The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1)

by J. C. Staudt

  The first flecks of daylight were piercing the horizon as Daxin’s mare bore him eastward. By the time he’d lost sight of Bradsleigh, Infernal had been looming to his left, a gargantuan semi-circle cut along the horizon’s edge. Rimford Springs would be five long days’ ride away, maybe four if his mare held out.

  He’d trudged home a week later, empty-handed, not knowing whether Rimford Springs had been Vicky’s destination in the first place. Over the years that followed, Daxin would journey to every city, town and settlement in the Inner East. In all that time, he would never find her, and he would never forgive himself for letting her go. His self-disparagement only got worse whenever Toler berated him.

  “She left you,” Toler would say. “Let her go. Vicky made her choice, even if you don’t agree with it. She’s not important anymore. Savannah is what’s important now. She needs her dad, and you’re not around to give her the time of day.”

  Daxin had known Toler was right, but he’d been too stubborn to give up on Vicky. Love is love, no matter the cost. Family meant something different to Daxin’s brother than it did to him, and it seemed they would never stop criticizing one another for their variant brands of opinion. Daxin felt guilty when he thought about it now—all the times he’d ignored his daughter or pushed her needs aside. He had been so determined to find an explanation for why Vicky was gone that he’d neglected Savvy. Admitting it was true stung him like a switch.

  Daxin pushed those memories away and swallowed the lump in his throat.

  Ellicia was studying him as if she could read what he was thinking. If she could, she chose not to say so. “I’m sure she’s a fine woman. Must be hard being away from her for so long.”

  “It is. But when life takes you in a new direction, you make the best of it.”

  “Living down here has been a new direction for all of us.”

  “This place isn’t that bad. Well, it’s pretty bad. But it has potential.”

  “I guess it does, now that you’re here to show us what to do with it.” Ellicia’s smile set her green eyes alight.

  “Yeah, if I don’t wake up with a second mouth first.” Daxin drew a line across his throat.

  “Oh hush. You’re afraid of Eivan and Duffy?”

  “Afraid? Yeah right. But I will fall into a deep sleep eventually, and when I do…”

  “I’ll stand guard and protect you,” Ellicia said matter-of-factly, straightening.

  “You’d be my biggest hero.”

  “I will be then, you watch.”

  Their eyes met, and they shared a smile. These little moments of silence between he and Ellicia were beginning to feel less like they needed to be filled. Perhaps she was having that same thought, because she didn’t say anything else for a long time. Finally, she said, “Where would you go if you could travel anywhere?”

  Daxin considered the question before he answered. “I’ve done a good bit of traveling in my life already. Nowhere specific that I’ve always wanted to go or anything. Sometimes I think I’d like to just… get lost.”

  “Get lost?” Ellicia laughed, leaning back to rest on her elbows.

  Daxin liked her laugh. It made the walls of the cave sound better than any stone he’d ever listened to. “Not so lost that I don’t know where I am. Just enough that no one else does.”

  “You want to live out here in the scrubs? This is no place to make a life.”

  “You all are making a pretty good go of it. Plus, the scrubs don’t bother me. If I ever die out here, it’s nobody’s fault but mine. And then I’ll be too dead for it to matter, won’t I? Infernal’s not going to care one way or the other.”

  “You’re a strange man,” Ellicia said, offering him a somber smile.

  Daxin tilted his head toward the others. “Not so loud. I don’t think they know.”

  “Oh, I think they do. They’re just being nice.”

  “They’re doing a good job of it. With all the compliments I’ve been getting around here, you’d think I was famous.”

  The Glaives were relatively famous around the Inner East; the name still rang a bell because of its association with HydroPyre and the legendary desert cities. Wealth was hard to come by these days, so families like the Glaives and the Vantanibles seemed to have fans and detractors in every settlement from the Slickwash to the Horned Gulf. But there were other things besides his name that Daxin couldn’t reveal to these people—less because of who he was than because of who they were.

  “You all sit around the fire and tell jokes about me while I’m sleeping, don’t you?” Daxin said. “I guess you already know me better than I’d like you to.”

  “And that’s been no easy accomplishment.” Ellicia’s tone had gone from whimsical to demure. “Luther, I’ve been wanting to ask you something, but I didn’t think it would be polite.”

  “If you’ve been thinking about it that much, you should ask.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’ll give me a straight answer.”

  Daxin shrugged. “I guess not. But I’m not stopping you.”

  “Okay.” Ellicia sighed, her eyes searching Daxin’s for some form of reassurance. “How is it that you can make children?”

  “That’s a good question. We’ve tried to have more kids since Savannah, but it hasn’t happened. People in Brad—in Pleck’s Mill think there’s something special about us. We’ve gotten offers for every type of surrogate parenting arrangement you can imagine over the years. I think we’re both too old now to be up for the task, though. The reality was that we aren’t special. Just lucky.”

  “We had some people in Unterberg who had children,” Ellicia said. “Not many. I knew a couple who had two sons and a baby on the way. I’ve heard stories of people living below-world for long enough and getting their strength back, being able to make babies again.”

  Daxin had heard the same stories. “I hope that’s true.”

  Over the next three weeks, Daxin’s wounds seemed to heal faster every day. His ankle grew stronger too, though he still couldn’t put his full weight on it. Biyo rode Daxin’s mare whenever he went out to check the traps or gather firewood, and soon the horse was in better shape than Daxin.

  Each evening, Ellicia cleaned and dressed Daxin’s wounds until he no longer needed the dressings. Yet the less attention his wounds needed, the more time they started to spend together. Most nights they talked until Daxin got so tired his eyelids gave out on him. Sometimes they stayed together all day, either carrying on fragmented conversations while they worked or wasting away the hours whenever the air was judged too poor to venture outside. After four years of being alone, Daxin found himself craving the attention. Soon he was using every excuse he could come up with to justify the time they were spending together.

  The thought of Eivan and Duffy plotting his demise had been enough to keep Daxin on edge during his first days in Dryhollow Split. Now the two men appeared to have little interest in bringing him harm; they seemed more interested in improving their trapping expertise, and they had started to volunteer almost every day to inspect the previous night’s catch and reset the traps. Daxin thought better of letting them take his mare whenever they went out alone, but the two seemed willing enough to set out on foot.

  Despite his own mistrust, the other villagers never questioned the two men’s intentions. Time and again, Eivan and Duffy returned after long hours away, bringing fresh game, cactus meat, and sprigs of whatever edible or medicinal plants they had come across. They would leave early in the morning and be gone until mid-afternoon sometimes, and the villagers were all the more grateful for the extra time they spent gathering. Often they gave weather reports, although the weather hardly changed. Some days they would claim to have seen a herd of wild horses, a heavily flowered plant, or some other uncommon sight that would stir the villagers into a flurry of excitement.

  On one particular afternoon, as they waited for Eivan and Duffy to return, the villagers were discussing the idea of sending out an exploration party. Daxin had
pointed out the importance of knowing their surroundings, but he had since decided to limit the extent of his aid to suggestions and guidance. After he was gone, the villagers would no longer have the benefit of his consultation, so he thought it best that they learn to live without his help now. Two more weeks were all it would take, he estimated, until his ankle was strong enough to stand on. Staying any longer than that was out of the question; he felt the burden of his mission too urgently to deviate from it for longer than was necessary.

  “Here’s where I think we need to look first,” Biyo was saying. In the absence of an actual map, he had scrawled out a rough diagram from memory on the cave wall.

  There were too many people crowded around for Daxin to see much of the map, but he could tell that Biyo was pointing to an area south of Dryhollow Split. It was the direction Daxin had been coming from when he’d happened upon them. He and Ellicia were sitting on the smooth, low stools made of hewn tree stumps, speaking to one another in hushed tones as they watched the meeting unfold. “He’s a good leader,” Daxin said. “And yet he has that hotshot swagger that makes you want to break his neck. It’s not because he’s full of himself. He just wants you all to think he knows what he’s doing.”

  “He does know what he’s doing,” Ellicia said. “At least as far as the way he gets everyone to work together. The way he’s kept us going all this time is something special. When we left Unterberg, some of the people went off on their own. Biyo said we should stay together, and we’ve all sort of followed his lead ever since. We were all so scared, but he put on a brave face and gave us the hope we needed.”

  “The people of the Inner East don’t have much to cling to anymore,” Daxin said. “They’re quick to rally around anyone who can give them the tiniest shred of hope. So somebody comes along and tells them they can fix all their problems, and they believe it. You know, the truth is that the easiest thing to believe is the thing you want to believe. The most powerful leaders in history were the ones who told the most congenial lies. But Biyo isn’t like that. He gives you the truth, even if the truth isn’t what you want to hear.”

  “After living under someone like Nichel, Biyo is a refreshing change,” Ellicia said. There was something in the way she said it, something in her pacing or her tone that Daxin found odd. He was about to ask her what she meant when one of the scouts, an old beak-nosed man they called Schum, padded into sight at the cave entrance.

  “They’re coming back,” he shouted. “Looks like they caught somethin’ big. Real big.”

  The meeting ground to a halt as the villagers began to jostle toward the entrance like a flock of rubbernecking birds. Duffy’s silvery-red beard came into view as the returning trappers rounded the bend, carrying a pole on each shoulder. Along one of the poles were tied several small catches: a desert fox, two mice, a tiny squirrel, a groundhog, and something else the trap had crushed so badly Daxin couldn’t tell what it was. The crowd parted as Eivan and Duffy stepped down into the cave and shunted this pole off onto the nearest two men who were willing to take it.

  “Outta the way, it’s heavy,” Duffy yelled. Both men were red-faced and sweating, but Duffy in particular was flushed almost purple and breathing heavily. He stumbled over his own feet as they heaved the second pole off their shoulders. A murmur rose when the people saw what they were carrying.

  Covered in brownish green scales and rippling with reptilian muscle, the beast’s head and tail hung limp, eyes bulging from its skull like some macabre clown. Its open mouth showed serrated rows of cuspidate teeth, a lolling, forked tongue, and a jaw that looked as if it could stretch wider than a snake’s. The animal was several feet longer than the height of a man, and everything about it was built in the way of a predator. Daxin recognized it right away.

  The village was in an uproar; everyone was asking Eivan and Duffy the same questions, but the commotion was drowning them all out.

  “What in the high Infernal sky is that thing?” Biyo was shouting as Daxin and Ellicia approached.

  Daxin clapped a hand on Biyo’s shoulder and leaned into him, shouting into his ear. “Let’s quiet these people down so we can talk this out.”

  Biyo nodded. After a laborious few minutes of hushing and shushing, they were finally successful in calming the villagers down.

  “So where’d this thing come from?” Biyo asked. He crossed his arms, looking all the less comfortable for having done so. His face had taken on the same frightened, gun-to-his-head expression Daxin recognized from the day they met.

  “It was in one of the big traps,” Duffy said, “body just laying out like this, head squished under the rock. At first we thought it was a mountain cat we’d missed on our rounds somehow, what with the color and all. Looked like it could’a been rotting there for days. But naw, it’s fresh, alright. Never seen anything like it in all my life.”

  “And you, Eivan? You know what this is?” Biyo asked, his face as blanched as the dead trees outside.

  Eivan bared his skewed yellows in a snarling grin. “A big lizard.” He had begun to neglect shaving, and tufts of hair had cropped up like a crown on his skull, making him look all the more crazed.

  Having observed Eivan’s behavior over the previous weeks, Daxin had begun to think him less a threat. The man was unpredictable, but that was more likely because he was slow-minded than because he was prone to violence. Still, Daxin would take no chances with him.

  “Doesn’t anybody know what this thing is?” Biyo pleaded, searching the faces in the crowd.

  No one spoke, the villagers’ attention locked on the big dead creature on the floor of their home.

  Biyo looked at Daxin. “Luther, you must have seen one of these things before.”

  “I’ve never seen one before. But I know what it is.”

  A clamor rose again, but the crowd grew silent just as quickly.

  “Tell us what you know then, Luther.”

  “I’ve read about them. Back home in Pleck’s Mill, we have lots of books from the old university that still have most of their pages. It was in an old textbook, one of the ones they used to give out to first-year students. This thing is called a voranic tarragon. That’s the official name, or it’s also called other things like the voranic lizard, rock lizard, rock monster, or sanddragon.” The crowd was murmuring, but Daxin spoke over them. “Don’t ask me how I remember this much about it, but it’s venomous. When it bites its prey, the venom keeps the blood from clotting. So if the poison doesn’t kill it, the blood loss is supposed to weaken it enough that the tarragon can overpower it.”

  Biyo was stoic, as if the muscles in his face had gone limp. “High coffing Infernal.”

  “If you’re lucky, you’re dead by the time they get there. A tarragon this size can swallow a full-grown man, no problem. They usually keep to the deserts, so this one probably wandered into the Bones from the east. We’ll make this fella into a nice couple of dinners, and then it should be the last one you ever see, I hope.”

  Duffy was the only one there who hadn’t gone white as a sheet; his cheeks were still rosy and flushed. He wobbled and leaned forward, half-closing his eyes as if he were on the verge of sleep.

  Daxin bent his knees and took hold of the bearded man as his legs gave out. Others came to his aid, and together they lowered Duffy to the ground, an awkward dance of lost balances and tangled limbs.

  “Get us some water. Cold if you can,” Biyo shouted as they fanned Duffy with whatever they had on hand. “He’s gotta be suffering from heat exhaustion. Ellicia, can you take a look at him?”

  It was an ironic sight: the bearded, potbellied man laid out alongside the carnivorous reptile he had nearly died carrying.

  Ellicia knelt and handed Daxin a wet rag from a wash pot someone had given her. She began to unlace Duffy’s animal skin overvest. “Soak his skin. Chest, arms, underarms; everywhere you can.”

  Daxin did as she instructed, not noticing that the crowd had fallen silent.

  Biyo almost stumbled over t
he dead tarragon as he came to kneel beside Duffy. “Someone get this thing out of here,” he said.

  Schum and another man took up the pole and carried the beast away.

  “This isn’t heat stroke,” Ellicia said, after she’d spent a moment examining Duffy. “He’s feverish.”

  “You mean he’s got the flu or something?” Biyo asked.

  “Seems like it,” Ellicia said, befuddled.

  Daxin saw why when he glanced down at Duffy’s leg. There was a jagged hole in the man’s trousers about halfway up the calf. The leg had been bandaged with a strip of cloth about the same color as his pants. When Daxin lifted the pant leg and untied the bandage, blood flowed from the sodden bite marks beneath. The skin around the fang holes had already begun to corrode.

  “He’s been bitten, he’s been coffing bitten,” Biyo said, and fell backward on his haunches. When his hands touched the floor behind him, he scrambled away, cringing at the memory of the tarragon that had lain there.

  Daxin was hesitant to reveal what else he knew about the sanddragons, but it was better to get it out now, while there might still be time. “This is very bad. If the sanddragon injected its venom into Duffy’s leg, there are other sanddragons who already know it. They can smell toxified blood from several horizons away.”

  The uproar resumed. The villagers were screaming at Biyo for guidance, at Daxin with questions about the sanddragon, and at Eivan for an explanation of how this had happened.

  “I’m going to get these people away,” Daxin told Ellicia, shouting. “That’ll give you some space. Just do what you can.”

  “If that bite is poisonous, then either we need the cure now or there’s nothing I can do,” Ellicia yelled back. “We could amputate the leg, but it may be too late. How long is it supposed to take?”

  “Depends how much venom the thing put in him. Could be as little as a long day, or as many as three,” Daxin said, showing the numbers with his fingers. “I’m no doctor; I have no idea if amputating would help or not. That’s up to you to decide.”