Until now, I fear I have given a hazy view of the wasterlander constituent. A reader might be given to thinking they were human rather than animate meat. This misgiving is due to my own biases, my focus on those few that had minds and thus can be given names, actions, agency, trajectory. It is the folly of a novelist that I shall correct with the firm hand of history.
Lucius was given a clear look at the true nature of these creatures when he exited the ruins. It was something akin to a new day, in that people were waking up from their dozing beneath the sunless sky and naturally, most set about filling their stomachs with what was on hand.
On that day, it was the corpses of friend and foe, of some hundred savages that had attacked Luigi’s caravan. The corpses numbered only a few dozen, so the survivors clustered about the bodies, ripping at the flesh and gnawing on the bones. They crunched through knuckles and fought to stuff fingers into the soupy mass of gray matter within the skulls.
Despite this attack, Luigi’s cohort had grown. This was the nature of tribal warfare in the sunless desert. Loyalty did not exist among the masses. Combat generally ended whenever the leaders were slain, then the followers would no longer have a reason to fight. They could be haranged and whipped into line, following the victor as meekly and savagely—as circumstances demanded–as their previous owner.
It is this behavior that draws them even lower than slaves. These mindless creatures have more in common with corpses than with people. Their mental faculties preclude memory, empathy, problem solving. Like cockroaches, they can direct themselves in a straight line toward a desire. With a firm enough hand, they can carry out tasks of the simplest nature. In this way, they can haul their own food and water, they can follow across the dunes, but they cannot conceive of a reason to do so besides avoiding pain.
They cannot even conceive of themselves as thinking things, let alone one another.
This is the characterization of the hungry mob that Luigi Sacerdote had to stare in the glazed eyes and intimidate into submission. Not just anyone could do that, for it was always too obvious that a slight mistake would have them turn on their master.
Thus, Lucius did not ask where they procured his clothes. It was Golden that told him, unbidden. “You should thank me. Do you realize how difficult it was to kill a man without shedding his blood? And without him soiling himself either! There’s only a bit of sweat in those clothes and you’ll just have to bear with that until we find an oasis. Are you going to thank me?”
Riding atop one of the camels, as befit a man with a mind, Lucius took his attention off the clockwork hand and cocked an eyebrow at his angelic companion. “How did you kill a man without shedding his blood?”
With a smirk, he explained, “I should clarify that I only kept his blood off the clothes. With some of these puppets, I knocked the fellow off the edge of a building and flipped him upside down. Then all I had to do was lop his head off and let the blood drain into the sand. I was afraid something might splash when the creatures started lapping up the blood like wine, but luck was on our side.”
Lucius quickly inspected the neckline of his thobe again, but there were no stains, only another man’s smell. “I wonder if they have perfumes somewhere,” he mumbled, turning again to the relic.
It was a curious thing, not because the construction was altogether so impressive. The materials were largely gold and elegantly crafted to create a blueprint for a prosthetic. He had seen much the same mechanism about three years prior at The College.(1) A certain craftsman, whose name I shant spoil yet, had created a similar fake hand for a swordsman. The request had been to allow his return to dueling, but that had proven too much for the future golemancer at the time and not for lack of ingenuity. A duelist’s grip is not some cludge to grip the handle of a sword, but every bit as elegant as an orchestra conductor’s wand. Every finger must be individually engaged to whip a blade about with proper speed and force. With an arm cut off midway between elbow and wrist, the only thing that could be made was a grasper. It would open and it would close with the flexing of the remaining forearm. The duelist could toast a goblet of wine, but spent years failing to learn how to use his left hand instead.
The desert relic was fully articulated, but controlled like a puppet. By a series of loops and pulleys, every digit could be manipulated as though it were the user’s own flesh. Naturally, someone missing their hand could not use it, so it could not be a prosthesis. My pupil lacked the morbid ingenuity to realize that the loops he played with his own fingers were not meant to remain. The wires were designed to be stabbed through the flesh and fused to the person’s tendons.
Instead, he postulated, “Do you think this is for working in acid or something?”
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Golden huffed at the change in subjects, but said, “To keep your hands clean?”
“To keep your hand from dissolving.”
“I suppose it could be used like that. Maybe it’s just a novelty. Inventors are always experimenting and it’s clear that whoever made this didn’t care particularly much for it else it wouldn’t have been left there.”
Lucius fitted his hand to it and played with the fingers, making a few vulgar gestures until he realized Lupa was riding her camel toward him. “What now?”
“We’re being followed,” she said, gesturing to a shadow on the horizon.
“Perhaps I should run off and join them.”
“If you’d prefer your luck with cannibals, by all means.”
He sneered. “And I’m not surrounded by them already?”
“The priest keeps these ones in line.”
“Then why not send me back there to kill their priest? And have Luigi convert the thralls.”
She shrugged. “We may yet, but not here. I’ve come to warn you that we will be going down to the crystal caves.”
Golden groaned. “Must we?”
Lucius asked, “What are the crystal caves?”
“Our larder,” Lupa answered, and tugged her camel away.
Lucius gritted his teeth rather than yell after her, then asked the question again of Golden. The bird said, “Quartz mostly, enough that light can come up from below. Very pretty, if you’re into that sort of thing. I understand it can be rather like finding yourself in a twilight swarm of fireflies, or the illumination pools of Aillesterra. The latter I can’t speak to, the snake never much cared for me.”
The explanation didn’t quite satisfy Lucius, but they were soon upon upon the earth fissure. The camels had to be dismounted and led by the reins, often by force as they balked at the damp smell. This slowed the mass of people, bunching them together until it seemed all manner of spear, club, and sword danced about Lucius in a forest of weaponry matched only by the heat of battle. The formation was chaos, but to expect more of the thralls would have been folly.
Lucius grumbled about how they should be marching four abreast with sergeants at the fore of every unit, that they should have been scouting and ranging the land for forage or camp sites. Entering into a cave system is something no sane general would ever willingly partake of, but that was the logic of northmen–men afraid of other armies.
As Lucius would learn, no ambush could possibly be laid in the crystal caves, for lion worms were the least of the threats. Such danger came after the mind-numbing awe of finding himself inside rough-hewn sandstone and quartz caves. The veins of crystal glowed all about them in a hundred thousand facets of purple(2).
What was more than the light was the water. It trickled and splashed in natural springs and ponds that grew deeper and colder the further beneath the surface they went. Lupa had to grab Lucius before he knelt down to drink from one of the ponds. “Does your stigmata heal loose bowels?”
Drying his hands upon his thobe, Lucius muttered, “Theoretically.”
She scoffed. “Maybe I should have let you. Biting off your stigmata would have been so easy with you shaking and sweating, hugging your knees and begging the world for mercy.”
He sneered back at her. “Point taken. But maybe someone needs to tell him that?” he suggested, pointing to where Golden was wading into one of the larger pools. Before Lupa could speak, he dove in. After a moment, he emerged with a wriggling eel as long as a pony between his hands. Leeches dangled from the creature’s soft hide, which flopped off and across the ground. The thralls snatched those up, chomping through the bloody guts as Golden laughed at them.
“I don’t suppose you have any cleanser, do you?” he asked as he stuffed his fingers into the eels gills and ripped the head off. In short order, the waste of the fish had been tossed to the thralls to fight over and he had two enormous filets that he wore about his bare shoulders like a sash.
Their moment of awe was interrupted by the grunt of a thrall. “Lion.” Lucius hardly knew to react to such a moniker. The idea that the mindless thralls understood him to be the Gambling Lion, a name barely known among the armies, seemed beyond belief but that was because he didn’t believe the memories of one man might pass over, however muddled, to his predator.
As it turned out, the thrall had been sent to fetch him by the priest. Enough hours had passed if not quite to exhaust one’s legs but to befuddle the march entirely. Camp had to be made before the mass of thralls disintegrated and became food for the wasteland. With no requirement of restraining him, the thrall brought Lucius near the front of the host. A round tent had been hammered into the stone, not for protection from the elements, but for privacy. It distinguished the priest from the lowest caste.
Into this, Lucius stepped, quickly realizing that this would be his opportunity to whip the army with his tongue, to twist its aim to suit his purpose. He stood little hope of escape without them, so a path had to be found with them.
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1. The College is capitalized because at this time, no other such institution had been founded. Other kingdoms had their methods of instruction, but only Vassermark had ventured to make an institute where pupils had to go to their teachers rather than the other way around.
2. The color feeding through the firmament is subject to change over the years, it was purple at the time but many an adventurer has gone looking for these caves since and reported green, red, even black light. I suspect those last explorers have a touch of madness to them.