by Logan Jacobs
“Guess you really liked the taste,” I called out to get his attention.
He turned his magnificent black head and snorted. “It’s not half bad, but I was just snacking out of boredom. Where to now?”
“We have a sorcerer to battle,” I said as I held up the map for him to see.
“A sorcerer?” he repeated as I swung up onto his back.
“Yup, calls himself Lord Gorander,” I said. “Lord, my ass. I’ve never heard of a noble house called Gorander. And if he really belonged to one of the noble houses, he wouldn’t be this far out west.”
“Spoken like a true royal snob,” Theo said.
“I just like honesty,” I said. “I like to call things what they are. No more and no less.”
“You don’t exactly tell people you meet the whole story about what you are,” Theo pointed out.
“I tell them exactly what I am now,” I said. “No more and no less. What I’ve been in the past is irrelevant.”
Theo snorted, which is what he tended to do when he somewhat disagreed with something that I said, but couldn’t think up a good enough argument against it.
“Which way?” he asked.
I reached forward and held the map in front of his face so that he could read it.
Then we trotted on out of the now significantly less-blue Bluegarden in a cloud of dust, before anyone could ask us where the flowers had all gone.
Chapter 10
The landscape changed a bit as we rode along, just as the ranchers in Bluegarden had told me it would. The barren plains that I was used to started to fill up with more and more trees. That meant more shade. It also meant that it was harder to see who or what was approaching from a distance.
“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Theo asked. “You know, a lot of the people in Bluegarden kept staring at me while you were in the saloon. Even though they hadn’t heard me talk. I am just an exceptionally handsome horse, and I think that they coveted me. What if we’re walking into an ambush by townspeople who want to steal me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “The ranchers I was talking to never saw you. And the people staring at you probably just wanted to know why you were eating all their flowers.”
“You’re just jealous that I am handsomer than you,” Theo declared.
“I’d imagine I am downright ugly by horse standards,” I agreed, “but human women don’t seem to mind my face.”
“Why are we going after this sorcerer anyway, if no one is paying you for it?” Theo demanded. “Isn’t that the rule?”
“I fully intend to collect payment as always,” I said. “But under the circumstances, it sounds like doing so upfront won’t be feasible.”
“Hmm, I don’t know if I like this plan,” Theo said. “Sticking to the code is what has worked for us all these years.”
“Oh, so you like the code now?” I asked. “You spent years saying it was stupid and trying to convince me to rescue every damsel in distress like some kind of damn knight.”
“Yeah, I did,” Theo admitted. “Then I realized that out west, half the damsels are schemers and swindlers who cause more distress than they feel. Same for the fellows. These people just don’t have the same sense of shame that people living in proper civilization do.”
“I don’t think it’s all bad,” I said. “I think they’re a bit more genuine in their interactions with each other. When they’re not trying to swindle each other or stab each other in the back, anyway. They can judge a person more on his or her own merits, and not so much the person’s family. And people sort of make their own destinies. I like that.”
“What kind of destiny exactly do you think you’re making for yourself?” Theo asked.
“My own,” I answered. “Destiny doesn’t have to be some grand thing, you know. Some men are just destined to grow--”
“If you say corn, I’ll buck you off,” Theo warned.
“Cabbages,” I said. “And that doesn’t mean they can’t live a full life doing that. And take joy in the small things. And take pride in being some small part of much greater things.”
“Well, I wasn’t bred to carry a cabbage farmer,” Theo said.
“Maybe you shouldn’t define yourself by who sits on your back,” I said.
We fell comfortably silent after that as the sky darkened and the shadows of the trees lengthened over us. Soon we found a sheltered spot and bedded down and fell fast asleep.
I dreamt of Vera that night. The tawny curves of her body, slender yet muscled as I had never seen a woman’s body muscled before. And the graceful lines of the red-brown tattoos that marked it, symbols in the Savajun language. She’d told me the meanings of some of them, but not others.
She had been apprenticed to the First Sorcerer of her tribe, and it would have been blasphemy for her to reveal the most sacred of their runes to an outsider. She even believed that it would weaken the runes’ power. But I had loved to trace them with my fingers anyway, not really caring what they meant, just appreciating the way they swept across her collarbones, snaked around her arms, rippled across her back, crept teasingly from her hipbones down the outsides of her strong, lean thighs, and even adorned her hands and feet. I found the tattoos mesmerizing, mysterious, sensual, just like Vera herself.
I asked Vera once whether her people used the tattoos as a means of beautifying themselves. She had laughed and said that no, they were considered hideously disfiguring.
“Then why would they apply them?” I asked when I realized she wasn’t joking, a bit horrified for her even though I thought the marks only enhanced her beauty.
“As a warning,” she said. “All sorcerers are marked thus. Not in exactly the same way. We choose what our own marks will be and where we will wear them, but tattooed all over his or her body so that other members of the tribe will not be in danger of falling in love with us, so that they will remember what we are and stay away. We are dangerous. We are born to protect the tribe. To defend it from all enemies. Not to breed. Not to be made soft by having families.”
“But you left your tribe,” I said. That had been one of the things that first attracted me to her. She had a will as independent as mine, and had rejected the duty that she had been shaped for, that had been imposed upon her from birth. “They can’t tell you what you are supposed to be anymore.”
“But I can’t erase what I am any more than I can erase the tattoos,” she replied. “I am a creature of dark power. I lust for blood just as I lust for your body. And I yearn to test the limits of my arts, in ways that pervert the course of nature. You cannot turn something like that into a wife and mother.”
“Most men couldn’t,” I said. I wasn’t sure that I could either to be honest.
Vera had unpredictable rages, and sometimes her powers seemed to possess her almost like a dark entity and turn her into someone I didn’t recognize. And she was more loyal to magic itself, which she worshipped as a god, than to any person or tribe or country. She saw herself as a vessel for magic, subservient to its irrational purposes. But, that didn’t mean a fellow couldn’t daydream now and then.
“You can’t even plant a baby in me,” she laughed as she pointed to one of the tattoos on her chiseled stomach. “This rune forbids that. But, you are welcome to try.”
And try I did. Many times.
In the haze of my memory-dream, I was lying down on my back, and Vera was nestled beside me as we recovered from an earlier bout of lovemaking. Then I reached over and pulled her naked body on top of mine to show her that I was ready for more. She stared down at me with her feline black eyes and kissed the tip of my nose, then hungrily moved to my mouth. Meanwhile she spread her legs so that my hardened shaft, which was trapped flat between us, rubbed along her slick cleft as we kissed. Then she raised herself up slightly on her elbows and knees to give my cock space to rise and gave a shuddering sigh as she let the tip prod her entrance.
I reached out to rub the top of her cleft with my thumb, which made her yelp, an
d then she couldn’t bear the temptation anymore and immediately started working to impale herself onto my cock. Once I was buried all the way inside of her and her ass rested on my thighs, I started to buck my hips from beneath her, and she cried out happily as she fell forward and planted her hands on my shoulders. My thrusts traveled through her entire body and caused her small, but perfectly round and pert, breasts to bounce. After a minute or so I felt her walls begin to clench around my shaft as she moaned.
Then, her eyes turned fully black, the pupils expanding to swallow all the white. She bared her teeth in a snarl and barked out some harsh phrase in Savajun that I didn’t recognize at first. It had been years since I’d heard the language. Vera had taught me the basics of it, although I never became good at speaking it, since I could not mask my natural accent and was unable to produce many of the more complex tongue clicking or rolling sounds that did not exist in my own language. But on the rare occasions when I had interacted with Savajuns on precariously civil terms in towns or trading posts since, they had always used their stiff, rudimentary version of our language, or the ones that knew no words of it remained silent and let their companions speak for them.
Then, my brain finally processed the meaning of Vera’s words. “Wake the man up!” That didn’t make any sense. It took another second for me to realize that it wasn’t Vera’s voice at all.
My eyes flew open.
I saw that Theo and I were surrounded by a band of Savajun warriors with bows and tomahawks pointed at us.
I counted ten of them, and I quickly ran through several hypothetical fight sequences in my mind that I could initiate from my current position on my back, on the ground, with my sword still sheathed, and although in the most favorable one I slew seven of the warriors, the eighth one still got an opening to bury a tomahawk in my skull.
Theo might be able to escape, but if he tried to help me, which he probably would, then they would capture him and make a slave of him. And although most bandits or sellswords or militiamen would, Savajuns did not run away after you slew seven out of ten of them. They just accepted that they were dead men too and fought with a consequent lack of fear.
I guessed it couldn’t hurt to try talking to them.
“I am not your enemy,” I yelled in broken Savajun and raised my hands as I sat up slowly. They allowed this as they stared at each other in surprise. But when I tried to get to my feet after that, they jabbed me with weapons and muttered angrily to show me that that wasn’t allowed.
Theo whinnied angrily when they did that, but I was grateful that he was keeping his wits about him enough not to talk.
“Who are you and how do you know our language?” one of the Savajuns demanded. He was wearing a headdress that appeared to have been fashioned from the horns of a buffalo. I wondered if they had been hollowed out, because honestly I didn’t know how else you could hold your head up straight under the weight of something like that.
I couldn’t tell him the truth about how I had sorta learned to speak and mostly understand Savajun. Vera was distrusted by white men, to be sure, but she was utterly loathed and despised by the people she had turned her back on and betrayed, as they saw it. Even if this wasn’t her former tribe, which it probably wasn’t, none of them would look kindly on a sorceress who had left to live among white men.
But I couldn’t tell any detailed lie, either. I could have done that with a white man, since most white people were so entirely ignorant about the Savajuns that they would believe any absurdity I invented. But these people were sure to catch me if I tried to make up a story involving their culture. And Savajuns took a very dim view of liars.
Instead I did the only thing I could think of and decided to change the subject.
“I am hunting the evil sorcerer,” I said, in Savajun. “Please help me. How do I find him? I must stop the evil sorcerer.”
“… You hunt the sorcerer?” the Savajun wearing the horns repeated.
“Yes,” I said excitedly. “Yes. You know of him?”
“He is an evil, he is a shadow upon the land,” the horned Savajun replied sternly.
“I will kill him,” I promised.
“How can you do that?” another Savajun asked. That one had red stripes smeared across his face. “He is far too powerful. He is the greatest sorcerer to rise in a hundred years. And he fights for no tribe. Only for himself. He has no honor.”
“Are you a sorcerer?” asked a third Savajun, whose earlobes were stretched grotesquely by what appeared to be discs carved from horn.
And just like that, these painted, feathered, horned, half-naked tribesmen started to sound a hell of a lot like the ranchers back at Izzy’s saloon in Bluegarden. Which is to say, full of skepticism that I could go up against Gorander and win.
“It is not possible,” one of them declared. “Brave warriors have tried and perished.”
I was about to explain that I wasn’t a brave warrior, I was a pragmatic mercenary motivated solely by self-interest and money, but then I remembered who I was talking to. Frontiersmen could usually understand that point of view and somewhat respect it. Most Savajuns would probably figure you weren’t even worthy of being their slave and tomahawk you on the spot.
“I am a magic user,” I said. “And I am a famous… warrior, among my people. I have never failed to kill a targ-- an enemy.”
“How do you come to speak our language?” the Savajun with the horns repeated his earlier question. Damn, he hadn’t forgotten then.
“I have traded with your people,” I answered. That was harmless enough, and true.
“But so have other palefaces, and they never acquire more than a word or two,” he said suspiciously. “Only those that have lived with us have ever learnt.”
“And me,” I added with a nervous chuckle. “I’m a fast learner, I guess. So, this sorcerer-- you have fought him? Your tribe has fought him?”
“We have lost brothers,” the Savajun with the stretched earlobes said. “The sorcerer is a blight upon the land. He destroys the land. He strangles the minds of humans and crushes their spirits. He should not exist.”
“So you will let me go?” I asked. “So that I can get rid of the sorcerer for you? And for everyone else that he’s harmed with his magics?”
The Savajuns exchanged glances. Two of them opened up Theo’s saddlebags and began rummaging through them. Despite their obsession with honor and courage, they were just as shameless of bandits as any gold-toothed paleface. They just didn’t see it as stealing at all as long as the victims weren’t from their own tribe. They saw it as the lawful plunder from a martial victory.
The first thing they pulled out was my miniature axe. The Savajun who found it held it up for all the others to see, and they had a good laugh about that. They must have just thought it was a toy for a child or something. They hadn’t even asked me what my power was, after I told them that I was a magic user, and I felt that was a detail that might prove helpful to keep to myself for now.
Then they pulled out the store of hard biscuits that I had wrapped in a napkin, and one of them gnawed off a piece and grimaced.
“Nourishment, not pleasure,” I said with a shrug. One of the Savajuns guarding me jabbed me lightly with his tomahawk, as if I was being rude by interrupting them while they rummaged through my belongings and decided what was worth stealing. I could have easily grabbed the tomahawk from him and buried it in his scowling face, but once again, I just didn’t see a plausible outcome where all ten of them ended up dead before I did. Besides, I was starting to hope that their mutual enmity for the sorcerer Gorander could potentially turn them into useful allies.
They did take all the gold pieces I’d kept in Theo’s bags, but I still had a few dozen coins in my boot heel, and the value of all my gold was dwarfed by the value of the seven remaining vials of potencium that I carried, and they didn’t bother to take them. I speculated that it might have to do with their strict and complicated traditions regarding magic. Maybe only sorcerers we
re allowed to handle and distribute potencium, or something like that. I didn’t know why, but I was just thankful that they didn’t take them.
One of the Savajuns reached for my sword, which of course was the other most valuable object I carried.
“I need that to slay Gorander, the sorcerer,” I said desperately as I again felt the impulse to go on the attack.
The Savajun in the horned headdress raised his hand with the palm out to the one who had been about to take the sword and gestured for him to stop. So I guessed he must be the captain of this raiding party.
“Thank you,” I said to him. Although part of me was angered by the idea that a man deserved thanks merely for refraining from stealing all of my belongings, the more pragmatic side of my nature won out. I wanted these Savajuns to like me. I wanted them to trust me. I wanted them to aid me.
He nodded. His warriors had finished searching the saddlebags by then and appeared to have found nothing else they wanted, so I thought that at the worst, we were all about to part on as amicable of terms as could be hoped for, all thanks to Vera’s language lessons.
Then, his warriors unfastened the saddlebags, lifted them off, and set them down gently on the ground. And the horned Savajun walked over and swung himself up onto Theo’s saddle. Theo’s nostrils flared with anger. He swung his head to stare at me and awaited instructions, with every muscle of his body tensed for action.
“No,” I said flatly, to the Savajun who had just mounted my horse.
“What do you mean, no?” he inquired coolly. Half a dozen of his warriors still had their weapons pointed at me. He knew exactly what I meant. He just wanted to emphasize to me how unthinkable it was for me to attempt to set terms at this point.
“You can’t take my horse,” I said. I stood up and ignored the fact that that involved getting nicked by several blades along the way. One of the Savajuns used the haft of his tomahawk to whack me across the back and knock me sprawling again. I stood up again, and this time I put my hand on the hilt of my sword. My calculations hadn’t changed. I could take out most of them singlehandedly, but not all of them. But I didn’t care anymore.