Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2)

by J. C. Staudt

  Lokes seemed to share Weaver’s sentiment. He shook his head. “That place is full-on spooky. Dangerous too, I heard. How’s a fella like you wind up in a nuthouse like that?”

  The shepherd smiled—with pain or humor, Weaver couldn’t tell. “I… joined the Order.”

  Lokes guffawed. “You’re kidding me. You ain’t no shepherd, you just a daggum fool who runs around with the crazies. You can’t pull one over on ol’ Lokes, now. Where them other catty-cooms at?”

  “I was… looking. For the others.”

  “That makes me innerested. Where was you fixin’ to look?”

  “North, first.”

  Lokes brushed away the idea with a hand. “Bah. Ain’t shit up north. Been there a hundred times. No riches or catty-cooms I ever seen. I reckon you’d ‘a been wasting your time.”

  The shepherd gave him a weak smile. “Hidden things… no one has seen… since… before.”

  “Since before what?”

  The shepherd’s eyes went cold. He let out a final breath and died.

  “What the—hey.” Lokes slapped him again. “Hey. Mister. Hello. Hello?” He turned to Weaver. “He done croaked already? Thought you said he weren’t gonna do that yet.”

  Weaver crossed her arms and thrust out a hip. “That was before you done slapped him to death.”

  “That cipher was supposed to close him up. Used to be you could do a better job in half the time. I reckon you’re slipping.” He tapped his temple and gave her a condescending stare. He was provoking her, and she knew it. He knew just what to say to get under her skin.

  “I ain’t never promised you he was gonna live or he wasn’t. You shot him the way you shot him. Innards gonna do what they do. You puttin’ words in my mouth.”

  “You keep running that mouth of yours…”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me,” he mumbled.

  Anger boiled inside her. “How many times I gotta tell you? I ain’t no doctor. I told you you’d better hope he lived. That weren’t no joke.”

  Lokes spat. He stood and kicked the shepherd’s body. “Dumb coffing luck. I oughta quit being such a good shot.” He gave her a cocky smile.

  Weaver was in no mood to placate him. She turned away, evading his bid for attention. Sometimes she had trouble remembering why she had taken up with Lokes to begin with. The man who was now her lover and constant companion had been facing the hangman’s noose the day she found him, up for some string of petty crimes throughout the nearby territories. Law was a foreign concept across most of the Aionach, but the Calsaire’s Guild enforced its own brand of justice on the countryside of middle Calgareth.

  Guildcross was one of the larger frontier towns in the north, and home to the Calsaire’s Guildhall. Jallika had been sent there as a child, less to hone her craft than to unburden her father. The Guild administered fairness and balance from its vantage point atop the bluffs of a high mountain pass, the only way through the Vors’ Rhachis for horizons around. There the ancient Guildhall stood like a doorway to the skies, its smooth plaster walls crumbling with age. A wide gate spanned the gap beneath it; no one ever came through the pass without the Guild’s permission.

  Lokes had never been a man to follow the rules, such as they were. As he had always told her, “Only reason anybody ever made a rule was so’s he could get a head-start on breakin’ it.” Weaver was a Calsaire of the Guild, however, bound to her oaths and sworn to keep the sacred code at all costs. It was a creed as old as the Aionach itself, they said—one which had been veiled in secrecy for thousands of years.

  Weaver had never revealed the tenets of the code to anyone, least of all Lokes. It was the most significant secret she had ever kept from him, though far from the darkest. On this day, I speak these sacred words, never again to be imparted unto any living thing, she had sworn. I take these oaths as my bond, putting vengeance aside and renouncing death for the sake of retribution. For a thousand deaths will never pay for the first. It was a promise she intended to keep, if for no other reason than that the eyes of the Guild were always. For ere the world is ended, we will meet the fates as one.

  They had made her swear that if she ever encountered a normal sandcipher—normal being a subjective term, since sandciphers, trained or untrained, were of exceptional rarity to begin with—her obligation was to offer her services in training said sandcipher in the ways of the Calsaire. As yet, she had only sensed the passage of another sandcipher on one occasion. The other had been so far away over the sands that the feeling had lasted no more than a moment.

  I will use my talents always in the service of maintaining balance in the world. This last point Weaver found rather ambiguous, since she could almost always find a way to interpret her own actions as ‘balanced,’ even when the justification suited her own ends more than anyone else’s. She rarely felt balanced when she used her talents to help Lokes. Today had been no exception. Lokes had shot a man because he felt like it, and she had tried to keep him alive because it was what Lokes wanted. The only way to achieve any sort of balance from the incident would be to leave the man unburied, letting his body nourish the birds and beasts, and thus returning him to the world.

  “What’s your problem?” Lokes asked. “Why you being all quiet and sulky over there?”

  She shrugged. “Just thinking.”

  “‘Bout what?”

  “Nothing.”

  Lokes scowled. “Fine. Put this dway in the sand. I’ll rustle us up some firewood.”

  “I’m not burying him, Will.”

  Lokes squinted at her through the growing darkness, cocking his head as if he hadn’t heard her correctly. He raised his voice. “You think I’m gonna sleep with this feller lookin’ through his eyelids at me? Put him in the sand, I said.”

  Weaver sighed, too tired to fight him.

  “You heard me?”

  “I heard,” she whispered.

  “Good, ‘cause I ain’t gonna repeat myself,” she heard him mutter as he stalked off into the twilight.

  Jallika Weaver didn’t need Willis Lokes. Not for protection, and not for comfort. She’d left the man she was with to follow Lokes into the wastes—left the Guildhall and its familiar faces and routines. She hadn’t been looking for a man who would coddle her. She’d fallen for him because he was strong; because he knew what he wanted, and because he didn’t treat her like a helpless flower who needed to be rescued all the time. That was what had kept her by his side through all the long horizons. She loved him because he didn’t need her.

  Taking the dead shepherd by the ankles, Weaver pulled him away from the slanted rock. It took all her strength to move him; scrawny though he was, he’d been a tall man, so the weight was heavy in his bones. She traced a line around him, then spent a still moment with her palms pressed to the sand, feeling its intricacies and making sense of its imperfections.

  Before she began the burial cipher, she glanced over to make sure the horses were a good distance away. Meldi and Gish were grazing on a patch of scrub a dozen or so fathoms off, minding their own business. Weaver set in, willing every grain to yield its place. The sand slid out from under the shepherd’s body, a million entities moving in perfect conformity. As the sand spread, the corpse receded, sinking like a stone in the quick, as if time were speeding by in multiples. The ground rumbled, but the horses didn’t spook.

  It was only a moment before the body was gone. Buried and forgotten, deep enough that even a passing fox who might sniff it out would be hard-pressed to dig for it. There would be no carrion birds circling above when they woke in the morning; they would observe no fresh-blossoming death-stench over breakfast. Most importantly of all, Lokes would be satisfied.

  He returned with an armful of kindling and a small bundle of felling’s grace, a fibrous weed whose slender leaves became dry and stringy during the long year and made good tinder. Lokes got the fire going, then plunked himself down against the slanted rock where the shepherd had lain. He drew his knife and began scr
aping at the dirt beneath his fingernails. All the while he said not so much as a word to Jallika. It was as if he didn’t even notice she’d buried the shepherd like he asked.

  Convinced she would find no meaningful conversation with him, Weaver clucked her tongue and rubbed her fingers together to bring Meldi to the fireside. The filly whickered softly as she stroked her face and neck. “There we are. That’s my good girl.”

  Lokes’s eyes flicked up from his work. “You think you can go one night without smothering that poor animal? You ever leave her, she gonna wander around in circles ‘til she drops dead.”

  “At least someone around here would be sad to see me go.”

  Lokes rolled his eyes and resumed his picking.

  Silence stretched out for a few minutes, until finally Weaver could take no more. “Does anything I do ever make you happy?”

  “Happy ain’t my thing,” Lokes said. “If this Toler dway is in Unterberg, we got a long way to go—and fast, if we want to be back in Belmond in time to meet the southerner and pay off Fink. I ain’t trying to lose out on that bounty on account of Toler not being where he was s’posed to.”

  “Relax, honey. We got plenty of time.”

  Lokes poked at the fire with a stick, sending up a flurry of embers. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “For Infernal’s sake, Will. I can’t say a word to you anymore without you going buzzards on me.”

  Lokes said nothing as he returned to cleaning his fingernails. Once he got into one of his moods, there was little use trying to get him out of it. Weaver let him stew in his own juices while she retrieved her pack from Meldi’s saddle, laid out her bedroll, and sent the horse back into the scrub to graze.

  After a time of meditation, Weaver readied herself for bed. Lokes didn’t look up when she slipped out of her leather jerkin and slid into her bedroll. She lay awake for a long time, staring up into a field of twinkling stars, bright and full in the wasteland’s perfect darkness. Soon she heard him snoring and turned to find him leaning against the slanted rock, exactly where he had been an hour earlier. He’d put on his hat and pulled it down over his eyes.

  She rolled over and unfolded her extra blanket, insulating herself against the night’s wind. She tossed and turned all night until splashes of pink heralded the light-star’s coming on the eastern horizon. She gave up trying to sleep and trudged off into the scrub to take care of business before Lokes woke up.

  They packed their things and headed west before dawn, galloping through the early morning hours while the heat was still low. Their midday rest was the first time Lokes spoke to her all day. He discussed only shelter and food in a tone that was curt and impersonal, as if he possessed no desire to right what had gone wrong between them the night before. Weaver was hesitant to spark his ire anew, so she answered him in kind and said nothing more.

  That night when they made camp, his demeanor changed. After he’d built the fire, he came over to sit beside her. When he put his arm around her, she knew what he wanted. She tried not to flinch away. His touch was what she’d longed for, but not like this. There was no tenderness in it; no love or forgiveness or atonement. It was lust, and it made her skin crawl.

  “You mad at me or something?” he asked. “You been quiet all day.”

  Weaver couldn’t believe he’d said something so dense. Could he really be that oblivious to the way she was feeling? How did he not realize he’d hurt her? They’d barely said ten words to one another all day, and yet it was as if he hardly noticed; as if he hadn’t been suffering from their estrangement at all.

  He kissed her beside the ear, where her hair fell in thin dark wisps. His lips were soft, the whiskers above and below hard and scratchy. She could smell his sweat from the day’s ride, a man’s sharp, striking musk. He squeezed her and kissed her neck, sending a tingle through her.

  “I’ve been quiet?” she said. “What about you? You’ve been snippety as a jackal ever since last night.”

  “Aw. You know I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.” He put a hand on her breast and spoke to her between kisses. “Come on, sugar. You know I love you.”

  She inhaled, trying to rid herself of the sick feeling in her stomach. What she got instead was a lungful of peppery wood smoke. How Lokes could be so heartless, so ignorant of such important things, she would never understand. Had she overreacted—made this a larger issue than it ought to have been?

  Lokes was a hard man in every sense of the word—hard to live with and hard to please. Yet compared to all the cowards and chumps and over-easy dways she had known in her life, his equal was hard to find. He was always open when it came to talking about his life before her, but he closed up tight as a trap whenever she pressed him about the future, or even the now. Right now, his lips and his hands were all over her, and it was all she could do to keep from taking her frustrations out on him.

  She considered burying Lokes like she’d done with the shepherd the previous night. She imagined him sinking into the sand, still breathing, still alive, and listening to him squirm and struggle through his last breaths. Those thoughts always made her feel disgusting and deranged. She hated herself for even thinking them. She didn’t hate Lokes; she didn’t want him to die. She just wanted him to care. Sometimes she felt like the only way he ever would was if she forced him to. She stopped resisting him and let him have his way.

  Afterwards, Weaver couldn’t help but feel used. Part of her wanted to cry. Mostly she was just glad he was done with her. She would get no further attention from him tonight, she knew. She waited until he fell asleep and spent the rest of the evening trying to think back to what had caused their fight in the first place. If she could find the cause, maybe she could break the cycle. It was a theory she’d tried to puzzle out before. Hours later, her results were no different, and she gave up.

  The days of their journey passed, and the cycle continued. Lokes grew more irritable and impatient as their deadline loomed. Finally, in the bright dawn of a cloudless day, they crested a low ridge on the edge of the scrubland, from which they could see the drab, foreboding spires of the Black City in the distance. Unterberg was all black steel and sharp lines, its skyscrapers vaulting toward the clouds and plunging through the gray rock of the mountainside to join with the network of caves and concrete tunnels below, where the hundred rivers ran like snakes through the below-world, bringing trade and fresh water to the Inner East’s northernmost settlements.

  When they reached the wide funnel of rock that led into the foothills of the city, Weaver reined up, unable to make herself go any further. Meldi threw her head and danced sideways, sensing her fear. A little farther on, Lokes realized she had stopped and wheeled his mount to look at her.

  “Aw, come on, you pansy,” he said. “You ain’t getting all yellow again, are you?”

  Weaver hated leaving the sands. The touch of stone or pavement underfoot made her feel like a sailor on dry land. She gulped, then shook her reins and nudged the filly onward.

  Lokes shook his head as she came near. “I swear, you must be the only person alive who’s afear’d of stepping on stones.”

  As they wove their way up the path, the streets filled with people. Unterberg was one of the wealthiest and safest cities in the Inner East, a result of both the Vantanible trading empire and the convergence of the hundred rivers. In truth, fewer than two dozen rivers ran through the city’s below-world districts, but their tributaries numbered in the thousands.

  There was no barrier to entry in the Black City, no blockades to keep out the unwanteds. All who brought trade were welcome, and all who caused no disturbance could expect no maltreatment in return. It was Vantanible’s police force who dispensed punishment to those who went against his will. The police were agreeable to those who stayed in line. To those who didn’t, the authorities often resorted to brutal beatings and other displays of cruelty in the streets.

  Vantanible himself was known to be swift and hard-nosed, though his discipline tended to fit the crime
. Coming to Unterberg made Jallika Weaver nervous for more than its lack of sand. Almost on principal, Lokes held an utter lack of respect for any symbol of authority. Whenever they came to the Black City, Weaver always seemed to have her hands full trying to keep him out of one scuffle or another. She often found herself living in an unfortunate reality where Lokes was unable to take his anger out on whatever dway had slighted him, and was thus more likely to take it out on her.

  They tied Meldi and Gish to the hitching rail outside Brannon’s Pub, Lokes’s favorite local watering hole, which was set into the side of a decaying high-rise. The building’s deteriorating stature made Weaver so dizzy she could hardly stand to look up at it. The pub’s wainscoted frontage was so weathered as to be nearly worn away. Its carved profiles had been resurfaced so many times they’d turned to shapeless lumps below layers of peeling brown paint.

  They entered the dimly lit pub and were greeted by the sour smell of spilled beer and the dry yellow film of second-hand smoke. Lokes ordered two rounds of a local brew, a pale lager that was hard to find in the desert cities due to their lack of cold storage. Laughter and drunken conversation rang through the hollows of the room as they took their seats at a high-top table to wait out the midday heat.

  “Now where do you s’pect we might find a dirty rotten shepherd like this Toler dway?” Lokes asked, his mustache lathered in suds.

  Weaver laughed at him. She tried to wipe a thumb across his upper lip, but she only got halfway along before he swatted her hand away.

  “Geh,” he grunted. “Leave me be, woman.” Now there was froth on half his mustache, which made him look all the more ridiculous.