by Deck Davis
“Why the hell did nobody ever tell me about this? I’ve been traveling Toil half my life.”
“Because you’re more likely to see a magic pig dancing in the clouds than a dry lightning storm. So few people visit Toil, so little wildlife lives here, that when the storms begin, they usually starve, lacking energy gained from movement. Sun Toil is thousands of miles long and wide; you’d have to be unlucky to get caught in one, to be in that place at that time.”
“Sounds like the kind of luck a man with two dust storms closing in east and west has. A man who needs to go south a little but can’t, because if he moves, he might blow his people straight to one of the hells.”
“There’s something else,” said the oracle.
Gunar’s stomach lurched now, the knot getting so tight he was in pain. “The sky’s going to start raining fire on us? The gods are going to spray molten shit over our heads?”
“One of your traders has a wagon filled with isopropoil, yes?”
Gunar nodded. “The Sanzancers buy it to blast their quarries.”
“The only thing more likely to explode when dry lightning hits would be a cart filled with dynamite. We were lucky with the last strike, but the next could blow us all to a thousand pieces.”
Gunar faced his people. Failure throbbed inside him. Part of him knew that two dust storms coming from different directions was such an anomaly that only the subtleties of nature could be blamed. The oracle had told him that to get caught in dry lightning was exceptionally rare. Could Gunar be blamed for that?
Every person here, save the children whose parents had brought them, had taken a role in this convoy of their own free will, because they wanted to earn gold.
Even so, he could hardly look at them all now. He’d failed them, hadn’t he?
No.
He’d faced things like this before. Not these exact things, but he and danger were old friends. Now, he’d do whatever it took to get free of Toil’s three-pronged attack.
“Nobody move,” he yelled, feeling their collective attention snap on him. The time for shielding them from panic was over. “Don’t take a step, don’t move your arms, and don’t do anything.”
As they watched in nervous silence, he explained that every movement of theirs would charge the static in the air and that this would result in an explosion of dry lightning that would almost certainly cause the isopropoil cart to explode, killing most of them on the spot.
“I won’t lie to you,” he told them all. “This is going to get worse. But that’s why I brought a necromancer with us. Any man who dies tonight will get his life back.”
This seemed to smooth over some of their frayed nerves, and everyone seemed a little calmer. Everyone except Helena, who marched over to him.
She was smiling, but a husband knows when his wife’s smiles are genuine, and he knows which smiles are painted on and really mean I’m mad as hell. He couldn’t blame her.
“I didn’t marry a liar, so why am I looking at one now?” she whispered. Even in her anger, they were a team, and she wouldn’t question his leadership in front of everyone. “The necromancer isn’t a master. He’s here to revive the beasts, not people.”
“Men make better decisions when they’re not terrified,” said Gunar.
She seemed to understand his reasoning now even if she wasn’t happy, and she put his arm around him while he addressed the caravaners.
He spoke confidently, He warned them against their instinct to run, explaining that running would make their collective death more likely, not less. Given the fact that movement could doom them every man, woman, and child, Gunar would personally kill anyone who ran.
Did he mean it? Perhaps. He’d once had to wield Toil justice and tie a noose around a man who had lost his mind and decapitated two bison and would have done worse, had Gunar not ended his suffering.
With nobody moving, a silence settled over the camp so eerie that Gunar wished he could command the bards to start singing. The silence gave the sound of the dust storms free reign to tease their way into the caravaners’ ears. It made them seem like they were moving closer.
There was no denying that they were turning southeast and south-west now, and that the caravan would be caught in them. That was as deadly as the lightning; in a dust storm, the sand grains would spin so fast that they were like tiny razors in the air, and they would shred absolutely everything.
Yet if they tried to change course, they’d provoke a dry lightning strike that could hit the wrong wagon and blow them all to the stars.
How had it come to this? Gunar had taken so many precautions that he cut his profit margin by paying for a necromancer and a storm oracle. How had he led his people into death’s snapping jaws?
Forget self-pity. Pity never pulled a man up from the ground.
Gunar began to work a plan in his head. Firstly, they would have to risk movement. No way around that. But if he could offer extra gold for anyone willing to drive the explosive cart away from camp, then that would remove one threat.
If the isopropoil cart couldn’t blow up near them, he’d feel a little safer. Then they could travel south again. Their movement would generate dry lightning, but it was a risk they’d have to take, and it was manageable if the explosives weren’t with them. It was the only thing they could do, because staying and getting sucked into the dust storm’s wake was a death sentence for every man, woman, and child.
Now, who was likely to volunteer to take the explosive wagon away, and who among the convoy could Gunar ill-afford to lose?
It was when Gunar was thinking this, when he was descending into a guilty self-pity, that he heard the first cracking sound.
But none of us have moved!
He braced himself for the flash of burning, pure white and then the rumble of an explosion.
And there was an explosion, but not of lighting.
A woman screamed. Her husband pushed into front of her, shielding her. When he saw what she had seen, he screamed too.
More explosions. More screaming, yelling.
Gunar’s command to stay still was abandoned as some of the campers ran to their carts for their weapons, as some of them hopped up onto their carts and then disappeared behind the canvas to cower, as mothers and fathers instructed children to climb under the caravans and hide until it was safe.
When Gunar saw what had caused his words to go unheeded, he understood.
He even ignored his own command.
All around their camp, forming a circle and closing them in, mounds of earth had exploded to reveal the opening of tunnels.
From these tunnels emerged Toil-lusks. Gunar had seen a lot in his years, but nothing compared to the first time he’d ever seen a lusk. Taller than a man by a good few feet and with cracked, dirt-colored skin and wings that made a thut-thut-thut sound. Everything about them was repulsive unless you happened to be an entomologist. Even the biggest insect lover would take a step away when a toil-lusk fluttered his way and then landed nearby, antennae swirling, pincers clacking together.
There was an old saying. Disaster always travels with his brothers. It had never seemed truer. Storms, lightning, and lusks? How in all hells had they hit them at once? Even the more experienced travelers were panicking now. They could have coped with one disaster, but three?
Gunar eyed the explosives wagon. He’d have to drive it away by himself. Get it as far away from camp as he could. There was no time to waiver, no time to even explain it. He saw Helena now; she was across camp, helping young little Boysie find his mother and father.
Gunar didn’t have time to tell Helena what he must do.
He sucked it all in, tried to turn his emotions to stone, and he turned to face the explosives wagon. That was when he saw the necromancer already sitting on the driver’s platform, urging the bison to move.
The necromancer had read the danger, and he’d put the camp above himself. Gunar felt a welling of gratitude building inside him.
There was an explosion
behind him. He turned around to see two women and a child laying on the floor, bodies charred black. Dry lightning. It had added three more to its victim list, and it was charging again now as the campers packed and tried to flee. It was the strangest sight Gunar had seen; everyone’s hair was standing completely on end.
Lusks wove in and out of camp, pincers stabbing, jaws snapping, hunting for soft flesh and having an easy time of it because nobody had been ready for the fight.
Lighting charged and then struck, exploding into the ground, burning skin, sending the stench of singed hair into the air around them.
And then, after the pincers and lightning had claimed all too many lives, as the surviving campers managed to get to carts and command their bison to move, that was when they realized that the dust storms had found them.
Swirling sand grains, millions, billions, trillions of them, whizzed around in circles, traveling so fast that the eviscerated everything they touched. They sheared through canvas, through wood, through metal, through skin. The sound was deafening, a screech of whirring death.
Even the lusks knew to leave then, burrowing back underground into their network of tunnels under the Toil soil.
The storms from east and west converged, becoming one giant cloud of doom, their sand shredding anything it touched until soon no sounds could be heard. The noise of wagon wheels turning ceased, and not because their drivers had been careful in oiling them; it was because the storm had lashed through the drivers, shredding them into nothing. It was because it had done the same to the cart themselves.
Hours later, the storms moved on. The dry lighting disappeared. There were no lusks here anymore.
No sound could be heard. There was little trace of the hundreds-strong convoy that only this morning had breakfasted under a clear Toil sun. No mercenaries arguing about cards, no children playing.
Death had blown its foul breath over Gunar’s company. Men, women, and animals. Work hands, mercenaries, wives, children. They all suffered its taint.
The song of death was sung softly into their ears, the notes changing for every person, the words belonging to only them as they died. With each death, the storm abated, the lightning crashed softer, the lusks fled with full bellies.
Then there was only silence. Like a planet with no atmosphere, with no touch of a man. Just a peaceful, calm, suffocating vacuum of sound.
Dozens of them died that day. A spread of families with dreams and purpose, dead.
But one man had ridden from the storm.
A young man from Queen Patience’s Magic Academy. A survivor who had been seized by the hand of fortune and dragged through three disasters to achieve the unlikeliest of escapes.
A journeyman necromancer separated from the academy he once called home and working for Gunar as a mercenary. He had been tasked with resurrecting any livestock who perished on the slog through Sun Toil. No chance of that now.
There was only one sound now; an explosion in the distance as the necromancer, who had never driven a cart before, hit a rock.
The jolt made the precarious cargo in his cart ignite.
An unusually tuned ear would have heard a thud just before the explosion; the thud of the necromancer diving off the wagon and hitting the ground.
A boom sounded out, the noise traveling far over the desert to the distant canyons and rocky hills and caves. Debris rained from the sky and thudded onto the ground.
When the explosion was over, the necromancer stirred.
He blinked.
He opened his eyes.
Pain throbbed through him, and he retched until his eyes watered.
CHAPTER 4
Jakub Russo
It was disconcerting to be in agony in one part of his body and completely numb in another. After Jakub had finished vomiting and blinked the water from his eyes, he saw why this was the case.
A wooden rod from a wheel spoke was sticking out of his waist, just to the left of his stomach. That accounted for the pain.
The numbness came from his legs, where he had the slight misfortune of having a full bison carcass lying across his thighs, pinning him down.
His first thought was, which god did I piss off today?
His second was, how the heck did this happen?
He knew this trip had been dangerous. A journey through Sun Toil, how could it not be? But since everything that had happened in Dispolis, with the flesh-stripping murderers kidnapping academy students and torturing the magic from their skin, Jakub had wanted to do nothing but travel. He needed gold for that.
The merchant Gunar Helketoil was renowned for making the Sun Toil trip once per year and paying wages that’d keep a man flush for six months. He had to; otherwise, nobody would make a trip like this.
Besides, the danger became merely a threat if you planned enough, and experience chiseled that threat to just a warning. Gunar was a seasoned Toiler, and what’s more, he traveled with his family. That had been enough to convince Jakub that Gunar knew what he was doing and that the wages were worth it.
His reason was that a trader wouldn’t take his family on a dangerous journey. He was revising that opinion now, and his current thinking was that Gunar Helketoil was a crazy bastard and that Jakub was even crazier for not seeing it.
He’d agreed to travel with them as the caravan necromancer, bringing the bison and pack animals back from the dead should they succumb somewhere along the journey through Sun Toil.
It was going to take more than just journeyman necromancer to bring them back now. Jakub couldn’t remember much of what led to him being trapped under a dead animal, but he saw flashes of memory in his mind.
Dust storms taller than a giant. Leviathan toil-lusks rising through cracks in the ground and feeding themselves into a frenzy on the panicked caravaners. Lighting crashing down, exploding into the ground.
He heard snippets of sound; women screaming, Gunar bellowing. The feeling of chaos that was as real as the static in the air.
Looking around, he couldn’t see any sight of the others. No people. No dead animals apart from the bison currently using his legs as a mattress.
“Hello?” he tried to shout, but his voice came out throaty, like a man on his death bed calling for the nurse. “Hello?”
It was useless. The others were dead, and anyone who had survived was gone. That left him alone here, trapped, thirsty, and in pain.
But wait. Was he ever alone? Had he ever really been alone since he had earned the journeyman necromancer rank?
Back then, after leveling to journeyman [1], he’d visited Necormancia Hall for the first time, and he’d met the original creators of his art. Their names were Nelania, Crotalus, and Mancerno, and each existed in a gaseous form, fed by the necromancers who cast spells in their name.
The three had bargained with Jakub, tried to get him to choose their own shade. A shade was a path of necromancy that would influence which spells a mancer learned, and out of necessity, Jakub had made a choice he sometimes regretted.
He’d chosen Mancerno’s shade, the dark path of the Raiser.
Since then, he’d been able to talk to the ancient spirit using his mind, though Mancerno’s intrusions were mostly uninvited. Now, though, choosing the Raiser shade could turn out to be a masterstroke.
“Mancerno,” he thought. “Are you there?”
No answer.
“Mancerno?”
The silence worried him. Mancerno had never wasted a chance to invade his mind, so where was he?
Then the realization hit. He hadn’t spoken with Mancerno for weeks now, and the lack of intrusion on his thoughts was something that had passed unnoticed because that was the way things should be. Like a noise sounding outside your window for hours, it could stop and you wouldn’t notice it had ceased.
He knew why, too. After choosing the Raiser shade and earning its powers, Jakub was supposed to use the spells. Each spell fed Mancerno, allowed the ancient spirit to exist. Jakub had barely used any of his talents in the last m
onths.
Now Mancerno had abandoned him the only time he might ever need him.
With no help coming from ancient spirits, he needed to focus. The only sign the caravan had even been here was a lonely wheel wedged into the dirt a couple of feet away from him, missing a rod. A hand-sized part of said rod was safe though; it was safely wedged inside Jakub’s waist.
Where the hell was everyone?
The longer he thought, the more doors opened in his mind.
Memories of the dust storm hitting with such speed and force that the grains began eviscerating tent canvas and shredding flesh from people’s bodies.
Memories of the giant insects spearing mercenaries who didn’t know whether to defend themselves from the storm or the creatures.
Memories of Gunar screaming orders here and there, and then bellowing his last before dry lighting shot from the sky and electrified the ground around him.
That had happened. It was no nightmare, no figment of his mind. Yet there was no sign of it now. So where had they all gone?
The lusks could have eaten the people and the animals. That was why they had attacked the caravan, after all. But if that was the case, where was everything else? Where was the wreckage from the tents, the wagons, and all the inventory they were taking across Sun Toil?
Besides, it didn’t make sense for the lusks to destroy all evidence of the caravan. Jakub had a three-week gap between taking the Toil job and setting out, and he’d used it to prepare. He read everything he could about Sun Toil itself, about wilderness survival, about the flora and fauna and creatures and critters he might expect to find in a hole like this.
Growing up in the Queen’s academy, he had long-since been taught the best ways to retain information quickly and in great volume. Memory palaces, mindscapes he could wander through freely, accessing facts as he needed them.
And he had read about the toil-lusks. Omnivores who ate cacti and cholla plants most of the time. The spikes of a cactus presented just a few seconds of a problem for them since the lusks could cover the plants in their acidic spit and then flick the spikes off.