by Jonathan Olfert
in Issue 140, September 2023
Parok’s Well: a caravanserai, an enclosed camp along the salt trail from the corpse of Old Jegest to ravenous new kingdoms. For a caravaneer, Parok’s Well is a waypoint like any other in the Five Deserts: a milestone to dream about, and then to forget. Forget, too, the dusty man in the corner, clearly of a piece with every other soul on the road. He makes his living reading letters for you, writing them, or sketching simple maps. Charcoal portraits for a kiss, and the keenest ears around.
Not a bad man to know, if he takes a shine to you. Might be he’ll remember you next time you work the trail.
His name is Shuel. He’s been a notable portraitist, he says, painting kings and sketching princesses in their boudoirs. Their names change with every telling. He carries two small plain daggers: one for eating, and one with which he never, ever eats.
Winter comes down hard on the high desert, in places that switch between hot and cold quick as a king’s favor. When pregnant clouds force their way over distant mountain walls, they damp the sand and the dunes freeze, a treacherous crust over softness. Then comes the snow, and everyone in Parok’s Well runs out to dump it in the geriatric well and the cisterns and sealed pots. The snow won’t last. Just a breath of warm weather, just a crack in the door, and the desert will drink deep the first chance it gets.
That’s everyone working, too, even the caravan guards, the drunks, the joyboys and girls, the wounded, hangers-on, beggars, portraitists: dashing back and forth with pots and bundles, through gates gone slippery, laughing as they scavenge snow all day. Well into the night if they can, until some fool snaps a leg when a dune’s only frozen on top. The shrieking’s not enough to sour a mood, not around here, but they take the dregs of happiness indoors before the real cold comes.
That’s the picture — the screams of bone-setting, forty people shivering and laughing around the fires, snow-damp to the shin, boots off and steaming, and Shuel’s helping the alewives ply their trade, and all the water-stores are full enough for weeks. When bitter wind rips over the walls, into the compound, you just bull closer to the fire, and look up to see the stars unveiled. Nowhere’s got stars quite like the desert.
Nobody, however, barred the gate first. Because who’d go raiding on a night like this? For a thousand miles any which way, even the preacher-cults and cannibals are hoarding snow and warming up at their firesides. In fact that’s the local cannibals right over there, laughing-drunk with joyboys and girls and caravaneers. (Anyone who’s worked a long-haul salt caravan knows there’s shared interests aplenty.)
It’s a good night. Nobody’s barred the gate.
They all take the shriek for that leg being set. ‘Get him drunker than that, you animals,’ someone yells at what passes for doctors here, to much laughter. Shuel, though, who’s tasted all manner of screams on the wind — Shuel’s walk changes. He’s been circling with clay pots of local ale, gets a fingernail-sized copper piece for every pot he collects intact. So far he’s up to three and that’s fine, that’s a week’s meals if he stretches it, or a trinket for a girl who’ll give him a better spot to sleep.
When that first new shriek rolls through the gate, Shuel’s rolling amble tightens up, no wasted movement. Before the possibilities take shape in his head, the portraitist (maybe semi-exiled spy, some king’s eyes and ears at the edge of the world) has extricated himself from the crowd and deposited the tray of ale-pots on a barrel.
He’s got his eyes closed to seal out the light, let his vision adjust, and when he opens them he’s scanning the dark at the edges of the compound, peering through the gate, keeping his back to the fires to preserve what little night-vision he can muster on short notice. He’s two, three steps from the closest group: plenty of room to maneuver, to run, to vanish into the crowd, to pull that dagger he never uses for eating.
This is all automatic, faster than ale-muddled thought. Truth be told he’s tipsy enough that all this feels like — smells and tastes like — long-gone royal banquets when nastiness came calling.
There. His eyes fix on a shape coming through the gate. It moves uncaring, without the joyous rush of a pack-hound or the tactics of wolves. Big cats work alone in the jagged hills, and that’s close. But there’s arrogant cruelty in the gait as well, and that says human.
Steel catches starlight. The gleam flickers once down a long nimble blade, an expensive blade, and it’s gone. Sheathed, not in a scabbard but in the back of a caravan guard coming in from the jakes.
The guard gets out a scream as the blade slips between spine and ribs and lungs, dead center until it thunks against the inside of his sternum. The great vessels under the heart are ribbons. Blood pours down his back and legs in surging waves. His killer, the presence in the dark, has already yanked the blade free and moved on.
Twenty feet away Shuel flinches. Despite the gloom, he knows that kill.
When the long blade hacks into the falling guard’s skull, sends a spatter into the caravanserai’s side buildings and hutches, and ends the screaming, Shuel sees a grin in the dark.
“I murdered you,” Shuel whispers through numb lips, and as the caravanserai explodes in terror, the shape turns that grin his way.
The enemy is standing in the only gate. Caravaneers lunge for the dubious safety of their sleeping camels and stacked salt-bundles. Steel slithers free of scabbards. Terrified fools, or maybe the wisest, clamber up the compound wall and throw themselves over into the dregs of the snow. The sand is crusted hard tonight: bones crack, but they’re safer outside the wall, and good for them.
Shuel melts into the chaos, keeping distance from the killer but unsure which way to go. He needs a moment to think past the ale.
A knot of caravan guards, conveniently, chooses now to seek revenge. The stranger’s long blade slithers and whips, flicking spearheads away, biting deep into spearshafts far enough from the heads that splinters will confound their wielders, rip their hands open depending on the moves they try. It’s elegant work. Sir Daine Larjess always had flair.
No court has two factions unless war is imminent, and maybe not even then. Try sixteen. If Shuel’s memory serves, Daine put his sword through five great heirs, usually in contrived duels over women or gambling. He had a knack and a taste for it, and though his killing earned him favor in various quarters, he rebuffed favor when it demanded exclusivity. No, Daine killed for Daine.
Shuel was, in those days, called Murietto: a portraitist, a secret-gleaner and occasional poisoner, a powerful gamepiece who knew his place. But very often, his was the brush that adorned the ceramic funerary masks of pretty boys and girls who died with Daine’s name on their lips.
Murietto the poisoner had, of course, no right to feel indignation, no ground to stand on, but you lived with hypocrisy every day you were at court. So as he painted those young people’s masks, he gave himself permission to feel regardless, and to act on that feeling.
From there, what to say? A poisoned dagger at a ball, one last death-mask painted, and an ignominious posting in which to rot. On balance, he’d kill Daine again and take the exile, given the chance to do it over. Some men need to be ended.
About to climb over the wall, Shuel pauses on the roof of a brewing-stall and looks back at the carnage.
A corpse is burning, and the ruins of a wagon used for shelter. By that light, Daine is finally visible as a human shape. He moves back and forth killing. His death-mask, a porcelain shell across his upper face, is resplendent with the complex Larjess coat of arms that Murietto, Shuel, put there fifteen years ago.
The palaces of Palako are awash with strange deals and terrible sorcery; the Five Deserts have far different mysteries. Between those two lives, Shuel knows various kinds of living dead when he sees them, and Daine doesn’t move like one. And that adds nuance, self-doubt, even a spark of interest — because clearly Shuel made a mistake along the way, or he’s been played. Fifteen years back, did someone switch his lethal acosar gum for a similar-looking poison that would simulate death? Wouldn’t they have needed to know Shuel planned to kill Daine, then steal his dagger, clean off the acosar, add their own substance, clean that off and add more acosar after stealing the dagger again once Daine was dead, and navigate all that in the context of Shuel cleaning Daine’s blood from the crevices of the weapon…?
None of it seems remotely possible. The puzzle has its teeth in him. He bartered that fine dagger for food and trade goods years ago, or he’d have gone and investigated right now despite the deaths unfolding in Parok’s Well. Despite the near-certainty that, as he crouches here on the hut’s roof with a hand on the walltop, the dead man butchering the caravanserai is here, primarily, for him.
“Murietto,” sings Daine in his fine tenor, ripping his sword from a woman’s back.
Shuel winces at the death, the escalating stench, and slips over the wall.
The compound wall is ten feet high. Others came down this way with varying success. One man, a trade combine’s quartermaster Shuel considers more or less a friend, made the jump with a strongbox on his shoulder. His legs have punched through the frozen crust into loose sand and snapped crazily below the knees. His feet and shins are still embedded in the earth though he lies moaning on his face. His name is Joresh and he’ll never stand again.
A fresh well of feeling bubbles up in Shuel. As the sound of butchery wafts over the wall, he takes his poisoned dagger — a plain little thing — from its careful anchor in his boot. He rests a hand on Joresh’s upper back to steady himself and offer sympathy. Quick and clean through the neck is the way to do it: the blade’s acosar gum will end Joresh’s suffering in the space of a heartbeat.
Instead of killing, Shuel finds himself pricking the backs of Joresh’s strained thighs, a handspan from where the reversed shinbones jut up behind the knees. Blood spurts up in the blade’s wake with a healthy pressure. A nick of an acosar-doped weapon can numb, weaken, set a mark up for kidnap or just keep them from foolishness. Joresh will still lose both legs below the knee if he lives at all, but live he might, and his moans grow slurred.
With one ear on the continuing violence inside the compound, Shuel puts the dagger away and hauls Joresh up to roll him over. The quartermaster’s lower legs flop and grate in unsettling ways. Shuel takes off Joresh’s belt and uses it for a quick tourniquet around both legs, for whatever that’s worth.
“Best I can do,” Shuel says, and for once he means it, guilt pricking at him since, after all— “This one’s on me.”
The strongbox lies nearby, cracked open. Gold gleams inside. He pockets a couple of pieces — tomorrow could bring anything — and moves on.
Sand-choked crags overlook the Parok’s Well compound and the road, blocking summer sandstorms from the desert’s heart. Up in the hills, in the ruins of a burned-out cannibal camp, Shuel lies flat among old bones at a perfect vantage point.
Wind stirs a dozen haphazard fires down there. Squinting, Shuel can make out at least that many bodies. Everyone else has found refuge in the near or distant dark. One last figure moves around unhurriedly with sword in hand, starlight shimmering on his porcelain mask.
“You think I’ll come back,” Shuel mumbles, “or you think I’m still there. Why? I could vanish into the hills, so why aren’t you hunting?”
The most obvious answer, he figures, is the curiosity gnawing at his heart. Daine had the measure of him once, knew him for a man who liked secrets and questions, and assumes Shuel’s still that man. Assumes, too, that Shuel would need to know if he’d made a mistake or been betrayed fifteen years back. (He has, of course, been betrayed more recently, or else Daine could never have found him, not if Daine spent a lifetime searching the towns and caravanserais of the salt roads. That much is clear.)
An ugly possibility takes hold, uglier than these petty betrayals, uglier than the prospect of his own incompetence.
If — if — he stabbed Daine with some other venom back in the day, if someone arranged that, perhaps it was the angry patrons who sent Murietto down the salt trail to become Shuel. Perhaps he was simply shuffled off as a less useful asset than Daine: a listening ear kept far away, first in reserve or as a joke, and then forgotten.
That’s got the ring of truth, mostly because it’s how Shuel would do it. It’s as elegant as Daine’s swordplay, and it’s funny too. Fifteen years they’ve been laughing back in Palako about the fop who thought he killed the duellist.
And what’s changed? What’s let them turn Daine loose and send him here? Maybe Daine’s just that influential now, free to kill, and he’s here for fun. Maybe he’s always known where Shuel was and, like the patrons they mostly shared, never bothered to end him.
Now, Shuel is no stranger to wrath. Anger’s driven him to do his share of good and ill, mostly the latter. But it’s been a helpless frustration, a whining shitty fury good for nothing but a blade in the dark. Farther back, killing only when his patrons allowed — yes, plenty of frustration back then too, rage watered down. Truth be told, killing Daine was the only moment he felt strong, that and when he set out on his salt trail exile, happy with what he’d done. Happy he’d mastered himself enough to slip the leash and take what came of it.
That happiness is long gone. But so’s the frustration, because he owes nobody anything, except of course the bodies down there. And Daine and all the rest who made a fool of him.
He has no proof of any of this, but a blade doesn’t need proof to adjudicate.
Now it’s his turn to be the monster in the open gate, and Daine’s inside waiting. Daine’s killed over twenty locals and caravaneers, run through or sheared apart or both, sprawled across Parok’s Well. It would help if Shuel could think of them as terrain. Gods, Shuel thinks, he’s killed the camels.
Daine isn’t even breathing hard. He moves like ink. Gore mars the painted mask and dulls the starlight on his blade, double-edged and needle-straight. That gilded crossguard had amethysts, if memory serves: fresh blood has turned them all to rubies. He wears flowing black weighed down by spatter. He’s smiling.
“How long did you all laugh at me?” says Shuel. He takes out the poisoned dagger for all the good it can do against that sword. There are wiser ways out here — starvation, for one, or fire — but he needs this. He knows a distant kill would taste like watered wine gone sour.
“Years and years, Murietto. We’re still laughing.” One gloved finger taps the temple of the funerary mask and leaves a red mark. “I’ve kept this on my mantlepiece. I wear it out to galas, or to get my portrait painted.”
Shuel fights for the old cold, fights not to be provoked, and fails. “By whom?”
“The portraitist? Lord Lachmat.”
“That hack painting my work?”
Daine laughs now and means it. The contempt is real. “I believe he also repainted your studio.”
Shuel moves. He feels Daine’s eyes on the dagger, as expected: an acosar-doped short blade is as much his signature as that long thin sword of Daine’s. Behind his back Shuel’s got another blade, a workknife he took off Joresh, who’s unconscious but alive, belt still tight around his knees. That ugly knife whips up in an underhand throw. Not much to do out here but throw knives and dream.
Daine blocks and gets a piece of it. Harder than you’d think to stop a whirling knife with a length of slippery steel. The knife skitters down the sword, whines off that bloody crossguard, and bites Daine’s shoulder in passing. Not a soul here left a mark on him — not the guards or the joyboys who, most nights, know their way around staying alive — so Shuel lands that hit by way of apology.
The next few, if he can swing it, will be just for him.
As Daine slinks back into stance, trying to disavow the hurt, Shuel jams the poisoned dagger into his boot and comes up with a caravan guard’s spear. Not a weapon he knew back in the day: spears are too common for court. Out here in the desert, where good steel’s pricey, they’re as ubiquitous as knives. Shuel takes that spear midway down the shaft with his left hand, plants his strong hand down near the splayed-out wooden end, and keeps his feet loose.
Dirty, shaggy man with a spear. Daine’s killed a dozen of him. Would be more, but he was busy killing cuckolded lords or princes terrible at cards.
Daine takes a proper duellist’s stance: left hand back, left foot pointed out, right side forward, hips and torso turned to minimize target area. The stance is effortless and clean. Shuel knows Daine won’t get sloppy, contemptuous or not. Daine’s had that kind of fun tonight already.
All’s not lost. On these roads they call the spear the king of weapons. You can do a swordsman a lot of inconvenience with a spear even if he knows his business. And Shuel’s left-side-forward, as if Daine was fencing a lefty, so that’s something. Without taking his eyes off Daine, Shuel punches the spearhead into a nearby dead man’s bowels and brings it up filthy, a threat of festering. Is that a flinch behind the coat-of-arms mask?
Daine moves in. His sword flicks out to bat Shuel’s spearhead aside for a more committed strike; Shuel backpedals, cringes away, and the sword point slices his forearm. Could’ve bit much deeper, but the gore on there may fester: a problem for tomorrow.
Shuel loosens his left fist and shoves forward with his right. The spear jabs like a duellist’s lunge, forcing Daine to dance back. The spear retracts rattlesnake-fast before Daine can hack at the wooden shaft, and Shuel lashes out again, low. Daine parries and a wood-chip flies.
They probe at each other like this, back and forth across the body-strewn compound, between the fires, feet skidding through sparks and slush and bloody sand. They’re not young men, but they’re well-forged in different ways. Daine has trained for this. Shuel has kept himself alive.
The cut burns on his forearm, but not like it should. A trace of acosar on the sword, Shuel figures, whatever’s left after that sword passed through twenty men and women. Not enough to slow him after twenty years of exposure to his favorite venom, he hopes. Not enough to kill.
He has another cause for hope: he knows Parok’s Well perfectly.
When he needs greater traction for a thrust, Shuel anchors his foot in the hollow where he dug out the corner post of Gaila’s old workshop. When he ducks back into Keyashan’s stall, Shuel knows the ragged thatch conceals a sturdy beam, a shelter that buys him time. When Daine chases him through hulking dead camels, Shuel rocks the rickety trough with his boot, fouling Daine’s balance with a surge of slop. When the spearshaft splinters into ruin, Shuel casts it in Daine’s face and snags the spear that Joresh kept under the counter of his open-air hutch in case of raiders. This spear is rustier but has an eager edge.
As Daine loses patience, chasing Shuel through huts and stalls and workshops and up onto the snow-slick walltop, Shuel struggles to bring the old spear to bear. They’re bleeding from half a dozen shallow cuts apiece. It’s full pursuit until Shuel leaps across the top of the open gate and somehow lands it.
The wall is mud brick and three handspans across, no more. He turns crouching and sets the spear, and Daine pulls up short instead of risking the jump. Smart man.
Shuel’s breath rattles like a snake behind his sternum. He musters a smile and keeps Joresh’s spear where it is, ready to impale Daine if he follows.
“Oh, nicely played,” Daine says. Somewhere along the way he’s cracked the paint on his funerary mask, and it breaks Shuel’s heart to see his painting ruined. Other than a secret and embarrassing experiment with camel hair, he hasn’t held a paintbrush since he left Palako.
Shuel comes up throwing his acosar dagger — and leaping again, knees on fire, right back the way he came.
Daine’s sword flicks the dagger into the dark and gets back in line to impale, but the spearshaft catches the sword. The edge bites, first shallow then deep, tangling sword and spear between the two men. Shuel’s boots skid on the walltop and his full weight smashes into Daine’s chest, into that delicate fencing stance. The sword lacerates them both — first on impact and then, writhing, as they fall.
A hot sunrise wakes Daine from acosar-stifled dreams; Shuel’s been watching since the stars left. The last of the snow is steaming on thirsty dunes.
The pair of them are in the crags, the cannibal ruin overlooking Parok’s Well. Convenient source for leather thongs strong enough to bind a man of action. Daine’s suspended from scorched poles in a cleft of rock, a butcher-spot dyed brown. The wind has stolen all the scent of old blood and new: Daine wakes naked, bleeding out through poison-numbed cuts all down his legs. Lean thigh muscles, severed up high and split along the fiber, dangle around his shins in plump lengths like sausage on display. Daine will never walk again, never so much as crawl. He can’t feel it, but he can see wet bone where his thighs used to be. To his credit he doesn’t scream.
“I loved a…hunter here back when,” Shuel says. “Taught me a lot about getting by. Her cooking wasn’t to my liking, but she knew her business. Ah.” He tips the point of his reclaimed dagger at Daine’s face, and feels his voice shift back toward the registers of older days. “There. That’s the sweet moment when a man knows he’s well and truly done.”
He leaves it at that. Daine’s not inclined to talk, but nor is he smiling now.
He smiles even less when Shuel — painfully — shrugs into Daine’s black clothes, belts the long sword around his waist, and dons the painted death-mask.
Apart from shaving (and that’s easily done if your dagger’s keen), Shuel figures he still looks similar enough to Daine to get by in the dark. And palaces, they’re full of dark corners, aren’t they?
©September 2023, Jonathan Olfert
Jonathan Olfert‘s paleofiction, SFF, and horror has arguably proliferated farther than it deserves. His sword-and-sorcery tales have appeared in Old Moon Quarterly, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, previously in Swords & Sorcery, among others. He and his family live in Atlantic Canada.