by Deck Davis
“It’s only a bronze to take ya here,” said the driver, “And a gold for one of my horses,” he said.
He’d brought three horses instead of two, at York’s request, and the third was going to be York’s only companion for his trip through Toil. He was a muscly beast with skin so grey he was almost silver, and a thick, black Mohawk of hair running from his head to his torso. His name was Kolja, which York knew was a Killeshi word for journeys long, and it seemed fitting.
York gave him the agreed price and another gold besides. Since the driver was too astonished to pick them up, he placed them on the seat next to him. “That’s a gold for you and one each for your grandkids. Maybe you can take a few months off and spend some time with them.”
“I ain’t took a day off since my plums dropped. Need to think of the future.”
York stopped himself just short of laughing. The man was even older than York, and he considered himself just a few steps short of the grave.
“The future will come and pass before you know it, and the time for seeing them will be gone. They’ll be doing their own thing. Come on, now. The whole journey here you talked about nothing but them. So stop talking and go see them.”
The driver tapped his forehead and gave a salute. “Right y’ar. Sure I can’t tempt you to come back with me? There’s a tavern you’d like, a hunter like you. The barman has a boar’s head on the wall bigger than a frigging dragon skull.”
“I’d love to. But I’ve got things to do.”
The driver leaned closer and whispered as though half the queen’s spies were listening. “You ain’t one of those…cultists, are ya? The ones who walk into the desert buck naked. They say they go there to die, and then they’re reborn.”
“The only thing you need to fear in Toil is the heat. And the bears, but I’m not worried about that,” said York, swinging his burlap so the driver could see it.
“What ya got in there that’s any good against a bear?”
“Two bolt wands artificed so hot they’d cook a pig to a scratching half a mile away.”
“Bolt wands?” asked the driver, with the suspicious edge to his voice that most people had when they were unfamiliar with magic.
“It’s artificed. The mana charge is in the wand, not me. Anyone could you use it. You, my friend, could use it.”
“Heh. When Bessie and Doggart start slacking, shoot a little fire and fury at their feet.” He leaned forward and stroked his horses after saying this, as if he needed to reassure them that he was joking. “What else ya got? Cuz the way I see it, you miss your shot with your little fire toy, and you’ve got a ton of bear pounding at ya.”
“Traps, snares, ointments, armor, a crossbow. And if all that fails…”
“You’re as fucked as a salt-priest’s wife on her wedding night,” said the driver and laughed, slapping his knees with his crab hands. “What about the sheath? Ain’t seen you pull nothing from it. Not all the time you were with me. Left your sword at home?”
York shook his head sadly. “No,” he said, feeling the emptiness open inside him. “She’s gone.”
“Where’s it gone?”
“A bear took it from me.”
Mirth sprang in the corner of the driver’s eyes, using his crow’s feet wrinkles as channels to flow through. “A bear took your blade?”
“This is no ordinary bear. He’s a clever bastard. And magnificent.”
“Gonna kill him? Know a few fellas who’d pay a salary for a bearskin. ‘Specially a desert bear.”
York shook his head. “No, I won’t skin him. He’s no ordinary bear, I told you. He doesn’t deserve it. Death? Maybe. Death’s a fair price because it’s the order of things. But to strip its skin in death? Separate it from its fur and let some rich old bastard put it down on his parlor floor and trample all over it while he shows off to his guests after dinner? Let them get drunk and dance over it and spill wine on it? Not a chance. We’re equals. He took Mauve, I took his claw.”
“Mauve? That the name of ya sword? Not Lightbringer or Godkiller or Tummyscratcher? A man don’t usually name his sword like that.”
“That was her name, and she’s gone.”
“Mauve,” said the driver, laughing. “Fuckin’ Mauve. What a name for a blade.”
He opened his mouth wide and brayed like a horse, he found it so funny, and York saw that the tips of his teeth near his gum were stained black from tobacco and his gums were swollen like a mule’s. He slapped his knee with his crabby hands.
As York watched his hilarity, his own anger flowed in hot currents, more and more joining the stream of fury the longer he watched this man laugh at Mauve. Before he knew it, he was moving.
A blink later, and the driver was on the floor, no longer braying but with his mouth agape, and York was standing over him and his knuckles stung.
Now he felt shame, a shame that cast him back to two times of his life; a longer span, decades ago, and a short conversation with Patton just days earlier. “You’re still headsick,” he’d said.
Was he right? Was York a headsick old man coming out here to die?
He offered his hand to the driver but the man refused it and he scurried a few inches back by moving on his ass and elbows, dragging himself through the dust that stained his trousers white.
“You’re a crazy fucker,” he said. “Knew it when you asked to come to Toil, but coin’s coin. And then you drag me off ma damn wagon and slap my chops, and you had this look in your eyes, you god-damned insane son of a bitch.”
“I’m sorry. It’s been a hard few weeks. Here,” said York, and fished another gold coin from his burlap and flipped it to the driver, who let it fall at his feet and instead climbed up to his wagon, picked up the reins and shook them.
“Hep!” he shouted, and the horses began to run, and soon the driver and horses were a cloud of dust on the horizon, heading into the past.
He wondered what the driver’s greeting would be when he got home. How many eyes would eagerly watch his horse turn down the road and clomp home? Would a house door open and kids run out and would a woman would wait in the doorway, buzzing with excitement?
It made York think of his wife and wonder what she was doing now. Word was that she’d gone to Brownbark, and she was overseeing a forest regeneration operation. Good on her. They might have split up, but he still wished her well.
Maybe that was why Patton had gotten so mad. York had driven his wife away, but Patton had lost his. His son was right; they weren’t the same.
His real loss was Maeve. His little shard of sunlight. A blade that had been with him since he first sprouted hairs on his pits, given to him by his pa. Maeve had been with him since he could barely lift a bow to graze a buck, up until he was the best hunter in the east of the queendom, all the way up to his ill-fated journey into Toil.
York would have said his headsickness started there. A quack told him it had its roots way, way before. Probably in what happened to his ma back when he was a bairn. But no, York knew that Toil was the sunlight that made his headsickness grow. And now he was back again.
He hitched the burlap on his shoulder and set forth, walking just a few hundred meters until he officially crossed back into Sun Toil for the first time in decades.
Hips tiptoed over and around the mess of men and blankets, careful not to wake his men. It reminded him of his dancing days a little; pirouette here, twist there.
Truth be told he thought it was a bad idea, sleeping out in the open in a place like this. It was cold as shit at night, and in the morning you woke with yellow rays of heat on your face, like the sun was pissing on you to say hello. But his men had insisted and Hips always listened to his men, but he’d made a compromise; they could sleep in their bags instead of the awful tents he’d bought for them, but they had to fashion a canvas roof using material from one of the wagons. The wind still got in, but at least they were protected from the sun.
“I don’t want you guys getting a sunburn,” he’d told them all.
“Aw, come on, Hips. We want to see the stars.”
“Then see ‘em. I’m not saying put a canvas roof over the whole gods-damned desert. Just make sure you don’t wake up to a face full of sun, that’s all.”
He reached a blanket at the end of the row and he crouched down and all he could see was a mess of ginger hair, the man inside was wrapped up so tight. He was a bulky man who quivered with every breath, and those breaths sounded like a pig napping after a full meal.
“Jim,” he whispered.
No answer.
He shook the shape.
“Jim,” he said again.
Jim slept on, oblivious.
Hips leaned close to him, so close his lips almost touched his ear. “Jim, I’m docking your pay. You only get half this trip,” he whispered.
Jim bolted upright, struggling against the blanket he’d wrapped so tight around him it was like a burial shroud, and when he got his hands free he rubbed his eyes and then his hair, which stayed back once he swept it because it was so packed with grease.
“Hips? What’s the time? Shit, the stars are still out. You don’t need to be waking me when the sky’s twinkling.”
“Never mind the stars, they’re like a Dispolis street troupe; they’ll be there every night, same time same place. Miss a performance, catch the next one. You seen Marleya?”
“She went out lookin’ for the mancer.”
“I know that, you big, ginger bear. I’m the one who sent her. She not been back?”
“Don’t imagine she’d come back without seeing you, Hips.”
“Damn. Get some sleep, we’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
“You’re the one who woke me, jackass.”
Hips suppressed a grin and tiptoed amongst the sleeping forms again until he reached a thinner, longer form separated ten feet from the rest. He’d only taken a few steps toward it when the form bolted upright, launched at him, and Hips felt the cool edge of a blade against his throat.
“Salvatore,” said Eyan, eyes milk-white with no iris. He breathed in relief. “It’s you.”
“Who’d you think it was? A Killeshi warband? This is why none of the guys’ll bunk near you. You’re like a bear trap in human flesh.”
“Instincts are woven into a man, or they aren’t instincts at all, Salvatore,” said Eyan. “You can no more unpick them than you can fish the black from the night sky.”
Hips nodded. “My dad kept horses, you know. And he used to go in the morning to feed them, and one of them kept trying to buck him in its sleep. Kicked its back legs out with enough force to crush a diamond nutsack. So he started feeding it diluted poppy in its evening hay. No more risk of getting his chest caved in.”
“Salvatore, all the poison in the world could run through my system and find nothing to nourish it, nothing to cling to.”
“And your poison resisting abilities are eclipsed only by your modesty,” said Hips, and he moved closer to his good friend. “Listen, Eyan. Marleya hasn’t come back yet. I told her I didn’t want her spending the night in the dunes. I wanted her to come back if they didn’t find anything by evening.”
“A place like this has a way of disrespecting wants. We shouldn’t have come.”
Eyan said this with a sudden change in tone that chilled Hips. He felt the words sink deep to his marrow and lie against his bones. On feeling this, Hips did want almost every man does when faced with a fear he can’t or doesn’t want to comprehend. He ignored it.
Instead, he thought about Marleya somewhere out there in the desert, and he had half a mind to send a few men out on horseback to find her. But no, they couldn’t spare the men or the horses.
They couldn’t wait here for her, either. Their water supplies wouldn’t last forever, and if they stayed here longer than planned and ran short, Hips would have to keep morale in check by taking water from the slaves and giving it to his men. If slaves started dying of thirst, what was the point in all of this?
Damn it. He hated thinking of her all the way out there, but what could he do?
“Marleya knows what she’s doing, doesn’t she?” he said.
Eyan reached out and put his hand heavy on Hips' shoulder and squeezed. “She’ll be fine, Salvatore.”
Gunar’s night vision grew stronger and stronger even as his body got weaker. He knew it was important to sleep, but he didn’t think he deserved the mercy of dreams when he’d gotten his people captured by slavers.
So, while his pathetic band of survivors got their rightful rest, he stayed awake. He lay down so he didn’t alert the slavers but he positioned himself so he could see them. Study them. Wait for weaknesses, see what they did in the night.
Tonight, the leader was hopping from blanket to blanket like a gods-damned ballerina. Gunar always thought he was good at getting the measure of a man; you had to be when recruiting folks who you’d need to trust for miles and miles of travel into the harshest land in the queendom. But Hips kept slipping from his measure, and Gunar didn’t know about him yet. Every instinct he had told him he was a good man, but how the hell could that be possible?
The woman was the one he distrusted. Gunar had seen plenty of cruel stares in his life, and hers turned his stomach juices to an icy slush. Walking around camp with burning coals in her eye sockets and that damned oil whip by her side. When she was afoot, Gunar had told his folks to pretend the ground was the most interesting thing they’d ever seen.
That was why tonight had seemed a good night for something. He didn’t know what, but something. The woman was gone, and she’d taken a couple of slavers with her.
“A man can’t think if he doesn’t sleep,” said a voice, and Gunar felt a weight rest on his shoulder and he felt cool breath on his cheek.
He felt gratitude beyond anything else in his life that the storms and lightning and lusks had spared him and Helena and Beate, though he knew he didn’t deserve it. A fair world would have let Helena and their daughter live and claimed Gunar’s soul for what he’d led his people into.
“I’ll sleep when we’re out of Toil, free, and kissing the grass of the queendom.”
“People are worried about you, darling. They still look to you to lead them, and they see what this is doing to you. They hear you muttering to yourself.”
“Muttering?”
“Talking about sentries and oil whips.”
“I was thinking of how to escape. I didn’t realize I was saying it aloud.”
“That’s because you haven’t slept. You’re more use to us when you don’t have headsickness.”
“I’m no good to any of them, Helena. I promised them gold for a couple of months of tough travel and look how that turned out. Might come a time when the folks the storm claimed are the lucky ones.”
“If you believe that then you aren’t my husband. You’re a miserable, woe-be-me arse who’s wearing his skin."
"I don’t see a way out. I’ve been thinking of ways. Anything. But I just don’t see how. I thought maybe the storm oracle has magic he hasn’t told us about, but that sack of shit hasn’t said a word since they pulled us out of the storm.”
“Shock affects people in different ways. Some might say staying up all night and not sleeping is one of its many arrows.”
Gunar ran his hand through his hair. He swore it felt thinner than even days earlier. “I gave up the mancer, too. I could have let them think he was dead. And then maybe he’d have got out of Toil and told someone what happened. But I gave him up, and for what? They took the information, gave us a couple of days of nicer food, and that was that.”
“Did you really think they would let us go? For all your talk about judging characters, you tend to look for the light even when it’s pitch black.”
Gunar nodded. “I was desperate. Thought the mancer’s life would be worth more than all of ours, and they’d let us go.”
“Worth more?”
“You know what I mean. Fetch a better price. A guy with essence or mana or whatever the hell
they call it in his veins.”
“Well, we got a few nicer meals out of it, and that perked up spirits. Besides, the mancer probably died first. You sent them looking for a spirit, and now they’re three people weaker. So, my love, what are we going to do with that?”
Helena’s words were like goose fat on burned skin, and as much as they dulled the hurt, he could still feel it. If he was going to do this for anyone, it’d be her. To show her that he led them into their bonds, but he would get them out.
And it was then, as he felt her breath on his cheek, as the bitter winds screeched around them, that inspiration came to him.
He knew he needed to sleep to give himself the best chance of catching it, and so he lay back and he let Helena guide his head to her shoulder and he closed his eyes.
Morning came and the slavers were still three people short. Hips had barely slept a second, and he felt hungry as he walked through the camp and smelled the pork rinds cooking in flashes of fire in metal pans, and the steam rising from bowls of sweetened oats cooked in cow’s milk.
Harri, the stable boy from Tofsteed who’d been accused of stealing silverware from Duke West’s kitchen drawers, was hard at work. Hips had bought his slave rights but had decided Harri would be worth more tending their horses in Toil, and he was proved right by how early the lad rose and how late he went to sleep. Now he was sitting on an upturned bucket with a horse leg on his lap, fishing stones and gravel from its shoe.
Eyan was over at the edge of camp sitting cross-legged, hands on his lap, eyes shut. He was as naked as a babe and his skin was ghost white with alchemical paste, and Hips had learned no manner of remonstrations or rebukes would get him to wear clothes while he ‘focused his life energy.’
Hips had yet to see a use of all this life energy he accumulated each morning, but Eyan was one of his oldest crew members, and besides, saving Hips’ life ten years ago had bought him as much focusing time as he pleased. Eyan nicknamed Hips Savior, but they had saved each other. They were equals now.