A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO NAKH-MARU
Jessica Cluess
Marooned on a far-flung world, the only survivor of his expedition, Jeff’s taken up the life of an adventurer. But when he saves a girl from a group of bandits out in the desert passes, Jeff learns that, sometimes, rescuing the princess is more trouble than it’s worth....
The vermillion sun had reached its zenith when Jeff of Ut-Maru realized his khefer was dying. The beast made erratic loops back and forth, its claws digging furrows in the desert sand. With a curse, he yanked on the reins and slid down from the saddle. Jeff stood before the creature, its antennae waving like flags of surrender.
Poor guy.
In his log, Jeff had described khefer as mantis/anteater/??? The beast regarded him with its honeybee eyes and made a mournful glugging sound. Jeff patted its fuzzy, chartreuse-colored head. When a tongue escaped its cylindrical snout and tried to lick him, Jeff backed off. The tongues were acidic. He’d learned that the hard way.
“Sorry, pal.” He gestured to his traveling companion. “Okay, lady. We need to walk.”
The woman crossed her arms and spoke in a Marunian dialect Jeff hadn’t mastered yet. She was high class. If the sarong of river pearls and platinum mesh hadn’t hinted at it, the haughty line of her mouth would’ve done the trick. In Jeff’s line of so-called work, running into the high society of Ut-Maru was inevitable. Above his own sarong hung a sword belt. To his left was a koh-pash blade of fine adamantine, gifted from the Nashwa of Sukh-Maru after Jeff rescued his infant son. On his right he wore a lead scabbard with a large X marked off in masking tape. He’d written VOID! BAD NEWS! on the tape. He didn’t draw that sword unless he’d exhausted all other options.
The woman leapt down as the khefer slumped over and died. Jeff collected the woven saddle and bridle in a hurry.
She made a disgusted noise when the body began to pulsate and seven babies that looked like fat, green caterpillars chewed their way through the parent’s corpse.
“We’d better go before they start spitting.” Jeff ushered her away. “They’re pretty venomous as newborns.”
He’d learned that the hard way, too.
So now Jeff of Ut-Maru walked beside a high-class woman who looked like she wanted to complain to the desert’s manager. He’d tried getting her name, but with the language barrier all they’d managed was a few rude gestures. He’d at least told her his name: Joffah. Marunians couldn’t master the “Jeff” sound.
She stalked the sands like she commanded them. Like most born on Ut-Maru, she wore as little clothing as possible to allow the healing rays of the vermillion sun access to her flesh. She was small and curving, her skin the rose-gold color peculiar to her people, her hair a forest of copper ringlets. She wore a top of platinum weave, pearl, and crystal that revealed her stomach and the majority of her chest. Jeff couldn’t give lessons in modesty. His muscular torso was always exposed to the vermillion sun. The rays didn’t just give him good health and perpetual youth like they did the native Marunians. Jeff received added benefits, like running a mile in fifty seconds, or bench-pressing a house.
Reynolds said before the crash that human physiology might react to the peculiar radiation in a different way. She’d been right.
His skin had a reddish tint these days, and he wondered if he’d wind up a giant ball of melanoma. But the perks made up for it.
The lady began to wilt after twenty minutes of climbing up and down the iridescent dunes. Her sandaled feet turned in on themselves.
“Here.” Jeff scooped her into his arms and trudged on.
The woman screeched and belted him across the face. He accidentally dumped her onto a dune and watched her roll downhill. At the bottom she dusted herself off, shook her fists, and shouted at him.
“Last time I do anything nice for you!” Jeff rubbed his jaw. Damn. The woman climbed the dune and started a colorful game of charades.
She grabbed Jeff’s shoulders and forced him to kneel. Her head was above his. She smiled. She made him stand, and measured her head to his chest. She scowled.
“I gotta keep your head above mine if I carry you?” Maybe saving her from that pack of raiders had been a stupid idea. He’d been headed across the Bowl of Sisi when he came upon a group of hooded men on khefer-back as they struggled with the kicking, furious woman. Jeff wasn’t the type to ride past something like that, so he’d dispatched the bastards quick and helped the girl. Plus, judging by the fancy look of her he figured she’d fetch a good rescue price at Nakh-Maru. That’d been the one word she said that he understood: Nakh-Maru. The northern desert’s capital kingdom, or nashwafiet. Jeff envisioned a reward for returning some aristocrat’s daughter. Or concubine. Or both. Hopefully not both.
So Jeff of Ut-Maru trudged across the desert, giving the lady a piggyback ride. She couldn’t be much younger than his thirty-four years, but she seemed to take juvenile delight in the whole thing.
“Joffah?” She tugged his hair.
“Yes, your exquisite pain-in-the-assness?”
She began speaking rapidly, even though she knew he couldn’t understand. Jeff tried to parse it; he had always been good with languages. That and his military training had made him the prime candidate for this expedition six years ago. He’d set out with three others.
Now, three metal ID tags hung around his neck.
“I can’t understand you! I. Cannot. Understand.” He did the tourist thing of speaking slower and louder. She whapped him with her fist. “Ow! Lady, you wanna walk?”
But then he noticed a plume of rose-colored dust on the horizon. Someone was headed their way. Jeff jogged to meet the figure. First a black speck appeared, and then came the whisper of scales upon sand. An Akh-Thoth crossed the dunes, slithering merrily into the deep desert. As was typical of his kind, the Akh-Thoth had a human torso and serpent bottom. His skin glittered with scales, and around his neck hung a red, fleshy frill that Jeff knew would fan open if he got mad. Fortunately, Akh-Thoths tended to be pretty agreeable, so long as you weren’t some large variety of rodent. The lady spoke in a smug-sounding way and whacked Jeff’s ear. He “accidentally” dropped her. She rolled down another dune. Such a shame.
“Excuse me.” Jeff used the low-Maru dialect, which almost everyone (except the noble pain in the ass) spoke.
“Greetings, well-traveled one.” The Akh-Thoth appeared surprised as the lady climbed up the dune and gazed murder at Jeff, dusting sand from her shoulders. “Is it not unwell to be about in the Bowl of Sisi without a mount?”
“She, uh, mounts me.” Jeff realized how that sounded. “I mean, is, in this place of death, there come to be a khefer-farmer?”
Jeff wasn’t as good with low-Maru as high-Maru, but those speakers mostly remained in the capitals.
“Yes.” The creature pointed back the way he’d come. “Thirty leagues. I doubt you will make it, though.”
“I’ll be fine.” He’d walk until the vermillion sun gave way to the crimson moons, then he’d rest. No use trying to journey after dark.
The woman spoke rapid-fire. The Akh-Thoth appeared surprised.
“Can you understand her?” Thank God.
“She speaks a very antiquated sek-Maru.” He answered the woman, who threw up her hands in gratitude.
“Tell her to stop punching my head.”
The creature conveyed Jeff’s message. The woman spoke for forty-five seconds without drawing a single breath. The Akh-Thoth wrapped two of his four arms around his torso and laughed.
“What’d she say?”
The Akh-Thoth wiped a tear. “She says no.”
Jeff stared at the woman. She regarded him with narrowed eyes.
“That’s all?”
The creature shrugged. “It was the way she said it.”
He slithered off in a cloud of pink dust.
The afternoon passed as the vermillion sun lowered in the sky. Jeff was careful with their water, but they would have to find a new source pretty soon. He didn’t think they had enough to get them all the way to this farm, let alone to Nakh-Maru.
“I hear Nakh-Maru’s a city of pearl.” Jeff discovered that you could have a wonderful dialogue with somebody when neither of you knew what the other was saying. Now that she didn’t have to deal with Jeff shouting “Do. Not. Understand,” the lady was all right. When she poked at the hilt of his Void sword, Jeff stepped away. “No, no. You pull this when you can’t control it, things get bad.”
She seemed to understand by his tone what he meant.
Eventually, they came to a pair of red-salt ruins. The ancient Marunians had used the hard, layered stone, or “red salt,” to form their wonders and temples. Unfortunately, sediment didn’t last the way adamantine and titanium did, so all the old-world stuff had crumbled. Jeff and the woman found a pair of sandaled feet nearly four stories tall. Jeff couldn’t imagine what it’d looked like finished.
At the base of the statue, they discovered an oasis. He and the woman hurried down to drink. The water on Ut-Maru was clear as glass, cool even in the desert. Back home, a satellite system on the fifth colony of Earth’s long-distant descendants, the water was tepid and a little cloudy unless you lived in a high-end high-rise.
They drank, refilled their water skin. The woman shook off her sandals, then reached around to unwrap her sarong.
Jeff turned his back and waited until she’d finished her bath. Not that he wasn’t interested; pain in the ass though she was, she was a damn fine woman. But he liked to think he was a gentleman.
He heard splashing, then dripping as she got out of the pool. The woman stomped around to face him.
She wore a furious look, and nothing else.
“Whoa, lady! I’m trying to do the decent thing.” He turned his back again, heard her growl. She marched around and planted her nakedness in front of him, arms rigid at her sides. When Jeff started to look away, she let out a string of blistering curses. “Fine. Fine. You win.” He glared at her.
The glare softened to a gaze. Clothed, she’d been comely. Unclothed, she defied description, all rosy, tapering curves. Not a sharp angle to be seen. His eyes went out of focus while she stood with her hands on her hips. Then she gave a brisk nod, like concluding a business meeting, before nabbing her clothes and getting dressed.
“Good job,” he croaked, and winced. Smooth.
The sound of multiple thumping feet allowed some blood flow back to his brain. A herd of wild khefer had come to refresh themselves. Quick, Jeff opened his satchel and took out the bridle.
“Hold on.” He sprinted around the edge of the pool, kicking up sand and dust as he went. The khefer scattered, thumping up the hill on their weird padded feet. They had six legs, born to scurry over the sands. Even a souped-up guy couldn’t compete long with a wild khefer in the deep desert.
Jeff caught up to a small, strawberry-colored one. He wrapped his arms around the thing’s middle and hefted it into the air. Khefer on average weighed almost a thousand pounds.
It was a mild workout.
The creature screeched, flicking its venomous tongue and scrabbling with its six feet. The rest of the herd ran on. Khefer had no loyalty to one another. Their short life spans meant they wanted to eat, procreate, and get devoured by the next generation. Jeff knew a lot of people like that back home.
He carried the squealing khefer until it calmed. “You’re gonna do as I say? Huh?”
Khefer were naturally compliant. If something bested them, they submitted. He set the creature down, put the bridle on. Took a couple of tries, and he had to stay away from the tongue, but he finished and hoisted himself onto its back. When he tugged, it stopped. When he slackened his hold, the khefer went forward.
What a pain in the ass this day had been. “Wish I could just walk away for once,” Jeff muttered as he rode back to the oasis.
But that was the best and worst part of him: he never walked away.
Jeff did feel pretty smug when he rode up to the astonished woman. She sat behind him, and they headed north.
When the vermillion sun had almost disappeared, Jeff located a good place to camp for the night. He tied up the khefer, found some spiny desert-milk pods for it to eat, then gathered sagebrush and built a fire. The second moon joined the third and first at different points in the sky. Jeff had never seen more stars anywhere else, even up in the dense black of space.
“Joffah?” The lady frowned. He passed her some dried khefer meat, took a bite for himself, and rummaged through his satchel.
“In a minute. Gotta record the day’s log.” Jeff pulled out a dog-eared notebook and increasingly tiny pencil. It’d been four years and he had to make the space last, so he wrote small and short.
Him, Reynolds, Takahashi, and Petrov had come here on an information-gathering mission. Reports had called this planet Second Mars, based on the fuzzy satellite feed. The Syndicate didn’t think humanity needed another arid backwater, but they sent a small team to map the terrain, investigate the local flora and fauna, and do otherwise scientific stuff. Jeff had been the backup muscle.
As such, he wasn’t the best person to record the official log. But Reynolds, dying, had asked him to continue their work.
Unfortunately, his entries looked a lot like:
Day 226
Found three more lakes. One is purple. Algae??
Or
Day 679
Many interesting rocks.
Jeff had included some useful shit, like differences between the low and high languages of Maru, and the names of certain types of animals and birds. Ut-Maru was a low-tech planet with some stuff that he wished Reynolds, the resident biologist, could’ve got a chance to record. She might’ve developed a theory for why the human body reacted to the vermillion sun as it did. For his part, Jeff had only written The sun makes me STRONGER?? Beside it, he’d drawn a stick figure version of himself with three wavy lines coming out of his head. He’d also drawn the sun, smiling.
Day 1,572
Rescued a woman from high desert raiders. Taking her to Nakh-Maru. She speaks some antiquated dialect. Will start up vocabulary list later. She is a pain in the ass.
Satisfied, he put away his stuff and refocused on the woman as she chewed her dinner with disdain.
“It’s got that briny taste, I know. If you choke it down fast, it’s not too bad.”
She swigged from the water skin. Afterward she pointed at him, then gestured at the sky with a quizzical expression.
“Yeah. I come from up there.” He gazed at the star-speckled heavens. “Place called Exodus-5. It’s a satellite colony on Rhea, the second moon around Crius. Atmosphere isn’t naturally hospitable to humans. Even with terraforming, you can’t go outside the city confines too much.” Jeff rested his head against the tanned leather of his satchel. “The city’s like everywhere else in the satellite worlds. High tech. Instant dinners. Late-night porn. People are still boys at thirty-five and shit. I like it better out here.”
At least on a planet like Ut-Maru, you saw action. Besides, there hadn’t been anyone back home. Jeff didn’t remember his dad, his mom was long dead, and his older brother traded in cryogenic bonds or whatever. He’d left for college and never returned.
That’s what’d been nice about the expedition, and Reynolds and Takahashi and Petrov. Jeff gripped the tags around his neck.
“Hmm?” The lady pointed at his hand.
“These were my three friends.” He showed them one by one. “Reynolds, Patricia. Takahashi, Hideo. Petrov, Konstantin. We came here together.” Firelight winked on the tags. “The ship crashed. They died.”
She made a sad noise. Seemed she could tell what he meant. In repose, just eating dinner before the fire, she seemed nice. Jeff sat up.
“Joffah.” He placed a hand on his breast, extended toward her. “You?”
“Klionthe.” A slight shrug. “Klio.”
It was such a damn human gesture that he laughed, which got her high and mighty again. Klio nabbed the satchel that’d served as Jeff’s pillow and rummaged through it while his head hit the ground.
“Come on,” he groaned as she took out his lightweight blanket and wrapped it around herself, even though the night was warm. Jeff sensed that trying to argue with Klio would get a lot of angry gesticulations and maybe an attempted ball strike or two, and he just wasn’t in the mood. “Join the service, they said. See new and exciting planets, they said. Observe wonderful new cultures, they said,” Jeff grumbled. As Klio curled into an angry ball, he listened to the flames crackling in the otherwise silent desert night. Back home, he’d fall asleep to the ceaseless murmur of traffic outside his window and the low reverberations of some frat party down the hall.
Yeah. This was way better.
The dream was always the same. Him, Reynolds, Takahashi, and Petrov wearing stupid paper party hats and blowing plastic horns, laughing as the lunar clock rolled over for a new cycle. They’d spent two years traveling to Ut-Maru. The Syndicate hadn’t valued the mission, and it showed in how second-rate their ship was. The cryo-pods quit working four months into the trip, meaning they had to spend all that time together. Birthdays. Holidays. Game nights, drinking powdered beer and shouting at a rerun of some classic sitcom.
Best days of Jeff’s life. He dreamed of Reynolds playing cards and laughing. Him and Takahashi whipping up what they could in the kitchen. Petrov never understanding what was funny about the old sitcoms, which itself became hilarious.
Then Jeff and the others were running down the hall amid clouds of smoke and ozone. Their shitty spaceship had no pilot, only an AI program to land the thing. Turned out the AI program wasn’t much of a substitute.
Jeff jumped into his escape pod. When he hit the button to close the shield and jettison himself, he noticed that the lights above the other three pods, the ones that should’ve been green, remained an angry red.
Reynolds was trapped across from him. He screamed, trying to break open the shield to get to her before he was launched into space. Jeff hurtled toward the planet alongside the ship, watching in horror as it hit the desert sands.
And then he was pulling Reynolds out of her pod. She was the only one who’d survived the initial impact, but she’d been broken. It took her hours to die. When she was fading, she whispered, “Please. Do the work. Don’t let it have been for nothing. Please, Jeff. Please—”
Jeff awoke with a gasp.
“Joffah?” Klio perched by his side, looking concerned. He sat up.
“Sorry. Bad dream.” He rubbed his eye, felt instinctively for the Void blade. He always kept it against his back as he slept. Still there. Good. “Guess I woke you.”
He could see her anxious face in the triple moons’ light. She swept the blanket over him. Jeff protested, but it was nice to feel her settle it around him.
“Shhh.” She stroked fingers through his hair a few times. Then she lay down not too far from him and began to sing. Jeff almost laughed. It was a Marunian lullaby people used on their fussy children.
“I don’t normally have nightmares,” he said, which wasn’t strictly true.
“Shh.” As her voice lilted and fell, Jeff drifted back into the cocoon of sleep. This time there was no crash.
Just Klio.
When Jeff woke again, the first blush of dawn was warming the sky. He hadn’t slept so good in years.
“Klio?” He sat up beside the dead fire pit, pushed off the blanket. Jeff was alone. Klio had vanished.
Worse, she’d taken the khefer. Worst of all, the Void sword was missing, too.
Oh. That little...
“Daimoh,” Jeff growled, the unflattering low-Maru word for an animal's withered ballsack. He got up, snatched his stuff, and followed the khefer’s tracks, impatient for the sun to rise. Loss of sunlight sapped his strength and speed. He was still strong, but humanly so. He bounded up one dune, down another, and saw the woman galloping far ahead.
Unfortunately for Klio, the vermillion sun peered over the ridge of the desert, bathing Jeff in its light.
“No you don’t!” he shouted, bounding toward her ever faster. Klio glanced over her shoulder and sneered, guiding the khefer over the waves of sand with a natural grace. Jeff put on a final burst of speed and snagged the creature’s hindquarters. The momentum sent Klio flying. Fortunately, the desert made for soft landing.
“You insipid, arrogant pest!” she yelled while rolling down a dune. She seemed to make a habit of doing that.
Jeff found the Void blade tied up behind the khefer’s saddle. Then he frowned. “Wait a minute. You speak high Marunian?”
“Of course I do!” Klio clambered back up, shaking sand from her sarong. “How could I survive in the day-to-day without it?”
“I dunno. You seemed to get by pretty good just punching my head and screaming.”
Jeff took the Void sword, then cursed as the blade began to slide out of its leaden sheath. Fast, he managed to keep the weapon from exiting into the world.
Unfortunately, that gave Klio time to snatch the koh-pash’s hilt.
“I can’t believe I saved your ass.” Jeff ducked and dodged as the woman swung his sword a couple of times. She was pretty good, too. Attractive quality, if only she hadn’t been trying to kill him. All he needed to do was draw his Void blade and she was gone, but he wouldn’t. While she was good, she wasn’t that good.
“Give me the Worldeater and you can go.”
The Worldwhater? Jeff snatched her around the waist, lifted her above his head. She dropped his sword, and her legs pedaled helplessly. “How dare you!”
“Feeling’s mutual.” Jeff tucked her under his arm like a piece of luggage, nabbed his weapons, and belted them above his sarong. Klio kicked and swore worse than anyone he’d ever met, and he’d been in the damn military. “Look, lady. We can either chat, or I can tie you up and drag you to Nakh-Maru. One is gonna be much more pleasant.”
She seethed in that old-timey dialect. Finally, she grunted. Jeff set her down. Her rose-gold face had turned a mottled amethyst with fury. The khefer, meanwhile, drank from a desert-milk pod and ignored them.
“Let’s start easy. Who are you? Why do you want my sword? And why’d you act like you couldn’t speak my language?”
She lifted her chin.
“I am Klionthe Sioda aht-Larsa, Nashwatith of Nakh-Maru.”
“You’re royalty. Naturally.” Jeff took a swig from the water skin. “Only royalty would get their ass kicked and act like they won.”
She sniffed. “If you don’t care to hear my woeful tale, I won’t burden you.”
Jeff tossed her the water skin. “Woe away.”
“My father’s throne has long been coveted by Efrekit, my many-times-removed cousin. I was traveling across the Bowl of Sisi with an armed guard to my aunt’s palace in Yath-Maru. Efrekit hired raiders to kill my entourage and take me hostage in order to pressure my father to step down. They were spiriting me away when you came upon us.”
“So far, pretty standard stuff. Not sure where my sword comes into all this.”
“When you rescued me, I noted the Worldeater hanging upon your belt and knew I had to claim it.”
“To steal my stuff.”
She looked affronted. “To seize a weapon that would enable me to crush my enemy and grind their bones into dust!”
She was a woman with a plan. Kinda hot.
“Why do you keep calling this a Worldeater, anyway?” Jeff patted the sword.
“Do you even know what you possess?” Klio looked like he was some kind of dumbass. Hell, she might’ve been onto something. “Where did you find it?”
“Couple years ago, I got into a little altercation with some thieves. They cleared out of their den on short notice and left some stuff behind, including this. I call it the Void.”
“Why?”
“Because it sounds badass. So what is it?”
“Look.” Klio touched the scabbard. Her fingertips danced across a scrawled collection of runes. “Ut-Maru has known many gods, some so ancient they were forgotten even before our red-salt temples were built. These gods were merciless, and worshipped with blood rites conducted in caverns beneath the earth. Almost no concrete record of them exists.”
“You a student of this stuff?”
She looked primly pleased. “I have achieved high ranks in classical studies and philology.” College girl. Nice.
“So the sword belongs to a god?”
“Specifically to Tesu, the war god.”
War god? Yeah, that tracked. “So this was stolen from a temple?”
“Undoubtedly. Most wouldn’t know it on sight, but I recognized Tesu’s sigil.” She pointed out a spiral bisected by lightning. “Its capacity for destruction is rumored to be limitless in the correct hands. Now, I will wield it for my father and our nashwafiet.”
“Lady. Klio. I can barely handle the thing. How were you planning to manage?”
“I’m adaptable.”
Jeff wasn’t going to argue with her. It got him nowhere. “I get it. You wanted my sword to protect your people. Why didn’t you just tell me that? Why’d you pretend you couldn’t understand me?”
“First, because a language barrier would make me appear more reliant upon you and lower your guard.” Jeff frowned. College girl was smart. “And then, because it was funny.” She laughed. “You were so exasperated.”
“Think I liked you better when I couldn’t understand you.”
She glowered. “Give me the Worldeater.”
“No. I wouldn’t give it to anybody. I only keep it because I know I can handle it and won’t abuse it. I can’t trust anyone else to do either.”
“Then wield it in defense of the Nashwa of Nakh-Maru!”
“I’m a simple man. I take jobs where there’s a right side and a wrong one. Politics muddies the water. Always has.”
“Then why did you even rescue me from those raiders?”
“Because you were in trouble.”
Her thin eyebrows lifted. The expression in her blue eyes softened.
“Besides.” Jeff cleared his throat. “You looked rich. Figured I’d get a decent reward for saving you.”
She turned her face away with a hmph.
“I won’t pay you.” Klio folded her arms. “If you choose to leave me to perish, so be it.”
He fought the urge to roll his eyes.
“I’ll take you home, and protect you until we get there.”
“Why?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Because it’s what I do.” Jeff snagged the khefer’s reins. “Hop on.”
But Klio stared the way they’d come, a look of frozen horror on her face. Didn’t take long to discover the problem.
A great dust cloud rose into the air. Shit. A storm? But this wasn’t the season for them.
Klio plucked some shiny bauble from her sarong and peered through it. She swore, then passed it to Jeff. Hell, this thing operated like a telescope. Fashion and function, as his ex used to say.
Jeff saw almost one hundred men on khefer-back charging toward them. Green silk standards flapped in the wind. Some of the men looked like the desert raiders he’d rescued Klio from, but the others bore an insignia of three crossed swords on their breastplates. Wild calls and ululations rose into the air as they raced forward.
“So. My cousin appears to have found us.” Klio cleared her throat. “He has brought a few reinforcements, as well.”
“Reinforcements?” Jeff tossed her the jewel. “That’s an army, lady. If you’d told me what this was about, I would’ve done a better job at covering our tracks.”
“Shouldn’t track covering be standard in your profession?” She winced, though. She was nervous. Good. “We must ride.”
Jeff picked her up and tossed her on the saddle. She made a bewildered noise.
“I’ll catch up,” he said.
“You can’t face them alone!” She sounded mad, of all things.
“Worried about me?” He slapped the khefer’s rump. “Go!”
Klio raced away as Jeff faced the oncoming mob by himself. The dust rose, blocking out the sky. He sneered as he drew the Void and prepared a two-handed swing.
At first glance, the Void, or Worldeater, looked like a normal sword, with one exception: the blade was obsidian black. Then there was the weird purple glow that outlined the edges, curling into the air like steam. Weirdest of all, the blade seemed to have a mind of its own. When exposed to the air, it tugged the wielder this way or that. If you weren’t strong enough, it’d control you instead of the other way around. Jeff’s arms trembled. The sword tried pulling him forward, but he resisted. Sweat poured down his face. Running ten miles was easy. Wrestling the Void took effort.
The enemy approached. The sun glinted on adamantine helmets.
“Assholes,” he whispered, and struck.
Jeff didn’t kill them so much as explode them in a shower of gore. Chunks of smoking armor rained from the sky. Jeff grimaced at the splat of entrails as blood misted upon his face. The enemies’ khefer began bolting in every direction. Jeff had taken at least ten lives with the first stroke. He charged headlong into the melee with a scream.
The Worldeater grew hot in his hands as he sliced. They fought back, but between the sword and his strength there was no competition. Thirty seconds later he stood alone amid the splashes of brackish red upon pink sands, at least thirty dead in pieces around him. Jeff sneered at the blade, which seemed to brighten with glee at the slaughter.
“Joffah!”
Klio called to him. Jeff turned.
Her wrists were bound. She was seated upon a strange khefer, with a large man riding behind her. This guy had rose-gold flesh, and green eyes so bright they seemed to glow. His head was shaved, his muscles gargantuan. He wore a breastplate with the three crossed swords upon it. Dozens more raiders and soldiers flanked him.
The shaved-head guy spoke in the same antiquated language Klio had used earlier. She wincingly translated.
“My cousin Efrekit demands that you sheath the Worldeater and surrender yourself. Or he will kill me.”
To make his point, Efrekit held a dagger to her throat. Klio didn’t cry or beg. She accepted her fate. After all, Jeff had told her he wouldn’t give this thing to anyone. Now she’d seen why.
But high-and-mighty though she might be, he had to save her. Like an idiot, he couldn’t walk away.
Jeff sheathed the sword and flung it to the ground. Klio’s mouth fell open in shock.
Something walloped Jeff across the back of his head. They meant to knock him out with one blow, but he was a little too strong for that. He couldn’t fight back for Klio’s sake, and had to wait patiently until they succeeded after three or four more tries.
What a stupid day.
“Joffah. Awaken.”
Jeff opened his eyes. Took a few minutes for his vision to quit sloshing around. Already the back of his skull felt better, if a little tenderized. The vermillion sun’s rays hadn’t touched his skin in some time; he could feel his diminishment. Damn it. The air was clammy and smelled almost fungal. They were underground. He touched his right arm, and wrinkled his nose. They’d smeared some kind of sickly-sweet treacle-y crap on him. He sat up and noticed the ring of scowling soldiers. Wall torches provided dim lighting.
The chamber was circular, with pillars upholding a domed roof. The ceiling yawned away into darkness, probably thirty or so feet high. To the right, a massive statue stood upon a platform and extended its arm. The leering thing’s face was demonic, with a crown of curling horns all around its head. The eye sockets were hollow.
Jeff glanced behind, and saw several men protecting a stone doorway. No exit. Before Jeff, a large cave mouth was the gateway to utter blackness. Before that opening was a stone dais, atop which stood Klio.
And Efrekit.
“We may be in some trouble,” she said.
“I see you’re fluent in understatement, too.”
“They plan to feed you to a worm as tribute and take the Worldeater.” She winced. “It is also my cousin’s intention to marry me to every man in this room as payment.” Jeff looked at all the burly, well-furred scumbags. That was a lot of marriage. “I wouldn’t mind being killed by a monster instead.”
“Sorry, I’m not trading.”
Jeff looked up again. The very top of the chamber had a ring of boarded-up windows.
Windows...
“Can they understand us?” Jeff asked.
“That ancient dialect I used is considered the only appropriate language in the more fundamentalist sects. The soldiers here were raised according to the old customs.”
“Come on. Everyone knows low-Maru,” Jeff said.
Casually, Klio spoke. “Everyone in this room sleeps with their mother and urinates uncontrollably.” No one batted an eye. Huh.
Efrekit talked, and Klio translated. “He would like you to grovel.”
“Groveling’s not my thing.” Jeff crossed his arms while Klio translated. Efrekit grinned and spoke.
“He asks if your ‘thing’ is rotting in the intestines of a beast.”
“If I have to choose.”
Klio spoke. Efrekit did as well. “He says you seem stupid.”
“Tell him he’s not wrong.” She did. The commander laughed, as did the men. At least Jeff was funny. “Actually, he’s the idiot. He could’ve cut my head off, instead he brings me to an underground temple to fight some worm as ‘tribute.’ Tell him he’s a backward, superstitious mouth-breather.”
Klio glared. “I asked for death by combat. It was the only way to keep you alive long enough to escape.”
Ah. “Well, then it’s a good plan.”
“I am a ‘mouth-breather,’ am I?”
“Don’t take this personally.”
“I take everything personally!”
“I noticed!”
Efrekit spoke. “He asks if we are like this always.”
“Let’s focus on getting out of here.” He looked all around the room. Friezes littered the walls, images of horned monsters spearing men and women with delight. Great. There was also a carving at the front of that dais.
A spiral bisected by lightning.
Jeff looked at the sigil, then the statue. Its outstretched hand appeared awful empty. Oh man, what were the odds?
“Klio. Where’s the Void?” He didn’t use the term Worldeater. Didn’t want anyone to catch on.
“Directly behind me. Efrekit wears your koh-pash on his belt.”
Jeff’s nostrils flared. Son of a bitch.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t think these guys know where we are. When I give the signal, you need to get me the Void.”
Before she could speak, the room trembled as an echoing cry sounded in the distance. The call came from within the cave, approaching the chamber. The cry changed to a muffled roar, drawing closer with every passing second. The men bellowed and beat their chests to welcome their worm.
Then Jeff heard the papery glide of massive wings. He glared at Klio.
“That doesn’t sound like a worm.”
“No translation is flawless!” she snapped.
A giant, pale moth swooped into the temple. Efrekit bellowed in joy, as did the rest of his soldiers.
The moth flapped high into the air, hovering directly overhead. At least, it looked like a moth. It had the bulbous eyes, the dusty wings, and the furred limbs. But the mouth was different, cavernous and filled with razor-sharp teeth. The thing screamed, the noise reverberating off every dank stone in this underworld.
Well. Shit.
The moth-thing swooped. Jeff threw himself to the ground, shuddering as a dusty, papery wing slid across his back. He coughed, the noxious dust filling his lungs, and ran to the other side of the circle. He wondered why the monster only went for him, then remembered the stickiness they’d painted on him. Probably monster barbecue sauce. The moth flew higher, ready to dive-bomb and swallow Jeff in one delicious gulp. But even without his superlative strength, Jeff was a tough son of a bitch. He raced over to the statue, climbed up its foot. Men roared their approval as the moth swooped again. Jeff crouched and waited. When the moth came for him, he jumped to the side. The thing almost bashed into the statue, but recovered.
That gave Jeff enough time to leap on its furred back. It smelled like dust and ass; he coughed and clung to the demon as it screamed, pulling him high into the air.
“Kick a window!” Klio shouted as the moth fluttered back and forth, flapping crazily through the air. Jeff almost tumbled off twice. “Don’t fall!”
“Great strategy!” he shouted.
He cursed as the monster sped toward the top of the chamber, aiming to crush him against the ceiling. Jeff threw himself off in time, clutching the window ledge as he dangled above the three-story drop. The bastards shouted as he pulled himself up and kicked out one of the shuttered windows.
He saw they were deep underground. The broken window was half a foot or so off the desert floor. If only he could’ve got the hell out right then, but Klio and the sword were down below. A shaft of vermillion sun hit Jeff’s leg. He crouched, letting the rays soak into his back. It wasn’t much of a boost, but it was all he needed as the moth swung around to nab him. When it approached, Jeff jumped high and landed on its back. He grabbed the left wing and ripped it off like so much tissue paper. The moth shrieked in agony. As it fell, Jeff forced its head down so as to pile-drive it into the floor, kamikaze style. It worked; the moth splattered nicely. The sunlight still pouring down upon him, Jeff crushed the beast’s head with two stamps of his feet.
“Klio! Now!”
As Efrekit watched in stupefied silence, Klio grabbed the koh-pash blade from its sheath and sliced her cousin’s head off with a warrior’s cry.
Damn.
She nabbed the Worldeater and leapt off the dais. Using the element of surprise, she raced through the soldiers and threw the blade. She threw well. Jeff caught and unsheathed it. The sword vibrated in his hand as Klio ran into the light. He held the weapon high over his head. “Tesu! Look what I brought!”
Nothing happened. Seconds ticked by. The room of cutthroats snarled and began to approach. Klio tensed.
The sound of stone grinding on stone froze everyone. The immense statue’s hollow eyes flared to red, fiery life. A bestial growl echoed throughout the chamber as the stone arm began to lower. Jeff felt the blade tug harder than ever. This time he let go.
The sword spun through the air, arcing upward until the statue clasped it. The living statue, god, or whatever it was surveyed the men who’d disturbed its temple and gotten giant moth guts all over its floor. He had to be pissed.
Then Tesu swung his returned blade. The first stroke wiped out fifteen men in a shower of blood. Jeff doubted that Tesu would be nice enough to give the mortal who’d returned his blade a pass.
Time to go.
“Get ready.” He grabbed Klio and tossed her high into the air. She gripped the ledge and scrambled up it, heading out the window.
“Joffah! Come on!”
But as Jeff prepared to jump, he remembered the satchel.
It was on the dais, beside Efrekit’s headless corpse. His log was inside. All the work he’d done for Reynolds and the others would be lost forever.
Cursing, he took his koh-pash and pushed past a throng of men. Some tried getting through the doorway, and Tesu murdered them. Others stampeded into the cave. He heard echoing screams as they ran, and then the high, unnatural cries of unknown beasts.
“Joffah!”
“The log!” He couldn’t leave it behind. Not his one promise to Reynolds.
“You’re going to die!” He could barely hear Klio over the cacophony. Jeff turned back and saw that she’d vanished. Probably nabbed a khefer and was hightailing it across the desert like a sane person. Good luck to her. But he couldn’t leave.
He’d promised Reynolds. Please. Do the work. Please, Jeff.
Except that wasn’t all she’d said.
Please live. Live a good, long time. Be happy. Please do that for me.
He could grab the log, or he could live. There was no third option. Jeff stared at the satchel as he gripped the tags around his neck, felt their names press into his hand.
He raced for the sunlight and the window. Out the corner of his eye, he saw Tesu prep another big swing in his direction. The blade had quadrupled in size after regaining its master’s hand.
Jeff felt the sun on his skin. He crouched, and leapt just as the blade whiffed beneath his feet.
He clung to the ledge. Shit. He was still a little weak. As he tried to pull himself up, he heard the war god’s cry.
A rose-gold hand reached in and nabbed his wrist.
“Hurry!” Klio pulled with all her might, and Jeff used the last of his strength to haul himself up and out of the window. He rolled into the sand.
The god’s bellows died down. Maybe it had gone back to sleep in its temple of blood and death, sated, its power restored.
“Shit.” Jeff closed his eyes, grateful to feel the sunlight. Then he looked down at the woman. “Klio. Thank you.”
“Why?” She seemed a little embarrassed.
“For being good with a sword. And for not leaving me.”
“Well. You did destroy my enemy. It’s only fair.”
She smiled. So did he.
Nakh-Maru was more than a city of pearl. It was titanium and adamantine, sapphire and emerald. Children played in amethyst gardens, and the gates yawned wide to welcome home their Nashwatith.
The palace resembled some spun-sugar concoction of silver filigree and glass. When the travelers arrived, servants outfitted in the purple silk livery of aht-Larsa descended, offering bowls of hot water for washing and candied flowers as a treat. Klio paraded along the halls of marble with Jeff at her side, his mouth agape. The northern capital was by far the richest he’d seen on this planet.
“I recall insisting that I wouldn’t pay for your services,” Klio said.
“Yeah.” Jeff noticed a settee made of solid gold. “I can see money’s tight at the moment.”
“But I’ve amended my decision. You shall indeed have a reward.” The woman gave a sly smile as they entered the throne room. A flight of twenty platinum steps led to a chair so resplendent with diamonds it almost hurt to look at.
“Thanks. What is it?”
Klio climbed two steps and stood before him. She spread her arms in a grand gesture. “I have chosen you, Joffah, to sit at my side in my father’s palace and rule with me when his time has passed.”
Jeff blinked. “Uh. What?”
“We shall be united in flesh, knit by ties indissoluble.”
“Like...marriage.”
“Every lavish delight shall be yours, as I shall be. You shall have days of power and nights of pleasure. Amongst our people, you shall be hailed as a god. Splendid shall be your raiment, and sacred oil shall anoint your brow. No creature that dwells upon our planet—nay, no creature that dwells within the boundaries of our universe—shall know such ecstasy. Your life shall be a paradise. Come and take your seat upon the diamond throne, and take me in your arms.” She looked at him with those sapphire eyes, her coral mouth quirking. The most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen.
Jeff thought about it.
“No thanks.”
“What?” Her smile vanished.
“Nice of you to offer, but I’m not the settling-down type. Plus we’ve only known each other, like, a day, and we fought the whole time.”
“Not the whole time,” she argued.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll take that khefer we rode up on and go. Though if you’ve got some water and dried goods that’ll last me to the next nashwafiet, I’d be obliged.”
Klio looked like he’d urinated in front of her as Jeff strolled away.
“How dare you take your leave when I have not dismissed you!”
“See? It’s like we’re married already.” Jeff fought laughter as Klio threw herself in his path.
“You would give up a throne? You would give up me?” She sounded like the second one was more incredible. She didn’t lack for confidence.
“I go where I want, do what I want. It’d take a lot to make me give it up.”
“Do you suggest there is no desire between us?” She narrowed her eyes. “Perhaps that’s why I had to force you to look upon my undraped form.”
“At the oasis? That insulted you, didn’t it?”
“It is a matter of etiquette! To avert one’s gaze from the naked flesh of another is to shame that person. I could have you whipped for such insolence!”
“Sorry. Not into whipping.” Jeff caught her up in his arms and lifted her so that their eyes met and their heads were perfectly even, height wise. “So if I saw you naked, you’d be happy?”
She sniffed. “Entirely. But only if you reciprocated.” She wound her arms about his neck. “I believe in having all things equal between a husband and wife.”
“Maybe you can convince me to stay,” he said, bringing his mouth down on hers.
She convinced him. Twice.