Chapter 55: The Price of Confidence
Chapter 55: The Price of Confidence
Seventeen, probably. Eighteen at the outside. Nocturnal, an ambush specialist, and built around a single trait that made it worse than its level: it can suppress itself. Sound, scent, presence — all of it damped down to nothing while it stalks. An eight-person hunting party had vanished in daylight, leaving seven spent cases behind, and at least two of them had been dragged away.
I thought about walking north instead.
I want to be honest about that, because I did think about it, standing on the plantation road with my pack half full. I could have been forty kilometres away by nightfall.
And then what? Start again. New ground, no water, no trade, nobody selling ammunition, sleeping in a pump house.
The Panther was sitting on the only hunting ground I had. It was working its way closer to the settlement — the boundary marks were newer nearer the road — and inside a month it would start taking people at the walls, and long before that it would have made my entire routine impossible. There was no version of this where I ignored it and my life stayed the same.
So I went and told them, and I let them think whatever they liked about why.
The leadership at Fenwick Junction was two people, whatever the noticeboard said. Halloran was somewhere past sixty, built like a fence post, and had run something logistical before the Merge; he asked the sort of questions that establish whether you actually saw a thing. Neve was maybe thirty, ran the hunters, and had the specific hard competence of somebody who has been right about danger often enough to have stopped enjoying it.
I laid it out for them in the trade shed with four of Neve’s hunters standing along the wall.
"Territorial marks at chest height on eleven trees between the plantation corner and the reservoir road," I said. "Three abandoned kills, throat-taken. The whole district’s gone empty of anything under Level 5. Your party’s trail ends six hundred metres past the plantation road, and there’s a broken shotgun, seven cases in two groups, blood in three separate places, and two drag marks going north-west."
"Two," Halloran said.
"Two."
He looked at the table for a while.
One of the hunters against the wall said, "And you were out there alone."
"I was."
"Doing what, exactly?"
"Hunting. Same as every day."
"Same as every day," he repeated, and made it mean something else, and Neve told him to shut up without particularly raising her voice.
They knew the species before I named it. Neve had been thinking Nightfang for a day and a half and had been hoping to be wrong, which is a thing I understood.
Their plan was better than I expected.
A clearing they already knew, four hundred metres inside the new boundary, with good ground. Buried mechanical restraints — actual leg traps, salvaged and chained — with weighted nets rigged above and noise-makers seeded across the approach. Floodlights and lanterns ringed around the whole clearing and left dark until the moment they wanted them. Two elevated platforms reinforced for riflemen and archers. Close-range fighters behind barriers on the ground. A blood trail laid from the boundary in, using fresh kills, and the largest carcass chained down at the centre so the thing couldn’t take it and vanish into the trees.
"It’ll come for the chained one," Neve said. "It can’t drag it. It has to stay and work at it, and while it’s working, it isn’t listening."
I made them go through the whole thing twice before I said anything, including where every light was and who was on which platform.
It’s competent, I thought. It’s genuinely competent. And it’s built for something that fights like an animal, and this thing has been picking off armed men one at a time in daylight.
"It’s a reasonable plan," I said. "I’m in, with two conditions."
Halloran waited.
"I may bring a friend."
The room changed temperature. I watched it happen — four hunters going still along the wall, and Neve’s eyes narrowing about two millimetres.
"And whatever comes off the Panther gets split by contribution," I said. "Actual contribution. Not headcount, not seniority."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then the one who’d been needling me earlier said, "A friend," in a tone that was doing a lot of work, and looked at Neve, and then said it again with a different emphasis in case anyone had missed it.
I let him.
Because I knew exactly what they were assembling in their heads, and it was all my own fault: the man who hunts alone, comes back carrying four times what he should, never explains his stores, and has now casually mentioned a friend nobody has ever seen. They’d decided I had people. Somewhere out there was a crew, or a patron, or an expert I’d been keeping in reserve, and I was about to produce a killer who’d take the fight and the best of the loot.
Halloran and Neve went outside and talked for six minutes.
They came back and accepted, and I understood why before either of them said a word. Contribution-based distribution was already how they did it. Refusing my second condition would have meant admitting the first rule of their own settlement was decorative.
"Bring your friend," Neve said.
I nodded and said nothing else, and let every person in that shed keep the impressive version.
Because tonight, I thought, walking back to the print shop, I am going to stand behind a wall and roll a die, and the die does not know what a Nightfang Panther is.
It could hand me an A-grade swordmaster. It could hand me a competent accountant. It handed me a frightened archer three days ago and she was worth more than most of the men in that room.
And if it goes badly, the Panther will make the largest contribution by eating me.
The charge was available. That was the only certainty I had managed to bring to the meeting, and I had let an entire room mistake it for confidence.