Chapter Two
Chapter
Two
Vulture
He woke with the sun beating on his brow.
Vision came. The colors of sand and sky condensed into
detail. As Isaac took a few aching blinks of his eye, he saw his own pack lying
a short distance from his feet. The linen flap was flung open, and the contents
were scattered across the sand—phials and phylacteries, maps etched with
charcoal, language ciphers, empty waterskins, and the last remnants of his
meager rations. He had not been carrying much, and whoever had gone through his
supplies hadn’t seemed interested in what he did possess.
Gradually, he became aware that he was lying in a sitting
position amongst the smoldering wreckage of the pirate ship. In front of him,
there was a small river of shifted sand, which he guessed was where his body
had been dragged. He felt rope cutting into his wrists, and he came to the
immediate realization that his arms had been tied through a cannon hole along
the broken edge of the hull. His wrists were bound together with what appeared
to be the rigging of the ship.
He pulled again. The rope was rough and gnarled, chafing his
skin. His hands and legs were blistered from the sand. His head throbbed with a
latent concussion. Most of all, he was thirsty. He was completely, utterly
thirsty. When he tried to swallow, his throat began to split and bleed.
He kept yanking on his restraints. They did not give way.
Isaac gritted his teeth, almost snarling through the pain.
“Well, well!” a voice called. “My hero awakes!”
Above him, at the edge of the burned top deck, the same
hyena that had slaughtered a dozen pirates was now peering down at him. He was
only barely able to twist enough to see her. After a moment of silence, she
tossed two packs down into the sand. Isaac had time to note that one of the
packs was smaller than the other before the hyena jumped into the sand herself,
landing with a heavy thump that he felt through his legs.
She turned to him, her mohawk of hair fluttering gently in
the breeze.
Sitting down as he was, Isaac thought she was impossibly
tall. He doubted his head would even reach her shoulder. Currently, she had
traded the tattered rags of a prisoner for the sleeveless vest and knee-length
trousers of a pirate’s garments, which had likely been all she could scavenge
from the ship. There was a motley assortment of leather armor scattered across
her form, consisting of a leather plackart, a single pauldron, a set of
vambraces, a poleyn on the knee, and a belt slung heavily with pouches.
Despite now being dressed far more like a human, her hands
and digitigrade feet were visibly tipped with claws, each of them wrapped in
overlapping lines of cloth. There was still blood on her fur.
“So,” she said, walking toward him, “how we feeling, then?”
Isaac swallowed what little saliva he had left.
The hyena stopped at the edge of his boots and squatted
herself down to his level, which left her still more than a head above him. At
this distance, he could see a deep scar running up the tip of her black nose,
along with a more jagged line etched beside her eye.
“How’s it feel,” she asked, “smashing the finest pirate ship
of the desert?”
Isaac did not answer.
She gestured out to the burnt pieces of hull, most of which were
sinking into the sand. “Terror of the dunes, the scourge of every merchant, the
bane of many lords. Oh, she thought herself the tooth biting at the teat of all
civilized society, and you just bloody well snuffed her with a flick of your
wrist. Like some candle on a cake.”
Isaac blinked.
“I ain’t mad,” the hyena said, casually wiping blood off her
thigh, like some food had spilled at dinner. “Quite the opposite, actually.”
Isaac attempted to speak. His throat was very raw, and the
words pained him as they emerged. “It—was not my—intention.”
Her ears perked up. “That so?”
He shook his head.
“From what I heard,” she continued, “you fired first. My
jailers were quite surprised.”
“I thought—your ship was a wyrm.”
She straightened. “The giant sand dragons? Them that fly from the ground in a flurry of teeth and
scales? You thought one of them was on the prowl, and your first thought was to
lob a ball of fire in its direction?”
“Yes,” Isaac said.
“Truly?” the hyena asked.
He nodded.
“And you would consider this a wise decision?”
He shrugged against the rope.
The hyena sat back on her animal-like feet, staring at him.
All at once, she laughed, exposing the teeth along her snout. “You just got
that right blend of na?ve and foolhardy about you, huh?” She leaned in again.
“What’s your name, love?”
“. . . Isaac.”
She placed a hand to her chest, resting it on a patch of fur
above her breasts. “Zaria. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Isaac stared at her.
“Might be you want to say that back,” Zaria said. “Bein’
polite and all.”
“I’m not a very good liar.”
She snorted. “Are we to be enemies, then?”
Isaac yanked on his restraints. “You’ve tied me to a boat.
What else should we be?”
“Well,” Zaria said, “I suppose I could be grateful to you
for rescuing me from certain torture and death, even if you did so by flipping
the gods-damned ship I was chained against.”
For a moment, Isaac considered telling her about his
mission.
“Of course,” she continued, eyes roaming over him, “even
then, one has to wonder how thankful they should be to someone who didn’t even
mean to help them. One has to wonder if, given the opportunity, they’d just
turn around and burn her alive, like everyone else.”
Isaac decided not to tell her. In fact, he resolved himself to keep his mission a secret. Nothing good
would come from telling a cutthroat his plans.
“One could have a sense of honor,” he replied, regaining
some of his voice.
She grinned at him, like he had told a dirty joke. “Honor
supposed to replace common sense, is it? Suppose I feel so good about letting
you go that I don’t even notice you tossin’ another
fireball my way?” She shook her head, eyes never leaving his face. “No. What
one really has to wonder is—what’s some well-to-do mage like yourself, armed
with vials and book-learning, doing all the way out here, in the wasted sands?”
Isaac did not reply.
Zaria stood up to her full height. She towered far above
him. “Feeling thirsty, Isaac?”
“What?”
The hyena gestured towards his own pack, which had been
upturned and ransacked near his feet. “Couldn’t help but notice you got empty
skins in your pack. Nothing but salt meat and chemicals for nourishment,
neither.”
Isaac felt incensed. “Did you steal from me?”
“Oh, I would have, but I can’t rightly eat your parchment,
can I?”
His maps and ciphers gently fluttered in the desert breeze.
Isaac wondered, fearfully, if she had managed to read them.
“You really are a special fool,” she said. “The sun out here
kills men nearly as fast as the wyrms. I’ve seen people go mad from thirst
inside a day. And you’re marching along on foot with barely a few cock squirts
of liquid, merry as you like.”
He felt the urge to lick his lips. They were horribly
chapped, and a white scum was beginning to form at the corners of his mouth.
Zaria watched him carefully.
“There’s an oasis,” Isaac said, shrugging his shoulder to
what he thought was the northwest. “According to my map, it’s only a few miles
away.”
She chuckled. “Oh, aye, there was a spring there once, true
enough. It’s been dry a few odd years now. Safe to
say, if we hadn’t stumbled across each other, you’d be gasping your last.”
Isaac tried to swallow. He had no saliva left.
“I’ll ask again. You thirsty, Isaac?”
He looked up at her. “Yes.”
“Want me to give you some water?”
He did not respond.
“Come now,” Zaria said. “It’s freely offered. Quite
refreshing. A human like you might get the shits, but, you know, that’s the
risk we take.”
“Yes,” Isaac said, gasping out the word. “Yes, I would like
some water.”
She wagged a clawed finger. “Now, now, young sir, that was
not very lordly of you. Mind your manners.”
“What?” Isaac thrashed in his restraints. “What is your
game, beastwoman? Let me go!”
“You get that line from a book, Isaac? Read it in one of
your adventure tales?” She regarded him with amusement. “Magic-wielder like
yourself must come from the nobility. Educated in proper etiquette and such. So
why don’t you say please?”
Isaac stared back at her.
“Come now,” she said. “Simple word, isn’t it?”
His throat was raw. His muscles were pained. His mind was
growing dizzier by the second. When his last waterskin had emptied, and his
urine had been darker than sandstone, Isaac had decided to brave the dunes with
the sole intention of quenching his thirst. Now, it seemed his only option to
save himself from dehydration was the hyena in front of him.
Even still, he was well aware that she was toying with him,
leveraging the complete control she had over his life. Isaac had not become a
journeyman in magical transmutation just to be bested and mocked by some common
pirate.
But, at the moment, there really was nothing for it. He
would have to swallow his pride before the water.
“Please,” he said, gazing up at her.
A grin emerged along her snout. “Knew you had it in you.”
She turned and sauntered over to the two packs she had
tossed from the deck. In her temporary absence, Isaac ran his rope bindings along
the edge of the cannon hole, hoping to find a sharp edge to cut them on. He
found nothing but smooth brass, which made him quietly snarl. Isaac knew over
two dozen spells, most of which could easily reduce the hyena to cinders,
chunks, ribbons, and droplets—of course, with his wrists bound in place,
casting a single one would be impossible. The mnemonic incantations required
the full use of his arms. Without it, he was helpless.
As Isaac pulled on his restraints again, he noticed the body
of a pirate, lying a modest distance away. It was the lioness he had killed