Chapter 88: Bait And Wait
" Shit. What happened to that one.?"
Asp asked pointing at the male dead body , at the face opened along its length into hanging layers.
" I do not know , " Kei said. " Maybe it was prepped for the Viletails’ lunch. "
Asp smirked. The answer suited her — a thing made into food explained by being food, no further question required. She had grown up where the dead were furniture. A sliced face was a curiosity, not a horror.
But Tula did not smirk, and Tula did not look away.
The two bodies were not Madam Butterfly. She had half-expected one of them to be — had watched Kei’s hand at the necro bead with the specific waiting of someone testing a vision against the world — and neither was. The woman was a stranger. And yet the man, the man whose face had been taken apart so thoroughly that no feature survived to be recognized, sat wrong in her. Not a face she knew. A *knowing* she could not attach to a face. Something at the edge of it — a name she had heard said in a room, a house, a network’s worth of intelligence about people who had stopped being where they were supposed to be — circling a body it could not land on because the body had been cut past the point where landing was possible. The feeling stayed. It did not resolve. It stayed.
Kei had taken the Twin Umbral Wings from his weapon bead.
He set the curved blades to the bodies and made cuts — long, shallow, opened along the limbs and the torsos where the blood sat closest to the surface — and the blood came. It had not decayed. Nothing in the necro bead decayed; the preserved pocket held what was put into it exactly as it had been put, and so the blood that came out of these two was as fresh as the day each of them had stopped owning it, and it ran red and real onto the forest floor.
He worked, and he watched Tula while he worked.
" How do you want to do this , " he said. " Will you sit out here somewhere while we hide? Or hide, and come out when the Viletails come? "
Tula did not answer.
Her eyes were on the man. On the opened face. Her mind was not in the glade.
Kei saw it. He saw where her eyes were and how long they had been there, and the suspicion arrived in him plainly, without alarm: that she had recognized something in the male body, or thought she had, or was reaching for a recognition the sliced face would not give her. It was possible she knew whose this had been. It was possible she had begun to.
He found, turning it over, that he was not much troubled by it.
The Viletails would leave nothing. That was the shape of the plan and the shape of his ease with it — that whatever Tula thought she saw would be inside a Viletail within the hour, carried off in pieces too small and too distributed to be anyone, the evidence eating itself as the plan ran. A body that was gone was a body that had never been a problem. He let her look. He went back to the cutting.
" Tula. "
She heard her name this time, and came back from wherever the man’s face had taken her, and looked at him.
He asked it again. How she meant to be the bait.
She thought about it — the thinking visibly returning to the present from somewhere further back — and she answered. " I hide. I come out only when the Viletails come. " Not before. Not exposed on open ground waiting to be the first thing they found. Hidden, until the dead had drawn them, and then a living thing stepping out among the dead.
" Then we do that , " Kei said.
The four of them took cover.
A stand of foliage grown thick under the leaning trunk of a Hemoth Pine, twenty meters from the bodies, with sightlines to them through the leaves — Asp, and Tula, and Corvyn, and Kei, folded into the green dark and gone still. Behind them the blood did its slow work. The air over the bodies turned metallic, the iron smell of it thickening as it spread, and the forest floor beneath the two corpses went dark and then darker, the crimson soaking down into the earth — and where it soaked, the first threads of Bloodmoss began to come up. Small. A faint reddening of the ground that had not been there, the moss that grew where death fed it answering the feeding, spreading in a slow ring out from under the bodies the way it spread in the corpse gardens of things that killed more than they ate.
They had made a small beacon. Blood and growing moss, a column of the forest’s own death-signals rising off a patch of ground that an hour ago had held nothing.
The four of them waited inside the leaves.
Asp watched the bodies. Kei watched the canopy, and the wrongness still sat behind him where his sense could not reach it. Tula watched the man she could not place, the feeling that he was someone refusing to leave even now that his face was turned away in the dark. And Corvyn waited among them, patient, a thing wearing a man’s patience, and none of them looked at it twice.
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Far from the glade, the Heart was a different shape of dangerous.
Doctor and Rapax ran with their shadow domain spheres fully drawn — the contained shells of their domains closed around them, two grandmasters moving at grandmaster speed through the deep Heart — and behind them came the Red Apostle, and she did not run. She swung. The spider-legs that rose from her back had begun secreting silk, thick lines of it cast ahead and caught, and she went through the canopy on them branch to branch, hand over the dark hand of her own thrown line, a thing built to take a humanoid down crossing the ground the way a humanoid could not. Two grandmasters fleeing in front of her had instigated her past the point of letting them go. She came on, relentless, and she gained.
" Doctor , " Rapax called, the baritone carrying back over his shoulder as he ran. " How long do we run? We are getting farther from the bleed bark with every stride. The Shadow novices are getting left behind , none to watch them over except Corvyn .Why not turn and engage? "
" A little further along this way , then we can engage dear " Doctor, running, unbothered, the warmth on the words even now. " When we reach the zone where the Hanging Choir hang. Our spheres will nullify their song at the shell — we will not hear them. But she has no shell. She will hear all of it. " A breath, even. " And she is a thing made of loss, fury dear — her brood, her eyes, her legs, the evolution she spent to become what she is. The Choir takes exactly that and shows it back to you until you cannot stand inside your own mind. We give her the Choir. Then we turn. We strike her the moment when she is already breaking under the choir song "
Rapax took it in a stride, and found the Doctor’s idea solid.
A creature could not be fought at its strength near the Choir-Eater, and could not be fled forever, but it could be led — into the one ground where the terrain did the first half of the work. Lead the grief cum anger-made thing into the grove that fed on emotions. Strike it when the choir song had already made it vulnerable .
He nodded, running, and did not see the thing that came.
His shadow sense caught it before his eyes did — the full-alert thread of it flaring, his Perception answering in the same instant — and Rapax threw himself sideways off his own stride. A lance went through the space his chest had filled. Not metal. Silk — strands drawn together and thickened and stiffened into a single rigid shaft, a spear made of the same web she swung on, its point hardened enough to take a grandmaster through the back if a grandmaster had been a half-second slower.
He did not stop. Neither did Doctor. They turned their heads as they ran and saw her behind them, swinging at the height of the branches — and saw the division of her labor, the horror of how complete a hunting thing she had become. One pair of the spider-legs cast and caught the silk that carried her. The other pair was drawing fresh strands together as she came, thickening them, shaping a second lance in the air while the first still quivered in the trunk it had found, readying the throw before the dodge of the last one had finished.
Doctor and Rapax bent lower and ran faster.
Behind them the second lance left her legs and came.
