July 13th, 761, 7:42 PM; Day 118 of the Menetnashte Expedition
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After Kermanevar, camp life continued more or less unchanged. Mary Collins managed to merge into the Expedition rather seamlessly, proving herself cheerful, willing to do any kind of work, and on one notable occasion killing a foot-long scorpion with a thrown rock. There were a few arguments here and there, largely between Samael on one side and Pelletier on the other, with Edmund increasingly taking the professor's side, but after having been in close quarters for nearly four months now, a certain strain was bound to show.
In a way, the terrain changed also. You were now halfway across the Sebuan desert, and the rocky flatlands of Kermanevar and Dezbar increasingly gave way to sand, rolling dunes that stretched as far as the eye could see. To most of you, used to the forests and fields of the Core, the feeling was increasingly one of a small insect on a very large plate. A poorly cleaned plate at that.
The sand and grit got into everything. The sand was in your clothing and in your boots. It got into your books and the scabbards of your weapons. Even your food had a curiously gritty taste from the eternal, faintly blowing sand. Light sandstorms swirled across the Sebuan desert time after time, burying everything in a foot or two of loosely acumulated sand. More than a few of you had taken to wearing damp filter masks around your mouths, so that at the least you wouldn't have to breathe the sand.
It was at this time that you grew to truly appreciate the camels bought back in Phiraz. They traveled the slippery, shifting sands with a kind of sure-footed calmness, eating little and requiring almost no water. Combined with Kuzan's magics, they kept the trip from becoming an exercise in pure hell.
As it was, it was purgatory. In time, it would end.
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Still, no one was too happy when you reached the Jackal's Ruse. You saw it when you were still days away, a distant, muddy-brown spot on the horizon, visible when you crested one of the interminable sand dunes. It was... not an inviting sight.
During the day, you saw thin streams of smoke rise up into the sky, polluting the skyline for leagues in every direction. A lone, ugly, fetid pillar of smoke, it was still nothing compared to the dark shapes you saw flying about at night. They circles around the graveyard of ships, never fewer than two and never more than six, flapping madly through the night, never tiring or ceasing until dawn was upon the horizon.
One night, at Samael's urging, Khalil had used his spyglass to try and find out what they were. They were too high, but a little mathematical work told you that they had wingspawns measuring around twenty feet.
No one had slept very well that night.
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Still, uninviting appearance notwithstanding, the Jackal's Ruse was supposedly home to a monastery of desert ascetics, and more importantly a chance to resupply and learn what other dangers awaited further. And Lia had a promise to fulfill. So, putting your misgivings aside, you progressed onwards to the Jackal's Ruse.
It was late one July evening that you finally reached the graveyard of ships. Looking out at the sight before you, it struck you as an oddly appropriate term. This was a graveyard. A place of the dead. At the far end of the graveyard of ships loomed a building of sandstone and scavenged wood atop an outcropping of stone. This must have been the monastery, the chapel of this churchyard.
You hadn't been quite prepared for the sheer scale of the Jackal's Ruse. From end to end, it formed an irregular circle some three miles in diameter, littered with outcroppings of rock and the dead ships of a dozen sea-faring cultures. Most of the ships were still there, preserved by the desert, though you imagined they must have been centuries old, in some cases.
They loomed like broken, beached whales, masts and spars grasping upwards like broken ribs. Tatters of sail remained like ghostly shrouds from the masts, and dessicated seaweed and dead barnacles covered their hulls like a plague. At times, when the wind blew just the right way, there was a scent of rot in the air.
The closest ship was an excellent example of the kind of decay the Jackal's Ruse engendered. It was a caravel of some sort, of Blaustein make Kuzan identified. The forward third of the hull had broken off, slumping forward, and chunks of the hull had fallen off, revealing cavernous holes in the ship. A few rusted cannons jutted from gunports, and a few shreds of a blackened flag hung from the crow's nest.
In the dying light of dusk, the entire graveyard of ships seemed to take on a ruddy tint, as though the ships had been dipped in blood. It was appropriate, for here, in the Jackal's Ruse, was the greatest expression of malice you had seen in the Expedition yet. You had seen the hatred and madness of necromancers, fiends, and faeries, but this...
The Jackal's Ruse was an expression of the world's malice.
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