Book II. Chapter 140. Cesspit

Until very recently, the clearing had seemed lived-in, a human foothold in the heart of a wild forest. Now it was a mesmerizing sight. But the spell it cast had nothing to do with beauty. Quite the opposite.

Neither the torn-open pavilions nor the tents ripped to shreds were smoking anymore. The earth had been literally ripped open, all but plowed into deep furrows. Pieces of the field kitchen, the shower, and the walls that until recently had screened off the cesspool lay scattered all across the clearing.

“Bastards...” Rita hissed from behind her bandage, clenching her fists. “Fucking bastards... How could anyone do this...”

She stood at the edge of the pit. Stood there and stared down. Bodies lay below amid severed roots and thick mats of spruce boughs someone had spread in patches over the reeking mass. And pieces of them. Arms and legs torn off, broken bones jutting from stumps and ripped-open bellies. The organs that had spilled out formed vile garlands around the corpses’ gray, swollen faces. Dull gray maggots and tiny gnats were feasting as they crawled over the grime-smeared clothing.

That was all that remained of Second Station. The clearing was a field of devastation, stinking of carrion left to rot; only the lone shed that housed the generation section still stood. They had stripped it of all its equipment, nearly ripping the door off its hinges in the process. The door swayed on its lower hinge, creaking mournfully. Whenever the wind blew, it banged against the wall.

“Oh, Chaz...” Magister Tikhonov lowered himself beside the barely recognizable remains of Senior Magister Chaz Nalensky.

Like the others, Nalensky’s face was swollen and already crusted with the filth the carrion feeders had left behind. Chaz’s body leaned back against the generation section’s stoop. Or perhaps someone had placed him that way. Ardi thought that was more likely.

There was almost nothing left of Mr. Nalensky. He looked as though someone had drawn a line from his left shoulder to his right hip, then removed everything beyond it. In his one remaining hand, Chaz still clutched a partially melted fragment of his staff. Scorched remnants of clothing hung in tatters from his mutilated torso. Below him, bloody furrows stretched across the ground like little rust-colored snakes.

“Eternal Angels, what happened here?” Bors asked, though the question was aimed more at the empty air than at anyone in particular.

Bors tugged off his hat with a trembling hand and wandered through the ruined camp, his blank gaze roving over what remained of the Station.

“Do you see Ostrozhskaya, Shpritz, Rogov, or Melin?” Zalessky had already shed his gear and pack and set both aside. He picked up an axe.

Zalessky walked over to the nearest dead tree, rolled up his sleeves, lifted the axe, and swung hard.

“No, Drabomir.” Rita swiped furtively at her face with her forearm, then shrugged off her jacket as well. “You can’t even tell who’s down there. I think I can see people who weren’t with us, too... Damn it! Fuck! We’ll have to haul them all out!”

“It’ll take a long time to bury them.” Zalessky had made a point of standing with his back to the “camp”; now he hacked at the dry trunk with abandon. “We’ll burn them. The old way.”

“Yeah...” Rita drew the word out and sniffed. “Bors, Cap—damn it. Corporal! Help me... If I do it myself, I won’t finish hauling them out until tomorrow evening.”

Neither Bors nor Ard objected. Neither hesitated at the thought of climbing into a pit teeming with worms and piled with dozens of dead bodies. They merely exchanged a quick glance. Then they stripped to their underwear and set their clothes aside.

Rita had already uncoiled the ropes and fastened several lengths to the logs driven into the ground, the old braces for the wooden wall that had shielded the camp from the stench. Bors and Ard ran lines around their chests. They knotted loops in the rest and tossed them down into the pit.

The ghastly, suffocating work dragged on. Again and again, they retched until all they could do was cough up sour spit.

They descended into the pit together and slipped the loops around the bodies, checking that the crude rigs were cinched securely around each corpse’s neck, thighs, or arms. Then they climbed back out, wound the ropes around their forearms, and hauled the bodies up. Whenever a corpse reached the top, they carefully examined its head, bloated like an overripe plum.

Ardan didn’t know what Bors and Rita were looking for. He was searching for only two faces: Taisia Shpritz’s and Miss Ostrozhskaya’s. Sometimes he even thought he had found one of them, sure that right then, at that very moment, he would brush aside the matted hair, tear away the bloody crust, dodge the spurt of pus, and see familiar eyes. Eyes no longer so quick to laugh. A little haughty, yes, and always ready to tease him cruelly and even hurt him, yet kind in their own way.

But no.

His heartbeat would slow, and his hands would stop shaking. Though he knew it was wrong to say so, Ardan would untie the ropes with relief and drag the unidentified body off to one side. At times, between the injuries and the damage from exposure and gnats, it was impossible to tell by sight whether the person had been a woman or a man. Then he would clear his throat, rinse his eyes with water, smear his cheeks and upper lip with earth that smelled of gunpowder, and climb back down into the pit.

Before long, Zalessky joined them, soaked in sweat and flushed.

Meanwhile, Magister Tikhonov sat on the steps of the generation section. He held Senior Magister Nalensky’s head in his lap and rocked it gently, as if it were a baby.

The sun moved on across the sky, indifferent to the horror below. The wind blew, making the centuries-old trunks creak and the canopies rustle. The shadows slowly lengthened, stretching out and crawling over the ground, while Ard and the Hunters kept descending into the pit in near-total silence, exchanging only an occasional word.

The Hunters let their emotions show only after they had carried the last body out of the pit. By then, every one of them was smeared with dirt, sweat, blood, pus, and shit.

Rita wept softly. Bors bent low beside Rita, the only one of his subordinates to survive the accident, and recited a prayer. The same prayer Zalessky had spoken over Anatoliy as he lay dying. Drabomir himself had already gone over to the logs he’d chopped and begun laying them out to form the base of a pyre.

They had neither the strength nor the time to build funeral pyres several tiers high. That was the custom among the warriors of Galess, their way of sending fallen comrades on their journey rather than burying them in foreign soil. According to the beliefs of the old kingdom, the wind would carry the ashes of the fallen home, back to their families.

So they would have to burn the bodies more or less in the same arrangement they had occupied in the filthy pit. They would heap them around the wooden shelter, scatter sawdust and birch bark over them, ring the pile with branches, and then light it.

On all fours, Ardan tried to think of anything at all, even the funeral pyre. Anything but the smell. But the smell kept burrowing under his skin and would not let go. Ard could taste it: the sweetish, astringent tang of rot mingled with the rusty copper of old blood.

Again and again, he broke into coughing fits that left him spitting, his body jerking in small spasms. At one point, he stretched out on his stomach, then rolled onto his back. He felt a little better: the acrid smell of smoke and gunpowder masked the rest of the stench.

Overhead, the stars had already kindled once more.

“Come on. Give us a hand.” Zalessky nudged Ardan’s boot with his own.

It was probably a strange sight. Four people in nothing but underwear and boots were hauling bodies again. To the pyre this time. Neither Ostrozhskaya nor Shpritz nor any of the captains was among the dead. That probably meant something, but Ardi was in no condition to think.

Before long, they were done with this part of the work as well. Zalessky brought over the abandoned fuel canisters for the generators. He pulled out the stoppers and walked through the gaps they had left between the bodies so air could reach the pyre. As he went, he doused the logs and the remains themselves with the last of the fuel.

“Wait!” Magister Tikhonov cried. “We need the bodies if we’re going to understand what hap—”

“Anomalies,” Ard and the hunters answered in chorus. All four of them.

Only Zalessky went on.

“Anomalies, Lamp,” Zalessky said hoarsely, looking away now and then. He had only two hunters left to lead. “The tracks on the ground and the marks on the bodies show that someone drove about ten Dovars here.”

Magister Tikhonov flinched and took a step back.

Dovars were omnivorous anomalies that resembled a cross between a wild kanaban, a cat, and a dung beetle. Tough chitinous armor covered their bodies, and they had paws instead of hooves. They usually lived in packs and rarely hunted mammals, preferring Ley-flora instead. Thanks to Dovars and other anomalies with similar diets, dangerous plants could not overrun everything.

There it was: a peculiar balancing mechanism, fashioned by nature through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

“Whoever did this probably spooked a whole pack,” Zalessky continued, “and drove it here. The Dovars caught our people off guard, and while our people were dealing with the pack, the rifles opened up. And Mr Nalensky may not have been able to hold his own against three war mages. Ard, what do you think? Could that be what happened?”

Ardan nodded.

“The wounds suggest the spells they used against him were similar to those Melin and Rogov used to dispatch the undead. But these spells drew on air, and perhaps sound, rather than fire.”

The claws of anomalies couldn’t have sheared off three-quarters of a human body that cleanly, and neither could shrapnel from even the heaviest artillery shells. The bandits Mr Onton had hired probably didn’t have that kind of military firepower either.

Onton had probably procured their rifles ahead of time, and smugglers had delivered the weapons to the Park just before the operation. More likely, an advance party had brought them in, then stayed behind in the bandits’ camp to cover its tracks. But before it could break camp, Zalessky, Ard, and the others caught up with it.

“Chaz never had much talent for war.” Magister Tikhonov stared unseeingly at the Senior Magister’s disfigured body, which lay in the heap with all the others. “Back when he first came to the Grand, he seemed promising. Then he failed at the Blue Star. Only two rays. War magic was out of the question. Still, he never stopped loving Magical Boxing. Maybe he loved anything that put him close to danger. He was a brave man. He and I didn’t always agree, but… forgive me… this is no place for that, and…”

“It’s all right, Lamp,” Zalessky hurried to reassure him. “Someone ought to say a few words. How about it, Bors?”

Bors sniffled and walked over to the pile of bodies. He took a flask from his bag and poured a little cheap whiskey over his subordinate’s corpse.

“If there aren’t any good bars in heaven, boys, then I’ll see you in hell. We’ll drink till we’re fuc—”

“Ahem.” Zalessky cut him off. “It’s a funeral.”

“Oh… right…” Bors caught himself. “Until the demons get so sick of us that they throw us into the Light themselves. And on the way, we’ll drop in here. Back into the mortal world. And we’ll party like we’ve never partied before. So for years afterward, the whores will still be telling filthy stories about us. Yeah, boys. See you in hell. Be sure to wait for me there before you start the party.”

Bors swallowed and turned away. Then he walked off toward the forest, away from the ruined Station.

“Rita.”

Rita remained silent.

“Rita… we’re the only ones who can perform the rites for them, and…”

“Our people aren’t the only ones here, Drab!” Rita shouted. She tore the cloth from her face and flung it onto the logs. “There are ten or so of those bastards here, the ones who did all this! Are we supposed to perform funeral rites for them too? Well? Am I supposed to say a few words over them too?! Are you out of your mind, Drab?!”

“What are you suggesting I do, Rita?!” Zalessky finally snapped. For the first time in Ard’s memory, Drabomir was shouting. “You can barely tell one body from another here! Do you want us picking through bodies all night, trying to figure out who’s who? Or what? Huh?!”

“Maybe I do! Maybe I want to drag those bastards back into the shit we hauled them out of! Then dump some more on top!”

“Then go ahead! Go on!” Zalessky threw up his hands. “Do it! Let’s spend time on that too! And while we’re here doing hell knows what, over at First Station—”

“Aaaaah!” Rita let out a wordless scream, then spun toward the fire and spoke in a rush. “I hope you’ve got those bitches firmly by the throat, brothers and sisters. So they don’t escape. Soon we’ll meet on the other side, and together we’ll do things to them that would frighten even demons. See you in hell.”

She turned on her heel and soon caught up with Bors.

Zalessky watched Rita go, weariness in his eyes, then struck his flint and lit the logs. The wood caught almost instantly, and flames leaped several meters into the air. Zalessky barely managed to jump back in time to keep from being singed.

Zalessky, Magister Tikhonov, and Ard stood together, watching as tongues of flame slowly began to lick at the dead bodies. From the pocket of the jacket draped over his shoulders, Zalessky pulled the sacred symbol of the Face of Light and a small prayer book. He traced a triangle over himself and began reading a prayer:

“Do not fear the darkness that rises as a wall in your path. Do not falter before those who creep through the gloom, for the Face of Light walks beside you on your right.”

Ardi stood nearby, watching the fire. Several dozen bodies lay there. Ordinary men and women who had chosen dangerous work, yes, but… They must have made plans of some kind. Waited for something. Hoped for something. Even believed. Probably. No, not probably. Definitely: they had believed.

And then their lives were cut short simply because someone had given himself over to greed. Not for any great purpose, nor because they themselves had chosen their path, but because of ordinary, utterly unjustifiable greed.

Thirty-five thousand exes.

An absolutely staggering amount of money. Several families could live on it for several generations without wanting for much of anything.

A chapter from www. was reproduced without the author's consent, while reading there supports the writer.

Thirty-five thousand exes.

They weren’t worth so much as a single sigh, let alone dozens of lives.

Yes, perhaps Ardi understood better now why Magister Tikhonov hadn’t wanted to share the discovery about the Winged-Horned with Ardi.

Ardi looked at his belt. His grimoire was already back in place, hanging from its chains and swaying. Inside it, among the pages, his research lay waiting for the right moment.

And should he, too, have stopped and thought long and hard about what he was doing that day, when he came racing into the Black House? Maybe what he called a theory, really no more than a hypothesis about the best way to approach Methods of Long-Range Communication, would have been better off on a shelf in a cabinet at the Stables than on the Colonel’s desk.

And if so, then his Multidimensional Seals and transmutational runic links… If Ardan ever managed to solve those two puzzles, would the answers be worth sharing with the world?

“Think about that tomorrow,” Ardan reminded himself.

“…See you in hell. Let’s go.” Zalessky ended the prayer with the hunters’ traditional farewell, then beckoned Ard and Magister Tikhonov over. “No one’s left to notice the smoke, but we’d better not take any chances we don’t have to.”

“But at night in the Park…”

“It’s dangerous, Lamp, I know. We all know,” Zalessky cut him off. “But no matter what you say now, we’re not stopping here for the night. We’re not stopping a kilometer from here, either. We’ll go as far as we can. We’ll clear our heads, and in the morning we’ll think about what to do next.”

Magister Tikhonov stood there for a moment. Then he nodded and cast one last glance at Senior Magister Chaz Nalensky’s body, already catching fire.

“Farewell, my friend,” Magister Tikhonov whispered, then stepped back into the darkness slowly closing around them.

For several moments, Ardan watched the Sparks guide the souls of the fallen onward before the souls vanished into the sky. Then, without saying a word, he left Second Station, the last of them to go.

***

“This is becoming a strange habit,” Rita ground out as she handed the binoculars to Ard.

“I don’t need them,” he reminded her.

“Oh, right…” Rita caught herself and held the binoculars out to Bors. “I liked it better when I thought you just couldn’t make anything out because of the concussion, not that you don’t need binoculars at all.”

“Jealous?” Bors asked, raising the binoculars to his eyes.

“That’s part of it,” Rita admitted.

Ardi had already lost count of how many times all five of them had lain on the crest of a rocky hill, looking off toward some distant point. This time, with the Park’s treetops behind them, they were looking down at First Station, which sprawled across the steppe.

The same buildings, most of them built of planks, though brand-new red brick was already showing in places. The roads were still hard-packed dirt, with wooden planks laid over them here and there, until the day when hot, soulless asphalt would cover them, too.

The small town looked almost the same as it had when the expedition of the late Senior Magister Chaz Nalensky and the missing Senior Magister Varvara Ostrozhskaya left it a month and a half earlier.

Emphasis on “almost.”

Rough-looking men now stood guard at the entrances to First Station. They had blocked the roads with makeshift gates and piled up sandbags; they stood with bayonets fixed to their rifles, peering into the distance. Their “colleagues,” if one could call them that, had taken to the rooftops and wandered the empty streets. Every so often, their expressions and gestures made it clear they were shouting something crude at a girl passing by with her eyes fixed on the dusty road.

In fact, aside from the women and, of course, the bandits, there was no one else at First Station. The previous evening, they had run all the way to the hill where they now lay, kept on their feet by the Hunters’ alchemy and the brews Ard had managed to make from what remained of the ingredients gathered at Second Station. There they’d had the “good fortune” to witness a brutal scene.

One of the bandit leaders, the man Sidogib Montov remembered as Husk, had executed one of the sheriff’s deputies. The two men went out into the street, and the deputy, a strapping fellow with massive hands, rolled up his sleeves and settled into a fighting stance. Apparently, they were supposed to fight with their fists, or something like that.

Husk just laughed out loud and shot the poor man. He hadn’t aimed for the chest or the head, either. He’d aimed for the belly. The deputy clutched the wound, trying to stop the blood gushing through his clothes, but there was no stopping it. Husk kept guffawing and firing into the ground at the feet of anyone who tried to approach the wounded man. His young wife was shouting something, but the other bandits held her by the arms. And the wounded man lay on the ground and went on dying for a long time. Chills racked him, his teeth chattered, and he never took his eyes off the woman he loved. He knew perfectly well what would happen next.

Husk wouldn’t even let the wounded man die with a shred of hope that everything would be all right after he was gone. When the deputy had turned deathly pale and the faint shudders had finally stopped, the bandits simply ripped the clothes off the screaming woman, grabbed her by the hair, and dragged her away as she kicked and shrieked, not even into a building, just around the corner.

All the deputy could do was work his cracked lips without a sound. That was how he died: lying in an enormous pool of blood, tears on his cheeks, staring at the corner of the building and whatever lay beyond it.

The next shot didn’t ring out for several hours.

Zalessky had stopped Bors, Rita, and Ard from rushing to help. They needed a plan. Without one, they would do no more than meet the same fate as the sheriff’s deputy.

“You think they herded everyone into the town hall?” Bors studied the town, his chest pressed against the stone.

“Too many people.” Zalessky shook his head. “More likely, they just executed a couple of people as a warning, as they did to the deputy yesterday, and bribed the mayor.”

“But there’s a Pink mage there!” Rita reminded them.

“I’m afraid Mr. Zvonkov…” Magister Tikhonov shuddered. “…has met the same fate as Nalensky. May the Eternal Angels receive him.”

“But he’s a Pink mage!”

“It makes no difference.” Tikhonov shook his head. “We’re not war mages, after all, not like Rogov, Melin, or Ard. He may have put up a fight, of course. He did go to training now and then when the Army called him up. But I doubt it. Rogov himself hadn’t cast a seal in years unless he absolutely had to. I suspect he’d Break his own shield on his very first attempt to raise it.”

Rita grimaced, then spoke curtly.

“Mages.”

Ardi didn’t blame her. Even to him, a Pink mage was some unfathomable force of Star science. Something akin to a natural disaster or a legendary anomaly. Practically the pinnacle of a Star mage’s career. Even among those who wore a Black cloak, not every mage even remembered the basics of warfare, and fewer still possessed even a fraction of Mr. Aversky’s talent.

As Professor Tiun Listov used to say, the paradox of Star science was this: the deeper a mage delved into the study of his chosen path, the less competent he became in every other field. There were exceptions, of course, with Edward Aversky once again among them, but their very existence only confirmed the rule.

Like Nalensky, Rogov had spent most of his career researching anomalies. If either man needed seals at all, he used them only within his own very narrow specialty. That was precisely why the “Military Faculty” existed at the Grand, and precisely why future war mages, even after studying there, spent several more years honing their skills under the Army’s supervision, just as Engineers trained in engineering offices and Healers did their residencies in hospitals.

A Yellow or Pink cloak on a mage’s shoulders meant … absolutely nothing beyond the bare fact that it was there.

“Most likely, they fed the townsfolk a load of lies,” Bors breathed. He handed the binoculars to Zalessky. “Something about how, if nobody does anything stupid, the bandits will finish their business and leave quietly.”

“But thousands of people live at First Station! And they’re just a g-gang of b-bandits.”

“You’d be surprised, Lamp, just how reluctant even an armed man is to use his own weapon,” Zalessky answered the question hanging in the air. “If there’s even the faintest hope of simply sitting it out, the average person in town will choose to sit it out.”

“But the cowboys—”

“No one pays the cowboys to do that.” Ardi spoke up this time. “I think most of them went back to the steppe as soon as they saw the gang. And the ones who didn’t get out in time are sitting tight at home and waiting.”

“W-what are they waiting for, Ard?” Tikhonov stammered. The night before, Rita had handed him the binoculars without thinking, and he had seen … what he’d seen.

“A chance either to escape or to help free the town.” Ardi shrugged. “But they won’t help for free. I’m sure most of those who seized the town are on the wanted list.”

“F-for the b-bounty?”

Ardan nodded. In Evergale, especially in the off-season when there wasn’t enough work to go around, the braver cowboys would sometimes sign on with marshals or bounty hunters as extra hands. They rode all over the steppe in search of wanted criminals. Most often, they hunted criminals who didn’t have to be brought in alive for trial. The bounties were smaller, they would say when they returned to the farm, but there was less trouble, too.

“I still don’t like your plan, Corporal,” Zalessky growled, handing the binoculars back to Rita.

“We don’t have any other options.”

“Yeah, but it could blow at any moment, and I sure don’t feel like getting my ass fried in some magic free-for-all,” Bors added.

“They can’t set it off whenever they feel like it,” Ardan objected, glancing at his watch. “Exactly twenty-four hours from now. Tomorrow at noon.”

“What makes you so sure, Corporal?” Rita snorted and snatched the binoculars from Zalessky’s hands.

“I agree with Ard.” Magister Tikhonov backed him up. “They w-won’t be able to s-synchronize the explosions.”

“I remember what you said yesterday, Ard.” Zalessky gave the barest nod, almost furtively. “But why are you so sure tomorrow is the deadline?”

“Because they’re supposed to bring Miss Ostrozhskaya to a spot twenty kilometers west of here tomorrow evening.”

“I still think the fucking Old Hag is working with them.”

“Rita, you just can’t stand her wrinkled ass. That’s all.”

“Believe me, Bors, I’m not the least bit surprised that you know what the Old Hag’s naked ass looks like.”

“Enough, both of you.” Zalessky cut off the spat before it could go any farther. “But there’s no reason to assume noon. They could trigger the explosions as early as dawn.”

Ardi reluctantly conceded Zalessky’s point.

“I’m only estimating.” Ard spread his hands. “But even if it’s at dawn, we have even less time.”

Zalessky looked as reluctant as Ardan had a moment earlier. He nodded anyway.

“But what makes you think they’ve taken Shpritz, Rogov, and Melin captive, Ard?” Zalessky pressed, not for the first time. “Not finding their bodies in the pit tells us nothing.”

“In Montov’s memories, some of the hired bandits balked at making it look as if their own countries were behind the attack,” Ardan reminded him again. “They may be bastards, but they’re no fools. They’ll want to frame someone else and draw suspicion away from themselves. And in theory, it wouldn’t be all that hard to blame the explosion on a duel between two Blue mages that went too far.”

“And they need Miss Shpritz for that?” Zalessky narrowed his eyes.

“Exactly.” Ardi nodded. “If she publishes an article saying Rogov and Melin are responsible for the disaster, no one will come looking for the bandits, or so they believe. And no one will have any reason to suspect Ngia, Fatia, or Tazidahian. That will let the bandits go home with an enormous sum of money. Maybe even start their lives over.”

“But what would make Shpritz publish an article like that?”

“Threats.” Ardi shrugged. “If she doesn’t publish it, they’ll find her and kill her. Something like that.”

“Sounds—”

“Sounds like the Corporal wants to get into that hack’s lacy panties.”

“Rita—”

“What, Drab?” Rita cut in. “He’s a Cloak! And you’re really going to trust a Cloak? Nothing personal, Corporal, but I don’t trust you. Especially after you played us for fools for more than a month!”

“Ard’s married,” Magister Tikhonov reminded her in a timid voice.

“So?” Rita snorted. “As if that’s ever stopped you men.”

“Well, don’t judge the rest of us by your own experience.”

“Bors, please remind me how long it’s been since I last told you to go…”

“But where are you going to look for them, Ard?” Zalessky ignored Rita, took the binoculars from her, and studied the City again. “There are far more buildings here than you’d find in a typical settlement on the steppe. Searching them all… I can’t even imagine how long that would take. But we certainly wouldn’t be done by noon.”

“Or by dawn,” Bors reminded him.

“Or by dawn,” Zalessky repeated, tilting the binoculars slightly.

Ardi tapped his nose.

“I’ve got more than my eyes to work with.”

“What, Corporal?” Rita hissed, her voice briefly taking on a snake’s thin, dangerous edge. “You mean you’ll sniff them out?”

“Yes,” Ardan replied easily, his voice even. “I very much doubt the bandits let them take a shower. So the captains and Miss Shpritz should smell… the way Second Station smelled. I can find a smell like that. Not right away, but I can. Besides, we don’t have all that many buildings to check after all. Only three.”

“That’s sheer nonsense! And…”

“S-sorry, b-but some matabar packs have a keener sense of smell than most predators do.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, Tikhonov...”

Rita shot Magister Tikhonov an oddly defeated look, cursed under her breath, and began sliding back down the hill. Before long, the others slid after her, straight down over the rocks, scraping their bellies and thighs and ruining their clothes.

In a deep hollow, their little fire smoldered under a fireproof cloth. Rifles, grenades, and revolvers lay all around it on the fabric. Their entire modest arsenal.

“When dusk starts to fall, I’ll slip into the city.” Ardi picked up a stick and began scratching a map into the ground. “There are only a few places where they could be holding them. Even with the bandits’ three Blue mages, it’ll take a great deal of power to sustain a shield capable of holding Rogov and Melin. So it’s either the town hall, the inn, or the Hunters’ Guild building. Nowhere else offers easy access to high-capacity generators.”

“The town hall and the inn are on the same square, so that’s no problem. But the Hunters’ Guild building—” Ardan drew a line on the ground and dug out a small hollow. “It’s too far away. And from what we saw on the rooftops, that’s exactly where the bandits are focusing their attention. That would explain why the three mages weren’t out there, too. We didn’t see a single one of them all night. They’re simply standing guard over the captains and Shpritz.”

The hunters exchanged glances.

“Now I’m beginning to believe you really are a Cloak, Ard,” Bors drawled. He shivered slightly. “Honestly, I can’t stand your kind.”

Ardi ignored the remark.

“First, I’ll check the inn. As I recall, the wiring there is laid out rather haphazardly, so tapping into it shouldn’t be difficult. And because the number of guests is always changing, the system should be built to handle varying loads, and...”

Ardan stopped short. He looked from face to face, then let his shoulders sag. No one except Magister Tikhonov had understood a word he’d just said.

“I’ll check the inn first,” Ard concluded.

“Are you sure that’s where they are, Ard?” Zalessky asked, a touch of hope in his voice.

Ardan wished he could lie. Wished he could use what Skusty had taught him. But he couldn’t. This wasn’t that kind of situation at all.

“No,” he answered honestly.

“So, Corporal, you’re just going to gamble everything and hope you get lucky.”

“I wouldn’t say that...” Ardi began. “But without going into the details, yes.”

Rita swore again.

“Remind me why we can’t simply sit here and wait for the Army, the marshals, even the Cloaks themselves. I mean Cloaks older than this kid, and scarier. And I don’t mean their faces.”

“Actually, Rita, I’d say Ard’s a pretty scary guy.”

“That’s because you’ve got pea-sized balls, Bors.”

“You’ve never seen them.”

“I don’t even need to see them to...”

Rita waved one hand vaguely in the air, then shut her mouth. A heavy, oppressive silence settled around the campfire. Zalessky had been right about people who preferred to hole up and keep their heads down. The same held true for the five of them.

The Sleeping Spirits knew Ardi would rather have been almost anywhere but here.

“You don’t think the Army will come, Ard?”

“No, Drab.” Ardan shook his head. “It took us four days to get here. If the messages made it to their intended recipients at all, the Army and the marshals would need another two days to get here. Even their fastest advance units would. Or longer.”

“Those fuckers got it all exactly right,” Rita burst out again. “Never heard of bandits who thought their fucking plans through this carefully.”

Ardi hadn’t gone into detail about Mr Onton. If Onton was involved with the Puppeteers, then neither Zalessky nor his subordinates should know all the details.

“And once it gets dark, you want us to rig the grenades in a chain around the perimeter?” Zalessky spoke up again.

“Yes.”

“And then set them off and charge through a city full of bandits to the vault?”

“Yes, but if I manage to free the captains, the gunmen won’t be a problem anymore.”

“And what about their three Blue mages, Ard?”

“They’re guarding the captains, so we’ll have to deal with them first no matter what. Everything else comes after.”

“And if you can’t pull it off?”

“Then you won’t get the signal, and you’ll survive.” Ardan spoke calmly, as if the death he was discussing, hypothetical though it might be, were not his own. “But if that happens, try to keep track of the bandits as they leave, just in case. And if Ostrozhskaya… I mean… well…”

“Shoot her.” For the first time, excitement colored Rita’s voice.

Ardan nodded once.

Zalessky drew a sharp breath and raked his fingers through his hair.

“If I’m honest, Ard, all of this sounds like some kind of reckless gamble.”

Ardi knew that.

“But I suppose we really don’t have a choice,” Zalessky concluded. They all went quiet again.

***

“Magister Tikhonov.”

Evlampiy flinched in surprise, and Ardi hurried to apologize.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“It’s all right, Ard, it’s all right,” Evlampiy assured him at once, though he was plainly frightened. “I’m just uneasy. You know, I wasn’t ready for things to turn out like this. Of course I knew the expedition might be dangerous, but not this dangerous.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, Magister Tikhonov.” Ardan stepped closer to Tikhonov and held out a page he had torn from his own grimoire. “If we don’t succeed, please make your way to the Black House in Metropolis. Give this to Captain Pnev. He’ll know what to do.”

“Oh, Ard, but how can I? I’m supposed to…”

“You’ve already done everything you needed to, and more, Magister Tikhonov.” Ardi gave him a sincere smile. “Everything else is our job now, not yours. Besides, I believe we’ll pull it off.”

“Really? You truly believe that?”

“Of course, Magister Tikhonov. If you don’t believe you’ll bring back your quarry, there’s no point setting out at all.”

Evlampiy took the note with a trembling hand and carefully tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

“That’s why you have to survive, Magister Tikhonov. So when it all starts, stay here. No matter what happens, do not go near the city under any circumstances. All right?”

“Y-yes… of c-course.” Evlampiy nodded, then suddenly turned away, ashamed. “F-forgive me, Ard, for being so useless.”

“You found the Winged-Horned, Magister Tikhonov. I wouldn’t call that useless.”

“But I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“And that’s exactly what I mean.”

Ardan wanted to say something else, but Zalessky, Rita, and Bors had reached them. The sun was dipping below the horizon, painting the sky in dozens of shades of red and gold. The air was slowly turning icy, and the wind was picking up across the swaying grasses.

“Good luck, Ard.” Zalessky held out his hand. “Eternal Angels be my witnesses, we could all use some tonight.”

Ardi shook his hand, then shook hands with Rita and Bors in turn. Afterward, he began climbing up the rocky hill.

“Hey, Corporal.” Rita’s voice came from below. “Anyone who decides to go off and die is…”

“A pocket full of holes!” Zalessky, Rita, and Bors finished in unison.

Ardan opened his mouth, closed it, then answered.

“A Fatian.”