Chapter 69: THE KILL
They struck camp at first bell.
The senior had the eight of them lined up in the time a man took to fold a bedroll. He read their faces, not their coats. Same as the first morning.
Aiden had the kit bag on his shoulder, Miasma on top of it, Nyx in the dark of his own coat between his arm and his side. The small Hearthcat was at his boot before the boy in livery had finished standing up.
"East to the lower marches," the senior said. "Half a day. Camp at the burn line at the edge of the lightning ground. New rotation tomorrow."
He looked at Aiden once.
"You walk with the apprentice at second flank. Same instruction. You log. You do not engage. If you cannot disengage, you call the hawk. It is working further out today. Fifty seconds, not forty."
"Sir."
They walked east.
The road ran along the foot of the old burn for two miles, then climbed into ground that had burned longer ago.
The trees out here were not the trees inside. These were taller. Blackened to the upper third. The branches above the burn line were gone entirely, where the second-growth trees still had theirs. The floor between them was open. He could see two hundred paces between the trunks.
The light was different.
Yesterday’s cloud had come up from over the lower marches in a low grey ceiling. This morning’s was a different cloud. Thinner, higher. The light came through it flat and even from everywhere at once, so nothing on the ground threw a shadow. Every trunk stood clear of every other trunk. He could see how far apart they were and how far the gaps ran.
Open ground. Shadow Step works out here.
The boy walked beside him. The small cat at his boot. He had his notebook in his coat. He had not written anything in it yet today.
The first lightning tree came up at the third ridge.
It was further out than Aiden would have placed it from the road. The boy saw it first.
"There."
Aiden looked.
A tree older than anything else standing. Twice the height of the burned ones around it. A black scar ran down the trunk on the southwest side where lightning had come off the top and gone to ground. The scar had been there long enough that the bark had grown a ridge along both edges of it.
The top of the tree was dead. Above the scar there was no crown, only a wide flat spread of grey deadwood the size of a small roof.
Below the scar the trunk was alive. Green bark. Living branches. On one of them, hanging out over the burn floor, were the small dark fruits the man in the herb lane had cut open in front of him.
Embercore.
He noted third ridge.
The boy did not write it.
"My master told me to log lightning trees if I saw them," the boy said. "But not to write what was on them."
"Why."
"Because a house owns what grows on them. He said if I write it down, my name ends up on a page next to something a house owns. He said that kind of page finds people."
Aiden looked at the tree.
Twenty gold, he wanted. For one of those. Off a tree standing half a day from West Gate on a road that has been in the city’s books for centuries.
A house that wanted this tree took it a long time ago. The price is what they charge for taking it.
He went on.
The new camp was at the burn line itself, where the old burn ended, and the unburned forest began.
The senior set the camp on the burn side because the burn side did not have a canopy and the canopy made his hawk’s work harder.
A ring of blackened stones sat in the middle of the clearing. Somebody else’s fire, some other season. The water source was a small spring that ran out from under stone twenty paces north.
He set his bedroll.
The senior gave him the second-flank assignment at half-bell. Aiden walked it with the boy and the cat.
The lower marches out here had the same shape as the trail they had walked the last two days. Slope, second growth, the upper slope above somewhere, but the second growth had different trees in it. Older. The floor harder. The trails along it cut deeper.
He read trails.
He had walked twenty paces in when Miasma’s spines came up.
The single rise.
He stopped.
The boy stopped behind Aiden. The small Hearthcat stopped at his boot. He looked along the trail.
The cat’s ears were working. Forward, hold. Forward, hold. The boy had learned to read the ears before anything else in the field.
The wind had been steady all day. It turned now, crossing the slope instead of running down it, which put his scent out ahead of him.
He watched the grass heads to see which way it was going. Then he moved two paces downslope and waited for it to settle. A lock opened when it was ready to. So did ground.
A Greyhide Boar came out of the second growth thirty paces ahead.
Tier 2. Grey plate ran from the shoulders down the back to the hips in fitted segments, overlapping like roof tiles. The tusks lay flat against the lower jaw, not raised. The eyes were small and forward. The body was the size of a calf and the weight of two men.
There was blood on the lower jaw. Not its own.
The boar saw them.
The eyes did not change. The tusks did not move. Then the whole body turned a shoulder’s width toward them, and the tusks came up off the jaw.
It decided.
It came fast. Too fast to step clear of.
The boar did not run. It came in a straight line with its head down, pushing off the ground with all four feet at once. Aiden felt each stride come up through his boots before it had covered ten paces.
He had the small blade out of his boot. He had Nyx going off his side without speaking to her. The small cat was already pushing the boy back down the trail behind him.
The boar’s plate was the problem.
The knife was no good on plate. He had put it under ribs before. This thing had no ribs a blade could reach.
The plate had joints. Two on each side, where the segments met above the shoulder and the hip. Two fingers across. He could not hit them with a knife on a moving animal.
He spoke without looking at her.
"The joint. Shoulder. Two finger widths."
Miasma was already off the kit bag.
She went across his chest and off his shoulder in one motion and jumped. Not at the boar’s head. At the shoulder, on the outside, where the plate segments overlapped. She landed on the boar’s back with her forefeet on the front plate and her mouth over the seam.
She put the acid into the seam and came off the boar’s opposite flank, back onto the trail.
The seam softened where the acid landed. The two plates had been locked together. Now the front one slid on the back one instead of holding against it. The boar’s next stride pushed its shoulder forward. The front plate went with it, and the seam pulled open a hand’s width.
Wet grey meat under it. No plate on the meat.
Aiden stepped inside the swing of the tusks and put the blade in the gap.
He pushed twice and pulled it out.
The left foreleg buckled on the next stride. The whole weight of the animal came down on that side. He stepped off the trail as the body hit the ground where he had been standing.
The boar lay on its side and did not get up. It was still breathing.
He stood at the edge of the trail with the blade in his hand and pulled a full breath. It went all the way down and came back.
A year ago a close kill on a body that size would have put his chest on the trail beside the boar. Tonight the lung did the work. It took half a minute before the boar’s breath did not come back in.
The small cat was not at his boot.
He looked.
The cat was three paces back along the trail, between the boy and the place the boar had charged from. Ears forward. Still. Ready for something it had decided to watch and not fight.
Aiden went to the boy.
"You logged it."
"I logged it."
"Write what I tell you. Greyhide Boar. Tier two. Coming at second flank on the lower marches trail. Killed by the lamplighter with knife and beast. Joint above the shoulder, left side. Body left on trail at the third hundred paces from camp."
The boy wrote it.
"What else."
Aiden looked at the boar. He looked at the blood on its lower jaw that was not its own.
"The boar was on a kill before it came at second flank. Kill not identified. Kill not approached."
The boy wrote it.
They walked back to the camp.
The senior took the report. He wrote it down. He did not write a second column.
The senior looked at Aiden once, the same brief look.
"You put your beast on it."
"I did."
"Directing a beast to strike counts as engagement. I am writing it as beast deployment, defensive, no admit injury. The Academy has a column for engagement and paper that goes with it. I am not the man who fills the column."
"Sir."
The senior closed the book.
"The other flank reports at last light. Eat. Sit down. Do not leave the burn side without me."
He went.
The cry from upslope did not come at last light.
The wind came out of the east, off the lower marches. It brought the smell of the burn and the wet green under it.
And then, thin under both, blood.
Aiden stood at the edge of the burn side, where the burn side became the lower trail. He had not cleaned the blade yet.
The boy sat behind him with the notebook closed under his coat. The small cat sat between the boy and the trail.
He listened.
The open burn carried sound like an empty street. No leaves, no undergrowth, nothing between him and the trail but flat black ground.
It came thin and steady from three hundred paces off. Not teeth on plate. Something working at a body. Wet, unhurried, going on and on.
I killed it and left it on the trail. The body brought something down off the slope.
Whatever is out there did not have to make that kill. It just had to wait for me to make it.
And it is three hundred paces from the boy.
He did not move.
The boy behind him did not move.
The sound on the trail went on a long time before it stopped. After it stopped, the wind out of the east kept coming, and the smell kept coming with it. The cry did not come.
Yesterday it had cried twice and gone hungry. Tonight it had a body and nothing to say.