Chapter 1458: Ten Thousand Versus One

Northern reached the lip of the valley an hour before dawn.

It had taken the Hunter a whole day to run there. It took him most of a night, and he did not run at all. He went the way Eclipsing Dread let him go, from shadow to shadow.

He stepped into the dark under one pine and out of the dark under another a hundred paces further north, over and over, through a forest that had nothing but dark in every direction. It was tedious. By the fortieth mile, he had started counting the steps out of spite.

Now he crouched among the roots at the top of the southern slope, resting his elbows on his knees, and looked down at the city of the Forest Hunters.

It was quieter than it had been the night before. The cooking fires had burned down to embers in their clay pits, ticking faintly as they cooled.

Most of the Hunters were asleep in the root-halls, curled together in heaps the way wolves sleep. Only the sentries were awake. They were posted along the valley’s rim in pairs, each with a clay pot of mist hung round its neck. Each sat so perfectly still in the branches that from the ground it would have passed for a knot in the bark.

The mist from the censers lay over the whole valley floor like milk in a bowl.

Northern looked at it for a long time.

’Right. Let’s think about this properly.’

He had never, in his entire life, fought ten thousand of anything at once by himself. He had fought armies, but he had always had an army of his own behind him, or Revant, or Annette, or a hundred Echoes.

This morning he had nobody. He had told Lord to go home. He had not even brought Mr. Fluffy. And he was not going to summon a single Echo, because an Echo was a thing people could see. He had no intention of explaining to anybody how a Sage named Rian had come by an army of the dead.

So it would be him. Just him.

And he had rules.

The first rule was that none of them could leave. It did not matter how many he killed in the valley if a thousand of them slipped out of it and went south to the villages. He had not forgotten Hollin’s Ford.

The second rule was that none of them could talk. He had watched what their grammar did on the rubble slope. With their voices, three hundred of them had nearly dismantled a fortress. Without their voices, under Doron’s fog, they had huddled on the rooftops like frightened sheep.

And the third rule was that he wanted every single one of them to count. Every one of them was fragments. Every one of them was an Echo. And somewhere at the far end of this valley, under the biggest tree, something vast and old was sleeping that he wanted very, very badly.

He thought about fire and discarded it immediately. Sun’s Legacy would have turned the whole valley into a furnace in a heartbeat, but the mist drank fire. He had watched it drink Vanessa’s. Besides, a column of smoke this far north would be seen from the Keep’s walls before noon. Worse, a prince of the Empire had once looked at his flames and seen Reimgardian blood in them. Fire was out.

Lightning was the only thing a Sage named Rian was supposed to have. Even so, a storm over a valley like this would tell everyone within fifty miles precisely where he was. Lightning was mostly out.

’So... quietly, then.’

He stood up and dusted off his knees.

Whispering Gale came first.

Northern opened his hand over the valley, and the air in it simply stopped. Windless spread outward from him like ink dropped into still water.

It ran down the southern slope, across the valley floor and up the far side, until it had filled the whole bowl from rim to rim. The mist over the valley floor stopped drifting and lay perfectly flat. The branches of the great trees stopped swaying. A pine needle that had been falling past Northern’s face hung beside his cheek for a moment before it remembered gravity.

And the valley went silent.

Not quiet. Silent. There was no longer anything in it that sound could travel through.

Frostheart came second. He did not bother with anything elaborate. He had found two ways out of the valley in the night.

One was a narrow gorge to the north where a stream ran out, and the other was the long slope to the south he had just come down.

He walked along the rim of each and closed them. Ice climbed out of the frozen ground at his touch and went on climbing.

It became a wall, then a cliff, pale blue and so cold it steamed in the dawn air, until each of the valley’s mouths was sealed from floor to rim. In the northern gorge, the stream ran into the foot of it and stopped, frozen mid-tumble into a glassy lip.

He looked at the southern wall when he was done and sighed.

’That’s going to be hard to explain later.’

Then he walked down into the valley.

The first sentry saw him when he was halfway down the slope. It stood up on its branch with its golden eyes wide, opened its mouth, and trilled the warning to the Hunter beside it.

Nothing came out.

It tried again, clutching at its own throat. The Hunter beside it had turned to look at it, puzzled, and was trying to trill a question back. That did not come out either.

For a moment the two of them simply stared at each other across a silence neither of them had ever heard before.

Northern reached into the shadow at his feet and drew out a blade.

Umbral Severance made it for him, long and thin and black as a hole in the morning. He reached into the shadow of the nearest tree and drew out another one for his left hand.

Tempest’s Cadence settled over him the way a familiar coat settles over the shoulders. It was a simple talent, really. It wanted two blades, and it wanted him to keep moving, and the longer he kept moving without stopping, the faster he would become.

He did not intend to stop.

The two sentries died in the same breath, neither of them making a sound.

[Your clone has slain Devil Destroyer - Forest Hunter]

[You have gained +18 talent fragments]

[Your clone has slain Devil Destroyer - Forest Hunter]

[You have gained +18 talent fragments]

[Tempest’s Cadence: Tier 1]

He came down off the slope and into the first root-hall before the bodies hit the ground.

It was full of sleeping Hunters, thirty or forty of them, curled together in the dark and smelling of smoke and warm fur. The first few died without waking.

Then one of them opened its eyes and saw him. It opened its mouth to scream and made no sound at all. After that the whole hall was awake at once, scrambling for spears in a silence so complete that Northern could hear nothing but the blood rushing in his own ears.

He found that he liked it.

He went through the hall like a draught through an open door. Every stroke of the black blades was clean, one to the throat, one to the heart.

Every seventh stroke, whether he aimed it well or badly, Phantom Strike carried straight through bone and hide to the core, and whatever it touched simply stopped. He did not waste strokes. Every Hunter he killed was fragments, and every Hunter he killed was an Echo, and a clean kill was a kept one.

[Tempest’s Cadence: Tier 2]

He came out of the far end of the hall, and the valley was waking up.

They came out of the root-halls in their hundreds, and then in their thousands, with spears in their hands and golden eyes wide in the grey light. They were looking at each other. They were opening their mouths and closing them. They were trying to do what they had always done, and they could not. Northern watched a whole city of the most intelligent monsters in the north stand frozen in the silence, turning their heads left and right, waiting for a voice that did not come.

It lasted perhaps ten seconds.

Then one of them raised its spear. It was a big Hunter with a scar across its face, one of those whose cores burned hotter than the rest, and it brought the butt of the spear down on the frozen ground.

Once... Twice...

Three times.

Northern felt it through the soles of his boots.

All across the valley, heads turned. Other spear butts came down. A slow, heavy drumming began to run through the earth, root to root and hall to hall, climbing into his shins instead of his ears. Like water finding its level, the whole city of the Forest Hunters turned toward the young man standing alone in the middle of it and began, silently, to close in.

Northern stared at the scarred Hunter. Then he laughed out loud and could not hear a single sound of it.

’Oh, you clever, clever things.’

They could not talk through the air, so they were talking through the ground instead. It had taken them ten seconds to work it out.

He spun the black blades once in his hands.

[Tempest’s Cadence: Tier 3]

"All right then," he said to the silence, and went to meet them.