar was the only man to trade there, which was how he made his fortune.
A man might take a long route, cutting through Toil to avoid trouble on the road outside it, but this wagon was too deep into Toil for that.
So, being not a trader, he could only think this wagon was a dark omen. He remembered something Gunar had told him about how brigands would travel into Toil to bury corpses they didn’t want to leave on the road for passersby to find.
Jakub marked the location of the water hole on the map. He collected water in the snakeskin and then wrapped it up and put it in his fur inventory bag. He widened the hole with his fingers and put his fur in and then buried it with the upturned sand and patted it down so it looked natural. The only thing he kept was his dagger, which he tucked between his boots and trousers.
“Ben, close your eyes and appear dead,” he told his friends. “Sam, whatever happens here, I want you to follow me at a safe distance. Ben, you stay here.”
When the wagon got closer Jakub saw the driver, a woman with her hair hacked short by a dagger’s kiss. She had protected her chest with brown leathers, and the leather glistened white with alchemical paste so the sun didn’t seep into the material.
Her bare arms showed a pattern work of purposefully made burn scars; swirls and circles and triangles all a deep, angry red. Where Jakub’s tattoos were gouged by ink, this woman had forged hers by fire.
The wagon was pulled by two horses, both of them weary and with good reason, because Jakub knew from Gunar’s long fireside explanations how better-suited bison were for pulling wagons in the desert. The canvas covering the wagon was black, again a poor choice of color for the climate. Gunar told Jakub he’d made the same mistake once. That one day it had gotten so hot that he’d seen a black wagon roof draw enough of the sun’s rays to set on fire.
Jakub touched his dagger for reassurance and he waited f
or the wagon to draw up. It was useless to run because the water had oiled him on the inside but it wasn’t magic. Of course, he did possess the magic that would heal him, but his soul necklace felt light and he didn’t want to waste the precious essence on himself.
He would just tell the woman the truth. There was nothing to hide about him traveling with Gunar and his company. The trick would be gauging the woman and seeing what she had to hide.
When the wagon had almost reached him, Jakub had one last thought. He spoke his spellword of Essence Grab and focused on the kangaroo rat.
Essence Received!
Essence Remaining: [IIII ]
The rat had gained him an extra bar of essence, though no advancement toward leveling his necromancy. Even so, the extra bar made him feel a little better because there was no telling when he might need it.
The horses caught him by surprise, halting with a wheeze and stomp of their feet just ten meters away. Their coats were unhealthy, the hair weak and splitting. The poor animals weren’t used to the sun and weren’t being cared for enough to bear it. Now that it was close, it was obvious that the wagon had been given more attention than the beasts pulling it. The wheels were oiled, the wood had no splinters in sight. All the canvas roping was double tied and not a hook missed.
The woman folded the reins over the driver’s seat. Jakub waited for her to hail him, but she didn’t. She stared at him, and Jakub stared back because his mentor Instructor Kortho had long ago taught him that when someone stared you out, you either met it or you looked away, and that moment would decide what kind of man you were.
She was the first to break, and Jakub felt a minor victory in that. He knew it was pathetic but wins were rare out here and you took what you could. He never thought that digging a hole in the ground and drinking desert water out of a snakeskin would count as one of the happiest times in his life, but that was the state of things now. His life was different.
