That first dawn, Tarek and his former cage mates sat around the slavers’ fire and ate while their erstwhile masters huddled in the cage wagon, unable to move until Tarek gave them leave. One of the men, Harsted, a dark-skinned fellow with broken nails and a mouth full of rotting teeth, ate so much of the jerked meat the slavers had kept to themselves that he vomited. He merely laughed, said something incomprehensible, and went back to eating. The other one, Yoni, was more careful, but the glee of eating their captors’ food made him break out in giggles every fingerspan or so. The woman found skins of wine and drank herself into a sullen stupor. She was the only one who hadn’t tried to communicate her name to Tarek. He didn’t push her on it.
It had been shockingly easy to take the other guard and the slave master by surprise once he had Progget under his thumb. As Tarek had instructed, Progget had come in the dark of night to free him once the other two were asleep. The miserable guard had passed his keys to Tarek through the bars, and it was the work of mere moments to unlock his chains. He’d moved silently so as to not wake the others in the cage, fearing that they’d make noise and give him away. He crept slowly past them, begrudging every heartbeat it cost him, until he could open the gate at the rear of the wagon and clamber down. His legs barely supported him, and he’d forced Progget to give him a shoulder to lean on. He could feel the fear and anger boiling in the man, and it didn’t bother him in the slightest. Progget had been the one that speared him. He deserved a little pain and sorrow.
Using the guard’s knife, he’d crossed to the dying embers of the evening fire where the other one slept in his bedroll. He made Progget cover his mouth while he pricked the man’s outflung hand and licked the blade. He knew he’d have to wrestle with the blood lust, so he intentionally stepped back before tasting the blood. He couldn’t see the cut he’d made in the dark, couldn’t smell it, and got only the smallest trace of blood from the blade. Even so, he spent a long twenty heartbeats trying very hard not to leap on the waking guard, open his throat with the blade, and put his mouth to the fountain. As he wrestled with himself, Progget wrestled with his mate, hands wrapped around his mouth and legs tangled together to keep him quiet and immobilized. As soon as Tarek had regained his senses, he told his new thrall to sit quietly while he gave a similar set of instructions as he’d given to Progget the night before. This new fellow was even angrier than Progget. Tarek was glad.
Together, the two guards caved in the door of the caravan home that the master locked himself in every night, hacking through it with hatchets. The master met them with sword in hand, and the new fellow took a nasty cut to the leg before they were able to overpower him and hold him down. The shrieking filled the night, and Tarek was glad of the sandy, desolate wilderness all around. When he cut the master, he didn’t hold back. He drank the sweet blood until he felt the man growing weak. As with Kanga all those moons ago, drinking deeply let him see the man’s memories and know his heart. His name was Degán, he came from an impossibly large group of people very far away, and he was the human equivalent of rat droppings. He’d killed his aged aunt for her gold teeth when he was twelve and things had only gotten worse from there.
Finally, sated, he pulled free of Degán, wrapped his bleeding arm in a bit of cloth, and sent the three men to release the other prisoners, commanding them to lock themselves into their chains. The newly-freed wretches stumbled into the moonlight, confused and wary, and Tarek met them with arms full of food that he’d found in Degán’s rolling home. He couldn’t speak to them as he could with the men he’d drunk from, of course, but he wasn’t about to attack them if he could help it, and he didn’t dare bring Progget or one of the others out to translate – he worried his new friends would murder the ones who’d enslaved them. It would have been justice of a sort, he supposed, but Tarek wasn’t ready to add more death to the weight of his soul if he could avoid it. Already he felt uncomfortable with how easily and shamelessly he’d commandeered his captors. I’ve broken the rules I grew up with. Will it turn hard to keep myself from breaking all rules? It would be so easy to lose myself in this and simply drink my way to a life without opposition. That’s what Xochil wanted me to do. If for no other reason than that, I should be wary.
He kept Harsted, Yoni, and the woman company at the fire despite their obvious unease around him. They spoke freely with each other in their own tongue and rarely looked in his direction. He kept an amiable smile on his face and kept cooking the tubers he’d found in the food stores, which they were happy enough to snatch up and eat along with everything else. He was catching perhaps one word in every ten as he listened; he could only assume that after a more than a moon’s turn of hearing everyone jabber, he was starting to make connections of meaning. Or, more likely, being able to understand the slavers through the blood magic is helping me learn their language faster. It wasn’t enough to make much difference with these three, but at least he could say “jarsum” – eat – as they did it anyways.
Fortunately, the freed prisoners ate themselves into insensibility and sleep soon enough. Yoni fell asleep with a hunk of meat still cooling in his fist, and the woman curled up around the rock she’d been sitting on as if hoping it would protect her. Tarek stood and stretched, reveling in the free movement. It was tiring showing a friendly face to people who had no interest in being near him. He didn’t blame them, of course – they had to know he’d worked some kind of magic to free them, even if they hadn’t actually seen him consuming the blood – and it was a relief to get up and search the camp without an idiot’s grin on his face.
He went to Degán’s wheeled cabin first. That’s where the best food had been, and it made sense that he’d keep the most useful and valuable things close. Tarek wasn’t even sure what he was searching for. He needed to get back to his friends. Pahtl and Kanga were no longer together, he could tell, and he worried that the little group had splintered in his absence. Kanga, if you’ve hurt Tavi or the others, I’ll find a way to have you killed, even if I can’t do it myself. He’d thought so little of his companions as he struggled to control his blood ravings and scheme to escape that now it felt almost strange to think that he could go find them again.
They were south, somewhere very far south. Beyond that, he had no idea, and moreover, he knew less than nothing of what lay between him and them in this strange new land. The terrain had grown ever hotter and sandier as they’d traveled, and now the horizon was nothing but endless hills of sand, with the dry patches of scrub grass coming fewer and farther between every day. He was glad to see that the third cart the caravan carried held nothing but huge barrels of water – they’d need it all if they kept heading south and the land stayed this hot and dry.
The slave master’s cabin held a bed, a writing desk, and a multitude of cubbies and ingenious wooden drawers that pulled open to reveal his goods. Most of it was paper that had been scrawled on in some kind of vivid black ink. The runes looked similar to the writing he’d learned back home, but just different enough that he couldn’t be sure of what sound any of them represented. They’d be in their foreign language anyway, so it wasn’t as if sounding anything out would help him much anyway.
One drawer held a pouch full of metal discs stamped with a crude man’s head on one side and crossed swords on the other. Some looked like the yellow gold he’d seen the Kuruk wear as body decoration, while others looked almost like the good steel blades some of the richer tribes used. A third kind, the largest discs of the bunch, was a dull red-brown that barely shone at all compared to the others. He didn’t know what they were for, but they looked important, so he stashed them carefully away where he’d found them.
In another drawer he found drawings of faces, and his was one of them. The other prisoners had sketches too, and each one had the almost-familiar runes alongside them. A fifth sketch showed a man he’d never seen. If the master had drawn these, he was quite skilled. Tarek’s face looked very much like the engraving Xochil had shown him in the abandoned pyramid temple he’d led them to not so long ago, back in the lands of the Lost. You’re not my brother, old man, I don’t care what you say.
Finally, rifling through the loose papers atop the writing desk, he found something that might be useful. It was a thick, well-oiled curl of animal parchment marked with a multitude of criss-crossing ink markings, runes clustering around small circles and along irregular lines. It had to be a map, but no matter how long Tarek stared, he could make no sense of it. He simply had no frame of reference.
That’s easy enough to solve, he thought with a certain amount of satisfaction. He left the cabin and crossed to the cage wagon. A quick glance showed his three erstwhile friends still asleep around the fire. He’d need to wake them before the sun got too far overhead; it wouldn’t do for them to get sun-scorched and dehydrated on their very first day of freedom. For now, though, he let them enjoy their rest. He felt as if he ought to be exhausted too, but the blood he’d consumed still sang in his veins, giving him a strange, jittery sense of vigor.
He heard weeping as he approached the wagon. He knew without even thinking about it that it was Progget; the man’s emotions were a firestorm of rage and self-pity. Tarek hardened himself against it. These are bad men. They’re getting what they deserve. He’d left the cage door unlocked; all three men were in fetters, and he’d told them not to run away, regardless. When he climbed in with them, all three watched him warily. There was no trace of tears in sight, and that let him pretend he hadn't heard them.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
He held up the map to the slave master. “Teach me how to read this,” he commanded.
Degán sat up, his already pale golden skin all the more sallow from how much blood Tarek had drained from him. “It’s a map.”
Tarek sat in front of him and spread the vellum between them on the strawed floor. The other two edged away, glad to not be the focus of his attention. “I know it’s a map; I want to know where we are.”
Degán sucked at his teeth, and Tarek could feel the sensation of his tongue probing the dead space where a false metal tooth filled in for a long-missing real one. It was disconcerting to feel so much of him, both physically and mentally. Tarek had never taken so much blood from someone before, and the flood of information coming from him was distracting. The pain in the slaver’s arm where Tarek had fed on him ached and burned. For the first time, though, Tarek was not overwhelmed by the sight and smell of the bloody bandage hiding the wound – he’d sated himself so completely on his blood that now, a good number of handspans later, his bloodlust gave him no more than a twinge. Degán’s emotions were the most distracting of all: he didn’t seem to have any. Where the other men were potent mixes of anger, terror, and confusion, but the slave master felt… attentive? Mildly interested? Perhaps a touch put out? It was as disconcerting as looking into the eyes of a lizard and seeing no real consciousness reflected back.
“Here,” Degán said, plunking a bony finger down near the top of the map in an area devoid of marks. “The Lesser Sarabe.”
Tarek scanned the map. The points drawn in to the north could only be mountains, and indeed, distant, jagged peaks painted the horizon in that direction. They extended in a crescent across the north, with an empty expanse beyond them before a clear coastline. The landmass represented filled most of the parchment, an oblong, irregular shape that looked a bit like a headless rat, with a tail made of an island chain far to the southwest and a severed, stumpy neck in the northeast, not too far from where Degán’s finger had landed.
“What is this land called?” he asked.
Degán blinked slowly, reinforcing Tarek’s earlier thought of him as a lizard. “I just told you. The Lesser Sarabe Desert.”
“No, the whole thing,” Tarek said, circling the landmass with a finger. “This land must have a name.”
Degán considered him carefully. “Where are you from?”
“Tell me.”
He sighed. “Sarcen. I wish I knew how you compel us like this. It’s a handy trick. If I drank your blood, would I be able to do the same?”
“You are never to touch my blood,” Tarek said quickly. “That goes for all of you.”
Degán shrugged and nodded, while the other two stayed silent and looked away. “I’ve heard of magicians doing wonders before – you know, gardens in the air, water from a stone, that kind of thing – but never anything about blood-taking. It’s fascinating.”
Tarek grimaced. He was on the verge of telling the man he wasn’t allowed to talk about the blood magic at all, but he’d just promised himself to be wary of using his power to compel total compliance. He’d already told the men they couldn’t tell anyone else about his power; forbidding them from speaking of it even to him smacked of tyranny. “It’s just a thing I can do. I hardly know more about it than you do.”
He nodded sagely. “You probably shouldn’t admit that so freely.”
Tarek felt a spike of alarm and squinted at Degán, but the man’s face was calm and his emotions as bland as warm water. He might as well have said it was a lovely day as proclaim that the one who had total control over him had just made an error in judgment.
“You really have no idea where you are?” the slaver asked, looking back to the map.
Doubly cautious of his words now, Tarek chewed on that for a few heartbeats before responding. “I’m not from here.”
The narrow little man was unflappable. “From the lands of the Thunn, then? You don’t have their look.”
Tarek ignored him and pointed to the southernmost part of the map. “I want to go there.”
That got an eyebrow raise out of him. “Not much of interest near the southern coast. If you’re hoping to profit from the Paramount’s wars, you’re two years late. All the goods and gold are long gone; nothing but desperate folk running from the horselord reserves. There’ll be nothing but burnt fields and crows on corpses if we go there.”
His heart sank. He didn’t know for certain that his friends were as far south as all of that, but the thought that Tavi and the others might be caught in the midst of some battle was intolerable. Pahtl was somewhere else, still very far south but more easterly than Kanga, and he couldn’t imagine why. Is Tavi with the otter or the human? Would Zuli have gone with him or abandoned them completely? Pahtl was certainly better company than Kanga, but he was also a fickle-minded little thing that might have decided the other humans were boring without Tarek around. There was simply no way to know. Best I can do is head south and decide which way to turn when the time comes.
“I had planned on stopping for supplies and the hand-off of goods in Besthura,” Degán said diffidently, pointing at a circle with runes next to it a little south of their position. “We’ll have exhausted our water crossing the Lesser Sarabe one way or the other; we’d be wise to take on more water and food, whether you decide to head south or not.”
A flame of indignation sparked in Tarek’s breast. “Hand-off of goods?” he repeated quietly.
He spread his hands. “I don’t suppose you have any interest in recapturing the others? They’ll be worth a pretty sum.”
“No,” Tarek growled.
“Then we’re to be the sale,” Degán said, nodding calmly. “These two will be worth it – tough men can always find a use – but I’ll be no more than a handful of bronze for you.” He tapped his chest with a rueful look. “Childhood disease. Bad lungs.”
Tarek goggled at him. “Don’t you care? You mentioned selling these two and they’re suddenly near to pissing themselves.”
He shrugged. “I’ve worked my will on others for twenty years and more. It’s too much to expect for things will always work out the way I’d prefer.”
“And you don’t mind?”
“Oh, I’d happily cut you from nose to kneecaps,” the slaver said easily. “But since you’ve forbidden it and apparently I must obey, what’s the point in being unpleasant about it?”
Tarek shook his head incredulously and returned to the map. “I don’t think we need to stop in this place you’re talking about, though. We’re almost on top of it.”
A tiny smile tugged at the corner of Degán’s mouth. “We’re still two weeks’ ride from Besthura.”
Tarek frowned. “Weeks? What is that?”
Degán shook his head. “Seven days in a week. Where are you from?”
“Impossible,” Tarek said. “You told me we were right here, and if this is Besthura – I want you to teach me your runes, by the way – then it can’t be that far.”
“Ah,” the slaver said, nodding. “You’re from some place small, then. Adjust the scale of your thinking, my friend. It will take you ten months… months? You know this word? How about moons? Very well, more than ten moons to reach the southern coast.”
Tarek put his head in his hands and stared at the map, trying not to let frustration and impatience overwhelm him. So big. It’s impossible. Even with the others moving toward him, he was looking at a journey of several moons.
“Beyond Besthura is the Greater Sarabe,” Degán advised him. “Even by yourself you’ll need a full two carts of water to cross it, and the money you’ve surely taken from my wagon won’t come close to covering it. You’ll have to sell us in the city just to buy supplies.”
“We’ll see,” Tarek said, rolling up the map and standing.
“Don’t feel bad,” Degán said. “It’s a waste of energy. You sell us, you get what you want and where you want to go. It feels unpleasant at first, but you get used to it.”
“I’m not making a career of selling people,” Tarek said with a snort.
“Neither was I at first,” the chained slaver admitted. “Things change. You’ll see.”
Tarek got out of the cart as quickly as he could. Talking to Degán made him want to jump in a stream, and he hadn’t seen one of those in a fortnight. I’d best wake up the others. They’ll get sick if they stay too long in the sun.
Rounding the water cart, he looked to the fire and saw no one. A glance around showed not a soul nearby. His heart, already hurting from the knowledge that it would be moons before he found his friends, sank even lower.
The people he had saved from being sold had feigned sleep and waited for him to turn his back so they could run away. He’d known they weren’t friends, but still, the fear implied by their flight saddened and angered him. He could track them by their footprints in the sand, of course, but he’d intended to set them loose in the first village or town they crossed. This just made it that much easier for him. A quick look in Degán’s wagon showed him they’d taken the rest of the food stores and the pouch of metal discs as well.
They were chained, beaten, and marked for sale, he told himself. They had no reason to trust you even before you started using blood magic in front of them.
Still… he had hoped, if not for friends, at least for companions.
I’ll have Degán sit on the front wagon with me and teach me the language and reading as we go. He’s a lizard of a man, but it’s more useful than sitting in silence.
But before he mustered himself for a hard journey to come and the morally questionable actions upon which he had to decide, he gave himself a moment. Twenty heartbeats, or maybe fifty at most. For that moment, he squatted by the fire’s embers, and sitting in silence was all he did.