“Crackerville... Tentacle orgy…” Dia said, brow furrowed.

“It’s called Yildiz, not Crackerville. Why do you keep calling it that?” Arne asked.

Dia just shrugged. At least Arne thought so, but with the camel’s movements bumping her back and forth it was difficult to be certain.

“When can we stop?” Dia asked. “I’m still freezing, and I need sleep.”

“I don’t think anyone is following us. They might look for us on the main road, but it’s been windy all night, so nobody can track us out here,” Toog said.

Arne looked around in the desert landscape. The road to Estrin was to the west of them, roughly an hour’s ride he would say, and on the distant eastern horizon, the sun painted the ridge of the Watchful Peaks mountain range gold before rising fully. There, far in the distance to the north of them, a few palm trees that had just been a black dot on the horizon a moment ago, showed up. It seemed too few to be a large oasis, so likely nobody lived there, and they could seek shelter and get a few hours of sleep.

Before they had left the tavern in the dead of night, he had grabbed several blankets and food, and waterskins enough to last them several days.

“That was really cold, by the way,” Toog said, nudging the camel up beside Arne’s. “Last night.”

“What? I can’t help that we had to flee at night. Deserts get cold. That’s what the blankets were for.”

“No, no. I mean the whole pet, pet, kiss, kiss, fuck, fuck with that guy and then the moment you had a chance for it, stab, stab. No hesitation. You are evil, Arne,” Toog stated seriously, nodding.

“You’re kidding, right?” he asked, a genuine question. “I can’t really tell; you are very difficult to read.”

“No, I think you’re evil too,” Dia added, unprompted. “Who would drag a wounded woman around like you did with me last night? Definitely evil.”

“I hauled you into the street to …life suck the people coming at us. I saved you!” he protested.

“They would have come in and I could have ‘life sucked’ them when they did. That was totally unnecessary agony you put me through! I can still feel your arm against my back like it was still skinless.”

“You know what? Fine! I’ll just let you be the next time a spider death crab from beyond this world attacks your face!” Arne snapped.

“Don’t be sour,” Toog said gently. “I’m not judging you; I’m just saying you’re evil when you can be a considerate orgy lover one moment and a murderous, stabby maniac the next.”

“Don’t be absurd. I am not evil; I am just pragmatic!” Arne stated. “And besides, I don’t think mudslinging really carries that much weight when you’re a torturer.”

“Then why do you take offence?” Toog asked, seemingly just curious, but incredibly hard to interpret.

Was it a joke? Arne couldn’t tell. He shook his head. It didn’t matter. “So, spider death crab?” he looked at Dia. “What happened?”

“Oh, well, it was great. I got to know the ritual, it’s actually a bit simpler than I thought, and then there was the point where the crazy priestess suddenly changed, grabbed my arms, and began speaking some other ritual that I couldn’t really follow.”

“Why not?” Arne asked.

Dia looked at him, clearly puzzled. “How do you mean?”

“Why couldn’t you follow it? I don’t know anything about magic. I need this explained.”

“I didn’t know it?” she looked at him like he had lost his mind. “It’s hard to predict verbatim what someone will say when you don’t know where they might go? And I couldn’t figure out what was supposed to happen so I couldn’t infuse the words with any power. Obviously.”

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“Right. I guess that will do. Then what?” Arne asked.

“Oh, yeah, like you can explain stuff you do! Why didn’t you just knife everyone at the orgy to begin with?” Dia almost shouted.

Arne closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. “She grabbed your arms and spoke some other ritual?”

“Yeah. Then the death crab came out and I couldn’t move. Nothing more to say!” Dia snapped.

“Did the priestess control the death crab?” Arne asked. “Or was it the other way around? Do you think she was controlled or however you want to describe it, like the one Toog tortured?”

Dia rounded on him with so sour an expression he drew back a little in the saddle. “Nothing. More. To say,” she repeated.

Arne sighed. “Right. Toog?”

“Hm?” Toog seemed to surface from the murky depths of private thought.

“Did you get anything out of last night that we would benefit from knowing?” Arne asked.

“Oh, yes, I wrote the words down. So we have the ritual. For the death crab summoning too, I guess. But it’s so far just the rough phonetics. Still, worth a try, right?”

“How did you avoid being taken over by the …sex feeling? And husband guy called you a watcher, like he wasn’t surprised you stayed clothed.”

“There were watchers in the Arabesk orgies, too. Didn’t you talk to anyone there?” Toog asked.

“No, there wasn’t. Everyone at the orgies were naked. And participating,” Arne refuted.

“Eventually, yes, they gave in, but there were people circling the outside of the orgies in Arabesk. The watchers. I was a watcher. That was how I managed to do all those drawings.”

“Oh. Right. Well.” Arne shook his head. “…So, how did you stay out of it?”

“I was on drugs. I assumed you didn’t want any,” Toog said.

Arne considered arguing but gave up on the idea. “You are quite correct, anything else?”

“Nothing. I mean, except for this one, of course…” Toog just shrugged and flipped the saddlebag nearest Arne open so he could see the folded, awful mess of sagging white flesh, finger-like legs, and pincers.

“Gods!” he exclaimed. “You brought that fucking thing!”

“Of course. I want to dissect it. It would be silly not to. We need to know so much more about them.”

“Great idea.” Arne kicked his ill-tempered camel’s flank to nudge it away, in case the folded-up sack of death crab and pincers suddenly decided to come alive.

o-0-o

Watching Toog humming a happy, serene tune while meticulously peeling the awful crab beast apart layer by layer was better than the priestess torture by a certain margin, but still quite repulsive. Toog was dressed in the normal baggy desert garb with scarves and bandages wrapped around to protect both the face and the hands from the drippings.

Arne had put his meagre gear down and tethered the camels to a palm tree. Then he had fastened a blanket taught between two palm trees as a shade-sail, one for Toog and one for Dia and him, and sat there, watching Toog work, having a silent breakfast with Dia until she curled up next to him, seemingly half asleep.

A small, cracking snap sounded and Toog broke one of the long finger-like legs off after having opened the skin around the joint. Happy to be a fair distance away, Arne still saw pale yellow ichor drip from the removed limb and Toog carefully scraped it into a small bottle from the medical kit that had somehow survived the flight from both Arabesk and Crackervi– Yildiz! Arne shook his head at himself.

“Those people Toog talked about in a tavern who died.” Dia said, curled up close to him with her back turned.

It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t know what to say.

“Well?” she asked.

“Well what? What about them?”

“Were they yours? Like friends? It was a you-thing. I never pay attention to that,” she said unapologetically.

Arne was silent for a moment, mulling it over, but then decided to tell her. If she wanted to harm him, she would very much do it to his face, not with cleverly gained information behind his back. “They were,” he confirmed. “Some were friends. Two I grew up with, from when I ended up on the streets. Some were people where… we came to trust each other over the years because we worked beneficially together. Some were people I could trust if I paid them well. Which I did. Several of them were hardly more than children. Apprentices of the older ones.”

“I wish it was me,” Dia said.

Wondering if she meant something like ‘me, who had people whose loyalty I could buy’, Arne just looked at her, not bothering to hide his confusion. She was still lying curled up with her back to him, her pale, randomly cut hair tousling in a hot desert breeze. She still didn’t bother turning around.

“What do you mean?” Arne finally asked.

“I wish it were my people who went and keeled over horribly. It would save me the trip.”

Ahh, that made a lot more sense, he felt. “But then someone else would get to kill them. Sounds like you would want that pleasure yourself.”

Dia seemed to disentangle herself from a sleepy state and rolled over on her back to look at him. “You are right,” she said seriously. “You are very, very right.”

Arne couldn’t help smiling and Dia grinned up at him for a brief second before rolling over on her side and going back to her catnap. He had a feeling her broaching the subject to begin with was a sign of… sympathy? The Dia version of it, at least. Maybe because she had been vulnerable last night after the crab attack? He mulled it over and then dropped it. It didn’t matter since manipulating Dia seemed completely nonsensical, so having a grasp on her emotions was pointless.

“Oh…”

Arne heard the softly spoken word carried on the warm desert wind and instinctively knew that Toog had found something awful. But it had been almost three hours of calm by now. It really was about time something terrible happened.

“So…” Toog said and turned around towards them. “The death crab. I think it’s pregnant with a Dia.”