The Chronicles Of Fone Bone, Oathbreaker

Chapter 6: Into the Desert

The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands.

-Proverbs 30.27

Someone was shaking Annie awake.

She blinked to bring herself to a groggy consciousness, but seeing Dietrich's face looming over her shocked her fully awake.

Sunlight streamed through a gap in the curtain on Dietrich's window, illuminating a floating sea of dust motes. The warm light redeemed some of the small room's stark crudity. Bluebirds whistled somewhere outside and the enclosed room smelled of sap. Annie sat up, rubbing her eyes. "What day is it?"

"Today," he said. He was slipping on a belt with a large leather holster. He pulled a gun out of the closet that looked like a bone-made double-barreled shotgun sawed off to about fourteen inches. Its stock was gone, but in its place was a makeshift pistol grip held in place largely by baling twine. Dietrich loaded a couple of shells and slipped the gun into its holster.

"You vant I get your soos now, Miss Annie?"

Groggy as she was, she took a moment to interpret his accented Bonish. "Uh...yes. Yes, I need them."

"Fine. Come vis me, please, and zen ve vill meet Rictus and Serge at zuh map room."

Annie's shoes squished, but she figured she would just have to bear it. In anticipation of the desert journey, she had changed her skirt for a pair of khaki cargo shorts, but she still wore her damp windbreaker. The walk to the map room was short, and though the early morning air was fresh and cool, the sun glowed in a clear sky and its rays were hot. The beaten earth of Portsmouth's streets was damp, and an odor of manure rose from it.

The map room was a small hut in an obscure corner of the citadel. Its sole occupant was an eccentric, elderly human with a long white beard. He was dressed in grungy shirtsleeves, and he constantly waved his hands as if he didn't know what else to do with them. Serge and Rictus were already there when Annie and Dietrich arrived.

"Anysing on zuh ozer side of zuh desert?" Serge asked.

The old man bobbed his head and waved his hands as he walked back and forth across the room in front of a wall full of pigeonholes holding maps. He stopped at one, grabbed a piece of paper, and yanked. Several maps fell out onto the floor, but he ignored them and took the one he wanted over to a low table where he unrolled it.

"Zer is legend," the old man said, "zat zuh Big Johnson Bone tell to human trappers of valley across desert."

"Why would Big Johnson have been speaking to humans?" Annie asked.

Serge glanced at her. "Even in Big Johnson's day, zer vas more amiable interaction betveen human and bone zan you might sink. Go on, Heinrich."

The old man pointed at an imaginative set of crags drawn on the map in the midst of a blank patch labeled Desert. "Big Johnson known as great liar, but if legend true, zen Valley is here, to souseast." He placed a compass on the map, took a bearing, scribbled it on a piece of paper, and handed it to Serge. "Map may be inaccurate. Can do no better."

Serge looked at the bearing. "Good enough," he said. "A mountain range as big as zuh von you've got drawn zer ought to be easy to find, even if zuh directions are off."

"Big Johnson great liar, and map may be inaccurate," the old man repeated.

After they finished in the map room, they met up with a group of fifty human men. Serge walked around and shook hands with them all.

They were heavily armed, and as Annie had suspected they would be, they were carrying illegal bone-made guns. Annie didn't care for guns, and she especially didn't care for guns made for the express purpose of killing bones. Besides the submachine guns and assault rifles, four of the men had some exaggerated monstrosities strapped on their backs. They looked like cannons.