Chapter 56: Adrian’s Mysterious Friend
Chapter 56: Adrian’s Mysterious Friend
They spent the afternoon making the clearing into something that could kill.
Two teams buried the restraints — four steel leg traps, chained to driven stakes and covered with the same leaf litter they’d lifted off, which somebody had thought about, because the wrong litter smells wrong. Weighted nets went up into the branches on quick-release lines. The noise-makers were tin and wire and old sensor housings, seeded in an arc across the eastern approach.
By four o’clock a chain of dead Ridgebacks lay from the boundary to the clearing, each one opened so it would keep talking to the wind. The largest went at the centre, chained through the shoulder to a stake in a wet black circle.
I walked the perimeter once. That was all I intended to do.
Then I stopped at the north-west lantern, which was set on a stump about four metres behind and slightly below the second platform, and I stood there long enough that Neve came over.
"Problem?"
"When that comes on, it puts your riflemen on the platform in front of it." I pointed, and traced the line with my hand. "Everybody on that side of the clearing gets two black shapes against a white glare and nothing else. Including the Panther."
She looked along my arm for about three seconds.
Then she turned and shouted at two men to move it forty metres left and lower it, and the men moved it, and while they were doing it she said, without looking at me, "How many of these have you done?"
I could have said none. I could have said this is the first organised hunt I have ever attended in my life, and I only spotted that because I spent four days being backlit by floodlights in a debt camp and thinking about what it would take to shoot me.
"A few," I said.
Which was a lie, and which cost me nothing at the time, and which I have since decided was the exact moment the story about me stopped being adjustable.
Positions went in before dusk. Riflemen and three archers up on the platforms. Six close-range fighters behind the ground barriers with spears and a fire axe and, in one case, a length of scaffold pipe. Halloran on the western barrier with the light switches. Neve on the ground where she could see everything.
I took the south-east barrier alone, and told them it gave the best angle on the approach. It did. It also had a stand of hazel behind it that nobody could see into.
I did not activate Blind Call — not at dusk, not through the two hours of silence in which forty people tried not to cough. Whatever grade came up, the clock would start the instant it did, and a high grade means a short manifestation. I was not spending it waiting for an animal that might not come until three in the morning.
At twenty past ten, the eastern noise-makers went off.
Two of them, forty metres apart, in the space of about four seconds.
"On the trail," Neve said, quietly, into the dark. "Nobody moves. Nobody lights anything."
I went backwards into the hazel.
[Blind Call Charges: 1/1]
[Blind Call activated.]
[Eligible Grade: A.]
A.
[Summon selected.]
[Physical manifestation initiated.]
[Manifestation Duration: 00:30:00]
She arrived in the middle of a charge.
Literally — mid-stride at a dead sprint, glaive already swinging on a downward diagonal, and the blade went past my face close enough that the hair on my arms stood up from something that wasn’t wind. The point buried itself beside my boot. Leaf litter went up in a burst and a crack of thunder went off six inches from my ear.
Then she stopped, because the enormous thing she’d been running at was no longer in front of her, and I had a second or two to look at her while she worked that out.
She was tall and twenty-nine. Crimson hair hung in a heavy braid coming apart at the end, and two black horns swept back from her temples like something grown rather than worn. Gold eyes with vertical slits dominated a striking, sharp-boned face built for command rather than softness.
Dark fine scales climbed the sides of her neck, crossed her shoulders, and continued along her forearms where the armour ended. Black-and-gold plate chased with draconic patterns fitted a powerful figure: a broad, full chest, hard narrow waist, strong hips, and long armoured legs planted with the certainty of someone accustomed to battlefields making room for her. And crawling over all of it — armour, glaive, skin — was a constant thin blue-white creep of lightning that lit the underside of the hazel leaves.
Fear arrived first. Attraction followed anyway, sharp and physical and profoundly unhelpful.
She looked at the trees, then at the sky, then down at me.
Then she moved her weapon arm, and her whole face changed.
"What has been done to me."
Her voice was low and it was not a question anybody sane would decline to answer.
"You’ve been—"
"My strength is sealed." She flexed her hand and the lightning stuttered. "Half. Less than half. This is a leash. Who put a leash on me, mortal, and where is he?"
"Nobody. It’s a level restriction — you’re synchronised to mine, it’s how the class works, it isn’t aimed at you—"
"Then it is incompetence, which is worse." She turned in a slow circle, taking in the trees and the dark and the shape of the clearing beyond, every word at the same measured volume that made the back of my neck itch. "I was three strides from a Gorge-Kin’s throat. Two thousand of my soldiers were behind me. If you have taken me from that field—"
"You go back to the same instant."
She stopped. "Explain."
"When this ends you return to the exact moment you left. Same stride. The same distance from its throat. Nobody sees you go and nobody sees you come back, and the time you spend here doesn’t happen there. You lose nothing."
Vaelora — she gave me the name later, without ceremony, the way you’d hand over a receipt — considered that for perhaps two seconds.
[Summon Identified: Vaelora.]
[Race: Dragon-Blooded.]
[Age: 29]
[Summon Grade: A.]
[Native Advancement: Unresolved.]
[Manifested Level: 13.]
Then she waved her hand, and every other question I had braced for went away.
"Acceptable." She pulled the glaive out of the earth. "What am I killing?"
The question came with such complete disinterest in everything except the answer that I understood any further explanation would be wasted. She had been torn out of one world, dropped into another with most of her strength sealed, and given thirty minutes before being thrown back into a war. Apparently only the quality of the thing waiting to be killed required clarification.
That was either admirable focus or a serious defect in her personality.
I suspected both.