Raybeck and Heimar walked briskly, at first through the valley and then, once they had gotten out, through the desert sands.

  They moved in silence after they had left the valley until they were further out into the desert, out of hearing of the beastfolk village the Army had been using as its camp.

  Then the quiet simply felt strange, given all that had happened.

  We should be discussing how to deal with our new mission, Raybeck thought. Though the truth was, there was only one thing on his mind, predominating over more practical considerations. Let me just get it out there, and I can think about something else.

  “Why did you really agree to it, Heimar?” Raybeck asked, a slight tremor in his voice. He had not spoken in over an hour, and he felt a little rusty. “Is it truly wise to get into something like this on a foundation of half-truths?”

  “I meant everything I said to the young mage,” Heimar replied evenly, not breaking his stride.

  Raybeck gave the older man a look, but Heimar’s eyes were focused straight ahead, on the mining outpost that was coming into view in the distance.

  “Look,” Heimar added after a moment, “I wanted to do it, and everything I said was sincere. I just left out one reason. When I saw your face, I knew what you had chosen. And I didn’t want you to be alone. The same as when you tried to break free from the undead holding us. I didn’t try anything until I saw what you were doing, and then I joined you.”

  “But why?” Raybeck asked, turning to gaze at Heimar’s face again. But Heimar remained staring straight ahead, his expression impassive.

  “Maybe I still remember the boy you were when you came to me,” Heimar said in a low voice. “The young man I mentored. His big weakness of character, as someone coming out to work in the mines, was that he hated to be alone. Think about what we have to do going forward. Hide our affliction, try to retain a sense of self, mislead our former brothers of the mine to keep them from joining the Army’s volunteer corps… That’s not even getting into the matter of spreading the infection. To do that, we have to bite people, scratch them, sleep with them, or otherwise expose them to our fluids so that the virus gets into the bloodstream.” He shook his head. “What a ridiculous mission. If I had to describe this adventure to my younger self, he’d call this the fantasy of an old man far past his prime. And an impossible task.”

  Raybeck swallowed. It did sound daunting, yes. He’d been distracted from thinking about the task in its full magnitude by his curiosity about Heimar’s motives—or rather, he’d been avoiding thinking about it and willingly taking any distraction that came to hand.

  “We could end up burned alive by the Trust,” Raybeck said.

  It was worse than that. The Divine Trust might torture them for information first. Their souls could be condemned to destruction, assuming that the priest caste were honest and that the necromancer’s assertions about the afterlife were untrue.

  That, of course, took for granted that there was something left of the two men’s identities by the time the Trust got to them. The necromancer had been careful not to outright promise anything on that score. The two might have faded mercifully into brainless zombies by then.

  “I know,” Heimar said. “As I said, we face very long odds. The sort that would make a certain young man I knew give up, especially if he were all alone.”

  “So that’s it?” Raybeck asked skeptically. “You risk your own soul to keep me from feeling isolated?”

  “Not everything is about you, Beck,” Heimar said in a gently chiding tone. “I told you, I meant everything I said to the necromancer. There is still life to be had. There is life in these old bones, and there is life in my young friend’s body yet. I know it.”

  “I wish I shared your… faith.”

  “I know,” Heimar said, breaking into a broad grin. “Thank you for making me feel useful with your doubts!”

  Raybeck shook his head and smiled grimly.

  “We could have a good life,” Heimar added. “Even a longer one, perhaps. That mage’s creatures didn’t appear to be rotting. I think we’ll see many new sights from now on, Beck. Things far more interesting and impressive than anything we’d have encountered in the mines. We have our whole lives ahead of us.”

  Our undead lives, Raybeck thought. He slowly smiled and shook his head.

  “I never knew you didn’t have faith in the gods, Heimar.”

  “I believe in them,” Heimar said. “Everyone knows Vika and Astara exist. I pray to them, too. But only a fool places all his eggs into one basket. There are old stories of other gods—”

  “Heresies,” Raybeck interrupted. “People like the necromancer, making contracts with beings they don’t understand, probably devils or demons…”

  “Let me tell you a personal story, then, my young friend,” Heimar said.

  Raybeck nodded his assent. They had a bit more walking to go. The camp was just a dark speck in the distance.

  “When I was a young man, you know I was a sailor. I took work on a mighty vessel. The crew was adventurous, and the captain owned his own ship. We sailed far from these shores seeking our fortunes.”

  Raybeck raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t heard of ships traveling much out of sight of shore. It was well known that the open ocean was incredibly hazardous.

  Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

  “I remember how canny and confident the crew were, every one of us,” Heimar continued. “Such a skilled group of men, it was hard to tell the difference between our good fortune and our brilliance as sailors. But of course, even with a good crew, your luck runs out eventually if you keep pushing it. On one voyage, we ran aground on an island. Our ship was damaged, but we didn’t think it was any problem with our resourcefulness. In a matter of a few days, we patched the damage up with driftwood, nails we salvaged from a nonessential part of the ship, and an adhesive we extracted from a nameless plant we had discovered on the island that had a sticky, waterproof sap. All we needed to get away from that island was a favorable tide.

  “That island must have been cursed, though. Or perhaps we brought the curse on ourselves with hubris. Every time we tried to put out to sea, the same stormy waves that had driven us ashore lashed us and battered the ship. They threatened to break the vessel apart once and for all before we could get it into deep enough water to have a chance of escape.”

  “Couldn’t you wait until it wasn’t stormy out?” Raybeck asked.

  “We tried that,” Heimar said. “When we had arrived, it hadn’t been that stormy, though. The waters were incredibly rough even in mild weather in that part of the ocean. And it seemed that the weather we experienced when we were trying to leave was almost uniformly worse. At first, we tried to put on our brave faces and be patient, but it’s harder to do that when you’re stuck for a week, then two weeks, then a month, and the storms never let up. When the food stores run dry, and the island is barren, and there are no fish coming near shore… you begin to get desperate. We were stuck there for three full months.” His face took on a haunted look.

  “Sometimes I dream I’m back on that island, you know,” he said after a moment. “Those are the only nightmares I ever have. We put three men to death near the end, for cannibalism…”

  “But how did you escape? Did—did Vika and Astara help? I’d guess not, because of the conversation we’ve just been having, but… I can’t imagine how you survived this cursed island without divine intervention.”

  “Neither could we,” Heimar replied, smiling a dark, mirthless smile. “By the end of month one, I assure you, we’d all become quite religious. We’d gather for daily prayers, and no one would miss it. No one would even be late. What else were we going to do? The ship was already fixed, all that was wrong was the weather…”

  “Anyway, around the end of month three, shortly after the cannibalism incident, an old sailor came and found me. He and a few older men who had lived their whole lives on the sea went around and began quietly telling the younger men of the ship—that was me, at the time, believe it or not—the men without any rank, about an old sea god that they knew sailors before them had worshiped. For generations of sailors prior, this god had provided safe passage and favorable winds in dangerous patches of ocean. In gratitude, the sailors gave him offerings… The matter was contentious at first, fights broke out over the heresy, but we were desperate, and Vika and Astara weren’t getting the job done.”

  “Didn’t your ship have a priest aboard? It sounds like you were a large crew, from the story you’ve been telling.”

  The miners didn’t have an ordained priest to tend to them, but it was not abnormal for workers in such dangerous work to have men of the gods nearby. For sailors planning to sail out of sight of shore, that would practically be a requirement.

  “Aye. There was a chaplain. He firmly condemned the matter as heresy. Said we ought to live and die with the gods that had raised us up from ignorant savages and children and given us the heights of civilization that we enjoyed. He spoke many pretty words. That made up our minds. That night, we killed him. Scooped out his guts and threw them into the sea. Most of the crew got in on it. Only a few pretended not to know anything was happening. We said a prayer to that sea god afterward. His name was Yeitan.”

  “And it worked?” Raybeck asked.

  Heimar nodded slowly. “It worked. The old god heard us. The sea lapped up the blood and guts greedily, like a cat sipping at cream. The next morning, the sea calmed, and a rainbow appeared. A damned rainbow!”

  “I see.”

  “Yeah, you do, don’t you?”

  “That would definitely give you more of a reason to listen to the necromancer.”

  “It’s even more than what I’ve told you, Beck. When we returned to Niet, we stopped in a major port city, Sarda.”

  Raybeck simply nodded.

  “Well, we had all agreed to keep what we’d done to ourselves when we left the island. Made a blood pact. But sailors who have been away from drink and on strict rations for months on end aren’t responsible people. The men went wild in the first few days, and some fool opened his mouth about what had happened. The Divine Trust got wind of the rumor. And that kind older sailor who’d told me the truth vanished… A few days later, I came upon him being tortured in the town square.” His voice shook with emotion. “That was when I finally realized that the gods of my youth might be real, but they were not to be trusted. The whole reason why ships rarely sail out of sight of land in our time is because of how dangerous the sea is. But it seems the seas are dangerous because we’ve failed to honor the sea god… If the gods we follow would try to keep us from worshiping another real and powerful god, a sea god that could keep us safe while we were doing our jobs, what else are they keeping from us?”

  “That… I don’t know, Heimar.”

  “Exactly. We don’t know!” Heimar smacked his fist into his palm. “Now might be our chance to learn more of the truth than we were meant to.”

  Raybeck smiled. Somehow he felt a bit better. The world might be larger than he had reckoned. Perhaps there was a real, legitimate place for the two of them in it. Maybe, somehow, the choice they had made was less monstrous than Raybeck kept imagining. There could still be a happy ending.

  But it was also time to discuss how they would persuade the others to stay where they were. In the distance, he could see a lot of men gathered outside.

  Not all of our men, but a number of them are ready to leave. Waiting for the others, I’ll wager. Hopefully we can manage to talk them out of marching to the beastfolk village. Even if we just delay them by an hour or two, I know that would help the mage.

  It occurred to him that he wasn’t sure whether the necromancer had ever introduced himself. He couldn’t recall a name.

  But I’m supposed to hear his voice in my head eventually. I guess it doesn’t matter…

  “Don’t worry too much about the details, Beck,” Heimar said quietly, breaking the silence.

  Raybeck looked at him and furrowed his brow. “I’m that obvious?”

  “I just know you. All we have to do is stick to a simple lie when we get there. We say the Army isn’t ready to move out after all. Commander Volusia wants to spend time making additional preparations, and he asks that we do the same. We can wait to move out until tomorrow. For today, we should gather extra rations and turn our pickaxes into short spears. The Army will reimburse us for the lost pickaxes. That part arguably makes sense, since the supply cart we saw only had enough weapons to arm around forty or fifty people. We tell the guys all that, and they’ll eat it up.”

  “You think so?”

  “Have you met our brothers of the mine?” Heimar asked, quirking his lips. “It’s an excuse for holding back a bit longer. Which gives time for the danger to fade or the military to solve the problem or the beastfolk to flee, avoiding a conflict. Remember, almost all of the men who were actually willing to volunteer to fight for pay are already with the Army back at their camp. Will our colleagues go for it? I all but guarantee it.”

  there's always Patreon.