Assassin from Abyss

Chapter 87: Like a Lizard

The question hung among them. Who would be the bait.

Kei broke it.

" The one who acts as live bait is not the one who matters , " he said. " What matters are the ones following the bait once it is taken. The Viletails are fast. Whoever follows has to keep their pace and stay unseen at the same time. That is the hard part. Not the being taken. The keeping up after. "

It moved the weight of the question off the bait and onto the follower, and they felt it move.

Tula broke her own silence.

" And if one body is not enough? " she said. " If the Viletails come, and the dead body does not satisfy them, and they decide not to carry the live one off but to kill it where it stands? "

" Exactly my thought. " Corvyn, quick to it.

Kei held the question. She was right. They did not know how many the bait would draw, or how hungry the drawn ones would be, and a plan that depended on the appetite of a thing he had never seen was a plan with a hole in it. He felt his hand forced, and he did not like the feeling, and he kept it off his face.

" Then I provide a second body , " he said.

Corvyn’s head turned. " Another one. " A beat. " How many bodies are you carrying? " The smile stayed but something cooler sat under it. " This is a little strange. Is this one also something you found at the Cruentus Mouth? " freewёbnoνel.com

Tula, silent, agreed with him.

Asp did not stir at the talk of bodies. A spirit naga raised in the Black Bowels, where the dead were the floor you walked on and the air you breathed, did not flinch at corpses traded like supplies. She waited for the answer the way she waited for weather.

" Yes , " Kei said, and lied. " This one as well. At the Mouth. A man, taken by a Hollow Stalker. "

" If you say so. " Corvyn’s tone did not match the words. The words let it go. The tone did not.

Tula turned to him then — to Kei.

" What about you? " she said. " Are you not willing to be the live bait? "

There was something under it. A thread of disdain he could not source, and did not try to. He answered it plainly.

" I have no issue being the bait. But can you keep up? " He looked at her without unkindness and without softening it. " Coming down the bleed bark — after Corvyn, you were the last one down. After Asp. If you can hold the pace once the Viletails run, then yes, I will be the bait and you can follow. "

Tula bit her lip.

It was true and she knew it was true. Speed had never been the thing she was made of. House Nightloom had given her other gifts, the cocoon and the records and the long memory, and not this. She said nothing — but the nothing was not agreement. She would not be following anyone at a Viletail’s pace, and she did not trust the man asking her to.

" So , " Asp said, into the stall. " What is it to be. Who is the bait. I will do it, if the rest of you can keep up when they take me. " freewebnσvel.cøm

Kei nodded. " I can keep up. Be sure of that. "

" No , " Asp said. " You show me. " She pointed at a Hemoth Pine standing clear of the others at the glade’s edge. " Climb that and come back as fast as you can, and then I will believe you. That goes for you as well, Rite Cleric. And you, Tula. "

Both nodded, and the three of them watched Kei walk to the pine Asp had marked.

He did not give them time to measure the tree first.

Before they had finished taking in its height — forty meters, grey trunk running up into the canopy dark — Kei had already broken into a run along the ground, three strides for the momentum, and jumped, and caught the trunk and started up. Twenty-two Deftness moved under him. He took the first quarter before their eyes had settled on him, and in four minutes he had gone up the whole of it and come back down and stood among them again, breathing even.

" Good , " Asp said, and there was a small surprise in it. " You are almost as fast as me. In my half-naga form. "

" Your turn , " Kei said to Corvyn.

Corvyn walked to the pine.

He did not run for momentum the way Kei had. He simply walked up to the trunk and put his hands to it — and from behind, where the others stood, what his hands did when they touched the bark could not quite be seen. They settled against it. They held to it. The way a thing with pads to its fingers held, a lizard on a wall, the whole hand laid flat and gripping by something that was not grip.

Then he climbed.

And the climbing was wrong in the way the walking had been wrong, except more so, because there was more of it to see and more time to see it in. He did not climb like a man finding holds, reaching, testing, committing his weight to one grip before he sought the next. He flowed up the trunk. Fluid, continuous, no hitch anywhere in it, his body laid close against the bark and moving with it as though the pine and the thing on it were one surface and the surface had simply decided to rise. A lizard ran up a wall like that — the whole length of it in contact, the limbs moving in a rhythm that did not look like effort because nothing in it strained. A man did not. A man’s climb was a negotiation with the tree. This was not a negotiation. This was something that belonged on the tree more than it belonged on the ground, returning to where it belonged.

Asp watched, and the pleasure she had shown at Kei’s speed did not come. Kei watched, and the wrongness that had sat in him since the hideout shifted, very slightly, as if it had heard its own name spoken in another room and could not yet make out the word. Tula watched, her stillness gone tight. None of them said the thing that each of them, in some place below speech, had begun to feel — because it had no shape they could hand to the others without sounding mad, and because the man on the tree was the senior who had kept them alive through the argument and was, by every account they had, one of them.

In two minutes Corvyn went up the whole pine and came back down it, unwinded, his breathing no different at the bottom than it had been at the top. He had been faster than Kei. He had not, at any point, looked as though the height concerned him.

" My turn does not need taking , " Tula said, before Asp could point her at the tree. She shook her head. " I cannot match their speed. I cannot match yours, Asp. " A breath. " I am willing to be the live bait. But I have one condition. And one question. "

Corvyn, back among them now, heard it and stilled to listen.

" What , " Asp said.

Tula turned to Kei.

" What would you do , " she said, " if the Viletails eat both the dead bodies and still will not take me alive? If they come for me to kill me where I stand? "

" Then we kill them , " Kei said. " And we use their bodies as the next bait. "

He paused.

" Now. Your condition. "

Something in her settled at the answer — not comfort, but the satisfaction of a plan that did not break at the first failure, which was its own kind of trust, the only kind she was prepared to extend him. " Before I go out there as bait , " she said, " I want to see the bodies. "

Kei nodded.

He turned his wrist, the bracelet on it with the necro bead set into the band, and he pointed it at the ground and opened it.

Two bodies came out of it and lay on the forest floor.

One was a woman. naked and unmarked — no wound the eye could find, no laceration, no break, the skin whole everywhere it showed. She lay as though she had been set down sleeping, her face composed, something near peace still resting on it, the kind of stillness that came to a face only when whatever had ended it had ended it gently, or from the inside, or so fast the face had not had time to learn it was dying. And the wrongness of that was its own slow horror, slower than any open wound. Bodies did not arrive at death unmarked. A creature of the Cruentus did not leave a body whole. A thing eaten or struck or run down showed it. This woman showed nothing, and a body that died and kept its peace had not died to anything that lived in this forest.

The other was a man. naked as well. And there was nothing peaceful in him. His head and his face, down to the neck, had been opened — sliced through in five or six vertical layers that had parted and now hung loose from one another, the architecture of a face taken apart along its length and left to fall open, the cuts clean and parallel and deliberate. It was not a wound. It was a piece of work. No beast’s jaw made those lines. No Hollow Stalker’s heavy forearm came down in five even passes a blade’s width apart. Something had held this man still and cut him with intention and care, and the care was the worst part of it.

Asp looked at the bodies, and her face, hardened by a childhood among the dead of the Black Bowels, found something in these two that the Black Bowels had not prepared her for, and stayed on them.

Tula looked at the bodies — at the woman with no wound, at the man with too deliberate a one — and somewhere behind her eyes a room she had been shown once in a borrowed vision laid itself over the glade, a masked man and a blade and a woman’s head, and the shape of the thing she had been refusing to finish thinking finished itself.

Corvyn looked at the bodies, and said nothing, and the smile he had worn through all of it was, for the length of a breath, simply not there.

And none of them, for that moment, looked at anything else.