Chapter 86: Who will be the bait ?
They reached the glade where the severed feet of Vaelor had been found.
The north path’s interior, the older growth, the Bleed Bark canopy thick overhead — the place Team Umbra had stopped in the night because Rada had pointed at something on the ground that Rapax could not run past. Asp led them up to it, to the Hemoth Pine root where Rada had sat through her fatigue crash, and there she told it again. In full, this time. For Kei, who had not been there.
How Umbra had broken from the Red Widow on the strength of Rada’s shadow twin — the double she could throw out of her own shadow, that had pulled the Widow’s eyes off the running formation long enough for them to live. How the Widow had come after them anyway, threading the canopy on its silent lines. How they had halted here, in this glade, because Rada had seen the two severed feet on the floor and the torn ashen-black robe beside them, and had pointed, and Rapax had been unable to run past it. How Rapax and Asp had studied the feet and the Umbra High Cleric had named the robe — the weave of a Temple of Caedis shadow master’s apparel — and named the man who had worn it. Vaelor. How Asp had smelled the truth the bite-marks half-told: that the rot ran older than the bites, that something else had killed a master on the rising edge of grandmaster, killed him clean and left no mark of its own, and only after had the Viletails come to feed on what was already dead. How, in the middle of that reading, a lone Viletail had dropped silent down the Hemoth Pine for Rada’s neck, and Asp’s thrown foot had struck it, and Rada had summoned her twin daggers and killed it where it landed. How the Red Widow had arrived then in full. How Rada had thrown the dead Viletail’s body to foul the Widow’s path, and bought, with that one throw, the seconds in which three more Viletails had dropped from the canopy and taken her — tails across her mouth and her hands and her legs, bound and carried up and gone into the dark, while the fatigue still held her too far under to answer.
Kei listened. Tula listened. Corvyn listened.
When she finished, Kei walked to the place where Rada had thrown the dead Viletail.
The body was there. What was left of it. Pressed flat to the forest floor, the flesh spread and stuck to the ground under what had been the Red Widow’s weight, the shape of the thing gone entirely, the rot already working in it. He crouched over it and read it the way he read everything, and it told him nothing it had not already told him by being where it was.
" Well , " Asp said. " I have told you everything I know. How do you mean to proceed? "
Tula looked at him. Corvyn looked at him. The same question behind both faces.
Kei did not answer at once.
Something was at him. Had been at him since they left the bleed bark — a wrongness with no shape, a sense of being watched that his Perception could not source, and that his older instinct, the one this body had not given him, the one he had carried up out of a life of rooms with too many exits and too many men who smiled, could not point at either. In the life before this one it had kept him alive more than once, the cold drop in the gut that arrived before the knife did. It was speaking now. It had no words and no direction and it would not stop.
He had kept his shadow sense out along the whole walk here, the thin two-mark thread of it, reaching for the thing he assumed was behind it — the Choir-Eater, full and slow and curious, trailing the warm bodies that had sheltered above its feast through the night. He had not opened the domain. An open shadow domain in this forest was a meal rung like a bell, and he had learned that lesson in the glade behind them at the cost of three clerics and a night he would not forget. So he reached with the sense alone, listening and not shining — and the sense found nothing, and the wrongness stayed, sitting in him exactly where it had since they climbed down. The thing his instinct felt was not in front of his sense. He did not yet understand that this was because it was behind him.
He weighed telling them. He set it aside, and gave them a different thing that was also true.
" I am thinking about it. " He looked from Asp to the canopy. " I was also thinking — if Rapax and Doctor come back to the hideout and find us gone, how do they find where we went? "
" I saw to that. " Asp’s tail-tip flicked, pleased to be asked. " Leaving the hideout I drew off some bleed bark sap — for study, later. I marked the Hemoth pines along the route from the hideout to here. Two curved daggers, in red sap, on the grey trunks. Rapax and Doctor will see the markings glowing and know which way we came. "
Kei nodded, and meant the nod. " Good thinking. "
" Good work, Asp , " Tula said.
" Yes — excellent work. " Corvyn had a cloth in his hands, working it over his palms, and he gave Asp a warm open look as he said it. " With any luck Rapax and Doctor find the markings and reach us soon. That is how we get clear of this mess. " He tossed the cloth away into the bushes at the glade’s edge, done with whatever had been on his hands, and turned back to the group.
Kei looked at him.
" Tell me about the Viletails , " he said. " Do they hunt in packs, or alone? "
Corvyn answered without a pause. " Packs, mostly. Sometimes alone, when the work is assassination — but even then they move in pairs. At least a pair. "
" And they live in packs? "
" In packs. Whole families of them. "
Kei looked around the glade once, the canopy, the dark above the canopy. " Is it possible they took Rada as food. For the rest of the pack. "
The question turned Asp’s head. Tula’s. Corvyn’s face stayed where it was, neutral, and he answered it as flatly as he had answered the rest.
" Possible. Likely. Live stock, kept for the pack to eat — the small ones, the ones with young. They do not kill what they can carry breathing. "
Kei was quiet for a moment.
Then: " We need fresh bodies. Live and dead, both. To bring the Viletails here. " He said it the way he said everything, level, a man laying out a mechanism. " They will eat the dead. And the living ones they will carry back — to the place they took Rada. We follow them to it. "
The silence that came after had a different weight than the silences before it.
Asp stared at him. So did Corvyn. And Tula — Tula’s mind went, without her choosing it, to a thing she had been shown and had never told him she had seen. A fragment, a sliver out of the Choir’s borrowed eyes on the night the vision had taken her: a masked man in a room that was nowhere near this forest, a woman with daggers, and the woman’s head coming away from her shoulders slow and final, and the words the masked man had said as he did it — words she had not understood then and had not been able to stop hearing since. She had not known, watching it, whose memory she was standing inside. She thought she might know now. She kept her face as still as House Nightloom had taught her to keep it, and she looked at the man in front of her who had just laid out the using of living things as bait in the same flat voice another man would use to read a list, and she thought, with a small cold certainty she did not want, that he was the same man.
It was Tula who broke the quiet, and the question she asked was the practical one.
" Where do we find dead bodies? Now. "
Kei’s eyes went to Corvyn.
Corvyn caught the look and answered it before it was a question. " No. I will not give up the high cleric’s body. It deserves a burial. And it is mush — it would serve nothing. "
" All right , " Kei said. He did not argue it. " I have a body. In my necro bead. A woman’s — I found it at the Cruentus Mouth, on the way to Caedis. "
That caught Tula’s attention, and held it, and she said nothing.
Asp asked the other half of it.
" And the live bait? " she said. " Who will be the live bait? "
The question hung.
No one answered it in the second that followed — Asp looking to Kei for the answer, because it had been his plan; Tula’s eyes on Kei’s hands, on the necro bead he had not yet opened, waiting to see whether the woman who came out of it was the woman from the vision; and Corvyn looking at the three of them with an expression of patient concern, his gaze sliding once, sideways, to the bushes at the edge of the glade — to the cloth he had thrown there, the cloth that had wiped two curved daggers off a row of grey trunks — and then back, easy, before any of them could follow it.
