Author Archives: steinulfr

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

Over the next week things settled into a steady routine. I spent the days in the wagon, sleeping as often as not. My wounds were still healing, and rest would help. And it wasn’t as though I was missing much. The wagons continued their slow roll to the south, forest and field passing us by with steady monotony.

 

Rose slept a great deal as well. After the first day we silently came to an arrangement in which we would trade off through the day, one of us resting while the other stayed awake. It wasn’t precisely keeping watch, but it resembled it closely enough to make the difference minor.

 

Rose, as I’d observed, didn’t sleep well. The girl tossed and turned in her sleep, and when she woke her eyes were often dark and hunted. She didn’t talk about in what she saw in her dreams, and I knew better than to ask. I had enough nightmares of my own that I felt no great need to stack on more of someone else’s.

 

In the times between naps, I spoke with Derek. Our driver was a relentlessly cheerful man, talking about flooded out bridges and broken axles with the same good humor as sunny days and clear nights. I honestly wasn’t sure whether it was an act. He had endless anecdotes from years of life on the road, and he never seemed to tire of sharing them.

 

I was just as glad. It meant that I didn’t have to share any of my own.

 

The days were long, which was impressive given that it was the wintertime. Each morning we were roused well before dawn by the clanging of a spoon on a metal pot and the harsh, strident sound of Konrad’s voice. Breakfast was passed out, a simple meal of dense bread and honey. The camp–such as it was; we slept in the wagons and there weren’t all that many of us, so camp was a small one–was swiftly packed away as we ate. By the time the sun rose, we were already on the road. We stopped in the middle of the day to water the horses, and then continued until it was dark enough that the humans couldn’t see. I was quietly grateful that my vision had been improved by the Change; I couldn’t see in the dark, but I needed less light than they did, which was almost the same thing here.

 

It was this which was, in my opinion, the interesting part of the day. After the wagons had stopped, a fire was quickly built. Konrad carried a tinderbox, but he used alchemical matches to light the fire each night, a luxury which was at odds with his otherwise frugal attitude. Konrad’s wife, an imposing woman named Olga who was at least as large as he was, prepared the meal each night. More of the heavy trail bread was accompanied by beans, as well as sparing rations of jerky and dried fruit. It wasn’t good food, precisely, but I’d eaten less and worse often enough not to complain.

 

As we sat around the fire and ate, people talked. The topics of conversation varied widely, everything from idle chatter about the things we’d passed that day to idle speculation about the road ahead, all the way to talking about family left behind and hopes for what was at the end of the road.

 

It was strangely intimate. I could understand that, in a way. We were all just brought here and tied together by circumstance. We would never see each other again after this, would never touch each others’ lives at all. It was easier to talk about hard topics when you didn’t have to care what the person you were talking to thought of you.

 

I learned a lot about my fellow travelers, in those first few days. Konrad and Olga were hard but fair, and while they were strict, they held themselves to the same standards as everyone else. Konrad had a dry humor about him and Olga sometimes looked over the camp with a quiet contentment that reminded me of Corbin in the inn on a busy night. The memories that brought up were so sharp that they hurt, not least because I knew they would come to hurt less with time.

 

There were two men who traveled with the caravan, working for Konrad. Derek was one, and he was much the same in the evening as in the daytime, always ready with a quip or a wry observation. It wasn’t until the third day that I realized that while he was always talking he didn’t talk about anything of consequence; there was no discussion of home or family, no mention of what he wanted or what he feared. Nothing at all to let anyone see past the surface, aside from the occasional glimpse of bitter hatred towards the empire.

 

The other man, whose name was Trevor, scared me. There was an ugliness to him that went further than his features, though those were none too pretty either; he was tall and muscular, but blocky features and a missing eye more than outweighed any aesthetic credit those might have bought him. More than that, though, there was something about him that was wrong, and deeply disturbing. He leered at me when he thought no one saw, looking at me less like a person and more like a piece of meat, and at Rose even more so. It didn’t escape me that Konrad had set the father and son to ride in the wagon driven by Trevor, and left the two girls with Derek.

 

The father and son were named, respectively, Heinz and Mathias. The father was old enough to have grey hairs but not so old that he moved stiffly, and the son was perhaps ten or slightly more. Heinz was clearly worried but he managed to keep up a pleasant front, forcing cheer and pretending to think that everything was all right. Mathias, I thought, hadn’t managed to see through that front yet. They were going to Hasburg in the hopes of finding work, Heinz being a metalworker who had lost his livelihood when the mine closed down. His wife–not Mathias’s mother, I thought, but more likely a stepmother–was staying behind in the village they’d left, hoping to join them if they found a way to support themselves in the city.

 

The other two passengers were more of an enigma. Finn was a young man, hardly more than a boy, who spoke no Tsuran and spoke Skellish only with a heavy accent of the far north. His right arm ended in a stump, and he fumbled with his left hand too much for it to be an old wound. He spoke not at all of his past and, when the topic of family had come up, only bent his head in what looked like deep sorrow. Reika, on the other hand, was a Changed woman from Akitsuro. She was tall, significantly taller than anyone else in the caravan, with long limbs and scales. Her tongue flickered out of her mouth like a snake’s when she spoke, and her fingers were always moving, fidgeting and tapping. She didn’t say why she’d left, nor why she was going back, though at one point she did share a story about having been cast out of her family after being Changed.

 

And then there were the last two. The Dierkhlani, and the varg. They sat at the edge of the firelight, more often than not together. Neither of them partook of the shared meal, instead eating bread and meat from his packs. The Dierkhlani seldom spoke unless spoken to, and it was even more seldom that anyone else worked up the courage to speak to him. The two of them sat, a silent but very tangible presence, with our camp but not a part of it.

 

Late one night, after the rest of us had gone to our rest, I looked out of the wagon and saw them there, lit by the embers of a dying fire. The man was sitting on the ground, his legs crossed, staring into the coals with eyes that reflected back golden-yellow. One hand rested on the back of the varg, which was curled up on the ground next to him. The other was on the hilt of his sword, lying naked across his legs.

---

We had been on the road for nine days when it all went to pieces. Hasburg was two days in front of us, and another three days past that was the border of what had once been the Kingdom of Skelland, and was now the Imperial Province of Skelland.

 

I’d been expecting it for a while. Ever since that scare with the imperial blockade the first day, things had been going smoothly. It had been going well, and I’d learned better than to expect for things to go well for me.

 

My first warning that the magic pulse was coming was when the fur on the back of my neck stood up, rising like a dog’s hackles though the display it made was rather less impressive. I felt the tingle run down my spine and I sat up straighter, my ears perking up. I could feel the potential gathering in the air like the aftermath of a lightning strike, my connection to the metal around me flaring up so bright I could almost taste every coin in the pouch I carried, could almost smell the nails holding the wagon together.

 

Rose woke out of a light doze, startled by my motion. She could tell that something was wrong, but she couldn’t tell what it was. It left her startled and scared, flinching and looking around like she was wondering where the blow would come from. That reaction, all by itself, told me more than I wanted to know about Rose’s scars.

 

Derek couldn’t feel the magic, either. But the horses could. Blackie paused midstep and looked around, making a noise that I didn’t know horses well enough to name, and even Star’s ears went flat against her head. Derek was a good enough driver to recognize it instantly, looking around for trouble in much the same way Rose was.

 

Then, just seconds after I felt the building tension, the pulse crested. The air rippled, a flicker of red passing from left to right across my vision. I could taste cinnamon and less strongly charcoal, and my body abruptly felt like it was squeezed into a suit of clothing two sizes too small, the air pressing in on all sides. The metal around me abruptly strained towards me, everything from the pouch of coins on Derek’s belt and the horses’ bridles to the nails in the wagon being pulled towards me by the invisible connection between us. A corner of the cloth canopy over the wagon caught on fire, flaring briefly with viridian flames before settling in to a more typical smoldering.

 

And then it was gone. The pressure faded as abruptly as it had come, the tastes vanished from my mouth, the pouch fell back to hang naturally. Rose squeaked in surprise, one hand going to her face as she scrambled backwards. Derek exhibited no such signs of shock, instead leaping instantly to smother the smoldering fabric.

 

Not too bad, as magic pulses went. I’d seen them do substantially worse than just a minor fire. I let out my breath in a relieved sigh. I hadn’t even realized I was holding it.

 

And then I heard the screaming.

 

It was a high-pitched scream, and it had a certain authenticity to it that told me more than I needed to know about what the screamer was feeling.

 

There was only one person in this caravan capable of hitting that particular pitch. And that, in itself, was enough to know what had just happened.

 

Before that initial scream had entirely faded, I was on the ground and running. Derek and Rose stayed behind. From the sounds I heard behind me, I was guessing Rose was slightly hysterical and Derek was doing what he could to calm the poor girl.

 

I left that to him. There was someone who needed the sympathy rather more, just now.

 

I knew where to go. Two wagons in front of us was the one that Heinz and Mathias rode in.

 

I was fast when I needed to be. I got there just a few seconds after the pulse passed. But there was already a crowd there. Trevor and Heinz had been crowded out of the wagon; Heinz was clearly upset by this, while Trevor was just standing and trying to calm the horses. The animals hadn’t been pleased by the pulse’s effects, let alone the chaos that came afterwards.

 

The people who had done the crowding were no surprise. Reika was there, stooped over to fit into the wagon. The Changed woman customarily walked beside the wagon, her long limbs having no trouble keeping up with the horses; she would have been only a few strides from the wagon. And there was the Dierkhlani, who customarily rode a distance in front of the lead wagon and should have been a hundred feet away.

 

In between them was the source of the screaming. Mathias was lying on the floor of the wagon, twitching wildly. He’d stopped screaming, at least. If he were very lucky, he might have passed out. But his body was still moving, tremors running down his limbs and occasionally building to spastic convulsions. His breathing was rapid and shallow. His eyes were open, far too wide, but they were rolled so far back that nothing could be seen but the whites.

 

The people outside the wagon clearly had no idea what was going on. The people inside just as clearly did. As I was approaching, the Dierkhlani stooped down beside the boy. With a smooth confidence that made it look perfectly natural, he reached into Mathias’s mouth, pulling his lips open and sliding a strip of leather between his teeth. It was just in time, as moments later his jaws snapped shut hard.

 

Reika, meanwhile, reached out and rested one hand against the boy’s forehead. She didn’t try to restrain him, even when one of his flailing arms struck her on the shoulder. She just let him flail.

 

I pushed forward without asking, pulling my jacket off as I climbed into the wagon. Neither of them questioned it as I slipped in beside them, squatting down beside the convulsing child. I managed to dodge past his arms to his head. Once I was there I reached under his neck, momentarily displacing Reika’s hand, and slid my folded jacket between his head and the floor of the wagon.

 

The Tsuran woman glanced at me and smiled, just a quick flash of teeth and a couple gaps, before going back to resting her hand on the child’s head. The Dierkhlani didn’t even spare me that much attention. He was intently focused on Mathias, watching and waiting.

 

There are three things that can happen to people who are caught in a magic pulse. No one had ever really been able to predict which would happen to a given person, and the only way to really find out was to be in one. Or several; not everyone who was in a pulse was in a position to be hit by it, and it could take several before you happened to be in the right place at the right time. Like most things to do with the magic, all of it was strange and inexplicable, seemingly random. For all of that, though, it’s pretty easy to characterize the ways people are affected.

 

Some people are unaffected. The magic doesn’t touch them, doesn’t want them, and no matter how many pulses they’re in they’re left unscathed by it. Some people Change. And some people die.

 

Mostly people already knew which group they fell into. It was hard not to, not when everyone over a certain age had been in more pulses than they could count. Once you’d been through three or four without Changing, you could pretty much say that you weren’t going to.

 

Mathias, though, was young enough to have been born after the wards. He’d lived his whole life behind the alchemical protections, safe from the whims of the magic pulses. This was his first time outside, his first time caught in a surge of magical energy.

 

And he was Changing.

 

It took several minutes for the signs to start showing. The others left us alone in the wagon for that time, even pulling Heinz away. I knew exactly why they did, though it wasn’t something I could readily have articulated. It was just…wrong. Mathias was Changing, and that made this a thing for the Changed. Having them there would be like having men in a birthing room. And so they–all of them, even his father–stayed at a respectful distance.

 

He wasn’t a part of their world anymore. He wasn’t one of them. He was one of us, with all that implied, and now he always would be.

 

The first evidence of the Change was in his eyes. They were still rolled up into his head, but the whites shifted tone slightly, shading more to grey, and the blood vessels were more prominent. It made him look bloodshot. Instants later the features of his face began to shift as well, growing wider and coarser.

 

I winced as I watched. I knew from experience what it felt like to have bones shifting around like that. It was…a kind of pain I wasn’t in a hurry to feel again. I found myself once again hoping that he was unconscious. Most people were conscious through the initial Change, but some were lucky enough to pass out early in the process.

 

“Feverish,” Reika said. Her tone was bleak. She knew what that meant. We all did.

 

Some people Change in response to the magic, and others die. But there’s a degree of overlap between the two.

 

The speed with which the Change was progressing, the rise in temperature, the convulsions, they all said volumes about what was happening and the volumes in question weren’t happy ones.

 

“Fuck,” the Dierkhlani said. The tone said more than the word could, harsh and too-loud. He moved forward, resting his hand next to Reika’s, and then swore again under his breath. I couldn’t understand that word beyond that it sounded northern, but again, the tone said it all.

 

“He might stabilize,” Reika said. She didn’t sound hopeful.

 

The Dierkhlani didn’t say anything, just reached up to the boy’s eye. He gently rolled it down until he could see the pupil, and frowned. “Too dim in here,” he muttered absently.

 

I glanced around, and saw a lantern hanging from the front of the wagon next to the driver’s bench. It was there, presumably, so that driver and horses could see their way if they were traveling after dark. Right now it was just a handy source of light, and I grabbed it without hesitating.

 

The Dierkhlani barely glanced at me as I held it out towards him, then looked again and snatched it away from me. He produced an alchemical match from one of his pockets, the sort that used a scrap of flash paper, and used it to light the wick.

 

I was expecting him to set it aside at that point. But instead he brought the lit lantern down, holding it as close to Mathias’s face as he could get, while also holding his eye in place.

 

His pupil was huge, dilated until only a scrap of a blue iris was visible around it. It didn’t contract as the light came close, though it had to be painfully bright. Not that I could have said from looking at him. Mathias was still trembling, badly, but he didn’t seem to be capable of deliberate movement.

 

Another bad sign. Your pupils weren’t supposed to be that wide, not when it was bright.

 

“Temperature still rising,” the Dierkhlani said. His tone wasn’t harsh now; it was blank and analytical, which was worse. “Heartbeat…almost two hundred per minute.”

 

I looked the kid over. His skin was flushed, a red almost too bright to look natural, though I wasn’t sure if that was the Change or the side effects it was producing. His features were still thickening, his face growing broader so rapidly I could almost see it happening. The veins were standing out in his arms, and the color was growing stronger, almost less blue than violet.

 

The Change wasn’t stopping. If anything it seemed to be speeding up.

 

“He’s dying,” I said. The words weren’t loud, but they fell like hammer blows, shattering the silence. My voice was steadier than I felt it had any right to be.

 

Reika looked away, and didn’t say a word. The Dierkhlani didn’t so much as flinch. “Yes,” he said simply. “Help me roll him over.”

 

I wasn’t sure how he knew what was going to happen next. Vomiting was almost universal when people were being Changed, but it usually took longer than this to set in. His timing was perfect, though, and we had the boy rolled onto his side just in time. He retched violently, throwing up the remnants of the morning’s meal and a stream of thick, foul-smelling bile. He kept going for some time after it stopped coming up, coughing in between. The leather pad came out in the process, but that didn’t matter. He was past the worst of the convulsions now, and in any case there were bigger issues than a bit tongue just now.

 

“Have to bring his temperature down,” Reika said as we rolled Mathias back onto his back. “Damp cloths?”

 

“Wouldn’t matter,” the Dierkhlani said. “His heart rate is out of control. That will kill him before the fever.”

 

“Drugs?” I asked. I remembered the doctors back in the Whitewood using medicines on people who were taking the Change this badly. I also remembered how rarely it worked.

 

“Dangerous with the Changed,” the Dierkhlani said. “The reaction to many chemicals is…different.”

 

“Dying anyway,” I said.

 

He laughed, a humorless chuckle. “True. But it’s a moot point. We don’t have time to get him to a medic, and I don’t have anything that would help.”

 

I thought for about half a heartbeat, then grabbed my pack. I’d brought it with me when I ran, less because I’d expected this contingency than because I’d had plenty of time to learn the habit of grabbing my bag in an emergency.

 

I fished around in it for a moment, and then came up with the smaller bag that contained the few things I’d managed to keep with me when we left Branson’s Ford. I pulled out the vial of sedative, and put the rest back into the pack.

 

I’d bought this thing more as a simple poison than for its medical value. That had been shortly after I got to Branson’s Ford, when the paranoia from the camps was still strong. I’d used it as a sedative a few times since, though I still didn’t wholly trust it. That kind of mixing between alchemy and herbalism was…unreliable at best.

 

I held it out to the Dierkhlani, who stared for a moment and then snatched it out of my hand. He quickly opened the vial and poured a drop onto his finger. The thick, dark liquid was viscous as honey, though I knew from experience that it was bitter in the extreme.

 

He sniffed at it, and then licked it from his finger. It was a quick motion, resembling a cat lapping up water. He didn’t seem worried about it being poisonous or even a strong drug. But then, he wouldn’t. He was Dierkhlani.

 

“This is tincture of digitalis,” he said. “In charged blackwater. Where did you get this?”

 

“Later,” I said. “Will it help?”

 

He frowned, considering it for a heartbeat. Reika looked to be caught between hope and fear. “Maybe,” he said. “It’s…risky, but he’s as good as dead otherwise. We can try.”

 

“Few drops,” I said. “More and–”

 

“I know,” he said, cutting me off. “Need a needle, a clean one.”

 

I had a great many things in my bag, including quite a few that were sharp and metal. But I wasn’t confident that I could come up with a needle quickly, and I wasn’t sure that anything in there counted as clean. I raised my hand to point outside.

 

Reika bolted, moving faster than I’d have given her credit for. Like the snake she resembled, it appeared the Tsuran woman was capable of moving very quickly when she needed to. It wasn’t more than thirty seconds before she was back, holding a thin sewing needle in her hand.

 

The Dierkhlani snatched it from her and passed it quickly through the flame of the lantern, heating the metal to a dull glow. He held it steady, waiting for it to cool, and held the bottle of sedative in his other hand. “Hold him still,” he said.

 

I moved to do so, grabbing Mathias’s legs while Reika got his arms. “Not drinking?” I asked. That was how I had taken it in the past, a few drops mixed into water.

 

“Too slow,” the Dierkhlani. “And he’d throw it up again.” He slid the needle into the bottle without saying anything else. When he pulled it out it was glistening black, coated in the thick liquid.

 

We all held our breath as he slid the needle into the boy’s arm, just below the elbow. It was, I supposed, one perk of those raised, vivid veins. They were easy to see. The Dierkhlani held the needle there for several seconds, and then pulled it back out. The black liquid had been replaced by blood, though it didn’t look like human blood. The color was a red a few shades too dark, and it glistened like oil. More of that strange blood leaked from the pinprick hole in his arm. None of us paid any attention to it. He had more to worry about right now than losing a little blood.

 

“Now we just wait and see,” the Dierkhlani said. He capped the vial of sedative and handed it back to me.

 

I let out a sigh of relief. He looked at me oddly. “You realize he’ll still likely die,” he said.

 

I shrugged. “Sometimes hope is all you have,” I said simply.

 

He smiled. The expression was odd, wry and sad. “Sometimes it is,” he agreed. “My name is Erik.” It was the first he’d introduced himself to me, or to anyone in the caravan that I’d heard.

 

“Silf,” I said.

 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Silf,” he said, still with that wry smile. “Now let’s wait and see if he has more than just hope, or this has all been for nothing.”

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

The next morning found us gathered outside the inn. It was a cold day, snowflakes drifting lazily down in the predawn twilight to gather on the wagons and horses. Some of the travelers were clearly nursing hangovers, but they still moved about their tasks without tarrying, albeit with a certain amount of groaning and grumbling.

 

There were a few notable exceptions. Konrad was watching over the proceedings with a steady, calm look that spoke of long experience. The caravan master was quick to step in when something was done incorrectly, but mostly the members of the caravan seemed to know their business, and he was left to watch in silence. That was reassuring; it suggested that this was a competent group of travelers. Most of them, I was guessing, had made this trip before. It was a profitable one for a merchant, carrying goods from the northern provinces back to the empire’s heart.

 

The other exception was the Dierkhlani. It took a few moments for me to locate him; he wasn’t with the others. Eventually, I spotted him leaning against the wall of the inn, eyes closed though he was facing towards the gathering caravan. He looked much like he had the previous night, in the same studded leathers and with the same broad blade strapped to his back. The main changes were that he had other weapons visible among the leathers–a dagger’s hilt here, a knife at his belt, a coiled chain on the other hip–and a small backpack. It took me a moment to see that he was standing next to a varg.

 

I stared when I realized that. The slender canine creature was lying on the snow, chin resting on its paws, watching the proceedings with a clear gleam of amusement. I might have thought it was a dog, but I had seen vargs, back in the Whitewood. Not many; even there, they had been an unusual sight. But I knew enough to recognize it for what it was.

 

I’d always found vargs fascinating. Intelligent as humans, they said, and from what I’d seen it was more or less correct. But it was a very alien sort of intelligence, very different in its view. As a child I’d been entranced by their minds, by the fact that such obviously inhuman beings were still people. After I was Changed, well, I had other reasons to find them fascinating. After all, we had rather a lot in common.

 

I shook my head, remembering the reason I was here, and walked to where Konrad was standing. Rose followed silently after me, eyes downcast. I wasn’t sure if she had looked at the people we would be traveling with at all, or she was entirely lost in her own mind. She had a tendency to do that, I’d found, to draw away from the world into the space within her head.

 

I couldn’t blame her. We all had our demons.

 

Konrad watched us coming, a faint smile playing across his lips. “Well,” he drawled, the northern accent coloring his voice more strongly than it had last night. “I’m no mathematician, but I seem to recall two being more than the one we agreed on.”

 

I shrugged and held out my hand, opening it. Two silver nobles were resting on my palm, twice the amount we’d agreed on. I didn’t say anything; the money seemed more eloquent than I was.

 

Konrad seemed to agree, as he grinned broadly and took the coins from my hand, dropping them quickly into a leather pouch at his hip. “Glad we have an understanding,” he said. “I’m Konrad, miss. What’s your name?”

 

Rose chanced a glance up at him, then flushed and quickly went back to looking at the worn cobblestones beneath our feet. “Rose,” she said, hardly above a whisper.

 

“I take it Silf here explained our rules to you?” Konrad asked. Rose nodded quickly, and he grunted. “All right, then,” he said. “Come with me.” He strode confidently over to one of the wagons, with us following behind him and trying to stay out of the way of the people working around us.

 

It wasn’t much to look at. The wagon was small, a bit battered; one of the wheels had clearly broken and been repaired. But it was a covered wagon, fabric stretched tight over a simple wooden frame–nothing too solid, but enough to keep the weather off. Inside there were some crates and sacks, and a pair of horses were standing in front of it, already buckled into their harness.

 

“This is where you’ll be riding,” he said, patting one of the horses affectionately. “The load in back is mine; don’t muck about with it, or the horses. Now sit tight, we’ll be on the way shortly.” He dipped his head in a slight nod, and then turned and walked back to his post at the center of the action.

 

I watched him go, then clambered up into the wagon. I offered Rose a hand up, and she looked at it for a moment, but then she hauled herself up without taking it. I didn’t comment on it, and neither did she.

 

The back of the wagon proved surprisingly comfortable. The wooden planks were worn smooth, and the cloth cover over us kept the snow off. Once I laid the blanket I’d stolen from the inn down over the planks, and leaned against the crates, it felt almost cozy.

 

A few minutes later someone else climbed into the wagon, more smoothly than either of us. He had the red hair of a northerner, though something about his features suggested Tsuran ancestry. “Derek,” he said, bowing to us. It was a clumsy bow, but a certain humor in his eyes suggested that it was deliberately so. “I’ll be your driver today, ladies. Feel free to complain if the ride is too rough. I can’t do jack all about it, but you can complain all you like.”

 

I smiled politely, and Rose let out a genuine giggle at his joke. Derek smiled as though well satisfied, and then turned to the horses, checking over their harness.

 

True to Konrad’s word, the sun was just peeking over the horizon when the caravan got on the road. The first I realized of it was when the wagon in front of us began moving, wheels crunching the snow quietly under them as they began to roll. Derek clucked to the horses, which obligingly broke into a slow walk.

 

I found myself smiling as we left the town behind. I wasn’t going to miss the place, even if I could have remembered where it was.

---

The cover of the wagon kept out the weather, but it also limited our view of the outside world. I couldn’t see much past the horses’ ears, and the back of the wagon in front of us. As such, for the next several hours, my world narrowed down to the interior of our wagon, Rose, and Derek.

 

The horses were obviously well trained, and Derek was mostly content to lean against the back of the driver’s bench and let them follow the train. It gave him time to talk to us, which he obviously enjoyed. Rose was far too shy to chat with a stranger, though, and my throat was hurting, so he mostly talked to himself. He didn’t seem to mind, and he had an easy humor about him that made it charming rather than irritating.

 

Over the next several hours, I learned a number of things. I learned that the horses’ names were, rather unimaginatively, Blackie and Star, that Blackie was the more temperamental of the two but easily calmed with a touch or a word, while Star was steady and largely ignored the people behind her. I learned that Derek had been traveling with Konrad and his wife, whom I hadn’t yet met, for over a year now, making several trips from the capital north to the provinces and back. I learned that all but one of the wagons belonged to Konrad, making this almost less of a caravan than a personal convoy. I learned that there were five guests not including ourselves; one of them was a merchant with his own wagon of trade goods, two a father and son planning to stop in Hasburg, one a Changed woman from the south, and the last a quiet boy from the north who was missing a hand.

 

I also learned things which were less immediately relevant, but more troubling. I learned that the roads were bad, and getting worse, with deserters from the legions a major problem even this far south. I learned that Derek had heard of what happened in Branson’s Ford, not in any detail, but only that some villages had been lost and the legion sent to eliminate the threat. I learned that a tax collector had been found hanging from a roadside tree only a few miles to the east, and rumor had it that a whole village was to be decimated for the crime.

 

Eventually, I drifted off, the rocking of the wagon and the quiet drone of Derek’s speech lulling me to sleep. I felt Rose grab my hand as I was beginning to doze, her grip so gentle I could almost have thought I was imagining it. I didn’t say anything.

 

When I woke, it was because the motion of the wagon had stopped. The snow had also stopped, though the noon sun was shining through pale wintry clouds. “Have to water the horses,” Derek said simply upon seeing me stirring. Sure enough, a few moments later Konrad approached with a bucket of water.

 

“There’s a roadblock up ahead,” he said as he got close. “Nothing too bad, it sounds like. Just a few legionnaires going through people’s goods to make sure they aren’t carrying any contraband.”

 

I frowned. That might not be too bad for him, but…well. Given that I apparently had a bounty on my head now, it seemed like a poor idea for me to have much to do with them. “Hide?” I asked, simply.

 

Konrad understood exactly what I meant. I could see it in his eyes. “Something you don’t want our good protectors looking at, Silf?” he asked. There was a hint of sarcasm in his tone, a subtle twist on the last few words.

 

“Me,” I said dryly.

 

He nodded. “And just what did you do to draw their ire, girl?”

 

I considered for a moment how to answer that. What had I done, even? I’d killed Hideo, yes, but I had a suspicion that my fate had already been sealed long before that. From the moment I’d stopped him from killing the village, maybe. Or maybe even sooner than that, as soon as I’d come to understand just what their mission there was.

 

“Did the right thing,” I said. “At the wrong time.” My throat seized up as I spoke, and the last phrase came out in a choked whisper.

 

Konrad nodded again. “Sometimes that’s all it takes,” he said. “Reckon I know a thing or two about hard choices, myself. Don’t worry, Silf, I’m not about to hand you over to the legions.” From the bitterness in his tone, I was guessing this had less to do with me and more to do with his own feelings towards the imperial legions.

 

“Thank you,” I said. “Truly.”

 

He waved his hand. “You paid,” he said. “Now. Derek, make some room for her in with the furs. Won’t be comfortable, but should be safe enough. Just keep your head down.”

 

Derek nodded, but Konrad was already moving on to the next wagon. Derek came back into the wagon a moment later, shooting me a curious glance on his way. I pretended not to see; I wasn’t remotely up to answering questions right now.

 

It didn’t take long at all for him to clear out a space among the crates. I took the hint and climbed inside, crouching down. He promptly packed me in, surrounding me with the heavy wooden crates. The smoothness of the operation suggested that I wasn’t the first person they’d had to smuggle past a roadblock.

 

It was dark, once I was inside. My little pocket within the crates was cold, and dark, and claustrophobic. It smelled strongly of pine, of leather and fur and tanning agents. The enclosed space began to bother me, making me feel trapped, and it was only with difficulty that I managed to keep myself from hyperventilating.

 

When we began moving again, I couldn’t readily tell. Here in the back, in this strange little pocket, there wasn’t an easy way to know. I only realized it when I heard movement outside, a horse’s chuff and the quiet crunching of snow under the wagon wheels.

 

It was hard to say how long that lasted. Long enough for me to begin to panic. What if my read of Konrad had been wrong? What if this was just a way to get me to stay complacent until he could hand me over to the officers at the roadblock, pocketing the bounty and the profit from what I had paid him? There wasn’t a great deal I could do, if so.

 

Then I heard voices. They were muffled by the furs around me, the sounds blunted and blurred. I could make out Konrad, speaking Tsuran without a hint of an accent, and someone answering in the harsh tones of a person doing a job they hated. That could be good or bad; he likely didn’t care about doing his job well, but he might be looking for an excuse to make someone else feel as miserable as he did.

 

I went tense again when I heard footsteps coming closer. When I felt something nudge the pile of furs I was buried under, I almost panicked.

 

In the end, though, the legionnaire kept walking with barely a perfunctory prodding of the fur, moving on to the next wagon. I stayed where I was. There might be more of them.

 

What felt like a lifetime and was probably a few minutes later, I heard the wagons creak into motion again. They rolled forward slowly, snow crunching under the wheels, and then began picking up speed until we were moving as quickly as we had been earlier.

 

It wasn’t long after that that I heard another voice, this one definitely Derek’s; I’d heard our driver talk more than enough to recognize the sound of his voice. Moments later, I felt another rustle of movement in the furs, and then I was blinking against the harsh light of the sun as the last of them were pulled off of me.

 

Rose smiled down at me, and finished clearing the pile of pelts away. She didn’t offer me a hand as I climbed out, and I didn’t ask for one.

 

“Went smooth as butter,” Derek said. “Don’t you worry, they didn’t suspect a thing.”

 

“You’re sure they didn’t find anything?” Rose asked. The girl’s voice was anxious and wavering.

 

“Of course they found something,” Derek said, clearly amused. “They’d be all kinds of suspicious if they didn’t find any contraband at all in a convoy like this. They found a jug of unrefined blackwater that didn’t have the assessor’s seal on it, four bolts of Skellish wool that didn’t have their tariffs paid, and a pound of moldy cheese that fell all over them when they opened the cupboard to check it.” There was a note of vicious amusement in his tone as he said this last which made me suspect the prank had been his idea.

 

That amusement faded rapidly, though, as he continued. “All of that was fine, dealt with. Not something to worry about. But the other merchant with us was apparently smuggling a crate of legion-issue armor. And that’s a far sight worse than just having some things that haven’t been properly inspected and taxed.”

 

“What will happen to him?” Rose asked.

 

“You’ll see,” Derek said, his voice and manner uncharacteristically grim, and then he fell silent.

 

I made my way back up to the front of the wagon and sat down next to him on the driver’s bench. It was warm now, the snow having burned off after morning, and I was enjoying the fresh air after being stuffed under those furs.

 

Minutes passed after that in silence. Rose was slowly relaxing, losing the anxious tension she’d exhibited when she helped me out. I wasn’t. I knew what Derek meant. It began to snow again as I waited, but I didn’t go back into the covered section of the wagon. My own  fur was warm enough that it wasn’t too bad.

 

Finally, just when I’d started to wonder whether we’d see it or not, a tree came up on the side of the road. It was a large cedar, lightly dusted with snow. And, as I’d known there would be, there was something in the branches.

 

I could tell when Rose recognized the form of the merchant, dangling from a particularly strong branch by the rope around his neck. Her eyes went wide, and she was staring fixedly at it.

 

I’d seen more hangings than I ever wanted to. Back in the Whitewood, there had been lynchings of suspected imperial sympathizers during the siege. And afterwards…well. There had been plenty of reason to hang refugees in the camps, valid and otherwise. In watching, I’d learned that there are two ways to hang someone. The first is the merciful way, where you use a long drop. The fall snaps the neck, and the victim dies almost instantly.

 

This man hadn’t been hanged like that. He’d been hoisted into the air slowly, leaving him to slowly strangle. It was a long, ugly way to die.

 

The legionnaires had already left. They weren’t needed here anymore. He was already dead. He probably knew it. But his body refused to admit it. He was still moving, kicking, grasping at the rope with his hands.

 

“White gods,” Rose said, staring.

 

“Stealing legion equipment is a capital crime,” I said quietly. I wasn’t watching. I didn’t want to have to watch another person die, not right now.

 

“Are we going to help him?” Rose asked. Her voice, somewhat to my surprise, wasn’t accusatory. It was just a simple, honest question.

 

“Can’t,” Derek said. “They’d have us up there next to him as fast as you can blink.” He grimaced and patted Blackie’s neck, seemingly more for his own comfort than the horse’s. “Only thing I could do for him now is end it faster,” he said. “And we can’t even risk that. Don’t know how they would take it.”

 

I took one last glance back as we rode away from the roadblock, one guest less than we had been before. The merchant had gone still, slowly spinning at the end of the rope as snowflakes slowly drifted down from a cold, grey sky.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

I walked into the taproom of the inn again, grimly.

 

Seven days. I had spent seven days here, in this town whose name I still couldn’t remember, which had never mattered and never would. Seven days, trying to go south. I still hurt, my legs and chest aching from the wounds I’d been dealt, but my injuries had been more or less healed for days.

 

I generally considered myself to be a patient enough person. But even I was growing exceedingly tired of waiting, and it left me in a foul mood.

 

The problem was that it wasn’t such a simple matter, getting to Aseoto. The heart of Akitsuro was far to the south, on the southwestern coast. The trip would take weeks, and it involved crossing some dangerous territory. Impatient though I was, I wasn’t so desperate as to try and make that trip alone.

 

Most of the survivors of Branson’s Ford had already gone their own ways. Black had left to continue her wanderings, and Ketill to find another village where he could work as a farmer; both of them had good reason to leave as soon as they could, given that the bounties on their heads from the war were still high enough to tempt people into doing foolish things. Livy had an uncle in Hasburg, a nearby city large enough to actually matter, who was taking her in. Most of the others had gradually drifted away, going to other villages or finding work in the town and surrounding fields.

 

Much to my surprise, Rose was the only other survivor who was still around. I’d never met the girl before the ghouls, but now she and I were staying at the inn together. I think we both needed that connection, needed to have someone else who could remember the events of those few awful days in order to help ground ourselves. It was a strange, broken sort of tie.

 

I was at the inn today for the same reason I had been for the past week. I was looking for a caravan bound south which I could join. It was the way most people traveled cross-country. It was safer than trying to do it on your own, and relatively simple. You paid for your own food and a bit extra for their trouble, and in return you got the protection afforded by numbers. I’d seen enough of them passing through Branson’s Ford to know the gist of how it worked.

 

Money, at least, wasn’t a concern, at least not immediately. Before Black left, she’d given me a hefty pouch of coins, saying that Corbin had given them to her just before they parted for the last time and told her to pass them along to me. I believed her. I’d long suspected that Corbin was far wealthier than he let on, and it made sense that he would give me something indirectly. If he’d passed it along in person, I’d have known what he was planning, and I never would have left him there if I’d known he was going to die.

 

It was, I supposed, an inheritance of sorts. One of a few which he’d left me. That and the scraps of my old life which I’d managed to keep since the Whitewood burned were all I had left. Everything else was gone.

 

Today, though, things were different when I walked into the taproom. There was an energy to it, a life, that usually wasn’t there. Part of it was that there was an unusually large crowd this evening. But there was also a difference in attitude, in how that crowd was carrying itself. They looked tired, but they were still animated, excited. There was a feeling of energy and ambition which was unusual. Looking outside, I could see a number of wagons through the window.

 

A caravan. Finally.

 

I paused just inside the door, looking for the person who was in charge of this group. It wasn’t hard. I’d spent long enough in places like this to know how to read the movement, the flow of things. Once I’d parsed it out it was easy to see that it was all swirling around one man, a pale northerner sitting in the corner with a large mug of ale that he wasn’t drinking from.

 

I took a deep breath and then approached him, interrupting his conversation with a tall Tsuran woman. He waved her off, looking at me. “Something on your mind?” he drawled, in Skellish flavored with the northern language they spoke in the Tears. I couldn’t remember the name of it.

 

I nodded. “Caravan?” I asked. The word came out badly, hoarse and rough with a catch in the middle. Speaking, now, was even harder than it had been before. I suspected I’d done myself permanent damage screaming when I found out that Corbin was dead.

 

The northerner sat up straighter, focusing his attention on me. “Aye,” he said. “Bound south, to Akitsuro, then east. Interested?”

 

I nodded, relieved. With how very northern this man looked, I’d been concerned that he would be heading the other direction.

 

“Listen up, then,” he said. “We leave at sunrise. Anyone who isn’t ready to go at dawn gets left behind. We’re setting a hard pace, and if you can’t keep it that’s your problem. Everyone has to pull their own weight, and I won’t hear any complaining about it, either. You look like you can handle yourself, but we’ve got a guard along in case anything goes wrong.”

 

I raised my eyebrows slightly. “One?” I asked, in a slightly incredulous tone. One guard wouldn’t do a thing if something went wrong, not when most of the predators that haunted the roads to the south ran in packs.

 

“He’s Dierkhlani,” the northerner said simply, gesturing towards the fireplace.

 

I gaped at that, and followed his gesture. It wasn’t hard to pick out who he was pointing to. The man was lounging in a chair next to the fire, eyes closed. He had a lean, almost feline build, not large, but lean and fit. He had on leathers that reminded me a bit of Black, though these were clearly armor rather than hunting garb; it was studded with metal over key areas, providing another layer of protection. Most telling of all, he had a sword strapped across his back. It was a long, simple blade, something that could be used with one hand or two, with no frills or ornamentation.

 

“How?” I asked, unable to stop staring. I’d never seen one of the Dierkhlani before. They weren’t exactly given to wandering around backwoods villages. I doubted that Branson’s Ford could have hired one if every resident had pooled their funds together.

 

“He was going the same direction,” the caravan leader explained. “Could never have afforded his rates otherwise, I’m sure, but since he was going that way anyway, he agreed to come with us. So as you see, one guard should be more than sufficient.”

 

I nodded, still staring at the Dierkhlani. If what I’d heard of them was accurate, one was more than a match for a pack of ghouls or a group of deserters. Much more.

 

“On to business, then,” the northerner said, pulling my attention back to him. “We’re three weeks out from Aseoto, three and a half. Longer if the weather turns bad. We’ve got food and drink for you, simple fare, but it will keep you standing. I treat Changed folk right, and I won’t stand for my people doing anything else; someone gives you grief over it, tell me and I’ll sort them out. Same goes the other way, though; you start a fight with someone and we’ll be having words. Steal from one of us, and I will personally break your legs and dump you at the side of the road.”

 

I nodded. It sounded reasonable enough to me, and understandable. The bit about not treating the Changed poorly was a nice touch. I had seen more than enough of people who didn’t.

 

“How much?” I asked, my voice breaking slightly on the second word.

 

“Three silver pennies,” he said promptly. “Good Tsuran coin only, won’t take anything else. You walking, or do you need to ride in one of the wagons?”

 

I winced slightly at the cost, but then forced myself to nod. It was an exorbitant sum to me, but I could afford it with Corbin’s gift, and I’d heard that things cost more in the cities. “Ride,” I said after a few minutes, reluctantly. I hated to admit it, but walking that kind of distance wasn’t a good idea, not with my legs still healing.

 

“That’ll be another two silver,” he said. “Payment up front, in full. Sound like a deal?”

 

I nodded once, firmly. I had my doubts about it–the price was high, and the presence of the Dierkhlani certainly wasn’t something I’d expected. But it would get me out of this gods-forsaken town, and at the moment that was all that mattered to me.

 

“Just one thing left, then,” he said. “What’s your name?”

 

“Silf,” I said.

 

He nodded. “Mine is Konrad. Pleasure doing business with you, Silf.” He spat into his hand, then held it out to me.

 

I spat into my own, then shook his hand. It was a very northern gesture, that, especially with the spitting. Not quite an oath, but still a rather formal way to seal an agreement. I expected that in Akitsuro that habit was regarded as charmingly provincial, and likely rather unsanitary.

 

“Remember,” Konrad said. “Dawn, with the coin.”

 

I nodded, and walked away, towards the stairs. Before I left, I took one last glance back, and saw that the Dierkhlani had left. His seat by the fire was empty. I hadn’t seen, heard, or felt a thing. But then, I wouldn’t have.

 

I shivered slightly, and went upstairs.

---

The rooms here were nothing like those back at the inn in Branson’s Ford. That had been a noble’s mansion, before the war, and even after the scars of battle and years of disuse it had still been rather grand. It had also, I now realized, been refurbished by a gifted alchemist. Corbin had provided alchemical lamps and tumbler locks, imported drinks and exotic spices. Here, the light came from simple oil lanterns, and the locks were crude warded locks that I could likely have picked with just my claws.

 

Inside, the room was small and sparse. The only furniture was a pair of beds with thin straw mattresses and a rickety wooden chair. There was a small glass window in the opposite wall, which wasn’t very well made; it leaked cold air around the edges all night.

 

Rose was in her bed, sound asleep. The girl had been sleeping a great deal, even more than I did, and that was saying rather a lot. I wasn’t sure if I should be concerned about her.

 

I rapped sharply on the wall to wake her. We had determined, between us, that that was the safest way to go about it. I couldn’t readily speak loudly enough to wake her up, and she didn’t respond well to being touched.

 

I didn’t know what horrors were in Rose’s past. But I knew that there were some. Her eyes had a darkness and a distance to them that spoke of ugly things inside, and I was sure that it was older and deeper than just the ghouls ravaging her home. Considering that her parents had been hermits, broken in the war and never healed, I had my suspicions about what it was that had put that darkness in her eyes, and they weren’t pretty ones.

 

She stirred a few moments after I rapped on the wall, slowly pushing herself upright. She had to lean against the wall to do it. Her eyes were too wide, staring past me without seeing me; her body jerked once, retching, before she settled down again.

 

She was waking from a nightmare. I knew that feeling too well to mistake it in someone else.

 

I gave her space, sitting in the chair and waiting. After a few moments, she resettled herself into a more upright position, and brushed her red hair away from her eyes with trembling fingertips. “What is it, Silf?” she asked softly. Rose had never, in the week and change that I had been more or less living with her, raised her voice.

 

“Caravan,” I said, simply. I didn’t have to say more. Rose knew what I had been looking for, and why.

 

Her eyes lit up, and she smiled. The expression almost seemed to light the room, made me realize that she was beautiful in her way. Considering the shakes still running through her hands, and the darkness still in her eyes, I wasn’t sure that beauty was much of a gift for her. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “When do they leave?”

 

“Dawn,” I said, looking away from her.

 

I could still see, out of my peripheral vision, as she nodded. “That’s excellent. Silf, I…I’ve been thinking.”

 

I looked at her curiously, waiting for her to continue. The silence stretched too long, and she didn’t seem able to finish on her own, so finally I prompted her. “And?”

 

“And I want to go with you. I want to go to Aseoto.” The words, when they did come, came out in a rush, tumbling over each other as though all of them wanted to be the first one out of her mouth.

 

I blinked. This was the first time Rose had mentioned any desire of that sort–the first time, in fact, that I’d heard her voice any kind of plan at all. “Why?” I said, too loud, and then winced at the lance of pain that went through my throat.

 

Rose looked down at the floor. “I don’t…have anyone else,” she said, more hesitantly. “To go to. Or anyone to stay with. I know we don’t…know each other very well. But you understand. You know what happened.”

 

“Why Aseoto?” I asked, more quietly this time. It still came out hoarse and thready, almost silent.

 

Rose was silent for a long time, at that, so long I almost thought she wouldn’t answer at all. “They wanted to keep the world away from me,” she said at last. Her eyes had that distance to them again, but now they had something else as well, something I recognized: rage. “They kept me…locked away. And I’m tired of it. I don’t want to go back to that, Silf. I don’t want to go to some village and, and marry some farmer and never see anything else ever again. There has to be more than that to life.” She closed her eyes tightly, her hands shaking more badly now. She laced them together, trying to control it, with moderate success.

 

I edged close and, very gently, touched her leg. She opened her eyes and jerked back as quickly as a startled rabbit, staring at me. There were unshed tears in her eyes.

 

“It’s all right,” I said. “We’ll go to the city, and find something better. You’ll be all right.”

 

She smiled at me, her expression so grateful it was almost pitiful. If she hadn’t been who she was, and I hadn’t been who I was, I suspected that she would have hugged me. “Thank you.”

 

“Of course,” I said. “Now, I brought dinner, and then we should both get some rest. Have to be up bright and early tomorrow.”

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

I kept the smile on my face until Silf was out of sight. I thought it might be one of the hardest things I’d ever done.

 

Then I let my face fall, and sat down heavily, leaning against the tree behind me. The legionnaire–Sumi–sat down beside me, laying his crutches on the ground. He looked calm, almost peaceful–a great deal calmer, I expected, than I looked or felt.

 

There would be a great deal of work to do soon, and it would have to be done quickly. But first, I thought I was entitled to a moment for myself, to come to grips with what had just happened.

 

It wasn’t every day a man had to sign his own death warrant, after all. And for it to happen now, when I  had finally seemed to be safe, when I had finally told Silf the truth and her response hadn’t been the condemnation I’d expected after all, made the blow even more brutal. It was terribly, viciously painful, and a part of me wanted to just cry out in frustration at the sheer unfairness of it all.

 

But that wasn’t going to solve anything, and if I was going to sell my life, I wanted it to at least buy something worth the selling. So I bottled that immature frustration up, shoved it deep down inside, and then shrugged out of my pack. I placed the pack on the ground next to me and pulled open the flap, reaching inside. The pack itself was a simple traveler’s rucksack, the sort of large, heavy backpack which all sorts of travelers carried for long journeys. Inside, though, was a cavernous space, several times larger than what the pack should have been able to hold.

 

Folding space on itself was one of the most impressive pieces of alchemy, one of the things which caused the uninitiated to gasp when it was mentioned in stories, or to draw back with a shocked stare when they saw it in person. The irony of it was that it was actually very simple, as alchemy went, the geometry and technique very straightforward. Blackwater infused into silk, charged glass, and finely drawn silver wire, all folded through a simple four-dimensional polytope and stabilized with charged wolframite. The reason it was so rare had nothing to do with it being difficult; charged, purified wolframite was just hellishly expensive, and you needed exponentially more of it as the size you were warping grew. Expanding an entire room with it would be the sort of expense that probably only the emperor of Akitsuro could afford. A bag using those principles, though, was something that almost every veteran combat alchemist used. It was too damn hard to carry all your tools, otherwise.

 

I brushed my fingers over the contents, the jars and flasks and pouches. I tallied up what I had available, mentally working through how I could most usefully weaponize and deploy it in the narrow window of time I had remaining.

 

I’d always thought best when I had a deadline. It turned out that a literal one was no exception. My mind swiftly began drawing connections, pulling various things together and twisting them into place, arranging and rearranging at a million miles a minute. I fell so far into the diagrams and calculations that the world around me faded into the background by comparison. The aches and pains of the day, the worry and fear, the frustration, the dread, it all fell away.

 

It felt good. Fantastic, even. It had been so very long since I was presented with a really challenging project. I was good at this, once upon a time. One of the very best.

 

Finally, the picture in my mind’s eye was complete. I spent a moment surveying it, comparing lengths and angles, checking and rechecking my calculations. I changed a few things slightly where I’d made minor errors, where the system I was creating could be refined slightly, made more efficient, where slight vulnerabilities and exploits could be patched.

 

I would almost certainly have to adapt it. It was how things worked. Plans always had to be adapted to changing circumstances. But it was something to work from.

 

I blinked, refocusing on my immediate surroundings, and found that Sumi had moved. The legionnaire was standing beside me, leaning against the tree to balance without his second foot. His sword was drawn, hanging easily by his side.

 

I hadn’t even noticed him moving. It was why I had accepted his offer to stay and keep watch for me, why I would have asked for it if he hadn’t volunteered. I’d always had a tendency to sink so far into my calculations that I didn’t notice what was right in front of my face. It was a useful trait when I had to concentrate in the middle of a battle, but it also left me vulnerable when I was working.

 

Sumi noticed my shifting, and grunted. “Ready?” he asked.

 

I simply nodded, shouldering my pack. First, though, I took out a small vial of fire-oil. The clear, viscous liquid shifted slightly within the smoked glass, somewhere between oil and honey in its viscosity. Slightly thicker than what was normally used, slightly more concentrated. The vast majority of the time, what people thought of as fire-oil was actually cut with a relatively high proportion of regular oil. It stretched it further, and burned almost as well. This was diluted in that way as well, but not as heavily.

 

I placed the vial against the ground at the base of the tree, then took out a hand drill and carefully drilled through the stopper. I slid one end of a spool of cord through the stopper, down into the oil, and clipped it to the vial to make sure that it wouldn’t slide out. Then I hung the spool from my belt and began walking. Sumi sheathed his sword, grabbed his crutches, and followed me.

 

I didn’t go inwards, not yet. Time enough to go into the valley the ghouls had claimed later. For now, I would do the preparatory work outside of it.

 

As we walked in a slow circle around the valley, I stopped at irregular but frequent intervals to place another vial of oil down. Each of them had that specially prepared cord inserted into it, some of them using fresh spools and others splicing into one that was already running.

 

In many ways, this was the most delicate part of the entire process. Setting traps was always a delicate affair, as much art as science. When those traps were relying on a relatively imprecise type of fuse, it complicated matters further. Set the fuses too long, and they would be uselessly delayed. Too short, and they would trigger this ring before the ghouls were inside it.

 

That was unacceptable. For this to work, as many of the enemy as possible had to be inside before the outer ring of fires started. With luck it would trap many of them between the two fires and leave them to be burned to death with no escape. Without luck, it would at least trap and delay them long enough for the others to get far, far away.

 

Sumi was calm and silent as he watched me work. I could tell that he’d been around combat alchemists before. There was a degree of familiarity in how he watched me, a degree of understanding.

 

It took a while, to go all the way around the valley at enough of a distance to keep from alerting the things inside. We weren’t moving too quickly; Sumi was on crutches, I was concentrating on getting my placements right, and we had to stop frequently to place more of the fire-oil. Just as well; we didn’t want to draw the monsters in before the others got far enough away.

 

That was, after all, the point.

 

In this, if nothing else, I had to thank Hideo, or whatever his name really was. He’d had a rather gratuitous amount of the fire-oil with him, enough to leave the village of Branson’s Ford nothing more than a field of cinders. I wasn’t entirely sure whether that was to cover his tracks when he left, or because he knew that having that happen would destroy me. From what I’d seen of the Imperial agent, I was guessing both.

 

Now, though, it was serving a very different person, protecting instead of destroying.

 

There was enough of it to weave a very thorough web through the forest. Some of the vials were left lying against the trees’ roots, others up in the branches. A handful I very carefully opened and painted over the bark, or poured into the undergrowth. It wouldn’t burn on contact with air, not at this concentration. But having some of it already applied would help to ensure that the fire burned steadily, rather than in a single flash when the flasks lit off.

 

That was, of course, also the point of leaving the flasks full and stoppered. When the fire-oil caught it would expand too rapidly for the glass to bear, leaving it to shatter and spray flaming oil in all directions. Between that and the natural spread of fire in a forest, it would close off the gaps in the pattern rapidly.

 

Finally, we reached the tree we’d started at again. I checked the placement of the oil against my mental blueprints, confirming that there were no gaps, and then turned to Sumi. “Have to go inside for this,” I said, the first I’d spoken since sending Silf off with a lie and a smile.

 

He nodded. “There will be resistance inside,” he said. “We’ll have to work fast.”

 

“Yes,” I agreed simply. I glanced at the clockwork device I’d wound just after they left. It was designed to allow drops through it at regular intervals, allowing for the gradual and consistent addition of a liquid to a mixture. In a pinch, though, the amount by which it had wound down provided a decent estimate of time. “Seven minutes,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “That’s how long it will be until they’re far enough away for us to start.”

 

He nodded amiably, sinking down to rest again. His expression was pained. I couldn’t imagine how he had done all this with one leg. I had to respect him for that. It took one tough son of a bitch to do what he had done, let alone to do it while crippled.

 

“Why did you stay?” he asked, suddenly breaking the silence. “I couldn’t have made it out anyway, but you could.”

 

“I could have,” I said. “But they couldn’t.”

 

“And you’re willing to die for them?”

 

I was silent for a long moment. “They had a saying, where I grew up,” I said. “Back before it was annexed. ‘A man who has no one he would die for is not fit to live.'” I wasn’t talking about the villagers, and we both knew it.

 

Sumi didn’t pretend otherwise. “She seems like a good girl,” he said. “Strong. I’m sorry I won’t get to see her once she’s grown. She’ll be something great, I think.”

 

“If she makes it out,” I said.

 

“She will,” Sumi said, confidently.

 

“Do you really believe that?”

 

The legionnaire shrugged and grinned wryly. The expression made him look so much older, somehow. “I used to sit with the rookies before their first battle,” he said. “Every time. Seems near every one of them had someone they were worried about. Would their brother live, would their mother remember, would their lover be faithful, you name it. Every time, I told them it would be fine, even if I knew that the brother was in a unit that was going to be dead to a man by morning, and the lover was lying down with five other legionnaires in my century alone. You know why?”

 

“Because it gave them a reason to fight.”

 

“No,” he said. “Because you have to believe in something.” Sumi gestured with one hand, the motion somehow conveying the feeling of a shrug. “If they lived, they could turn things around. Do better. And if they died, well, at least they didn’t die feeling empty.” His expression turned deadly serious. “Sometimes people need to get better than what they deserve. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

 

I nodded thoughtfully. “She forgave me,” I said. I wasn’t sure quite why I was saying it, except that you had to talk to someone, sometimes. And what did it matter, anyway? We were both going to be taking this conversation to our graves. “That was…I never expected that. Not after what she went through. What I put her through. That forgiveness was…a gift I don’t think I deserved.”

 

Sumi’s eyes were piercing. “Anyone can forgive a person, I think,” he said. “But I reckon there’s only one that can really absolve you, and that’s yourself.”

 

I nodded. “I think…I think this might be my absolution,” I said. “This. Today. Not that you have to die to be absolved, I don’t think. But a long time ago, I made something that was supposed to help people, to protect them, and someone else turned it into something horrible. They used it to kill, to destroy so many lives. Now, today, I get to turn that around. I get to make it into something good again, I get to protect people. I get to save someone who was ruined by the consequences of my actions before.”

 

“There’s a fairness to that, I think,” the legionnaire said. “It isn’t right, but it’s fair. Balanced.”

 

I nodded again. “What about you?” I said. “Anything you need to talk on before we finish this?”

 

Sumi smiled wryly again and shook his head. “I don’t think so. Don’t have anyone left who’ll miss me, and there’s nothing I need to confess, either. Don’t get me wrong, I have my share of sins weighing me down, but I found my absolution a long time ago. I won’t say I’ve always done the right thing, but I’ve tried to do the fair thing. I did the best I could with what I had, and I made my peace with that. If I die today, I’ll die clean.”

 

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I glanced at my improvised watch instead. It said that we were a minute overdue for my estimated time. “Right,” I said. “Let’s roll.” There was a weight to the words, a finality.

 

Sumi nodded and stood, supporting himself with the crutches. I slung my bag over my shoulders, and took up my arbalest. I’d had the weapon ever since my Legion days. It had served me well, over the years. In a strange way I was more sorry that it was about to meet its end than that I was. I wasn’t going to let that stop me from bringing it with me, though. Letting it fall into the hands of these monsters would be…catastrophic.

 

We started into the valley, cresting the hill and continuing. We weren’t making a huge fuss about it, but we weren’t exactly being secretive, either. Attracting attention was, after all, the whole point of this endeavor. It would be silly to worry too much about being caught.

 

Still, I’d placed three of the interior detonation points before we encountered the first ghoul. I didn’t even realize it when we did, for a moment, being too busy notching a large, heavy jar of the fire-oil into fork between two branches. Any disturbance would make it fall, and break, splashing the contents over the grass and trees around it. When I turned around, Sumi was leaning on just one crutch, the other hand holding his sword. Said sword was buried two-thirds of the way to the hilt in the face of some vaguely froglike ghoul.

 

“They’ll know we’re here, then,” I said, unnecessarily. I hurried forward, reaching into deeper pockets of the bag, for things that weren’t so benign as fire-oil. At the next tree I took out a pair of small metal devices, a chisel, and a length of wire. I licked my lips nervously, and then started working.

 

Using another alchemist’s work was always a risky thing. Once you got beyond apprentice work, the lamps and iceboxes and such, every alchemist had their own style. The geometry, the folding, the ratios…hell, even materials could vary widely between one person’s work and another. It tended to produce odd quirks and idiosyncrasies of use, which were hard to predict if you weren’t familiar with the style.

 

Modifying another alchemist’s work, on the other hand, wasn’t just risky, it was outright foolish. Trying to patch one style of work into another, trying to use your own technique on someone else’s foundation, was an exceedingly difficult and delicate endeavor. It was the sort of thing best undertaken with great care, preparation, and a great many safety features and failsafes. I had a talent for it, and even so I wouldn’t normally dream of trying to modify a completely foreign working without at least a day of preparation.

 

I was reasonably confident that I knew what these two did, though, and I had very little to lose. So I quickly incised a set of glyphs which would provide a different track for the magic to take flowing through the devices, adjusting the geometry of the structure without fundamentally altering it. The length of charged wire I wound around one, touched to the other, and then pushed the end into the tree.

 

Once the improvised explosive was in place, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and turned around. I found three ghouls closing in, rapidly. Sumi was leaning on his crutch, sword in hand.

 

It was a simple weapon, that sword. Almost crude. A plain, straight sword, short enough to use without interfering with the person next to you. You could teach someone to use it in a matter of hours, and even masters tended to use mostly simple, brutal strikes.

 

It was easy to underestimate it as a result. I knew better.

 

As the first of the ghouls stepped in, I lifted my arbalest, quickly sighted along it, and fired. The bolt shot forth with awful speed, almost a blur, and slammed into the ghoul’s face, solidly between its eyes. The momentum of the projectile carried its head backwards, and its feet flew up in front of it as a result, leaving it to slam unmoving to the ground.

 

I’d always been a rather good shot. Nothing like a master arbalester, but I had very good coordination and an excellent grasp of trajectories. The skills transferred more than I would have guessed.

 

The next closed in before I could reload, lunging at Sumi. It had clearly identified the crippled man as the lesser threat.

 

It was quickly shown the foolishness of that view. He brought the crutch up in a sweeping motion, brushing its claw easily aside. It left him off balance, which he compensated for with the backswing of his sword, which opened the ghoul’s throat. Moments later, the next ghoul was struck twice with the tip of the crutch, expertly placed strokes to the throat and eye. It fell, moments before the legionnaire himself overbalanced and had to plant the tip of his sword into its chest to support himself.

 

It was an impressive display. No more so than many other legionnaires I’d seen, and less than some, but impressive nonetheless.

 

I didn’t bother saying anything as I hurried forward, grasping the staves of my arbalest and pulling them back. They came easily, pulling back until they clicked into place. In a bit of alchemy that I was inordinately proud of, the staves of the crossbow were stronger in one direction than the other, taking the force that should have been required to pull it back and instead adding it to the power transferred to the bolt when they sprang back. In combination with the alchemical engines augmenting the force of my pull, it was no harder to draw back the heavy steel staves than a moderately firm longbow.

 

I’d barely slotted the next bolt in when I had to fire it, launching the bolt into the chest of a strangely-shaped ghoul with scythes for hands.

 

That general pattern repeated itself several times over the next few minutes. Ghouls came, faster and faster and faster, and the two of us could barely clear them out long enough to buy me the space to work. I’d always done my best work under pressure, but now even I was pushed too far, forced to do fast work rather than good work. The geometry of my kludgy alterations to Hideo’s work was beyond clumsy, the materials only barely suitable.

 

At the fourth tree, there were half a dozen ghouls. Too many for us to reliably handle. Instead of jury-rigging another trap out of the other alchemist’s weapons, I simply threw a handful into the crowd.

 

Pressure triggers are the most common in alchemical weapons. They’re simple to use, unlikely to go off by accident, and easy to make.

 

This bunch of trinkets exploded with silent light. One of the ghouls shattered–kinetic force bound up in a spring structure, most likely. Another collapsed as the flesh in its legs melted and ran–something akin to an acid-based attack, probably using charged quicklime augmented with purified charged lye. Two more rippled strangely before collapsing with blood running from their ears–almost certainly a sonic resonance, targeting the delicate tissues of the brain and using a crystalline glass structure and slate. That last was actually clever.

 

The last two were quickly removed, and this time I used one of my own devices instead, a mixture of charged salts separated by a thin glass wall. Break the glass and the salts would mix, setting off a violent chemical and alchemical reaction which would burn rapidly and uncontrollably. It was a refined version of one of my earlier, failed attempts at fire-oil.

 

Half a dozen points later, we were at the keystone of my design. It was at the center of the valley, in the very heart of their territory.

 

It was a vile, disgusting place. The trees all around were covered in unnatural growths, tendrils of pulsating wet flesh growing all over them. The ground squished underneath our feet with a sick sound; ugly experience in the legions had taught me enough to know that it sounded like we were walking on exposed intestines. The air was moist, and thick with a heavy organic scent, somewhere between a birthing room and a slaughterhouse.

 

“This is the place,” I said. “It’ll take me a moment to set this up.”

 

Sumi nodded. His face was visibly strained, and he was starting to waver, barely able to stand. “Give me the bow,” he said, slurring slightly. “One of ’em got my wrist, can’t use the sword.”

 

I nodded and handed the arbalest to him without comment before kneeling. I reached into the bag, and then, very delicately, I drew out a cask.

 

This one was much, much larger than the vials I’d used before–where they had been the size of a single drink, this was a cask the size of a small keg. Made of heavy green-black wood, it weighed far more than its size would indicate, enough that I grunted with effort as I lifted it out of the bag. Part of that was the wood itself; lignum vitae was among the densest woods available to most folk. Much of the weight, though, was the contents, which were far more dense than the diluted fire-oil I’d used elsewhere in the trap.

 

For a long time, after the Whitewood, I hadn’t touched fire-oil. I’d nearly burned my notes on it, I had been so distraught at what it was used to do.

 

In the end, though, I was too much the alchemist to abandon the idea so easily. Fire-oil had been my creation, my great innovation, and even though just thinking of that made me sick now, I still couldn’t make myself entirely abandon it. Doing anything related to it made me feel like the weight of guilt burdening me was too great to bear, but there was a part of me that felt that I deserved to feel terrible. And so, over the years, I’d continued to refine the recipe, purifying and improving it.

 

This cask was the result. This fluid was to ordinary fire-oil what that substance was to the sort of oil harvested from olives. A drop of this thick golden syrup was enough to scorch someone to the bone; a vial would be enough to immolate them entirely.

 

And I had a keg of it.

 

I drew a dagger, the blade of which was high-quality steel augmented with a simple alchemical sharpening in charged copper, and slashed at the ground. The ground had a strange texture, somewhere between packed dirt and meat, and the sound it made when parting was more akin to the latter. With quick, hard strokes I chopped out a hole in the ground, using the fine blade like a shovel.

 

Before I could do more than that one of the ghouls tackled me from behind, dragging me to the ground. It clawed me across the back of the neck, opening a minor artery and ripping the muscle in my left shoulder. I managed to writhe around and stab it under the skull, the dagger sinking deeply into its brain. I shoved it off of me and stood, a bolt flying past my head into another ghoul’s chest as I did.

 

They were pressing in all around, now, too fast to clear out. I had to work fast, because if I wasn’t finished in the next few seconds this would all be for nothing.

 

Rather than drill carefully into the cask, as I would have preferred, I stabbed it with the dagger. Thick, golden fluid leaked out around the blade, barely visible in the darkness. I hadn’t even realized that it was getting dark, I’d been so focused on my work. I shoved the ends of the various fuses into the hole and then tossed the cask into the hole I’d dug, frantically pushing dirt back into place around it. The cask would be impressive enough on its own, but the explosion would be far greater if it were contained. Fire-oil didn’t require air to burn, but it still heated the air around it, and the resulting expansion if it were contained would be enough to level much of this valley.

 

I heard a sharp sound like breaking wood and I knew that my time had run out. I dumped my bag out onto the ground, hoping that some of the things still in it would trigger from the heat and pressure of what I was about to do, and grabbed one last vial of fire oil out of it. This one was rigged with a container that would spark when broken, setting off the contents.

 

Before I could stand again, I felt a sudden impact in my guts. At first I thought I’d been punched, and was merely out of breath. Then I felt the warmth running down my side, and realized that one of the ghouls had just stabbed me with my own dagger that I’d thrown aside in my hurry.

 

I looked up, and saw dozens of the things closing in all around. Sumi was standing, blade in hand. He parried a claw, slashed and just barely missed the throat of another monster, and then met my eye. His gaze was calm, serious, and peaceful.

 

Another ghoul came upon him from the side, reaching forward with a hugely oversized claw. It tore the legionnaire’s throat out, and he fell.

 

I stood, grinning, the flask in hand. I felt…clean. One of the ghouls came up behind me, reaching around. Its limb ended in a long, bony scythe.

 

“Come and get it, fuckers,” I said, tossing the vial hard at the bundle of fuses over the buried keg.

 

Some of the ghouls, perhaps getting more from their group intelligence than others, started to run. Others stood and watched. I watched with them as the glass shattered, the charged iron woven through the glass sparked, and the fire-oil caught.

 

The world burst into a bright, glorious rush of heat and light. I was grinning widely, staring up into the midnight sky, feeling clean for the first time in years.

 

Then I felt a burning on my neck, a wetness, and the world went away.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

I sat in a room in an inn, in a city that never had mattered and never would. It was the nearest settlement of any size to what had once been Branson’s Ford, but I couldn’t bring its name to mind.

 

The inn had a name, as well, unlike the one Corbin had run. There had been no need to name it back there; it wasn’t like there had been another inn in twenty miles or more. This one was called some inane name, The Sickle and Sheaf or something of that nature. It was ridiculous.

 

I was eating dinner, a simple meal from the kitchen downstairs. It was a bowl of rice with bacon and mushrooms and a sweet sauce that made my mouth burn like it was on fire; a very southern dish, very Tsuran. I’d decided, after a few bites, that I liked it. That didn’t make me eat it any more quickly than my usual slow, jerky routine. The awareness that it was good was a distant one, on the level of abstract thought rather than visceral emotion.

 

I hardly reacted when Black came in and handed me a glass of water. It had the faintest trace of cloudiness to it, the barest suggestion of some other inclusion in the liquid. That, I assumed, was the drug, a delicate mix of alchemy and herbalism, distilled and blended with exacting precision. Black had been keeping me drugged for several days now, ever since I first woke up after learning that Corbin was gone. I didn’t entirely remember what I’d done, then. I remembered choking and running, fire pressing in on all sides and people everywhere running and screaming. They told me that wasn’t real, that the only reason people had been running was because I was a sobbing mess lashing out with magic and metal at anything around me. No one had been killed, but it had been a near thing, and then I’d slashed my own wrist open with a dagger.

 

Unsurprisingly, the people around me had deemed this undesirable.

 

I took the water eagerly, and tossed it back in one long swallow. The taste was slightly bitter, but I welcomed it.

 

It was easier to be drugged, right now. To be sedated, not so far as to lose consciousness, but enough to take the edge off the raw pain inside me. It was easier to handle it when everything was kept at one remove, wrapped in a thick layer of cotton gauze and held away from me.

 

“Are you eating all right?” Black asked, pushing the bowl of food towards me gently.

 

I shrugged and took another spoonful of the rice, then stared at it for a moment and set it back down. I was hungry–I could feel the hunger, gnawing at my guts, and I knew that this dish was appealing to my palate. But I had no appetite, no desire to actually eat it. The notion of actually chewing and swallowing it was revolting, enough to make me gag.

 

Black sighed. “The doctor looked at Livy,” she said. “The infection is gone, and that cut is starting to heal. It looks like she should be fine.”

 

I wondered if I should feel something at that. Happiness, anger, guilt, anything. It seemed like I should, but the actual reaction wasn’t there. Or, if it was, it was so numb and muted and distant that I couldn’t even tell what it was.

 

“Is there anything I can get you?” Black’s voice was gentle, but there was a touch of desperation to it, barely hidden beneath the calming surface. It was the sort of voice you used on someone who was standing on a high ledge, or had a dagger at someone’s throat. A person who might do something disastrous if you didn’t treat them just right.

 

I thought about it for a moment. And then, without really deciding to, I found myself answering her, the first time I’d responded to that question since we arrived at this inn two days earlier. My voice sounded distant to my ears, like someone else was speaking. The sound was barely a whisper, but it still sent a rush of pain through me, like dragging a rasp over raw wounds. I had damaged myself, screaming after Corbin died. Perhaps permanently; perhaps not. It could be hard to tell with the Changed.

 

“Juice would be good,” that voice said, and it was only after the words had left my mouth that I realized that they were true.

 

Black looked almost shocked, and then grateful. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and left the room once more.

 

I looked at the food and then raised the spoon to my mouth. It was delicious, the salty flavor of the bacon and the richness of the mushrooms contrasting with the bright sharpness of the sauce. It felt like chewing ashes, and I was almost sick as I swallowed.

 

Black returned a few minutes later with a tall glass of apple juice, fresh from the icebox; the glass was cold to the touch. She then went to sit on her bed, leaving me plenty of room.

 

There wasn’t much in the room; it was, certainly, nothing so extravagant as my rooms at the inn had been. Two small beds, one table, two chairs. Nothing else to speak of. At first I hadn’t cared, but after a few days cooped up in here the confines of this room were beginning to feel like a prison.

 

I raised the glass to my lips, and then found myself guzzling it as though I were drowning. It tasted like the most magnificent thing I’d had in years, the crisp flavor and gentle chill of it a balm on the ravaged flesh of my throat. Then I put it down, and my body heaved as though I was sobbing.

 

The next half hour or so passed uneventfully. Black worked on whittling a block of dark wood into a vaguely feline shape. I tried to eat, and stared at nothing for long moments in between bites.

 

The silence was broken by a knock on the door, two sharp taps spaced exactly one second apart. Black opened the door, and Marcus came in.

 

He and Aelia had both survived the flight from Branson’s Ford. Two out of four; better odds than the village at large. So few people had lived and made it here that I could remember each and every one of them. Black, Livy, Ketill, Samara, Otto and his son Renard. An adolescent girl named Rose who I hadn’t known before–her parents were hermits who were broken in the war, and wouldn’t allow her to visit the village. It didn’t matter now, since they were dead. Big Erik, who’d had an orchard and a field, and his wife Kari whom he’d brought back with him from a trip north to the Tears years ago. Small Erik, a boy who had been beginning to work as a lumberjack. Maria, a Tsuran woman who was startlingly handy with a bow and refused to talk about her past; I knew very little about her, since she kept to herself. Dagny, a refugee girl not so different from myself, even to the point of being Changed–though hers had a rather different manifestation, soft scales covering her skin and huge yellow eyes.

 

Twelve people. It seemed shockingly few, and yet at the same time extraordinarily lucky.

 

“I got the official response from Aseoto,” Marcus said as he walked in.

 

Black was so stunned that she forgot to close the door for several seconds, and I wasn’t far behind. Aseoto was far away, all the way down on the southern coast, and he’d only managed to find who he was supposed to report to this morning. It would take a fast messenger a week or more to get to the capital, and a comparable amount of time to get back.

 

“How?” Black said, voicing the question I was thinking.

 

Marcus shrugged. “Some alchemical invention they’ve come up with,” he said. “Can write something here and it shows up back at the capital. Too expensive to use most of the time, but it helps in an emergency. Anyway, the important thing is what the response is going to be. The emperor is dispatching the Fourth Skellish legion to deal with it.”

 

Apparently that phrase was supposed to have some sort of weight to it, from the way he paused to let it sink in. He might as well have saved his time, because both of us just stared at him. “Should that mean something to me?” Black asked at last.

 

He nodded. “The Fourth Skellish was the legion behind the attack on the Whitewood,” he said. “Third made up the backbone, but Fourth was the one that planned it, gave the order, and led the push in. After he found out about the attack, they say the emperor was so enraged by the destruction he almost had the whole legion decimated. But in the end he mostly only hit the officers, and repurposed the legion rather than disband it. Now they’re something of an elite force, lots of channelers and alchemical support. Especially fire. They’re the ones who get sent in when the throne wants something gone, burned to the ground and sown with salt.”

 

I barely heard the second part of what he was saying. I was too fixated on what Marcus had just casually said. The emperor hadn’t been the one to give the order to torch the Whitewood? Had actually been upset by it?

 

It had to be a lie. I just couldn’t see the reason for Marcus to lie about it.

 

“So they’re taking it seriously,” Black said.

 

Marcus nodded. “Very. The vanguard will be there in a few days, and then they have the full weight of a legion behind them. They’ll raze that whole section of forest to the ground. It’s over now.”

 

“Good,” I said, surprising myself a bit. Marcus looked at me, looking as surprised as I felt, and then nodded.

 

“There is one problem, though,” he said. “Apparently Hideo had some way of communicating with his superiors that we didn’t know about. He sent them his observations and guesses about how the ghouls were functioning. But he also sent something else. Something that apparently implicated a Changed girl of your description in his murder.” Marcus looked at me seriously.

 

I blinked in surprise. I had been expecting a lot of problems, but that wasn’t one of them.

 

“I won’t tell them,” Marcus said. His words had a weight to them, a sense of formality. “Not after what you did for us. But they’ll be looking for you, with or without me.”

 

“We have to leave, then,” Black said. “Get somewhere far enough away that they won’t find us.”

 

“Aseoto,” I said, taking myself off guard slightly. Not too much, though. I was feeling a bit more in touch with myself now, a little less blurry and disconnected.

 

They both looked at me like I’d just sprouted a second head. I flushed slightly, and then continued. “Not looking there,” I said. “And enough people to blend in. And….” I frowned, struggling to think of how to convey what I felt. That if Akitsuro had ruined my life, I wanted to at least see what it was all for. That going anywhere else felt like it would be running from that shadow over my life, and I was sick of running. That I remembered the awe with which Aelia had spoken of the city, the way Corbin had described the great alchemical workshops. That I’d had my fill of living in a ass-backwards village in the middle of nowhere.

 

In the end, I just shrugged, and hoped that they could understand, at least a little.

 

“She has a point,” Marcus said slowly. “They aren’t likely to be looking for her down there. This isn’t enough to merit a national alert; I’m guessing the order to bring her in will only be circulated through the local legions.”

 

“I can’t go with you,” Black said. “Not there. I’m wanted on sight. They’d string me up before I got through the gates.”

 

I nodded. I’d been expecting as much, given how much trouble she’d apparently caused them during the war. And besides, it had been inevitable. I’d heard as much from Ketill, from Corbin, even from Black herself. She never stayed.

 

“You’re sure about this?” she asked.

 

I nodded. “I’m sure,” I said, with more conviction than I really felt. It was already beginning to feel like a poor decision.

 

“All right,” Black said, with obvious reluctance. “I’ll start making arrangements, then. If you still feel the same after you’re healed, then…well, I suppose then you’ll go.”

 

I nodded, and stared at the table, and for a long time no one said a word.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

We had one lucky break, this time. The ghouls were in front of us, rather than in our midst already. It meant that our best fighters were the first to encounter them.

 

The initial exchange was devastating, to both sides. Black smashed one of the monstrosities into another, and left both broken on the ground. Marcus fell to the ground with another in a tangle of limbs and blades. One of the ghouls slipped through the front line and fell upon one of the young women in the second row who was using a crude wooden spear; claws batted the weapon aside and tore her face off before anyone could react.

 

It was a loud, chaotic, gory mess, and no one had any real idea what was going on. I pressed forward, pushing against the person in front of me just as the person behind was pushing me. We were all pressing forward, trying to overrun the ghouls by sheer mass, and it was working. I saw one of them fall, and hands rose and fell over it, stabbing at it with spears and pitchforks and whatever else people could find. By the time I reached it, there was nothing left but a mess of torn meat and broken bones, so mutilated that I couldn’t even tell what sort of ghoul it had been.

 

There were more of them in front of us, though I wasn’t sure where they’d come from. I was struggling to see past the people in front of me, struggling to see what was going on. I saw another person fall, and as I walked past I saw that his leg was crushed just below the hip. He couldn’t walk, and more than likely he was dying already. I’d seen people die like that in the refugee camps; the bone in their thigh broke, and they bled out into their own leg, never even showing a wound.

 

Finally, I saw a ghoul. It was low to the ground, built more like a hound than a person, and it had slipped through the legs of the people in front who were too occupied with its larger brethren to notice.

 

I froze and stared at it. There were only a handful of feet separating us; no one else was close enough to do anything. I looked at it, and it looked at me, seeming almost as surprised as I was.

 

Then it jumped, a truly incredible leap. It didn’t even come up to my knee, but that didn’t stop it from flying at me at around my head height, extending long, sharply hooked claws at my face.

 

I sidestepped with more luck than skill, and caught it with my arm. It dug one of those claws in just above my wrist, tearing a long furrow, but I managed to throw it away.

 

It hit another of the people nearby–Ilse, I realized after a moment–and made her stumble just long enough to have her arm nearly torn off by another ghoul. The one I’d just thrown was already back on its feet and about to pounce again.

 

This time, though, I wasn’t startled. I threw the fistful of jagged metal in my hand, and reached out to the world around me, the swords and axes and scattered armor of the villagers. I called on it, called it up, and let the magic rush through me in a sudden ecstatic wave. I saw the metal hang suspended in the air, and then I saw it moving forward, almost slow in that moment of perfect harmony though I knew that it was terribly fast.

 

Then the world snapped into focus again, and the metal leapt forward, into the ghoul. I’d done better at focusing my channeling than usual, or just gotten luckier; none of the shrapnel missed it. Sharp, jagged edges bit into its flesh, punching into it. One edge caught on its skin and tore it off, ripping its throat wide open.

 

The ghoul collapsed instantly, falling backwards. Next to it, Ilse stumbled forward, blood spraying from the deep gash in her arm, but she retained enough focus to swing her cleaver and catch the ghoul that did it in the throat.

 

Slowly but surely, we pressed forward. I was walking on ground that was soaked with blood, now; my foot fell on a length of intestine from some poor, disemboweled soul, and I almost fell as it slipped. I had another fistful of metal, this one a web of thin wire; I wasn’t sure when I’d grabbed it.

 

In the press, it was hard to see what was happening, where we were. I didn’t realize we’d neared the edge of the forest until I stepped out onto the plain. I didn’t realize that the others had stopped until I stumbled past them without meaning to.

 

Once I had, I saw what was in front of us, and I understood why they’d stopped. There were still more monsters in front of us, a dozen ghouls and even more stranger things in front of them. Walking plants, some pale beast with icicles hanging from its fur. A handful of vargs appeared to be collared and leashed with some sick-looking, pulsing flesh; it reminded me uncomfortably of the growths on those trees, back where the ghouls had the center of their power.

 

So many of them. How were there so many of these things? It seemed unreal, impossible. So many of them, and so few of us. I couldn’t take the time to see how many of us were still alive, still moving, but it couldn’t be many. Perhaps ten, at most.

 

I wanted to laugh, or cry, but all that came out was a thin whine. It was almost the sound a distressed dog would make. I stumbled forward a few steps more, unsteadily. My legs felt weak, like I was about to fall on my face.

 

The monsters stood still where they were, impassive and silent. I looked at them. They looked at me. Not a sound broke the silence.

 

It was almost peaceful, in a way.

 

In the back, the ghouls shifted. Raised bows, aiming high to lob their arrows over their allies. It would be imprecise, but it didn’t matter. There were many of them, and few of us.

 

I felt tears on my face. I couldn’t believe the sheer unfairness of it all, that we’d made it this far and survived all this, just to be cut down when we finally made it to safety.

 

The ghouls looked like they were moving through honey as they raised the weapons and loosed their arrows. The shafts rose, rose, high up into the sky. They hit the top of their arc and began, in a loose mass, to fall.

 

I could see the metal of the arrowheads gleaming in the moonlight as they began to fall towards us. It reminded me of days gone by. Of watching a coin sparkle as it fell towards the river.

 

I felt like I was in a dream as I reached out, calling to the magic.

 

I was tired, exhausted even. My mental focus was at an ebb. But what I was doing was simple, far more so than most of what I’d used the magic for. Metal wanted to fall, after all. This was nothing I hadn’t done before, plenty of times. Just…never on such a scale.

 

I called the magic, as strongly as I could, feeling it flowing through me like a river in flood. I jerked my arm down.

 

In front of me, two dozen arrows dropped straight down, as suddenly as rocks dropped off a building. The cruel, sharp arrowheads that had been meant for us hit the front ranks of the monsters instead.

 

They were completely unprepared for it. All across the line, they stumbled and fell. With their own weight backing my channeling, the arrows hit hard, sinking deep into flesh wherever they hit. I kept channeling even after the initial impact, pushing the monsters down.

 

I stood alone, arm outstretched, and a dozen monstrosities out of humanity’s worst nightmares fell to their knees before me.

 

One didn’t, and I was too tired and focused to even notice. The enormous, frozen beast was too strong and simply too large to be pushed down the way the others were. It broke into a lumbering run towards me, ready to impale me on its sharp tusks.

 

Before it could, Gunnar was there, stepping into its charge with more grace than I’d have believed the old farmer possessed. He shoved his boar spear up under its chin, driving into the soft flesh under its jaw. It groaned in agony, a noise that was peculiarly close to the chattering of an otter, and tried to recoil.

 

Gunnar followed it, bracing that spear against the ground and keeping steady pressure on it. As the icy beast pulled back he pushed it a little harder, and it toppled. A quick thrust and twist, and it was gushing blood from a tear in its throat, bleeding out so rapidly that even a creature that size would sure be dead in moments.

 

The farmer stepped up beside me, and grinned at me. There were gaps in his smile that hadn’t been there before. “Told you we’d take care of you,” he said to me. There was genuine caring in his tone.

 

I blinked, holding back tears suddenly. I’d never really believed that I fit in with the villagers; I’d always secretly suspected that they would be just as glad if I’d died, way back when I first showed up. But now…even Gunnar, who had been the most outspoken against me when I first arrived, had just risked his life to save mine.

 

They cared. They really did care.

 

I started to stammer out some sort of thanks, though I knew that I couldn’t even begin to express how much that meant to me. Even if I’d been able to speak properly, it would have been a struggle to fit even the tiniest part of that feeling into words.

 

Before I could even try, Gunnar suddenly jerked. He looked down, and I followed his gaze.

 

A long, bony spike was protruding from his chest. It was about as thick as my arm, and it was right where his heart should be.

 

A moment later it pulled back. Gunnar fell into a pool of his own blood.

 

I stared at the body, even as I saw Black tackle the ghoul that had done it.

 

It’s not fair, I thought, numbly. The coil of wire fell from my hand. I fell to my knees, crying openly now. I could barely even see.

 

And then, suddenly, the emotions were calming. I was fading now, falling back into my own mind, as another me took center stage. This was the Silf that had been born of the siege, the attack, the refugee camps. The Silf that was a dangerous, brutal, uncaring killer.

 

And she was angry. The kind of cold, detached anger that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Not since the camps, and the things I’d seen there.

 

I watched as she stood, and turned towards the ghouls and their pet monstrosities. I watched as she pulled her pouches open and let the contents fall to the ground. I saw as she raised her arms high, looking up towards the sky. Tears were still running down her face.

 

I closed my eyes for a moment, and took a deep breath. It smelled awful, blood and smoke and death. I could hear the screaming, see the flames. I was back there, back then, real as ever.

 

And then I opened my eyes, and I reached for magic. I called the metal, and the metal answered me.

 

All around, it began to vibrate, and then to rise into the air. It didn’t matter what it was; coins, swords, sling bullets, all of them answered my call. They drifted forward to me, hanging suspended in the air all around me. I felt powerful, in my element and with dominion over it. I felt like the stories they told of fire channelers walking amid the wildfire.

 

Mine, I thought, the first coherent thought I’d had in some time. This belongs to me. I trailed my fingertips over the hatchet Black had given me, which was hovering right next to my cheek, and smiled faintly.

 

And then I threw my arms forward, feeling magic run through me on a scale I’d never even imagined before this moment. If before it had been a river in flood, this was a dam bursting, a wall of water shattering everything in its path.

 

The cloud of metal flew forward, all at once. Hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of cold, hard death shot towards the monsters as fast as if they’d been shot from an arbalest.

 

The ghouls and their pets had been charging us. It didn’t matter. When the front edge of that mass of bronze and iron and steel hit them, they stopped dead in their tracks or even flew backwards. I couldn’t even follow individual projectiles; it looked more like a single, solid mass of metal, slamming into them with all the cheated rage of a girl who had been hurt and abused and spat on and stabbed and raped and kicked and starved and broken and Changed.

 

Ghouls are tough creatures, hard to kill. They could keep fighting long past the point any normal creature should be dead. Some of their minions were actual trees, and Changed plants were notoriously difficult to harm.

 

None of that mattered. Large or small, weak or strong, when my working hit them they died. They all died.

 

As the last of them fell, I let my arms fall to my sides. I was breathing hard, and crying steadily. As the reality of what I’d just done began to set in, I felt the physical consequences of trying to channel so much energy at once. My legs went weak, and I fell to the ground, struggling to see through the most painful headache I’d ever had.

 

I could hear people talking, but the words washed over me without making an impression. It was just noise, meaningless babble. I couldn’t process it right now. I barely even twitched as Black picked me up and we started walking, continuing away from the forest. She held me cradled in front of her, like a child. When I twitched or moaned, she made soft, comforting noises, and didn’t try to talk.

 

I wasn’t certain how long passed like that. It was difficult to keep track of time at all; I was falling into that dangerously blank state of mind that I sometimes did, my mind filled with fog and snow and white noise. I’d been exhausted even before that little display; now I was so far beyond merely exhausted that calling it the same thing felt like an insult. I would have lost consciousness, except that my head hurt far too much to permit it.

 

I wasn’t entirely sure what brought me back to myself. Some sound, perhaps, or just an awareness that something had changed. I stirred slightly, blinking and looking around, trying to figure out what had shifted.

 

Then I saw the shadows extending out in front of people, and thought that I’d fallen asleep after all, that the sun was rising.

 

Then I realized that this light had to be coming from the wrong direction to be the sunrise.

 

I squirmed in Black’s arms feebly, trying to look behind us.

 

What I saw was a scene from my worst nightmares. The forest was burning. Tongues of flame stretched up, up, higher than any building I’d ever seen. They twisted and twined around each other, leapt and sparked like mad dancers. I couldn’t see from this distance, but I knew all too well what it must look like, inside that firestorm. Trees torched to cinders in an instant, flames spreading faster than you could run, coughing and smoking from the smoke.

 

I couldn’t see precisely how large the firestorm was, beyond “large enough.” It looked like it was miles across, and if it wasn’t, it surely would be soon. I could feel the heat of it on my face from here.

 

I stared, fascinated and enthralled and terrified by the vision of the flames. I was breathing faster now, my hands clenching weakly at my sides without me meaning to do it.

 

And then I remembered that Corbin was back there.

 

I stared for an entirely different reason, now. I was trying to figure out how in the black gods’ names he could have managed that. He would have had to set it off at a distance, to be safe from the blaze when it was so very large. And how would he get through all the ghouls it would bring in to meet us? Or the things the fire would bring in, the salamanders and fire spirits and scorchers? It seemed impossible.

 

And then I saw Black’s face, and I knew the truth.

 

“Never met a braver man,” someone said. It took me a moment to recognize it as Marcus, the legionnaire’s voice unusually solemn.

 

“Keep moving,” Black said. Her voice was think with unshed tears. “It doesn’t matter if we stop now.”

 

I struggled, trying to get loose from Black’s grip. I might as well have been pushing against a stone wall.

 

“Hush,” she said to me, trying to smile and failing. In the light from the fires I could see tears in her eyes. “It will all be okay. You’re safe now.”

 

I shook my head stubbornly, still trying to work my way free. “Corbin,” I said, and then again, louder. “Corbin.” A third time, this one loud enough to hurt deep inside me, I shouted “Corbin!”

 

“Someone get my bag,” Black said urgently. “I have a sedative in there.” Someone rushed to get it for her, and hurried voices were exchanged.

 

I ignored it all. I screamed, and didn’t stop screaming until I felt the drug entering my blood. It rose up to drag me down into alchemical blackness, and I went gladly.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

We kept moving, heading at an angle to the direction we’d been going so far–south, rather than northwest. I wasn’t totally sure of our location; I hadn’t been keeping track of it well, too focused on the immediate to care. But I thought that if we kept going this way we would pass through the forest and come out on the road southwest of Branson’s Ford. There wasn’t much in that direction, but following that road to the east would bring us to the main imperial roads and the major cities of the province.

 

Not that I had the attention to spare thinking about that. Black and Marcus started pushing us harder once we left Corbin behind. Not that we’d been dallying before, but there had been a certain amount of leeway to it. They would slow the pace when people were breathing hard, pause for a moment every now and then.

 

Now, we weren’t. The pace never slacked, not even slightly; if someone had literally collapsed from exhaustion, I suspected that Black would simply leave them behind. And it wasn’t an outlandish possibility, either. I knew that I was physically stronger than many of the people with us, and I was exhausted. I was just stumbling along, unsteady on my feet from fatigue. My legs were burning, my back ached, even my arms were sore. Looking around, in the brief moments when I could manage it, I didn’t think that I was alone. More than a few of us were looking unsteady on our feet.

 

In spite of that, though, not a single person complained or asked for a break. Word had spread of what we’d seen on the other side of that ridge, and everyone was acutely aware of what it meant. Everyone knew, in the back of their minds, that to slow now was death. The feeling of desperate urgency hung over our little army like a cloud, and if any of us were inclined to flag, all it took was one thought of what lay behind us to spur us forward again.

 

I wasn’t sure how long we’d been moving. It felt like hours, but I knew that was in my head. The constant dread and fatigue were taking their toll, making every moment feel like it was taking ages to pass at the same time that time seemed to be slipping past me far too quickly.

 

I knew it couldn’t be too long, because the sun was still inching its way down towards the hills. It was low enough now to paint the clouds a brilliant golden orange, and I found myself turning my face away to keep from being blinded. But it was still light out, for at least a little longer.

 

I was having to focus on the ground right in front of me to keep from stumbling into someone; I didn’t look up, didn’t know where we were going beyond broad directions and the person in front of me. Thus, it came as a surprise when we abruptly ground to a halt and I heard Black say, “I take it that isn’t supposed to be there.”

 

Startled out of my exhausted trance, I looked up, blinking against the light.

 

We were in a steep-walled valley, high enough into the hills that there was little in the way of vegetation. What few trees managed to grow looked more like bushes, and even the grasses were struggling to find a foothold on the steep, rocky ground. Ahead of us the hills closed in to a narrow notch before, presumably, opening up again and beginning to drop towards the plains below.

 

And there was the problem Black had pointed out. That notch was entirely blocked with rubble and debris. The bulk of it appeared to consist of boulders and rocks, but there was a substantial quantity of mud and brush as well.

 

“That’s fresh,” Ketill said confidently. “And it ain’t the right season for rockslides around here.” He spat on the ground. “Ghouls rigged it somehow, more than likely.”

 

I stared, dismayed, and I wasn’t the only one. It was easy to see that we would have to climb over that whole pile to proceed. It had to be forty feet up, across steep, rough terrain.

 

Some of us couldn’t do that. I wasn’t even sure if I could, not after the past few hours, and the past few days before that. And that wasn’t even considering the possibility that the ghouls might have left a special surprise of some kind in there, or even be there themselves.

 

“Is there any way around?” Marcus asked.

 

“This is the only trail that leads this way,” Ketill said. “We’d have to double back a long way to go around, and we don’t have time.”

 

“I know a way,” Jakob interrupted. The old hunter sounded exhausted, and he looked terribly worn, having to lean on a spear to walk. Between his age and his injuries, this must have been an incredibly draining journey. But he was still standing and walking, and there was a grim determination in his voice. “Next valley east, there’s another path.”

 

“There’s no path there on any map I’ve ever seen,” Ketill said.

 

Jakob snorted. “I been here,” he said. “There’s a path.” Without waiting for a response, Jakob turned and started walking slowly east, moving through the crowd.

 

“Do we follow him?” Marcus asked.

 

Ketill looked at Egill. Egill looked at Ketill. Almost in unison, the two men shrugged. “Jakob’s a crotchety old bastard,” Ketill explained. “But he knows these hills better than anyone. If he says he’s been here, he was here. Coulda been thirty years ago, though, and no way to tell if that path is still there.”

 

“We don’t have a better idea,” Black said decisively. “Let’s go.”

 

Jakob was not as pleasant of a guide to follow as Black and Ketill. He set an erratic pace, one moment skipping ahead and the next slowing to a crawl, for no reason that I could identify. He led us up to the hill on our left, then ducked into a crack between two rocks. I’d have sworn it went nowhere, but he slipped behind a thorny raspberry bush and kept going.

 

For a moment I was reminded of my secret place behind the inn, and a bittersweet smile flitted across my face. But this was a much smaller hollow than that, barely large enough for a person to stand in. Jakob scrambled up the side of the wall, surprisingly adroitly, and then waited impatiently as we worked to get everyone else up the rock behind him. I had no trouble with it, but most of us weren’t as accustomed to climbing, and needed help to get to the top. Black had to bodily lift Egill up; the former mayor’s injured ankle was getting increasingly painful, and he didn’t trust it climbing up the rocks.

 

Up top, Jakob promptly ducked down the other side, dropping down the side of the hill. He was moving far more smoothly now, his spear held at the ready rather than being used as a cane. It was like looking at a different man entirely; this wasn’t an old, tired, broken man, but a hunter in his element, trained and deadly. He made Black look graceless.

 

The rest of us weren’t as lucky. We were as much climbing as walking, and while that was a good thing for me most of the group was visibly struggling with it. Our pace had slowed dramatically, and a number of people were slipping and stumbling as we descended.

 

Jakob stopped halfway down the hill at a game trail that I didn’t even see until we were already on it. I would have thought it was nothing more than a momentary break in the vegetation, but Jakob started along it, and it kept going, winding through the trees.

 

I followed along gamely, trying my best not to flag. Our pace was still troublingly slow; that last climb had taken something out of people. Our orderly formation from earlier was gone, now, as people simply struggled on however they could. To call it ragged would be kind.

 

When someone finally fell, it came out of nowhere. It was a man I couldn’t put a name to through the haze of fatigue, who looked to be in his late forties. He stepped wrong, and his ankle twisted out from under him. He stumbled to the side and overbalanced, tumbling forward. When he tried to catch himself his damaged foot couldn’t hold his weight and he tumbled, rolling down the hill. Within seconds he was out of sight, screened by the angle and the trees.

 

We all stopped and stared for a  moment. “Should we go help him?” Egill asked finally, in a small voice.

 

Black shook her head. “No time,” she said. “We have maybe half an hour before dark. We must keep moving.”

 

“That’s my cousin,” someone said. “I’m not leaving him.”

 

“Then you can die with him,” Black said. Her voice was harsh, even brutal. “But you will not drag all of us down with you.”

 

“Better that than abandoning him,” the same voice said.

 

Marcus had almost the same tone as Black–harsh, perhaps even cruel, not out of malice but because it was the simple reality of the situation. “He broke his ankle. Even if we could find him he can’t keep this pace, and we can’t afford to wait.”

 

I waited, idly wondering whether the objector would actually put their actions behind their words, and stay to wait with the man we were abandoning.

 

No one stepped out to stay behind, and after a few moments we continued down the path, following Jakob.

 

More time passed. It was measured in footsteps now rather than seconds, and not enough of those. Several times I marched for what felt like hours, only to glance back and see that I wasn’t even out of sight of where I’d started at. My legs were starting to actively burn now, and I could feel my feet blistering. I wanted to ask for a rest, but I didn’t dare. Not only could we not spare the time, but if I sat down now I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stand up and keep walking.

 

When something changed, I was almost too exhausted to realize it. Almost. But, luckily, not quite. I heard a noise from up ahead, a rustling, and I knew that it wasn’t us.

 

Almost on reflex, I flung my arm out, catching Black in the midsection.

 

Instantly, she looked at me. “Something wrong?” she asked, terse and quiet.

 

I nodded quickly and pointed forward. Black held up her hand, signaling a halt, and glanced to the side. “Ghouls, you think?” she asked.

 

Marcus grunted. “Sucker’s bet,” he said. The legionnaire grimaced. “Can’t say I ever thought I’d get killed by ghouls. That’s just a humiliating way to go.”

 

“Can we go around them?” Egill asked. The mayor was in visible pain now, and his ankle had swollen grotesquely.

 

Black shook her hand. “We don’t have much time before Corbin lights their nest off,” she said. “Can’t afford the delay in finding a way around.”

 

“Can’t go around,” Ketill said. “And can’t go back.” The old farmer tightened his grip on his scythe, and showed his teeth in an expression that was nothing like a smile. “Guess we have to go through, then.”

 

“One moment,” Egill said quietly. Then, raising his voice loud enough to be heard by our entire group, he continued. “Ladies and gentlemen, I know the past days have been trying. Some of our number have fallen, and more may fall in the next few minutes. The gods know that this is…not what I expected to be faced with when I became your mayor. I’ve not been perfect, and I know we’ve all had our disagreements. But I could not be more proud of you. You have faced incredible demands in the past days, and you still stand against those that threaten your homes and your families.”

 

He paused and swallowed, hard enough that I could clearly hear it, before continuing. “But now you are called upon to face another trial. A group of these monsters is waiting for us, and the gods have dictated that we must fight them to pass. I know you are tired; I know you are scared. But we are all that stands between these creatures and our home. We cannot fail. And should I fall, I want you to know that it has been an honor to serve as your mayor for all these years. Thank you.” He bowed his head a moment, then glanced at Black and nodded.

 

It wasn’t exactly a stirring speech, and the group he was talking to wasn’t exactly a battle-ready force. Unsurprising, then, that the response was solemn nods and murmured prayers rather than cheering. But I thought it did what it was supposed to do. It reminded the villagers of what they were fighting for, and put a little spine back into them with it. Hands tightened on weapons, people stood a little straighter, and murmurs of encouragement spread through the ranks.

 

We weren’t ready for this. But we’d have to do.

 

The march forward wasn’t a traditional battle charge. It couldn’t be; we didn’t know where they were, precisely, and our ranks were broken up the trees. It was more of a tense, wary shuffle forward, waiting anxiously for the ghouls to show themselves.

 

Black rested her hand momentarily on my shoulder, then moved forward to stand in the front lines. It was necessary. She was very probably our strongest and most experienced fighter, and we were not so numerous that we could afford to spare that.

 

I stayed where I was, clenching a fistful of jagged metal pieces. They were pressing into my skin, hard enough that some of them might well have drawn blood. I couldn’t seem to make myself slacken that grip, though. My breath was coming too fast, my eyes darting all around. I thought for a moment that I smelled smoke, but no. It was just a memory. Just the past, intruding into the present. I shook my head to clear it and shuffled another step forward.

 

Instants later, a dozen ghouls dropped from the trees and lunged towards us.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

I just stood and stared. Some of the people with me were saying things, in hushed whispers. I was hardly aware of the voices, couldn’t have said what any of the words were. It hardly seemed to matter. What could they say that would make any difference at this point?

 

We didn’t have a chance. Not against this. I didn’t know much about war; I wasn’t a soldier. But I knew that most battles were decided by numbers, in the end. The ghouls had them. We didn’t. It was as simple as that.

 

In spite of everything, I’d really thought this would work. Oh, I’d known it was a long shot, intellectually. But it hadn’t felt like an extreme gamble. I’d really thought, on some level, that we could pull this off, that once we finally started working together and taking it seriously this could be done.

 

I found myself smiling bitterly as I stared out into the valley. It seemed Hideo had been right all along. Branson’s Ford had never really had a chance.

 

A flicker of motion caught my eye, and my gaze focused slightly. At the base of the valley, not that far away, there was a break in the sea of deformity. There was a person down there–a person I recognized, even, although I couldn’t put a name to him. One of the villagers, who had been sent back with the injured.

 

Any hope the sight might have given me, though, was promptly undermined by the circumstances he was in. He had a ghoul standing on either side of him, one the height of a man with long, flexible arms, while the other looked to be half the height but twice the weight of the first. The man was struggling, but the two ghouls dragged him along, not seeming to care about his efforts in the slightest.

 

I raised one shaky hand to point at it, only to find that the rest were already watching the scene. “Watch what they do,” Black said. Her voice was the barest whisper, hardly audible even a few feet away.

 

As though any of us could have looked away. I couldn’t even blink as the ghouls dragged the man along. He was still fighting them, but from a distance it looked as though his struggles were getting weaker. He was tiring, perhaps.

 

They half-carried, half-dragged him up to one of the trees. They stopped next to one of those strange, cancerous lumps of meat–a particularly large one, easily the size of the man itself. I could clearly see that when they held him up in front of it, not seeming to struggle with the weight at all. They stood like that for a few seconds, and then began pushing him into the protrusion. It parted smoothly, slowly around him, like he was sinking into quicksand.

 

“Bloody ashes,” Marcus said softly. “What are they doing to him?”

 

“They’re killing him,” Egill said. The mayor’s voice was equally quiet, though I wouldn’t have described it as calm. There was a quiet rage simmering just under the surface that made me shiver slightly.

 

He was right, I realized. I might not know the details of it, the hows and whys. But they were killing him.

 

I started forward, without thinking, no idea of what I would do. I hadn’t taken a step before I felt Black’s hand on my shoulder. It was a gentle grip, but there was no give to it at all. “We can’t save him,” she said, in a voice that had all the gentle finality of dirt falling on a coffin’s lid. “Let’s go.”

 

I grimaced, but I could see that she was right. Now that I thought about it, instead of just reacting, there was no doubt about that. Even if we could somehow kill all of those ghouls–and that seemed impossible, even with everyone who had come–we could never do so before they killed him. He was beyond our ability to save.

 

He was already dead, and we had to focus on saving the living.

 

None of us breathed easy until we were most of the way down the ridge again, out of earshot of the monstrous horde on the other side. Not that we were safe, precisely. I was acutely, painfully aware that all it would take was one noise carrying just right, or one ghoul deciding to see whether there was anything interesting happening over here, for us to be caught.

 

Back where we’d left everyone else, things seemed to be quiet. People were sitting around, a few of them eating food they’d brought. The sight reminded me that it had been a long while since I’d eaten myself, but just the thought was enough to make me feel ill. I could still smell the sick, musky decay of the ghoul’s valley, and it didn’t go well with the fear in the pit of my stomach.

 

“Let me grab Sumi,” Aelia said quietly as we got close. “We don’t want to tell everyone what’s over the hill until we have a plan.”

 

“Would just panic them,” Marcus agreed. “Go get him.”

 

Some of the people looked curiously at Aelia as she walked through the group, and I’m sure that some of them could see us a short ways away. But none of them were making a fuss about it, at least not yet. I couldn’t hear what she told him, but he was moving at a fast hobble as they started towards us, and his expression was concerned enough that I could see it from here.

 

“What did you see?” Sumi asked once he was close enough to do so quietly. His expression was strained, and I could see that managing this pace with one leg had been hard on him, but it didn’t show in his voice.

 

“Lots of ghouls,” Marcus said simply. “I put enemy numbers at roughly two hundred and fifty. They’re bunkered in over this rise, and they’re organized.”

 

Sumi took a breath in through his nostrils and let it out slowly. “Two hundred and fifty,” he repeated. “You’re sure?”

 

“Can’t be sure,” Marcus replied. “But I’d estimate that many or more, yes.”

 

“There’s more,” Corbin said. His voice was similarly crisp, falling into the same patterns and inflections as the other men. Legion-style, I assumed. “The enemy were pushing civilians into some sort of Changed pod. Looked vaguely ghoulish, but I haven’t seen anything like it before.”

 

“You think that’s how they’ve been reproducing?” Sumi asked.

 

“Not quite,” Black interjected. “I watched them putting other things into the pods. Deer, rabbits, even some plants. At a guess, I’d say it’s more likely that they’re just using them for organic mass.”

 

“Meaning?” Ketill asked. The old farmer sounded like he was badly out of his depth, and he knew it.

 

“They’re eating them,” Corbin explained. “Break them down and make ghouls out of the parts.”

 

Ketill paused, frowning. “So if they kill us,” he said. “They’ll make more of them out of us. Be even more of a problem for the next guy.”

 

“Probably how there’s so many of them,” Marcus said. “We aren’t that far from the other villages that were overrun. They probably dragged the bodies out here.”

 

“There’s more, though,” Black said, cutting them off before they could get any further into speculating. I felt rather grateful to her for that, since I was starting to feel a bit ill again just thinking about it. “I spent a good while scouting this area out. I didn’t see anything else like this valley, and it looked like they were all dragging bodies back here. I think this is the only place that was Changed like this.”

 

She and Corbin exchanged a meaningful look. I could see that there was some significance to it, some meaning that was shared between them, but I couldn’t have put a name to it. There was a history and a complexity there that I wasn’t privy to, and I knew it.

 

“I’d say that makes our job here rather clear,” Corbin said.

 

“We don’t have the numbers to attack that group,” Sumi said. “We’d be annihilated.”

 

“The point of this attack was never to defeat the enemy,” Corbin said. “It was to escape.”

 

I frowned. Something about that phrase was…concerning to me.

 

Before I could pin it down, Aelia spoke up, in the same thoughtlessly formal inflections as the other legionnaires. The imperial legions were many things, but not even their worst detractors could accuse them of being undisciplined. “You never had difficulty with our security in the war,” she said to Black. “Think you can get past theirs?”

 

Black frowned, tapping one finger against her other arm. “Possible,” she said after a few moments. “But if Hideo was right about them having some shared consciousness, I don’t know how long I could keep it up. Probably couldn’t take down more than a dozen of them before they noticed.”

 

“Shouldn’t need that,” Aelia said. “Can you get a piece of one of those pods for me? There’s something I want to check.”

 

Black frowned for a moment, and then nodded once, decisively. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and then slipped away up the hill before anyone could say anything else.

 

We were left waiting in tense, frightened silence. I caught myself rolling a coin around in my hand, and when I noticed, I clenched my fist around it rather than put it back into my pouch. The solidity, the cool metal, the faint connection I could feel through it, were…calming. Soothing, even. Corbin had a faraway look in his eyes, and he was moving his fingers, lips moving slightly. Aelia took a moment to check the bandages on the stump of her ruined hand.

 

None of it covered for the fear. I could see it in every movement, in the way we were standing. At any moment Black might get caught, and while I’d seen firsthand that she was a terror in a fight, even someone with her experience and phenomenal raw strength would have no chance against the numbers in that valley. If she got caught, the first we’d likely know of it was when the horde came over that hill.

 

Minutes passed. I was breathing hard now, my hand clenched so tightly around that coin that my claws were digging into the skin of my hand. Aelia had that light arbalest out and was checking the gears, applying some oil out of a small bottle from her belt. Corbin was still doing the same thing, but there was more purpose to the movements now.

 

Finally, after far too long for comfort, Black came out of the trees. Literally out of the trees; she dropped to the ground less than ten feet away from us, landing on her feet smoothly and easily. I jumped, and I wasn’t alone.

 

But she had a lump of meat in her hands, which she handed to Aelia with a self-satisfied smile.

 

Up close, the stuff was far worse than it had been at a distance. It smelled rank, decay and dry musk and some vile corruption of a spice that I couldn’t quite name. It looked like meat, but there was something wrong with that as well. It was covered in a thick slime, and the surface was strangely soft, almost reminiscent of viscera. Where Black had torn it away I could see the interior, and it was a bizarre one, red and raw without any visible structures or organs. It looked like a cross of flesh and fungus, meat with the blank, undifferentiated nature of a mushroom.

 

Aelia took it, looking faintly disgusted. “Anyone have a flint?” she asked.

 

Corbin silently produced an alchemical match, and Aelia grinned. “Even better,” she said. “Light it off, please.”

 

He struck the match against his thumbnail, and it sparked to life with a hiss and a moment of pale green flame before it settled into a more traditional fire. He touched the match to the chunk of meat.

 

It burned. It burned vigorously, like it had been soaked in oil. It wasn’t burning quite like meat, or wood. There was a strange quality to it, like different parts of the thing were burning at different paces. Fire ran through it like worms through an apple, following some trails that I couldn’t see, and burned it from the inside out. Aelia had to drop it within a few seconds.

 

The smoke was vile. Even worse than the smell of the thing had been before, by far. I retched and nearly vomited; Ilse actually did vomit, thin bile spattering onto the ground.

 

Aelia stomped the fire out before it could spread. “They’re scared of fire,” she said simply. “Think we know why, now. It can burn out their nests.”

 

“If they’re really that concerned by it, they’ll put it out,” Sumi said. “They have the numbers and coordination to just swamp it in bodies.”

 

Corbin snorted. “We might not have a fire channeler,” he said. “But we have his kit, and Hideo had a fair bit of kit as well. Not to mention mine.”

 

Sumi looked, to put it mildly, dubious. “You think that’s enough?”

 

Corbin glanced at me before answering. He had that distant look again. “It’s enough,” he said simply.

 

Sumi grunted. “You’re the alchemist. I’ll take your word for it.”

 

“Won’t kill them,” Corbin said. “Not all of them. But if we’re right, it’ll keep them from making more, and it’ll keep them busy.”

 

Sumi nodded. “I understand,” he said. His tone was grave. Those words had a weight to them. “I’ll give you a hand with it.”

 

Corbin looked at the crippled legionnaire, seeming surprised. “You sure?”

 

Sumi nodded again. “Someone has to watch your back while you work.” He turned and looked at Marcus. “You’re in charge of getting this back to the legion,” he said. “The legate has to know what we found here.”

 

Marcus nodded, once. “Yes, sir,” he said simply. “See you on the other side.”

 

“Time to move, ladies and gentlemen,” Corbin said. “We have a great deal of work ahead of us, and not much time before nightfall.” He looked at me, and for a moment it seemed he would say something else.

 

And then the moment passed. We went back to the rest of the group, where Sumi quickly explained the new plan. Marcus took over after that, marshaling the people to movement again. There were a few grumbled complaints, as stiff muscles were forced to move again, and weight was put onto blistered feet. But anyone who was considering arguing was persuaded otherwise by the quiet, cold gravity in Marcus’s tone.

 

Corbin and Sumi, meanwhile, went a bit aside from the rest. Corbin had dropped his pack, and was pulling out various alchemical implements, jars and reagents and braziers. It seemed remarkable that he could fit so much into the pack, large and bulging though it was.

 

I walked over to them as the rest were getting ready to move on. I didn’t say a word, just stood near them.

 

Corbin looked up at me and smiled. It was a strained expression. “Silf,” he said. “You should go get ready.”

 

“Could stay,” I said. “Help you.”

 

He shook his head. “Too many people would just get in the way,” he said. “I’ve got Sumi to keep watch, and they shouldn’t even know we’re here. We’ll slip away in the chaos, and catch up to you later.”

 

I frowned. “You’re sure?”

 

He nodded. “Absolutely. And…thank you, Silf.”

 

I smiled at him. Then, impulsively, I darted forward and put my arms around him, hugging him close.

 

He froze for a moment, then returned the hug. He was slow and careful in the movement, not squeezing. He knew how upset I could get by physical contact, how easy it could be to make me feel trapped. He just rested his arms lightly on my fur for a few moments.

 

Then he let me go, and made a shooing gesture. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

 

I smiled at him again, and then turned and walked back to the others. Black was waiting for me at the center of the group. She looked at me for a moment, and then looked past me to Corbin. She nodded.

 

We walked away. I didn’t look back, though the temptation was great. It was bad luck to look back in moments like that one, and we needed all the luck we could get.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

In the aftermath of the attack, we were left reeling, trying to figure out what had just happened. It took nearly a minute for the legionnaires to calm people down and start bringing order to the chaos.

 

There hadn’t actually been that many ghouls. Three that dropped from the trees, and another four that had rushed us on the ground while we were distracted. They’d been trying to flank us. It was the same tactic that they’d been using all along–distract us, draw us out and hit us from where we weren’t looking–and it had very nearly worked. Without quick work by those of us who’d kept their heads, and without the timely arrival of Black, those few ghouls might well have been enough.

 

As it was, we’d put them down, but not without cost. There were three dead, and another five badly injured.

 

The worst part was that the ghouls themselves had barely done any damage to us. They’d killed the man I saw, and ripped into three others. But two of the dead had been killed by their own allies. One woman slipped while shooting and put an arrow into the back of one of our less experienced fighters, and then a lumberjack had gotten too eager and chopped into another man’s neck. The other two incidents of friendly fire weren’t as extreme, but one of the younger girls with us was barely able to use her arm, and Egill was limping badly. The mayor had been shoved by accident, and sprained an ankle in the fall.

 

It was, to say the least, a mess.

 

I took a minute, on the edges of the group, to get myself under control again. I was trembling, badly. I was breathing too fast, and my heart was racing, and I was starting to get a dangerously blurry feeling once again, my mind going blank.

 

By the time I’d got myself under control again, Black was standing at the center of the group again, with the other important members of our little expedition. I stumbled closer, listening for what they were saying.

 

“Can’t say I expected to see you again,” Ketill was saying as I walked up. He was looking at Black, and he sounded like he wasn’t entirely sure whether he was glad to have been wrong.

 

She just shrugged. “I thought about leaving.”

 

“What changed your mind?” he asked. “You ain’t exactly known for staying on with lost causes, let alone coming back after you leave them.”

 

Black seemed to consider that for a few moments. “You have to hope that things will get better,” she said at last. “Sometimes hope’s all you have. Sometimes it’s enough.” She was talking to Ketill, but she looked at me as she said it.

 

I recognized the words. I’d said them to Hideo, on the night Black left. She’d heard me. She’d listened, even if he hadn’t.

 

I smiled.

 

Ketill paused, clearly not understanding the byplay, and then frowned. “Nice words,” he said. “But we’re going to need more than hope to get out of this alive.”

 

“Ah,” Black said. “And that’s the other reason I came back. I may have more than hope to offer.”

 

“What do you mean?” Egill asked. His face was tight with pain, but his voice was calm and controlled.

 

“We should get moving,” Black said. “Northwest from here. I might have a way out, but we have a long way to go and not much time. We really don’t want to be out here after dark. I’ll explain as we go.”

 

I could tell that no one was happy with having to wait, but they could see the sense in what she was saying. And besides, what did it matter? Deep down, I thought, we’d all suspected that this was hopeless, just a way to die with honor rather than wait for the monsters to kill us slowly. If Black’s plan didn’t work, or if she were for some reason betraying us, it could hardly make things worse.

 

I was impressed at how quickly the legionnaires got the group moving again. They handled the aftermath of the attack in a rather brutally straightforward way. The dead were set to the side to be, in all likelihood, consumed by scavengers; a proper burial was a luxury we did not have time for. The few people too wounded to continue were sent back to the village with a small group of able-bodied guards.

 

I noted that those guards were the same people that had been causing problems for us. Those who had caused the worst of the chaos, the ones who’d injured their allies, the ones who were more liability than asset. The legionnaires had taken the opportunity to weed them out, it seemed.

 

They were bait. A group of wounded, lightly and incompetently guarded? It was too tempting a target to pass up on. They were going to distract the ghouls, drawing fire from the rest of us.

 

The chances of them reaching the village alive were minimal. They were being sent to die. I wondered whether they knew it.

 

In any case, after only a few minutes we were moving again. Egill and Ketill were in the center now, other veterans taking their positions at the corners. It was less than ideal, but the villagers would never go along with Black’s plan unless it was presented by people they trusted. Egill had been the mayor for years, and Ketill was broadly respected.

 

I ended up with them at the center once again. Corbin and Black both refused to let me out of reach; it seemed any stumble on my part was quickly followed by them asking whether I was all right. It was simultaneously irritating and immensely comforting.

 

Once we were properly moving again, Black resumed speaking. “When I left earlier, I wasn’t exactly running away,” she said. “I was going to find the answer to a question. You see, we all know that there are an enormous number of these ghouls–dozens, at least. But it occurred to me that we didn’t really know why there were so many. We had no idea how there got to be so many of the things. And so I thought I’d start with where regular ghouls come from.”

 

“They’re Changed folk,” Ketill said. “Everyone knows that.”

 

“That’s not entirely true,” Corbin said quietly. “Or rather, it is, but there aren’t enough humans who Change dramatically enough to become ghouls to explain why there are so many of them. The accepted theory is that they must have some way to reproduce–probably asexually, since the broad range of physical characteristics they show would make normal reproduction impossible.”

 

Black nodded. “Exactly. So I figured there has to be a reason there’s so many more of these things than usual ghouls. They have to be coming from somewhere.”

 

“And?” Egill sounded impatient, almost angry.

 

“And I found it,” Black said. In contrast to the former mayor, her voice was calm, almost empty. It had a sort of numb quality that reminded me a bit of refugees I’d known who had seen too much to bear, and been left damaged by the experience. “That’s why I came back.”

 

“What is it?” Corbin asked.

 

Black just shook her head. “I can’t explain,” she said. “You’ll see soon enough.”

 

And on that ominous note, we kept walking.

---

Black led us further and further north and west, straight away from the village. We’d been marching for hours; my feet were starting to hurt, and some of the older and more infirm among us were visibly flagging, struggling to keep the pace. It was late afternoon by now, edging into evening; if we were out here much longer it would turn to night. I knew, with a sick certainty in the pit of my stomach, that we did not want to be out here after dark.

 

We were far, far past anywhere I had any experience with. I didn’t think that any of the other villagers likely did, either. It was dangerous to range so far from the wards, and there was nothing out here that couldn’t be had closer to home. The forests in these parts had nothing of great value; there were no alchemical reagents or precious metals, no rare herbs or Changed beasts of note. The forests around Branson’s Ford yielded only lumber and game, and those could be harvested without traveling nearly so far.

 

It was Livy who noticed it first. The mayor’s daughter was walking near me, at the center of the group–less because of her father, I thought, than because despite her naïveté she was a remarkably adept shot with a sling. “Is that tree…alive?” she said, pointing.

 

I followed her finger with my eyes, and frowned. The tree she was pointing to was a normal enough one, at a glance, a large spruce not far from the game trail Black had us following. It wasn’t moving, or doing anything else that was particularly lively.

 

Then I took another step, and saw what Livy already had. The tree’s bark had a faint sheen to it, glistening in the sunlight. It didn’t look wet, exactly, or at least not wet with water. Oil, perhaps, or something altogether stranger.

 

“We’re close,” Black said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. She hadn’t so much as glanced at the tree Livy was pointing to. “Everyone be quiet.”

 

The mood hadn’t exactly been celebratory before, but at that it became positively funereal. No one spoke, and we were all trying to be silent, creeping along one slow step at a time.

 

It soon became painfully obvious that many of the villagers were absolutely terrible at being quiet. Almost every step there was a jangle of metal, or a loud footstep as someone stumbled. Invariably this was followed by glares and hushing from those near the offender, usually making more noise than the initial misstep. Like a candle in a dark forest, these noises didn’t so much break the silence as emphasize how deep it was.

 

Livy was the first to point it out. But as we continued further into the forest–into the domain of the monsters, because I had no doubt now that Black was leading us in the right direction–I began to see more and more signs that something was deeply, profoundly wrong. Trees that were oozing that strange, glistening liquid; I couldn’t convince myself it was sap, no matter how I tried. Grass tangled into mats with some thick, tarry substance that stank of anise and decay. Something that looked like mold, but rather than any of the usual colors of mold it was a bright blue marked with swirls of violet and amber.

 

It wasn’t until I saw that last that I realized what this was. These things were Changed.

 

Plants were less susceptible to being Changed than animals–thankfully so, else we’d all have died long since. Barring human intervention, it was quite rare for it to happen. It took a surge of magic of the sort that came along only a handful of times in a decade, if that.

 

I shuddered and edged further away from the mold. Ghouls were bad enough; Changed plants were almost worse. I’d heard stories of flowers so toxic that just breathing the air around them could kill, trees coming to life and crushing the people walking past, even grass so sharp and strong it dragged people down and cut them to pieces. The vast majority of Changed plants were harmless, as I understood it, but there was something incredibly disturbing about the notion of the forest itself turning against me.

 

“Just over that ridge,” Black said at last, after we’d been walking through that forest of nightmares for half an hour or so. “Only a few people should go. We really don’t want to be seen.”

 

Sumi nodded, and gave a few quiet orders. Most of the group stood and waited warily as a handful split off. Corbin went, all but dragging me with him, and Black, and then all the people I would have expected–Ketill and Egill, Marcus and Aelia, Jakob and Ilse. I was a bit surprised by that last, but Ilse moved to join us with the sort of assurance that brooked no dissent, and no one tried to turn her away.

 

The ridge Black led us to was a steep one. It was easier for me to move on all fours than on two legs, which my aching back was quite relieved to learn, and some of the humans had to grab the trees and pull themselves up. She kept the pace slow enough for us to move quietly, though I could tell she was itching to move faster, and when Ilse started breathing hard she stopped for us to rest.

 

Black really didn’t want us to make any noise.

 

I found out why when we reached the top of the ridge.

 

The other side was a canyon of sorts, narrow enough to fire an arbalest from one side to the other. It looked much like the rocky, forested ground near the village. I was guessing that it had been a peaceful sort of place, gentle breezes and rustling leaves, perhaps a brook running along the bottom of the valley.

 

Now, it was a glimpse into hell.

 

The smell, oddly, was the first thing that struck me. The air coming off that canyon was fetid, somewhere between musk and decay, and too warm, something like the breath of an unimaginably vast predator. There was something strange about it, almost reptilian.

 

The next thing I noticed was the vegetation. It was wrong, in a way that dwarfed any strangeness we’d seen up to this point. The trees were twisted and warped, deformed. Some of them were bent almost double under the weight of enormous, cancerous lumps. The growths looked more animal than vegetable, slick pinkish things that seemed to pulse slightly.

 

Through that strange, corrupted forest walked ghouls. It was hard to say how many of them there were; the trees were sparser than elsewhere in the forest, but there were still trees, blocking my view of much of the ground. But there were dozens of them, maybe hundreds.

 

We were outnumbered. Not just a little outnumbered, not just slightly outnumbered. We were horribly, laughably, overwhelmingly outnumbered.

 

I let out a choked sound, almost silent. I wasn’t sure whether it was a laugh or a sob, and I wasn’t sure it mattered.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

Despite knowing what to expect, I was surprised to see the crowd that gathered outside the inn a few hours later. Surprised, and more than a little impressed. There were enough people there that it wasn’t worth getting an exact count, which meant that it had to be almost everyone in the village. As I’d predicted, even children were coming out to fight; the youngest person there couldn’t have hit puberty yet.

 

For a moment I was quietly furious that we were sending children out to fight, and maybe die. Then a more practical side of me kicked in and reminded me that if we failed here, they were dead anyway. We’d already established that this offensive, desperate though it was, was our last hope; we didn’t have a backup plan if this failed.

 

Which, in a way, was what made me think it might actually have a chance of success. Before, we’d been reluctant to commit fully to a plan. Half-measures afforded a measure of safety, but that hesitation had meant that we never quite had all our resources behind any of them.

 

That wasn’t going to be a problem this time. For better or worse, we were all in, now. Things would be decided here, now, one way or the other.

 

The legionnaires were the ones to organize things, telling people where to stand and what to do, in one case physically dragging a man into position when he was slow to move. Somewhat to my surprise, no one argued with them about it. Not even Corbin. Not even Ketill, and I would have sworn that I’d never see him taking orders from the imperial legions.

 

But then, it made sense. This was their sort of fight, after all. Ketill was a terribly dangerous man, and even before the legionnaires had been crippled I wouldn’t have bet on any of them lasting ten seconds in a fight against him. But Ketill fought on his own, always had. When it came to tactics, positioning, leveraging a group to make it more than the sum of its parts, no one beat the legions of Akitsuro.

 

The arrangement they formed us into was a simple diamond formation. The edges consisted of our best fighters. Most of those people had seen combat before, in the war, though some were just big and strong enough to earn a place there that way.

 

The points–the most dangerous and critical positions, even I could see that–were held by the genuine experts. Marcus was in the lead, and while he and I hadn’t gotten off on the right foot, I had to admit I was impressed by that. The legionnaire might not have been in favor of this plan, but now that it was time to go he didn’t complain or hesitate on his way to the front. To my left Ketill was holding his scythe again, face blank and distant. On the right of the diamond, Egill had a spear of some kind, though he looked far more nervous about his position than either of the other men. Bringing up the rear–in what should theoretically be the safest of the four key positions–was a young lumberjack who hadn’t fought in the war, but who likely had more raw muscle than the other three put together.

 

The interior of the diamond consisted largely of those who weren’t able to fight, not really. The young, the old, the infirm, the wounded. They all had weapons, but most of those weapons were…well, they didn’t inspire confidence. There were kitchen knives, fireplace pokers, crude spears, even a plank with a few nails hammered through it.

 

And then, at the center, were the people who could hope to do something at range. There were some slings, some bows, a single legion-issue arbalest that someone must have acquired during the war. Jakob was there, though the old hunter was obviously still in bad shape after having been almost killed the first time he met the ghouls.

 

I realized that I’d barely thought of him since he was injured, hadn’t even known whether he was still alive, and immediately felt bad about it. I liked Jakob, I really did–I could sympathize with a man who was scarred and set apart by what he’d seen in the war, after all. It was just…there had been so much happening, and so many people, and so little time.

 

There was never enough time.

 

Corbin took one look at the group, grabbed my hand, and all but dragged me to the center of the formation. Sumi and Aelia were there, as they finished arranging everyone else. It made sense; Aelia, even reduced to the lighter arbalest she could manage with one hand, was more use at a distance from the front lines, and Sumi wasn’t going to be fighting on crutches.

 

“She’s with me,” Corbin said to the two legionnaires who were now more or less in charge of things.

 

Sumi barely glanced at me. I could barely recognize, in those cool, measuring eyes, the man who’d sat with me looking over the river and talked of philosophy and feeling clean. “That’s fine,” he said, after barely a moment to consider it. “She’s better off throwing coins than mixing it up anyway.” Then he seemed to dismiss us entirely, going back to lining everyone up where they were supposed to be.

 

I swallowed hard and crowded in beside Corbin as close as I could get. There were so many people, and everyone was armed, and everyone was scared. It was starting to feel too familiar.

 

Corbin didn’t seem like himself. He carried himself differently, and there was a hardness in his eyes that had never been there when he was just an innkeeper. He smelled like alchemy instead of cooking, dust and smoke and acrid odors I had no names for. He was carrying his arbalest, and a heavy pack, and I could swear that I heard something humming in that pack.

 

When the order came to march, it took me by surprise. I couldn’t even see what was happening, crowded in the middle of the group like this; I barely even came up to the shoulders of most of the people here. I just had to focus on walking, keeping the pace and not bumping into anyone and making absolutely sure that I didn’t stumble, and trust the people who were choosing our course to know what they were doing.

 

I was worried that the legionnaires had put us too close together, crowded in like this. They knew their business, but in a way that was a problem, because it meant that they expected us to know ours. Some people could live up to their expectations–those who were familiar with legion tactics, who just knew how to fight. But there were plenty more who had no idea what they were doing, and packed in so closely they could easily get in the way of the people who did.

 

I was in the second group. I had no delusions about that. I was physically fit, and I could channel, but that didn’t translate to knowing what I was doing here. A few hours training with Black was not enough to make me competent.

 

I stumbled, and had to hurry for a few steps to keep from bumping into the person behind me. I tried not to think about the plan after that. Focus on my job, and trust the legionnaires to know theirs.

 

We were moving slowly, going west to where the ghouls seemed to make their home. None of the villagers was used to moving in formation, and we had too many walking wounded to make good time anyway. Our de facto commander was on crutches, for the black gods’ sake. It would have been comical, except that it was happening to me.

 

When we finally reached the wards, we all paused. Someone asked a question, and when they realized that we couldn’t hear they shouted it. “Should we take this ward Corbin made?”

 

Sumi seemed to consider it for a moment, then shook his head. “We can’t leave a gap in the wards,” he shouted back. “They could slip right by us into the village.”

 

There was a generalized murmur of assent, and we started moving forward again, at an even more glacial pace now that we were outside the safety of the wards. At least we’d had a chance to get used to moving in formation before the possibility of attack became an immediate concern.

 

“Ward isn’t worth it anyway,” Aelia muttered next to me, softly enough that probably only Corbin, Sumi, and I could hear. “Could keep a few people safe, but it’s not worth locking down our channelers.”

 

“What channels do we have?” Corbin asked back, at a similar volume. He was slotting into the interaction smoothly enough to make it hard not to remember that he’d been in the legions himself, once.

 

“Silf’s got metal,” Aelia said. “One other metal, and two kids with air that won’t be flying any time soon.”

 

“No fire?” Corbin asked.

 

“One woman has fire, but not so much as you’d notice.” Aelia sounded distinctly unhappy.

 

“Damn.”

 

“I have Andrew’s bags,” Sumi offered quietly. “Flash paper, and some torches, I think.”

 

“That helps,” Corbin said. “Still, it’d be nice to have more channels.” He grimaced; I could hear it in his voice, even if I didn’t really have the attention to look. “Bones and ashes, this is an awkward sort of phalanx.”

 

“It’s what we have,” Sumi said.

 

Corbin grunted. “Too true.”

 

The conversation tapered off after that. There seemed to be nothing more to say.

 

Things continued more or less uneventfully as we started into the trees. People were on edge, fidgeting with weapons, looking for ghouls behind every tree and under every rock. But nothing happened. There was no sign of the hostile presence in these woods. There was no attack.

 

Until, suddenly, there was.

 

I couldn’t see what happened, at first. I just heard shouts of surprise from the leading edge of the formation, followed by the sounds of a scuffle. A few people in front of me raised bows, but without a better angle on what happened, for me to get involved would be stupid. Channeling, after all, was imprecise at the best of times.

 

The fight was over quickly, well before I–or most of our group–could really do anything. “Cervi,” someone shouted. After a moment I recognized the voice as belonging to Marcus.

 

“I thought they were supposed to be tame,” someone else said from the crowd behind me. I didn’t recognize this one.

 

“Not tame,” Sumi said. “But they aren’t usually aggressive. Something must have provoked them.”

 

I nodded along to what he was saying. I’d never seen a cervus before, but I knew that much about them. The things were, as I understood it, some sort of Changed deer, and they weren’t that much different from what they’d come from. Those horns weren’t just for show, but they didn’t attack people, as a rule.

 

People were looking around, talking. I forced myself to ignore it. If something strange was happening out here, it was a fool’s bet that these ghoul creatures were involved somehow. If there was one thing we’d learned so far, it was that we had to think when it came to them.

 

Assuming they had a reason to get the cervi to attack us, they must have expected to gain something from it. But it wasn’t actually hurting us. Cervi were dangerous in their way, but not to a group like this.

 

Thus far their attacks had largely followed a simple pattern. Draw us out, and then hit us in a way we weren’t expecting. If they were following the same pattern–and why would they change it when it demonstrably worked–then….

 

I looked up.

 

Ghouls in the trees. Three of them that I could see from where I stood, thin things that could blend into the branches. One was almost directly over my head.

 

I reacted quickly, instinctively. I’d already been holding a handful of coins in one hand, Black’s hatchet in the other. It only took a heartbeat to fling the coins up and channel through them. Outside the wards, with the metal of the hatchet to draw on, it was easy. The bits of bronze and iron shot up into the branches, sparkling brightly in the sunlight.

 

It was a very obvious, even flashy sort of attack. It drew the eye.

 

The good news was that it drew the eyes of the people with me, pulling their attention up to the threat. It served as the warning that I couldn’t shout to them.

 

The bad news was that it also made the ghouls very aware that they’d been caught, and drew their attention to me.

 

The one over my head was already dropping as the coins hit it. They cut into its flesh, but they were just coins. They weren’t going to stop the momentum of what had to be over a hundred pounds of ghoul falling at me.

 

I ducked to the side, and the world dissolved into chaos. I was squeezed between people, jostled around, pushed to the ground. People were shouting now, weapons raised, as the ghouls fell claw-first from the trees.

 

A part of me had to admire the cleverness of their tactic. They’d bypassed our outer perimeter, going straight for the more vulnerable people in the middle. I wanted to blame the legionnaires for leaving that vulnerability, but I couldn’t. They’d done what they could. And the legions weren’t used to being under attack from above; usually, they were the ones in control of the skies.

 

On the ground, things were even more chaotic and impossible to process than when I was standing. All I could see was a forest of legs, lacking all meaning. People were shouting and screaming and yelping. I tried to push myself to my feet, but my hand slipped in the mud, and someone stumbled into me as someone else pushed them, and a boot came down less than an inch from my head without its owner realizing a thing.

 

That was bad. If someone stepped on me wrong, I’d be as dead as if the ghouls got their claws on me.

 

Grimacing, I shifted back into the vaguely quadrupedal gait I sometimes used to relieve the pressure on my spine, still not coming above the waists of the people around me. Like that, I started moving out, not paying that much attention to where I was going, what direction I was moving. Anywhere, just to get out of the press, out of the chaos that might prove to be more deadly than our enemies could hope to be.

 

Progress was slow. I was slipping and sliding on ground that seemed infinitely more treacherous than it had moments ago. I was bumped and shoved, tumbling to the ground again and again, once in a tangle with another girl. I still hadn’t managed to fully stand, and I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing; it did not seem like the world above my head was a very safe place right now. Weapons were passing over my head, people were still shouting, and while I hadn’t seen anyone be wounded, I could smell blood.

 

Finally, after what felt like years but was probably better measured in seconds, I reached the edge of the press. I tripped on someone’s foot as I took that last step, tumbling to the ground in the open area beyond the crowd.

 

Even in the midst of the fall, I felt a certain relief. I was in the open air again, away from the chaos, the press, the heat and screaming and madness.

 

That relief lasted until I came to rest on my back, and focused enough to look around.

 

As it turned out, there were ghouls out here, too.

 

The one I could see was larger than those I’d noted in the trees, easily twice my size. Its skin looked something like a callus, thick callus embedded with dirt until the color of the skin underneath was lost to sight.

 

It was facing off against a young woman with a simple wooden spear, and what looked to be a middle-aged lumberjack holding his axe. Apparently they were doing decently well for themselves, because I could see places where that tough skin had been cut into, cut away.

 

But the ghoul was still standing, still fighting. And it wasn’t nearly finished yet. As I was still trying to get my bearings I saw the man swing for it, hard, and I saw the ghoul pull away. It wasn’t quite fast enough, and the axe bit into its skin just a bit. He snarled, turned the momentum of the follow-through into an even harder stroke at the ghoul’s head.

 

He was strong, predictably enough, and he knew how to handle an axe. But he didn’t know how to keep his head in a fight. He didn’t see that the ghoul was leading him on, getting him to overextend himself.

 

The axe whistled past just to the side of its face. Before the man could react, the monster surged forward, far faster than it had been a moment ago while dodging, and ripped his head from his shoulders.

 

The girl shrieked, shrinking away from it. The ghoul turned in my direction, stalking forward.

 

I tensed. I was still on the ground, but I’d somehow kept my grip on the hatchet through all that. I had the coins, and the other metal I’d brought, razors and wire and assorted sharp things. I should, I hoped, at least be able to keep myself intact for the few seconds it would take for someone else to realize what was happening and step in.

 

Before I could do anything with those weapons, something seized the ghoul from behind and pulled it backward, toward the trees. Except it wasn’t just pulling the ghoul. This was something far more sudden, powerful, and violent than that would suggest. The ghoul’s feet left the ground, and it didn’t touch down again as it was whirled in a circle and slammed into a sapling.

 

It hit hard enough to cave its chest in to the spine. It hit hard enough to break the tree, which fell away from the impact.

 

I stared. There didn’t seem to be much else to do.

 

Black let go of the ghoul, watching to be sure it didn’t start twitching again, and then she turned to me. “Hey, Silf,” she said, walking over to me. “Sorry I’m late.” She offered me her hand.

 

I stared a moment more, and then shrugged and took her hand, letting her pull me effortlessly to my feet.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter