14. FOURTEEN #3
Calver grimaced. He’d already dipped a reluctant toe into this alliance. Niklaus had proven himself enough for Calver to take the plunge.
The moment was a boulder upon a precipice, and Calver waited for it to crash down on his head. Niklaus’s eyes were bloodshot. It was hard to tell whether he was emotional or intoxicated. “We… We—do we need to have a conversation?”
Most likely both.
Dex tensed. “What’s he saying?”
Niklaus shot Dex a look. The man’s signals were sloppy and difficult to distinguish.
Niklaus’s nose wrinkled.
Now they both looked at the boy.
Dex’s eyes narrowed on Calver like he’d kicked him, and Calver felt it. Why? This boy was working for the enemy. This boy could have everything Calver cared about roasting on a spit in three tendays’ time.
“You’re not actually entertaining Meyernes, are you? He’s using you.”
And Calver was using him. The arrangement seemed to be paying its dividends.
Calver argued with Niklaus.
Niklaus winced.
Fates, his signaling was terrible.
Dex’s eyes flitted between them. “Either way I look at this, it affects my kin. You’re not getting rid of me. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Niklaus shot Calver an overlarge smile.
It anything but fixed it. Calver’s hand found his face. If there was one thing he knew, it was the lengths a man would go for his sister.
Niklaus insisted.
Killing Dex with Niklaus as witness would only extend his trouble.
He should run. Now. He could keep experimenting on the plate shield in the desert, far away from either of them...
but he’d already tested it every way he knew how.
Niklaus could amend for that. He could get him a second shield, and Calver could test how they functioned as a unit.
He nodded at the plate shield.
At that moment, the morning horn blared.
Niklaus cleared his throat. “It will need to wait until evening. Duty calls.” Then he signaled,
Calver hesitated before nodding. They needed to act like everything was normal—not like they’d just made a hasty alliance against the leader of the Nelfinden military, with his informant in the damn wagon.
Fates…what had he just agreed to? The hair rose on the back of Calver’s neck, and bile rose into his throat. Niklaus could just as easily be in on it with Dex. They would tell command. And command would tell him, without words, what it felt like to be buried beneath the sand.
He’d let too many people in. He’d made a mistake. He’d…
He’d needed help—an ally he couldn’t drain the life from just by touching.
So many lonely years before, Mesu Calisto had spoken to him about trust and water in the desert. Funny, the things that made a man remember. Rage fizzled, but regret lingered. Trust, like water, could not be held with closed fists.
Niklaus’s eyes lingered on him for too long before he returned the nod.
“What’s happening?” Dex snarled.
Niklaus smiled. “We’re on dish duty.”
“No. We’re going to have a conversation about whatever you’re excluding me from.”
Niklaus flipped a brush from his belt. “Here’s your conversation. I clear. You wash.” He ran a thumb over his shadow of a beard again. “I don’t love what the suds do to my fingers.” Then he grabbed Dex by the scruff of his shirt and dragged him out the door.
Their muted bickering moved farther and farther away, and the new silence of the wagon made it feel like a tomb. Calver tried, in vain, to swallow.
Trust now, overanalyze later. Trust now, overanalyze later.
He sank onto his knees, then slowly let his head thunk against the floor. He savored a gasp of a breath, even with his face pressed against the musk of the floorboards. It might be one of his last now, after all.
Trust…?
Preservation, what had he done? Trust was a fool’s errand.
And, being the fool that he was, he probably deserved to be this entirely done for.
It started as a gentle nudge at the periphery of Calver’s mind as he marched with the caravan that afternoon. It compounded into an overwhelming urge, thrumming through his veins.
Find me.
It was a summons—nearly identical to what he’d first felt from the Survivor, fourteen years ago, before the Survivor had become him. One mind-djinn was more than enough, thank you very much.
Void.
His seasoned mind smothered it. If only he’d been so well-trained back then.
He had plenty of other problems to deal with before following phantom compulsions in the direction of Cul’Mon. He worried briefly for Fankalo, so close to the source, before remembering that she did not share his sickness. She was fine.
By nightfall, the summons was gone.