The screaming came through in pieces. Not together, and not from one direction: it found the seams and came at him through them, the way smoke finds the cracks in a room that has been sealed a long time.
He knew the place. He had never once stood in it. That was the worst part of it.
Fire. Ash. Buildings folding into their own footprints. Off past the range of hearing, something enormous was walking. He stood in the middle of it with his mouth open and nothing coming out of him.
Ahead of him the ground split into a wound of flame and torn soil, and something climbed up out of the split. Wreathed in fire. Grinning with no mouth. The Circle crossed the fires without needing a rhythm to keep.
His legs refused him. Some part of him understood that this was a dream. Dreams did not taste of iron and salt and blood.
Then the angle changed and he was not watching any of it.
He walked. Gold worked along his arms, heavier than cloth and finer than any harness, and power sat on him the way a second skin sits on a body. Below him people bent, or begged, or screamed, and which of the three it was made no difference to anything. His voice came out of him and it was not his voice, and it carried down through the earth and along the bones under it.
"No prisoners."
"No survivors."
"This is not punishment. This is culling."
The Circle did as it was told. The blade-dancer was laughing while she took an orc elder apart in the middle of a plea. The barefoot one leaned to a man's ear and said something quiet, and half a field of people wept until their lungs gave out. Reaper came on the way a sentence comes on when it has already been passed.
He watched. He walked. He ruled.
Except he did none of it. He was behind those eyes, inside that body, wearing the power the way a corpse wears a flag. Then the ground went out from under the whole of it and he was outside himself and alongside himself, barefoot in the ash, with a child's voice in his throat, screaming at somebody, at anybody, to stop.
He watched his own hand come up, jeweled at every finger. He watched the Imp Queen go down. He watched her skull give under the heel of that smile, and the smile did not move for it.
He screamed, and no sound came out of him, and nothing in that body moved at all. Only fire. Only ruin.
He looked down at the arms he was wearing. The long bones under the skin of them turned to glass. The glass turned to dust, and the wind came through and carried the dust away.
Air came into him in short pulls that quit before they were finished and had to start over. Sweat had glued his hair flat to his forehead. He was in a room. Wood and plaster, maps gone brown and soft on the wall, one sconce burning low on its bracket, a rough wool blanket knotted at his knees. The fire let go of him a piece at a time, and the screaming went with it, and what stayed was ash at the back of his tongue.
He sat up.
The other half of the bed had gone flat and cold. His coat lay folded over the back of the chair. His murasame katana leaned against the chair leg within arm's reach, and on the sill sat a stone jar with a cloth tied over its mouth. The smell had crossed the room to meet him: yarrow, comfrey, silverleaf, and under those three something no plant on this earth had put there.
He looked for what they had left, the way he would read any ground he meant to know: the floor, the corners, the sill, the dust that either held a print or did not.
He found no sign of either friend beyond the jar on the sill and the smell still coming off it.
Bandages ran his shoulder and his upper arm, tied off at an angle no man manages with one hand. Underneath, the gash went from the shoulder across the top of the arm. Somebody had closed it, and by the feel of it, it had been closing all night. The skin lay tight over muscle that wanted to be left alone. Warmth sat under the cloth and worked, like a hand that had not stopped.
That was not a night's healing. That was faster than a night.
He went to the door and stopped with his palm a hand's width off the frame. Something lived in the grain of the wood. Faint. Nearly spent. A working that had held all night and was down to its last heat.
He knew the hand that had laid it before he knew anything else about it, the way a man knows a signature. Midknight's.
Nobody else worked that way, every thread of it decided in advance, nothing spare in it and nothing left to chance.
It had been shaped to watch one room and to carry word to whoever set it if anything crossed that door that the house had not sent.
Archon set his palm flat to the grain and pushed. The thing woke under his hand, thin as paper, and he let it spend the last of what it had carrying word to wherever Midknight had got to. Deliberately. If the man was alive out there, he had just been handed one fact: the man in the room was up, and moving.
He took the window instead. Over the sill, down low, into wet grass.
Dawn had not committed to anything yet. Every color in the yard was the color of wet ash. One line of prints crossed the ground, deep in the heel and put down deliberately, and nothing had crossed that line behind them.
The mud had taken the prints cleanly, and they were all one man's, and the man had not stopped at the wall to look back at the window he had come out of. There was a slip at the edge of the grass where a heel had gone and been taken back.
He had carried the coat out over his arm. Folded, the rent had not shown. Open to the gray light it did. The wool at the shoulder was pulled long and twisted out of its weave, the way cloth goes when a closed fist takes hold of it and holds on while something pulls the other way.
He remembered water coming up over the whole of him, and a fist in that cloth hauling his face clear, and a voice going on at him through the noise. Then the water, and then nothing where the fist had been.
Below the hollow the river was loud in the gray, all of it coming down out of the hills with nobody to attend it. Shadow washed downstream. Nothing had come up off that bank. The current ran the whole width of the channel and did not slow at the stones and did not catch on any of them, and there was no print in the mud on either side of it.
Midknight's trail ran one way: toward the rim road, then bent down-country, back toward the water. That is how a man walks when he is following somebody the river carried off and did not give back.
Archon read the line, and took it.
Then the lamp came around the corner of the inn, and the imp girl from the kitchen came with it. She stopped when she had him and took the whole of him in, boots to bandage to bare arm, before she said anything at all.
"You're up."
"Where is he."
"Gone before the tonic went cold." No apology in it. "He carried you in. Nobody else came through that door with him. He made the salve in our kitchen, with Varrik holding jars for him, and then he gave the jar to me and told me how to use it on you, and went out the back."
"Toward the rim."
"Straight to it. No lantern." She shifted her grip on the lamp. "He asked about the woman who collects tribute."
Archon said nothing to that. He did not need the rest of it. The trail had told him already.
"You should eat," she said. "There are men in the yard. Three of them and a mule. They pay, so the innkeeper takes it." Her mouth did something. "They have been watching the road since they got here."
Then she looked at him and held it, past the length a look needs to be polite, waiting to see what he would do with what she had handed him. She had looked at Midknight the same way.
"I'll eat on the road."
They had been up before the light, and that told him something. A man in a bed he has paid for sleeps late. These three had been moving for a while.
The leader had a fire going and a pot over it and the easy face of a man who had settled his morning in advance and found it to his liking. Broad through the shoulders. A fleece collar.
A longsword hung where a man could see it, and a swagger that used more of the yard than the yard had going spare.
He came across with his weight rolled back on his heels and the grin already running, and the grin stayed there whether or not there was anything in the morning to grin at.
The thin one talked before anyone had introduced him, and he stood close enough that his breath reached Archon before his voice did. Sour, old drink, and something worse underneath it, and he stood there breathing it into the cold and did not know he was doing it. A chipped front tooth. He had the face of a man who had been the youngest in every room he ever walked into.
The third kept his head down over the strap in his hands. One eye was gone, the socket sunk and seamed shut, and the one he still had went down the road twice while the other two were talking, and came back.
"You're the one the girl's been up all night tending to," the leader said. "Cray. That's Mott, that's Hale."
Archon stopped at the edge of the light.
"Man in your shape shouldn't walk out of here alone." Cray nodded at the road. "We came off the rim road yesterday. There's not much left of this valley to look at."
"What did you see."
The fire popped. Cray took his time with it.
"Party came off the rim road the night before last," he said. "Four of them, all in dark. Two carrying."
"Carrying what."
"Something that was not walking." He smiled. "And that's the cheap half of the answer."
Archon looked at him, then at the other two. Three men and a mule on an empty road, with a story built to fit the shape of a man who was leaving. They were bandits. The price on the rest of the answer was a price on getting him out of the yard.
"There's a price on the rest," Mott said, leaning in to say it, close enough to breathe the sourness of him across the fire, because he could not help himself.
Cray did not sound annoyed. "There it is."
"You want coin."
"I want to walk the same road as a man who knows what to do when he meets what's on it. You've a blade worth more than my horse, and you look like you know why." He shrugged, comfortable in his own morning. "We walk as far as the ash line. You hear the rest on the way."
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
While Cray talked, Hale had gone off the road to the left, ten paces into the scrub, and stopped where the ground took his feet out of sight. Mott stayed close to the mule and the packs and never looked at the packs straight on. Cray had planted himself half a step inside Archon's sword side, talking and waiting.
They were setting a surround, not an escort.
Archon did not need the rest of it to be true. He was going to walk with them either way. A man alone on this road was no safer than a man with three of them beside him, and he wanted the ash line, and he wanted their eyes on the rim road.
"Keep the price," Archon said. "Walk."
Mott was on his feet before the word finished. Hale stood without a sound. Cray kicked the fire apart and looked pleased with the arrangement.
They left the yard and took the road up out of the hollow.
Cray talked the whole way up. He talked about the collections, and about a village north of the valley that paid its tribute in salt because it had nothing else to pay in, and about a sergeant he had ridden with and did not miss. Archon gave him three words at a time and read the ground.
"You've the look of a man who knows the collections," Cray said. "What did she take off you?"
"Nothing I had."
"Then you had nothing." Cray spat off the side of the road. "Same as the rest of us. She took the salt off that village and left them the hoops to carry it in. You ever eaten a thing that was only salt?"
"No."
"Neither had they. They paid the salt up until the hoops went, and then she took the hoops." He walked a while with that. "The sergeant I rode with would have called it order. He called everything order. Made him easy to follow and easier to leave."
"What happened to him."
"Nothing. He is still riding." Cray's grin came back for that and did not reach anything. "Still collecting, is what I mean. Same woman, different valley."
Archon looked at the ground and let him talk. Boot heel, boot toe, the drag of a mule's back hoof. Three men and a mule, and the mule was not carrying what a mule carried for the road these men claimed to have come down. Its panniers rode high and light and swung when it walked.
Mott walked beside him for a stretch, talking the entire time, his breath going wherever it went.
Archon let them hold their positions.
The ground lost its color by degrees. Moss went first, then the grass, then the trees thinned to black stumps. Ash lay an inch deep over the whole of it, fine as sifted flour, and it took the shape of a boot and kept it.
The birds had quit somewhere behind them and Archon had not marked the place. Nothing moved in the ash. No wind moved it either, and the quiet over it was the quiet of a room where something has been broken and nobody has come to clear it away.
A stump stood at the roadside with its top sheared flat, and the wood under the shear was black, and the black stopped where it stopped and did not run up the grain the way fire runs.
They went on up the road, and Cray stopped talking. Hale came back in off the scrub and walked on the other side of the mule and would not look at anybody. The ash took their boots to the ankle and let them go without a sound. Nobody spoke for the rest of the climb, and the silence did not thin.
The road bent around a stand of dead trees and opened into a hollow ringed with broken trees. Ash dusted the moss, and the ferns had been blown outward from a single point.
The trunks along the rim leaned away from the middle, all of them, the way grass leans away from a stone dropped into it. Two of them had broken at the base and gone down with their crowns out, and the bark on the broken faces had lifted in strips and hung.
Archon stopped at the rim of it and crouched over the marks and read them the way he had read the yard. Burn radius. Blast pattern. Deep heel strikes where a man had set his feet to cast, both heels dug in side by side with the toes turned the same way.
Broad pressure marks from something heavier. A crushed root with blood on it, and the blood not fresh. He put a hand flat on the moss and found the ground under it packed, not scattered. Somebody had stood his ground here.
He closed his eyes and put the fight back together. A barrier, and something striking it. Then a scorch mark with glyph residue in it, the kind only lightning leaves. Then nothing.
No body. No drag trail. One last set of footprints, lighter than his, walking out.
"Whatever happened here," he said, "he went down."
His voice caught on the next part. "They took him."
The footprints did not lead away from danger. They led toward the rim.
Behind him the road had gone quiet. Hale stood out in the open on the ash, feet showing, and the mule had been turned so its head faced back down the road. Mott had come up beside it with a hand inside the near pack and the other hand where Archon could not see it.
Cray had the longsword out of its sheath and stood half a step inside Archon's sword side, and he was done grinning. They had come far enough from the inn. There was no step on the road behind him and no step in front of him that did not belong to one of the three.
Archon set his feet.
The ash moved.
It stood up in four places. Not together and not quickly, the way a thing stands when it has been lying under a foundation a long time and has finally been handed a reason.
The smell came up out of the ash with them, rot and old burned things and something sweet underneath it, the smell of a wound open longer than the man it belonged to. Mail hung off them in lace. One carried a rusted halberd on a shoulder that had come out of its joint.
One wore the layered wraps of an imp caster, and the green under its skin moved wrong. One had a shoulder hanging loose and its head turned too far, listening to something that was not in the field.
The last came up with its arms over its head and would not bring them down, warding off a thing that had already finished with it. All four had the same eyes. Sick green, lit from somewhere behind, and nothing that had been a person was still standing behind the light.
They did not come quietly. The shriek started in the one with the loose shoulder and went through all four of them, thin and high and nothing a living throat does, and under it a growl that had no breath behind it and went on anyway.
It crossed the ash and got into his teeth.
Then they came, and how they came was the worst of it, because they came the way people come out of a house that is already burning: one keeping its arms over its head, one turning to look behind it for something that was not there, one with its mouth working on words that had gone.
And every one of them did it again, and again, and it had already happened, and it would not stop happening.
Hale died first, because he was the one standing out in the scrub. Two of them came on him from behind the stump line, and Archon heard the sound a man makes when he is being pulled two ways at once. Hale was still turning when the halberd came down.
Cray got out of its way by putting Mott there.
The young one went onto his back, the halberd through him, chipped tooth showing in an open mouth that made no sound. The wight put a boot on his chest and pulled the blade free.
Then Archon moved.
Ash was ground. He had been reading ground since he came off the bed, and he read it now without deciding to. Ash grains stood out on cloth. Water moved under the ground. He could see where each of them put its weight and how much of that weight the joint below it could take.
He could see how far back behind the green in each pair of eyes whatever had been the person was standing, and the newer break in the shaft of the halberd, and the split in the handle of his own blade under the grip wrap. His shoulder burned and told him exactly what he had left.
He took the caster first. Two cuts, wrist and throat, and it kept chanting with its throat open, so he put the point up through the roof of its mouth and it stopped. The wraps it wore had been good cloth once, layered, the kind a person chooses, and the green under them went out a panel at a time.
The one with its arms over its head came in low and wrong, and his blade went through it, and that did not matter, and it did not matter again, and bones he had just cut pulled themselves back together with a wet clicking he felt in his wrist.
He put his knee on its chest, set the point into the joint under the skull, and drove down until the clicking stopped. The arms came down at last while he was driving the point in, and lay open at its sides, and the face under the swelling still had the shape of a woman's.
The halberd came off Mott and swung for his head. He went inside it, under the haft, and drove his wakizashi up through the jaw and out of the top of the skull, and it dropped. The halberd came down with it and lay across the ash with the haft still in its hand.
The fourth one, the one with the loose shoulder, came for him last. It came with its head turned wrong and swung wide of him, and Archon stepped inside the reach and cut through the neck. It folded into the ash, and the movement stopped.
Silence came back in layers. His breathing was loud in it and his hands were shaking, and neither of those was fear. The ash settled around the four of them and lay over the halberd and over the open hands of the one that had come at him last.
Something touched his belt.
He caught the wrist before he decided to move and closed his hand. The bone gave against his palm, small and final, and Cray came off the ground with a sound that had no words in it.
Archon set the point down into the ash beside the man's head and looked at him.
"Straight road," he said. "Keep the mule."
"You can't leave a man out here." Cray had gone grey, and his breath whistled. "That thing's still walking. I heard it. I can't hold a sword."
"You put Mott between you and it."
Cray had nothing to say to that.
Archon took the water and the dried meat out of the mule's pack, left the mule, and walked away from the sound of a grown man calling him something he had been called before.
He walked on, keeping to the line the light prints had taken. The country fell away toward the rim by degrees.
The ash gave out. The trees got smaller and worse, and the last of the road ran out of cover, and there was nothing else on it behind him.
The basin opened the way a sore opens. Trees leaned away from it. Wind came up the slope and would not go in. The ground inside it was pale and flat and did not hold a print, and the far side was lost in a haze that did not move. Archon drew the blade.
Then a voice arrived from behind a tree that had no business hiding anyone.
"You grow stronger."
Informer stood in the ash with his hands loose at his sides, and he looked pleased the way a man looks when a ledger has come out even. He had not come up the trail and had not come around the trees, and the ash in front of him lay as flat as the ash in front of Archon.
"Closer to the Pattern with every step."
"Save it," Archon said. "I don't have time for riddles."
The head tilted. "Healing is not the only thing happening to you."
Archon did not slow. "Good. Then it worked."
"You misunderstand." Mild. Conversational. The words came after him like something being set down on a table. "You are nearer the Pattern than you were. The salve did not do that, and it was not meant to."
"My friend may be dying," Archon said, and kept walking. "Explain the metaphysics later."
"Perhaps." Softer, and not to him: "Three souls. Bound. Yet fractured in form."
Archon was already down the trail.
"No wonder," the Informer said. "No wonder you have endured this long."
Archon looked back once. The ash was empty.
The ground fell away into forest, and the forest was wrong by degrees. Blackwood curled back into itself like fingers, and bark cracked open to show green light moving in the wood. Ash gave way to soil that held his boot a half-step too long before it let go. Every breath came in tasting of copper.
Roots crossed the path at the height of a man's shin and had the worn look of things walked over many times by feet that left no prints. The whole of it pressed against his senses until everything felt too loud.
Something was missing from the light where nothing should be missing.
The first one drifted out from the base of a blackwood and stopped. No face. No shape past the suggestion of a small hunched silhouette, and a cold coming off it like water off stone. It did not attack. It pulled, and standing near it was like standing in a draft in wet clothes. The dust under it lay flat and did not stir, and when it moved on the dust stirred again behind it.
He went around. It followed for a dozen paces and stopped at a line he could not see.
Others stood among the trees. Dozens of them. Every one facing the same direction, every one the size of the first or smaller, and the small ones came no nearer.
None of them had a face he could find, and the ones nearest the path stood to the ankle in the ash with their heads turned toward the basin, all of them turned the same way, like a field of people watching something go up.
He went past with his teeth set and his eyes forward while their pull dragged at his arms like mud, and not one of them moved, and not one of them needed to.
The dead got easier after that, which had its own kind of humor in it. Zombies came up out of a gully with their arms raised and their mouths working, and he took them apart at the shoulder and the knee and did not stop to count.
The first one he cut wore a belt and a purse, and the purse had been opened and emptied a long time ago, and the belt was good leather and had outlasted the man. The second one had been a woman and still had the shape of one about the shoulders.
A skeleton came out of the mist, and he broke its ribs open, and behind him the bones put themselves back together with a clicking he could hear, and he did not go back to finish it, because finishing it cost time.
Then the ghoul.
It came out of a stand of blackwood already circling, and he knew it was different before his eyes had finished telling him. The weight moved right. The head tracked him. When he cut, it changed what it was doing in the middle of the swing.
It opened his shoulder through the bandage and came back for more, and he gave it the tree behind him.
The blade went through its chest and into the wood and he held it there with both hands while it scrabbled at his arms, and he stood close enough to watch the light go out of eyes that had belonged to somebody. It took a while to stop.
The hands went on opening and closing after the rest of it had gone still, and it was the hands he kept his eyes on, and not the face.
When the hands stopped, he put his boot on the chest and pulled the blade back out of the wood in one slow pull, and the body came with it for a hand's width and then let go and lay still.
He pulled the blade free and kept moving.
The forest opened. A ring of blackwood around a depression in the ground, and at the bottom of the depression, stone. Old walls, cracked, lit from inside by the same green that ran in the trees. A doorway stood open at the middle of them, and the dark inside it was deeper than the day outside and did not care.
He stopped at the threshold with his shoulder bleeding and his breath ragged and the salve running thin at last.
Something underneath was wrong in a way the corrupted forest had only suggested. It came up out of the doorway like cold off a pond, patient, and it knew he was standing there.
Midknight was down there. He hoped Shadow was okay.
Archon set his boot on the first step and went down into the dark.