Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2)

by J. C. Staudt

  Nichel’s business associates bobbed in their leather chairs, tapped their pens, sipped their water, and looked around at one another. The only thing it seemed they weren’t prepared to do was speak.

  “Not a thing. Not a coffing thing from any of you. What in Infernal’s name do I pay you for? You’re fully aware of the kind of financial hits we’ve been taking lately. It’s one thing for the savages to harass us from time to time. Kill a few shepherds. Maybe make off with a few stolen goods. But these are entire caravans they’re walking away with. Dozens of crates, hundreds of horses… whole shipments gone missing. Just… disappearing in a puff of smoke. Who’s going to answer for that? Huh? Who’s going to pay those merchants to stay in business? Who’s going to go out there and convince them they should keep trading across the wasteland when they can sit here in their comfortable warehouses and let the customers come to them? It’s going to take more than a few dways with javelins, I’ll tell you that much. This is unsustainable. We’re going to end up leaving a whole lot of people in the lurch if something doesn’t give pretty quick.”

  “The nomads are just defending their homeland. You can’t blame them for that,” said Bilner Nichols, the plump, balding man in charge of Vantanible’s personnel department.

  “They’ve gone far beyond defending it, you imbecile. This borders on genocide.”

  “Why don’t we send an envoy to Sai Calgoar to initiate peace talks with Tycho Montari?” suggested Hayley Abbott, Nichel’s head of public relations, as she swept a tuft of medium brown hair from her eyes.

  “The last envoy we sent to Sai Calgoar was twenty strong,” said Nichel. “One man came back. They let him bring us the box of toes they cut off the others before pressing them into slavery. The nomads don’t want peace. They want every one of us dead or enslaved. As long as they have the upper hand, why would they accept a truce?”

  Hayley shrugged, fidgeting with the faded buttons on the cuff of her sleeve.

  “The men need to be better armed,” said Jaimber Rollins, the rider who’d returned that morning with news of his caravan’s destruction. “That’s the only thing that’ll keep the nomads at bay. We need plenty of guns, and plenty of ammo.”

  “Are you going to pay for that?” asked Nichel. “Are you going to train them? Teach them how to shoot? Javelins have been our shepherds’ weapon of choice for years. Fighting from horseback, there’s nothing better than a good spear. You said the nomads surprised you… came out of nowhere. Got right in the middle of things. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

  Jaimber nodded. He was dusty from his ride home, his face battered and bruised, his skin lightburned from overexposure. A patch of his long brown hair was missing, as if someone had ripped it out in a handful. It was clear the man had been through an ordeal before his escape, but although he’d given Vantanible a detailed report on the attack itself, he’d kept silent when asked what the nomads had done to him.

  “That’s how they’re winning,” Nichel was saying. “Not because they’ve got better weaponry, but because they’re cunning. Because they’re aggressive. And because they have the numbers and the tactics to confuse and disarm us. A bunch of handguns going off in every direction while the nomads are in your face isn’t going to solve the problem. You’re going to kill as many of each other as you do of them.”

  “Right,” Jaimber said, pretending to agree.

  Nichel stooped over to lean on the table with both hands, his shoulders heavy with the weight of his stress. His eyes flicked up, scanning the room with sharp scrutiny. “Nobody has anything else to say? No more suggestions? Alright. Get out of here. All of you. If I don’t start hearing some ideas—good ideas—” he shot Toler another look “—by tomorrow morning, it’s going to be time for a few personnel changes around here.”

  The men and women around the table stood and began to file out, but Nichel caught Toler by the arm and pulled him aside before he could leave. “Don’t think I’m not watching you, Toler. I’ve been hearing things about you lately. Things I don’t want to believe.”

  Toler kept his expression relaxed, though his heart was pounding like a drum. “I don’t know what you could’ve heard, unless it’s that I’m a Glaive. I’ll always be guilty of that.”

  “Just watch your step. I’ve welcomed you into this enterprise, and I’m preparing to welcome you into my family. But so help me, I will end you if you give me a reason.”

  “I’m heading over to spend the afternoon with Lenn. When should I tell her to expect you home?”

  “It’ll be a late one tonight,” said Nichel. “I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

  Toler glanced at the half-empty cognac decanter on Nichel’s desk, and the new glass he’d already filled. Is that what they call it? “I’ll tell her not wait up.” Toler wrenched himself free of Nichel’s grip, straightened his leathers, and left the room.

  He walked the streets of Unterberg, worry tugging at the edges of his calm. The smuggling ring he’d been operating over the past two years had never aroused Nichel’s suspicions before. Using Vantanible’s caravans as his vehicle, Toler had moved illicit goods through every city from Lottimer to Beywarden—everything from counterfeit gold to zoom to pre-Heat ammunition. Although he’d sworn to give it up a dozen times, each new success had changed his mind.

  Vantanible’s home was a sprawling, extravagant flat occupying the entire third story of the Guaranelle Building. Toler never used the main entrance, which sat level with the first floor on Pinkard Avenue. Instead he ascended the wide exterior staircase carved into the mountainside, which wrapped around the rear of the building and joined it to the in-ground parking garage behind. Clay Nomad assassins had used this staircase the night they broke into the flat and tried to kill Reylenn. That was back when Vantanible’s security team had consisted of a graying man with a lantern in one hand and a six-shooter in the other.

  “How was the meeting?” Reylenn asked as Toler entered the apartment and tossed his jacket over an armchair in the foyer.

  Toler sighed. “Your dad’s pissed. He’s livid. Like, beside himself.”

  Reylenn gave him a soft, understanding look. “He gets like that. For a man in charge of an empire, he doesn’t handle stress very well. Come here, sweetheart.”

  “Don’t I know it?” Toler crossed the marble floor to her chair by the window, where she sat overlooking the streets of the Black City. He kissed her forehead and sat on the brown leather ottoman beside her.

  She wore one of the special button-down gowns her father had commissioned from the Calistari seamstresses. Her right leg was bound in a cast of heavy white plaster from ankle to thigh, propped on her wheelchair’s leg rest. The smaller cast on her left leg ended below her knee.

  Daxin’s plan to have Reylenn killed may have failed, but he had certainly reduced the likelihood of her bearing Toler’s children anytime soon. The nomads had managed to stab her twice before she jumped out her bedroom window to escape them, landing hard enough to fracture two vertebrae and break both her legs. Toler hadn’t told her about Merrick Bouchard, and he likely never would. Knowing he’d let the healer slip through his fingers was bad enough. Telling Reylenn there was a man out there who could repair the damage to her body, and that Toler had failed to bring him home, would crush her.

  Tossing unwashed waves of cream-colored hair aside, Reylenn took Toler’s hand and gave it a squeeze, then favored him with a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry if he’s been irritable lately. He has a lot going on right now.”

  He isn’t the only one who’s got a lot going on, Toler wanted to say. He squeezed her hand back. “It’s alright. I just wish there were something more I could do to help him. These nomads are ruining everything.” The recent attacks had been cause for concern when it came to Toler’s illicit business activities. But that wasn’t something he could talk about with her. He would be back on the trail as soon as Reylenn could walk again; he’d concern himself with smuggling and Salt Nomads when the time came.


  “Dad has adapted before. He always figures out how to get around these kinds of problems. I know you want to help him, but you don’t need to. Unless you want to go out there and leave me again…”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here until you’re better.”

  “You won’t go, but you want to. Admit it. It’s okay. I see the way you stare out over the wastes. You love being out there.”

  “I love being with you.”

  “Toler, I know the way love looks in a man’s eyes. I see it when you look at me… and I see it when you look out there. You love the danger of it. The travel. The adventure. It’s one of the things that attracted me to you when we first met. But at the same time, it scares me.”

  “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than here with you,” Toler said. “You know that.”

  “You like sitting here twiddling your thumbs? I don’t. I hate it. We haven’t even been able to have sex since you’ve been home. Now that I’m like this, why would anyone want to stay?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “Because you’re scared of what my father would do if you left.”

  “Stop it. You know that isn’t true. Kiss me.”

  When Toler leaned in, Reylenn turned away stiffly. “Promise me you won’t leave again.”

  “Don’t be cruel.”

  “I’m not being cruel. I’m trying to show you how much I love you. How much I need you. If you ever left me, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d—I’d jump again.”

  “No you wouldn’t. Please don’t say things like that.”

  “I worry about you too much. I miss you every second you’re gone, even when you’re here in town. I can’t stand the thought of losing you.”

  “You’re not going to lose me.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise. I’m going to marry you, Lenn.”

  When she turned back, she was beaming from ear to ear. She pulled him close and kissed him, long and deep. “I just want to know I’ll be your one and only, always and always. That you’ll be here with me forever.”

  “I will,” he promised, though in his heart he knew it was a lie. The wide world had already begun calling to him again, and it would only be a matter of time before he answered. He only wished Reylenn had the same desires he did; that she would one day ride with him to the Aionach’s distant shores, the way his parents had ridden together before he was born. Perhaps in time she would warm to the idea. When she was better, and she could walk and ride again. For now Toler would content himself to be with the woman he loved. That would have to be enough.

  Toler prepared a late lunch, and they spent the afternoon talking and playing games and discussing plans for the future. When the light-star was low in the sky and the heat had gone down, he took her outside and pushed her through the streets, past markets and shops and taverns where savory cooking smells and sounds of merriment assailed them on the breeze. They even ventured into the trade caves, where they found a quiet spot to sit beside the river and watch the rafts and barges drift along the currents from town to town.

  At dusk, he brought her all the way up Salver Street and along the climbing footpath to the Brauman Lightpost Overlook, a memorial to the Vantanible ancestry set in concrete and stone, giving visitors stunning views of the city and the desert beyond. Reylenn was a slight woman, tinier still from her injuries than her nineteen years might suggest, but Toler was sweaty and breathless by the time they arrived.

  “What do you think it all means?” Reylenn asked, taking him by the wrist and pulling him close. “Our lives. The world out there. The light-star, and what it’s done to us. Do you think it’s all going to end?”

  “I think a lot of people wish they knew the answer to that,” Toler said, wiping his brow.

  “I’d settle for knowing why those savages attacked me. I could understand them going after my father. But me? What have I ever done to them?”

  Reylenn had spoken of these things often since Toler’s return. The attempt on her life had given her a new, more critical perspective. Telling her his brother had ordered the hit would be as ruinous for Toler as telling Vantanible about the route map. No matter how it pained him to see her struggling with these unanswered questions, Toler could never divulge what he knew.

  “They must’ve been planning to kill your father after they were done with you, only they didn’t make it that far,” Toler said. “Thank Infernal they didn’t.”

  “I don’t thank Infernal for anything. Sometimes I think I would rather have died than become such a burden on you two.”

  When Toler knelt beside her, Reylenn’s tears were shimmering in the half-light. He put a finger to her chin and turned her face toward his. In her eyes he saw the pain of self-pity, the tug of war between love and misery. “Don’t you ever think that. You’re no burden on me or your father. I’d still love you if those Infernal-forsaken savages had taken your legs altogether. And hey—they didn’t. You’re going to walk again. How many more weeks did the doctor say until you can get your casts off?”

  “Three on the left one, four on the right,” she sniffed.

  “See? There you go. I’m going to hold onto you, every single step until you’re moving around on your own again. It won’t be long now. You’ll be good as new by the end of the short year. Then we’ll go riding again. How about that?” Toler smiled, wiping away her tears with his thumbs.

  “The doctor said it could be another two years before I can walk again. He said I’ll probably have to use a cane, or… or a walker, for the rest of my life.”

  Toler shook his head. “He’s covering his ass. Nichel Vantanible’s doctors don’t ever make predictions they can’t keep. That’s a worst-case scenario. I’m telling you.”

  She seemed to brighten at that. “And you’ll be here? You’ll stay with me? Even if it takes that long?”

  “Even if it takes that long. I promise, baby girl.” Toler bit his lip. That was Daxin’s pet name for Savannah. I’ll miss you too much, baby girl, Daxin used to tell her every time he left. Knowing his brother was still out there somewhere made Toler afraid for Reylenn’s safety. Daxin knew she was still alive. Would he abandon his grudge and leave her alone? When I kill him, he will.

  Toler brought Reylenn home, where they ate dinner and talked all evening until Reylenn began to complain of the pain in her legs. He gave her a small cup of the liquid painkiller prescribed by her doctor, then helped her into bed and kissed her goodnight as she began to doze from its effects. Then he made his nightly rounds, inspecting every door and window to ensure it was closed and locked. Nichel still hadn’t arrived by the time Toler came outside, so he made sure Vantanible’s night watchmen had no plans to vacate the premises before the master of the house returned.

  As Toler crossed the street toward home, two things struck him with a sudden disquiet. The first was that he had never left Reylenn home alone at night before; he had always made sure at least one person was inside the flat with her. This was usually the housekeeper, Ms. Daubert, who was away tonight visiting family in Elcombe.

  The second thing Toler noticed was how queasy he felt. It wasn’t the food; he knew the meat and vegetables they’d eaten for dinner were fresh. It was the feeling he always got just before the starwinds came.

  He gazed up to study the night sky. Unless his eyes were deceiving him, he thought he could see faint slivers of green and purple beyond the veil of black. Sometimes the starwinds came suddenly; at others their coming was gradual. The more gradual manifestations were not only the longest-lasting, but the most severe.

  Toler’s stomach was churning by the time he came to the side street beneath his apartment. If he didn’t make it inside soon, he was going to lose his dinner in the alley. He still had to enter the building through a broken window, ascend seven flights of stairs, and walk the long hallway to his apartment door. As it turned out, he didn’t make it nearly that far.

  A figure emerged from the shadows. Gun
metal gleamed in the starlight as the figure came forward, the barrel of a silvered chrome revolver held steady in its grip. “Stay where you are, Shep.”

  Another one of these coffing zoom freaks, thinking he’ll get an easy score out of me, Toler predicted. But this was no drug addict. Next Toler knew, a second figure came from behind to grab him by the wrists. He struggled free and whirled to see a slender black-haired woman, her dark eyes shining.

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” said the woman, her accent thick with northern twang.

  “Then leave me alone.”

  “‘Fraid we can’t do that,” said the man, pressing his revolver barrel into the small of Toler’s back.

  There was nowhere to run. The narrow alley was crushed between two tall buildings, and the man behind him looked like he knew how to use that revolver.

  “You’re Toler, ain’t you?” asked the woman.

  A shiver ran through him. “Who are you, the shit patrol?”

  “My name’s Jallika Weaver. This here’s Willis Lokes.”

  “How do you know my name, and what do you want with me?”

  “We was sent here to… retrieve you,” said Lokes. “Gentleman wants to see you in Belmond.”

  “I’m not going to Belmond.”

  “I got a dozen rounds of three fifty-seven says you are.”

  “Tell me who sent you and how much he’s paying. I’m sure we can work out a deal.”

  “Unfortunately for you, the gentleman didn’t give us a name,” said Lokes.

  “Was it Calistari? Fat dway, fancy clothes? No? How about Mandrake? Brown hair, red beard… beady eyes?”