Red Wishes Black Ink

Uicha de Orak, Wildcard of the 6th Renown, representing the Forgotten One, seeing a mirage

Lavicta, Elementalist of the 10th Renown, Gen'bi Nomads, finding her people

The Firstson, Monster of the 1st Renown, representing the Forgotten One, can be discreet

22 Blossum, 61 AW

The Gen'bi desert

38 days until the next Granting

That morning, there was dust on the horizon. A fuzziness blurred the sharp line between endless sand and endless sky. Uicha squinted and shielded his eyes, trying not to let on how excited the change in scenery made him.

"What is that?" he asked.

"People," Lavicta replied. "Hopefully, our people."

"What do you mean?" Uicha asked. "Who else could it be besides your people?"

Lavicta grunted. "See, there's our people, and then there's our people. You get it?"

Uicha did not, but over the last week he had learned it wasn't worth it to press Lavicta. She had already offered up what she would and there wouldn't be more coming. They had seen other signs of life as they meandered through the desert on the backs of their horsasis. Uicha wasn't sure if the markers—half-buried campfires, ghostly footprints, split cactus rinds—were becoming more numerous, or if he was just getting better at spotting them. Regardless, he got the sense that Lavicta steered them away from encountering anyone else, going so far as double-back across their own tracks until the wind changed. At first, this approach had made Uicha uneasy, but in the last couple days, at least, they had a reason to be more circumspect.

The Firstson kept pace with Uicha's mount, his stone legs never seeming to tire. The gargoyle paused, plunged his hand down into the sand, and lifted up a scorpion the size of Uicha's fist. The bug thrashed, spiking its tail against the Firstson's knuckles with a noise like raindrops against a windowpane.

"Bug," the Firstson declared, holding the scorpion out to Uicha.

"No, thank you," Uicha replied.

The Firstson cocked his head. He grabbed the scorpion's tail with his free hand and twisted it free from the body with a sound like a popping cork. He tossed the body away, then waved the tail at Uicha.

"Weapon," he said. "Good weapon."

"All yours," Uicha replied.

The Firstson nodded and slid the ichor-dripping appendage into his scrounger-skin cloak. Lavicta had turned to watch the exchange; she shook her head and pushed her hat lower. Uicha wouldn't have blamed her for steering them away from the dust cloud, but for once Lavicta kept them on their same path. She was interested in whatever was out there.

They crested a sand dune, ambled down its side, and then started up the next. Sweat dripped into Uicha's eyes, and he tugged at the hood of his cloak. His lips were dry with grit, so he reached back to grab for his canteen. He no longer paused in the slightest to gulp down the fresh-tasting if lukewarm water that poured from the horsasis' udders. They reached the top of the dune and Uicha had to press the back of his hand against his mouth to keep himself from coughing up the water in surprise.

A fortress had appeared in the distance. A burly structure with walls of sandstone, two guard towers, and a courtyard that somehow featured a grove of trees at its center. Uicha closed and opened his eyes, but the fortress was still there. It was impossible that he wouldn't have noticed it when they'd ascended the last dune.

"I'm seeing things," he mumbled.

"You ain't," Lavicta replied. "That's no mirage."

"You told me that the Gen'bi don't have towns."

"We don't have any permanent ones."

Uicha wished that he had his spyglass from his travels aboard the Dartmyth. Shielding his eyes, he tried to square the distant structure with what Lavicta had told him.

"I don't get it," Uicha concluded.

"That's all Messoratia. One of our champions." She thumped her breastbone. "Those walls are made of Ink."

Uicha thought back on the champions of Ambergran. They always had a healer who would use their abilities to help the villagers, but the rest were typically glory-seeking swordsmen or archers who used the Ink to augment their fighting ability. Even the other champions he'd encountered—like Sara Free of the Ministry or Curse of the Flamingo Islands—mostly focused on their own skills. He'd never heard of a champion doing anything like this.

"How long does it last?" Uicha asked.

Lavicta shrugged. "About a day. Longer if Messo can keep himself awake. Then, he needs a day to wait out the fade."

"Amazing," Uicha said.

"Eh," Lavicta replied.

Across the hot sands, things had a way of looking nearer than they actually were. They were still two hours out from the fortress, Uicha craning his neck to keep the building in sight as they curved over dunes. Uicha imagined what he might build if he had those abilities. His first thought was a ship, but what good was a boat that disappeared every day, leaving the crew to tread water until Uicha could recover? The gods put such limits on them. The Gen'bi wandered the desert endlessly, with only a day's worth of shade offered when their champion could manage it. The more he thought about it, the more the arrangement felt fickle and cruel.

Uicha caught himself. His thoughts had begun to sound like one of Battar Crodd's sermons.

As they finally neared the fortress, Lavicta turned to him. "Your gargoyle child might upset some people," she said.

Uicha frowned at her choice of words, but nonetheless turned to the Firstson. "Hey, uh, would you…?"

The gargoyle flexed his wings. "Hide," he said. "Watch."

With that, the monster made three bounding steps across the sand and took flight, his beating wings causing the horsasis to shy away. Soon, he was a black crescent in the blue sky, not so different from a bird of prey, although Uicha hadn't seen many of those out this far. Although he flew high, the Firstson didn't stray far, circling above the Gen'bi fortress.

"Sure," Lavicta said. "No one will notice that."

They approached the open archway into the fortress at a slow walk. More than a dozen Gen'bi were visible inside, all of them dressed in a similar style as Lavicta—pieces of leather and hide, mixed with colorful wrappings, and wide-brimmed hats. A few of them were stripped down to nothing, their weathered, bronze bodies floating in the shaded pool of crystalline water beneath the palm trees, while others laconically harvested fruits and vegetables from a garden that somehow grew right from the sand.

Lavicta reined in under the shade of the stone archway, where a man sat on a bench, lazily fanning himself with his wide-brimmed hat, while leaning against a round, silver shield wedged into the sand. He was sun-dried like the other Gen'bi, but Uicha guessed him to be in his fifties. He was bald, with a white goatee run through with streaks of crimson. The man was disproportional, as if ample muscle had once hung from his bones, but had since withered down except for his wide shoulders and thick forearms. His shirt was open, thick silver chest hair sprouting through the biggest collection of Ink that Uicha had yet seen.

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Messoratia glanced at Uicha, more out of curiosity than irritation at the younger man's staring. When he spoke, his voice was a low rumble.

"Lavicta, I got some kind of monster just landed up in my watchtower," Messoratia said. "Itching me like a bug bite."

"That belongs to the kid," Lavicta said, hooking a thumb toward Uicha.

"He doesn't mean any harm," Uicha said, feeling that this was true via the strange bond with the Firstson. He knew that the gargoyle-turned-champion was content enough to linger in the empty tower, watching the goings-on below. That answer seemed good enough for Messoratia, though now he studied Uicha with actual interest.

"And who are you?" he asked.

"Uicha de Orak."

"Well, I'll be roasted." He raised an eyebrow at Lavicta. "You actually went and found him?"

"Had him dumped in my lap by the Magelab's inquisitor," Lavicta said.

"No kidding? And here I thought you three going out to hunt Ink was a waste of time."

"Wasn't no waste," Lavicta said sharply. "We need all we can get. According to the mage whore, everybody knows what we're wishing for. We getting done ugly because someone ran their mouth."

Messoratia drummed his fingers on his shield. "You know who done that, don't you?"

"I'm not stupid," Lavicta said. "He here?"

"Yep," Messoratia said with a nod.

"And the others?"

"Here, too," Messoratia said. "Estinabris has a delivery, so I wouldn't go bothering her. You know how she gets."

"You don't think she'll want to hear what this one's got to say?" Lavicta asked, hooking her thumb at Uicha again.

Uicha had sat idly atop his horsasis, listening to what the Gen'bi said, and trying not to get too distracted imagining how that water might feel on his chafed skin. Samus Bind had said that the Gen'bi intended to close their desert. Uicha remembered the merchant champion Milena Russi and how she'd used chanic to augment her own symbols—chanic which Uicha had taken for himself and put to more permanent use. He couldn't imagine a closed desert would please the outsiders who traded in the crimson substance. But what would that mean for Uicha? He didn't have a side in that conflict, and so his face was a blank when Messoratia nodded toward him.

"He got anything to say?" Messoratia asked, not unpleasantly. "He know the answers to everything?"

"No," Uicha said. "I don't."

"Just more nonsense screamed in our ears, then," Messoratia said. He put his hat back on his head and pushed the brim down. "Tell you the truth, I'm ready for the long quiet, sis. I'll fight like you want, but I won't be mad when it's done."

Lavicta turned her head and spat, nearly hitting Uicha in the leg. "Fuck off with that, Messo. I don't want to hear it."

"Fine," Messoratia replied, then waved her away. "Go on. Leave me to my musings."

Scowling, Lavicta put her heels into her mount and continued under the archway. Unsure what to do with himself, Uicha followed. He let out a deep sigh as a cool breeze blew off the shaded water at the courtyard's center. Lavicta, however, hadn't been softened at all by the change in environment. She hopped off her horsasis, then tossed the reins to Uicha.

"Go put the animals away," she said, gesturing to a paddock along the side of the courtyard. "I'm going to talk to my Quill."

"All right," Uicha said, though Lavicta hadn't asked, or even waited for a response. He watched as she stalked around the edge of the pool, stopping when she reached a narrow old man stripped down to his undershorts, soaking his feet. Lavicta kicked sand at him by way of greeting.

Glancing up, Uicha found dozens of windows looking down on the courtyard, movement behind some of them. He wondered if the rooms in Messoratia's fortress came fully furnished; he wouldn't have minded sleeping in a bed for a change. Uicha kept his hood up as he tugged the animals toward their enclosure. He could sense the other Gen'bi watching him with listless curiosity. None of them said a word to him—they hardly even talked to each other.

Uicha got the lumbering horsasis put away, the gate latched behind them, and was about to confront the daunting question of what to do next, when a woman's scream sounded, shrill and agonized, from one of the windows. Looking around, Uicha was surprised to find none of the Gen'bi reacting.

"Child birth," said a young Gen'bi man leaning against the paddock fence. "Don't worry, friend. Our healer's in with her."

"Oh," Uicha said. "I see."

"I know that look," the young man said. "You're thinking, by the gods, these people fuck? They make new Gen'bi, to live out here in this blasted desert? You're thinking you could never be so cruel."

"I wasn't thinking that," Uicha said, meeting the young man's eyes.

Uicha was pretty sure the chatty Gen'bi hadn't been there when he first dragged the animals in. He was only a few years older than Uicha—early twenties, at most—the weathered lines less pronounced on his cherubic face. It took Uicha a moment to figure out what was different about this Gen'bi; he wore ornaments. Overlaying his leathers and ward-weave, the young man displayed a collection of dripping gold chains, a ruby lapel pin, and a glittering diamond in his right ear. His other ear, however, had been cleaved clean off his head, the flesh then cauterized into a wrinkled ridge, so that his white hat sat slightly lopsided. When he smiled at Uicha, his canines flashed with small jewels.

"Sure," the Gen'bi said. "You came in with Lavicta, huh?"

"Yeah," Uicha said, glancing over his shoulder to where his escort huddled in conversation with her shrunken Quill.

"Did she mention me?" the Gen'bi asked. "She don't like me very much."

"Who are you?"

"Peplucaria," the Gen'bi said. "Alchemist. Champion. Wisest man in the desert."

Only now did Uicha notice the hint of Ink peeking out from between Peplucaria's silks and chains. Uicha quickly did the math in his head, figuring that the talkative champion Lavicta had groused about wasn't the healer upstairs in the fortress, assisting in the birth of a child.

"No," Uicha said. "She didn't mention you."

"Sure," Peplucaria said again. He nodded toward an entryway that led into the building. "Say, come talk with me in the shade for a minute, huh?"

"Shady enough right here," Uicha replied.

Peplucaria rolled his eyes. "What's the saying, islander? Na flamanga 'e na emad," he enunciated perfectly. "Any port in a storm?"

Uicha took another look at the Gen'bi, who would've been perfectly comfortable in one of Flamboyance's seedier marketplaces. It has only been a few months since Uicha himself first learned those words—the traditional call for aid of the islanders—but he still bristled at this Gen'bi using them now.

"What do you want?" Uicha asked.

"We got a clever friend in common," the Gen'bi replied. "He warned me you would be coming. Told me to keep an eye out, so that's what I'm doing."

Peplucaria held out his hands—a ring on every finger—like he was about to do a magician's trick. From his coat, he produced an avocado-sized fruit covered in two-pronged spines that reminded Uicha's of a snake's fangs. With deft fingers, Peplucaria flipped open a short knife and split the fruit in half, revealing spongy, dripping crimson flesh. He held out half to Uicha, who made no move to accept.

"What is it?" Uicha asked.

"Viperfruit," Peplucaria said, speaking briskly. "Grows on cactus out here. Tastes sweet, but then you'd feel your mouth go numb, and your head go other places." He dipped his head down and tongued a bit of the flesh into his mouth. "That's what would happen to you. An outsider. For me, who been weaned on the juice, whose mothers and fathers worked its dye into my hair since I was a boy, it don't do nothing but quiet the voice for a little while."

Uicha carefully slipped his hands into the pockets of his cloak, grateful to feel the hilt of his scimitar through the fabric. "What're you telling me this for?"

"Sometimes, we let an outsider partake," Peplucaria continued. "They end up lost on the sand, out of their gourd, until they dry up and stop making problems." The Gen'bi leaned in, whispering, Uicha close enough to smell the sweet juice on the man's breath. "I'm telling you so that, when my Quill offers you a bite, you'll know just what he intends for you."