by Deck Davis
Even with that, he gave off a goodness. The spotter found it difficult to explain why. If his gaze was dark most of the time, then he could only describe this goodness as light. A shroud of common decency that seemed to hang around the stranger.
“Why does he sit with the drivers?” said the other spotter. “Bunch of thieves and crooks.”
The driver of his cart looked back at them in disgust. The spotter shrugged.
His friend answered. “A thief once does not a thief always make,” he said. “Drivers get treated like shit. They get their water last. When we’re having breaks, they’re heaving inventory around, redistributing weight. They’re cutting open grain sacks, sharing it out. They’re diggin’ stones out of horse hooves. Maybe the necro thinks they could use some friendly company. I’ve seen him sit with a different driver every day.”
“Gunar hires criminals because they’re cheap. Don’t mean you can trust ‘em.”
“He won’t hire anyone who’s hurt a man. Just thievin’ and the like. There are plenty of reasons a man might steal.”
“Is that what the necroprancer told you? I saw you talking to him the other day.”
“Necromancer,” corrected the spotter. “You want to be careful who you mock, ‘cuz sometimes it’s your own tongue that chokes ya. Only thing I got out of the mancer was a smile and a good morning.”
“Best you leave it at that. If necromancers speak too much, their words call out to the dead. That’s why he acts like words cost gold. He doesn’t want to say too much and accidentally raise an army of zombies.”
“Idiot. He doesn’t speak because of all the shit that happened in Dispolis.”
“Huh?”
“You been sleeping with your head up your arse for a year? A bunch of crazy bastards were kidnapping academy kids and cutting their fingers off and stuff.”
“Why?”
“Well…they’re crazy. That explanation enough for ya? Crazy don’t need a why. Our necro had something to do with it.”
“And Gunar’s letting him travel with us? The hell?” said the spotter, looking worriedly at his fingers.
“No, idiot. You got wyrms nesting in your skull or something? He weren’t part of the torturing. He was caught up in it. They almost got him. That’s why he’s here with us, and not out raising rich folk from the dead like all the other academy necromancers.”
“I wouldn’t turn my back on him when the moon’s full. Hope Gunar’s staying wary.”
The spotter shrugged. “They say he helped Gunar’s girl. Necro was passing by when we was camped outside Leercroft, and he saw little Beate sitting beside Old Shep, crying.”
“That mutt is older than the gods, I swear.”
“Well, he’d reached the end. Dropped down dead.”
“Bullshit. He’s over there on a wagon with Beate. That dog will outlive the stars. Don’t talk shit.”
The driver shot the spotter a stern glance. This driver had a long ponytail of oil-black hair, and his skin was so ravaged by the sun he looked like bleached leather. His stare was enough to stop the spotters mid-sentence.
“No swearing in front of the bison,” he said.
“Sorry,” said the spotter.
His friend rolled his eyes and carried on. “No way did Old Shep die. Beate loves that thing. We woulda known if he kissed the arse of fate.”
“I’m telling you. While we were all in the tavern in Leercroft, Old Shep died. The necro saw Beate crying, and he brought Old Shep back from beyond. Didn’t ask for payment or nothin’. Gunar had this bright idea; we usually take forty or so pack animals to get us through Toil, right? So as when some die in Toil, we’re not screwed. Only, forty animals eat a lot of grain. And where does grain money come from?”
“Gunar’s purse.”
“Right. And the hands we hire to coral ‘em and feed ‘em and stuff. Where are they paid from?”
“Gunar’s purse.”
“Maybe you got some spark in your skull after all. One last one for ya. Where are we paid from?”
“Gunar’s purse.”
“If the necro can resurrect beasts when they die, they don’t need to bring as many as back-up. They don’t need as many hands cuz there aren’t as many bison. That makes Gunar’s purse heavier. And that makes ours heavier, too. Word is that the necro didn’t ask for much. Just wanted to get as far away as Dispolis as he could. Even refused a reward for helpin’ Beate and Old Shep. You should be thankful he’s here.”
The spotter watched the necromancer in silence then. Suspicion still weighed heavy on his mind, but that was to be expected from someone who’d never cast a spell in their lives. Even so, he had to admit that his friend was right. Maybe they were lucky to have the guy with them.
Despite the merriment waiting when they reached Equipoint Rock, the caravaners were a serious bunch, and when they were working, they were working. Most were seasoned Toilers with five, six, even a dozen trips under their belts, and they treated the desert with the wariness they’d give a semi-tamed wolf.
They rode best in darkness, traveling out of the glare of the day sun. They navigated by maps and stars, then following the path the storm oracle set out for them. That was a controversial point for some, because just as the necromancer was a new addition, so was the oracle.
Nobody knew how the storm oracles came to their conclusions; some said they could smell oncoming storms and the directions of their approach. Others believed they really were oracles, and that their divination were faint memories of storms yet to happen.
Others, people like the spotter who now watched the necromancer with more curiosity and less disdain, knew the truth; storm oracles spent their educative years learning about wind patterns, about the sky, and about the way the world interacted, and they followed those rules to predict the weather.
The traders followed these rules, too. From evening until sunrise wagon wheels would roll over the cracked ground, taking advantage of the cooler temperature. During the day, when the sun was at its cruelest, they would cover the pack animals under canvas, treat their caravans with a lashing of alchemical lotion, and get in their wagons, strip to their pants, and try to sleep the day away.
Even under the fabric - which they had also treated to repel the sun - the wagons were cramped, sticky, sweaty, and hotter than lava.
The children felt it worse, so frustrated with their inability to sleep that they’d cry, mutter, turn over and over, waking the rest of the family up. It wouldn’t be long until a voice from another cart would cry out: “What you shut the brat up?”
This would spread wagon to wagon, a dozen “shut the hell up!” shouts that grew in volume until Gunar would lose his patience and threaten to tie up the next shouter and leave him beside an anthill.
They would all sleep eventually. Some of them had been used to much worse conditions than this. The spotters, the beast hands, the mercenaries, and the wagon drivers were tough men and women. Stronger than steel, most of them. They had to be; Gunar demanded that only the most durable of travelers joined him, because a chain with a rusted link wouldn’t stay a chain for long.
That was the way he thought of them; not as people, but as inventory. Tools. Links in a chain. Gunar had flaws, many of them, but chief among them was that as soon as he led his caravan over Toil boundaries, he turned as cold as the Sun Toil nights. The mercenaries had the measure of him. They knew that Gunar Helketoil viewed them as cattle, numbers there to get his supplies to Sanzance and collect his coin. As much as Gunar would always try to keep them all safe, he did it out of prudence, not love.
Every man, woman, and child there, save his wife and daughter, were expendable to him. And being expendable was a normal state of being in a place like Toil.
That wasn’t to say that their journeys through Sun Toil were death sentences, though. No man would work with the sure finger of death pointing at him, no matter what the pay. There was a risk here, but a manageable one.
Sure, they might have been traveli
ng over the largest desert in the queendom, one that spread its sandy claws thousands of miles north, south, east, and west. They might have been driving their caravans along a storm path so narrow it was the equivalent of shooting an arrow through a keyhole.
But they weren’t a bunch of amateurs; this was a merchant caravan led by Gunar Helketoil. Steel-Stomach Gunar had journeyed across Sun Toil every year, starting when he was just fourteen and apprenticed to a trader from Blackroll, until now when he ruled his own fleet of wagons.
‘No sane man braves the barrens of Sun Toil,’ was the common saying, and it was true. Unless they could help it, nobody would place even one foot on the vast desert, no matter how much it tempted them with a shortcut. If a hunter found that his usual way was blocked by a bear and her cubs, he’d go another route, no? So it was with Sun Toil and traders.
See, it was a desert by categorization, but an ocean by nature. A dry ocean, sure. An ocean that would wrench every drop of moisture from a man. An ocean that lacked even a molecule of water. But, just like a raft caught on a swell at the start of a storm, cutting even a mile across Sun Toil could trap a traveler. Though they might have a map, though they planned to be in Toil for less than a day, the desert would claim them before they realized it, like waves carrying a raft deeper out to sea.
A dust storm would rise around them, blinding them, playing games with navigation devices and setting them off course. It took only a few hours of errant travel before a man could lose his bearings completely.
He could believe he was walking out of Sun Toil as planned, but the barrens were drawing him in, crooking a finger and beckoning him deeper into its odd mix of desolation and beauty. Leading him into the land where silence sank you into an almost mind-changing isolation, scenery that made you know that you were truly alone in this world and that provoked questions inside even the least insular of men.
Come on. Keep walking, traveler. This way, it would say.
It was wise to ignore that voice, but a man like Gunar didn’t get rich by selling the same old things on the same old routes. The Trader’s Guild saw to that, where the already-rich helped the soon-to-be-rich and kept the undesirables in a lowly-station. The guild made sure that men like Gunar couldn’t join it, and that non-guildies would barely be able to trade a bar of soap in most populous towns and cities.
Men like Gunar had to find a different way to amass gold. They had to listen to sun-soaked voices best left ignored.
If you peeled back the canvas of Gunar’s wagons you wouldn’t find salt, milk, or oats. If you checked his maps you would never see them point to Dispolis nor Thorpe’s Point, nor any of the other cities in the queendom.
He made rare gold traveling rare routes, and in doing so risked the lives of his wife, children, wagon drivers, herders, mercenaries. Once each year he made the journey few traders ever would; a slog across the Sun Toil deserts and canyons. Through the heat and the dry thunder and the dust storms that spun so fast they could flay the skin off a man.
He did it because he knew what waited on the other side of Sun Toil. Across the thousands of desert miles, lived a people as isolated as they were rich. A city filled with folks who would pay fortunes just for one supply run made by the only trader crazy enough to do it.
But Gunar wasn’t rolling dice with his journeys. Or perhaps he was, but he weighted the dice before he let them fall from his hands, and he did this by way of his preparations.
Enough pack animals to carry his inventory three times over and support any in the company who were wounded and unable to walk.
Food and water to last a company three times the size for three times the journey length.
Mercenaries with weapons and training to deal with any of the creatures that hunted in Sun Toil’s barren foothills.
Alchemically treated tents for shelter from the heat and all but the harshest dust storms. Alchemical lotion for everyone to apply to avoid sunburn and solar madness.
A storm oracle who could look at maps and cast his magic at the heavens, then plot a pathway through the Sun Toil storms.
It was usually enough for any contingency, and the lords knew Gunar had seen contingency aplenty and planned for each. It had always been enough, with rarely a loss in his journeys over the years.
It wasn’t enough this time.
CHAPTER 2
One of the spotters leaped up onto his feet so excitedly he almost fell off the wagon. The company had finally reached the middle of Sun Toil after weeks of travel, and now the spotter pointed with his little finger, having lost his index finger after a post-dice argument.
“There’s old Equi!” he shouted. “Come here, you lovely old rock.”
With a shout from the driver below him, the wagon lurched to a stop. It broke too suddenly for the poor spotter, who flew over the edge and landed beside the horses.
His spotter friend hopped down from his cart, patted a horse on the head as he ran past it, and attended to his friend.
“Healer,” he shouted. “Get us a gods-damned healer!”
Gunar strode over, his eyes ablaze, and the hush among camp said that everyone knew why. Even the most ardent perfectionist looked sloppy when standing in Gunar’s shadow, and it made him come off as brash. Talk to Gunar in a tavern back in the fairer parts of the queendom and he’d slap your back and buy you a drink, but join his company on a Sun Toil sojourn, and you’d come to hate the man.
He had to be like that. A Sun Toil crossing was as lucrative a trade route as you could find, but the desert seethed with danger. On his first trip, Gunar had seen one man succumb to the poison of a scorpion sting, and another had come within days of fatal sunstroke. After seeing the man’s skin peel and pus seep out, after listening to him beg the sun for mercy through cracked lips, Gunar had vowed to be the most bastardly of bastards if it meant nobody died on his trips.
Now, his eyes burned hotter than the Toil sun as he strode over to the spotters and cart driver, unsure whether to blame the spotter for standing up on a moving cart, or the driver for halting so suddenly when he knew a man was on his roof.
“Can’t you incompetent sons of a-”
Gunar stopped talking. He traced his gaze north of the spotters and up, up, up to the distant sky. But he wasn’t looking at Equipoint rock, the triangle-shaped natural marker that signaled half their journey was done.
He stared for a second. When he turned away and faced the rest of the camp, the beast-hands and mercenaries and the women and children saw that his face was pale.
“Get me the storm oracle,” he said.
“He’s sleeping,” answered Tek, a young trade apprentice, one of only a few that Gunar had taken on in recent years.
“I don’t care if he’s dug a shit hole and hasn’t finished making his arse sparkling clean, get him here.”
“The oracle says we mustn’t interrupt his sleep. That’s how he sees the storms; in his dreams,” said Tek, in a voice steeped in mystery.
Those who knew Gunar well could see how much he was battling to contain his temper.
“That’s a pan of boiling bison piss,” he said. “He made that up so he can take naps while the rest of us poor bastards work. Wake him up. Drag the coot by his beard if you must. If he’s any sort of storm oracle, he’ll already know you’re coming and he’ll see the storm I’m about to lay on him.”
A woman standing by a caravan in the center of the wagon formation kneeled to the young girl next to her and whispered in her ear. Then she crossed the plains and approached Gunar.
She was tall with strong shoulders that were used to carrying lots of weight, and the worry lines on her forehead spoke about other weights she’d had to bear. Growing up as the elder sister in a family of eight siblings in Trough Yard, the poorest part of Dispolis, she’d had to learn how to take on more weight than a girl should.
This woman had done everything to make sure her seven siblings didn’t suffer the reported sixty percent infant mortality rate that hung like a ghost around d
istricts like Trough Yard. She’d worked, stole, borrowed, she’d done everything save presenting herself at one of the gentleman houses. No matter what she’d been willing to do, she’d always kept a part of herself away from all of that.
Helena Helketoil was tougher than the Sun Toil dirt, and Gunar was proud to have taken her surname when they married, as was the custom of Helena’s people.
He was proud to lead Helena and their daughter and these fine folks back into Toil each year, back to a land that years, years, and years ago once provided a home to Helena’s ancestors.
She was the only one who’d approach Gunar at a time like this. She was the only one capable of lancing the boil of anger enveloping her husband so that he could wipe away the pus and see clearly again. They needed Gunar logical, not angry. Helena was the woman for that.
“What’s got you worked up? We talked about this. You know how my father died,” she said. “You’re greying too fast, Guny. I want to enjoy that chestnut hair of yours for a few years.”
“What the hell do you mean what’s…” began Gunar. Seeing his wife, his features softened. Just like that, a transformation in a second, and now Gunar was lovable and loving again. Just a man standing beside the woman he loved more than anyone, save his daughter. “Oh. Helena. See Equi rock?”
“Course. We’re usually popping corks when we get here.”
“Look at the sky just east of it.”
“Not used to hearing you sound rattled,” she said. Helena studied the distance, and she furrowed her brow. “Dust storm. Could be headed towards us. I thought the oracle was good?”
“That’s not all. Look west.”
“I can’t see…oh. Oh hell.”
“Oh hell indeed.”
“Two dust storms?” said Helena. “I didn’t even know it was possible.”