7. SEVEN #2
And of course, against his every intention, he thought about Raimee. Raimee reading. Raimee on a boat, studying kelp. Raimee in a turban. Raimee with her hair down. Raimee in raider’s garb. Raimee in Skywalk attire… Raimee in nothing.
Laughing, arguing, questioning. Sometimes he ran away with her. Sometimes she walked up to him and told him how much happier she was in the company of Roskaad Thyatira. Those thoughts usually ended with a void mantra, which was superior to breaking his knuckles.
Calver knew not to go looking for her in the idle portions of the day, where he pretended to be present but compliant while the recruits went through training.
He resisted it about as well as the tide resisted the moon.
He did look for her, while simultaneously hoping not to find her.
What he found was whispers. Whispers from the recruits that there was a Ruxian in their midst. That she had reduced the Red Wing courtyard in Chira’na to rubble.
That she’d split a hole in the world and violence had erupted from it.
That she would take the throne and oust the oligarchy and support the Groundlings in building a people’s empire.
Calver winced, thinking of the similarities between the two women he’d made promises to. Definitely a conflict of interest.
NIKLAUS
Niklaus had never welcomed the morning. In fact, the sun was usually on its path of descent before his body found vertical alignment, but between the rigorous schedule of the Red Wing and the worsening symptoms of his withdrawal, he found himself waking at indiscriminate hours.
Darkness was still settled around him when his chills woke him.
He’d sweated through his clothes and into his bedroll.
The flaps of the tent beside his rustled as though someone had just left it.
Footsteps padded against the sand. West—but the encampment dug its shit-pits to the east. Niklaus bolted upright. The shratten kid was sneaking away. Where could he possibly be going before the rise of the sun?
Niklaus shed the frigid bedroll and stuffed his feet into boots. He might have done it quickly if his head wasn’t splitting in two. Then he tumbled through the tent flaps and into the open sands. The shadow had already slipped past the western perimeter of tents and into the open desert.
The desert.
It was only to be expected that the life Limtush had entrusted him with had a death wish. Niklaus would have yelled after him, were he not concerned about attracting the attention of several hundred physically exhausted and sleep-starved militia men.
Cursing silently, he followed the Azadonian into the sands.
If the boy got bitten by a viper, Niklaus could consider his assets permanently gone.
Nothing existed beyond the encampment but sure death.
He imagined his pathetic explanation to Limtush: After spending a tenday with me, the kid decided he would rather be fried like an egg than continue to pitch a tent beside me.
He could still see the boy’s fast-walking silhouette—a black pinprick that nearly blended into murky grey sands—and considered screaming out.
Niklaus was no survivalist, but that felt ill-advised as slicing open his wrist in the middle of the ocean.
The desert was deeply silent, especially so with the encampment out of sight.
He didn’t want to draw attention to himself, and he doubted the boy would listen.
Niklaus staggered, nausea threatening to spill the contents of his stomach across three mountainous dunes before he lost sight of the Azadonian completely, beyond the sunken impressions of footprints. He was too slow.
He paused to gasp for breath. The night was still at its darkest, alive with a myriad of stars in every hue, dusted by clouds of deep purple and red.
They offered little sympathy. Judgment, more like.
Niklaus glowered back at them. His cold sweats felt like needles against his skin. He couldn’t go on like this.
He palmed the tin in his breast pocket. Half of a tab. That was it. And he was going to use it to save a little shit that would gladly have seen him walk into the desert and never come back.
The tab made its way to his tongue. Ten minutes, and he’d be able to function. At least for long enough to get them both back in one piece. His eyes scraped the next rise.
One more.
He scrambled over the ridge on hands and knees, eyes searching the desert beyond: an endless sea of sandy hills, rocky crags and caves scattered among them. There. The boy stood, finally still… and he wasn’t alone.
Niklaus dropped to his stomach and slithered backwards until he wasn’t within eyesight. This was no longer a pitiful attempt at a rescue mission. This was an investigation.
Chest tight—it was hard to tell if it was from excitement, horror, or a genuine heart attack—he searched for a vantage point: a boulder, protruding from the ridge of the dune, some ten spans away. Moving to it on knees and elbows, he peered out from behind the stone.
The contrast between Thedexemore and his companion was nearly comical.
He was two heads shorter than the man, and half as thick around.
They stood, still as stones, opposite one another in a wide-legged stance.
The wind whistled around Niklaus as he watched for long moments, suspended in his anticipation of some sort of interchange.
Language. Contraband. Movement. Anything.
Then, with unprecedented speed, the giant lashed out toward Thedexemore.
The boy tried to leap away, but he wasn’t fast enough; the strike hurled him to his back in the sand.
Niklaus’s gut plummeted. He nearly rushed to the boy’s defense, sure the man was about to finish what he’d started, when Thedexemore’s peal of laughter split the night.
Niklaus released a shuddering sigh. He’d somehow ended up on the opposite side of the rise in preparation to do something very, very stupid. He retreated behind the stone again to watch.
The game continued. Sometimes the large man waited a full minute or more before moving.
Sometimes he only waited for moments. Sometimes he moved with a kick, sometimes with a slash of his forearm.
Always fast enough to be deadly… but the hits never seemed to damage the boy beyond knocking him off balance.
It ended when Thedexemore dodged sideways fast enough for the man’s strike to miss him by what might have been a hair’s width—but missed him all the same. Thedexemore whooped with glee. The man across from him gave a stoic nod.
Exercises next, sparring with hands as blades. Sometimes Thedexemore asked questions. The giant never responded, but he guided the boy’s motions using jabs that were neither gentle nor unkind. Sometimes he nodded—correct. Sometimes he jabbed the boy anew—wrong.
Not deaf; he understood Thedexemore’s questioning. Mute?
The longer Niklaus watched, the more he felt a hole yawning somewhere inside him.
His entire world had been built upon words.
And yet this dance of fighting forms built on silence filled him with both longing and shame.
It made the scrawny kid look like… well, it made him halfway look like he knew what he was doing.
Given the option to mentor Thedexemore, Niklaus had only returned insults as fast as they were given.
In time, the night lightened and Thedexemore sat in the sand, chest heaving. “Done!” he shouted, before lying back and taking a long drink from a canteen.
The silent giant pressed on, shifting through a progression of movements, quicker now.
His body sprinted and reversed, spun and twisted, lashed and rolled.
Niklaus had attended his fair share of tournaments and dark market boxing in Shrokan, but he’d never seen a body move like that.
Like it just might steer clear of sand in a windstorm.
The moss had kicked in. The world lightened; the pain faded.
And just as Niklaus contemplated how little he wanted to be on the wrong side of the mute’s movements, an idea sparked: a seed of Chaos, really.
It was so atrocious he nearly barked a laugh.
His moss tin would be full by morning, and this man was the catalyst.
Lifting a prayer, Niklaus slid down the dune towards the pair.
As he grew closer, the large man watched him with a too-bland expression and marble eyes.
Knowingly—as if he’d seen him watching them all along.
If Niklaus hadn’t observed the man tutor Thedexemore into worthiness seconds before, the look might have sent him scrambling back over the dune.
He lifted a hand in greeting. The motion elicited a scowl from Thedexemore.
“Bit crowded out here, eah?” the boy panted. He tilted his head to the tall man. “I’ll see you.”
As Thedexemore started toward the dunes, Niklaus jumped into his path. “Hold on. Introduce me to your friend?”
The boy maneuvered around him with a sidestep Niklaus was sure he’d just seen him learn. “Nope.”
Thedexemore might hate him, but he certainly felt differently about the mute. And what was a gamble without a little leverage?
“Can you signal?” Niklaus called to the man, signaling the message as he spoke. He would need to be a high-born or a sailor, which was unlikely. Nominal seafaring and excessive poverty had become Nelfinden standards. But the silent man’s impassive face moved ever so slightly.
Was it possible that, for once, the Fates favored his odds? Niklaus felt the first perfect inklings of hope ignite inside him.
Niklaus resisted the compulsion to dance a jig. Victory. Sweet Creation, victory.
“I’d think that, being stranded in a desert with a recruitment that’s clearly ostracized you, having a translator might be of value.”
Not that anything about the man suggested he would be a socialite, but the impassivity was a disappointment. Then again… if the mute hadn’t a need for a translator, why let on that he could signal at all?