Sandymancer

by David Edison

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Epic Fantasy; Science Fiction Fantasy; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

A wild girl with sand magic in her bones and a mad god who is trying to fix the world he broke come together in Sandymancer, a genre-warping mashup of weird fantasy and hard science fiction.



All Caralee Vinnet has ever known is dust. Her whole world is made up of the stuff; water is the most precious thing in the cosmos. A privileged few control what elements remain. But the world was not always a dust bowl and the green is not all lost.



Caralee has a secret—she has magic in her bones and can draw up power from the sand beneath her feet to do her bidding. But when she does she winds up summoning a monster: the former god-king who broke the world 800 years ago and has stolen the body of her best friend.



Caralee will risk the whole world to take back what she's lost. If her new companion doesn't kill her first.

Release date: September 19, 2023

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

Excerpt

Mag didn’t look so old up close, once you saw beneath her weathered locs—and Wet Sam was older—but for some reason that Caralee hadn’t yet worked out, people called her “Old Mag” all the same. Now, Mag did order everybody about worse than Wet Sam, who tended the shatterscat pit and had nobody to yap at. Joe told Caralee that the nickname “Old Mag” was a sign of respect, but Caralee didn’t think that told the whole story. Alderwoman Jackie did more ordering- about than anyone, but her hair hadn’t gone gray, and wasn’t she respected? Mag also knew a fair bit more than most folk in the village, but Caralee didn’t think that explained it, either. Nobody called Marm-marm old, and she knew more than anyone for miles.

What a life aheadda me.

Caralee couldn’t understand why folk expected a young woman like herself would stick around in a place with no name—especially if all she had to look forward to was being called old just for being capable, and when would people start to notice that, anyway? She was still sore that nobody’d noticed how she’d totally won her first wizards’ duel.

Mag’s hair was locked into tight twists, that hung thick over her shoulder, and was blasted by sun and sand into a sort of gray-white-brown speckle. Her dark face had lines, sure, and her swollen knuckles looked like they hurt, but she’d hopped into the cart almost as spryly as Caralee. Caralee wondered if Mag had ever wanted to see the world and whether or not she had done so.

Joe sat up front with Mag on the cart’s proper seat, while Caralee rode in the back with a dozen bags of cable plant, six sacks of cable flour, two bushels of cable wicker, a bundle of cable rattan, and another half dozen bushels of cable hay. That was a full shipment, all bound for market. Caralee bounced around like a sandfisher’s bait ear, but whenever the ride became too rocky, she’d whistle a certain up-and-down critter- call, and Oti and Atu would steady their pace. Mag held the reins, but the burden- critters always listened to Caralee—she let the docile insects show her their love, sloppy as it was, and she fed them her own scat in secret. There wasn’t a better way under the sun to befriend a critter than a fresh handful of your own shit.

The critters, Atu and Oti, were a life pair—hatched from the same egg, they were sterile workers, but mates all the same. The way they frittered over each other, tendered each other when one was injured, and screeched whenever parted—it was a bond as tight as any marriage, if sexless. Then again, it seemed to Caralee that once folk made a babe or six, things turned away from lust toward partnership.

The wisdom of bugs.

Their gleaming bronze- and- green antennae rose above the cart, almost as high as Joe’s head, frilled with long, soft bristles that looked like fur or feathers. Their heads and thoraxes reflected the sky through bronze mirrors, and their mottled pink- and- black proboscises were soft as toothless gums. They loved to kiss and suckle Caralee, and she liked it, too, even when her cheek came away scatty.

Beyond the two pairs of antennae, Caralee saw the wasteland open to a mostly flat platter of wind and sand interrupted by craggy outcroppings and wrinkled with long fingers of what had once been riverbeds. Above the wasteland, the noonday sky was almost purple, and the brightest stars twinkled even now. Caralee knew that the sky had once been brighter during the daytime, but when she imagined it—wouldn’t the world be hard to see, with all that light up above? Wouldn’t it be blinding?

The wind’s howl calmed into a thready fluting, and Caralee scanned the horizon. Would the wasteland ever answer her questions? Could she conjure up a sandy mannikin to tell her the truth? Caralee thought she’d sacrifice anything to know more, to go places, to be someone.

The halfway point of their trip to market rose in the distance at its awkward, leaning angle. A towering block of beige stone with a circle cut out toward the top, these steles had supported massive tendrils of the Vine as they crept across the land to touch the corners of the world. The Vine had wormed through the earth, slid across the soil, and coiled overhead. Once, the Vine had been everywhere—but now, only giant tombstones remained. Tombstones and cable plant.

So tall was the stele that as they approached, the monument seemed to rise higher than anything should—and they were still a good hour away. Soon they’d be able to see the worn carvings the stele bore. It thrilled Caralee to run her fingers over the sandworn inscriptions, written in a language that hadn’t been spoken in hundreds of years.

“Hoo boy, Caralee.” Joe lumbered right through her train of thought. “You ent never been to Grenshtepple’s before. The way you moon over them standing stones, I reckon you’ll just eat up all that Grenshtepple’s has to show.”

“Joe, leave the girl alone. She’s got thoughts enough in her head,” Mag scolded Joe without looking, also watching the horizon. Always scanning for danger, Mag kept her brood close and safe. She’d taught Caralee and Joe the same, although only Caralee seemed to listen.

“I have too been to Grenshtepple’s!” Caralee argued, anyway. “So leave me alone… I need more room for my thoughts.”

Mag hissed a laugh and looked over her shoulder toward Caralee with a wink.

Joe. In more than a few of those thoughts in her head, Joe did not leave her alone, but that was a whole other thing.

As the cart rumbled on, Caralee pictured how the land might have looked all those centuries ago. Vines as tall as the mountains sprouting from the northwest and never far from sight all the world over. A wicked prince, captured by all the king’s soldiers and sentenced to a death that kept him alive forever as a spirit trapped inside a stone.

She imagined that the prison—the matzeva, Eusebius had called it—looked like a giant tombstone ten times as tall as any stele, only instead of carving his name into the stone, they carved him, trapped. Sandymancers full of the old power, who could stop the man but not the ghost—who could save the day but not the world. Real sandymancers, not that candle-capped treebone who’d embarrassed her in front of everyone.

Just as Caralee had put Joe out of her thoughts, he stumbled into them again.

“Naw,” Joe said, still teasing Caralee about their destination and the sights she wouldn’t have time to see there, “you been to Grenshtepple’s, but did you get farther than the outsiders’ market? Did you listen to the singing stones? See the upside-down garden?” Joe shook his head. “Nawp. Don’t think you did.” He began humming a merry little tune. She hadn’t heard that tune before. Where’d Joe go and learn a new song? Grenshtepple’s? Stones don’t sing.

Unless they did.

“Late. We’re late.” Mag clocked the sun and huffed. They were late already? “Now the girl will be calling up that mannikin of hers in the middle of some woesome ruins, and her sandymancy will shout out to all the dust wights and chucklers and shadoweyes and spinecrunchers and wobbledygrouks, and she’ll get us all killed because of your teasing.”

Mag made up half of those names, but she made them up scary. Caralee pressed her lips into a line as Mag complained.

“That’s what I get for raising an orphan girl alongside my pup Joe. Shoulda kept to my own litter’s litter and left the wee wizard here to the mercy of the sands. Shoulda—but didn’t—and that’s more than half the wisdom I’ve learned in sixty years living in this wretched, broken, roustabout world.” Mag didn’t mean a word she said, and they all knew it.

“Mag?” Caralee asked. “Ent you seventy?”

“That’s what I said, girl.” Mag spat and pretended to wipe at a spot on the side of the cart that didn’t exist.

“Naw, you said sixty.” Then, “And don’t call me ‘girl.’”

“Naw, I said seventy. I shoulda said seventy- four, anyway, so we can all agree that I misspoke.” Mag looked at the horizon again. “We’ll make the bunkadown well before sunset at Caralee’s favorite place ever and reach Comez tomorrow afternoon. We’ll lodge there and get to Grenshtepple’s in three days’ time total.” Mag grunted. “Which is a day longer than usual, thanks to you two and that goon of a wizard… Buncha shatterscat, anyhow, that sandymancing.”

“Three days?” Caralee whined. She heard the girl in her voice and pinched herself for it. She was basically sixteen now and far from a girl, and she should talk like it.

“Aww.” Joe kicked the front of the cart and winced. “Three days is forever.”

That’s another thing we can agree on.

“Yes boy, three days.” Mag looked behind her to flash Caralee that look— it had more power than any sandymancy. “I know you’re hot in the pants to go exploring, but you keep calm about it. We bunk for the night, each and every time. You hear?”

Caralee hung her head. “I hear, Mag.”

“You, too, Joe Dunderhead.” She poked Joe’s big, round shoulder. “Either of you feel like reminding me why we don’t ride at night?”

Caralee answered first on her schoolgirl’s instinct. “Because we ent Patchfolk who know the secret ways, and we ent burden- critters who can skitter away from a dunderbeast’s maw, and we ent got guards to keep away the chuckleheads, scavengers, and dust wights. And because we ent stupid, is we, Caralee?” Caralee wagged her own finger in her face. “No, Caralee, we ent stupid. We’re smart and go to sleep in safe places so we don’t get eaten up in the dark.”

Mag sucked her teeth and scratched her forehead with a gray loc. “You got a smart mouth, girl, but that’s the sum of it, with no remainder.”

Caralee thought to add that you didn’t get remainders when doing sums, but kept her peace. That might count as smart-mouthed talk, even though it was smart, and Mag was smart, too, so what was her problem? Caralee long ago decided that if she had a family of her own, she’d let all her daughters talk as smart as they wanted, even if they did tend toward sass from time to time.

***

After some lip- biting on Caralee’s part and a measure of silence from Mag, the cart wobbled down into the dry riverbed that cradled this section of the road. From here to the stele, they followed the dead river that eventually became more canyon than riverbed. Caralee felt relief at escaping, for a while, the flat world that she saw every day, with its endless and endlessly tempting horizon. On either side, the riverbanks ran unevenly, like teeth in a maw, striped in shades of golds and reds and oranges.

They rode on, merrily enough if silent, until the critters crawled to a stop and would not be budged. It took a moment for the humans to hear what had startled Oti and Atu into stubbornness. It was a groan, a groan loud enough to be heard over the clackety wheels of the cart and the sixteen skittering legs of the critters.

Mag’s ears pricked up and her face went dark. She held her arm out to protect or stop Joe from moving, as if either were possible with Joe Dunes.

“Don’t. You. Move,” Mag growled through clenched teeth. Mag was always fiddling with something—the reins, a stray loc, boxing Joe’s ear for some completely understandable reason. You knew things were dire if Mag froze up, and just then, she was still as a fallen rock. The woman had a nose like none other, and hearing sharper than Caralee’s own.

The groan sounded again, from behind two toothy outcroppings separated by a narrow crevice.

Mag’s breath came fair to stopping; she looked afraid to exhale.

The noise grew closer, louder from the gap, joined by scraping, shuffling sounds. The crevice looked narrow, but not narrow enough to hinder many of the dangers Mag had taught Caralee and Joe to fear.

A woman stumbled through. She was caked in blood, her eyes white with sun-blindness, feeling her way with her hands. Crusted black blood covered most of her skin, and one of her legs was badly broken, with shattered yellow bone jutting out above her knee. Somehow she walked, anyway—hopping on her good leg, but still she put some weight on her broken leg, which sagged sideways with each limp- hop- step, pushing the broken bone farther out of her torn thigh. Ragged holes ruined her face, peeling away in patches. A dead woman, or near enough, moving about when she should be rattling her last breath.

The wounded woman groaned again, and it sounded like something rotten had snapped in her throat.

“Hhh- ello…” The stranger’s head rolled around a neck too weak to support its weight.

Aside from the horror of a walking corpse, Caralee saw something odd at once—felt, more like. Sandymancy? Beyond the woman’s nigh- impossible injuries, something strange shimmered around her body—like a mirage down a long flat road. The stranger, she… she changed.

Her short hair was brown. His long hair was black.

He laughed. She whimpered.

The woman shook. Her broken face was whole, then broken again. His perfect jaw was lined with dark stubble, then hers was smooth and shattered again. She was short, then tall, then short again. Full-bosomed, then muscle-chested. It was as if two people warred for the same body.

The stranger collapsed to one side, clawing with an arm at the dirt.

“She’s hurt!” Joe cried and jumped out of the cart, pushing past Mag’s outstretched arm.

Mag and Caralee both reached out to stop him, but he’d already slipped past their reach, and besides, Joe was beastly strong. Apparently, he was also suicidal. Mag’s rules weren’t for nothing, and Caralee knew it. Joe knew it, too.

He’s too kind, a part of her fawned.

“Joe Dunes, don’t you dare!” Mag shouted, and the burden- critters screeched, but Joe paid no heed. “The rules, Joe—don’t you dare!”

Caralee scrabbled out of the cart to give chase, and Mag shouted at her, too.

The shifting, wounded stranger pulled herself across the ground. “Who was my guide?” she said in a voice that was not a woman’s voice. “Where is my good wizard, who shook the earth to lead me out?”

The horror drooled onto the riverbed, eyes rolling back into their sockets, and coughed up a blood clot the size of Caralee’s fist.

Joe squatted low and reached out with his big hands to help her. He slipped one arm underneath her armpit, and with the other, he took her hand in his, ready to heave her up. She moaned when he moved her, in her womanly voice.

“You’re okay. You’re gonna be fine.” Idiot Joe lied to the dying, flickering wanderer. “I’m gonna get you up, all right?” His concern was obvious, as was his distress. For all his size and strength, Joe wasn’t made for tending to the injured. It shook him to see that kind of pain up and close.

“Joe Dunes, don’t you dare!” Mag screamed. Caralee had never heard Mag so wild.

“Come on now, one big lift and that’s it. I’ll be real gentle. It’ll all be fine.”

Only Joe stopped still. Instead of lifting the woman to her feet, Joe froze in place—not a wary stillness like Mag but an awful, unnatural paralysis. Mid-squat, mid-lift, arms and legs flexed—there was no way that anyone, even someone as strong as Joe, could stop in that position and stay there, so terrifyingly still.

Mag screamed over and over, chiseling the air with pure panic.

Caralee rushed to Joe, but stopped short and pulled away when she saw the look in his eyes. Joe’s eyes were light brown—at least they should have been. Instead, Caralee saw eyes much darker, almost black. If eyes could smile, these were laughing.

No, it can’t be. But those flashing dark eyes were real. They were real, and they looked out from Joe’s face. No. NoNo. Nonononononono.

Owing to her head so full of stories, so pesky and bothersome, Caralee knew just what that stillness meant. Caralee knew exactly who’d walked in that dying woman’s body and who, now, would walk in Joe’s.

She’d never hoped to be wrong so badly in all her life.

Caralee’s heart dropped and her gut clenched. Blood rushed to her head so fiercely she felt the pounding.

Then Joe unfroze and let the woman drop to the ground, lifeless.

Joe straightened his back and turned to Mag in the cart.

“I’m so sorry, Mag,” he said in his own voice. “Ent it funny, I never listened?”

He took two steps toward them, but they were odd steps. Like he was walking through knee-deep sand. Two steps, and then he fell.

It all happened so fast.

Joe flopped on the ground, fighting with his own body. He flipped onto his back and cried out. Caralee fell back onto her bottom while Mag screamed and the critters went wild. They bucked the cart, throwing Mag to the riverbed, where she held her hip and raged.

Joe went slack, rigid, and slack again. When he spoke, it wasn’t with his own voice. The voice that came out of Joe’s pink lips sounded cold, weirdly accented, and cruel.

“Don’t call them! I am so close. No!” It sounded like a bad dream. Another man’s bad dream.

Joe twitched and seized, flopping on the ground, arching and relaxing his back over and over, with such might that Caralee feared she’d see him snap his spine in two. His mouth frothed, his jaw clenched, and his eyes rolled back in their sockets.

He began to make such a noise as Caralee would never forget, somewhere between a scream and a whisper. She heard Mag whipping the reins at the critters, who’d managed to turn the cart around.

“Mag, get out of here!” Caralee screamed. The look on Mag’s face cut Caralee to the bone. Caralee never knew a face could hold so many emotions at once—heartbreak and fury and fear and regret and hate and love and resignation and, somehow, encouragement.

Mag sobbed, nodded, and scrambled backward. And then she was gone.

“Caralee!” The word came out of Joe’s mouth with that same awful twinning of two people, only two men instead of a woman and a man. His eyes snapped back to normal for just a heartbeat, and he looked at her, and Caralee saw a terrible concern— a concern for her. “Run, Caralee. You run. It’s him inside. He’s real.”

All the fight drained from Joe’s body in one exhausted breath, and he lay on the ground unmoving, except for his lips, and his eyes, which darted this way and that, even though he faced only the cracked indigo sky.

“I know, Joe. I know!” Caralee screamed again.

It felt like a nightmare. Caralee never thought she’d rue all her lessons, but she knew exactly what had happened— she’d known it as it happened, and there was nothing she could do. Knowing it was agony.

“Joe! Joe, look at me, Joe. Joe!”

It’s already too late. That’s him in there now. The monster.

Joe’s eyes turned from sandy brown to dark brown and back again. In a voice that wasn’t Joe’s, he said, “Apologies. I get my words confused when I first slip on a new mask.”

In a single fluid movement, he sat up and leapt to his feet. Joe could never manage grace like that.

The thing cocked Joe’s head, taking a long look at Caralee. His gaze was lightning—Caralee had never been subjected to that kind of searing focus. It burned through the fear that paralyzed her.

“It was you who quaked the earth, wasn’t it?” he asked in that odd accent. “Wasn’t it you, who called to me with your seventh sense? Yes. You led me out of the blinding dust storms. You brought me to this nice, strong, young body. You called me to freedom—and I had no idea how close I’d come, at last, to the edges of my wasteland. What a funny little worm you are, to have saved me.”

Caralee’s jaw dropped.

“You asked me a question. You asked me for my story. For the rest of it?” Not-Joe shook Joe’s head. “Rather a stupid boon to ask for, the end of my story, but you’re the worm, not me. In exchange for my freedom, I’ll allow you to know the end of my story. In the future, if you have a future, I wonder if you’ll be more careful with what you ask.”

Caralee tried to say “What?” but all that came out was a quaver and a line of drool.

“The desert grew, you see. And bodies are hard to come by in the wasteland. It’s been centuries, I think? With every stolen step, my desert outpaced me. That’s how the end of my story begins.”

Somehow, Caralee found herself.

Her blood still pounded in her ears. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing, let alone what she was hearing, but a rage surged through her such as she’d never known before. It felt like a kind of lust, but for violence. She would tear this ghost from Joe’s body with her bare hands, if it came to that.

This is all my fault.

With a leap forward, Caralee launched herself at the thief who had been Joe. He stopped her with an outstretched hand, Joe’s big fingers warm against her chest bone. She screamed and clawed and kicked, but Joe’s strong arm held her at bay. Her reach came pitifully short; not even her kicks connected.

Then Joe’s hand slipped from her chest up to her throat. Joe’s fingers squeezed. He lifted Caralee till her feet left the ground, and the blood that had rushed to her head was now trapped there. Pain ballooned beneath the skin of her face and behind her eyes.

“I do not know who you are, girl.” The monster’s voice was flat, infinitely threatening. It came out of Joe’s throat but sounded nothing like Joe. “Let me establish one thing before I decide whether or not to squeeze the life from you: fear me.”

Caralee’s rage trapped her better sense. He might as well have said nothing at all. Though she saw stars, she didn’t stop kicking, or punching, or spitting. Her spittle landed, if nothing else, across the legend’s cheek.

He regarded her with wonder. It was still Joe’s face, for now, but the eyes—those dark eyes—they belonged to the sand divvil, whose name needed no guesses.

“You’re a brave girl, aren’t you. Even braver for a worm.” That was not a question: he’d assessed her and cataloged her with one glance. “But of course, you don’t know me.”

“I know you, Sonnyvine,” Caralee growled despite the grip around her throat, the blood pooling in her head.

“If you know me—which is a questionable claim— then you must know that this body is mine.” He looked pleased, but his words cut through her heart. “What’s mine is mine, and those who don’t respect that law tend to die.”

Caralee’s growl died in her throat and her vision darkened, and she thought the bastard would snap her neck then and there. To her surprise, he dropped her to the ground where she curled up, sucking in air, head spinning.

“Get. Outta. Joe.” Caralee forced air into her lungs and out again, fighting for each word.

“Joe? Joe is my mask now. It’s not a body, it’s a mask, and soon the face you see will be my face. A strong body, but it will look like me, and smell like me, and taste like me. Me.” The monster stroked his chin, and Joe’s square, blond- stubbled jaw took on a slimmer, darker shape. “Have you ever slipped away from a masquerade with a pack of lovers? Discarded your costumes and tossed aside your masks to fuck in the hot blue waters of a mineral fountain?” He scanned her face. “No, I suppose you haven’t. I did desiccate the world, after all.”

Caralee squinted at the fiend in Joe’s body. If he could know her in a glance, she could at least study him back.

“You really are him, aren’t you?” Caralee asked, her sense of wonder betraying her rage. “Real and true in the flesh? In my Joe’s flesh?”

The abomination sneered. “This flesh is a mask for my soul; I own it, I will change it to suit me, and when I decide to throw it away, this body will die.”

She couldn’t hear that. She couldn’t think that. She had to think something else, anything else.

“You talk weird.” Caralee said. He did.

“I am old.” He considered that.

“Old and like from someplace else.”

Not someplace—somewhen. Did they talk like that in Vintage times, all tish-bosh-parrump? Caralee found it hard to imagine filling her mouth with so many fancy words.

“Well, language does change, but . . . has it been so long?” He put a hand to his head. Joe’s short yellow hair went black and long, of a sudden, then back again.

Looking skyward, he found the crack far overhead, and his eyes widened. “To see that… that vandalism unobscured by dust or sand- blinded eyes…” His expression held murder, and that wicked gaze slid down from the sky to glare at Caralee. “I am not from someplace else. I am, in fact, the least foreign person in this entire world. My world.”

Caralee pleaded with her better sense, begging for an explanation of what was happening, to make it something different from this killing loss.

“All things belong to me.” Joe’s body bent and grabbed a handful of grit from the ground. “I told them. I warned them. Instead, they chose this.” He sneered. “And now someone has desecrated my sky? What witch…” His thoughts seemed to swivel. “How long has it been?” the owner of the world asked the cable hauler. It wasn’t a question so much as a command with a rise at the end.

“Eight hundred years, give or take, say the stories,” Caralee answered on instinct, again. “How do you not know that?”

The monster blinked at the question and began to try to explain, turning to gesture toward the wasteland above, but Caralee seized the moment and leapt upon the world-killer’s back. She wrapped her arm around his windpipe and pulled his throat toward her as hard as she could.

Choke me, will you? Caralee took a deep breath. Guess what? I can choke you right back.

She wrestled him down as he sucked in a rasp of breath—that shadow of a fancy man, he swung his shoulders as if to toss her off like some cape, but Caralee held fast to his neck, twisting herself against him, and managed to wrench him off balance. She rode him all the way down to the ground.

One arm still wrapped around the monster’s head, palm to his temple, she put her free hand on the other side of Joe’s head and reached out with her sandysense. Sure, she’d shamed a traveling sandymancer—or tried to—but faced with this terror, all of Caralee’s confidence evaporated like a rare morning’s dew. She might as well have spent her life playing in the dirt.

Please, please.

Caralee extended her sandysense. With it, she reached into Joe’s head with every bit of her raw power, and she pulled. Self-trained, guessing at the ways of the art she’d been born with, Caralee sought out the mineral in Joe’s head and pulled with all her strength.

It had to work. It had to.

I’ll rip him out of Joe’s body with his own sandymancy.

Joe screamed. The god-king screamed. Pinpricks of blood appeared on his face, beneath her fingers. Bits of stuff began to pop out of them, mud from a man. They dropped upward onto her palms.

How he howled. How his face contorted with agony. Caralee all but cheered when she saw that agony and heard that howl. The taste of power blasted away her doubt as his blood dripped up onto her hands. Her strength swelled out into the world, where it worked her will. At that moment, Caralee thought she could do anything. She could become an avenging monster herself. She could become as evil as this divvil beneath her, feeling blood and sweat spilling upward out of Joe’s head.

The power and its illusion of freedom flooded her thoughts to distraction.

A divvil knows no distraction.

He got his hands up from beneath her and threw her off him with incredible force. Caralee flew backward and hit the wall of the canyon, falling to the ground with the breath knocked out of her chest.

She watched the monster stand and storm toward her. Already, he moved Joe’s body like it was his own—he walked with a different gait and didn’t swing his arms in clumsy circles. A shadow of long, dark hair flipped in and out of existence—less of a flicker now and more of a moment. He was taking root.

“Did you,” Joe’s thief began, breathing hard from exertion and whatever Caralee had done to him, “just try to pull me out?” He closed the distance between them and loomed over her, then slammed one of Joe’s boots into her chest with force just shy of rib- crushing, pinning Caralee to the ground. “Am I looking at a girl who threw herself at her god-king and tried to suck the earth out of his new skull?” His eyes were wide, no trace of Joe’s face on those slender brows, chin narrower and more sparsely stubbled. “Do you want to die screaming?”

Are you giving me a choice? Caralee wondered as she tried to escape the big boot that trapped her. Fucker! Horror filled her, and a little exhilaration. She expected to be pulped into the ground at any second.

“Easy off, now.” Caralee talked while she still could. She tried to think what someone brave would say, only she couldn’t imagine anyone brave enough to confront an evil out of legend. Except, Caralee had to face him. “You need me, monster!”

Laughter had never been so mean.

“Who could possibly need you?” The boot twisted; the monster sneered. “I wouldn’t so much as wipe these boots with you, worm.”

Caralee’s mind raced, thanking her instinct for answering without thinking. “Been eight hundred years, but you don’t know it?” she asked, trying at snotty and, presumably, failing. Doubt threatened to undo her entirely. “Sky’s been cracked over a century, and you don’t know who did it?” Fuck doubt, she thought. “Way you talk, seems like you only just stumbled out of the wasteland you made. Been shrouded in sand and dust storms since whenever you escaped your slab, ent it, body thief?”

The monster’s sneer slid into a smile. “Continue, girl.” The pressure of the boot on her chest lightened a touch.

“You asked who was your guide. Who rumbled the ground to lead you out. Fuck me for it, but that was me. You needed a guide out of your mess, but you ent out of it yet. The whole world’s your mess, but you don’t know scat about it. I’m your guide.” Right. That could be true, couldn’t it?

He removed the boot crushing her ribs and sucked air through his teeth.

“That’s…” He laughed again, this time at himself. “That’s almost correct. What a wonder.” He put a finger to his lips. Joe’s lips, Caralee reminded herself, though they didn’t look like Joe’s lips anymore. Not big and pink, but sharp and beautiful. Awful, but beautiful.

“There’s one flaw in your reasoning. You’ve just assaulted me. With magick. Historically, that has gone poorly for my assailants, and I am not as generous with my trust as once I may have been.”

Scat. That was a good point. Only what threat could Caralee possibly pose to the owner of the world, its king and its god? She said so.

“All I did was make you sweat a little blood…” She tried to make it sound harmless.

The world-killer wrinkled his lips and arched an eyebrow, telling Caralee how badly her attempt had failed. Then he reached out with one snake-muscled arm and yanked Caralee to her feet. Standing on watery legs, she brushed herself off as best she could. Blood from her attack still beaded across the monster’s face.

“Sweat a little blood…” Caralee felt pathetic and struggled to find herself again. She was desperate to stay alive long enough to save Joe. “And don’t you ever call me ‘girl,’ got it?”

The monster’s lips twisted into a sneer of a smile, but he nodded. “A fair request from a worm and—apparently—my guide. You’ve led me into the world again. It’s astounding, what a shit- covered young woman can do.”

What?

They stood there, facing each other, without a thing to say.

The moment stretched on.

“I’m gonna get my Joe back,” Caralee declared, deciding it was only fair to say so.

The monster snorted and started giggling. Of all the things, he got the giggles.

“Shaddup! I mean it.” How dare he!

Caralee started to snort herself. Oh no.

She caught the giggles, too, and soon they were both doubled over with the most absurdly inappropriate laughter, and neither could stop.

“I might kill you at any moment!” the monster howled through his laughter, perfect white teeth sharper and longer than Joe’s.

“I know!” Caralee howled back, stomach cramping up from laughter.

“What in the Vine were you thinking?” The monster smiled, laughter settling.

“I have no idea,” Caralee admitted, breathing hard but recovering. Then, dead serious, “I gotta get back my Joe. I’m gonna get back my Joe.”

“I don’t believe you.” He winked. “Young worm.”

The creature pulled back his hand as if to strike her, but kept it still, frozen behind his shoulder. Caralee felt the tingle of sandymancy just before the air itself slapped her fiercely across the cheek, wrenching her neck. He used his awful sandymancy and slapped her again, and a third time, until she lay on the ground, unmoving but determined to endure.

Not once had he touched her.

The monster scrubbed his head and face with his fingers. The pinpricks of blood that Caralee had pulled from his head mixed with sweat into a slippery red veil. “Eight centuries and I’ve never met anyone so bravely stupid, or so ingeniously inept. You look like nothing. You—obviously—come from nothing. You surely know nothing. What manner of shit-covered worm are you?”

Gasping and tasting her own blood, Caralee pushed herself up from the riverbed on all fours.

“Answer me, little worm.” Joe’s boot nudged her arms out from under her, and Caralee fell face- first into the dirt.

“What am I?” She pulled herself up yet again, spitting silt. “You stole my Joe’s body and still got the nerve to ask me what I am?” She threw up her arms in defeat. “You’re the monster, entya? Look at me. What else am I gonna do? Cuz I’m not stupid or inept.”

“Oh, dear me.” He put a hand to his chest, seeming— of all things— charmed.

“I’m smart, and better than that, I don’t ever, ever, ever give up. You hear me? You gonna kill me, you shoulda stomped me into the ground, because I’m coming at you with everything this world you broke gave me. I’m chasing you to the edge of it, you hear me? I’m gonna kill you till you’re dead, and I’m gonna get back my Joe, and that’s scatting that.”

“You idiot hero, thinking that something as insignificant as a girl could . . .”

He waved away the notion.

Caralee jabbed her chin in the air, squirming with all she felt—rage, humiliation, terror. She was a worm in hot ashes.

“I told you not to call me ‘girl,’ monster.” She balled her fists.

“Pfft. You’d only kill Joe. And you won’t kill Joe. A girl—a young woman—who never ever, ever gives up wouldn’t go and do that, would she?” He pointed a finger at her chest. “What’s to stop me from leaving Joe’s body right this minute—leaving it dead—and taking you instead?”

“Because I’m not fit to be your boot- wipe. Because I’m a shit-covered worm, and that’s not a mask you’d want to wear,” she spat.

“Fair argument. You are repugnant,” said the thief. “You’ll never win, you know.”

Caralee spat again. “Sounds like loser talk to me.”

What am I doing?

“What do you call yourself, young woman, shit-covered wizard-worm?”

“My name is Caralee Vinnet.” She squared her stance and faced him down.

“I’m no wizard, but I’m gonna end you, anyway, Sonnyvine.”

He held out his hand, palm thrust forward, holding it perpendicular to the ground. Caralee braced herself for some sorcery to slay her, there and then.

“If I can’t get rid of you, Caralee Vinnet, you might as well dispose of that ridiculous sobriquet.” Still he held out his hand, steady as a blade. “My names are mysteries into which you are not inducted, but you may address me by my title.” He bent at the waist, just a little. “I present myself, the Lord of a Thousand Names, Child of the World-Tree, Beyond-Whisperer, Druid Extreme, Archmage Royal, Admiral- General of War, Cognoscent Prime, First Functionary of Time and Deception, High Cryptobotanist, Keeper of Machine Secrets, and God-King of All the World: Amauntilpisharai, the last Son of the Vine.”

The truth, when she heard it confirmed out loud from the divvil’s own mouth, drained the blood from Caralee’s face.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He moved his extended palm forward, just a bit.

She recoiled. It wasn’t an invisible blade or a spell in his hands—it was, of all things, the offer of a handshake.

Caralee’s stomach convulsed, and her vomit sprayed his hand and his feet.

***

Caralee followed the Son of the Vine back to the cart, wiping puke from her chin. The cart stood intact, with no sign of Mag. Oti and Atu comforted each other with their moist mouthparts and stroked their feathered antennae together, still shaking with fright. Caralee saw Mag’s footprints leading back home and remembered that all-at-once look on Mag’s face when Caralee had told the older woman to run. Mag was no fool, but if her main concern had been self-survival, she’d have used the wide-bristled broom they kept tucked under the cart to brush away her tracks as she ran back to the village. Instead, she’d left a trail for Caralee to see.

Mag had given Caralee a choice. Bless Mag’s heart for knowing that if Caralee somehow survived, she wouldn’t let go of Joe so easily, no matter the danger. On the slim chance that Caralee chose to run home, however, she could follow Mag’s path and catch up.

Which way? She faced a choice between two whiches—but which which was good, and which which bad?

Mag had hit the ground hard when she’d been thrown from the cart, but her footprints led west—back home. They were staggered, perhaps from a limp, but didn’t look so uneven as to suggest that she had broken a bone. Mag would be safe, or safe enough. She wouldn’t make it all the way home on foot, but she’d get close enough to draw the attention of one of the outlying sentinel patrols before they fell back to the village for the night.

The trail leading back home was as clear as daylight; one last lesson, one last opportunity to save herself— an opportunity that Caralee didn’t even consider taking.

I gotta get my Joe back.

“What good fortune! Wise woman, your grandmother, to save herself.” The Son approached the cart. “She’s left us transportation, which, as you might imagine, provides a welcome change for me. You know, once I traveled upon a palanquin.” He thought a moment, then glanced at Caralee’s sandaled feet and her toes caked with sand and talc. “That’s a fancy cart with servants instead of wheels.”

“Mag ent my gran, she’s your— Joe’s gran. Raised me, though.” Then, “You made your servants roll like wheels?”

“Roll?” The Son stretched his neck and arched his back, reaching up to the sky with delicate fingers. “No, you little idiot. They carried me upon their backs and sang with joy at the privilege.”

“Sounds like a scat job.”

“No. To be part of my honor posse was, well, an honor.”

The Son climbed into the cart, testing its sturdiness by shaking it by the sides.

Oti and Atu calmed themselves at his approach. Must be they smelled Joe.

“I always did have a fondness for bronzebacks, though they were smaller in my day.” The Son clicked and cooed, and Atu looked behind her as best she could, her eight eyes black and curious. “My grandfather, the Most Holy Son of the Vine, used to boast that mating a spider to a beetle was one of our ancestors’ least appreciated accomplishments.”

The Son looked to the east. “Grandfather had a talent for seeing the greater prize hidden inside feats of quiet genius.”

Caralee couldn’t imagine this Son having a gramp, let alone a gramp who was a god- king that liked critters.

“Hello, insects.” The Son reached out to brush Atu’s thorax. “My, how you’ve grown. You’re doing most of the work now. That tells us something, doesn’t it?” He looked bummed out. “Grandfather was right yet again. I half wish Father were here, so I could see him pout over being so fucking wrong.”

“Was your daddy Sonnyvine, too, after your gramps?”

“Not for long.” The Son made figure eights with his hands, combing his fingers through the air like a storyteller around a campfire. “He didn’t need a long reign to imperil the world. My father was not a strong man, although he held strong opinions and feigned strength by clinging to those opinions despite any and all evidence that he was wrong. And he was so very, very wrong.”

“Yeah? About what?”

“Tell me, Caralee Vinnet, do you really think that one person can doom an entire world? Absent any myth concerning my misdeeds, would you believe that a single soul could destroy a world that took the ancients centuries to construct?”

Caralee craned her neck to look at the horizon, but the rocky walls of the ravine blocked her view. She knew from memory that the southern barrier mountains, like always, looked like they were trying to climb the sky, gray and lifeless. In every other direction, above the ravine, the horizon lay flat and brown, and the only things that she could have seen moving were drifts of dust and the slow slither of sand ripples shifting under the wind. You didn’t see the monsters until it was too late.

“I grew up here,” Caralee said, “so I can believe a lot of things.”

“Fair.” The Son rolled his eyes and gave up his hand- waving to scratch Oti’s hairy thorax. “Might you consider the notion that—after eight hundred years—what details remain of my story might, just possibly, fail to tell the entire story?”

Of course Caralee knew that. She’d gone to the wasteland and asked it for the rest of the story, just like the old wizard had said. Look what she’d gotten for it. Now that the wasteland had answered her and taken its price in flesh, Caralee didn’t know which was worse: what she’d done, or the curiosity that buzzed inside her head in spite of Joe’s fate.

“If you’re the only one left to tell your story, how’s that change anything? What was it that your daddy was so wrong about?”

“Mmm… no.” The Son shrugged off Caralee’s question. “You’re right. Why should anyone believe me? More to the point, why should I care? I am god and king.”

Oti hissed blissfully as the Son dug his fingers into the critter’s hairy exoskeleton.

Caralee stood before the cart, watching the familiar stranger sit in Joe’s seat. Was that by accident, how he knew just where the critters liked to be stroked? Or was Joe in there and the Son knew what Joe knew? Did the Son really know how bronzeback critters had been bred from other insects? Wonders and lies were hard to separate when they came from the mouth of a legend.

Only way to find out is to keep going.

With care, Caralee climbed into Mag’s seat and took up the reins. She realized she had no idea what came next, and said so.

“Where were you headed, Caralee Vinnet, my young worm?” the Son asked.

“Well, uh…Grenshtepple’s… by way of Comez, camping overnight at that big monument.” She pointed to the stele, its top just visible over the neck-high walls of the ravine. “Where were you headed?”

“I promised you the end to my story, not my itinerary… Why don’t you ride at night?” He stroked the lovely planes of his chin. “What is it you hide from when the sun sets?”

“Let’s see.” Caralee listed them on her fingers. “Cold; dunderbeasts; chucklers; sandfishers; bandits; scavenger critters too hungry to wait for us to die; and you.” She bared her teeth. “Most of all, it’s you.”

“Rightly so. I am the original danger. That’s the story, anyway. There is wisdom in fear, no?” He cocked his head. “How the world has changed. I don’t recognize either of those place-names, Comez and Grenshtepple’s. Villages?”

Caralee nodded.

“No large towns? A city, if possible?”

Caralee shrugged.

“A guide who knows nothing…Well. Why were you headed to these two villages?”

Caralee’s face screwed at the question, and she cocked her head behind her. “Cart fulla goods, ent it? We had a mind to sell or barter our goods, see, till you happened.”

Had a mind to do a lotta things, till you happened.

“Coin, then,” the Son mused. “Coin is good.”

“No scat.” Caralee resigned herself to her circumstances. This was happening. “We need to pick up our pace.”

The Son agreed. “That stele’s quite a ways a way, I should think, and the daylight fades.” He looked up to the dark, cracked sky. “It does, doesn’t it? The sun tells me the hour as it ever did, but why is the sky so dark?” He stared at the daytime stars and frowned at the crack in the sky, its spiderweb lines gold beneath the sun.

He can seem so unthreatening, Caralee thought, watching the Son measure angles in the sky with his thumb and forefingers. Squinting like Marm-marm at her shapes on the chalk- rock, the Son looked nearly as harmless as the schoolmistress. Caralee reminded herself that he was not. Her bloodied lip and sore neck proved it so.

“Marm-marm says it’s air leaking out, or nighttime leaking in—but I think nighttime leaking in is a stupid idea.”

“It is a stupid idea. The void beyond is a vacuum—an absence. It’s our air that’s precious.” The Son’s expression couldn’t be read.

“What’s the void?”

“You weren’t surprised,” the Son mused, “when I mentioned the building of the world. But you don’t know what’s on the other side?”

Caralee raised a finger. “How would I know what’s above the sky?”

The Son whistled, but Caralee couldn’t tell whether he was impressed or mocking her. “In that case, tell me what you know about the breaking of my sky.”

Caralee didn’t know much, but she supposed she knew more than anyone who’d been stuck in the heart of the wasteland for however long.

“They call themselves the Metal Duchy, and people say that they’re made of, you know, metal.” That sounded like a tall tale to Caralee, but she didn’t say so. “I’ve never seen one. The Metal Duchy punched a hole through the sky more than a century ago, but nobody saw any of their people till a few decades back.”

The Son took a breath and nodded as though Caralee’s tall tales made any kind of sense at all.

“A ship, then?” He bared his teeth. “It’s too much to hope that the impact object would be a simple extrasolar asteroid—our ancestors wouldn’t have built a sky vulnerable to any mundane celestial knockabout, and they swept the system of anything larger than your head. A ship’s engine, on the other hand…”

“You took that well.” Caralee didn’t want to test the Son’s good humor. “I wonder how they did it. And how’d they move through the void if it’s nothing, and if it’s nothing, then where’d they come from?”

“Took it well? You need to learn to distrust your senses. Just because I am not stomping my feet and sucking blood out of the nearest face doesn’t mean that I am not angry.” The Son didn’t seem bothered, but as he’d just said, seeming didn’t mean being. Caralee didn’t trust herself as much as he thought she did. “I don’t like trespassers, nor vandals, nor interruptions, and these aliens are all three.”

“Are we gonna see the Metal Duchy?” Caralee’s heart quickened at the thought, and at all the thoughts that followed. “Are you gonna kill them all?”

“Stay alive and see for yourself, new worm!” His laughter was a shallow kind of cruelty. “You have my word, you will learn the end of my story—but it’s up to you not to die before then.”

Caralee grunted, snapped the reins before slackening them, kept her eyes fixed forward as the cart rolled on, and kept her mouth shut for a long time. The Son returned the favor. A few hours of shared silence let Caralee think and adapt to the idea of riding in a critter cart beside the Son of the Vine himself.

Getting Joe back would require more than just sitting next to the monster. For now, Caralee clenched her jaw to keep her lips from quavering and kept her eyes fixed ahead and wide open so that the wind would dry her tears. Try as she might, Caralee couldn’t shrug off the memory of her angry demand from the wasteland. A life of grubbing in the dirt for cable plant, never going farther than the stalls outside Grenshtepple’s, never learning, no chance to be anyone.

She’d felt so angry at her lot and so dismissed by that hack of a sandymancer.

“Ask the wasteland and hope that it answers…” If it hadn’t been for that knot- boned wizard, Caralee would never have thrown her tantrum, never hammered the wasteland with sandymancy in some stupid hope that a desert could give her answers.

It was easier to hate Eusebius than herself, and Caralee knew that. Eusebius hadn’t summoned the Son of the Vine by ringing the ground like a big, loud dinner bell and serving up Joe Dunes on a platter.

I led him straight to Joe, and he ate Joe right up.

For better or for worse, Caralee discovered that no matter how she blamed the old wizard, she couldn’t manage to hate herself any less. This… problem?… was too awful to be real. The horrible warnings taught in stories were jazzed up so that they made their point—the nightmare wasn’t supposed to be real. The Son was supposed to be trapped in his matzeva, held forever by the awesome power of long- dead sandymancers.

She wished this was just a story. Stories get told, and then everyone eats dinner. Caralee would have to live with this for the rest of her life. Even if—when—she put things aright and got back Joe, she’d always be the curious girl who handed her friend over to the boogeyman. She’d be a real-life monster for the rest of her days.

Churning on such dark thoughts, Caralee had mentally exhausted herself by the time the little cart rolled beneath the shadow of the stele. Her body ached, as tired as her head, and she pulled the critters to a stop just as the sun surrendered to the horizon.

Frequent travelers had tamped down the ground around the stele, and a rock-ringed firepit waited to roast a dust hare or brew some gruel. Thanks to the Son’s attack and the upset of the cart, they hadn’t water to spare for gruel, so Caralee made what camp she could while the Son inspected the stele. Caralee wondered if he thought the monument as impressive as she did, and decided that he definitely wouldn’t.

I should be doing the exploring. Was it petty that she resented the Son for the idle time she’d otherwise have to adventure, while Mag would be ordering Joe about the campsite?

Her mission to save Joe would involve adventure enough, Caralee accepted, and she couldn’t deny that a part of her thrilled at the notion of seeing the world. Still testing the waters of her adversary and companion, she said so.

“If you’re as good as your word to follow me, I suspect you’ll learn that adventure means something more, something less, and something entirely different from what you expect,” the Son answered simply. He cocked his head at the tower behind him, its top and middle vanished by night. “But ‘monument’?” He mocked her with a mild sneer. “You do realize that this structure is nothing more than the remains of a support system for the actual marvel? Your monument is nothing more than abandoned scaffolding for what was, in essence, a tremendously capable aqueduct.”

The Son grabbed a sack of cable flour and tossed it to one side of the cart, sour-faced at his cramped sleeping space. He cocked his head toward the cargo to tell Caralee where she would be sleeping.

Why is he doing this? Why am I alive? Ent because he needs me. They both knew that. The Son had spared Caralee because of… what? Her smart mouth and sassback? She was essential to no one—the Son had the right of that—so why keep her with him?

Is there Joe in there? Does he feel what Joe feels? She didn’t dare to hope so, nor did she think it likely. The Son was not the sort of person who could be influenced—certainly not by as innocent a soul as Joe. Joe hadn’t the tooth for it.

“Why do you bother playing it nice-like?” Caralee didn’t know how to approach an evil god-king, so she stuck to the directness that had kept her alive so far. She took a flour bag for herself, padding down two bushels of wicker to sleep upon. Her eyes never left the Son. “Is it because you think that you’re invincible? Or is it so you can strike first? Do you even have a reason?” She ground her teeth. They were toothy questions. “And what’s an ackyduck?”

“I strike first to strike last.” No hesitation before his answer. “An aqueduct is an elevated road that carries water far away. The Vine carried much more than water, but the principle of its design was similar.”

The Son settled into the cart, forced to lie with his knees bent, head on his flour pillow.

“Should I? Run far away?” Caralee did the same on her makeshift wicker bed, but propped up on one elbow to face the Son. She had no intention of running—of course she didn’t.

“From home? Only if you want to see the world. From me? Absolutely yes. We’ve established that more than once. For what it’s worth, ‘more than once’ is a personal record. Congratulations, you didn’t die. That’s twice today.” The Son rolled away from her, such as he could, exposing his back. “I don’t ‘play nice-like’—say benign next time, it will make you sound like less of a fool. In any case, just because a thing is malignant doesn’t mean its malignancy is always apparent, or that it is only malign.”

Settling into his awkward sleeping arrangement, the Son added, “Your worthless cargo makes for an awful pillow.”

Quiet followed and lingered till it became the silence of sleep; tonight, Caralee faced that silence as a vigil. She leaned back, arms crossed behind her head, staring at the stars. She loved the way they seemed to swirl in thick clouds of magenta and blue, bleeding into green. The stars seemed to pour from the glowing clouds, as if spawned, and some instinct inside Caralee knew that the stars were born inside those impossible clouds beyond the clouds.

How does truth just come to a person like that? Caralee wondered. Something clicked. She knew she would get her Joe back. Sure as starbirth, she knew it for truth.

On the subject of truths, Caralee considered the wide broom that Mag tucked under the cart. The one she’d left behind for Caralee, to show those limping footprints. Maybe Mag had given Caralee more than one choice? Maybe Mag knew Caralee better than anyone. A broom with a real wood shaft cut from one of the rare treebones that was still sturdy and not a bleached husk. The shaft was almost as hard as stone. A shaft that even short Caralee could swing with some force, if she kept herself steady and struck first—to strike last.

The ride would be easier if Caralee were the only one conscious. Easier still if the other were tied up tight as the critter-bond.

From the foot of the cart eased the Son’s voice—alert but soft, not cutting through the sleepy silence. “Break off the crossbar with the bristles first.” He hadn’t moved, still facing away in that pose of, Caralee realized, false vulnerability. “The shaft alone will make for a decent quarterstaff, but you’ll hit yourself in the face with the broomy part and deny your opponent the fun of cracking your skull open.” He sounded almost concerned for Caralee.

“A quarterstaff is a good weapon for a beginner,” he continued as if the subject were academic. “You’d stab your eye out with a knife, and a sword would be a terrible idea. Do you have guns? Bows? Don’t ever touch a bow; you haven’t the focus.”

Caralee had no response at all, other than to wonder if a gun was like a bow.

Nobody ever let her touch a bow. Could the Son read her mind, or was he so smart that he’d thought her thoughts faster than she could think them herself?

It made her head spin, and she couldn’t follow her own thoughts, let alone find any further truth in them.

“Oh,” she said through the spin. “Just to be clear . . . this is about me not attacking you while you sleep?”

“Is it? The thought hasn’t even crossed my mind.” He took a deep breath, the liar. “What a violent young woman you are. It’s a shame you’re as worthless as spittle in the dirt.”

Caralee kept her sassback to herself. She curled up and willed herself to sleep with fancies of beating the pompous god- king to bloody death with a broom handle.

 

Excerpted from Sandymancer , copyright © 2023 by David Edison.