by Rin Chupeco
We’d spent nearly a day harvesting what we could from the dead beast, the Mudforgers doing their best to slow down the inevitable rot with water-based incanta and packing the carcass with good ol’ desert salt. Our two wagons groaned as we stacked as many portable chunks of meat as we could onto them; the wheels weren’t used to this much bounty at any one time, and they squeaked in protest. I estimated we were about four-fifths of the way done with the salvaging, despite five hours of nonstop work and over half of the clan pitching in. This was the biggest catch we’d had in a long while, and Mother Salla wanted to make the most of it.
“Yeah, Kad, I’m coming up roses everywhere.” I tucked my newly refitted Howler under one arm as I scanned the area, frowning. The aspidochelone remains were located at least twenty miles away from our underground home, and the threat of more sandstorms and mirages, not to mention possible ambushes by other nomadic brigades roaming the desert, made our task a nervous one. My hand drifted to the glowfire grenades strung around my hips like a makeshift belt, and I felt reassured by their presence.
I’d been on edge for hours. When I’d gone out on patrol at the end of yesterday’s cycle, I could have sworn I’d seen another one of those mirages wandering the dunes.
It had stood there, with no indication that it wanted a fight. It was far enough away that I couldn’t see its face, but I knew it was watching me, and the watching was what unnerved me most of all. And then it turned away without attacking, disappearing behind another sand mound.
I spent the rest of my shift waiting for an attack that never happened. Faraji, who’d taken over after me, reported nothing out of the ordinary on his watch, but it took me a few hours into the next day cycle to finally fall asleep.
Now, perched on top of the beast’s corpse, I scanned the wasteland again, but all I saw was endless dust.
“This will tide us over for months.” Mother Salla inspected the strips of blubber we’d lined up, looking pleased. “It is fortunate you stumbled on it before the insects and the heat could render the meat inedible, Arjun.”
It was Mother Salla who taught us how to boil those tissues for oil, how to fashion whalebone into durable bows and Howler pieces. She could tan skin into leather, could stretch out food rations to keep us all fed, could hit a bull’s-eye at a hundred and fifty yards with an adequate gun and nearly double that with a good rifle. It was she who’d found the underground network of caves that saved our lives, she who’d reared us like she was our trueborn mother. She must have already been old around the time of the Breaking; it was hard to tell what she might have looked like young, though she’d joked once that she’d stopped counting when she hit fifty. Most of us were orphans when she’d taken us into the Oryx clan, and for many she was the only parent we’d ever known.
I cleared my throat. My clan knew nothing about my run-in with the Sun Goddess, and I intended it to remain that way. “Yeah. All that matters is that we’re making the most out of it now, right?”
She tilted her face up to mine. “You’re rubbing your wrist again.”
I looked down, saw that I was worrying at my stump, and let my hand drop. “Sorry. Itching.”
“I raised you from infancy, Arjun. I know your tells. You have a habit of doing that when you’re keeping something from me.” There was no accusation in Mother Salla’s gaze, but there was curiosity.
My mind flailed, trying to find the middle ground between telling the truth and continuing the lie. “There was a mirage. I barely managed to dig myself out of the sandstorm it brought in.”
Mother’s brows knitted together. “I’m glad you’re all right, but this is not your first encounter with one. What happened to make you so worried?”
“It knew my name.” That had shaken me far more than I was willing to admit. “I didn’t even know they could talk.”
Mother Salla stared out into the desert, and I saw her jaws clench. “It knew your name,” she echoed, so quietly that I very nearly didn’t hear her. “They’ve always been mute before. Something has changed to make them stronger.”
“Stronger?”
“The magic spiraling at us from the west—it’s been gaining energy. The dead are finding voices. Derra and Salome reported finding one attempting to speak a few weeks back, but they assumed the words were nothing beyond death rattles. Perhaps some are even regaining memories of their past lives, no longer the mindless wraiths they were doomed to become.” It was almost like she was talking to herself instead of to me. “Perhaps they have even found some new purpose now. Ah, Asteria. You foresaw this, didn’t you?”
“So you’re saying there’s some new magic making them remember things?”
“I know enough about the patterns to know what’s possible. Something might have triggered a surge, enough to motivate new mirages to crawl out of their purgatories and . . .” Mother Salla paused. “And do what? I have no answers, either.”
It occurred to me that none of us knew much about Mother Salla’s life before the Breaking. We knew she was the best fighter among us, that she could survive almost anything the sands could throw at her, but I never thought about whether she’d learned all that long before the world burned, or if she’d had to in the months after. It hadn’t seemed important. “How do you know this?”
She didn’t answer, her eyes trained on the horizon. “We have company. Have we gotten all that we can, Mannix?”
“We could harvest more if we’ve got the time to.”
“We don’t.” She raised her voice. “We’re leaving!” she shouted, and everyone dropped whatever they were salvaging and began hoisting themselves up on one of the two wagons, Mannix and Faraji taking the drivers’ seats.
I saw clouds of dust rising up from some distance, caught a quick gleam of sunlight catching on silver, and swore. “Hurry!” I yelled down at the rest. Then I planted my foot firmly against the whale’s head and adjust my Howler, my sights trained on the first of the rigs coming into view. Nine hundred paces. Eight hundred. Seven. “Come on,” I muttered. “Come on, come on, come on. . . .”
“Get down from there, you lunatic!” Kad roared from below. “We’d hate to leave you!”
At four hundred paces I could make out the symbol they’d splattered on the side of their fire rigs: rings of flames licking up the sides, surrounding a grinning yellow skull. The Hellmaker tribe: violent, sadistic, psychopathic. Fire patterns sprang up around me, and I let them whip themselves into a frenzy, adding double the spark that was needed. The Skeleton Coast was a vast tract of dry land, but the Hellmakers thought they owned the whole lot, with everyone in it their livestock.
Because the Hellmaker tribe were also goddess-damned cannibals.
“Arjun!” Mother Salla screamed at me.
I pulled the trigger.
The resulting blue fireball sent the first rig careening straight up into the air, breaking apart quickly as it fell back down. A few screaming figures were buffeted up by the momentum, most of them on fire. Already I was reloading and training my barrel at the next rig, sending off another shot before I turned and leaped off the whale, landing with a grunt on a pile of blubber as Faraji gunned the engine. We took off after the other wagon, and I craned my head to see, hopefully, whether the Hellmakers had abandoned the chase after seeing what had befallen their comrades. No such luck.
“I think you just made them angry,” Faraji said.
“I’m more concerned about how hungry they are.” The Hellmakers didn’t have as many incanta casters in their tribe as we did, so their armor was rougher, their spells not as fully formed. They wore black greasepaint under their eyes to limit the sun’s glare, and their clothes were cobbled together from what they could salvage in the desert and from the people they’d eaten. It was not a comforting thought. Already the rig taking the lead was firing off shots of its own, missing widely.
But our wagons were heavier than theirs, and no matter how many incanta Faraji could work into the engines, they were getting closer.
&n
bsp; I didn’t have time to build up another explosive shot, and my next attempt glanced harmlessly off the side of the Hellmakers’ ride. I adjusted my aim; the driver caught one right in the chest, and I knew he was dead long before he’d tumbled off into the sand, his partner frantically trying to regain control of the wheel. A well-placed shot from Mother Salla took him out too, and the vehicle reeled listlessly to one side before crashing against a dune. Two down, four to go.
I popped the cap off one of the grenades and tossed it in the sands just as another vehicle neared. It promptly took out the passenger, leaving a bloody mess on the seat, but the driver continued his pursuit despite being covered in his companion’s grisly remains. My second grenade was more successful, exploding right under the rig’s engine and turning the machine and the two cannibals on it into a blazing inferno. Three down.
The next closest rig had already pulled up and was worrying our side. Our first wagon had a better head start, which meant they were likely to make it out; ours wasn’t looking as lucky. One of the Hellmakers keened, leaping from their vehicle onto ours, but all it took was one swipe of Air from Mother Salla, and the body was falling lifeless onto the ground. When another tried, I shot him point-blank in the face.
“A little more speed would be appreciated, Faraji,” Mother Salla suggested through gritted teeth.
“Not for want of trying, Mother, but—aaah!” Faraji clutched his suddenly bloody shoulder, but managed to keep our wagon steady. I took out the Hellmaker’s wheel, and then the Hellmaker, as he fought for control. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Faraji panted. “Just keep racking up the body count on their end and not on ours, aight?”
I looked back to gauge how close the nearest Hellmaker vehicle was, and Mother Salla let out a queer, choked gasp. “What is that?”
I turned to where she pointed. Up ahead, a figure clad in black was walking toward us, unmindful of the ongoing chase. It wore clothes similar to those on the mirage I’d encountered before. It was hooded, but from the curve of its body and the way it walked, I thought it might be a woman. “Well, shit,” I hissed.
“Do I run it over?” Faraji shouted, panicked. “Do I run it over?”
Salla, the mirage murmured.
“Mother Goddess,” Mother Salla whispered. “Jesmyn.”
“Go around it!” I yelled, hefting the Howler up so I could fire at the Hellmakers again.
But as we watched, telltale winds began to whip around the mirage, and I saw the swirl of dust and grit that was becoming far more familiar than I wanted it to.
“Sandstorm!” Mother Salla screamed. “Everyone down! Faraji, keep it steady!” Already she was grabbing some of the bigger pieces of whale meat and piling what she could over Faraji and then herself, and I hurriedly followed suit.
At the speed we were going, there was no way to reverse course and retreat. The mirage waited placidly as we tore toward it, close enough for me to hear it whisper Arjun once again before it was soon lost within the storm bearing down on us. We cowered as best as we could in our seats, the stink of brine and entrails mixed in with the hot, arid taste of sand. I closed my eyes and tried to ride it out, but there was a sudden burst of pain on my arm, a heavy blow that knocked me into the air, and I landed hard on the ground, grunting.
The wagon was gone, and Faraji and Mother Salla along with it, but the wind continued to howl, and there was nothing else I could do but huddle up and hope none of the Hellmakers ran me over.
When everything died down, I cautiously poked my head out. The wagons had escaped, that much I was grateful for. I struggled to stand, but a heavy boot landed on my spine and I flopped back into the sand.
“Hello, meat.” The heel dug painfully into my back and I stopped moving, hoping desperately that I hadn’t broken a second Howler in only two days. Hands grabbed me, turned me over, and pinned me into place. I looked up at a grinning Hellmaker with wild blue eyes and a scar running down the side of his face. There was a knife in his hand.
From what I could see, one of the rigs had survived the sandstorm, and the wreckage around us told me there were no casualties for the Oryx clan. Except, potentially, me.
“Thought you could get away?”
“Technically,” I said, because they were idiotic enough not to deprive me of my gun while I was down and therefore, hopefully, also idiotic enough not to notice me quietly feeding more patterns into it while I bought myself more time. “Most of us got away.”
He stooped down, and a line of spittle dropped from the side of his mouth, dangerously close to my head. He shifted his foot, and I bit back a cry when he kicked my injured arm. “A lot of difference that makes to you, meat. You’ll keep us fed and fat for the next couple of weeks, and we’ll hang your skin out like a painting over my tent.”
“That’s not really as flattering a tribute to my looks as you think it is.” Something was wrong. The winds had picked up again—without the mirage nearby, the desert should be as still as stone. I shifted my head and caught sight of a black figure out of the corner of my eye.
Bereft of witty rejoinders, the Hellmaker simply snarled and raised his knife.
And was slammed away by a sudden gust of wind that spiraled out from nowhere. Almost at the same time, I fired my Howler, catching one of the Hellmakers who’d been holding me down, turning him into a red streak on the ground in two seconds. My next volley was weaker, using enough patterns to sting in favor of speed, but a second Hellmaker still hit the sands, wailing and clawing at his eye.
Now on my feet, I tossed another grenade at the group and ran toward the lone vehicle. I could hear sounds of pursuit behind me, then a burst of fire that came dangerously close to my ear before the shooter’s snarl was cut off abruptly. The sandstorm was back, but this time concentrated solely on the Hellmakers while I stood, unharmed, scant feet away. The mirage had not dissipated when the sandstorm had passed. Instead, it remained where it was, watching me—like it had when I’d been on patrol the previous day.
I leaped into the rig and, after a few seconds of fumbling, found the trigger to start the engine. The mirage was protecting me. The idea terrified me more the longer I dwelled on it. Why the hell was it protecting me?
The Hellmakers were still up to their eyebrows in grit and tornadoes, too busy to notice when I tore out of the place, wheels screaming. I turned back to look one last time. The mirage did nothing, only watched me leave, and from underneath its cowl I saw a mouth form words that weren’t words. Inanna awaits you and the goddess, it whispered, and I fled.
Mother Salla clung to me, nearly weeping in her relief, after I’d stumbled wearily into the entrance of our caves. “We thought they’d gotten you,” Millie said, sobbing outright, clinging to my hand.
“I know you’ve made it your personal mission to kill off every one of those damned cannibals,” Mannix said, a relieved grin on his face, “but did you have to make us worry, too?”
“Couldn’t leave till I got my hand on one of their sweet rides,” I bullshitted, grinning and hoping my legs wouldn’t buckle underneath me now that the adrenaline had passed. “Can someone see to my other hand? I think I’m running out of them.”
An hour later, I was tucked into my cot with my injuries bandaged, a good stiff drink of codrum already down my throat, burning my insides in the most pleasurable way. My brothers and sisters surrounded me, needling and begging me for more information.
I hammed it up, of course. Skipped the part where I was facedown in the dirt with a knife trained on my head, and the part where the mirage came swirling in to save my butt. So I bragged about nabbing the rig while fighting off cannibals, and they ate up every word.
Except Imogen, the brat. “So you’re really going to claim that you faced off ten of those buggers with nothing but a Howler and got off scot-free.”
I waved my injured hand in her direction. “Not completely free of the scot, as you can see.”
“Are you sure there weren’t twenty of them? A hundr
ed? Ten million?”
“Immie!” I protested. The others broke into laughter.
“Be nice to him,” Kadmos chided, slinging an arm over her shoulder. “He brought you a new ride to tinker with.”
Imogen rolled her eyes. “Not if I have to hear some ridiculous story about Mr. Perfect Warrior over here.”
“I believe him,” Millie said sincerely.
“That’s because you’re too nice, luv,” Kadmos chortled.
“Hey, Arjun wasn’t the only one who got injured, you know,” Faraji complained, his own shoulder dressed and treated.
“I agree,” Mother Salla said firmly, shooing the others away. “Faraji, go back to your own bed so you can heal properly. Kadmos, see to the rig. Scrape off that foolish insignia on the side and give it a good scrubbing.” They had already pushed the vehicle down into the camouflaged crevice where we kept all our other wheels, preventing anyone from realizing the area was inhabited.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Millie asked worriedly.
I laughed. “I’m fine, Mil. Go see what you can do about my gift. You’re the best mechanika around here. Kad’ll only muck it up.”
“Thanks,” Kadmos said dryly, and Faraji chuckled.
“How did you get away?” Mother Salla asked the instant everyone was gone.
I straightened up. “Getting to the point so soon?”
“While I don’t deny your skills as both a fighter and a sharpshooter, there were far too many Hellmakers out there for you to make it back with nothing worse than a bloodied arm.”
There were no windows in the caves, so I focused instead on the small fireplace, where some sort of stew was bubbling over. Tarika could do wonders with salt and the herbs she’d managed to grow underground, surrounding them with soft patterns of light and what little water we could spare, and it smelled like she could make even rotting whale meat palatable.