Crimson Spear (Blood and Sand Book 1) (15 page)

The sand whipped at their clothes once more, tearing them, flattening them first this way against their bodies, then the other way. It was impossible to open your eyes in this sort of sand storm, even young Vekal knew—but his mother did so, holding the veil to her face to protect her auburn and hazel eyes. Vekal felt her hand tighten against his as she gasped at the pain of the onslaught.

“Closer! Come on,” she shouted to the two small figures at her side, as she held little Vekal’s hand and he held the hand of his own brother, Elak.

Elak was almost five years older, bigger and stronger than Vekal was, and that was why their mother had placed him at the back of the human chain with the smaller toddler between them. Still, it was hard work to cross the dunes back towards the hazy shape getting closer and closer.

Vekal tripped as Elak prodded him hard in the small of the back. His older brother was always being mean to him, Vekal knew. It was because Elak wasn’t his real blood brother. He came with their stepfather when his mother had married him. Two widowers with two sons finding love once more in the desert. It was supposed to be a story of hope, and yet for Vekal it had turned into a story of despair and torment.

The bigger Elak thought little of Vekal’s quiet nature and smaller frame. He teased and pinched and prodded the smaller boy at every opportunity when he thought that their mother wasn’t looking. Vekal had cried and complained, which had resulted in Elak being beaten by his stepfather. This had only seemed to make Elak even more vindictive and creative in his torment.

“Vekal?” His mother turned to wonder at why her son had stopped moving, just in time to see Elak pulling him to his feet, as if saving him from the sands.

“Good boy, Elak, looking after your new baby brother,” their mother said happily.

The sand storms were wild and high, but they were not the flesh-cutting storms of the Bone Plains. These storms were normal for a desert family like Vekal’s.

A few more heavy steps and suddenly the winds eased off, as the constant assault of grit was directed over their home rocks. They lived in a hollow of the Sand Seas, in huts made of reinforced hide and blankets barricaded against these rocks to stop the worst of the weather. They had a little stone well, and knew the many local routes across sand and dirt. Vekal’s family moved often, making their living as guides to those that crossed the desert, or from the meandering herd of desert goats that they kept in the cooler caves nearby.

“Woman! Where have you been?” their stepfather growled as he ducked his head from the flap of the tent. “You endanger my son like that, taking him out into the storm. Come! We have mending to do, dinner to cook, weaving to finish.”

Vekal kicked the sand at their feet. Their stepfather was a brute of a man, a small face and a small head on a tall, thin body. He wished that his mother had never married him, but he had come with his own herd of goats that was twice the size of mother’s. Even at the tender age of seven, Vekal had known that his mother and him, alone in the desert, were vulnerable. You had to be tough, and you had to have friends to survive out here.

“They have to learn how to survive the storms, husband.” His mother tried to laugh. “I have taught Vekal every season since he could walk, and it is long past Elak’s time to learn how to live out in the desert.”

“You can do what you like with your own son, woman.” They were at the tent, and Vekal saw his stepfather seize his mother by the upper arm and drag her inside. It must have been painful as she gasped, and Vekal knew that his mother was tough.

“Wait outside, Vekal, Elak. Wait,” she called back, as the flap to the tent closed, and amidst the howl of the winds above their hollow, they could both clearly hear the sound of Vekal’s mother being beaten.

“Silly woman,” Elak sneered, and Vekal turned on him, advancing with balled-up fists on his much bigger step-brother.

“Huh! What are you going to do, little brother?” Elak casually reached down and shoved him back into the dirt, hard enough to make Vekal’s palms sting. Just as he started to get up again, the bigger boy gave him one solid kick in the chest, before laughing. “My father is right to beat her. Your whole family deserves a beating for how stupid they are!” he said joyously, but Vekal noticed that he didn’t carry on with his threat as the sounds and cries from inside the tent stopped. When his mother re-emerged, she had a swelling lip and a bruise already blushing around her temple.

“Come in for dinner,” she said spiritless, and avoided Vekal’s gaze.

‘I will kill them for you,’ little Vekal thought to himself. ‘I swear I will send both of their spirits to hell for this.’

“By the Seven Stars and Holy Waters!” Vekal heard as he opened painful, gummed-up eyes. It was the thunderous, no,
rapturous
voice of none other than Captain Jons, standing over him and looking out to sea. Whatever it was that he was looking at, it didn’t appear any better to Vekal. Lots more grey and blue water under slightly less grey and blue skies.

And every bit of me hurts.
Vekal felt a pounding headache flare across his temples, and a tremor of weakness run down his limbs. That place near the center of his back, where the arrow had hit, was throbbing in agony as some disk or nerve scraped against the other, and a pathetic whimper escaped his lips.

“My dear priest. My poor cleric,” Captain Jons said in a voice that had seemingly resonated from the deep echo-chamber of his enormous frame. “I never knew it would take so much out of you,” he said, seizing the imperiled priest by the shoulders and hauling him painfully into the air to plonk him down again in the captain’s very own chair. “By the gods, there’s nothing to you, man. Skin and bones. Fit for the grave that you dead-huggers love so much, but not on my boat, no.” He pulled the nearby bell cord with abandon, until, a second or so later one of the female sailors with black hair and spotted headband burst in, a cutlass in her hand.

“Yes cap’n!? What is it? Is it this one?” she said, gritting her teeth and preparing for the killing command.

“No, Effie! For pity’s sake, can’t you see the priest is ill? Get some broth from the Mess, and some ship’s biscuit, a cut of ham and a bottle of the good stuff.”

“Cap’n?” Effie the sailor looked at the captain as if this was unexpected behavior.

“And tell cook, that I want the good stuff, not the usual swill we reserve for passengers. Go on with you, girl,” he said, watching as the door slammed before chuckling to himself. “Really, anyone would think that we’re pirates the way the crew carries on.”

You’re not?
Vekal coughed, and his spittle was spotted red.
Bad sign. Very bad sign.
He patted around inside his mind for Ikrit, only to feel curiously half-empty and stunted, as if the creature was asleep.

Could it have gone? What happened?
Vekal remembered the feel of sand everywhere, the pained look of his mother, the scorn of Elak, and the anger, oh the anger that rose and rose within the younger him…

But not even the anger could dampen the pain that was spreading through the lower half of his back, making his legs cramp and his toes curl in agony. What was it the devil had said? That it was keeping him alive—that the arrow that the Menaali had fired into him had done more damage than he should have been able to withstand. Vekal wondered if he was going to die.

But it wasn’t just him it seemed, who was now different. Around Vekal moved a reinvigorated Captain Jons, turning to his polished looking mirror and exclaiming when he saw his scraggly, wiry beard. “No, we can’t have you ill, can we? Look at what I have become,” he moaned theatrically before pulling the bell cord once more. “I feel like a new man, my little priest. I feel like at long last I could take on the world. That I won’t have to do these petty little terrible things in the ocean, but perhaps even, start over.” The captain said the last in an almost hushed, reverential tone, before breaking into a chuckling, booming laugh and slapping the table with a bare hand.

“I like you, priest. I didn’t believe that you could do it to be honest. I thought it to be just more landlubber mumbo-jumbo, but by the gods you have the gift. I feel as good as new!” Jons laughed, as a harried looking Effie came in, bearing a tray and a basket on the crook of her elbow. She looked from the captain to the shuddering, mewling priest suspiciously.

“Razors, Effie! Soap and razors!” He barked at her as she set the food down on the table. “They’ll be with Doc, and we’ll get this horrid beard scraped up and ship-shape before we hit Lookout Rock.”

“Sir? You’re
shaving?
” Effie looked amused.

“Cleanliness before godliness, Effie. Now come on, the winds are full and we haven’t got all day,” he said again, for once cheerfully rather than annoyed or angrily. Behind him, the priest looked at the array of food and felt faint with nausea and hunger.

“Eat, my man. Eat! It will do you good to put some meat on those bones. Something to feed the fishes with, huh?” he joked, before striding out of the state room as if the whole world was at his feet. Distantly, Vekal could hear the sound of him barking
compliments
at the crew.

Something rattled inside of the priest’s mind, as the buzzing consciousness of the devil started to re-emerge from whatever little hole inside his soul it had dug itself into. It sounded almost as pained as Vekal did.

“Imp…” Vekal gasped, gripping the wood of the table with arms that scratched the veneer in pain. “Please, imp, take away the p-pain…”

“Oh, now you need me, do you?”
Ikrit mumbled.
“But what good are you to me dead. And me falling back to hell? Gah.”
There was a sneer of annoyance, and like the application of holy water or honey, the Sin Eater felt waves of numbness spreading up through his body, bringing with it peace and elation. He could have wept with gratitude, before instantly feeling selfish and shameful for not embracing death more fully.

“Oh, quit your moralizing, cleric. We both know the measure of your soul, Vekal Morson. You have the weight of the dead on you, just as I have on mine, and you cling to life, but that is no bad thing.”

Vekal let the imp prattle and rebuke him without comment. He suddenly knew that his body was famished, and he started to gulp down the steaming bowls of broth and seed-encrusted flatbreads.

“There now, priest. I feel that we have turned a corner somehow,”
the imp said.
“You have a power it seems, although whether it is from your training or something that you have because of me, I do not know. But I bet just like that brat girl of Dal Grehb, that this fat old captain is now healed of every injury and hurt he ever had, and a few that he didn’t even know that he had. I bet that his heart feels as light as a feather.”

Vekal didn’t know, and he was so hungry that he kept on eating. The devil inside of him however, had other things on its mind.

“And I bet that he will be very, very grateful to whom healed him. What would he pay for such a treasure, I wonder?”

The pain was ebbing to silence, and the Sin Eater didn’t care what the captain would pay or how grateful he was or wasn’t. The only time that anything like this had happened before was when he had tried to hear the confession of Dal Grehb’s daughter, and she had been healed as the devil had been sucked into his own soul. This wasn’t how confessions were supposed to work, but right now, Vekal Morson didn’t even care about that, either.

“Heads!”
screamed the forward lookout, and Talon, despite the risk, couldn’t resist the perverse temptation to raise his head and look over the parapet. The youth couldn’t help it. Some animal instinct took over that forced him to see the danger before it hit.

It must be mid-afternoon, and the volunteer forces of Fuldoon had still to meet those of the Menaali blade-to-blade. The sun had risen across the arc of the sky, driving men and women to faint in their posts or collapse from the blistering heat, only to be assuaged by the efforts of other youths like Talon, who had taken to just flinging buckets of water over his section of comrades, who spluttered gratefully.

Down below were the Menaali and their tens of thousands of troops, their siege-towers, their thousands of archers mounted on the strange goat-like beasts they rode, and not to mention their caravans, their bulky engines of war, and their slaves. All had advanced slowly out of the desert sands to reach the edge of the cattle markets. The only thing stood between them and the city was the great river and the wall.

So far, Talon had heard Suriyen say to her seconds and point-guards that the Menaali would soften them up first, which he guessed that they planned to do with the introduction of giant boulders.

The boulder was as large as a caravan that soared towards them, and fired from one of the impossibly tall siege-towers that the tribesmen pushed. Talon watched it grow from the size of a pebble to the size of a dinner plate in the blink of an eye.

“Get your head down!”
s
houted the nearest wall-soldier to him, although Talon wasn’t sure what good that would do, other than he would be looking at his own sandals when the boulder demolished their section of the wall and all who stood there.

There was a moment of silence, a hush before each boulder struck, as if the whole world were watching.

The sound grew to a thunderous whine, like the way that some of the desert gales sounded in the deep canyons, before suddenly, for Talon, there was a feeling like being punched in the gut and a boom like the sky was falling in. He swore that the paving slabs of the wall underfoot shook as the boulder hit—
but it didn’t hit here
, the youth thought gratefully, before feeling instantly ashamed. As soon as the ringing in his ears cleared, there came the screams and the whistles of the lookouts. Talon risked a look once again.

The projectile had hit further up the wall towards the harbor, a good two hundred meters or so away from where he stood at the heart of it all, over the main gate. The walls of the desert city were thick, room for two to walk abreast on the flagged walkway on the city side, with wall fortifications wider than he was, and almost as tall. Fuldoon had many centuries of preparing against pirates and desert tribes, and its walls were the height of several buildings, with wicker-work cradles on pulley systems hauling men and arrows to their summit.

Even so…
Talon saw the ragged hole further up the river, and the smoke of pulverized stone, dust, and defender’s bone. The boulder had sheared off the top walkway and plummeted into the tiny, child’s-toy houses beyond, smashing a hole through the nearest street before coming to rest against another. Where the boulder had taken the top layer of fortifications, it had crumpled the wall platform on either side, creating a ragged hole of splintered stone and wood.

“Syzegi!”
Suriyen swore in a language that Talon didn’t know. She was running past him in her full armor, waving a yellow flag in a complicated pattern that the forward lookout saw, and repeated further to the damaged section. Within moments, teams of carpenters and laborers as well as the healers and clerics in white tunics were running towards that part of the wall from the city-side with tall ladders, seeking to mend bones and stone as soon as they could.

“Unlucky for us they hit right on top of the wall. Any lower and it might have bounced into the river,” she said to no one at her side, to Talon, to any who might listen. Already this first day of the siege they had thrown any number of boulders against the high walls, and only a few times had they managed to hurl them high enough to pass over the walls and into the defenseless streets beyond, or at the right points to start to demolish the stones themselves.

“Don’t worry, men!” Suriyen cheered to their own contingent atop the front gate. “We can take those, and they still have a river to cross!” she bellowed, but when Talon looked at the nearest soldier, he saw the man scowling, and whisper to his comrades.

“Doesn’t help those poor souls who got hit though, does it? We gotta take out those towers,”
the burly man hissed. Before Talon could hear what his friend replied, it was the lookout once more.

“Heads! Cover!” t
he forward lookout repeated, before giving a startled sound on his next cry.

Talon, as it seemed was his nature, turned to look to find that it was only himself and Suriyen standing amidst the whole line of crouching men, as a driving rain of arrows flew past them. There was no time to feel scared or to react, as the volley from the Menaali below was gone as soon as it had arrived, their arrows cracking and splintering harmlessly on the walls behind.

Talon rocked back and forth on his feet.
Had that just happened? Have we just been missed by an entire volley of arrows?
He looked at the taller Suriyen, who grinned a little hysterically, not believing it herself. She cast a look behind her, then snarled. The forward lookout, arguably the bravest man in the entirety of the wall defenses, had a black arrow sticking out from under his chin.

“’Ere, they missed the cap’n and her boy!” shouted the previously suspicious soldier. “They must be charmed! We’re lucky, lads,” the man called.

Suriyen ignored them, searching for a replacement lookout.

“Send the lucky boy,” the soldier called. “It’s a sign. He has the gods on his side.”

“No,” Suriyen started to say, but Talon felt the world quieten around him, even through all of the screaming and firing arrows and whistles.

I can do this,
he thought, as he nodded, standing up. “I’ll do it.” He ran up the few steps to the epicenter of the entire gate, flanked by silent, mean-looking guards on either side, and took his place. The role of any lookout was very clear, and the forward lookout even more so. Whenever arrows or boulders or screaming barbarians came to kill your unit, you holler. Whenever you see anything that needed to be spotted, like a man wounded or a wall collapsing, you holler.

And you stay alive,
Talon thought grimly, staring out at the entire might of the Menaali tribesmen.