Chapter 649: Do Not Resist

Land showed up as a thin dark line at the edge of the sky.

He saw it just as the sun started to go down. At first it could have been a cloud bank. Then it kept its shape, and the shape had a ragged top that looked like hills, and below the hills was the pale smear of a coast. Skylar saw it too. The wyvern’s wing beats quickened a little, and for the first time since the forest it dropped lower without being asked.

Damien let it.

The water underneath them was a different color near the shore. Browner, shallower, full of the usual mess a coast carries out to sea. It looked like water that fishermen could stand to look at. He breathed out and realised he had been holding some of that breath for hours.

There was a town. Small, tucked into a curve of the bay, with maybe a few hundred roofs and a short stone pier. Smoke rose from the chimneys in thin grey lines. A handful of boats sat tied along the pier, and more of them were pulled up onto the sand with their hulls turned over.

A fishing port. Perfect.

He did not take Skylar in. A Shadowfang Wyvern landing in the middle of a fishing town would cause more trouble than he wanted.

"Come down in the hills above the bay, in a gap between two ridges where nobody would see." Damien commanded Skylar and it obeyed.

He slid off its back onto grass that felt solid and dry and very ordinary under his boots.

"Good flight," he said.

Skylar shook its wings out once and looked at him with proud eyes. He put a hand on its neck and then sent it back through the portal. It was gone in a breath.

He stood there for a moment on the hill.

It was cold. The wind off the water carried salt and something fishy and something cooked, and underneath it all the smell of people. Woodsmoke. Wet rope. Tar. It was not a bad smell. It smelled like somewhere he could sit down.

He cancelled Luton as well. The slime would have passed for a hat in poor light, but there was no need to test it. He walked down the hill with his hands in his pockets and no one in front of him, and the town grew from a smudge into streets.

Nobody stared at him much.

He had expected a little more of it. He had been in the forest for weeks and his clothes had the look of it, patched and stained and tired. But a fishing port saw all kinds. A man walking in from the hills at dusk with a pack and a worn face was not interesting. A few people glanced up and then went back to what they were doing.

He was glad of that. He did not feel out of place, either. He had been among people not long ago, and it had not been long enough to forget how. It felt more like stepping back into a coat he already owned.

The first thing he did was look for a trader.

He found one near the pier, a thick-armed woman with a stall full of rope and dried fish and a hand scale hanging from a hook. He waited until she had finished with a customer and stepped up to the table.

"Buying cores?"

She looked him over. "Depends what grade."

He put five of them on the table. Luton had given them back to him in the hills before he sent it away, and he had picked the five least interesting. Grade Five, all of them. Dull red, about the size of a plum. Nothing that would make anyone ask questions.

She picked one up and turned it in the light. Then she looked at him again, a little differently.

"These are fresh."

"I hunt."

"I can see that." She set it down. "Don’t get many Grade Fives in here. Most of the Dunters who come through carry Grade Sixes and below. These are clean cuts, too. Somebody knows what they’re doing."

"Can you buy them?"

She named a number. It was fair, a little less than he would have wanted but not insulting, and he did not argue. She counted the gold coins out onto the table and slid them across, and he swept them into his pocket and nodded.

"There’s a place on the corner of the second street," she said. "Good stew. Clean beds. Tell Orla I sent you."

"Thanks."

"And if you’re staying, stay off the water." She was already turning back to her ropes. "Nobody goes past the second buoy these days."

He stopped.

"Why not?"

She looked at him over her shoulder. "You’re not from here, are you?"

"No."

"Then I’ll tell you what I tell everyone." She said it flatly, without drama. "Something moves out there. Big. Fishermen who went out past the second buoy this year have come back with half a boat, or no boat, or not at all. The council put up the markers last spring. We stay inside them."

"Has anyone seen it?"

"Nobody who talks about it afterwards."

She went back to her ropes. He stood for a moment longer, looking at the dark line of the water beyond the pier, and then he went to find the stew.

Orla turned out to be a tall woman with a loud laugh and arms like fence posts. She looked at the coins in his hand and at the dust on his clothes and said, "Bath first. Food after. You smell like a cave."

He did not argue with that either. Even though he’d cleaned up before leaving the forest, the smell didn’t completely leave him.

The bath was a tin tub in a back room, with water from a kettle that had been on the stove all afternoon. It was hot. Properly hot, hot enough to turn his skin pink.

He sat in it for a long time with his eyes closed and let the dirt of the forest come off him in layers. His ribs ached in the heat, and he noticed that they ached differently from how they used to. Not worse. Deeper. As if something underneath the ache was busy.

He got out, dried himself, and put on his one clean shirt.

Then he ate.

The stew was thick and salty, full of white fish and potatoes and a handful of herbs he could not name. Orla set a heel of bread beside it and left him alone to eat. He finished the bowl and asked for another and she gave it to him without comment.

Nobody else in the common room paid him any attention. A few men sat near the fire talking low about the catch. A woman was mending a net in the corner.

He ate slowly, because it was good, and because for the first time in weeks nothing was watching him.

When the second bowl was empty he leaned back and let the warmth in his stomach settle, and then, because he had been away for most of three weeks and knew nothing about what had happened while he was gone, he started listening.

It took less than ten minutes to get what he needed.

The talk near the fire was mostly fish, but it kept sliding off in the same direction. Demons. The word came up every few minutes in the way a bad tooth comes up in a conversation about food.

"North road’s closed again," one of the men said. "Third time this month. Caravans won’t use it."

"Whole valley’s emptied out up there," said another. "My cousin went through last week. Said there were villages with nobody in them. Tables set. Doors open."

"Hordes?"

"Bigger than the old ones. And they’ve got something leading them now. Something that thinks."

"They always had that."

"Not like this."

Damien picked up his bread and chewed.

The talk went on. It was not exactly news. It was the kind of grumbling people did when something had been wrong for so long that they had stopped being surprised by it. But it told him what he needed. The northern routes were bad and getting worse.

Demon activity was rising up and down the coast. Villages were being abandoned. And somewhere in the last few weeks, someone had decided that the ordinary kind of horde was not the only kind to worry about anymore.

He finished the bread and stood.

Out in the street, the light was almost gone. The lamps were lit along the main road, thin yellow circles on the wet stones. The air had cooled and the wind off the water had a sharp edge.

There was a building at the end of the street with a stone front and a carved sign of a sword crossed over a flame.

The Dunters’ hall.

It was closed for the evening, but the board outside was still lit.

A wide wooden notice board, covered in paper. Some of it was old, curling at the corners. Some of it was fresh. He stood in front of it with his hands behind his back and read from top to bottom, the way he would have read a map.

|PACK OF SIX TO NINE. GRADE SIX AND SEVEN. FARMING SETTLEMENT, TWO DAYS NORTH. SILVER RANK MINIMUM. PARTY OF THREE.|

|GRADE FIVE, LONE. NORTH ROAD, NEAR THE OLD BRIDGE. GOLD RANK. REWARD DOUBLED.|

|SURVIVORS OF THE CROSSING NEEDED FOR TESTIMONY. APPLY WITHIN.|

|WARNING: GRADE FOUR SIGHTED. THIRD TIME THIS SEASON. DO NOT ENGAGE. REPORT TO THE NEAREST GUILD HOUSE.|

He stopped at that one.

Grade Four. Sighted outside the strongholds, outside any forest. Not as a boss in a place everyone had agreed to stay away from, but out in the open, where people lived. Three times in one season.

He read it again.

"Don’t touch that one," said a voice behind him.

He turned.

A man had come out of the side door of the hall, a lean, tired-looking Dunter in a long coat with a scar down one side of his jaw. Platinum Rank by the badge on his collar, though the badge was dull from use. He lit a pipe and looked at the board the way a person looks at an old argument.

"I wasn’t planning to," Damien said.

"Good. Don’t." The man blew out smoke. "Nobody under Peak Platinum is supposed to go near those."

"And above Peak Platinum?"

"They send a squad." He tapped the pipe against the board’s edge. "Used to be rare. Now it’s every season. Two years ago they said the war was two years off. Last year, one. This year, nobody says anything."

"Why not?"

The man looked at him for a long moment.

"Because everyone knows," he said. "Nobody wants to be the first to say it out loud."

That was all. He put the pipe back between his teeth and nodded once, as if the conversation had run its course, and went back through the side door.

Damien stood in front of the board a while longer.

His eyes went back to the first notice. Six to nine demons, Grade Six and Seven. Farming settlement, two days north. A party of three, Silver minimum.

He was not a Silver. He was not anything, officially. He had no badge and no registration and no party. But he knew what Grade Fives and Sixes were, and he knew exactly how many of them he could take on his own with his bare hands.

It was a place to start.

He memorised the details and turned away from the board.

The room Orla gave him was small and clean, with a narrow bed and a washstand and one window that looked out over the bay. He shut the door and pulled the curtains and stood for a moment in the quiet.

"Summon Lin."

The portal opened by the door and the fox stepped through, ears up, tails settling. It looked at the room, at him, at the door. Then it walked to the doorway and sat down in front of it without being told, facing outward.

"Thanks."

Lin’s ear moved.

He sat on the bed and unlaced his boots. The mattress was soft. The window showed a thin sliver of dark water and a few lights bobbing out near the pier. For a while he just sat there, listening to the building creak around him, to the distant sound of voices downstairs, to Lin breathing quietly in front of the door.

He lay down and closed his eyes.

The first hour was fine.

He was almost asleep when the heat began.

It started in his chest, low and deep, a slow warmth that spread outward like ink dropped into water. He thought at first it was the stew. Then it reached his arms, and then his legs, and he realised it was not a warmth at all.

It was the blood.

It boiled.

He did not know what else to call it. His veins lit up from the inside, every one of them at once, thin lines of fire running through his body from his fingertips to the back of his neck. His heart began to pound, hard and fast, each beat pushing more heat through him. He opened his eyes and the room was swimming. He tried to sit up and could not.

The panel in his head flickered open.

[Refinement: Phase Two]

[Intensity: High]

[Do not resist.]

He did not have the strength to resist.

He gripped the sheet in both hands and held on while the fire moved through him. It went down his spine. It went into his ribs. It found the places where the broken bones had been put back together and it went through them again, and it was not the breaking he had felt in the ring but something worse, something slower and deeper, as if the blood were being poured through a mould and reshaped as it went.

A sound came out of him that he did not mean to make.

Lin turned its head.

The fox’s golden eyes found him in the dark, and for a moment it did not move. Then it looked back at the door, and the line of its shoulders said it all. It was staying. Whatever happened to him, it was not leaving its post.

He turned his face into the pillow.

The sweat started a minute later. It soaked the sheets in a few breaths, running off him in rivers, and the heat did not ease. His veins stood out under the skin like cords. His heart hammered. He could hear it. He could hear the blood moving. Everything in him was loud.

Somewhere outside, a clock struck the hour.

He lost count of the strikes.

He lay there and let the fire have him, with the fox at the door and the cold water just outside the window and a notification still burning in the corner of his mind.

[Do not resist.]

So he didn’t.