Page 24

Chapter 24

We hurried to return to the boat, though now we panted and staggered, oppressed by the heat of our helms. Malo, Tangis, and I took up the rear position, and for a long while we walked without saying a word. Then Malo dropped back to me, her green eyes sharp and searching behind her helm. “What does this all mean, Kol?”

“We’re hardly ten span away from that madness,” I said. “You think I should know?”

“Your immunis solved Sujedo’s disappearance in hours—and while she is far away, you are close. How did our impostor achieve that horror?”

“I can say little now. But…I feel like those smugglers knew him, trusted him, when he did this thing. I think they let him do it.”

“ Let him kill them? We found those vine-people frozen as if running away—and within the clearing, they had their arms raised in fear.”

“Yes, but if someone had tried to set up that reagent-weapon in a smuggler’s camp, and if they knew it was a weapon, would they have let him? That device was complex. It took time to assemble. And time to work, for I imagine it had to boil and trigger a reaction. But they didn’t expect it, or comprehend it. Some were exposed to it and did not know, I think. They breathed it in, then took up posts in the trees, or…or walked down to the river before being affected.”

“Like the man we found in the water.”

“But then it reached a critical point. Everything around it began to change, very rapidly. Some fled, but they did not get far.” My eyes searched the dark trees. “He meant to kill them, I think. All of them, all at once.”

“And the sign he left?” said Malo. “What could those markings mean?”

“The likely answer is,” I said slowly, “he did not leave it for us.”

“Then who?”

My eyes fluttered, and I recalled the anxious face of Immunis Ghrelin.

“Someone with a fondness for codes,” I said. “We need Ghrelin and Thelenai to start telling us the truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“An Apoth safe is robbed. The thief takes his prize into the jungle—and there he creates a weapon akin to titan’s blood ? One that instantly kills half a hundred people? If that’s what is being stored and secretly shipped out of Yarrowdale in common pots, it’ll raise no end of hell when people find ou—”

I froze midstep, staring into the brush.

“What is it?” Malo asked.

I stood perfectly still, studying a shock of ferns blooming just off the path. There was a break in the middle, as if someone had trod upon it. But something in my mind told me it should not be so.

My eyes fluttered, and I reviewed my memories of first walking this path. I found my memory of that same fern when last I’d seen it as we’d approached the clearing, but it had been whole and unbroken then. And I had been last in line, so I knew that neither the wardens nor Tangis had touched it.

I began to walk again. “Walk,” I said casually to Malo. “And walk free, if you can.”

“Why?” she said.

“Don’t look around,” I said. “Just keep walking with me.”

I studied more of the greenery about us as we followed the other wardens. Here and there I spied broken branches or bent leaves where I knew I should not.

“We are not alone here,” I said quietly to Malo. “The helms you wear have blinded you to it.” I placed my hand on the grip of my sword. “I see leaves broken about us, and bends in the ferns.”

Yet Malo turned to look at me, startled. “Like someone walked this path after us?”

“Yes, and they may be watching us sti—”

“No!” she said. Then, roaring: “No, you fool, not us! The boat, the boat !”

She cried something in Pithian to her wardens and ran past them, and together they all drew their short swords and bows and charged off toward the river. Tangis shouted some question at me, but I had no mind for it: once again, my hand unlocked the grip of my sword, and I pulled my blade free and chased after them.

Then I heard it: the cries and screams of battle, floating through the trees. I realized Malo feared that the smugglers would attack not us but our boat, which was far more vulnerable, and then we might be stuck here, lost in this warped forest.

I sprinted into the brush, squinting through the foggy eyepieces of my warding helm, all the jungle turned to a smear of leaf and shadow. And then, without warning, there were figures among the trees: men, scrawny and green-eyed and green-mouthed, rising from the undergrowth and wielding short swords and spears. I realized we must have run up on them as we charged. They turned and fell upon us, shrieking like mad things.

Then all dissolved to din and chaos. The wardens broke up, split apart, melting into the jungle to engage our opponents. Somehow in the whirl of screams and leaves, I found myself separated, then saw that I was surrounded by three attackers: one on my right, two on my left.

I took stock of them. They were untrained, weary, dehydrated: I could tell by their movements, by the boniness of their wrists, the cracking skin about their lips. Yet though they were weak, they did not hesitate. One of the men on my left leapt over a clutch of ferns and thrust his short sword at me. I watched the rusty blade shoot toward me, and a voice spoke in my mind, calm and controlled.

These may be the only witnesses we have to what happened. Disable, don’t kill.

Instantly my memories of my training poured into my muscles, and I was moving, dancing back, parrying his thrust while shifting away from the man on my right. I waited for the first attacker to thrust again and circled to the left, setting up my play.

He moved in, but his sword arm was weak and his grip feeble. I batted his thrust away easily, exposing his lower body. My blade bit out at the flesh above his right knee, severing the ligaments, then slashed his shoulder—I took a guess that his right was his dominant arm—and he fell to the ground, screaming.

The second attacker paused, intimidated by how quickly I’d felled his comrade, but the man coming behind him did not, hurling a short spear at me before moving in. A common tactic—and one I had trained in—and my body came alive, my memories filling my muscles with the movements of my training, and I batted the spear away with the flat of my blade.

Yet my strike was too slow—likely hampered by the warding helm—and the spear did not tumble to the side, but spun wildly and struck my warding helm, shifting it to the right so I could no longer see.

I staggered about, my environs turned to flickering shadows.

Should have trained in a helm, I thought. Should have practiced all this under the worst conditions.

My attacker moved in, trying to take advantage of my vulnerability. I barely glimpsed his stance through the glass of my helm, and saw the angle of his blade. My body responded—speedily, yet blindly.

I felt my green sword lick out and meet his blade at the expected angle; then I pushed, shifting, tilting my leverage against him and trapping his blade in my crossguard, the movement easy, familiar…

I could not stop myself. I felt the edge of my blade enter his neck, heard his garbled scream. The glass bulbs of my helm were splashed with blood, and he staggered away, and I could no longer see him.

I stumbled back through the trees, wiping at the bulbs of my helm and shoving the damned thing back into position. As I did I saw my third attacker staring at me, his eyes blinking uncertainly, his sword held limply in his hand.

“Get on the ground!” I shouted at him.

He blinked again, slightly raising the sword. Then he coughed, cried aloud, and fell to his knees.

I stared at him but then saw it: an arrowhead had punched through his left breast, just beside his shoulder. Then he tumbled forward and was still.

I looked up and saw Malo wielding her bow, her green eyes triumphant behind her helm.

“Move,” she said. “Now.”

I sprinted forward through the trees and rejoined the fray.

—

It was quick work after the first bout. It appeared that some small group of smugglers had been left destitute and stunned after the catastrophe at their camp, and had thought our boat would make an easy means of escape, yet the two wardens onboard had spotted them easily, hidden behind the boat’s armored walls, and fired arrows upon them, killing two and pinning down the rest. Then Malo and I and the rest of the wardens had come up behind them. It was such a pitiable spot for any force to be in that I felt quite bad for them.

When it was all done we found we had slain eleven and wounded four, though Tangis testified that most of the wounded would likely perish. The first man I’d felled had the best chances, he said, and together Malo and I helped carry him and a few other survivors back to the boat, where Tangis tended to him with his grafts and tinctures while we checked the rest of the fallen.

“What shall we do for the dead?” I asked Malo.

“Do? Nothing,” she said.

“It does not feel right to leave them to rot.”

“If we were to dig them graves, the forest would still spoil it,” she said. “Better to give them over to the trees and the vines. That is their world, anyway.”

I gazed back at the jungle and wiped the blood again from the eyepieces of my helmet. These were not the first people I’d killed, but they were the first I’d left to spoil under the sun. I made a silent prayer for them, picking one of the imperial gods at random—perhaps Davingli, goddess of wilderness and encampments—and boarded the boat.