by Deck Davis
York would rather die defeated and bloodied in Toil than lonely and shrunken in an empty house.
Thinking this firmed his resolve, and then, having left his doubt behind, he made Kolja gallop more and leave it well and truly behind, and he almost imagined some of his youth returning to him, as if his body had held back a last piece of resolve to nourish him in his last, great hunt.
It was while riding his fourth night that York spotted a dark shape way in the distance. At first, he didn’t believe his eyes, but a few miles closer there could be no doubt; he’d reached Equipoint rock.
He smiled now. Most people didn’t know the routes through the desert that he did, and they didn’t have a horse like Kolja. It would have taken some other fool weeks to get here.
The rock was still a few days ride from him, maybe even a week, but only a man alone and riding a horse that moved like the wind, racing against the cold grasp of time, could reach it so quickly.
He rode through the night and then into the morning, finally stopping Kolja when the sun colored the desert golden. He checked his claw and compass and saw that the bear was due east now, and York didn’t have the stomach to make the change in direction right now. He needed sleep first.
As was custom, he set his poles and canvas and he patted Kolja on the head, stroked his mane, and set down a pigskin of water and some grain. After that, he set off to piss. He’d only wandered a few hundred meters from the camp when he saw something on the ground.
“Strange,” he said.
He kneeled and picked it up, and he twirled it in his fingers in he held it up to the sunlight.
In any other place in the queendom, at any other time, there would be nothing strange about this. But this was Sun Toil, the remotest a man could get from the civilized queendom, a place where no voices echoed and a man’s words died as soon as he spoke them.
York looked at the piece of cloth. It was no bigger than his thumb tip, but it was colored black and must have come from a shirt or a pair of trousers. It wasn’t weather-beaten nor sun-damaged, and that meant that someone had dropped it recently.
Perhaps they had cut their shirt for some reason. To fashion something to protect their head from the sun, perhaps? Whatever the reason, a stray piece of cloth had been left behind.
Someone was in Toil.
As far as he knew, there were few explanations for a man to stray into Toil. He knew that caravans sometimes passed through to get to some of the fishing villages way out east. Some unscrupulous folks would travel to these barrens to bury corpses they didn’t wish people to find. There might even be a hunter or two roaming the desert.
Or, some unfortunate bastard had strayed into the desert and gotten lost.
York held the cloth against his compass. The needle flitted side to side, unsure of itself, before settling in a north-eastern direction.
“Interesting.”
Only a fool swam into unknown waters, and the wisest course would be to skirt east some, avoiding the owner of this cloth. At the same time, a man might paddle into unknown waters if he thought a fellow fool was drowning. There was no harm in following where the compass led him and seeing who was sharing the desert with him.
A sound shattered his thoughts. It had come from Kolja, and this was the sound a horse would make if it could scream. The noise seemed to scratch at York from the inside.
He’d left his crossbow and one bolt wand with Kolja and the rest of his stuff, so he drew the remaining wand from a loop on his belt. It was made of hardened leather, and it was cool to the touch despite the charge held inside it.
As he sprinted back to Kolja the beast’s screams were louder and sickening, and he was flailing his rear legs and trying to get to his feet but he couldn’t, and York soon saw why.
Four lizards were climbing over him. A writhing mound of scaly flesh, snapping their jaws over him and tearing chunks from him as the poor animal tried to shake them off.
The sound was so horrific that if it had happened in a place in the queendom with people nearby, they would have run to summon a mage, shouting “demon! Demon!”
But these were no demons. They were ten feet long tail to nose, though they resembled the komodo dragons from the south more than the bigger beasts like gators or diles. Each had rows of fangs that looked old in their yellowing but were strong enough to chew through skin and meat.
York stopped then. An old man against four desert lizards?
A hunter as old as he knew when the predator became the prey, and the last thing he wanted to do was draw their attention to him.
He held the wand tight in his hand, feeling the toughness of leather against his palm. One charge wasn’t enough. If he took the luckiest shot in the world maybe he could catch two lizards in the blast, but that’d leave two more to come at him.
Damn it! All of his goddamn things were with Kolja. His pigskins, ointment, crossbow, wand, water, grain, bean, water stone. What the hell was he supposed to do?
The way he saw it, two choices.
Use the wand to blast poor Kolja out of his misery, then run for it. Or, use his old nutcracker and figure a way to get these bastards away from his things.
CHAPTER 32
Nothing the first night. Nothing the second. A snapped snare on the third, but the animal had eluded the trap. Things weren’t looking great.
And then, some of the gods must have gotten together and said ‘you know what? We’ve put this poor Jakub bastard in the middle of two dust storms, dry lightning, and a toil-lusk attack. We woke him up with a damn bison on his legs. We’ve starved him, beaten, him, isolated him, and we’ve made slavers capture the only people within a thousand miles who he knows. What do you think? Go a little easier on him?’
There must have been a consensus up there, because on the fourth morning, Jakub checked his snares to find that he’d caught three rats, a fennec fox cub, and a jackrabbit.
Oh, if only York could see him now. He’d have been proud, if the old trapper was even alive, and if he even remembered two weeks where he’d taught Jakub his trapping skills.
Later the fourth day, temptation came at him like a muscled barbarian with a ten-foot sword and thunder writ in his face, and he spent hours battling it. He really did. But as is the way when a man’s resolve is tested by multiple forces at once - hunger, loneliness, and a deep yearning for a spot by the fire in a homely tavern – Jakub lost.
Temptation punched him in the face and kicked him in the balls, so that night he made peace with it. He lit a fire and cooked a jackrabbit, and he savored the meat as much as his hunger would allow, tasting a richness that he’d never thought possible.
Eating it, he honestly thought he might die from tasting something so divine. Who knew the secret to a godly meal wasn’t training to cook for years and then scouring the queendom for the ripest ingredients? All you had to do was get stranded in Sun Toil and then slowly starve.
After his jackrabbit meal, he checked the snares that had worked and compared them to the ones that didn’t, both in structure and placement, and he made new snares and set them.
The next morning, he had more dead vermin than he knew what to do with. And so, five days after deciding on his plan, Jakub knew it was finally time to act on it, and he almost wished he hadn’t been so successful with his traps.
Because now, at last, it was time for him to go bait and kill a giant lusk. Luckily, his experiences over the last few days had given him an idea for that.
Back in the academy, most of Jakub’s training had centered on necromancy. Even so, given that most necromancers went on to carry out fieldwork for the academy, it was considered prudent to teach necromancers how to fight. After all, the academy was part of the Queen’s forces, and when the queen’s army traveled the land to spread peace, it resulted in quite a lot of fights.
It was a wise idea to teach practitioners of the dead how to combat the living, but there was a problem; necromancers and mages, weren’t often great physical specimens. In fact,
most mages would have lost a tug of war against a cobweb. Jakub might have worked to tone his body during the academy, but he was by no means a barbarian.
That meant that a large portion of academy fighting training centered not on the physical side of combat, but the mental. Namely, taking every advantage you could get.
If you had warning of who you were fighting, when, and where, then you could delve into the details and find advantages.
Today, Jakub could go one better than that. He didn’t just know the who, where, and when; he could actually control them.
For one, he knew he was fighting a lusk. Lusks sometimes hunted in twos and threes but were often solitary. They could leap so high they could almost grab a star, but their on-the-ground motion was limited. If Jakub moved in unpredictable ways, like side to side, taking diagonal steps, the lusk would struggle to keep up.
Second, he knew he was going to bait the lusk out from the crack in the ground. The lusk would smell meat and blood and it could tunnel toward him and then breach in a spray of mud. It wouldn’t take much time to exercise caution.
Jakub eyed the wagon. After making the snares, half one side of the paneling was gone. His idea now was to strip a few more pieces of wood and sharpen them with his dagger and then place them so they pointed into the crack, so that the lusk would spear itself when it breached. The spikes would be too small to be fatal, but they’d slow it down.
That was his ‘where’ advantage.
Finally, there was the ‘when’. Last time out, the lusks had struck during the day. Jakub would have bet his last gold that lusks were day hunters who slept at night. But, given the fact that fresh flesh wasn’t on the menu much in Toil, they wouldn’t pass up a meat-rich meal even if it was dark outside.
If Jakub could coax one out at sundown it’d be just that little bit tired, unfocussed, not in full possession of its human senses.
Movement, spikes, night time. If he used all three, and if the gods were still taking pity on him, this could work.
He waited until the sun had set and stars watched from the sky like little eyes eager to see a tired necromancer bait a lusk out of its lair. His walk to the crack in the ground wasn’t a long one but it was tiring due to the canvas bag of rat, fox and rabbit flesh in his right hand, and the sharpened stakes he carried under his left arm. By the time he made it there, he felt like sleeping.
He set the meat bag down and crouched by the split in the ground. It was shaped like a bolt of lightning, widening at one end so that two men could fit side to side. He couldn’t see how far under the ground it went, but he dropped a scattering of stones and it was a while until he heard them land.
His first job was to position the stakes. He wanted to angle them downwards so that when the lusk smelled meat and breached, it would leap straight into the spikes. This was delicate because he didn’t want the lusk to die instantly and then fall back into the depths of the ground before he could reanimate it. He just needed to take a little wind out of it.
After experimenting a little, he decided that they were best positioned a few feet from the widest part of the split. That way, the lusk would leap up from the crack, and the spikes would tear into its lower torso and hindquarters, while still giving it enough room to clear the breach.
Next, he opened the meat bag. The canvas bag filled with flesh, guts, dried blood and stringy intestines and other miscellaneous inner body parts would have made most people’s stomach bubble, but Jakub was attuned to death, and he didn’t try to suppress his academy training this time.
He spread the biggest pieces of flesh on either side of the split and he gathered some of the slop and blood and he spread it on the insides, hoping the smell would drift deep into the gut of the ground and wake a lusk. And then he waited.
And waited.
But soon, Toil delivered another problem to him.
The night-time winds absent up until now, suddenly picked up, and they seemed to concentrate around Jakub and his trap, and they gathered the aroma of the meat and blood and they carried it far away, far across the desert so that there was none left to tempt the lusks.
Tired, shivering, with shocks of adrenaline working through him, he cursed the wind and waited for it to leave. When that didn’t work he talked softly to it, complementing its coldness and resistance, telling it what a good wind it was and how maybe for tonight, it could blow elsewhere.
When that didn’t work, he began to question his sanity in talking to the wind in the first place, and wondered if even solitary guys like necromancers could get too lonely.
The problem was, he couldn’t wait until the day because if his theory was right, the lusk would be alert when the sun rose. He needed it tired and groggy. Nor could he wait until the next night, because the slavers would get further and further away.
This had to happen tonight.
Desperate, Jakub grabbed a clump of flesh and he lay next on his stomach next to the split in the ground, and he took a deep breath and then he reached down into it until he couldn’t see his arm. He scooted up so he could reach deeper, and then he spread the flesh back and forth against the sides of the split down in the unseen darkness, hoping the deeper he left the meaty scent, the more chance of awakening a lusk.
Something crashed jut left of his hand. The surprise made his stomach tighten, he felt like his heart dislodged from his chest.
He withdrew his arm and rolled away from the split just in time for a giant lusk to breach. The sound was deafening as stone and dirt flew up and then came down like rain, splattering over his face and his hair.
The lusk looked like a shadow set against the black desert. A nightmare of an angry Toil god’s creation, skin glistening with indeterminate fluids, legs long and crooked but with muscle set against bone, perfect for propelling it into the air.
Its eyes were little black pebbles, and you could only tell they were there from the way they were slightly raised like boils on its face. When it opened its slit-shaped jaw its teeth shone pearl-white, like jagged stars but not beautiful; only destructive.
It took a few seconds for his shock to wear off and for him to push his fear to the recesses of his mind before he noticed that the lusk was shaking.
It took a few steps and veered right, and it kept biting at something in its side. Jakub slowly worked his way around, making a half-circle, until he got enough of an angle to see a wedge of spike sticking out from the lusks torso.
It was wounded, and Jakub watched it and he felt like its confusion and fear were palpable energies that drifted off it in waves.
The lusk would have breached the ground hundreds of times in its life, but never would it have found sharpened stick waiting for it, and now it couldn’t understand what had happened to it, and it began making a series of high-pitched sounds, like the chirp of a bird but undercut with terror.
This made the hairs of Jakub’s arms stand. He understood what the sounds were.
A call to its family. This wasn’t a lone lusk.
Nerves and fear and panic gushing through him, Jakub drew his sword and charged at the lusk, knowing he had to end this now. He reached it just as the insect registered his presence, and when he swiped with his sword he met air, the lusk leaping five feet to the right.
That was good, and it was bad. The lusk was still agile and it was dangerous, but it couldn’t leap to the heights it normally would. Up close, Jakub saw a dark fluid spreading over its limbs and skin. Not quite blood, but whatever passed for it in the lusk’s body.
He ducked low and ran right, out of the lusk’s limited vision. It turned to follow him but it was too late, and Jakub slashed at it.
When his sword met one of the crooked smaller limbs on its side, the lusk bleated like a stuck sheep, but the sound was a sharp corkscrew in Jakub’s ears, and he felt it bring on a pounding in his skull. The sound disorientated him, almost like oil sloshing in his brain and slowing his thoughts.
The next thing he felt was a tremendous explosion of pain in hi
s chest, and he felt himself fly through the air and then land on his back in a breath-sapping blow. Pain sprang through him, a bed of it burning through his nerves.
It must have kicked him with one of its larger legs, and the force scared him. He felt like he’d been charged at by a bull. As he gasped for breath he fumbled for his sword, only to see that it was ten feet away now.
And the lusk was leaping toward him five feet at a time. Only a second until it would be on him.
He gasped for air. He summoned every last spark of energy to get to his knees, and he saw that the lusk had kicked him all the way back so he was next to the split in the ground.
As the insect took one last leap, jaws open and teeth shining ghost white, Jakub ripped a spike out from where he’d dug it into the split, and he held it up and braced as a quarter-ton of insect leaped into him, impaling itself and letting out a dagger of a scream.
The sound slashed the insides of his skull as he felt its blood splash into his face, nose, eyes, over his lips.
Jakub fell onto his back once more.
He felt the lusk scrabbling to separate from him. He pushed it away, wrenched another stake from the split, raised it high and then drove it into the insect’s body.
CHAPTER 33
York, the hunter
He couldn’t bear Kolja screaming like that. A horse shouldn’t scream, yet there was something so pain-filled, so human, in his beast’s cries that he couldn’t stand it. Even now two lizards were tearing into his hind legs, while the other pair bit his throat and ripped away skin and flesh and sinew, caring not a bit that Kolja’s blood burst over their scales.
The hunter in him knew that Kolja was already dead. That he should bear his cries until they stopped, and then he could use his only weapon against the lizards while they were full and slowed from the meat.
