Escaping the Desert Town: A Name to Conjure With Chapters 5-6
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
Chapter 5: Shopping for Trouble
The group is in a desert town. It’s hot, dusty, and full of the kind of people who don’t ask questions because they don’t want questions asked of them. The town exists as a waypoint for traders, smugglers, and anyone else who needs supplies before heading into the deeper desert.
They need riding beasts. In Zarathandra, the standard mount is a rudhar. Think of a camel but worse. They’re stubborn, they smell bad, and they have personalities that range from indifferent to actively hostile. Standard fantasy transportation.
Uskban handles the negotiations. He walks up to a crooked merchant who sells stolen animals and intimidates him into a fair deal. The merchant senses that this wiry little man would happily gut him over a price dispute and decides cooperation is the smart move.
Meet Glupp
This is where the book gets its heart.
Among the merchant’s animals is a grundzar. A grundzar looks like a giant horned toad, scaled up to the size of a large horse. They’re enormous, armored, and have strong opinions about who gets to ride them.
This particular grundzar is named Glupp.
Glupp takes one look at Sandy and decides that this human belongs to him. Not the other way around. Glupp is not Sandy’s pet. Sandy is Glupp’s person. The grundzar walks up to Sandy, bumps him with his massive head, and refuses to acknowledge that anyone else in the group exists.
Zhadnoboth orders Sandy to ride one of the rudhars. Glupp blocks the path. The sorcerer tries to command the grundzar. Glupp ignores him completely. In a world where Sandy has no power, no freedom, and no choice about anything, this giant lizard-toad thing chose him voluntarily.
They buy Glupp too. There’s no reasonable way to separate him from Sandy without violence, and Glupp looks like he’d win that fight.
The Sandy and Glupp bond is one of the best parts of the book. In a story full of forced quests and dark backstories, this weird animal friendship is pure and uncomplicated. Glupp likes Sandy. No magic chains. No divine manipulation. Just a grundzar who picked his guy.
The Invisible Getaway
Once they have their mounts and supplies, the group needs to leave town without attracting attention. The Zalkrings have eyes everywhere. Spies, informants, trained animals. Getting out unseen is critical.
Zhadnoboth casts an invisibility spell on the group. It works. Mostly. Classic Zhadnoboth. The spell makes them invisible to casual observers, but edges shimmer and shadows fall wrong. Good enough magic from a good enough sorcerer.
They ride out under cover of the spell. Sandy on Glupp. The others on their rudhars. The desert opens up around them. Flat, hot, and hostile.
A spy crow spots them as they leave. Someone knows they left. During the night ride, they pass Zalkring riders on the road. Zhadnoboth’s spell holds just enough to keep them hidden. But the Zalkrings are active in this region. The group isn’t just heading toward danger. Danger is already around them.
Chapter 6: The Mirror Shows the Past
Chapter 6 is the hardest chapter so far. It pulls back to the Goddess watching through her magic mirror. But instead of showing the present, the mirror shows the past. The histories of Pognak and Uskban before the Zalkrings found them.
Pognak’s life before: He was a gentle man. Hard to picture, given the silent, brutal giant we’ve been traveling with. But Pognak had a wife he loved. A young son who followed him everywhere. Another child on the way. He lived in a small community. He farmed. He laughed. He was happy.
The Zalkrings came and burned it all. They killed his wife. They killed his son. They killed his unborn child by killing the woman carrying it. They held Pognak down and cut out his tongue so he could never speak about what he saw. Then they left him alive. Not out of mercy. Out of cruelty. They wanted him to live with it.
Uskban’s life before: He had sisters. They were the center of his world. When the Zalkrings raided his home, they took the women. Uskban’s sisters were brought to Zalkring ceremonies. What happened there was systematic, ritualistic torture. They were killed slowly as part of religious observance. Uskban was made to watch.
Aamodt doesn’t sensationalize any of this. He writes it plainly. The facts are devastating enough without embellishment. A happy family destroyed. A loving brother forced to witness the worst thing imaginable. These aren’t character backgrounds designed to make you think “oh cool, dark backstory.” They’re meant to make you understand why Uskban will walk into certain death to hurt the Zalkrings. Why Pognak follows him without question.
Why This Chapter Matters
Chapter 6 changes how you read every interaction going forward. When Uskban is cruel or violent, you understand where it comes from. When Pognak stands silently behind the group, you know what that silence contains.
It also raises uncomfortable questions about the Goddess. She watched all of this happen. She may have arranged parts of it. Did she let the Zalkrings destroy these lives because it served her purpose? The book doesn’t answer this directly, but it lets the question sit there.
Sandy doesn’t know any of this backstory yet. He sees Uskban as dangerous and Pognak as intimidating. The reader knows what made them this way, and that gap in knowledge makes every scene with the group feel heavier.
The group is moving deeper into the desert now. Toward Zalkring territory. Toward the treasure. And toward the confrontation the Goddess has been engineering for a thousand years.