by Deck Davis
That was just vague enough to sound mysterious and meaningless at the same time, and Jakub left the tavern drunk and uninformed, with the lute tune from the ballad playing in his mind, but the lyrics not sticking because rhyme was the glue of song.
Then, years later, he had been in Dispolis buying an academic text on burial shrouds and their supposed effect on resurrection, when he noticed a book. The Collected Lyrics of Twinkle Hands the Great (Who Played at the queen’s banquet twice).
Jakub flipped to the end and there he found the Song of Age and Empires, and again he saw that there was no rhyme to it. Remembering what Hands told him, he wondered if there was no rhyme, where was the reason?
And then he saw the genius. A song so long the lyrics spanned fifty pages, yet if he took the first letter of each line, they spelled out something of their own. A message. The last letter of each line did likewise, again with a message. That was when Jakub understood that even if you couldn’t see it, there could still be a structure to something.
Why did this come back to him now, as he paced the desert while two stolen horses peacefully slept nearby? Memories got stronger out here. Like his brain needed something to cling to. A little like his glyphline tattoos which were focal points for spells, memories were focal points for survival.
That, and the fact that he really, really needed a beer. He would spend fifty years resurrecting a barkeep’s chickens if he could just find a tavern, rent a room, draw a bath, and order beer after beer. Then he’d get in the bed and pull the duck-feather quilt over his toes and tuck it under his feet. Whenever he was in a bed, Jakub liked to tuck his feet.
He shook the thought away, and he looked from his map to the terrain around him with fresh eyes.
A reason for everything, even if you can’t see the rhyme. There was a structure to how the lusks behaved. So, what did he know about them? What had he seen?
One, they had breached from where there were already cracks in the ground. The terrain near Equipoint Rock was full of them.
Two, they didn’t show until things had already gone to all the hells. Until people had died, until their blood had been…
The hand of inspiration gripped him by the balls.
“Olin, fetch my blade,” he said. When the horse didn’t move, he trundled over to the canvas to get the weapon himself. “I was hoping that would work.”
An hour later, Jakub was riding Olin, after leaving Albin under canvas back at the rocks. Lacking a saddle, he’d improvised by using the dead slaver’s jacket, shirt, and trousers, strapping these around Olin’s body using thin strips of canvas he’d cut from the roof he’d draped over the rocks. There was nothing to hold onto save Olin’s neck, but the horse was used to a saddle and seemed to enjoy Jakub’s company, and the going was slow in any case.
They headed northeast, then north, then further northeast. Jakub stared at the ground so much he had a glare in his eyes when he blinked, like the sunlight had leaked into his skull. It paid off late in the afternoon when he spotted a lightning-shaped crack running all the way across the ground.
“This way,” said Jakub, gently tugging Olin’s reins and leading him toward it.
The trot of Olin’s hooves was the only noise as they worked their way over the dusty plains, following the crack which, after a few miles of thinning then widening then threatening to thin to a complete stop, opened ten inches wide so that it looked like a mouth set into the dirt.
Jakub hopped off Olin and stroked his mane, and he hefted up the improvised saddle that had started to slide. Walking a few steps, he tried to stretch out his aching arse, his knotted thigh muscles, and his hurting shins. That done, feeling a little more limber, he kneeled beside the crack in the ground.
There wasn’t much to see, just darkness. It was about what he expected; this wasn’t a lusk-breach, since a giant insect bursting from the ground would make a bigger mess. Maybe it was a sign of a lusk tunnel network under his feet. It made sense that if a lusk was burrowing a dozen or so feet under the ground, then the commotion might make a crack form on the surface.
The crack became slimmer again a few hundred paces away and from there it seemed to run on endlessly. The only thing in the distance was a clump of hills made from the orange rocks that were so plentiful in this part of Toil.
He wiped the sweat off his face and adjusted the piece of canvas around his head so it covered him better. He stared into the crack and tried to derive meaning from it.
This had to be a sign of toil-lusks. A crack by itself meant nothing because the desert was full of them wherever the sand gave way to flat plains. But this one was wider and had to mean activity underground. Maybe not lusks, but it was a starting point. Jakub brought up his map and made his mark.
Map marker added: Toil-Lusk tunnel network [Site of my impending maniacal plan and possible self-destruction.]
Daylight was dulling and the breeze was whispering in his ear, so he climbed on Olin and headed back to his new home, this time thinking not about where to find lusks but how to kill one.
CHAPTER 30
Sleep called to him all night but Jakub’s thoughts were fixed on ten-feet-tall insects that lived under Toil’s dirt. Ones who could rip a man in two, ones known for taking men, women, and children screaming underground, to their hives deep under the surface where they’d harvest them for eating.
What horrors happened in those pits of hell nobody knew, because nobody had been to one and lived.
Jakub was considering it.
Or he had been until he realized that was desperation making him chase after the phantom of a plan. As soon as he took his first, stupid step underground he was a dead man, and a dead necromancer wasn’t an effective one.
The only way was to draw a lusk out onto the surface and then kill it. He thought he had an idea of how to draw it, but the method made his stomach churn. There was no choice.
So, if he knew how to coax a lusk onto the surface, how did he kill it? They were an annoying combination of difficult to hit and strong enough to tear a man in half. They could leap over a person’s head easier than Jakub could take a step. How was he supposed to deal with that?
His first thought was tied into his plan to draw them out. Lusks only breached the surface for food. That was why they’d attacked the caravan; somehow, they sensed meat ready for collecting.
To draw one out now, Jakub would have to use Olin or Albin as bait, and the thought of one of the poor horses, the ones who’d come to trust him, standing beside a crack in the ground, completely unaware that they were being used to draw out a carnivorous insect…it made him tear up. His emotions were running strong, lately.
Also, Ludwig would be pissed with him. He’d tell Jakub that his life wasn’t worth more than Olin or Albin’s just because he was human. But his academy instructors would tell him the opposite; a necromancer’s work was more important than a horse’s, and thus his life was worth more. Pity Jakub had worked so hard on developing his empathy lately.
Supposing that he went ahead with his plan, then Olin or Albin could work as both bait and trap. He’d have to kill them, find a few snakes, and fill their bellies with venom. Then he placed them near one of the lusk cracks and waited. A few chomps of dead horses, and he’d have an equally dead lusk. All that without any danger to himself.
Sitting under his canopy and watching Olin and Albin lying right up beside one another, Olin’s nostrils flaring as he snored, Albin chewing on grain, he felt dirty. His thoughts felt like thick tar running through his brain.
So he thought some more.
The only way of drawing out the lusks that didn’t involve Albin or Olin meant taking a risk to himself. He could loiter beside an entry point and drip blood into the cracks to draw the lusks out.
When a giant man-eater emerged, he’d have to fight it himself, which he imagined was going to be more than a little difficult and carried an unfortunate consequence of possible death. And he’d worked really, really hard to avoid dying, so it se
emed a shame to waste that just to trap an overgrown bug.
Either kill a horse he’d grown fond of or risk killing himself, who he was also a little fond of.
In a last effort to figure something out, Jakub went through the inventory he’d found in the wagon, checking through the kidney beans, water stone, grain, and little knick-knacks that belonged to the dead slavers. It was when he idly popped a dried kidney bean into his mouth that a third option snuck upon him.
It took a lot of work. He avoided as much of the sun’s peak shining hours but even so, he had to work when it was too damn uncomfortable, and he felt like he had no sweat left to release from his pores and that most his body was made of dried ash that’d disperse if someone sneezed on him.
By the time the stars were winking at him he’d finished preparations of his third plan, which though would take work and might be a bust, would mean neither he nor his new horse friends would have to risk themselves.
He retreated under his canopy and he cuddled up to Olin and Albin and he shared their body heat, and he felt so exhausted that he might be able to sleep through the night.
Before closing his eyes he looked at the desert beyond, and he imagined his days’ labor out there, and he wondered if the things he’d made would work.
Earlier, when he had chewed on a kidney bean, he had suddenly thought of all the other desert critters. The ones who survived in Toil by eating plants, cacti, weeds. And though their diets were meat-free, their bodies certainly weren’t. If Jakub could kill a bunch of them, catch a few snakes, and then do so butchering and venom milking, then his first plan could work without Olin or Albin having to die.
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?