When Web had arrived at his village, he’d found it burnt to cinders by the advancing Blood Robe army. Nearly everyone was dead.
The famed hunters could have fled, but none had been content to leave the old and the young and the infirm to die.
They’d stayed, they’d fought, and they’d been massacred by the Blood Robes. Only a few cowards had fled.
Web hunted the cowards first, including the man who had called him a liar.
Now he stalked the Blood Robes in the deep woods of western Blood Forest. In military terms, his killings didn’t make much of a strategic difference. He killed only one man or one wight at a time, and always used only his knife or his bare hands. He spent days setting up a strike, and his target would simply disappear.
But not disappear forever. A camp of the White King’s men had woken one morning to find their kidnapped leader in the middle of their own camp. He was skinned, gutted, his throat cut, and hanging upside down from a tree limb as meat is hung to cure by a butcher.
The men in that camp weren’t simple foreign soldiers with lax discipline; they were locals who knew the land here; they were the White King’s best scouts.
Daimhin Web had murdered their leader simply to embarrass them.
From time to time, he would show up in friendly villages or towns laden with gems or gold or coin sticks he’d taken from his kills. He would give these to the town’s conn. He wanted nothing in return, not even the steel fishhooks or sugar or salt or whisky that other long-term trappers or hunters would have traded for. He simply gave them the valuables because he knew they would need money to rebuild their lives. And he would tell them the disposition of the White King’s forces and the direction in which they were heading—usually toward that village.
He asked for nothing, and seemed not to care if they heeded his advice. He spoke with a gentle voice and then disappeared. He became like a forest creature, and his eyes were soft and skittish, not what you would expect of a predator who skinned and gutted men.
He was content to live alone, and he had become a beast.
And now Kip was doing his best to emulate him, though it was more and more obvious that he’d had too much confidence that he could ape such perfection, moving through the dusky woods searching for the red wight Baoth.
This wight was so far into his transformation that Kip suddenly smelled him—the tobacco-and-tea-leaves scent of his red luxin and the slight whiff of smoke. Kip veered off his assigned line in the darkness, so intent on the hunt and the thousand thousand skills needed to track silently that he didn’t even tell Cruxer.
A pocket valley opened off to one side, far from the hunting ground the Ghosts had suggested, and as night settled on the Deep Forest, Kip’s options were being shut down. He’d packed blue luxin before the evening light faded, setting all the blue lines in the Turtle-Bear tattoo aglow, but it was uncomfortable to hold packed luxin for long, and it slowly leaked away regardless, like sand through cupped hands. His Turtle-Bear now looked faded as a fifty-year-old tattoo.
Kip did have a bow, but he wasn’t much of a shot. He couldn’t have lived an archer’s card, could he?
Nah, that would have been far too helpful.
Of course, at least one of the people in the cards must have been an amazing archer. More than one, surely, with so many warriors represented. In fact, Web himself had to be more than competent with a bow, but did Kip really want to sift Daimhin Web’s memories further? The first thing that came to mind when he pulled those memories farther off the shelf was the sight of the charred bodies of Web’s favorite little cousins. No thanks.
The next great warrior Kip could easily recall was Tremblefist, and though Kip had nothing but compassion for the man who’d lived and died a hero, fair or not, the memory that leapt out was of the Butcher of Aghbalu. Double no thanks.
Kip came over a rise and knew that something was wrong. You can’t let your mind wander while you’re tracking. He’d defaulted to being his overthinking self—and now the wight was gone, and Kip was alone.
In his reverie, Kip hadn’t even realized how he’d picked up the trail. Maybe Daimhin Web had sunk in deeper than he’d realized.
That didn’t matter now. Too much thinking!
In cresting of the rise, he’d skylined himself—putting his darker silhouette against the lighter forest behind him. He dropped to his face, lightly, landing on fingertips and toes so he wouldn’t make any more noise than necessary.
A whoosh ripped through the jungle as a fireball streaked over his head.
Kip rolled to the side to get behind a tree, trying to find the wight.
The creature that had once been Baoth was smart enough not to stand out in the open with a flaming hand. It was a monochrome red, so it needed an open flame to have lit the fireball. It might have a flint and steel to scratch sparks onto each flammable missile, but that was like a musketeer going into battle with musket unloaded. Few warriors were daring enough to trade strength for stealth, especially not passionate reds.
As he moved back to the crest of the hill, Kip guessed at the fireball’s trajectory from where he had been standing and where the fireball had hit the trees behind him. In the gloaming, the spotty light the trees allowed through their swaying branches made it near impossible.
Then he saw a constant, low light illuminating the leaves dimly from below. It was somewhat off to the side from the origin he’d guessed.
The wight was moving, trying to circle Kip.
Kip got behind the crest of the hill and ran to the side, flanking the entire hill. That much light cast upward? That meant the red wight was keeping a flame smaller than his palm—and probably in his palm. Kip’s studies had told him exactly how much sizzling and popping a flame of that size would make, and thus how loud it would be. Over this distance, in this jungle that he knew so intimately? Kip could guess exactly how much noise his own passage through the undergrowth could make without the wight’s hearing him.
Within half a minute, he’d flanked the wight, who was now moving stealthily toward where Kip had been. Baoth had further banked the flame he carried, making his right hand an inverted bowl like a hooded lantern.
How was he drafting so much with this light, though?
And then Kip saw how, and he was baffled that no one had ever explained it. The wight was drafting off himself. That must be at least part of why wights transformed themselves. This wight had copious amounts of imperfect red luxin encasing his entire body, so he could flash it back into red light that he could then draft. It was inefficient to draft from broken luxin, but this meant a wight could never be trapped powerless in darkness. Effectively, it carried its own mag torches in its body. And, come daylight, it could easily replenish itself.
The Mighty, like all the Chromeria, had discounted the accounts they’d heard of nighttime attacks. Drafters would never attack at night, they thought. They’d thought wrong, and it could have been a disastrous mistake.
But too much thinking, again.
Kip had lost the blue in all his running and loss of concentration. The fletching of his arrows had been fouled with mud from his roll on the ground. How accurate would they be?
He swapped through the spectacles on his left hip, drafting some superviolet—he didn’t need much—and then some red, each color sending a new glimmer of light into the Turtle-Bear tattoo. In sub-red, Kip looked for any forest creatures. All I need is just one squirrel, dammit.
But there were none.
Have to do this the old-fashioned way.
With his left hand, he pushed a veritable ice carpet of superviolet webbing forward through the undergrowth. Superviolet was so light and weak that any particular strand of it could break easily, so he took the Gavin Guile approach: more is better. He needed only one continuous section to project his will through the luxin. With his right hand, he picked up a rock and threw it deep into the woods off to one side. It was unlike his usual Kipliness that this time, he didn’t hit the first branch and
spoil the whole effect.
The whisper of the falling rock in the undergrowth froze the wight, who looked first for an attack, and then for prey.
The pause was long enough. Kip’s web of superviolet spread as far as the red wight’s feet, up its ankles, and to the inevitable seams between the solid luxin plates of its feet and its calves.
A man wasn’t made to have an exoskeleton. Skin moved and flexed in ways that solid plates didn’t allow. The solutions most wights came up with were taken directly from armorers: painstakingly articulated joints, or chain-mail meshes, or bulky straps and prayer. This wight was floating an entire layer of open red luxin underneath his armor so that he could use it for fuel, and so his skin could move.
With his left hand seeking the open red luxin, Kip reached his will through the superviolet, while his right hand sent a tiny bolus of a firecrystal through the superviolet toward his target.
Every plate of the wight’s armor would have knots—places where the magic had been sealed. Naturally, they would be on the protected inside. Kip was planning to unknot all the plates at once, but before he could reach them, the wight started to move.
Kip threw his will hard into the wight’s open red luxin. He pulled it all toward the wight’s chest, twisting hard. Its chest plate cracked with a snap at the same moment the firecrystal reached the wight’s feet. Kip popped the firecrystal up, and, exposed to the air, the crystal flared and sparked.
Covered completely in a mess of open red luxin, the wight went up in flames.
But that wasn’t enough. Kip ran forward, nocking an arrow.
The wight reacted first as a man would, slapping at the flames, terrified. So it wasn’t so far gone yet, or so smart. He could have drafted off his own flames and covered himself in more and more red luxin until it made a crust—it was difficult to burn a red drafter to death, if he was thinking.
Kip couldn’t give Baoth time to think. He loosed the first arrow a mere ten paces away. Drew another, loosed it. Drew another, loosed.
The wight screamed, a pillar of fire in the dark woods. He flung out a hand, and Kip leapt aside.
A gout of flaming oily red luxin went out from the wight, splattering and burning trees and bushes in a wide arc. It passed over Kip’s head. Then, weakening, the wight threw one more burst of liquid death upward.
By the time the flaming goo dropped to the ground, the wight was dead. It had become a charred pillar of blackened luxin, still-burning patches of red luxin, and steaming bits of seared human flesh and white bone peeking out like gore candles.
Within minutes, drawn by Kip’s oh-so-subtle signal fire, the Mighty arrived, along with Conn Arthur and a few trackers.
“So,” the conn said, looking around the forest punctuated with burning clumps of red luxin around this epicenter of destruction, “I’m guessing you didn’t get the scrolls he was carrying.”
“Ah shit,” Kip said.
Chapter 45
For a long while, Gavin lay bleeding on the floor of the yellow cell without even the courage to open his eyes. But he was a Guile, and to him ‘a long while’ without doing something wasn’t long.
He’d already catalogued his own injuries. It was the curse of his family: he couldn’t stop thinking or planning any more than he could stop breathing. He sat up.
The injuries weren’t bad. Well, ignoring for the moment the lost dogtooth, two stubs where fingers should be, and the gaping hole where an eye belonged. His cuts from falling were shallow, the bruises painful but not incapacitating, his jaw unbroken despite his father’s punches. The weakness from the hunger was extreme, though.
The first thing he saw was his own reflection.
“You were a beautiful man once,” it said.
Of course the dead man in yellow would be the perfect balance of logic and emotion, devastating him with each. Gavin ignored him for the moment, and cast his eyes down.
There was no corpse.
Oh, thank Orholam, there was no corpse.
“You don’t look well,” the dead man said.
“Does that make your work harder or easier?” Gavin asked him.
“Tell me, O man of Guile, what’s worse? Madness unknowing, or madness recognized?”
“So… harder, huh?” Gavin said.
What was this talk of madness? Maybe the yellow dead man thought Gavin was more gone than he was. Gavin tried to remember if hunger caused hallucinations. Perhaps it did. Perhaps that was why saints and ascetics starved themselves—they were seeking a path to enlightenment through the signals for help a body released when it was being destroyed.
Gavin wasn’t mad yet. He was too focused for that.
His father had pulled the rug out from under him. Very well, point to Andross Guile. His father had humiliated him by pummeling him with his fists. Fine.
Gavin was more than a match for the old spider. He would escape, and he would rise. He was unstoppable, unmatchable, superlative.
“Ah, Gavin Guile, surrounded with mirrors, and yet you refuse to see the simplest truths,” the dead man said.
“Dazen,” Gavin said. “I’m Dazen Guile.”
“Indeed. And what happened to Gavin?”
“Go to hell.”
“You seem not to have noticed,” the dead man said. He gestured to the cell. “Here am I.”
Orholam, I sure was a dick when I will-cast these walls with dead men.
I guess that was the point.
It wasn’t until Gavin moved to lap up some water that he saw the other wall of the cell. His blinded left side had faced toward that wall, and he’d been too addled from the fall and his hunger to fully examine this new hell.
He saw the bullet holes scarring the wall from when he’d blown off his brother’s head.
His breath caught as the memory filled his mind’s eye, as he lifted both Ilytian flintlock pistols and shot Gavin dead. One bullet through the center of his chest, the other right through the chin. If either pistol had misfired, he’d still have had a quick death.
“He was insane,” Gavin said aloud. “Maybe he was already insane before he came down here, but in my worship of him, I never saw it. Or maybe his madness was my fault. I know I’d not last sixteen years down here alone. Regardless, he was too far gone to be saved. It had to be done.”
“It was a mercy killing?” the dead man asked.
“Mercy too long delayed,” Gavin said. “And that is my fault indeed.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?”
“Do you have a point?” Gavin asked.
“Two.” The dead man pointed across the cell toward those impact holes.
Gavin stood with difficulty. He’d expected there to be blood spatter or brain matter or something similar for the dead man to torture him with.
There was no gore. Apparently the water wash had worked well.
Instead there were two simple holes, the squashed lead musket balls visible less than a thumb’s thickness inside each, the outside of each hole in the splintered yellow luxin forming short cracks in the top layer of the cell wall. He’d made the yellow luxin wall of this cell thicker than his hand; the bullets hadn’t even come close to fully piercing the wall.
“First thing that might catch your attention,” the dead man said, “is that there wasn’t any ricochet. Solid yellow luxin, and no ricochet? But then, with the positions of your hands when you fired, each shot was perfectly perpendicular to the angle of the wall. So it is odd, but not impossible.”
At first Gavin didn’t understand. And then he did.
“No,” he breathed. “This is a trick. No.”
“Oh, so you’ve spotted the impossibility, have you?”
Gavin shuffled over to the wall. He stuck his pinky finger into one of the bullet holes and scratched, trying to dislodge the lead.
“What is that going to prove?” the dead man asked.
“This is not my bullet. It’s impossible. He did this. My father. It’s a trick.”
“What are you doi
ng? Picking it out of the wall won’t prove anything.”
“I can see if it’s one of my bullets,” Gavin said. Like many veterans, Gavin had cast his own bullets. One of the tricks he’d picked up in his many years of fighting wights had been to pour the lead around a core of hellstone. It penetrated luxin like nothing else. Lead tore flesh catastrophically, but some wights layered themselves thickly enough with luxin armor to stop lead.
In Dazen’s musket balls, the lead would tear away quickly, leaving a hellstone core that could pierce anything but thick solid yellow luxin. Few knew his trick, and of those who knew, fewer still could afford the hellstone necessary. In monetary terms, it was like shooting solid gold musket balls.
“Ah,” the dead man said. “Look at it at an angle. You used to draft brightwater so pure a man could see through it.”
It was a good idea. He put his face against the wall. There! A nugget of hellstone, a hand’s thickness deep in the wall.
Desperate, he went to the other bullet hole, and saw the same.
“Father could have shot balls from my own gun. He would have access to my ammo pouch, too.”
“I told you it wouldn’t solve anything,” the dead man said. “But think. Where the black luxin hasn’t corrupted you, your memory was once so, so perfect for a mortal. Can you remember which bullets you fired that night? Can the Gavin Guile of legend remember that?”
The problem with hellstone was how brittle it was. Sharper than any steel, but you couldn’t carve it. It fractured into bitter planes and hard curves and angles. It meant that when he was casting bullets, Gavin always had to make odd compromises. A star-shaped chunk of hellstone was what he always looked for—its weight balanced so it wouldn’t put an odd spin on the musket ball, and small enough to fit within the lead, but large enough to retain momentum if it struck luxin and lost its lead jacket. Most times he made do with rough squares, triangles, or diamonds. Every bullet was different because the hellstone crystals were always different. He’d always arranged them by reliability.
Only the two bullets in his fine Ilytian pistols’ chambers had had the star-shaped hellstone cores. Even he wasn’t so wealthy that he could demand perfection in every bullet. His ammo bag was always full of second-best musket balls.