Please note that the chapter below is an early draft. Names and world-building details subject to change.

With friendly winds and no obstructions, the trip to Azenkar took four days, and Isa was determined to row through them all. Captain Xabres kept trying to insist that he come topside and “see the sights” but Isa didn’t have to go above to visualize the forty miles of countryside that passed between Krell and Azenkar. He knew what he would see if he looked: more tumbleweeds than people, skeleton churches and collapsing farmhouses, one village after another reduced to mass graves for the dead and the listless grief of the living. Isa had stopped in many of these settlements on his way upriver to Krell and seen what the plague had done to them. Most stood abandoned, their populations too small to sustain them in the wake of the plague. The ones that had clung to existence were somehow even sadder, each a reminder of Isa’s own little farm in Rionde, where he had left Spensa. He preferred the way these lands lived in his memory of eight, nine, ten years ago, when the people had been many and healthy and the whole world had been new.

So, Isa fixed his eyes forward—or backward rather—on the drummer, and rowed on. His hunter’s strength kept him in time with the Krellish oarsmen for the first day, but hauling on an oar required different muscles from hauling animal carcasses. Halfway through the second day, Isa’s body was in full mutiny. Every muscle from his toes to his fingertips had ceased functioning in protest, but he kept going by the grim instinct-born sort of willpower that kept an animal trekking for water across the Ascended Veldt. A primal need to survive.

“Inkarnam, I insist that you take a break,” the oarmaster said for the third time.

I’m fine, Isa wanted to reply but found that his chest muscles didn’t have the strength to spare. Instead, he set his jaw and shook his head with all the gravity of a three-year-old Taniri refusing to go to bed.

“You’re being an idiot,” said Torrinas, the man on the bench beside Isa. The Waning Ibis was a big enough vessel that it required two men on each oar. Torrinas had clearly sensed Isa’s strength fading with each stroke, making his job harder. “If you can’t pull anymore, we need a fresh rower.” He could barely speak himself, his voice strained to a growl with the exertion of picking up Isa’s slack.

“Esteemed Inkarnam, my guys don’t even row as long as you have without breaking above decks,” said the oarmaster. “If you won’t rotate out, I’ll have you removed.”

“Try it,” Isa managed to grind out. His human muscles might be shot but see how these rowers liked prizing a twenty-eight-foot python from this oar.

“Inkarnam, I swear to Ostia—”

“I’ll take care of this,” said a new voice. Having over-exerted his neck muscles shaking his head, Isa couldn’t turn to look, but a vague notion of gold in his periphery told him that Damored had come below decks.

“Excuse me, Madam,” the oarmaster’s drumbeat held steady even in his annoyance. “This is no place for a lady.”

Ignoring him, Damo shuffled her way down the narrow walkway between the rows of shirtless, sweat-soaked oarsmen. She didn’t have the steady river legs of an Azenkari, but good balance and years of travel by boat had steadied her just enough that she didn’t knock into any of the oarsmen on her way to Isa’s row. Isa resigned himself to the idea that she was going to forcibly remove him and had resolved to fight back anyway. It was going to be laughably one-sided, but he didn’t know what else to do.

“Okay.” Damo reached out but instead of grabbing Isa’s arm, she tapped Torrinas on the shoulder. “Take a break, handsome. I’ll handle this.”

In general, the oarsmen didn’t waste breath on extra noise but, caught by surprise, the men all around them laughed. The oarmaster might have snapped at them to focus but he was laughing too. “That’s very funny, Madam Sazuman, but please be on your way. There are no women below decks.”

“There are now,” Damo said, more impatient than offended. “Now, do you mind, sir?” she said to the man on the bench beside Isa.

“You’ve made your joke, alright?” he said. “Now beat it, sweetheart.”

There was the slightest edge to Damo’s smile. “You were just complaining that you needed a fresh rower when I came down. Sweetheart.”

“A rower. Not a woman.”

And that was the end of Damo’s patience. In a gold blur, she stepped forward and slammed an open hand into the man’s chest, knocking him from the bench. As he fell, she caught the oar in one hand and seamlessly slid into his seat beside Isa. There was a lurching fraction of a second in which Isa feared Alkem would take the oar from him. Then gold-freckled hands were on the handle beside his, pulling. Damo’s weight settled beside him, her feet braced against the bench before her, and they were back in time. Safe. Thank Osu.

Isa’s former rowing mate coughed, wide-eyed and winded, seemingly unsure how he had gotten from the bench to the floor. “What…?”

The oarmaster wore a similar expression of surprise, but his was colored with curiosity, as he watched Damo draw the oar back, deep and smooth, in time with the men.

“Torrinas,” he addressed the displaced oarsman. “Take a walk.”

“You’re not serious!” Torrinas said in indignation.

“But be on hand,” the oarmaster added, placating. “Let’s see how long the lady lasts.”

No one expected it to be long. Damo was very nearly doing the work of two rowers, pulling for herself and Isa, who had precious little left in him. Aware of this, the other oarsmen kept a curious eye on her, but the air of anticipation gradually dissipated as several minutes passed, then one hour, then two, without Damored slowing.

As the sinking sun drove spears of orange in through the portholes, the oarmaster had some of the men switch out—this time without bothering the two interloping mercenaries. One of the rowers who rotated back in was Torrinas, who leveled a sullen glare at the back of Damo’s head.

“She’s cheating,” he said as though he had been stewing on it for the full two hours he’d been on break. “The witch is using tactomancy.”

Damo tilted a grin over her shoulder at him. “Aren’t you a clever boy.”

He wasn’t, really. Anyone with a working knowledge of tactomancy would know that its use lent the godmarks a sun-like glow, but Damored’s freckles were dulled to their usual understated gold. If she had energy left from her last tumble, it was inert, stored up for later. She pulled against Alkem with human strength alone like everyone else, her breath audible with each drag against the water, cables of muscle standing out in her forearms, sweat sticking golden curls to her cheeks and soaking through her shirt—which she had kept on, “out of respect for your boys’ delicate riverland sensibilities.”

“Doesn’t matter how she’s doin’ it,” the oarmaster said. “Long as the Sazuman can row, she can stay.”

“How long are you going to stay?” Isa asked her under his breath.

“Long as I can,” Damo said. “You think you’re the only one using this to keep yourself alive?”

Damo cultivated an aura of such effortless power that it was easy to forget just how hard she had to work to keep that power from killing her. Sazumans weren’t born physically exceptional. The untrained garden-variety tactomancer could absorb twice her starting strength without tearing her muscles and breaking her bones. To take the septuple—or octuple or whatever she was at now—strength that Damo employed, a tactomancer had to train for years.

Damored’s whole body, from her steel-cabled arms to the tight column of her waist, to those head-crushing thighs, was the product of careful and constant conditioning. If she let any part of her physique atrophy—Osu, if she even failed to stretch regularly—she risked debilitating injury the next time she did something like punch a man’s head off or dangle a giant snake from one arm.

She rowed for the same reason Isa did: to outrun the spirit at her heels. Only hers wasn’t Theid or Alkem. Her pursuer was Ever and the inevitability of decay.

After a stretch, wind filled the sails above and Captain Xabres called, “Oars up! Let her ride!”

When they had drawn the oars in, Damo stretched with a contented sigh as Isa slumped in exhaustion against their horizontal oar.

“Are you okay?” Damo asked in Hunter’s Pidgin as around them, a few of the oarsmen struck up conversations in Krellish. “Want another sip?” She patted the flask of Goddess Gift at her hip.

“No, thanks. And shouldn’t you be trying to save that? I mean, if you’re planning to stay away from Sazuma for the foreseeable future?”

“Oh, it’ll be years before the effects even start to fade—if they ever do. Goddess Gift leaves the river way faster than it leaves a human body. You grow up drinking it like I did and tactomancy stays in your blood forever. That’s what little Sazuman tactomancers learn growing up, anyway. Although who knows if it’s true anymore, since the degradation.”

“You’ve lost me. What degradation?”

Damo looked at him in surprise. “Look, I know the rest of these riverlanders haven’t figured it out yet, but I thought a smart animancer like you would have put the pieces together. The Wildermyn have.”

“Pieces of what?”

“Shit. I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.” Damo rubbed a hand across the back of her neck, unsticking sweaty curls as she did so. “But now that I have, I guess you should know…” Damo rarely avoided eye contact during a conversation, but she didn’t look at Isa now, opting instead to examine a blister forming between her thumb and forefinger. “The plague wasn’t the presence of any sorta toxin or bacteria in the water. It was the absence of the cure-all—the Goddess Gift—inherent in the Sazumriver.”

Isa remembered dimly, as if from a dream, that this had occurred to him. He didn’t let himself remember those days—those weeks—Taniri had suffered and he had failed, and failed, and failed to help her. But a thought had flashed through his mind as he ransacked a dead Wildermyn’s medicine stores, scrambling for a cure as fever shook his hands and sent prickling black crawling all through the Gray:

What if you’ve been trying to treat the symptom, not the problem, Aer had suggested, zir voice fuzzed with shadow and the looming shape of Ever. It’s not enough to stem the bleeding, Aer’s voice had become Elder Thrask’s, scolding, as Isa knelt with the older Inkarnam over a set of fang marks in a hunter’s leg. What color was the snake?

“No,” Isa said, shaking his head to dislodge the claws of memory, and then again in response to Damo’s claim. “No.” He had ruled it out for one simple reason: “Goddess Gift doesn’t reach the riverlands.”

“‘Course, it does,” Damo laughed. “It’s diluted to the point that it doesn’t grant tactomancy, but any water of Sazuma is a gift.”

“Okay, sure, like in a spiritual way, it’s a ‘gift’ but—”

“No, I’m talking about its literal composition. At the point you folks start calling it Tisadne, the Sazumriver still contains… ah, what do the Wildermyn call ‘em? Antibodies? Vitamins?” She waved a hand. “You know, corporomantic stuff that keeps you from gettin’ sick. Why do you think riverlanders are always dyin’a disease out in the Wilds?”

“I…” Common knowledge was that they caught diseases from dirty Wildermyn, but the Inkarnai, who observed many of the Wildermyn’s methods of medicine and personal hygiene, knew this for the unkind urban legend it was. “I guess, I never thought about it.”

“It’s ‘cause the Wildermyn take plant remedies to compensate for the stuff they’re not getting’ from the Sazumriver. Only piece of advice my Rama bothered givin’ me when I left Sazuma the first time: wherever you go, eat what the Wildermyn are eatin’.”

Isa supposed that explained why the symptoms of the plague had varied so widely, from poxes to heart attacks, leaving Wildermages scrambling for the right remedies with each new case. But, “How do you know this? About—” What had she called it? “—the degradation?”

“Because I was in Sazuma when it happened. When those idiots tampered with the river’s source and created the plague.”

“No. I-I thought it was…” Beyond all human control. But all this time, it had been humans who caused the plague?

You knew this, Aer said, In the Gray, you always knew.

“Why?” he demanded, surprised by the anger in his ragged voice. You know, Isa, Aer said, imploring him not to ask. Theid gave birth to Alkem— “Why would someone do that?”

Damo shrugged. “Goddess Gift is like any precious thing; if someone finds a way to take all of it for herself, she will.” Desire gives birth to change. “Far as I can tell, someone in the Sazuman aristocracy wanted just a bit more from the water than the long life it had given her… then a little more… then a little more…” Damo frowned at one of her blisters, tore off a shred of whitened skin, “no matter what it cost everyone else.”

“No… who would do that?”

“A lotta people, if you think on the benefits. If little traces of Goddess Gift grant good health and few years’a drinkin’ it grants lifelong tactomancy, imagine what you could do with more. The Ramas who drink from the source already outlive the average person by… fuck, who even knows, when you account for how many times they’ve probably changed faces. I gathered that the ultimate goal was immortality, but I wasn’t gonna stick around to see if they succeeded.”

Isa closed his eyes and drew Aer close to keep back the oblivion of rage. “So, you’re telling me that the Sazuman aristocracy did this?”

“By process of elimination, yeah. They’re the ones with access to the river’s source, where the problems started.”

“Why?” Isa asked again, because it was the one word that kept boiling to the surface of his half-numbed, half-seething mind.

“I just told you why.”

“I meant why are you telling me this?”

Damo turned on the bench to consider him in the limited light from the porthole. When she spoke again, it was with a sad kind of surprise. “You’re angry at me.”

“No… Maybe.” The angry part was true. Isa was painfully, unbearably angry. But at who? All this time, he had blamed the plague on nature and Alkem’s cruel whims… He didn’t recognize his voice when he spoke again. “Are they dead?”

“Who?”

“The people who did this.” And did it hurt? He wanted to know. Did they suffer as Taniri suffered?

“Dunno,” Damo said anticlimactically. “It was all a bit of a free-for-all when I left. A lot of people pointin’ fingers, nobody with all the pieces to make a proper accusation.”

Isa was distracted for a moment from his mounting rage by a realization: “That’s when things went bad with the Spy Guild,” he said. “They thought you had something to do with it.”

“I’m unnaturally strong, even for a tactomancer,” she said to her boots, “a bit off, quick to violence, poorly behaved.” She rolled her eyes in an unsuccessful attempt to appear uncaring. “If someone was siphoning a little somethin’ extra off the river, wouldn’t you suspect me?”

“But you’ve always been freakishly strong,” Isa said. The first time he had met Damored, she had run down a wildebeest and killed it with her bare hands and that had been almost ten years ago. “And you’re not a savvy chemist; you barely remembered what antibodies were.” Given a moment’s thought, it was ridiculous.

“Funny how the smartest spies’ll throw logic to the winds when they need someone to take the fall.” Damo peeled another shred of skin from her hand, then shifted on the bench to face Isa fully, her scowl going cold and hard. “You know what I decided though?”

“What?”

“I decided that it doesn’t matter who fucked up the river for everyone.”

“How does it not matter?” Isa was half thinking that they needed to turn the boat around, go straight to Sazuma and kill the witches who did this.

“Because that kind of evil doesn’t just die. If the women who caused the plague are dead, their daughters, and nieces, and granddaughters are still around coverin’ for their crimes and reapin’ the benefits of their bullshit. That’s the way these Goddess-forsaken states work. That’s why I left the Spy Guild for good. I’m not workin’ for those bitches again. Or any bitches except myself.”

“Sorry. I know what…” What did he mean to say? I know what it’s like to lose the only family you know? Damo had been cast out of Sazuma for something she hadn’t done. It had been Isa’s actions that cut him off from the Temple Inkarnam, his decision to start a family, and his feet that carried him away from Spensa. All his loss had been fully, indisputably his fault. And that was a different sort of pain. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You deserved to know,” Damo said.

“Still, I—”

“Don’t worry about it. Sazuma’s behind us. Your home, on the other hand…”

“Oars!” Captain Xabres called from above decks. “We’ve got rough waters ahead!”

“I’m not getting off this boat in Azenkar,” Isa said as he and Damo got into position, his tattooed hands gripping the oar alongside her freckled ones. If he could avoid it, he wouldn’t even come out of his cabin.

“Really?” she said with a look down his hands.

“There’s nothing for me there.”

Isa and Damored rowed side by side until darkness fell and the only thing in the world was the drumbeat, keeping the oarsmen together, a single organism of pumping flesh and muscle. At last, it became too dark for Captain Xabres to see ahead of the prow, and the Waning Ibis dropped anchor by a fishing village.

Some of the oarsmen untied hammocks from the ceiling and clambered into them for the night while Isa and Damo retired to the guest cabins alongside the captain’s. Being the only lady onboard, Damo got a cabin to herself, while Isa shared with a pair of travelers who had bartered passage to Azenkar.

The stabbing, tearing pain all through Isa’s muscles was a comfort as he climbed the stairs to the main deck. It meant that, if he dreamt, it would be of viper fangs through his limbs, not anything considerably more painful. On deck, one of the traveling merchants had broken out a harp and a few rowers had taken up a racy Krellish shanty about pulling off a woman’s stockings. During his first travels on the river, Isa had loved sitting with travelers after dark, wrapping his imagination in their songs and stories. All he wanted now was to slither into bed and pass out. He had just grasped the door handle, ready to push it open and fall directly onto his cot when Damo touched his shoulder.

“What?” He shrugged the hand off anxiously, but her touch left no tactomantic tingle—just a warm line of sensation through layers of sweat. It took him a moment to realize that she had been tracing the animantic tattoos on his back.

“Just wonderin’…” She studied him a little too intently as he staggered around to face her in the lantern light.

“I’m not interested in a threesome,” he said, having noticed the attractive oarsman she motioned into her cabin when she thought no one was looking.

“I figured. You told me you weren’t goin’ ashore in Azenkar.”

“And?” He breathed, resting back against the door in case his legs decided to stop supporting him.

“I was thinkin’ it might be better if you visited home.”

Anger rose bitter in the back of Isa’s throat. First, Damo had to throw him into chaos with all that talk of Sazuman Ramas and their role in the plague. Now this. He would have shoved her away if he wasn’t worried it would tear the last remaining ligaments holding his arms together. This job was supposed to take him away from his pain, dammit, not back to it.

“I didn’t mean Spen—” Damo mercifully stopped short of saying her name when she saw the look on Isa’s face. “I didn’t mean her. I meant your cult.”

“I’m excommunicated,” Isa said, his annoyance cooled but not gone. “Why would I want to visit them?”

“‘Cause those tattoos are lookin’ like they’ve seen better days.”

Isa was quiet. She was right, of course. He had just spent years trying not to think about his tattoos.

“Now, I’m no expert on animancy, but other shapeshifters I know talk about goin’ home to their people when they need a touch-up.”

“Not all shapeshifters need to go home for that.”

“Okay, so you’ve got a bottle of your magic ink or whatever?”

“Dust.”

“What?”

“It’s magic dust.”

“Oh, cute,” she smirked. “Whimsical.”

“They mix the dust with ink. It’s—” not something you need to explain to a non-animancer, Aer reminded him. “I don’t have it. It’s just not a good idea for me to go back.”

“Suit yourself,” Damo shrugged with another irritatingly skeptical look at his faded tag runes. “Your funeral.”

“This whole job is my funeral. I thought we’d covered that.”

“Well, I wasn’t talkin’ about literal dyin’; I figure you’re fine with that. I was just thinkin’ that if you don’t come up with a pressin’ errand to run, you’re gonna be stuck givin’ Captain Xabres the grand tour of the canals. He’s been talkin’ about gettin’ you to take him to all the local hangouts. You know, since you’re the native.”

Isa grimaced. “Great.”

“As far as gettin’ outta that, your options are the cult or the estranged wife.”

“Or I could just lie.”

“Is that the best idea?”

“No,” Isa conceded, “but going back to the temple might be worse.”

“I get that,” Damo said, “more than you could imagine. But take it from me: just ‘cause the powers that be have kicked you dirtside doesn’t mean you can’t go back in and steal their shit.” She tilted her head meaningfully toward the flask on her belt. “Anyway, you look like you might wanna get to bed before you pass out. Just think about it.”

Ultimately, Isa had more time than he would have liked to think about it, since he woke the next morning with a debilitating ache in every muscle of his body that rendered rowing impossible. He could stand and walk with tremendous pain but that was about it. Staying in the dark of the cabin with his thoughts was out of the question, so he ended up on the main deck, watching the countryside pass. And, since he couldn’t think about the fact that each stroke of the oars brought him physically closer to Rionde and to Spensa, he pondered Damo’s suggestion. He rolled it around in his head, examined it from all sides, brought Aer in for a second opinion, and found that no matter how he approached it, she was right. Dammit. He had to go back.

Some animancers carried a stash of their originator dust with them, which they could mix into ink and use to touch up their own tattoos. Isa didn’t have his and his tattoos were wearing thin from too many years away from home; it was a miracle of Osu that they hadn’t failed him yet. If the lines became too separated, he could lose the ability to transform, or worse, succeed in transforming and not be able to shift back to his human form. To go on a near-suicide job without a retouch would be monumentally stupid; the youngest trainees at the Temple Inkarnam could have told him that.

All that was left now was the impossible choice between trying to sneak into the Temple unnoticed and walking in through the front doors. The first meant that he risked death at the hands of his fellow Inkarnai. The latter meant he risked their rejection. And that might be worse. No, he decided. It was definitely worse. So, the front doors were out.

Fortunately, there was more than one way into the Temple Inkarnam—all of them dicey, but Isa had a painful, sleepless night to mull his options.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this chapter of Seven Forsaken. You can get new chapters of this story early and read more serialized stories from the world of Altima on my Patreon.

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