Book II. Chapter 129. Bear’s Rift

The third morning of their journey greeted the caravan with a gray, clammy dampness that seeped beneath their clothes and formed tiny cold beads on their skin. Before dawn, mist had risen from the hollows and spread a pale veil over the steppe. Through it, the hills ahead emerged as dark, blurred humps, like the backs of enormous beasts that had lain down to rest.

Ardan stood atop the nearest rise. He had climbed it with the others after Zalessky’s scouts returned from patrol with word that the road through Bear’s Rift was blocked. Not by a rockslide. Not by a washed-out trail or an orc ambush. By something far more disheartening.

Bear’s Rift opened before them, a stone wound cleaving the body of the steppe. Two rocky hills of dark, almost black basalt rose on either side of the narrow gorge, their ridgelines broken and jagged. Even with the sun at its zenith, the gorge floor lay drowned in shadow. Between the hills ran the only road, broad enough for stagecoaches, packed hard by thousands of hooves and iron-shod wheels over decades of previous expeditions.

And now that road lay buried beneath carrion.

Ardan counted no fewer than thirty carcasses strewn along a good two hundred meters of the gorge floor. The Shaggyers lay sprawled in a jumble, some on their sides, others on their backs with swollen legs thrust toward the sky. Still others lay in positions that made one fact unmistakable: they had died anything but peacefully, and certainly not quickly.

Their thick brown fur, normally matted into dense felt that could hold in warmth even through the bitterest frosts, had been ripped out in clumps; what remained stuck out in ragged tufts and hung from their bones in filthy tatters. Their ribs showed through the skin as bare white arcs. On many carcasses, whole sheets of flesh had been ripped away down to the bone, exposing crimson muscle tissue that had already darkened and taken on a greasy, oily sheen.

Crows wheeled above the gorge, but they seemed in no hurry to descend and feast on the dead below. Dozens of black birds traced endless spirals, cawing hoarsely, yet not one descended to the corpses, as though something below frightened them far more than the reek of carrion tempted them. And, oh, Sleeping Spirits, the stench was so thick that even here atop the hill, two hundred meters from the gorge, it hit them full force: a heavy, cloying wave that brought nausea clawing up their throats and left every swallow raw.

But worst of all were the carcasses stripped to skeletons. Gnawed pearl-white, their joints torn apart and skulls split open, they lay among their less mutilated kin. Some murky, gelatinous fluid glinted in their empty eye sockets, resembling melted fat. Some of the skeletons lay with their jaws gaping so wide the animals seemed to have died mid-shriek, then frozen that way before their mouths could close.

Several other people had gathered beside Ard on the crest of the hill. Zalessky stood there, leaning on the hilt of his broadsword. His glass eye reflected the gray sky, blank and distant. Captain Rogov and Captain Melin stood a little to the left. Rogov had wrapped a wet cloth around his red beard and was breathing through it, trying not to swallow the stench. Gray and gaunt, Melin simply held a handkerchief to his nose and said nothing, his cold eyes narrowed.

Senior Magister Nalensky had climbed the hill as well, though the sickly greenish cast to his face made it clear he would have preferred to remain in the stagecoach. The two Yellow mage-scholars stood beside him, so unlike one another that the contrast between them might have seemed comical if not for the circumstances.

Senior Magister Varvara Ostrozhskaya was short, spare, and angular, with close-cropped gray hair and a face on which no expression but displeasure ever seemed to linger. Her thin lips were invariably pursed so tightly that they formed a single straight line, and her small, sharp eyes regarded the world with the wary suspicion of a gate guard watching each traveler approach after dark.

She kept readjusting her yellow cloak with offhand distaste. With every gust of wind, she tugged irritably at its skirts to keep them from flapping. In three days on the road, Ardan had not once heard her agree with anyone, and not once seen her refuse to argue with anyone. Her epaulets gleamed on her shoulders, bearing four rank stars: one with two rays, another with two, a third with three, and the last with one.

Beside her, Magister Evlampiy Tikhonov stood looking bored, the complete opposite of his senior colleague. Round and soft, with kind brown eyes and thick, completely white sideburns, he looked like a kindly Fae from a children’s book, if Fae wore yellow cloaks, of course. And suffered from a chronic inability to say no to anyone. He agreed with everyone, yielded to everyone, was always the first to apologize, and in every conflict adopted a position as far removed as possible from both sides of the dispute.

His sideburns stirred in the wind, and the Magister looked so meek and good-natured that you wanted to pour him a cup of tea and seat him by the fireplace, far from dead Shaggyers and rocky gorges. His epaulets showed only a modest rank: two stars with two rays each, followed by two with one ray each.

“Plague,” Ostrozhskaya said, the first to offer a diagnosis. She folded her arms across her chest and glared at the ravine as though the stinking steppe carrion before her was personally to blame for delaying their journey. “Clearly an infectious plague causing mass fatalities in a confined area. I’d venture that the herd entered the ravine to drink or bed down for the night and picked up some kind of pathogen from the soil or water.”

“Varvara, with all due respect,” Tikhonov objected so gently that his sideburns twitched guiltily. “The plague theory doesn’t account for the nature of the damage to the carcasses. Skeletons gnawed bare, hides torn off, skulls split open: all of that still points more toward an attack by a predator or a pack of predators.”

“Evlampiy, scavengers could have gnawed the carcasses clean after the herd was already dead,” Ostrozhskaya snapped in a tone that ruled out both argument and, just as firmly, the possibility that she herself might be wrong.

“But the crows aren’t landing,” Tikhonov ventured. He pointed at the sky with a trembling sausage of a finger.

“Because the carcasses are still too fresh and, for the moment, toxic.”

“Or because there’s something down there,” Zalessky said quietly, his gaze fixed on the ravine.

Everyone turned toward Drabomir, but he added nothing more.

Ardan, for his part, was listening. Listening and thinking.

The plague theory didn’t quite fit what he saw before him. An infectious disease capable of killing a herd of thirty would have left telltale signs: bloating, discoloration of the skin and mucous membranes, and at least some discharge from the mouth, nose, or other orifices. Even Ard couldn’t make out any of those signs at this distance, but the way the carcasses lay didn’t fit the theory. They weren’t clustered as tightly as sick animals would have been, huddling together before death. Instead, they lay somewhat scattered. Chaotically, even. As if they’d tried to leave the ravine and fallen as they ran.

Nor did Star Magic offer an explanation. An area-effect combat spell capable of wiping out an entire herd would have left traces on the ravine’s cliffs: melted stone, cracks, radial scorch marks of some sort. Ard saw nothing of the kind. The cliffs looked untouched.

Besides, why would a Star mage waste Ley wiping out a herd of Shaggyers?

“We need to go down there and examine the bodies,” Ardan said with no great enthusiasm.

Several people looked his way. Rogov snorted through his damp handkerchief, while Melin raised one eyebrow ever so slightly. For him, that was a gesture of utter contempt.

“Well, there you have it,” Rogov drawled nasally through the cloth. “You can tell right away when a man’s never once set foot in the Dead Lands. And apparently he’s never even cracked open a textbook on them.”

“Captain Skofsky,” Melin said in an icy, detached tone. “A mass die-off like this can be caused by an infection carried by parasites that live in the fur and internal organs of Shaggyers. Touching an infected carcass even once is enough for the pathogen to enter your bloodstream through microscopic cracks in your hands. The incubation period lasts from two to six days. Then fever sets in, the liver fails, and, in most cases, death follows. When the host dies, the pathogen spreads like fungal spores. So if you want to get the entire caravan killed merely to satisfy your own curiosity, by all means. But we’ll have no part in it. We’ll leave you to rot in the ravine. Or, if you prefer, we can practice some Blue military magic on you. To spare you the suffering.”

“And if this isn’t a plague,” Rogov continued. He pulled the handkerchief away from his mouth so he could speak more clearly. “If the culprit is some monster or Anomaly that mauled and ripped apart an entire herd, all thirty Shaggyers, then that’s all the more reason to avoid it. A Shaggyer is nothing like a rabbit, Captain. A full-grown male weighs nearly a ton and can smash through a barn wall with its horns. A creature capable of slaughtering an entire herd is far more than the two of us can handle.”

Ardan could have told them that he knew more about Shaggyers than all of them put together, but saying so would have served no purpose and would have made no sense within his own “cover story.”

“The wiser course would be to skirt Bear’s Rift along the northern trail, then continue northeast,” Melin concluded. “We’ll lose three days, maybe four, but we’ll make it there alive.”

“Three or four days will mean extra expenses,” Nalensky cut in. His complexion had already gone from green back to its usual pink, but his voice held none of its customary bravado.

“Better extra expenses than extra coffins, Mr. Senior Magister,” Zalessky said.

Ardan stood silent, still looking down into the gorge at the scattered carcasses and white skeletons. Yonatan’s face flashed through his mind. Then he saw the Wanderer’s mighty chest grow still for the last time.

Ard pushed the memory away.

“We don’t know where this threat is coming from,” he said, still looking down. “If we skirt the Rift by the northern trail, we’ll lose several days. But there’s no guarantee that whatever caused this—disease, an attack, something else—won’t be waiting for us there too. That would be like putting our trust in... the will of the Light. Nothing more than a blind gamble.”

Rogov opened his mouth to object, but Ardan went on, giving the captain no chance to get a word in:

“I’m prepared to go down to the Rift alone. I’ll inspect the carcasses, determine the cause of death, and come back. If it’s an infection, we’ll skirt the Rift. If it’s a predator, we’ll know what we’re dealing with and make a decision based on facts, not assumptions.”

Before the mages could launch into a noisy argument, a deep voice spoke:

“I’ll join you, Captain,” Zalessky said.

Ardan turned to Drabomir. He unhooked one of the small vials of alchemical solution from his belt. Not the one that enhanced reflexes, but another, smaller vial filled with a clear liquid that smelled of mint and something bitter and metallic. He soaked two pieces of cloth in the solution, fashioned them into bandages, and held one out to Ard.

“Over your nose and mouth,” he explained. “A disinfectant barrier for the respiratory tract. It’s no cure-all, but it’ll filter out most known airborne pathogens. It’ll last about an hour. After that... we’d better be well away from the gorge.”

Ard accepted the bandage with a grateful nod and tied the damp cloth across his face, over his Mask, which probably made him look even more intimidating than usual. Zalessky followed suit, then started down the rocky slope without looking back at the others.

The others remained on the ridge. Ard felt their stares on his back: utterly distrustful, a little anxious, and practically oozing irritation. Before long, he was far enough down the slope that the rocks hid the hilltop and everyone still there.

Ard and Zalessky descended in silence. Only two sounds accompanied their descent: the crunch of gravel under their feet and the distant cawing of crows circling above the gorge.

The smell grew stronger with every step. Heavy and sickly sweet, clogging his nostrils even through the bandage. Ard breathed through his mouth and tried not to think about exactly what was entering his lungs along with the air.

They reached the first carcass in only a few minutes. An adult female Shaggyer lay on her side. Brown fur as long as a forearm covered her huge, barrel-shaped body. Gas had bloated it until the skin over her belly stretched tight as a drum and glistened with moisture. Four short, massive legs with broad, cloven hooves jutted out in different directions. One hind leg was wrenched at the joint at an angle no living limb should take. Her head, crowned with a pair of thick, curving horns, had been thrown back, exposing her throat. A ragged, palm-sized wound gaped there.

Ard crouched beside it and examined the wound, taking care not to touch the tissue. The edges were uneven and ragged. They lacked the serrated pattern a lone predator’s fangs would have left; instead, the hide looked as though someone had seized it and pulled until it split. The muscles beneath the wound had been eaten away to the bone, but not cleanly, the way a feeding predator tears out chunks. Instead, the flesh was smeared around haphazardly, as though something blunt and broad had been dragged across it.

Ardan remembered Professor Kovertsky’s lectures at the Grand. Armed with chalk, a pointer, and his ever-present grimy glasses, he would diagram Anomalies’ internal organs on the board. A Shaggyer’s digestive system was more complex than that of ordinary cattle.

A four-chambered stomach, like a cow’s, but with an additional compartment: the so-called “meat pocket,” located between the rumen and the abomasum, in which the Shaggyer digested animal matter. It was this feature that made them omnivores, able to feed on grass, roots and all, as well as small rodents, bird eggs, and even carrion during the lean winter months.

A creature perfectly adapted to both the northern and southern steppes.

Ard carefully walked around the carcass and inspected the abdominal cavity. The belly had been cut open. A long incision gaped from the breastbone to the groin. The entrails had been partially removed. The liver, the “meat pocket,” and most of the small intestine lay nearby, uneaten for some reason. They simply lay some distance from the carcass, scattered over the stones, flattened and torn, as though someone had pulled them out, examined them, and tossed them aside as useless.

This was completely wrong. Predators don’t discard entrails. They don’t discard anything at all. The laws of the hunt teach you to eat everything you can chew and swallow. And the rare exceptions, wolverines and certain forest cats, don’t open the abdominal cavity at all. They prefer the muscle tissue of the limbs and neck.

Ard moved on to the second carcass, then the third. Again and again, the scene was the same. Throats torn open, bellies split, organs partly pulled out and strewn around. Several carcasses had whole sheets of hide stripped from their hind legs, exposing the muscles and tendons.

“Interesting...”

At one point, Ard noticed strange marks on the exposed bones. They were not claw scratches or tooth marks, but deep, parallel grooves, as though the bone had been scored with something sharp and flat, like a chisel or a broad-edged cutting tool.

Ard worked his way deeper into the ravine, moving from carcass to carcass, and each one only deepened his unease. At each one, he crouched down, examined the wounds, sniffed the air, and searched among the stones around the carcass. Breathing through the cloth was difficult, and after twenty minutes, the minty scent in the cloth began to fade, letting the heavy, faintly sweet reek of decay seep through.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelPhoenix. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

At the seventh or eighth carcass, Ard found what he’d been looking for. Or rather, what he’d hoped not to find.

The clayey ground around the carcass, saturated with blood and meltwater, was soft enough to hold tracks. Ardan went down on one knee and bent over them, his nose almost against the clay. The tracks looked shallow but distinct. The first thing that struck him was their number. Not a pair, not half a dozen, but dozens, layered over one another and tangled together, forming a welter of impressions that covered the ground around the carcass in an unbroken, chaotic pattern.

Ard still remembered how to read tracks the way Ergar and Shali had taught him. The depth of a print revealed the weight of the hunter or prey. The distance between prints showed the length of the stride. The shape of a print identified the kind of limb. The toes pointed in the direction of travel. And the sharpness of the edges betrayed speed.

And what he read made him freeze for a moment.

The creatures were bipedal. They were not moving on four legs, as most predators did, or on six, like some of Northern Park’s Anomalies.

Bipedal.

They moved on two legs. Though “moved” was putting it rather strongly. Shuffled was more like it. They took short, uneven steps, as if they’d forgotten how to walk. Their footprints were elongated and narrow, with no clearly defined toes, no pronounced arch, and none of the telltale indentation left by a heel.

So the tracks weren’t human, weren’t orcish, weren’t elven, weren’t animal, and certainly hadn’t been left by any dwarves.

Something in between. Something that might once have had a normal foot, before time or some other force warped it out of shape.

Ardan carefully ran a finger along the edge of one of the prints without pressing down. The clay felt cold and sticky. Within the print itself, he noticed thin, whitish fibers resembling plant roots, only much finer and set in far too orderly a pattern.

He raised his head and looked farther along the ravine. The tracks ran north, into the darkness between the cliffs. So many tracks. So very many. Dozens of creatures had moved in the same direction, shuffling over clay and stone and leaving trails of ugly, shapeless indentations behind them.

Zalessky stood a few paces behind him. He had clearly been watching Ard all this time without interfering or asking questions. But when Ard rose and their eyes met, Zalessky had already figured it all out on his own.

His living eye had narrowed. Usually his face was as unreadable as stone, but now it bore an expression Ard had never expected to see on such a man.

Fear.

“Undead,” Zalessky said quietly.

Several hours later

The hilltop had clearly grown more crowded. In addition to the six mages, Ard among them, and Zalessky, several more hunters had been summoned there, including Rita, who had a bandage covering the lower half of her face. And judging by the way she spoke and the way she drank from her glass only through a straw, the bandage had a specific reason tied to her work.

On the whole, hunters with prosthetics were rare. Given how dangerous the work was, you might assume the exact opposite would be true, but that was nothing more than backward reasoning. In fact, only the army had more cripples in its ranks than the hunters did. You simply never saw any of them on active duty. They all retired. The only exceptions were people like Zalessky, with his glass eye, and Rita, missing part of her lower jaw.

Finding an elderly hunter still in service was practically impossible. If you did come across one, though, you’d be better off running without a backward glance. It didn’t matter whether or not he was a mage. Seeing an old man on active duty in a line of work where retiring at thirty-two was considered late meant finding yourself face-to-face with some kind of fairy-tale monster.

“That’s unexpected.” Bors leaned over a map spread out on a camp table. “What could lesser undead be doing here?”

“Excellent question, Bors,” Rita said, her voice nasal. “Just incredibly apt. Say, why don’t we also debate which came first: your stupidity, or the mother who gave it to you?”

Bors growled low, like an angry dog, and turned toward her, but Zalessky stepped in.

“Bors, Rita, if you two start up your mating games in here again, I’ll shoot you both. Understood?”

“Yes, Drab.” Bors, wiry and dry as jerky, reluctantly turned away.

“Yeah,” was Rita’s only reply. She went back to her drink.

Zalessky turned to Matar, the third subordinate to come up the hill. Oddly enough, Matar carried an honest-to-goodness bow on his back, not a rifle. The bow was black, made of horn, and strung so heavily that no ordinary man, no one short of a Firstborn, could have drawn it without tearing muscles in his back.

“Matar, what do you make of it?”

The quiver hung at Matar’s hip, making him look like an archer who had lost his way in the pages of history and arrived several centuries late. The quiver itself, it must be said, looked modern. It had slots for nearly thirty arrows and was cinched in place with broad straps. A bandolier crossed his chest, fitted with what looked like revolver moon clips, except these were meant for the quiver itself.

Yeah.

Hunters are a strange bunch.

“When did the last expedition pass through here?” Matar’s voice had a faint whistle to it, and his Azure accent was heavy. “What about the supply runs to the Station?”

Chaz Nalensky had been sitting on the stagecoach steps all this time, lost in his own thoughts. Now he pulled himself out of his reverie.

“No expeditions have come through in almost a year and a half,” he said. “Grain is delivered to the city once every three months. Everything else is delivered along with it, and the Station’s output is picked up on those same runs.”

“So that leaves a gap of several months.” Matar nodded and rubbed his sharp chin, shaped like one of his own arrowheads. “Drab, I agree with Bors. This isn’t the Perimeter. Cold ones don’t rise out of the ground here on their own. Somebody raised them.”

Thanks to his adventure at Larand, Ard had begun to make some sense of the hunters’ slang. They called the Dead Lands the “Perimeter,” while “cold ones,” as one might easily guess, meant undead. Why “cold ones”? Because their flesh was cold.

“Necromancy is forbidden under the Al’Zaphir Pact,” half the mages protested at once, Senior Magister Nalensky among them.

“And crimes are forbidden by the Empire’s code,” Rita rasped, “but somehow I can’t remember our penal colonies and labor camps ever going so much as a single day without new guests. Drab, are you sure there isn’t some stupidity pathogen wafting out of the gorge? Because I can literally feel myself getting dumber in the company of these gentlemen from the capital.”

Ardan had to agree with Rita’s caustic assessment. No piece of paper, no matter whose signature it bore, could change the laws of the universe. As Professor Convel used to say, “Anything that can happen will happen sooner or later.” Granted, he’d been referring to debugging engineering systems and preventing errors and malfunctions, but the postulate held true in real life as well.

The mere existence of a law against murder would do nothing to prevent Drabomir, for example, from shooting Bors and Rita on the spot. The only thing holding him back was self-control.

“Rita...”

“Got it, got it.” Rita held up a hand. “But since I’m the only one here who’s ever encountered higher undead, I’ll put it this way: we need to get out of here.”

The mention of “higher undead” silenced everyone for a moment. To an ordinary person, the phrase would have meant nothing, but to mages and hunters... The undead, a class of chimeras and monsters, had appeared long before the war between Ectassus and Galess. Humanity’s first sorcerers had created them to solve the fairly mundane problem of obtaining free labor.

This gave rise to the “lesser undead”: animated skeletons. Bone tissue had fairly good Ley-conductivity and, thanks to its natural properties, could retain a Ley-charge for a long time. This made animated skeletons distant ancestors of the “Tony” dolls. Zombies were somewhat more sophisticated creations. With muscles and a nervous system, they could perform more varied and demanding tasks.

The “natural undead,” or “middlings,” as hunters called them, were all the unfortunate people cursed by the Fae. The Fae, and specifically the Summer Fae, created the first vampires partly to curb human population growth and partly as punishment. Over time, the vampires gave rise to servants of their own as their curse began to change under the influence of the Paarlax Field and acquire properties the Fae had never anticipated.

Semi-sentient ghouls; half-human, half-vampire vurdalaks; and sentient dead. Something like zombies, only not mindless. No one had seen them in ages, though, and the scholarly community agreed that sentient dead had never existed at all and that people, out of ignorance, had simply used the term for lepers.

The higher undead were filth of only two varieties: Liches, themselves divided into ranks by power and sheer nastiness, and Death Knights. Death Knights were, in fact, creations of Star Magic dating back to the War of the Birth of the Empire. No one could say which was worse to encounter: a Lich or a Death Knight.

“Surviving the expedition to recover a Death Knight’s skeleton doesn’t make you an expert on the subject, Rita,” Bors pointed out, not unfairly.

“Crawling out of your mama’s slit doesn’t make you an expert on ladies’ crotches either, Bors, though you sure as hell act like one,” Rita shot back, sharp and every bit as crude. Before the others had time to recover, she turned to Zalessky. “If there really is a pack of small cold ones there, it could only have appeared here for one reason, Drab. Somebody really did raise it. So I suggest we follow protocol.”

Silence hung over the hill once more.

“And what exactly does your protocol entail, if you don’t mind my asking?” Magister Tikhonov asked awkwardly, looking painfully embarrassed.

Zalessky didn’t answer at once. He narrowed his eyes slightly, crooked his fingers like a crow’s claws, pulled out his glass eye, wiped it, and slipped it back into place.

Bors barked, “For fuck’s sake, Drab!”

Rita snapped, “Boss!”

Matar just turned away.

“Want some alcohol?” Melin offered with his usual hint of mockery.

“Captain Melin,” Drabomir said with unexpected sternness.

“What is it, Mr. Zalessky?”

“Let me remind you: under the regulations and the agreement you signed, I am your direct superior. Respect the chain of command.”

Melin’s face showed he was none too pleased with what he’d heard. His jaw muscles bulged. He smoothed back his hair with one hand. He answered curtly.

“Yes, sir.”

“As for your question, Magister Tikhonov,” Zalessky said, turning to Tikhonov as though nothing had happened. “The protocol requires us to return to the nearest settlement and send word to our Guild’s operations division and to the army. Then they’ll send specialists here.”

“But aren’t you gentlemen specialists?” Senior Magister Nalensky narrowed his eyes.

Neither Chaz himself nor his colleagues knew the protocol in such detail. That might have seemed strange, but only to someone who didn’t understand the heart of the matter. All three mages were scientists. They spent most of their time in laboratories and the rest at receptions, conferences, and symposia with their peers. Perhaps they had once read the protocols and even signed them, but since they had no need for them, they had not committed them to memory.

It was just like at the Black House: a field agent had a general idea of an Investigator’s work but didn’t understand the finer details, and vice versa. It was the same here.

“Here.” Zalessky jabbed a finger at the eastern hill of Bear’s Rift. “There are at least a few dozen dead up there. Zombies and skeletons, but we can’t identify every type from the tracks alone.”

“There are different kinds of lesser undead?” Magister Tikhonov asked in genuine surprise. Then he caught the disapproving looks aimed his way and immediately wilted. “Please forgive me. Go on... please.”

Ardan could have named a dozen or so of those varieties on the spot. But since they didn’t know the details, what good would that do?

“We can worry about where they came from later,” Zalessky continued. “We need to decide what to do. If we follow protocol, this expedition ends right here, right now. Which, I imagine, you won’t agr—”

“Of course I won’t agree!” Senior Magister Nalensky roared. “Far too much is at stake! We have a direct order from...”

Nalensky caught himself and fell silent.

“What other options are there, Mr. Hunter?” Senior Magister Ostrozhskaya asked through gritted teeth.

Sleeping Spirits! Judging by their speech alone, you might have thought the quarrelsome Ostrozhskaya and the brusque, sharp-tongued Rita were related!

Zalessky pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket and opened it to a page with a small column of terse notes.

“We can use some of our special supplies and blow the hill to pieces.” He pointed to one of the entries with a pencil stub.

“And what if we don’t use them up or blow up the hill?” Tikhonov asked, just as timidly.

Zalessky said nothing for several seconds.

“If we proceed carefully,” he drawled, “then... call it two kilograms of explosives and three liters of Dancing Fire. That should be enough to burn out the entire cave network. And if there are pockets of gas in there, it should bring down most of the hill as well.”

“For some reason, I don’t hear any enthusiasm in your voice, girl,” Mrs. Ostrozhskaya rasped.

“Because then we’ll never learn where they came from in the first place, old woman,” Rita shot back in exactly the same tone.

The Senior Magister and Rita began to stare each other down, their glares nearly identical. By every reasonable law of physics, this should have resulted in mutual annihilation, the outcome everyone nearby was most likely hoping for. Unfortunately, nothing came of it except the air crackling with tension.

Silence settled over the hill again. It didn’t last even a few seconds.

“And what do you have to say, Captain Skofsky?” Captain Rogov asked abruptly, his eyes narrowing slightly.

Everyone looked at Ard. Much as he wanted to side with Mr. Zalessky and lend him support, duty demanded otherwise. As Milar put it, “First and foremost, you have to investigate any disruptions to the usual routine, because those are precisely the potholes that will point you toward the answer to your question.” Yes, Captain Pnev was a long way from being a master rhetorician, but he’d made his point clearly enough.

The undead were too glaring an anomaly in the larger picture for Ardan to ignore. So there was only one answer he could give:

“We need to go down into the caves and check everything,” he replied in a rather dry tone.

In the line of duty, Ard had to expose uninvolved people to possible danger. Worse, he had to use them without their knowledge while keeping the details from them. The necessity filled him with a persistent sense of disgust. He felt as if he’d gotten something filthy on him. He wanted to wash his hands and rinse his face.

But that was his job.

“Have you lost your mind, Skofs—” Rita began, but Zalessky cut her off with a commanding wave of his hand.

Zalessky said only, “Explain.”

Ardan nodded.

“If we leave a pack of icelings behind, this route will have to be marked for other expeditions or food caravans...”

“There are no more expeditions!” Senior Magister Ostrozhskaya barked. “And the next caravan isn’t due for another month!”

But of course, no one paid her the slightest attention.

“So we’ll have to send someone to Yellik,” Ardi continued, “which means we won’t be abiding by the protocol everyone signed. We have two options. Either we pretend we didn’t notice anything, shoulder the moral responsibility if any outsiders die, and answer for it afterward. Or we face those same consequences right away for violating the expedition agreement.”

Ardan paused for a moment to catch his breath. Sleeping Spirits knew he wasn’t used to talking this much.

“No one’s eager to be sentenced to hard labor, I take it.” Ardi looked up at the mages. “Or to pay hundreds of exes in fines...” Then he went on. “So that doesn’t leave us many options. Blow the hill, caves and all, straight to the demons and remain none the wiser. Or go down into the caves, wipe out the entire pack of icelings ourselves, and figure out what caused them to appear.”

Ardan finished and wiped the sweat from his forehead. How did the professors at the Grand manage to give ninety-minute lectures, sometimes without stopping even once? Despite the Black House meetings that sometimes ran long and all the reports that came with them, Ardi still wasn’t used to putting his thoughts into more than a few sentences at a time.

His conversations with Tess were the sole exception, but they felt entirely different.

“Captains Rogov and Melin.” Zalessky turned to the two Blue mages. “What kind of arsenals do you have?”

Ardi glanced sideways at his two companions’ epaulets. Rogov had four rays in each of three colors, while Melin’s were spread much less evenly: five rays in Red, then three in Green, and, unexpectedly, six in Blue.

Still, something he couldn’t explain, almost a hunter’s instinct, told Ardi that Rogov was a far more dangerous soldier than Melin.

The captains exchanged a look. Rogov spoke.

“If there aren’t any Rotters down there, none of that vile, filthy breed that gives off poisonous spores after you put them down and makes you lose your grip on a seal, give us half an hour and... Seventy exes as a bonus.”

“Seventy crispers.” Melin nodded, then added, “And that’s for each of us. Pay us, and we’ll burn as many as a hundred of the bastards.”

“As many as a hundred of the bastards.” And only a complete idiot would dismiss words like that as bragging. Rogov and Melin really could wipe out a far larger pack of lesser undead than the one occupying Bear’s Rift.

“What if some of them are Rotters?” Zalessky asked.

“Then we’ll need support from your people.” Rogov shrugged. “Rotter spores mean no Resonance and no complicated seals, so we’ll be badly limited.”

Zalessky closed the notebook and tucked the pencil stub back into his sleeve pocket.

“Would two five-man teams be enough?”

“That’ll be enough,” Rogov agreed after a moment’s thought.

Zalessky turned toward the pair who had been arguing.

“Rita, Bors, gather your people. You have half an hour to get ready. I’m in no mood to spend the night here when we have no idea what caused the icelings to appear.”

The look in their eyes made it clear they weren’t thrilled by the prospect of descending into caves teeming with undead, but neither argued.

An order was an order.

Everyone began drifting away, Ard included.

“Captain Skofsky,” Zalessky called after him.

Ardan heaved a sigh. He’d known where this would lead from the moment he’d made his suggestion.

“I hope I don’t have to explain that you’re taking part in the sortie,” Zalessky said, his voice hard. “Your idea. Yours to answer for.”

And yes, of course Ardan could have refused easily enough on the grounds that he wasn’t directly involved in the expedition, but... that would have been the stupidest thing he could possibly have done. Arkar had told him enough about the unwritten rules of military life for Ardan to know perfectly well the difference between what the rules said and how things actually worked.

And in practice, if he sent someone else to risk their neck while he stayed behind, he’d make enemies of several dozen Hunters.

“Of course, Mr. Zalessky.”

Zalessky said nothing else. Ardan hurried back to Miss Shpritz’s stagecoach and took a small box from the saddlebag on a mare grazing quietly nearby. He fitted spare accumulators into the mounts on his belt, then checked the grimoire’s chains. With luck, he wouldn’t have to expend any rays himself; Captain Rogov and Captain Melin would do it all.

Especially since fire was far better than ice against the undead, just as it was against chimeras.

“What are you doing, Skofsky?” Taisia asked, stepping down onto the grass.

Ardan gave her the short version.

“Wonderful!” Taisia cried, then vanished right back inside the stagecoach.

When she returned, she was already dressed in a different traveling outfit and armed with a portable, ludicrously expensive camera, a revolver with a cartridge belt, and enthusiasm of a decidedly unhealthy sort.

“What are you doing, Taisia?” Ardi said, throwing her own words back at her.

“I’m coming with you, of course,” Taisia said, as if that went without saying.

“Are you out of your mind?” Ardan’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re staying in camp!”

“Oh, really?” Taisia drawled. She cocked a hip and planted a fist on it. “I’m very curious to see how you’ll manage to stop me, Skofsky. And while you’re trying, I’ll start shouting very loudly about the Black House, the legends, and everything else.”

Ardan nearly choked with outrage.

“You... you... you’re blackmailing me?!”

“Exactly.” Taisia nodded, then winked and set off toward the hill, where the Hunters were already gathering. “So do your job, Skofsky, and protect me from all sorts of dead people.”

Ardi watched her go and silently thanked the heavens that Ergar had devoted so much time and effort to teaching him restraint and patience. His mentor’s rigid tails, which had lashed Ardi whenever he made a mistake, had served him well.

Ardan finished counting to fifteen and set off after the crazy journalist.