by Deck Davis
Chapter One
Sometimes you had to be stuck for a month on a beast-filled desert island before you really got to know someone.
“Let me get close to the damn thing and I’ll tear it a new bumhole,” said Flink, her teeth clenched so she almost growled the words.
She held her spear with her good hand in a practiced grip, while sunlight peeked through the gloomy clouds, casting rare beams of light on her half-beautiful, half-gnome face. Her face was angular, all sharp lines and rocky edges except for her nose which was cute. Her eyes, even though they sometimes held pure thunder when she was tired, were as brown as mud and only her long eyelashes softened them.
Her clothes were standard Skogland tribe attire. That was, function over style with loops for knives, places to keep potion vials, ancient stains and scorches smeared on her sleeves from dozens of failed alchemical experiments.
Her eyes looked as tired and every bit as pissed as Charlie felt. If a person’s nerves were finite and if people got snarky when they frayed, then it wouldn’t be long before they killed each other, never mind the other animals on the island.
“Just settle down a little,” said Charlie. “We’ve gotta be careful about this.”
His stomach ached with knots of pain that were less hunger pangs and more like tremors. This wasn’t just an island; it was a psychological experiment in what happened when you grabbed a westerner who’d taken his life for granted and brought him galaxies way from the nearest MacDonald’s, the nearest KFC, even the nearest Starbucks. Truth be told, it was bringing out a diva side in him that he hadn’t known existed.
To the east, angry waves washed debris onto the black sand beach, bringing in pathetic strips of twisted wood that had once been Larynk’s ship. It had only been a month since they gotten onto the ship with Larynk and had been attacked by a sea krecken, forcing them onto this god-forsaken island where nothing grew, and where the growls of creatures much bigger than them followed them like shadows. To call this place desolate and grey would be to call Mount Vesuvius a ‘pretty hot hill.’ This island bred wretchedness deep in its core, and this corruption spread over the blackened soil where only patch grass and weeds grew, and the obsidian-colored beaches that looked like an oil company had dumped gallons of the stuff on it. It was hell, it was desolate, it was god-forsaken.
Well, maybe god-forsaken was the wrong word to describe this place. It might have been as desolate an island as Charlie had ever seen, it might have been soul-sappingly dreary, but it wasn’t god-forsaken. In fact, Larynk, the god of Corn, was less than a mile away back at their camp. He was a god, and he sure as hell hadn’t forsaken the place. He couldn’t even if he wanted to.
The island was fifty miles away from the Skogland, Flink’s village, but it might as well have been a thousand. Nothing but an angry sea, blacker than the thickest tar except where its waves frothed white against the rocky edges of the landmass. The air was so heavy it seemed to stick to his lungs with every breath, filling them with salt, making his mouth dry, his clothes tight. As uninviting as that was, the island wasn’t content at stopping there in its quest to make things as crappy as possible; it had to go one step further, combining the maddening isolation and whipping breeze with a salty air. It was always humid, so Charlie’s shirt constantly stuck to his back. In a twist of fate, the salty air turned the skin on his arms raw, so that he always had to wear his coat.
Still, at least he didn’t have a body of thick fur he couldn’t take off, unlike his buddy. Longtooth placed his bow on his lap and stroked the string. He licked his pure white rat fur and then smiled, with his two teeth sticking out from his lips, one of them chipped. He’d lost as much weight as the rest of them, he was as drenched and tired as them too, but he never stopped smiling.
“One arrow is all it will take,” he said. “If you scare it off, we’ll never see it again.”
“I don’t know if that’s the way to go,” said Charlie.
The creature they plotted to kill was one they’d been hunting for a while, and their efforts grew more and more desperate with every meal they missed. It was an island orx; a kind of armored deer covered in a rock-like shell, with only one, tiny, weak point on its side. If that was its only defence, they could have just grabbed it and put it out if its misery. Would an island like this make things so simple? Nope; there was a problem; when an orx was scared or angry, a toxin flooded through its body, making its meat poisonous to eat.
So, they needed food, but their prey was covered in a rock-hard shell save for a tiny weak point. If they got close enough that they could hit the weak point with any accuracy, the orx would flood its own flesh with toxins, rendering the whole effort a giant waste of time.
It was for this reason that, as much as he didn’t want to be cruel to his pal, he couldn’t trust Longtooth to shoot it down with his bow. Luckily, an irritable Flink was already thinking the same, and she didn’t care about sparing feelings.
“And what if you miss?” said Flink. “You’ll scare it away.”
“I never miss…much. What else can we do? It’ll see you coming a mile away.”
Both of them were right, and that’s why Charlie wasn’t going to go with either of their plans. He just needed a way to get close without spooking the orx.
As he considered what to do, an insect buzzed above him. It was a wasp bigger than his fist, with a stinger that would cut through metal. Its buzz was so loud it rattled in his skull, competing with the whining wind that never left the island.
He stayed still as the wasp hovered around him. They were harmless if you didn’t do anything, but one wrong movement, one unexpected flinch, and it’d stab through you like a dagger. Few things in life were pissier than an angry wasp, and few things looked scarier than wasps on the Island of Complete and Utter Desolation.
Flink jabbed her spear in the air, stabbing through its belly. The wasp struggled, flapping its wings a dozen times a second, but the struggle soon left it, and it went limp. She pulled it off the end of her spear, held it under her boot, then wrenched its body apart, goo dribbled over her finger, the wasp’s husk of a body cracking open. She held it to her face, sniffed it, then threw its carcass away.
“Why is everything poisonous on this damn island?” she said.
Charlie couldn’t help feeling bad for the wasp and the way it lay dead, having been ripped apart only to be thrown away seconds later. Truth be told, hunting made him feel bad, too, even when he was starving. Why did he have to have such empathy for animals? He’d been that way since he was younger, when he used to spend hours in his grandfather’s veterinary practice. It had served his grandfather well, but it was another story for Charlie; his belly yelled at him and told him to forget about empathy.
Flink, on the other hand, had been brought up to hunt. Back in her village, animals were a resource like stone or wood. She didn’t consider their feelings, only what she could use them for. At times like this, with his stomach aching from starvation, he resolved to be more like her. What good was empathy if it stopped him hunting for food?
He shook the feeling away. This was a hunt. They either killed the orx, or they got weaker and weaker until soon they couldn’t hunt at all. The question was, how could they get close enough to hit its tiny weak spot without scaring it and rendering its meat useless?
He scratched his face as he searched for an answer, feeling the roughness of his month-old beard. He could have shaved it using one of his daggers, but he’d decided to grow it out. Beards were cool, and his boss at his last job had always insisted that his employees were clean-shaven. Charlie was a million miles away from Earth now, and his boss and his job were long gone, so if he wanted a beard then he’d grow one, damn it. He’d gotten a surprise whe
n Flink had pointed out how much grey was in his beard, despite him being in his early thirties.
The beard wasn’t the only new thing. The rain pattered down on him, and he was thankful of his new coat, one that he’d scavenged from a clothing crate Larynk kept on his ship. The collar was so straight that it always stuck up, covering his neck. When it got dark, gem sockets on the coat glowed light blue. Call him egotistical, but he’d chosen it because it looked cool.
Today, it was more than just an awesome-looking garment. The wind was picking up, and the clouds looked mean, and the coat shielded him from it. “If it gets much worse the orx is going to head back to its den,” he said.
“Larynk thinks the storm will last a week,” said Longtooth, in-between licking his fur. He stopped when he realized what he was doing. Longtooth was always self-conscious about being a rat, especially around Charlie, no matter how much Charlie told him to just act like himself, to forget about anyone else.
As much as Longtooth tried otherwise, he couldn’t change his nature, and that was the same for everything. Case in point – the orx. The island was its habitat, and its nature and its instincts drove it into the open to chew on rocks. Yet, its nature would also make it flee from them.
Unless someone could change its nature. Unless someone could drive the fear out of it and force it to stay still.
Charlie stood up. “I’ll tame it, and then we’ll kill it once it trusts me.”
Taming was one off his skills, but not the kind of taming you’d expect. He didn’t spend hours offering a dog treats just to teach it to shake a paw. Charlie’s brand of beast mastery was more high stakes; one where he tamed creatures like Apollo, his lion-like pet.
Taming wasn’t the only thing he’d recently learned. After Larynk had abused his godly powers to pluck him from Earth and bring him to this alien land, Charlie had earned three powers. One was magery; the art of wielding mana and channelling into spells that resided in his mind. Another was Bladefighter – deft use of the tri-daggers that he held in a bladeswitcher on his wrist. His third power was taming, a power over animals that given time, he could develop into mastery.
Patters of rain fell from the sky, sploshing on the dark island rocks, seeping into cracks in the ground. They drummed on the back of Charlie’s coat, and they splattered onto the orx’s hard skin. It wouldn’t stay out here for long, so he needed a plan.
Spells and daggers wouldn’t work here, but taming would. It made him feel bad to even think about a plan like that. To him, taming meant bonding with an animal, developing a mutual trust with each other. But he didn’t want to starve, and he wouldn’t let his empathy make his friends starve, either.
Taming was the only answer, because he wouldn’t have to get close to do it. His taming skill beat Flink’s spear abilities in that he could use it from further away, and it was a hell of a lot more accurate than Longtooth’s bow.
He let his thoughts settle. He tried to ignore the wind lashing against his raw cheeks and the rain spitting on his face and beard, focussing only on the orx, on its rock-hard shell, on its bulging black eyes, and on its mouth as it chomped on the black rocks littering the ground.
Energy filled him. Mana trembled over his body, vibrating across his arms and to his fingertips. His consciousness began to lurch from him, taking stuttering steps out of his own mind and toward the orx, where their two minds would meld together as one, and he’d gain mastery over it.
He slipped outside himself, part of his mind drifting with the wind, carried across the gloom of the island. A foot closer to the orx, then closer still…and then the energy left him, drained from him like water in a hole filled bucket.
Tame Failed.
He slapped the ground. Just like every other attempt to tame things on the island, he just couldn’t get a handle on it. Two days earlier, he’d tried taming a gull that flew overhead, hoping to convince it to fly close enough that Flink could spear it. And then, just like now, he’d started to use his tame power, only for it to lurch to a stop and for his mana to seep uselessly out of him.
What was he doing wrong? He’d tamed bigger creatures than this before. He’d tamed Apollo, for Christ sakes, his giant lion-serpent hybrid. Now, he couldn’t even get a grip on the orx.
He avoided Flink and Longtooth’s stares. He knew what they were thinking, and he knew he’d get angry even by looking at them. It was different for them; they were native to this world, they’d grown in it and learned their skills so they were attuned to them. Charlie had been granted his mage and taming powers by Larynk, god of corn, and the feeling that he hadn’t really earned them just wouldn’t leave.
“Newchie,” said Flink, using her nickname for him, “maybe I should-”
“I want another try.”
He refocussed. It was hard, but he buried his empathy, buried his growing anger at his own failure. Sound drowned out around him until the crashing sea became a whisper, and the wind wasn’t any more than a tickle. Mana glowed in his stomach, and it began to shudder along his chest and to his arms until it pricked all over him in a sensation that wasn’t painful but felt unnatural somehow.
He pictured the orx in his head and imagined their minds binding together as a meeting of man and beast. He was ready to cast his ability. He breathed in, his mind as clear as he could make it.
A shape leapt out from the bushes ahead, crashing into the orx. The orx and its attacker rolled along the stone, screeching, grunting, wrestling with each other. They became a blur, impossible to tell the two of them apart, limbs flailing and sending stones scattering around until the orx shrieked, and the forms separated from each other.
Charlie flicked a dagger into place on his wrist, but he made sure not to move enough to get noticed. Their guest was a giant crab, all shell and claws, bigger than the orx, massive enough to make Charlie wish he had more than just his daggers in a blade switcher on his wrist. It was a clinx-claw, a hellish blend of a crab with razor sharped claws, and the body of a giant cat. It was chest-tightening mix of power and agility, with a keen hunting sense and a hell of an attitude.
It tore the orx apart in seconds, scissoring its flesh apart with its claws, snapping a tendon here, a muscle there. It silent ferocity was sickening to watch, and Charlie didn’t want to see the blood spurting out, but at the same time he couldn’t take his eyes away from it.
A cold dread filled him. Of all the creatures on the island, the clinx-claws were the only ones that scared him. Once they set their sights on prey they hunted them to the end. So far, Charlie and Flink and Longtooth had managed to keep their distance whenever they saw them, avoiding drawing their attention.
The last thing they needed was for this clinx to mark them as prey, because it’d follow them to their camp. Not only that, but Flink had told him another unwelcome fact; these monsters emitted a pheromone when you hurt them, and the invisible scent would draw their clawed brethren from the dens, and the pack would stalk you until you were chopped liver.
Flink tugged on his sleeve. “We better go, Newchie,” she whispered.
She was right. The orx wasn’t theirs now, it belonged to the clinx who tore it apart with its claws, chopping it into smaller and smaller pieces like a chef preparing a meal. As much as his stomach yelled at him, he had to leave.
As they went to silently back away, a flare of orange and yellow light shot from the sky, tearing through the grey clouds and whizzing toward the island, where it exploded against the ground somewhere in the distance, near their camp. Sparks flew up, spurts of light crackling like a Catherine wheel and cutting through the ever-present dimness.
The light display drew the clinx’s attention, and then it saw them. It opened its claws, dropping chunks of flesh to the ground. Blood dripped down its shell, and it gazed at them with its large cat eyes, glancing from Charlie to Flink to Longtooth, sizing them up. With one step it began to prowl their way, evidently having decided it could take on all three of them.
It wasn’t wrong. Charlie had h
is blades, but he wouldn’t get a chance to use them up close; the creature was too fast. He could maybe use magic but even if he hurt it, all that would accomplish would be to draw its clan mates, and then the pack could follow them to their camp and ruin their only safe place on the island.
If he couldn’t hurt it, he needed to tame it. It was the only bloodless way out of this; if he could tame it enough to calm it down, he could command it to leave them. It wouldn’t help their aching bellies, but at least they’d be alive.
Longtooth nocked an arrow and drew back his bowstring. Flink gripped her spear tight, the pointed tip taller than her by a full foot.
“Wait,” Charlie told them. If they angered it, there was no chance he could tame it.
The clinx prowled toward them, its body slinking low against the ground, its claws clacking beside it and opening and shutting like the snapping of giant scissors. The thing was an evolutionary monstrosity, nature’s idea of a sick joke.
Charlie channelled his mana. He stared intently at the creature, trying to leave his own mind and burrow into its skull, to meld with its brain, to become one. He closed his eyes, blocking out everything around him. He could feel it now; his mind was moving, propelled by the mana, casting forth across the island to the clinx.