The Desert (Song of Dawn Trilogy Book 1)

by Liv Daniels

  Ever since he had finished talking, Leina noticed that Dangerman’s eyes were on her. His smile said, “See? You are nothing and I am everything.” Leina clapped, but she made no effort to hide the revolted expression on her face. That, however, only made the victory on Dangerman’s face more complete.

  Chapter 8

  The next day came as if nothing had ever happened. The slaves went to work as usual, the “peace” drained out of their faces. The work was as grueling as ever. No one could remember why yesterday had been so exciting.

  About midday, the woman who usually worked next to Leina dropped a few grains of rice on the floor. Sam was in the kitchen, and he promptly had her dragged off and replaced with a little boy, who, judging from the cleanliness of his clothes, was new. Through the whole ordeal, Leina kept her head down and made no visible response. She had worked with blind speed the entire day, still seething about yesterday.

  The new boy caught onto the work quickly enough, but he was not accustomed to the workings of the kitchen, the fear. He kept stopping his work, looking up, tapping his foot on the ground. Leina felt sweat dripping down her forehead. This was never a good situation to be in, but especially not with Sam in the room.

  The boy nudged Leina. “Is Dangerman really as great as he says he is?” He asked the question so innocently. It set her off like a match to a fuse.

  “No,” she hissed. “He’s a liar and a tyrant.” There. She had said it. But just a little too loudly.

  Sam’s coal-hot whip whistled down onto the back of her hand. With a cry she dropped the piece of meat she was working with onto the floor. The whip cracked again. Her hand was dripping with blood. Sam took her roughly by the shoulder of her tattered dress and dragged her out of the kitchen.

  “We’ll see what Dangerman has to say about that,” Sam said into her ear as he forced her down a stone hallway. He threw her into an empty cell, slammed the door shut and was gone. She cowered against the wall and cried like she hadn’t in a long time, sucking at her wounded hand.

  Dangerman himself appeared at the barred door before too long. The look on his face said that he had been waiting for this for a long time.

  “A liar and a tyrant, am I?” he sneered.

  “You know it’s true! Edward.” That was his actual name, and the only useful piece of information about him that Leina had been able to glean in the last three months.

  His face grew so red that Leina thought it might burst. “I forbid you to call me that!”

  Leina wasn’t finished. “This is all wrong. Everything here is a lie. You know that. And peace? It forsook this land the moment you first entered it.”

  Dangerman’s cool, calculating look had returned. “You’re the only one who’s lying here. And what even if you are right? You can’t do a thing about it. You fail to remember that you are utterly in my power, and so you shall be for the rest of your life, however long I choose it to be.”

  “Someday you’ll be destroyed. This can’t last forever.”

  “Oh, but it can. It will. The only reason that I’m going to spare your life is so you can see it. All you have to do is say, ‘Dangerman reigns forever,’ and you can go back to your work.”

  “Never.”

  “Stubborn, are we? If that’s the case, I’ll leave you to contemplate the consequences of ‘never.’ I trust that when I return I’ll find you much more agreeable. And hungrier.”

  In that particular instance, Dangerman spoke the truth. His servants carried whips, but Dangerman himself didn’t need to resort to such things. He had weapons that cut deeper. Leina had been given extra food the day before, but the effect quickly wore off. She quickly lost count of time in the cell, and she had only her thoughts and her hunger to keep her company—a bitter party. But with her hunger, her resolution only increased. Never would she say those words, much less to Dangerman’s face. She would rather die of hunger first.

  Dying of hunger, however, was more difficult than she had expected. To die of hunger was not a quick, easy death. It was the kind of death that taunted you for a very long time before it came, until you loathed it, and yet desired it above all. After the first several days, or what felt like several days, that was clear enough.

  But Dangerman was too cunning to let her die that easily. Just when Leina felt that the end was near, a small crust of bread and a little water were sent. She knew that they would only prolong her misery, but she ate.

  It was then that Dangerman came again with the same offer as before. Refusal was infinitely harder this time. Now there was an entire loaf of bread in his hand. She refused, but with a weak voice and her eyes glued on the bread. Dangerman left with a smug nod. He knew she was breaking.

  How long this went on, Leina couldn’t tell. Hunger and torment have a timeline of their own. The food came progressively less, and Dangerman progressively more. Again and again Leina turned him away, and again and again her hunger reached a new level that she had previously thought impossible. Her mind became one with her hunger, and she could think of nothing else. Still she held on to her resolution.

  Chapter 9

  Dangerman came. Leina was expecting him, but that never made the visits any easier. To be in Dangerman’s presence was to enter a constant battle with oneself, a futile insistence that he wasn’t as powerful as he appeared. His mien at all times appealed to the deepest part of your being that believed you weren’t worthy to be in his mighty presence, and even to look upon him was to defy it. But none of the blame ever fell upon him; he deflected it effortlessly, and if you were angry with anyone after an encounter with him, it was yourself. As Leina’s hunger deepened, her resistance to this effect was growing weaker and weaker.

  Immediately upon seeing him approach the cell’s barred door, Leina felt an irrational hope that her agony would end. She struggled to repress it, and greeted him with a stony face.

  He smiled wickedly. “It doesn’t have to be like this. It isn’t my fault that you’re hungry. It’s yours. You’re doing this to yourself.”

  “And you’re enjoying it,” she said, but her voice was weak, and seemed to come from somewhere outside of her. Her hunger made it difficult to concentrate on resistance.

  “If you insist on dying, Leina Skyvola, I’m not going to stop you,” he said, ignoring her remark. He leaned toward the bars. “And if you do, what would you gain? No one would know except for me, and it would only add to my satisfaction. Of that you can be certain. It would do nothing, mean nothing.”

  It seemed that he repeated the word nothing many more times, but she knew it was in her head. Or maybe she was the one saying it. “I’m so hungry,” she said, quite inadvertently.

  “Then just say it, and you can eat.” He held out a decadent-looking cake and two small fruits; where they came from Leina didn’t know.

  She knew she was losing it. The thought flashed through her head that she might not get another chance. She was suddenly afraid. “Dangerman reigns forever,” she said between her teeth, almost before she realized what she was doing.

  Dangerman broke into a grin and laughed delightedly. Leina grabbed the food from through the bars and ate as if she was afraid someone would take it away. There was a pang worse than any hunger pains in her stomach. Still Dangerman laughed.

  “Must you defeat me over and over again?” she said between bites. “Wasn't once enough?”

  “It was you. You were the one who called me a liar,” he said. More than anything Leina wanted to say that she had spoken the truth, but she wasn’t ready to go through another ordeal. With an effort she kept her mouth shut. He continued, “And look! I gave you the food just as I said I would. Very kind and truthful of me, when I much rather would have seen you die, don’t you think? You’re the one lying to yourself. And now,” he said, raising his voice as if making a judgment of some sort, “I will be off. You will work in my office for a time, so I can keep an eye on you.”

  Soon afterwards, a monster came and took her back to the room where sh
e normally slept. It was only midday, so it was empty. There was more food in the corner. Leina felt sick at the sight of it, but she ran to it from the monster’s grasp and ate ravenously between sobs.

  Chapter 10

  Leina awoke the next day among all of the other slaves, but she was not allowed to go with them to the kitchen. A monster separated her from the crowd and took her to Dangerman’s palace.

  In the office, there were two people bent over the desk, studying a map. Dangerman and Sam. They both stood up and faced her when the monster gave a low grunt.

  Sam broke into a smile that bore no hint of friendliness. He was delighted to see her, obviously, but not for reasons that she liked.

  “Ah, Leina,” said Dangerman. “I believe you’ve met my second-in-command, Sam?”

  Leina shrugged. Don’t give them anything to work off of.

  “We have met indeed,” Sam said, eying her cruelly. She didn’t meet his gaze.

  “Can you write?” Dangerman asked.

  “In three different languages,” she replied, a little hotly.

  “One will be enough. You are to copy some records.”

  As Dangerman located a heavy book and thrust it into Leina’s arms, Sam returned to studying the map on the desk. There was a smaller desk in the corner where Leina was to work. She quietly complied, took up a pen, and began copying. Dangerman’s apparent civility didn’t cause her to forget the hunger and pain of the day before. She was in a precarious place, she knew, and if she made a false move she would no doubt end up back in the frying pan. Or worse.

  “So,” Dangerman said, standing over her, watching her write, “You’ve come from the forest, probably lived there all your life, but you have some degree of education. A strange combination.”

  “How do you know that?” Leina said, trying to appear disinterested, not looking up from her work. In fact she felt uncomfortably like a specimen under a microscope.

  “Simple enough. It’s all in your clothes, your manner. You have this unusual way of being comfortable around people, and yet you’ve obviously never learned what not to say, or how most in your place would try to hide those things about you that might be considered strange. You haven’t been around people very much.”

  “Maybe I haven’t.”

  “At the same time you are very quiet, and think more than you speak, and would rather be alone. You came from the woods. And yet how do you know three languages?”

  “Books.”

  “Hmm. Keep an eye on her, Sam.” He stopped at the door. “You know, it so happens that I can write in four different languages.”

  Leina narrowed her eyes. “I’d better start learning another.”

  “Not on your life.”

  ***

  Leina went on copying for many weeks. Just why she was copying an entire book of records, she didn’t know; she suspected that it was a job that had been created expressly so that Dangerman could keep her watched. She started with records of shipments, mostly food and ordinary supplies. Most of it came from either Cavlin or a place called Gûgon, but just what that was she did not know. After she had copied all of the shipments, Dangerman gave her the book where he had taken down her name upon her arrival, and she began to copy that one. Her right hand, the hand that had been whipped, was still inflamed when she started, but it was not her writing hand so the job was easy enough. In fact, had it not been for the constant harassment, it would have been reasonably pleasant.

  Either Dangerman or one of his officers was in the room at all times. Sometimes they would confer quietly across the room from her, but it appeared that they discussed more important matters elsewhere, or after she was escorted from the office in the evening. Dangerman himself was out at least twice a week. This surprised Leina, as she didn’t think there were many places worth going in the empty Desert. He said that he was surveying his land, but he rarely brought back prisoners. Leina doubted that many people came to the Desert at all. And if they did, they certainly didn’t do Dangerman any harm. Why he felt the need to survey the Desert so constantly was beyond Leina’s understanding, and she could come to no explanation except that Dangerman’s egotism somehow compelled him to scrupulously inspect every corner of his empty kingdom on a regular basis. With Dangerman, explanations of that sort were never out of the question. Either way, Leina certainly didn’t mind having him gone.

  Sam, on the other hand, was almost always around. Leina had the feeling that he was watching her, and it made her nervous. Though he was always the first to pester and tease her, even beating Dangerman to the job sometimes, he didn’t exhibit the cruelty that she knew he was capable of. She had the uncomfortable impression that he was saving it, ready to pounce on her the moment she tripped up. She was right, but the day when it happened brought surprises of its own.

  Dangerman wasn’t around that morning. There were two officers in the room: Sam and a burly but not particularly bright one named Lester. Lester was giving Leina a hard time, as usual, but it was Sam that scared her more. He hadn’t said a word the entire morning, leaning against a bookshelf and staring ahead of him with a murderous look in his eyes. Clearly he was angry about something.

  “Chop, chop, little miss,” Lester was saying, clapping his meaty hands together as he spoke. “The day’s not going to stop for you so as you can get all your work done in time.”

  Since Dangerman wasn’t in the room, Leina knew that she wouldn’t be reprimanded for playing with Lester a bit. As long as she was careful not to smile or laugh, he wouldn’t become angry, only perturbed. Sam never intervened in that kind of game, and even with his current mood Leina judged that she was safe. It would give her something to keep her mind busy with, an opportunity that she never liked to miss. “And what makes you think it won’t?” she asked placidly.

  Beads of sweat began to form on Lester’s forehead. He knew that he was getting into another tangle, and now there was no going back. Why did he never keep his mouth shut around this exasperating girl? “Well… it doesn't stop for me,” he said slowly.

  “Oh, but Lester, that’s not sound logic. It’s a fallacy. How do you know that it won’t stop for me? Maybe I’m outside of time, and it doesn’t affect me at all. How do you know that I’m not?” That suggestion, of course, was preposterous, but it sounded credible enough to get Lester thinking. He clenched and unclenched his fists as if grappling in the air for an argument.

  Now Leina had perhaps taken the game too far. She hadn’t laughed in such a long time, and Lester’s contorted expression was so comical, that it was all she could do to keep a straight face. She reached to dip her pen in the ink well, but her hand was unsteady from suppressed laughter, and she wasn’t looking, and before she realized what had happened the well was shattered on the floor and black ink was oozing over the carpet. That was just what Sam had been waiting for.

  “Clean it up, Lester,” Sam growled, but his eyes were on Leina, and there was murder written all over them.

  Chapter 11

  Dangerman knew how to inflict wounds deeper than any of his servants, even Sam, but a wound doesn’t have to be deep to be lethal, and Leina knew it. It didn’t matter that her offence was trivial; Sam had exploded over much less, and she had seen in his eyes all that she needed to know. She wouldn’t put anything beyond him in this mood. As he forced her out of the office, across the void-like hall, and into an empty storeroom, Leina felt a surge of intense fear, quite different from the dull dread that had been normal since her arrival.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Leina pleaded.

  “Be quiet,” Sam hissed. He shut the door and leaned against it. Leina scurried to the other side of the small room, her breath coming in thin gasps. Sam stared at her for a long time. Finally he smiled, which only elevated Leina’s fear for the worst. “In a few hours, I’m going to tell Edward that I killed you,” Sam said with a degree of nonchalance that was shocking even for him.

  Leina pressed herself against the wall, trembling. “I don’t think
he’ll be happy about that. I’m sure he’s always wanted to kill me himself.”

  “Sure, but he’ll be even less happy if he finds out what’s really happened to you. You’ll be miles away by the time I tell him.”

  “What?” Had she heard Sam right? Now he wasn’t making any sense.

  Sam sat down on a nearby crate and motioned for Leina to do the same. She stayed where she was. “Look,” he said, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to help you escape.”

  “You think I’m going to believe that?”

  "I can't talk for long. Listen to me carefully. I'm not who you think I am. Now do you want to get out of here or not?"

  Leina nodded slowly. "Yes. Yes, I do."

  "Then you are going to have to trust me. You have to promise to do what I'm going to ask of you, and in return you can go free."

  "What is it?"

  “Promise you’ll do it.”

  Leina hesitated. She hadn’t trusted anyone in such a long time, but for all Sam’s inexplicable behavior, she wanted to trust him now. Her thoughts wandered to when she had first met him, and had believed that he was a good person. Maybe she had been right. She only hoped that her trust would not be betrayed. “Fine,” she said, taking a seat on another crate. “Just tell me what’s going on here.”

  "I can't explain very much. For now, it's better if you know less. Just know that I'm not on Dangerman's side. I know it’s hard for you to believe that after seeing how I’ve behaved around here. But if you can trust me on this, I promise you that I can get you out of here. Now I'm going to give you some instructions and then I'll be gone. These crates are used to haul waste out of the place—old food and paper and things. You’re easily small enough to fit inside one of them. Before I leave, I’ll pack you into one, and in an hour the monsters will come and take you out. It will be a rough ride, but you can handle it. The crates are tossed down into a shallow crevice just past the outside edge of the crater and left there to be picked up later. I’ll tell Dangerman that I got angry and killed you and threw the body into the lava, and he’ll never know.”