by Deck Davis
Fixed on this plan, he’d spent thirty minutes or so wandering his memory palace until he remembered a trapper he’d met near Dispolis in his fifth year in the academy.
Jakub had strayed outside the academy grounds looking for dill, basil and oregano herbs for instructor Hewis, who paid any student who’d collect them for him.
He was skirting along a crag when he heard a voice shout, “Don’t move, lad. You’re about to lose your foot.”
The voice belonged to a man with a chest as big as two barrels and thighs that could have belonged to a gorilla, they were so packed with muscle. Old in his wrinkles but young in his eyes, with a flame-red mustache and hair that was thinning on top. His face was covered by a scar that made Jakub wince.
“Look down at your feet, lad. And don’t take a step or it’ll be your last, I can promise you that.”
There, just a step in front of him, was a metal spring trap that looked like it’d take his whole foot and ankle off in one bite. Knowing how close he’d come to earning the nickname Hopalong Jakub sent a shock of adrenaline through him.
The man disarmed the trap and then told Jakub to sit down. He handed him a bottle. “Drink this,” he said.
Jakub took a sniff and felt drunk already. “I’m twelve years old,” he’d said.
“And? I was sucking from the whiskey tit when I was still too young to wipe my arse.”
Jakub laughed, took a swig, coughed his guts out onto the grass, and then spent an hour in the man’s company.
His name was York, and he was a hunter turned trapper who’d spent his best years all over the queendom hunting every kind of animal imaginable, but who had settled down when age began to tug at his collar.
He enjoyed learning about hunting, watching York make traps, and listening to his stories. He loved it so much that he met him every day for the two weeks that York spent around Dispolis. The hunter taught him all kinds of things, even contradicting some of the survival training given to him by the academy. Jakub began to treasure the hours he could spare to sneak away to hear about York’s life.
And then, York was gone. Jakub attended his classes, rushed through his after-class assignments, and then hiked out of academy grounds and into the marshes, only to find no sign of York. It was the same the next day, then the next, and finally Jakub accepted that the hunter had moved on, probably to more fertile trapping grounds.
Now, years later, Jakub had all the things York had taught him stored in his mental palace, and the old hunter was going to save not just Jakub’s life, but the lives of all the caravaners imprisoned by the slavers.
“I need to make snares,” he told Olin, who just blinked at him, unaware how close he’d come to becoming lusk bait.
He spent the cooler parts of the morning ripping wood panels from the caravan and breaking them down smaller and smaller until he could use them as triggers and engines for the snares he needed. Then he used his dagger to strip patches of canvas and cut them thinner and thinner until he could use them as cords for snare nooses.
The resulting dozen snares weren’t pretty, but they were ugly in a way that he was proud of because York the hunter had only shown him how to make them a few times, and that had been in the academy grounds where there was plenty of trees to cut branches off.
Next, he combed the surrounding desert land searching the ground, this time for smaller holes that might be the home of vermin. He set the snares in a dozen promising locations, and then there was nothing to do but wait, and hope.
Either this worked, or it didn’t. But the consequences of the ‘didn’t’ were too much to think about.
CHAPTER 31
York, the hunter
His throat was dryer than a lava-wolf’s arse crack. As smooth as Kolja ran, it had been many moons since York had ridden for so long, and now every gallop made his posterior beg for mercy.
The alchemical paste saved his wrinkled skin from burns, but even a few days into his journey he was feeling nostalgic about the sweet breeze that blew through the forest near his house in the fairer side of the queendom, the land where trees grew giant from the ground, where plants and vegetables and fruit flourished, where – say it quietly – water even fell from the sky.
“Come back to me, sweet breeze,” he said as he rode. “I’ll treat you like the most beautiful, buxom lover.”
These were thoughts that belonged to an old man. A young person could never think in this way, because the yearning for comfort was something that held the hand of Old Bastard Time, and together the two of them crept up on you.
He traveled with his two bags hitched onto Kolja’s saddle, his empty sword sheath on his belt, and with a half dozen pigskins of water tied to a rope that he tied around Kolja’s neck. He refilled these whenever he saw water, which he knew he could find when he spotted vegetation straining through the ground. He kept his machete in a holder strapped on his back, refusing to taint Maeve’s sheath with so base a weapon.
He held Kolja’s reins in one hand as he rode, though the beast was so smooth that there was hardly any need to hold on. In his right hand, he held the bear claw. Every so often, he’d reach into his shirt and pull out a string that was tied around his neck, only this one had a compass on it.
Golden and gleaming with magic, this compass had been artificed by a master York had met in Dispolis many years ago. Archibald, his name was, and the man was grouchier than a spayed bulldog. Magnificent workmanship, though. All a man had to do was take an object that symbolized what he wanted to find and place it against the compass, and the compass would point the way.
York tapped the bear claw on the compass. It gave a faint buzzing sound like a bee taking flight, and the needle spun.
He tugged on the reins. “Northeast a touch,” he told Kolja, who turned with grace and lost no speed in changing course.
He was pleased to see the cart driver hadn’t played him for a fool’s jester, at least. York had asked for the fastest horse the man could get his hands on, and by all the gods’ big pink arses, the trader had supplied a beauty.
In a few days travel Kolja had covered a week’s worth of ground, and he only needed a pigskin of water and three handfuls of grain a day to keep running. York suspected there was magic in his breeding somewhere down his familial line, though you wouldn’t think it at first sight.
York rode all through the night and early morning, resting up when the sun began to peak. Then he would feed and water Kolja, feed and water himself, and then he’d make toilet a quarter of a mile from where he planned to sleep. Ever the skinflint, he had a rotation of bottles that he pissed into and drank from, and he’d mix a cleansing powder into the bottles to reclaim any water in there that wasn’t pure waste.
That done, he’d unroll a sheet of heat-reflecting canvas, unhook four poles from the loop on Kolja’s saddle, and he’d cover him and his horse friend. He’d lay there protected from the sun, and he’d think of years gone by, tales told many times, faces that had come and gone from his life, and eventually those memories would walk him own the pathway to sleep, and he’d wake up to a world of darkness where the nocturnal desert animals scurried, hooted, hunted. Then York would pack his things and he’d ride, ride, ride, always following his bear claw and compass.
As they galloped under starlight he’d talk to Kolja and he’d tell it stories, and he knew Kolja couldn’t understand his words but hoped they comforted the animal. It comforted him to tell them, anyway. As a hunter and trapper York had lived a mostly solitary life, but even the most insular of men needed to hear their own voice sometimes.
When he wasn’t telling Kolja stories he’d tell him plans. How they’d kill the bear. How it would feel to see his old adversary again. How he’d feel afterward. He hoped it would give him completion. A sense of tying the ends of unanswered questions before he grew too old to answer them. As of now, he was on the edge. He already felt the miles in Toil sit heavy on him. The sun felt hotter than he remembered. He felt the sense that had he not come now
, it wouldn’t be long until he was too old.
And if he failed, what then? What could a man do who was too old to practice the skills he’d used all his life? Whose flesh and blood had cut itself from him and left for distant isles?
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 t
o 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.