NOVEL NEXT Book 2: Chapter 43
A tired and grumpy caravan set out in the morning, leaving a trio of shallow graves behind by the side of the road. Oak's hunch had proved correct. Those unfortunate few sick with the runs had lost their lives during the night, weakened by the long hours spent without food and drink in the Demon's grip outside Al-Badra.
Oak wished Belphegor would punish his errant spawn harshly for their failure. Losing a seal to a plucky young Warlock had to be humiliating. Couple decades of torture ought to set the fucker straight.
All told, the caravan had gotten off easy, not that Oak was dumb enough to say that out loud. The grieving families might take exception. He frowned at the unmarked graves as he marched past alongside the oxen pulling their wagon, feeling abnormally reflective. Would any of the deceased be alive if he had been faster? Would there be four graves instead of three on the side of the road if he had been a touch slower in banishing the Demon of Rot and Decay?
His old man would have called such thoughts hogwash. He had usually been correct about these things. Oak shook away his doubts and tipped his hat at the graves. Rest easy, poor souls. If nothing else, the dead deserved his goodwill.
Dying in a sickbed was no way for a person to go. Better to face the end with steel in your fist and a war-cry on your lips than pass away in silence during the darkest hours of the night, accompanied by nothing else but despair, struggling with every laborious breath rattling in your lungs.
The late priestess of the Erelim, Jehona, had not been wrong. A good death was its own reward.
***
Despite the poor state of the caravan, they made good time on the road. To no one's surprise, everyone wanted to leave even the memory of Al-Badra behind them. What should have taken them eons of blood and sweat, they managed in an afternoon. Not a day went by that the caravan did not cross twenty miles.
Most days, they passed twenty-two.
By the end of the third day of travel, since Oak had burned the Demon's mortal shell to ash, the dense and humid jungle gave way to an arid plain. Spirits soared until the lack of shade and the harsh midday sun ground people's good cheer to dust.
Such was life on the road. It was too wet or too dry. Too cold or too hot. Windy enough to qualify as a storm, or so calm as to be suffocating. Never comfortable for long, in Oak's experience. You either chafed until your thighs bled, or you ate dust and prayed for rain. Farmer's really had the right idea. Just stay put and grow some food, like a normal person. Let others sleep outside and face the vast dangers of the wilderness in the name of trade, baubles and wanderlust.
No matter the riches accrued by traveling across the face of Pairi-Daeza, hawking your wares, one has to be alive to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The odds of survival were decent, but nothing to write home about. A smart man would choose a different profession.
Oak doubted anyone had ever accused teamsters of being smart.
On the morning of the fourth day of travel since Al-Badra, a short downpour of rain doused the entire caravan before anyone had time to stash their tents inside their wagons. The timing was diabolical. There was no way to dry the tents during the day on the road, unless you wanted to cover the entire tent cloth in a pile of dust. Every wagon kicked up a cloud of the stuff, and the wind whipped it across the wagon-train with gusto.
Cursing up a storm, Oak abandoned his morning porridge next to the cookfire when the first raindrops fell and rushed to roll up his tent. Ur-Namma and Sadia just pulled up the hoods of their cloaks and kept eating. They were correct in their pessimism. By the time Oak threw his rolled up tent on the wagon bed, it landed with a wet splat.
A puddle formed on the caulked wood. Oak sighed, feeling genuine disgust.
Great. I'm going to sleep in a wet tent tonight. Morose thoughts circling inside his head, Oak walked back to the cookfire and crouched next to Sadia, who stared at her own dripping wet tent like she could dry it with will alone if she tried hard enough.
The lass was a spellsinger. Maybe she could.
Oak grabbed his bowl of porridge and shoveled a spoonful of tasteless sludge in his mouth. Fuck me. The porridge had grown cold. He let out a deep sigh, trying to keep the red rage circling inside his heart at bay. Killing folk would not heat his porridge. Or dry his tent.
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It would make you feel better, though, the Butcher whispered from the pit of his mind. That is a certainty.
***
In the evenings, Oak held off on examining the thought-plague he had recovered from Ma'aseh Merkavah and busied himself with constructing a second trauma-weapon to accompany Kaarina's Horror. Killing the tentacled monster resting on top of the Demon's lair in the Waking Dream of Al-Badra would have been much easier if he had two stingers instead of one.
The work was a welcome change of pace from the tediousness of divining the function of the meticulously spun sequences of Kushim's Bewilderment. For one, Oak knew what to do, and how to do it. Getting the desired result just required his effort and time.
Pigs would fly on the day Oak ran out of effort. Time was a different matter, but he made do with the scant hours available to him. Planning his steps during the day's marching helped to ease the work along and it, at least momentarily, chased away his most loyal traveling companion.
Boredom. Oak was bored enough to pray for freak accidents, hailstorms, and a second giant crocodile attack to grease the wheels of adventure and excitement. Sadly, nothing happened. The only constant source of intrigue and joy was his nightly theurgy session.
He had crafted Kaarina's Horror out of a single ghost holding a woman's crystallized memory of pain, loss, and sorrow. Her death had been ritualistic, orchestrated to create a ghost fit for purpose. For his second weapon, Oak took a different approach, mostly out of necessity. Setting up a proper ritual sacrifice to maximize the imprint of trauma was no simple task.
Doing it under the noses of over 1,500 people would have frankly been impossible.
On the soft, unreal grass of his sanctum, in the shadow of the great Gallows Tree, he took five of the nine ghosts he had snatched from the tentacled dreambeast's corpse, and blended them together. The process was more art than science, guided by intuition and feel.
With extreme care, Oak pruned away every idle thought and memory of day-to-day life, every joy and every triumph, until nothing but trauma and pain remained. Then he melded the remains of the ghosts together and forged them into shape. His iron will was both hammer and anvil, heat and quenching oil.
Under the false sun shining in the equally false sky of his sanctum, evening by evening, a second trauma-weapon slowly took form. The end result of four evenings of headache inducing exertion was a dark-red stinger, the color of old dried blood. Slightly longer than Kaarina's Horror and saw-toothed, Cluster of Hatred made for a savage weapon, wriggling with the need to rend a mind asunder.
Reverently, Oak picked the stinger up from the grass and slotted it in place behind his left shoulder blade. It fit him like a glove. Flexing both weapons, old and new, he extended the stingers past his collarbones and made a few practice stabs against empty air, imagining a poltergeist about to descend upon himself.
The swish of displaced air the stingers left in their wake sounded like success. Oak felt fulfilled. Like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, right when the last missing piece dropped into place.
***
After a grueling week of marching, they finally reached the city state of Mashkan-shapir. The walled city spread out on the southern bank of the river Nin-gublaga, which flowed from west to east, sprinting towards the great sea lapping at the eastern shores of Pairi-Daeza.
Or so Tochukwu had told him, after Oak had pestered the caravan leader about local geography.
Great spires of white and red rock dominated the vast city's skyline, stretching towards the frayed wisps of cloud struggling against the uncompromising heat of the afternoon sun. The towers glistened like jewels, casting the sun's rays anew on all who dared to look upon them.
Clusters of slums hid in the shade of the walls outside of the city proper, rackety houses drooping over each other like old folk bent double by Father Time.
Arrogance, pride, and a sprinkle of destitution. Oak could smell it all in the air, even over the stink of sweat and dung wafting off the caravan. This was a place fit for trouble, and filled to the brim with the desperate and the ambitious.
In Oak's experience, sometimes the difference between the two was entirely academic.
When he declared his intentions to visit the city at once, Ur-Namma and Sadia stayed behind, too tired to be swayed by the chance to walk down unfamiliar streets.
"Stretch your legs, if you must. You are a big boy, Northerner," Ur-Namma said. The elf laid on his sleeping pad by their campfire, whittling away at a piece of wood with his carving knife. Oak suspected the lunatic was working on another goose.
Elves. Mad like a knife-ear is a saying for a reason.
Geezer didn't want to join him, either. The hellhound flopped between Sadia's legs and laid his giant head on the exhausted spellsinger's bony thigh, giving every indication that he was done for the day.
Oak shrugged and left the caravan's encampment, whistling a jolly tune as he went. The shadows and the winding paths of the city called to him, whispering promises of wonder and novelty to his desperately bored ears.
It's their loss, Oak thought as he gazed at the lines of people flowing in both directions through the wide open gates, guarded by armed soldiers and a pair of granite statues. Two roaring male lions, big enough that a child could have easily climbed inside their mouths.
If he couldn't find something interesting in a city like Mashkan-shapir in a single afternoon, Oak would eat his wide-brimmed hat.