by Deck Davis
The woman spoke to someone unseen behind her. “We got any spare twos-and-twos?”
“Think so, why?” called a voice in reply from inside the wagon.
“You aren’t going to believe this.”
CHAPTER 24
Two men emerged from the back of the wagon. Ragged beards and mean-set eyes, skin smeared white with alchemical paste and swords hanging from their belts. They were on him before he could draw his dagger, pointing their weapons at his throat.
“Think he’s one of the traders?”
“Must be.”
“Up,” one of them told him, and both men dragged him to his feet before giving him a chance, and they marched him to the wagon and threw him in the back like he weighed less than a butterfly’s whisper.
They climbed up after him and made him sit down, and it was there he learned what the twos-and-twos were that the woman made them get. They were twin sets of manacles, rusted and time-worn.
One of the men put a cloth sack over his head and Jakub could smell the nutmeg or cinnamon that had once been in it. He felt the cool metal of a manacle around his wrist, and all of this had happened so quickly that he hadn’t had time to process his danger, but his instincts fired now.
“Sam,” he said.
“Huh?” answered a man.
“Sam, up. Kill one of them.”
“This one’s got sun on his brain,” said a man.
But then Jakub heard a rustle and a man made a sudden step toward him.
“Snake!” he said and Jakub heard a thump as he dove off the wagon.
The other man was too slow, and he could do nothing but scream. Blinded by the cloth sack, Jakub could only imagine the image before him of a reanimated snake biting a man.
He removed the cloth sack and saw one man lying on the wagon floor with a snake biting him again and again, tearing his skin and bringing out the blood. His skin had already bloated like rotten beef as the last dregs of Sam’s venom swum into his flesh.
Jakub reached for the man’s sword but it stuck on the loop on his belt, and now the other man showed his face at the wagon opening. Blood smeared his temple from where he’d fallen out of it.
He started to climb up. Jakub tugged at the sword but it wouldn’t move.
He took his dagger from his boots and as the man climbed up he plunged it into his neck, feeling the blade stick at the gristle and bone but he pressed harder, as hard as his newly-watered body would let him, and when he took the blade out the man slumped back off the wagon, out of sight.
He heard movement from outside from the driver’s carriage. Moving purely on survival instincts, Jakub looked at the snake-bitten man and he stabbed him five times in the neck until there was no skin left, just torn flesh with blood pooling in it.
He spoke the spell word of Essence Grab and focused on the man.
Essence Received!
Essence Remaining: [IIIIIIII ]
Necromancy EXP gained!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ]
He was interrupted before he could harvest all the man’s essence when the woman appeared at the wagon opening. She held a hot oil whip in her hand. The handle was made from brown cow leather but the whip itself was a floating coil of hot liquid, the oil held into its whip shape and kept warm by artificery, but it would lash against his skin when she struck it.
“Fire and stone,” she said. “You’re a stubborn one. Thought you were half-dead. Do you want to see your kin? They’re all waiting for you back at camp.”
“My kin?”
“Yeah. We got ‘em waiting for you. Well-fed, cozy. Hips even gave them his personal wagon.” She lowered the oil whip. “I’ll take you to them.”
Jakub’s ears had always been attuned to lies because he’d grown up with them. Even the most practiced deceivers got a strange edge to their tone when they lied, as if the lie lined their throats and warped the sounds of their voice. Hers was only slight. She was a good liar, so good he wanted desperately to believe her and to see who had survived from the caravan.
Remembering the twos-and-twos and cinnamon head sack, Jakub stabbed his dagger into the tarpaulin in front of him. He cut a line down it and then pulled it back and stepped through the slit, like a grown man breaching a birth canal.
“Thunder and rock!” shouted the woman. “Hips is just goin’ to have to settle for your corpse.”
After a cracking sound came a smell, hot and tarry. A spot of hot oil hit the back of his neck just before the hairline, the rest of the whip missing him as he cleared his breach in the wagon tarpaulin and found himself at the front, in the driver’s seat.
With the stench of oil came a burning smell, and he felt heat behind him. Jakub grabbed the reins next to him and he whipped them and the horses snorted but didn’t move, seeming to know the man holding their bonds wasn’t their master.
The woman was beside him now, oil whip still in her hand, the coil trailing on the ground. Smoke began to twist upward to the gods, smoke signals with no message and nobody to deliver it to even if there was.
He’d ridden horses before but never driven a cart, and he was about to learn the skill under pressure.
The woman raised her oil whip. “Salt and brimstone, you’re goin’ta make me kill you, aren’t ya? And I really, really don’t want’ta. I swore off that sort of thing years ago.”
He pushed the woman off the wagon and he raised the reins and lashed them down. This time the horse on the left, sandy as the desert and with rippling muscles all over its body, trotted. The horse beside it followed suit and the wheels whined through first use, but soon the cart was carrying him forward, kicking up more and more dust as it went over the sand.
The woman shouted behind him. Things about fire and thunder, stone and oil. Threats.
Jakub focused only ahead, to the distant north that was a sea of sand. The horses seemed to struggle in it. In places, they planted their hooves so hard they sunk. They weren’t used to it, so the cart must have come from another direction, one where the ground sand broke back into rock. That would be easier going.
Once he was far enough away, he stopped. He had a cart, and he had more essence but his items were way back at the dune, buried in the water hole. Ben was there, too, and Jakub found himself missing him.
He wondered if he should go back and get his things and maybe hitch Ben to the cart and have him pull it. While he was going that way, swing by and kill the woman.
The thought to murder her was so quick, so easily had, it surprised him.
That kind of practicality was a shadow of his past, of marks made on his stream of consciousness by the instructors of the academy. It showed the dent marks where they’d chiseled his thoughts to mold them. Maybe it was what he needed out here, where everything was in competition and remorse was a route to the grave.
He’d made up his mind to run her down using the cart and then look around for the tracks that she and her men had made to get here, so he could see how much truth lay in what she’d told him.
Raising the reigns, something gave him pause. Movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention, and when he looked east he felt his breath leave his chest in one gust.
He dropped the reins and let them flop over the driver carriage, where the sandy horse lazily flicked his tail against them.
The movement was a desert bear charging from the direction of the resting sun.
Lumpy, not a beast of pure strength but a skin sack of muscle and fat with old bones rattling inside that somehow combined to let it sprint. He could tell its age even a hundred wagon-lengths away because its fur was missing in patches, whether through the war of time or wars from Toil survival.
Its run was quick but lumbering, as though pain hit the bear with every other step.
The woman turned too late, she raised her oil whip too late, and when the bear was on her the whip fell from her hands and she was battered and bitten and torn by teeth and claws.
Her weak shouts died as soon
as she didn’t have a throat to make them through, and when she was limp on the ground the bear was on her, gorging on her skin and her flesh until her blood soaked into his fur and made a paint over his chest and face and nose, and Jakub was sure he could see the bear’s teeth now, a jagged row of knives covered red that appeared and disappeared each time it tore fresh strips from her.
After just minutes she wasn’t a woman. You couldn’t call her that anymore after the bear had feasted on her body.
CHAPTER 25
While the bear gorged, Jakub drove the wagon north. With every mile, the horses grew used to his presence, and after what he judged to be nearly two dozen miles he let them slow into a trot, and then to a stop. Standing on the driver cart he looked around and saw waves of sand everywhere, rising in places and sinking in others. Cacti popped up here and there, waving at him with the promise of food.
And there was no sign of any damn bears.
He climbed through his canvas slit back into the wagon. The man with the punctured throat had bled every drop in his body onto the wood, staining it so much that the dried blood looked like varnish. Jakub drained the rest of the essence from him.
Essence Received!
Essence Remaining: [IIIIIIIIII ]
Necromancy EXP Received!
EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ]
Missing his inventory bag made him feel vulnerable even if there wasn’t much he could use in it. Luckily, the wagon had a bounty. Jakub checked the dead man’s pockets and he checked a lidded crate in the corner of the wagon and he looked in a saddlebag hanging by its strap on the driver’s deck. Once he’d looked at all the things he pressed his thumb tattoo and let a spiral of smoke form in front of him, displaying the itemized inventory.
Inventory:
Pouch of Dried Mixed Beans
[A cloth pouch filled with kidney, black, and fava beans. Full of protein and ready to eat.]
Pouch of Dried Seeds
[A cloth pouch of assorted seeds.]
Water Stone
[An artificed, pyramid-shaped stone that vibrates when near a water source]
Jars of water x2
Empty Glass jars x6
Scabbard [Empty]
Coins
20 Gold
15 Silver
56 Bronze
It wasn’t just a good loot haul; it could save his life. The beans would keep him going for three, maybe four days if he rationed them, and owning two full jars of water made him feel like a king.
The water stone was interesting; where Gunar had relied on carting a wagon filled with water supplies, these people used an artificed stone to find water. He was looking forward to trying it out since anything that was artificed by magic enthralled him.
It was dark now, and the desert was louder than ever with the calls of the carrion and prey birds and the occasional high-pitched squeals of unseen insects, all competing with winds that started as breezes and seemed to gorge on something just as the bear had done, growing stronger and stronger until they were screaming around outside the wagon.
One side effect of studying necromancy was that he was perfectly comfortable in the presence of a corpse, and it was only when he almost stumbled over an arm that Jakub remembered he hadn’t gotten rid of the man yet.
He’d already taken everything useful, but he made one last check of the man’s clothes. As he moved the man’s sleeve to check if he wore and trinkets, he saw a mark on his forearm. Ink under the skin, like Jakub’s glyphlines, but there was nothing magic about these markings.
He was a slaver. No doubting it now. The markings were ones that prisoners got in some of the queen’s larger internment camps, where they were branded so they could never hide what they’d done. This man was a murderer and a slaver.
After rolling the corpse out of the wagon, dumping him, then riding a further five miles to put distance between him and it in case carnivores smelled the meat, Jakub decided to rest for the night.
He found the canvas shutter rolled up and fastened above the oval doorway. He untied a couple of well-made knots and let it unfurl, and he spent the night in a real shelter.
It was strangely cozy in there. It took him back to his days as a kid, to the first seven years of his life spent in tents, wrapped up in furs and sleeping side-to-side and top-to-tail with the other camp children who he didn’t share blood with but were his brothers and sisters, nonetheless.
This was a surprise. Those memories had always been tainted by the cannibalism that came later, when his mum and dad became Imbibists and ate the flesh of the dead hoping to digest their magic.
He’d never missed that time once the academy rescued him. He’d done his best to never think about all those years, or of the people he spent them with.
But now, wrapped in a dead man’s clothes, sleeping on the floor of a wagon in one of the remotest places in the queendom while the desert winds tapped at the canvas and tried to find a way in, Jakub thought back to those night in tents with his pretend brothers and sisters. And for the first time in a long time, he missed them.
The next morning he felt more refreshed than he had in a long time. He had a belly full of beans and water, and when he took a piss it came out vaguely normal-looking. He was looking forward to the days he didn’t have to check the color of his urine.
His renewed body eased the throbbing in his skull, and he felt like his brain had been in the grip of a strong hand all this time and now the grip had eased, and he could think properly.
With food and water taken care of for a while, maybe it was time to start thinking of long-term plans. It felt like evolution; he wasn’t just a scavenger of the desert anymore, living one sun cycle to the next. He could plan a way to get off this land of rock and ruin.
Two things seemed obvious; some of the traders had survived, and they were with the rest of the oil-whip woman’s crew. Given her disposition toward Jakub, he doubted they were spending their nights on duck-feather pillows and eating grapes.
Oil whips and two-and-twos and arm markings. These people were slavers. They had to be. They’d been in Toil when the dust storms converged, and they’d gathered whichever poor bastards had crawled out of the wreckage.
Now that he had a wagon, Jakub could start his journey out of Toil. It had taken him and Gunar’s caravan the best part of a month to reach Equipoint Rock, but Jakub was alone, so he could go faster. Assuming the horses didn’t die, maybe two weeks. If he did that, he was leaving the caravaners behind with the slavers.
Did he have it in him to do that, knowing the stories he’d heard of the cruel men and women who traded in human flesh?
Some of the slaves would be shipped across the sea and sold to the Baelin Empire, enemies of the queendom. They’d be tortured, flayed, stripped of not just their skin but everything else, down to their nerves, thoughts, humanity.
The old would be sold to the processing plants in the deep, deep, deep south, where it was said smoke rose to the heavens, and giant presses made from metal rose up and down all day long, creating a paste from human flesh and bone that was then sold to dark artificers who would use it in creation of diabolical items.
The children would be sold here, there, everywhere. Mostly for breeding, sometimes for other things. Things Jakub didn’t even want to think about.
As much as he wanted to see the emerald green grass of the real queendom lands so much that it was an ache in his chest, he couldn’t. He couldn’t go until he knew for sure.
If slavers held Gunar or other survivors, he had to help them.
Not wanting to waste the morning time when the sun was weak, he spent a few hours foraging for cacti. He used the water stone, walking in circles around his wagon and hoping to feel the stone vibrate and indicate water, but it didn’t. By the time his skin started to get hot he’d gathered some cactus fruits and flowers, and nothing more.
Back in the wagon, he cast his map out so the spindles of light spread over the wagon floor. There was a dot to show
his position, and then way, way across the sand plains were three dots to show Ben, Sam, and his inventory bag. He wanted to get back to them because not only did he want his inventory back, but his reanimated friends were useful. In different ways, they’d both saved his life.
But there was a problem. A big, bear-shaped problem.
The wagon was no protection from that thing; bears could run faster than a horse, and the canvas wouldn’t withstand even the softest swipe from its claws. Heading back to Ben and Sam meant heading back to its hunting grounds.
The safest, sanest choice would be to avoid it, but Jakub wasn’t allowed the luxury of safe and sane. He needed to find the rest of the woman’s group so he could see if any of the caravaners were alive and enslaved, and the only way to find something in Sun Toil was to have a marker.
Right now, there was a chance that whatever tracks the woman’s wagon had made in the sand and dirt to find Jakub at the dune, might still be there. Doubtful, but a chance, and his only one. Otherwise, he could search for days and hear not even a whisper.
It was the only way. Head back to the dune, look for wagon tracks that survived the wind, trace them back to the slavers. All this while avoiding rampaging bears.
Easy.
CHAPTER 26
York, the hunter – Hips Maguire – Gunar Helketoil
“You sure this is where you want me to leave ya?” said the driver.
He let go of the horse’s reins, but his hands stayed in position as though he was pretending to be a crab. The man had done his job so long it had changed his body. Hells, he even smelled like his horses, but that might have been because he rarely bathed.
York hopped off the cart. He opened his burlap sack and gave the driver four gold. The driver’s eyes widened so much his eyeballs were ready to pop out.
