Sometimes Cobo got this feeling, like there was something big looking over his shoulder, and that whatever it was really didn’t want them to ever hook up with the Dragon Eater Clan.
Because seriously, they just could not manage to get there without something blocking the way. A week out from the Great Tomb, they had ran right into the descending Sun and had to bunker down for the day, hiding inside the cart – but then three days later, the damn thing had rained on them again, then again the next day, then twice more the following week…
For a whole month, it seemed like the Rotting Sun had it in for them personally. Going a third the speed they should have, they started to get worried about water, so they cut further south to raid Blackleaf Clan caravans; that had gone well enough, and they restocked on food and hydration. But he had used most of his bullets, so now he was leaning a lot harder on his techniques, and they had to raid even more for food.
But other than that, it was smooth for a while. Greyleaf Forest was a pretty okay place; there was plenty of water, and the trees were mostly docile during the day. The Sun stopped hitting them multiple times a week, and they were making good progress – until they walked right into a full-on war front. Blackleaf guys and another clan were fighting it out in the dozens, and he didn’t want anything to do with that, so they tried to go around. But they kept running into little squads of two of three guys, and after a few days of that they were starting to get dedicated ambush squads going after them.
So they had gone back out to the desert. And again, it was smooth for a while. Cobo had been afraid that the Sun would pop out at any moment, but it had apparently moved on to pissing off someone else. They got about two thirds of the way to Red Beast Canyon over another two months, and mostly it was really boring. He got some good training time in.
Then they hit dragons.
Not exactly unexpected; the Dragon Eaters ate dragons, so obviously there were dragons around for them to eat. Common sense. But dragons were supposed to be solitary; they were running into herds of three, four, sometimes five. None of the really big ones, thank the Ancestors, but it was still too much. If it had happened just once, he would have considered it good luck. Thanks for the meat. But fighting them off constantly, they started to take damage. Stingy’s regeneration was better than his, but she was also a larger target; the first time they ran into a second herd in one day, she lost a leg and they started going back the way they had come, working together to lug the cart.
They ran into more guys from that second clan, one Cobo didn’t know the name of. They fought, and it was ugly; neither of them could move for days, too weak to pull the cart. There was wood growing into them, and he thought he would die every time he closed his eyes.
But they pulled through. Some combination of the dragon meat and Stingy’s innate poison allowing them to out-eat the saplings burrowing through them, and they came out of it harder than ever. They volleyed between the dragons and the forest, hoping to wear them down and break through, but then the cart finally broke too bad to fix. There was no way they could go through the dragons all at once, and on the horizon it looked like the trees had started creeping towards them by the hundreds.
North and east were fiery death. South was some weird shit that was almost certainly the wood people getting fed up with their raiding.
So now here they were, going west back towards the Junk Pit, hoping to run into a raidgroup and avoid starving. He had an empty barrel strapped to his back, while Stingy dragged a sled with another two empties and one half-full one. They had no meat left, save for their own muscles, and something was deeply wrong with the weather; by his count they should have been in the first half of the cold season, but it was sweltering. The sand was hot hot, burning, and he had eaten his boots three nights ago, so it was extra unpleasant. Stingy had never had shoes in the first place.
And yet, somehow, their spirits were high.
----------------------------------------
She was singing, her voice melodic and crackling, the guttural wordless chant echoing out over the tan dunes like glass bells. Every so often she would catch Cobo looking over, and she would smile while he pretended not to be caught.
It was a mating song, and it was a trap.
Here was the plan: when someone came over, or more likely a group of someones, Cobo would hide in an empty barrel and she would pretend to be alone. Just a lone woman, freshly molted, born to a nameless mother out in the wastes. She wasn’t too afraid of being recognised; she looked completely different than she had when she was a Junk Dog, the lack of potions stretching her out and altering her scent. Whoever she caught would absolutely be willing to take her back to the clan, so even if they didn’t run into any food right away it would be short in coming.
It was a much better plan than the one Cobo had suggested, and she was proud of it. And the singing felt nice anyway, like stretching a muscle she had never used before.
Day turned to night, then back to day. She drank wine, which did very little to ease her hunger, and chewed an eighth-handful of raw grain, the last of the edibles before they resorted to the cloth on their bodies. And all the while, she sang her wordless song.
There has to be someone out here. Even if Junk Dog wasn’t trying to expand, they’d still want to keep an eye on their borders. Unless they’ve been wiped out entirely- No, the Pit was a fortress. Even if they lost all the armies, the dregs left underground would survive to rebuild. But they wouldn’t be raiding.
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
She paused. “Do you think maybe we should have tried going north, up to the Yellow Spot?”
Cobo grunted. “Nah, that’s more of a wasteland ‘n this is. Why?”
She grunted back. “Just thinking. It’s weird we haven’t seen anyone.”
“Yeah.” They continued to trudge, and she started singing again.
It got hotter, somehow.
Stingy was mostly fine still, but Cobo couldn’t walk on the sand, it was literally cooking him now. He had to ride on the sled with the barrels, which was making them slower; he laid down, his front inside an empty container to keep a little of the heat off, and muttered incoherently. It reminded her of when they had been in the swamp, poison addling their minds, but this wasn’t poison. It was just sheer heat, melting his brain like butter a little more each day.
Maybe we haven’t seen anyone because of the weather. Isn’t it supposed to be the cold season? She didn’t exactly have much experience with the surface yet, but she would have assumed that the cold season would be, you know, cold. I guess the Sun is stronger than usual this year. That fits with how often we saw it. Or maybe they were walking into a Sun Cultist bunker. That was a cheerful thought; cultists would be made of meat, though it would be hard to eat for all the pus.
They started to only travel at night. During the day they would make a sort of wooden tent-thing with the sled and barrels, casting enough shade that the heat would barely fail cook either of them alive. Burying it a little way into the ground, she could almost pretend they were back in the Pit. But then the sky would change and it would get a little less sweltering, and she would start pulling things along, singing all the way. Don’t give up. There has to be someone – if not Junk Dog, then another clan. Metal Tooth or Yellow Spot, maybe even Dragon Eater.
Cobo kept using a technique, though he was too incoherent to tell her what it was. She let him do it; his endurance was a bit better now, and he still had enough brains not to run himself completely dry. So she just focused on moving. One foot, drag the sled, other foot, drag the sled, repeat.
On the day after they ran out of wine, they ran into someone. Somehow it was Cobo who spotted him first, despite being nine-tenths unconscious. He suddenly bolted upright, knocking his head on the barrel, and looked past her. His goggles flashed with reflected sparks from the midnight clouds. He said one word, “Lu,” then fell back down.
It wasn’t Lu.
----------------------------------------
The tunnels seemed to go on forever. They twisted around, sometimes going entirely vertical, and Bull had to admit that what they lacked in aesthetics, they made up for in defensibility. He was completely turned around inside ten minutes, not helped at all by being constantly on the run. That third guard must have gotten off an alarm, because he felt like a worm that had burrowed into the side of an anthill; deformed natives seemed to melt out of the walls whenever he turned his head, and he was only keeping away by the grace of his circuit’s rapid regeneration. Stuttering Step. Stuttering Step. Stuttering Step, third realm.
Actually engaging any in a fight would be suicide; he’d be jumped by a legion before he could get two hits in. And I don’t think they’ll be as merciful after the second breakout, especially since I killed the one guy. All he could do was flit around from tunnel to tunnel, hoping to stumble into an upwards shaft.
He dodged a wave of force, sent out a spattering of little first realm Fireballs, and Stepped through a wall into an emptier tunnel. Something with too many eyes startled at his appearance, and he felt something reaching into his mind. No.
The eye-thing jiggled in indignation as he Stepped down the new tunnel, pursuers already teleporting in around. An extra-thick barrier blocked him, maintained by a quad of freaks, and he was forced to use Hell’s Monkey to break through. Light Ray managed to hit an eye as he passed, to his satisfaction. This was the most dangerous moment; he couldn’t risk another costly spell for long seconds, lest his circuit break completely, so he had to be satisfied at taking one of them out for at least a bit. If they set up too many of the extra-thick barriers in a row…
He tried to Ray another as it leapt out of the dark, and to his dismay the beam curved up to hit the ceiling. Fuck. They’re adapting to my tricks. Suppose that’s a big benefit to everyone using telepathy.
But they hadn’t figured out everything, yet. It was obvious they didn’t know just how fast he recovered, or how shallow his reserves were; they were trying to wear him out like hunting dogs hounding a deer, but he was no deer. The qi circuit would let him fight more or less indefinitely, as long as he didn’t hit that waste limit that Lu’s notes had underlined twice. Stuttering Step is a cheap spell, though. I should be able to keep doing it for a while, as long as I don’t get caught.
No, he wasn’t a deer at all, though he resembled one at the moment for how much running he was doing. Just got to find one of those shafts. Lu said they'd be all over, so I’m bound to hit one as long as I don’t go around in circles. A glob of slime flew out of nowhere to hit his legs, hardening instantly to glue him solidly to the floor. He Stepped out of it, spin-kicked something head-shaped, then Stepped again. Damn annoying, though. How many teleporters do they have?
----------------------------------------
They didn’t have nearly enough teleporters. The Psychokinetics were the smallest brotherhood, and perhaps only one in ten could teleport a meaningful distance. One in a hundred could do that with a passenger or two.
And none of them could do it forever. With the less useful members feeding strength to the capture team they could keep going for a startlingly long time, but even then they needed to stop and rest every few minutes, if only briefly.
A limitation that he was beginning to realise the prisoner didn’t share. Already he had teleported a hundred times or more, flying through the tunnels like a heat mirage, there and gone in the time it took to blink.
That he could do this, that he could evade the might of the brotherhood in their own territory, after suffering confinement in the void for so long, only reinforced his value. Tanglebud was connected to the entire team, was managing and guiding them as if they were his own limbs, and still somehow the warrior was slipping through his fingers.
They needed to capture him again; they needed to understand this power. The grandmaster was close, but he was hitting blocked passages that couldn’t be forced through; there were biological limitations to using the foreign energy that he hadn’t been able to solve yet. They needed a real user’s mind. They needed a human to join the gestalt.
He burned more and more power spinning connections, bringing more brothers in, expanding the net. He had long since hit the limit of his processing power, but now he pushed past with abandon, disregarding any damage to his consumption that might be happening. Tanglebud dissolved, becoming a skein of thoughts only loosely bound together, a multitude of threads guiding the brotherhood to swat a single bothersome fly.
The man evaded the teleporters, so the brotherhood sent in kinetics to smash his limbs. He evaded them as well, too fast to catch. It sent in specialist psychics, but his alien magic shrugged off their control. It assembled groups to attack in multiple ways and hid them where he would pass through. A minute passed before the brotherhood realised he had snuck past somehow.
Finally, with great reluctance, the brotherhood began collapsing tunnels. This will hurt us, even if we recapture him. There can be no hiding this from the rest of the clan, now.
It would be worth it. If they could drag qi from his mind, it would be worth it.