Chapter 20
At Deadletter's Door
The man in ragged clothing smelled like he hadn’t bathed properly in days. He was in a forest, at a pre-dusk hour, scouting around with an old assault rifle, and he reeked. Not like something in a forest either; he stank like city sweat, like old clothes, and had frightened the ambient critters into hiding or running off. The idiot would attract anyone nearby if they were paying enough attention, or if they had Gastineo’s trained nostrils. Telling one species of tree from another without external factors was simple enough, let alone picking out a group of dirty fools stomping around a quiet treescape at dusk all of a sudden.
The bright orange light of a campfire began to glow brighter a couple dozen meters away, competing with the darkening orange of a setting sun; the rest of these uninvited newcomers were setting up for the night. Their scout, whose gun was on the ground, would not be able to do his job of making sure they were safe. For now, that man was being held in a standing choke hold, facing away from the firelight that snaked in past the trees, with Gastineo behind him and keeping a firm grip on the malodorous lookout’s neck.
“Led meh go!” the dirty man demanded in a squeezed, barely-there voice.
“Why are you here? How did you get this far so quietly?” Gastineo asked, his old voice gruffer than usual from keeping it so low.
“Fugg off, hermid ath-hole!”
“Because I have no tolerance for strangers here, I will ask only once more. Who are you and why are you here?”
The sentry laughed, or tried to through the choke. “Wurr here do... gill you...”
Well, that was that then. Gastineo Deadletter was known as a great many things in this forest of his and in many other parts of the world, but forgiving was not on that list. He tripped the ragged sentry forward, pushing him to his knees, and followed him down without letting go of the choking position. The noise from the hard landing on the man’s knees was honestly less that the man had made walking around snapping twigs and crunching leaves. The choke hold’s pressure was increased more and more, until no more could be added. It took another minute for the scout to lose consciousness completely, after which Gastineo still held the man from behind. He tightened his strong arms and snapped the man’s neck. The dead lookout was laid down on his side in dirt and grass.
“Hermit asshole” was what the dead man called Gastineo. The moniker the nearby Ko Monasi clan used for him was hermit – he overheard it often when children played in the spot of forest he took for himself, as if they referred to some kind of apparition or folk tale. Now people were here to kill someone going by that nickname.
His travels and research for the past three decades had earned Gastineo a handful of true enemies, but only one that would bother with trying to kill him and be capable of finding him in the first place: Citizen Vaiss. If past experience was any indication, it also meant these poor people were hypnotized. On his knees, the hermit moved to reach the dead scout’s ankle, pulled up the man’s dirty slacks, and saw a highly-complex symbol that was Vaiss’ standard Stitch for creating a combatant. It was a different than others he’d seen out east, denser, but not by much. When exposed to such a complex, nigh-impossible to replicate suggestion, a manipulated combatant became a blurred weapon, or more succinctly, blurred.
Gastineo was saddened by the discovery of Vaiss’ handiwork, his chest suddenly soft and warm, his eyes unfocused, his mind on this beautiful part of the world he now called home. You cannot live in blissful peace forever, he thought, when you helped start a war meant to last for decades. One of that war’s weapons was here now, dead at his feet, and he blatantly wished for another day, or week, or month of this wonderful peace he’d gotten used to.
That wish was pointless, however, and instead he tried to remember the last blurred he’d seen. Vaiss had sent a few to chase him and others who were fleeing the Tribeslands after failing to stop the Citizen then and there. That was nearly... thirty years ago? It was hard to keep track. For certain, he had not seen a person used like this in a long, long time, and it was all the proof he needed to know that he could no longer stay here, in this forest he had come to love very dearly. It was nice, for once, to have a place to return to after his searches took him elsewhere. The Ko Monasi had kept their promise of leaving him be, too, which was more than he could say for a couple of other tribes he made deals with.
They were good folk for the most part, those Ko Monasi, and he owed them safety at least. If Vaiss was active again after so long a wait, everyone near one of that bastard’s enemies was in danger. The Citizen would not have been napping all these years, he’d have been planning. The old hermit sighed, stroked his scraggly gray beard, ran a rough hand through his thick gray hair, and sighed again. He got up, shrugging his complex compound bow off a shoulder as he did, holding the powerful weapon low.
Gastineo Deadletter made almost no noise, not compared to a crackling campfire that was far too big. He picked out the largest tree near him that would still give a view of the fire, sneaked to it in a half-crouch, and grabbed an arrow from his shoulder-hung quiver. Hiding behind the thick tree trunk, he tilted his body to peer at the enemies. Five of them, three women and two men, all dressed in dirty, sometimes ill-fitting clothing, their hair not properly taken care of, the smell of them all coming together to form a gross waft that was luckily mostly hidden by the smoke from burning wood.
The hermit already took care of their scout, but he doubted the man would be missed. These people would take care of things with the hypnotic efficiency expected of Vaiss’ puppets. When he was much younger and first encountered such terrifying numbness, it was frightening and unnatural. The salt-and-pepper monster’s ability to create thralls has improved; the people here moved with more life, appearing to have retained some personality while having their free will taken away.
Gastineo nocked an arrow, drew and aimed it. Few others could handle that familiar heavy pressure against the string, and he prided himself on still being built like a structure of good, strong brick at fifty-seven years old. He looked to his left, trying to find his next piece of cover. There was no ambient noise other than a very light wind rustling leaves above him, and he was excessively careful about his movements, only moving his eyes while scanning about. Despite being relegated to his periphery, when the five ragged enemies stopped attending to their camp and looked in his direction at the exact same time, he took notice and cast his eyes that way. Gastineo knew he made no mistakes in finding cover and hiding, he was good at this, but somehow they knew exactly where he was, and would be able to see the outline of the side of his body and his bow and arrow. The hermit loosed his tightly held arrow.
Fwip!
A blur in the air, overpowered thanks to the tension on the compound bow, it pounded one of the women in the chest, exactly where her heart was, audibly cracking a rib to get to the vital organ. The woman fell back with half an arrow sticking out of her, the pure white feathers of the fletching quavering. She thumped to the ground, and the other ragged folk rushed to grab the assault rifles they had put down in order to get the fire going. The weapons were a couple of strides from the fire, which gave Gastineo the second he needed to dig into his waist-clipped travel pack, pull out a spherical smoke grenade, and toss it between him and the four remaining foes.
The grenade started spewing smoke before it hit the ground near the enemies, effectively taking away their view of the hermit. Gastineo moved quickly to his right, where the smoke was thickest, and rushed closer to the enemies. As soon as he was away from the tree the air was hammered by the near-deafening sounds of gunfire from multiple assault rifles, the trunk of the unfortunate plant pelted with bullets that chewed into bark with additional flat reports.
The smoke covered Gastineo’s fast approach and he reached behind him for an arrow, quickly drew it back, and loosed toward where there should be an enemy. He hit someone, but not fatally. He could tell from the type of scream, the height of his aim, and the grunt emitted by the victim t
hat the arrow hit an arm at best, not another heart. Still moving and just a few steps from the fire, the bow was now useless at such a distance, so he dropped it and tossed the quiver aside.
At this new angle, the smoke should have enough to hide him at least partially, yet Gastineo was dismayed to see the enemies turn to face him through the wispy smoke cover. How were they finding him? The time it took them to re-aim was enough to grab another smoke grenade, and this time he threw it into the smoke-blocked orange light of their, an easy target thanks to the size of the blaze.
Before anyone could pull a trigger, the grenade touched the fire and instantly exploded. A sudden and incredibly thick blue-black cloud covered the area around the fire, the pocket of chemicals in the grenade that was supposed to burn slowly expanding out instantly and completely. It made for a smoke screen that was chokingly thick, leaving no visibility for anyone, a blindfold made of air that greatly overpowered the first sphere. Gastineo held his breath against the miasma he knew would come, but the enemies burst into fits of coughing, gagging, and spitting. He kept moving swiftly toward the heat of the fire in the sight-squelching cloud. As he went, he reached down to his sides, put his middle fingers into little round metal holes on his belt, and pulled out two deadly, steeply-curved knives, each blade only about as long as his palm was wide. They were his preferred method of inflicting death when a bow was not useful.
The hermit slunk, a snakelike strafing around the campfire’s warmth, listening. The coughing would have been more helpful had the enemies been better separated, but it was enough to go on. A footstep broke a twig near the hermit, and he extended a hand half-bent at the elbow, knife forward, feeling his way as he stalked sideways, touching the ground with only the toes of his hunting boots. When his outreaching hand brushed against clothing, he felt the enemy move to turn, felt more clothing, and realized that he had touched an elbow. Without a sound, Gastineo pulled the person in, slid his arms under the enemy’s armpits, and swiveled him violently around.
Gastineo slammed the enemy to the ground, forcing him face-first into dirt. The hermit held him down with one strong hand and a knee, pushed him as hard as possible into the ground, then stabbed him at the base of his brain stem for an instantaneous death. Three to go, one of them injured with an arrow.
“We have to... get out of... the smoke...” said a woman, each pause giving time for a cough or two.
The voice was enough to pinpoint her and Gastineo bolted up, sprang toward where he heard it, one hand out again. In three steps, closer to the heat and faded orange light, he touched the woman’s shoulder. It was enough information for the hermit to stab forward, putting himself off balance and aiming for where her neck would be. He slipped a sharp knife into soft flesh, then yanked the knife to the side.
The over-extension of his arm meant Gastineo couldn’t aim perfectly, and the woman had moved slightly at his initial touch. Instead of neck, he got more shoulder, and the knife being pulled to the side caused a gash that made her scream, some of her hot blood splashing onto the back of Gastineo’s hand. The hermit tried to regain his balance with a big step forward, but his foot collided with a pile of firewood he saw earlier and lost track of, which sent him reeling to one side.
“He’s here! Next to me!” the woman yelled.
Rather than try again to stay standing, Gastineo threw himself into his lack of balance with the other foot, landed on his side and turned that into a roll. The woman who yelled for help pulled the trigger wildly, a too-long burst of gunfire that pelted the ground where he was a moment before. Gastineo got on his knees with far more poise than he had any right to, came up further into a crouch, and rushed forward to where he saw the smoke-muffled muzzle flash. He guessed correctly and barreled into the side of the woman that fired the rifle, sending her flailing into the campfire after getting so he could see her eyes fill with panic.
Flames spat, splashed, licked at the body, all as the woman screamed, panicked, and rolled sideways off the fire. In this blackness it was easy to tell that her clothes were on fire, and would burn themselves onto her skin in seconds. The gut-wrenching screams were loud, but Gastineo still heard two sets of footsteps. The remaining ragged enemies were coming to where she had stood. No surprise they weren’t helping her; Vaiss’ puppets were only given instructions for offense, not preservation.
Gastineo moved quickly to the side and away from the fire, as he knew what was coming next. Both the remaining enemies fired in the direction he was previously, where his momentum stopped after shoving the woman in the flames. Those two spread a wide arc of gunfire while the burning woman continued to beg and scream and cry for help. The sounds of gunfire masked his movement, and the hermit was able to run full speed around the fire without the need for stealth. He now knew exactly where his remaining enemies were, the flashes from the assault rifle muzzles cutting through the thinning smoke.
Gastineo moved behind the enemies before he began stepping forward again, knives ready. The enemies stopped firing.
“Did we get him?” asked a youthful, slightly feminine male voice to the left of the campfire.
“I don’t see a body. Move up a little, keep looking, maybe he ran off.” The woman’s voice was actually a little deeper than the man’s, and sounded hurt. She must be the one he stuck with an arrow.
The woman was to the right of the flames, near the burned one that had stopped moving, clothes still partially ablaze. The hermit moved in on the deep-voiced woman, seeing her clearer with every step as the smoke dissipated quickly. The arrow he loosed earlier was sticking out of her right upper arm. As the enemies slowly moved forward, checking for him, Gastineo bent down, picked up some dirt, balled it in his fist. He tossed the compacted clump high in the air, toward the trees to the far left, and waited. The two ragged people were inching closer together for safety, but were still a couple meters apart. The dirt clump hit a tree and burst open loud enough to grab attention, its bits hitting the short undergrowth to make a sound like someone rustling. The two enemies opened fire toward where they heard the sound, bombarding plant life with bullets.
Gastineo ran forward and to the right, to the woman. He got to her in barely two seconds, slipped a hand around her neck, and slit her throat with one knife at the same time that he severed her spine near the middle with the other. He pulled her body toward him so it wouldn’t noisily thump to the ground, and laid her gently onto her side, her neck gurgling blood onto the ground, dark, oily, and glistening, and her eyes twitching with finality. He got a lot of blood in his hands from having to move her, hurriedly wiped his closed fists on her clothing, then did the same for his curved blades.
The hermit slipped one knife back into its small holster on his belt, and grabbed another fistful of dirt with the freed-up hand, giving him some range to play with. The young man had stopped sporadically firing into the forest.
“I don’t... I don’t see anything. Do you?”
The young man turned to look in his remaining comrade’s direction and saw Gastineo clearly now that much of the smoke was blown away. The hermit imagined what the young man saw: an older man built like a small bull, with brown and black and bloodstained hunting clothes, standing over a woman he just killed, ominously lit in a combination of campfire glow and orange sunlight. The hermit threw the unpacked dirt at the young man, not hitting him really, but forcing him to close his eyes at the incoming speckles. Gastineo bolted at him, moving through the airborne dirt he just tossed with impressive speed.
Gastineo grabbed the young man’s chest to hold him the second he got close enough, then stabbed at his neck and chest while forcing the enemy backwards. The young man tripped, fell, landed hard, and the hermit hastily stabbed two more times at his chest. The victim stopped moving, and Gastineo stopped attacking.
Rather than lay quietly, however, the dying man spoke with disturbing clarity, his voice box still intact, the flurry of stabs not getting to that particular body part.
“Why... do you fight h
im?” the young man asked, wheezing.
“Because he must be fought,” answered Gastineo after a shrug, assuming the dying man spoke of Citizen Vaiss.
“No. He must be helped.”
“Only because he made you believe so. I have seen what he does to those who oppose his purpose: frivolous death.”
“That’s wrong. The Citizen, he saved me, he was going to make my family remember me. He will save all of us fro....”
“He has killed you, son,” Gastineo interrupted, aggravated by the boy’s forced servitude. “Killed you by sending you here to kill me.”
Unable to watch this any longer, Gastineo stabbed the young man in the chest, in the heart, pushing the small blade hard between ribs to get it done. Life leaked out of the unfortunate slave slowly, steadily, as his eyes rolled back and his mouth let one last breath leak out weakly.
Gastineo sat for a couple of minutes, thinking. Not about anything specific, of course, just meditating, focusing on his breath and body and nothing else. By the time he fully calmed himself, the artificial smoke was gone, with only the overlarge campfire’s rising black plumes filling some of the air. The bodies of the enemies were all visible around the fire. Gastineo sighed.
Then, he noticed an odd glowing object, slightly blue and small. It was near the man he pushed to the ground and stabbed in the back of the neck, the glow familiar. Gastineo got up, walked over to the fading, artificial blue light, and frowned when he saw it.
It was a cuboid object, small, translucent, and with a small sphere of what would be saliva in its center. The blue glow was almost completely gone now. The hermit picked it up, studied it from all angles, held it in a palm and squeezed to get the feel of the material. He put a tooth to a corner and bit down gently, the material undamaged. It was not a counterfeit or copy; this was the real thing. He reached into a pocket of his waist-strapped travel pack, pulled open a zipper, and reached inside. He took hold of his own cuboid object and took it out to compare it with the new one he just found. The one he carried with him had a hair sample in it, but was otherwise identical to the one with a sphere of saliva in it in every other way, including a diminishing glow. This was how they knew he was near the trees at the start of this mess – a wireless, sympathetic search protocol must have been set up beforehand for the saliva-carrier to point out similar ones nearby.
“Hmm, these are in play now?”
The hermit looked around, deeper into the trees, finding where he guessed the enemies would have come from. He saw a few broken branches, the start of an easily spotted trail. With this cuboid in hand, he knew how these unkempt enemies got here: Saint Cosamian Dastou’s mobile headquarters, the Caravan. Gastineo brought up maps and notes in his mind, putting together how that big machine got here.
There were a few towns maintained by the Social Cypher in the mountain range that curved and cut through the massive forest, each of them the residential area for a mine. There were many half-finished underground rail paths leading from the eastern shores and Blackbrick to here, meant for those towns. Something halted the progress of building those tunnel paths, and transport of product from the mines is handled by overland rail. But those tunnels only occasionally snaked in the direction of those towns; numerous others went all over, destinations with no purpose along with no end, most with interspersed cylindrical that have been covered by forest growth. Two of those tunnels are equidistant from here.
Gastineo talked to himself out loud, walking slowly toward the broken branches he detected as a path. “The Caravan would have traveled in an abandoned tunnel, found one of the pre-made escape wells to the surface, and deposited these people here to find and kill me.” He thought about how the enemies smelled. “And it was done in an incredible hurry, not enough time for these people to use the showers in the mobile headquarters’ barracks. Therefore, it went from Blackbrick, through an undisclosed tunnel, to an exit. Then they would have to hike the rest of the way here. In total, about two hours, most of it walking to get to me.”
None of what he was thinking was impossible, and only lent certainty to his assumption that Vaiss was at the head of all this. Only that man would know enough about these tunnels to tell someone how to use them effectively. If he followed the trail from these now-dead failed assassins, he’d find the escape well and could thereafter follow the disturbances in the ground made by the Caravan’s travel.
“Good. I am tired of waiting, of learning, of listening. I will, at last, rejoin the fray.” He said that more to the memory of his deceased friend, Saint Lonoj Ornadais, than to himself.
Gastineo reminisced momentarily, and realized he’d completely lost track of how long it’s been, the years melting together. It was easily three decades ago since the very first encounter with Vaiss, but could it have been more? Either way, back then the Citizen had been invincible, his powers daunting and frightening. Now? He was an obstacle to be overcome, and the hermit found was no longer afraid. Hindsight chipped away at those old fears piece by piece, reminded him of the mistakes and gave him ways to avoid repeating them.
He put away the cuboid objects, picked up his bow and quiver, ruined the left behind assault rifles, and lastly put out the campfire. He did all this with an eagerness bordering on giddy. The hermit smiled, took a sip from his canteen, and jogged toward the forest trail.
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