"Song preserve us... We are all going to die..!"
Rakim's mud-brown eyes stab a pitiless glower at lanky young Bilar. I will fucking not, he vows to himself. But you might, runt.
Yet even he can't pretend that things don't look grim.
What's left of the ragtag bandit gang stands in a haphazard circle around a pair of corpses tumbled into the leeside of a steep golden dune. These comrades didn't die cleanly; sightless eyes bulge bloodshot in purple-black faces, their tongues swollen in screaming mouths. Even with the winds high and the sand in his eyes, Little Ritt - a Kiliku outcast and the company's foremost tracker - followed their trail easily. The deaths are still fresh and yet already putrid.
Unnatural.
As the rearguard, Jasaad arrives to the grisly scene last. His camel lollops into the dune's sloping shadow, and he springs from its back to sprint the last few yards. Grizzled old Wisik steps aside to make way for him, weathered features set grave. Jasaad rocks to a staggered halt when he sees the foul end made for the deserters. Or rather, one of them in particular.
Detached, Rakim watches the first wave of pain shatter across the taller man's sharp face, and wonders why Jasaad didn't try to escape with these two. Well, no matter. He made the right call, even if it may not feel that way right now. His lover is dead and he is not yet.
"... So," rumbles Wisik through his shaggy silver beard. Like closing a metal gate over his heart, he folds thick-bracered forearms across his stout chest, and looks among his fellows. He finds the lesson here. "There is no running from it... Now we know."
Ritt rises from where he had been crouched examining sand clumped with bile. "Who here can blame them for trying," he mutters wearily, tugging his scarf up over his snub nose.
Not Rakim. He'd thought about bailing out too.
"So what, then?" asks Bilar, looking from face to face among the older bandits, sepia eyes bright with despair. "We sit around and wait for our turn? Take bets on who is next?"
"—I wager 20 dirham on the hope that it is you," sneers Rakim, tolerance grated away.
Bilar reddens and glares down at his patchy khuffs. The retort is bitten back. For now. Bleakly, Rakim predicts that if things get much more desperate, fear will drive this one to try something foolish. These trials have worn the group down to a red-raw nub. Loyalty and respect are always somewhere in the sequence of casualties. Rakim knows from experience.
Wisik glances between them, then speaks again. "We must face facts. None of us possess the power to end this before it ends us." Not this again... Yet Rakim finds himself more receptive this time. He mulls it over while the old man repeats what he's been saying for days now: "We must seek someone who does."
The mere suggestion rings of taboo — Ritt recites a prayer in an unfamiliar tongue, traces a quick series of notes in the air, and spits over his left pauldron.
"And invite an even greater damnation?" argues Bilar, mopping sweat off his hairless lip with his sleeve. "We should be praying, not questing after devils. Only God can grant mercy to anyone so thoroughly fucked."
"We are not fucked, whelp," Wisik contradicts in a growl. "Not yet."
Bilar rounds on the older man, voice cracking. "Tell that to Aqi and Fe—!"
"—Do not speak their names!" forbids Jasaad through grit teeth.
A tense hush falls. Wordlessly, Wisik settles a big hand onto the Tessouare's shoulder.
Kicked over by the wind, sand dashes off the dune's curving peak in a fine powder. It swirls around the five men, tugging at sweaty hair and tatty clothing. Above, the sky is a crisp larimar blue like the disc of a giant's cold eye, pale and pristine. But the hazy wall of brown air on the eastern horizon threatens change before nightfall.
Rakim supposes that if there really is anything to be done, it should be done now. Things are growing more dire every day.
It started with their food and water, turned to ash and sludge. When it moved on to the animals, Rakim first grew disturbed — the way their broken bodies were found, arranged just-so, all bent to the sun as if answering a call.
Then the first man died, drowned in his own blood. A strange sigil blistered the underside of his tongue where it wilted on his chest, bitten off. While his Brother succumbs to a slower death, five others have passed. Some of them, Rakim even liked, and now misses.
One, however, was because Rakim poisoned them, taking advantage of the chaos to cover the murder. The man was a liability, and his Brother had been talking of cutting him loose. The drained casks of heqet Rakim had pierced in the night were blamed upon these strange miseries too. He couldn't afford to let the men turn to drink in their anguish — nothing productive ever comes of that. The last of the qat was shared out as consolation; better to be alert than stupefied.
But with each additional death, each uncanny misfortune, it's become harder to deny that something is very wrong. As much as his practical Omrazi heart - solid all the way through - might reject such superstition... what other explanation is there?
Maybe she really did curse them.
Nothing else for it then. If Rakim is to die, it will not be due to inaction. He sucks in a deep breath, fights back a gag when the sweet pong of rot hits, and shakes some energy into his weary frame.
"Well," Rakim begins as he stalks forward, feeling all their eyes trailing after him like the tattered cloak at his heels. "The rest of you slugs can stand around and cry, if you like." He approaches the bodies, pausing by Little Ritt to lash him with the fire of his eyes. "But I will not lie down and surrender to the witch, however terrible her power may be."
Ritt holds his gaze steadily. Ritt never balks. Rakim likes that about him.
So Rakim pushes his luck and helps himself to the bone-handled kard on Ritt's belt, tugging it free. The shorter man frowns, but doesn't protest. He only asks in his soft-spoken way, "What will you do, then..?"
There's no reply at first. Rakim turns away to pop a squat in the stained sand beside the younger of the dead men. He slashes a scrap off the end of his cloak and wraps it around the cadaver's hand. Then he hacks into its blackened pinky finger without so much as blinking.
Behind him, he can feel Jasaad react. When he casually turns to look over his shoulder, he sees that Wisik is holding the Tessouare back, and Rakim is only being savaged by a pair of murderous peridot eyes. Rakim just blinks at him, unbothered. He supposes that he could have taken flesh from the other corpse. Whoops... How insensitive of me. But what's done is done.
Bones crunch and snap before the finger is ripped loose, wrapped up, and stashed away. Congealed blood spackles the site like beads of black dew.
Rakim stabs the kard into the sand there and rises to his feet to look among the men. Then he finally tells Ritt, "... Burn the bodies and go back to camp."
That's not an answer — it's an order. Reactions are as mixed as the cultures here represented; depending on who you ask, that is not a Godly way to send off the dead. But nobody argues. Jasaad shakes Wisik off to tend to the smaller corpse himself.
With that, Rakim turns his back on his comrades and goes, scuffing his way through the churned-up sand toward where the mounts wait and ignoring the churning of his own guts. He rode here on a camel, but now gathers into his gloved fist the reins of Ritt's scouting steed: a small horse, thin-coated and lightly-muscled, built for speed, stolen from a patrol encountered south of Koba last year. Up until two days ago, they had three such beasts. This one is the last.
"I will go with you, Spider," is called after him. Rakim doesn't have to look to know that it's Wisik, but he looks anyway. "You will not," he snaps, unstrapping Ritt's saddlebags to let them thud to the ground. "You will only slow me down."
"—What? You— what?" Bilar drops the ankles of the dead man he'd been shifting and pops up like a meerkat. He grabs at Jasaad's sleeve. "—he is not really going, is he? To the devil? He will not truly..."
"Why not wait until morning?" This time it's Ritt, watching Rakim with the same frown from before. He points east. "The Jinn are on the march. It is reckless to cross in their path."
If Rakim rolled his eyes any harder they might pop out of his ugly skull. "And it is suicide to cross mine!" he barks back as he swings up into the saddle, patience scattered like sand on the wind.
In truth, he'd gladly take any one of these excuses not to go. He's arguing against himself as much as the others.
But before he can so much as wheel the horse about-face, a pale hand latches onto his knee. Rakim blinks affront and bewilderment down at Bilar as he's jostled by the horse now nickering and stamping. "Do not go, brother!" the boy yells up at him, wild-eyed, making a frantic grab for the reins. "You will damn us all! Do not go, brother! Please, brother!" An explosive pressure is building in Rakim's chest. Behind, Wisik is lumbering up to intervene. But too slow.
Does Rakim only imagine the flash of steel in Bilar's other hand? Does he see it because he expects to see it? Was it perhaps a bit of jewellery or a buckle or clasp? These ideas are given no time to air.
Brother. Brother. Brother.
Rakim snatches Bilar's wrist. He yanks it high and hard, pulling him off-balance. And into the boy's yelping face, he snarls a hot severance: "I make no kinship with sniveling cowards."
The draw of Rakim's shotel is a singing arc extended in crimson. A cry, a whinny, a shout. And hooves beat sand flat in a receding thunder.
Rakim doesn't look back to see if there are now three bodies to burn.