by Deck Davis
Hips walked through the clatter of pans, the spit of fire, the hum of chat mixed with laughter, jokes, and soft song. Gums flapping about tiredness, sleep, and the lack of beautiful women. Every second or third man asked their captain to sit and eat some grits or oats with them but as hungry as he was, his appetite came in flashes and worry for Marleya wouldn’t let him eat.
He reached a wagon parked on the leftmost edge of camp and hopped onto the driver’s seat and then up onto the roof in two moves. At least he still had his agility. There he sat and he could see one full spectrum of Toil, as vast as it was featureless, like what he imagined one of the more gruesome afterlives to look like.
Watching the horizon as the sun rose, reached its zenith, and then began to set again, Hips couldn’t pretend that this was normal. Marleya should have been back by now.
He hopped off the wagon as the crew were packing up blankets, starting fires, and butcher Jon was cutting some of the foxes, rats, and voles that their scouts had hunted. Hips took the longest piss of his life, aiming at a crack in the dry ground and trying to send his water deep into the dirt so maybe it’d nourish something down there and sprout a piss plant in decades to come that would bear his name.
Then he approached his men and women and stood before them, and he spoke through a dry throat and cracked lips.
“We’re going to have to go,” he told them. “Marleya will find us.”
CHAPTER 27
One day in Toil was much like the one before it and the one sure to follow, and Jakub spent two of these in driver’s seat of the cart where he’d gotten to know his two horses quite well and had formed something of a bond with them.
Albin and Olin, he called them, after the heroes in a series of adventure books he used to read back in his early days in the academy when he didn’t fit in, and the ink on the pages was the portal to a world of escape. Albin – the horse version - was older and had an even temper, but his brother Olin was stronger, even if it took a harsh word or two to get him to listen.
He followed whatever tracks he could find, retracing the journey of this same cart over the desert, over plains of sand longer than a man’s imagination, squeezing through a valley of blood-orange colored rock that rose thirty feet into the air, taking a winding route through a mausoleum of dead shrubbery that seemed to have crystalized so it looked like a sculpture garden.
Jakub had the luxury of shelter and water now, since there was a rolled-up tarpaulin with fishhooks and wire thread in it that meant it could be pulled out over the driver’s seat and would stay straight, shielding him from the sun. He found success with the water stone, and the first time it led him to a water hole he sat in amazement, wondering at the level of artificery skill needed to make it.
Then he dug like a madman to find a water trickle, and he used a piece of cut wagon canvas to block the sand and fill the hole with water, which he then drank until his stomach said, “give me a rest!” and he filled up some of the empty jars.
As well as that, he stopped whenever he saw carrion on the ground, which was rare, and he tried to draw essence from them. Most were down to their bones and he knew you couldn’t draw essence from a sack of bones because they’d been dead too long, but the desert was teaching him a new motto to live by: try something once, be thankful a hundred times. You never knew what would work.
Early morning on the second day he’d woke with a hunger that felt different. It didn’t feel like a survival hunger, it felt like a normal man’s hunger, and he wanted to satisfy it. He pictured a fire, skewer, and meat slowly cooking and releasing its vapors into the sky, and there’d be a jar or pan under it collecting juices.
The problem was that no sooner had he spotted a tasty vermin or lizard skittering over the sand, legs akimbo and eyes darting up down left right or predators, then it was gone.
The would-be skewered meat heard his horses stop and wheeze, heard the wheels of the cart crunch over sand and stone and stop, and they knew the finger of death was pointing at their vermin arses, and their Toil survival instincts kicked in. Life was one long sprint away from death here.
The hand of the pale reaper himself closed upon everything every day, but when it opened its hands again it could be a stage magician’s trick, and the soul it closed upon was gone, having used its experience to live for another sun.
He had to content himself with something he was getting sick of; more cacti. Sure, there was a variety in types of cacti, and in the parts of it he ate. At night he lit a fire and he even tried grilling cactus leaves and fruits, hoping that charring it and giving it a smoky taste and burned texture might trick his brain into thinking it was the same as the over-cooked academy meat, but it didn’t work.
At least his belly was satisfied, though, even if his taste buds were threatening strike action.
So Jakub spent the day following tracks, gathering water, foraging cacti, and trying to draw essence from any carrion he saw on the desert ground.
At night he’d reflect on his progress because thinking that he was inching nearer and nearer to revival was the only thing that filling the hole inside him that kept getting bigger and deeper like something was gnawing it.
So he’d lay in the wagon with the cloth flaps open so he could see the stars birthing and dying in twinkles of pure white, and he’d press his thumb tattoo so that it cast smoky words in front of him and reminded him what he’d accomplished.
Casting it for the last two days of riding, foraging, and essence gathering, it made for quick reading:
Inventory
Jar of water x6
Burlap sack [Contents: Dried Beans]
Burlap sack [Contents: Grain]
Coin purse [2 gold, 4 silver, 11 bronze]
Dagger
A dagger with an iron blade and handle wrapped with dried pigskin
Essence Remaining: [IIIIIIIIIII ]
Necromancer EXP to next lvl: [IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ]
It was late afternoon a few days after getting the cart when he saw shapes in the far, far distance.
“Woah,” he saw, pulling sharply on the reins.
Albin stopped immediately, while Olin stubbornly took a few more paces, telling Jakub that he’d only stop on his own terms.
The shapes were so far away that they lay in the horizon where the sun seemed to warp the light, and they looked like ink bleeding over yellow paper. But Jakub was becoming used to the colors of Toil, and there was an overwhelming theme to its ground, rocks, and sand.
Yellow. Every gods-damned thing was yellow. Maybe a cactus would be green-yellow, and yeah, the sky was blue. But everything else was yellow.
The shapes in the distance were white and brown, and he guessed they must be wagons.
He had to play this right. Get too close and they’d spot him, and the last thing he wanted to do was ride right up to the slavers in the wagon he’d taken from their dead crew.
Leaning forward and stroking Olin to try and win the younger horse’s trust, he eyed the distance. “That’s gotta be, what, three miles? Five? Hard to tell out here, everything runs so straight.”
He decided it was better to dismount and then cut an arc around the shapes so they didn’t see him approach. They were bound to have spotters, and Jakub didn’t want to creep into their field of vision. He had a nasty feeling that if a band of desert slavers saw him, things might not end too well.
This meant leaving the wagon, but he didn’t want to just abandon it in plain sight. Needing to hide it, he cut south-east for half a mile to a rock formation he’d seen, where four finger-like stones were high enough and had a big enough gap in the middle to hide the wagon and horses. Jakub untied the canvas on top of the wagon and he arranged this on top of the rock tips so that the center was covered and Olin and Albin were in shade. He opened cloth sack of grain and two jars of water and left these where they could get to them.
“I won’t be long,” he told them, and then set out, once again walking away with regret at leaving some of his
only friends in Toil.
Two hours later he was close enough to make them out in detail. It was getting darker now, and he could feel the kiss of the wind on the back of his neck where his shirt didn’t cover all his skin. He didn’t want to stay here long; just enough to get the lay of things, and then he’d head back to Olin and Albin.
They were slavers, alright. They were smoking, sitting, cooking, laughing, and talking. Must have had a dozen wagons, all told, and enough horses to pull them. Half were parked so the driver’s seat faced into the desert, and these looked in different directions like points on a compass, and there were scouts sitting in the seats watching the horizon for movement.
Jakub had ground grit and stones under his boots and slapped the dust all over his shirt, trousers, face, hair so that he was camouflaged against the ground. He was but one man and he was still a giant’s stone throw away, and he didn’t worry about the spotters. Besides, the one facing his direction, meaning he had a whole hundred or so miles of the horizon to look at, had a wide-brimmed hat over his face.
Honestly, they didn’t look like a mean bunch. He wondered if he’d got this wrong. Misheard something. But in his head, he heard the crack of a whip and he saw the molten coils of oil in the woman’s hand, and a tool like that could only come from slavers. The wagon he’d taken from them looked like the ones parked in a circle around the camp.
Sweeping his gaze from left to right through camp, Jakub saw what he’d hoped for and dreaded. A fenced wagon in the middle of camp, set in a circular shape.
Inside the fence was a huddle of forlorn shapes all grouped together. Knees drew up against chests, heads hung low. Others staring out into the distance much like the camp spotters, except they scanned the horizon not for danger but for rescue. Dust clung to their faces, clothes, and hair. One, a man that Jakub tried for all the world to recognize but couldn’t, wore only half a shirt, with part of it burned away and the edges charred black, a sure sign of a dry lightning strike.
They were the survivors of Gunar’s caravan.
Jakub felt a rush of longing in him now. He’d spent maybe a month and a half with these people, yet seeing them now after everything had happened and the days he’d spent alone, they could have been his best friends in the world.
It was hard to reconcile their dust-pale and beaten faces with the ones in his memory, because his memories of the camp were happy ones where Gunar would call an end to the day’s travel and lutes would be fetched, fires lit, meat placed on sizzling pans.
He needed to see familiarity. See who had survived. He didn’t know all their names but he knew faces, and he felt like every pair of recognizable eyes would be like finding greenery in the desert.
Damn it. He was too far away to really see them. It didn’t matter, though, because it didn’t change his resolve.
Time to answer a question; how did one lonely necromancer free his friends from a guarded slaver camp?
CHAPTER 28
It took a full afternoon of thought back at the canvas-covered finger rocks, but he finally had a method and a means. Jakub lay under the canvas with his wagon in his peripheral vision and with Olin and Alban sharing the roofed space, and he went over everything in his head.
First, he had to choose his time to attempt a mass rescue; in the daytime or the night. He was no scout, but he guessed darkness would give him better cover than the beaming sun. Good – that was settled.
But the slavers had wagons parked on the edges of the camp, each with a man on watch. It made sense that at night they’d double their watch. To make sure he was edging on the side of caution, Jakub settled on the tripling their watch.
That meant 18 men staring out into the deepest darkness. Or, 36 eyeballs that could potentially spot him sneaking into camp, and would certainly notice a bunch of slaves sneaking out. He was fairly certain of that, because the way he saw it, slavers were protective of their slaves. They wanted to make sure they didn’t escape since it would be more than a minor mishap to lose the produce they had journeyed into the desert for.
So sneaking was out. There was just no way he could do this quietly. Like an actor changing garb to suit changing characters from one scene to the next, Jakub would have to look at this differently. The longer he did, the more certain he was that there was only one answer.
Chaos. A man dealt enough bad poker hands by fate to lose his life and fortune would be well advised to throw his cards and flip the table, and escape his debts while fellow players recovered.
Chaos could be a shield and a cloak, and Jakub saw it as his only way through the slaver’s watchers.
At first, he looked at his wagon inventory and he checked his spell list and he wondered how he could use his resources to draw the slavers away from the slaves. When he realized he was only thinking of the here and now, of the immediately visible. He was lacking imagination.
Instead, he imagined he had power without limits. If that were true, what would he do?
Well, the last time he’d seen chaos rip a new arsehole in a camp, it had been when he and Gunar and the rest of the folks neared Equipoint rock.
Yes, that was it. Complete and utter anarchy from the ground and sky. Only, Jakub couldn’t summon a dust storm nor could he wield dry lightning, so there was no way he could inflict that kind of destruction on the slavers.
That left one more means; the toil-lusks that had corkscrewed out of the ground and emerged in a spray of dust and had swept through the weather-battered caravan.
Jakub couldn’t control storms or lighting. But if he could find and kill a toil lusk, he sure as gods’ shit had the means the control one of those.
CHAPTER 29
If finding a toil-lusk was hard, then killing one was damn near impossible. Really, even trying it bordered on the kind of headsickness that usually saw men standing outside taverns at night, bollock-naked and shouting curses at the moon.
Jakub had only done that once, the night before an ex-academy friend’s wedding. It seemed perfectly normal at the time.
The more he thought about it the more he realized how utterly reckless it was to try this. Bards in taverns far, far away sung songs about mad kings and insane princes, and even those royal wife killers and child imprisoners weren’t headsick enough to do something like this.
He was going to do it.
And so he stood under a canvas strewn over three finger-shaped rocks, wondering how to coax out one of Toil’s meanest predators. The canvas-covering didn’t offer much room with him, Olin and Albin sharing its protection, and the sun was blazing so he wouldn’t take them outside.
But he needed to think. In order to think, he needed to pace. There probably wasn’t any science behind walking around and getting ideas, but it sure helped. Maybe it was something about blood flow. Then again, it was said that an old necromancer named Curious Tom created the basis for the Health Harvest spell while on the toilet.
Olin and Albin chewed on the oats in the half-filled burlap and they watched him walk to and fro with an empty, torn burlap over his head to protect him from the sun. He had a water jar in one hand and a handful of sunflower seeds from the slavers’ stash in the other, simultaneously sipping and chewing as he worked out how to get close to a lusk without dying.
Even after spending a lot of time talking with Gunar and his desert-seasoned men about what to expect from Toil, he’d never bothered asking how a guy might find a giant lusk and try to kill it. He might as well have asked how to trap the sun.
This left him wondering how to find them. He knew they’d attacked the caravan, but he hadn’t seen one since then. A few nights earlier he’d perhaps heard one, late at night when there was a drop in the wind and he heard a giant crash in the distance and wondered if it was a lusk breaching. But since then? Nothing.
That was the first knot to untie; how to find a lusk.
“Let’s break it down, Olin,” he said, noticing he was the only one paying attention since Albin was sleeping with his long snout rested ag
ainst his brother.
“If I get real, real simple about this, then I know that lusks live underground, and they only breach for food. I’m assuming they must have burrows or something. A network of tunnels, most probably, and they’ll have sources of water underground.”
Bored with the topic, Olin huffed and lowered his head to the ground, and the brothers slept side by side. Jakub pulled up his map, studying the transparent network of terrain as he paced.
The thing was, lusks seemed like a mystery on first thought. Ten, sometimes twenty feet tall. They were insects, yet they were carnivores and actively hunted for meat. They could appear from nowhere, as the caravan had found when they breached without warning and rampaged through camp.
As strange as they seemed, there would be structure to their behavior. Everything had a pattern to it, which Jakub had learned many years ago when he had been in a tavern near the academy.
The barkeep there knew that most students who went in were below drinking age, but he didn’t care. If they had coin, he served them. One sweet summer, when the smell of the annual pepper crop hung in the air, Jakub had gone to the tavern to watch a bard perform. Twinkle Hands, they called him, and he was supposed to have played at the queen’s banquets a couple of times. Then again, it was rare to find a bard who wouldn’t claim that.
Twinkle Hands played a lengthy set, finishing with a song that seemed to run for an hour. The words that Hands sang, hummed, and let roll from his tongue spanned eons and empires. As beautiful as it was, Jakub found it jarring. It was custom for a bard to rhyme his songs, but this one didn’t have a single rhyme in it, and the effect was like an ice bucket over his head. He couldn’t say why; it just stuck out. Maybe it was because Jakub needed order. He needed the expected.
So he asked Hands why his epic song didn’t rhyme, and the bard said, “If there isn’t a rhyme there’s a reason, and sometimes the reason can be a rhyme by itself when you understand how it sounds.”
