“In any case,” Kwerion said authoritatively, “you must embark on your quest for salvation immediately!”
“But I think I should prefer to remain with you — the troop is headed back toward Catechumia soon,” Lixal said. “I would appreciate the security of company. I will find some way to incorporate the deodand into our presentation. It will be a sensation! What other troop has ever boasted such a thing?”
“No other troop has ever performed while infected with the Yellow Death, either,” said Ferlash. “Novelty alone is not enough to promote attendance, especially when it is the novelty of horrid mortal danger, and is accompanied by such a dreadfully noisome and pervasive odor of decomposing flesh.”
The rest, even Minka, seemed to agree with the false priest’s objections, and despite Lixal’s arguments and pleading he and the deodand were at last forced to set off on their own toward distant Catechumia with nothing more in the way of possessions than what they could carry, since the troop also saw fit to withdraw their gift to Lixal of a private wagon, as being inappropriate for one no longer appearing in their nightly dissemination of knowledge to the deserving public.
Lixal Laqavee’s first night in the wilderness was an uncomfortable one, and the idea that he was sleeping next to an inhuman creature who would happily murder him if it could did not make Lixal’s slumbers any easier. At last, in the cold hours before dawn, he sat up.
The deodand, which did not seem to have even tried to sleep, was visible only as a pair of gleaming eyes in the darkness. “You awaken early. Have you reconsidered letting me take your life and now find yourself eager to begin your adventurous journey into That Which Lies Beyond?”
“Unequivocally, no.” Lixal built the fire back up, blowing until it filled the forest dell with reddish light, although the deodand itself was still scarcely more than a shadow. He had no particular urge to converse with the ghastly thing, but neither did he want to sit beside it in silence until sunrise. At last, Lixal reached into the rucksack that contained most of his remaining possessions and pulled out a box which unfolded into a gaming board of polished wood covered with small holes. He then shook a handful of nail-shaped ivory spikes from a bag that had been inside the box and began to place them in holes along the outer edge of the board.
“What is that?” asked the deodand. “An altar to your god? Some kind of religious ritual?”
“No, far more important than that,” Lixal said. “Have you ever played King’s Compass?”
The glowing eyes blinked slowly — once, twice, three times. “Played King’s Compass? What do these words mean?”
“It is a contest — a game. In my childhood home in the Misty Isles we play it for amusement, or sometimes as a test of skill. At the latter times money is wagered. Would you like to learn the game?”
“I have no money. I have no need of money.”
“Then we will play for the sheer pleasure of the thing.” Lixal extended his arms and set the game down an equal distance between the two of them. “As for the distance that perforce must always separate us, when you wish to reach out and move your pieces I shall lean back a compensatory amount, allowing you to manipulate the spinari.”
The deodand stared at him, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What is a spinari?”
“Not ‘a spinari’ — it is plural. One is called a ‘spinar’. The collective refers to these pale spikes. For every one you move to your right, you must move another to your left. Or you may choose to move two in the same direction. Do you see?”
The deodand was silent for long moments. “Move one to my right…? What is the point of it?”
Lixal smiled. “I will show you. You will learn it in no time — in the Isles even the youngest children play!”
By the time they reached Catechumia they had traveled together nearly a month and played several hundred games of King’s Compass, each of which Lixal had won handily. The deodand was somewhat literal in its employment of strategy and had trouble understanding Lixal’s more spontaneous decisions. Also, the concept of bluffing and feinting had not yet impinged on the creature’s consciousness in the least. Still, the deodand had improved to the point where the games were now genuine, if one-sided and for that at least Lixal was grateful. The life of a man tethered to a living deodand was bound to be a lonely one, and so his had proved in these last weeks. Solitary travelers fled them without even stopping to converse on the novelty of Lixal’s situation. Larger groups often tried to kill the deodand, the reputation of whose kind was deservedly dark, and such groups bore scarcely more good will toward Lixal, who they deemed a traitor to his species: more than once he was forced to flee with the creature beneath a hail of fist-sized stones. Twice the barns in which they had taken refuge for the night were set on fire with them inside, and both times escape had been no certain thing.
“I confess I had not fully understood the unhappiness of your existence,” Lixal told the deodand. “You are hunted by one and all, with no succor to be found anywhere.”
The creature gave him a look that mingled amusement with scorn. “On the contrary, in the general run of things one and all are hunted by me. In any average meeting, even with three or four of your fellows, the advantage is mine owing to my superior speed and strength. Our current plight is unusual — no sensible deodand would go into the midst of so many of his enemies in broad daylight when his inherent duskiness provides no shield against discovery. It is only being tethered to you by this confluence of spells that puts me in such a vulnerable position. Not to mention how it hampers my diet.”
This last remark, the most recent of several, pertained to Lixal’s insistence that the creature with whom he was bound up not consume the flesh of human beings while they were in each other’s company — which meant, perforce, all the time. This the deodand had acceded to with bad grace, and only after Lixal pointed out that he could easily warn away all but the most deaf and blind of potential victims. When he accompanied this injunction by employing the Rhinocratic Oath, showing the deodand how Lixal could cause the creature’s nose to grow so large as to block its creature’s sight entirely, the deodand at last submitted.
They both needed to eat, however, so Lixal had a first hand view of the sharpness and utility of the deodand’s claws and teeth when they were employed catching birds or animals. Because the distance between them had to remain more or less identical at all times, it meant that Lixal himself also needed to learn something of the deodand’s arts of silent hunting and swift attack. However, this level of cooperation between the two distinct species, although interesting and unusual, only made Lixal Laqavee more aware of how desperately he wanted to be out of the creature’s presence.
Since the Exhalation of Thunderous Banishment had proved worse than useless when employed on deodands — and that, Lixal suspected, had been the exact nature of Eliastre’s deadly ruse — it was only the talismanic bracelet around his wrist which kept the deodand at a distance. He no longer had any illusions that he could resist the creature’s fatal strike in any other way: the Rhinocratic Oath would not deter it for more than a moment, the Pseudo-Philtre was laughably inappropriate, and even the Cantrip of Notional Belittlement, which Lixal had employed early on in their forced companionship, had only slightly reduced the creature’s obsession with the day when it would be free of him (and, the implication was clear, equally free to destroy him.) He might have used the cantrip on himself to reduce his own level of unease but feared becoming oblivious to looming danger.
One interesting concomitant of the situation was that the cantrip-calmed deodand became more conversational as the weeks rolled on. There were evenings, as they leaned back and forth like rowers to access the King’s Compass gaming board that the creature became almost chatty, telling of his upbringing as an anonymous youngster in a teeming nest, surviving against his fellows only by employing those impressive fangs and talons until he was old enough to escape the nest and begin killing things other than his own siblings.