Chapter 71 — Before They Move I
**POV: Jace**
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My left foot was still nailed to the floor.
There was no floor and no foot and I was somewhere with nothing in it, and the ankle kept reporting a stone it was welded through, over and over, because that is the last thing it had to say.
> **[Mimesis activated.]**
>
> **[Killer identified: Søren Juel.]**
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> **[Three concealed Ability Cards generated.]**
>
> **[Choose one.]**
Violet. Red. Silver.
Silver is S and S is the highest thing on that table, and I did not spend any part of a second on the other two.
> **[Selection confirmed.]**
>
> **[Remaining Ability Cards destroyed.]**
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> **[Ability copied.]**
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> **[Snare — S acquired.]**
> **[Snare — S]**
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> **[Type: Active Control Ability.]**
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> **[The user fixes a point of contact between a target and the surface beneath it. The contact cannot be lifted, slid or rotated for the duration.]**
>
> **[Snare does not restrain the rest of the body.]**
>
> **[Range: eight metres.]**
The thing that killed me. Twice, inside about four minutes, and the second one was the one that mattered.
> **[Ability source recorded: Søren Juel.]**
>
> **[One Ability has been copied from this source.]**
>
> **[Ability source exhausted.]**
> **[Ouroboros activated.]**
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> **[Regression point established: Twelve hours before death.]**
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> **[Memories, Levels, EXP, Attributes, unassigned Attribute Points and acquired Abilities will be preserved.]**
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> **[Physical condition and Mana will be restored.]**
>
> **[Now regressing.]**
---
Wet leaves.
That is what arrived first, and the change was so complete that my whole body flinched with it.
One breath I had cold stone under my shoulder blades and blood filling the small of my back and a taste of my own teeth in my mouth.
The next breath was soil.
Damp bark, rot, resin underneath both. Something small rattling in the canopy about twenty metres up. Mist against the side of my face, moving.
I was walking.
My boots were coming down in leaf litter and lifting out of it heavy, and there was a stitch under my left ribs that had been there for two hours in this version of the day, and my ankle was completely fine.
I put weight through it twice to check.
Fine. Both of them.
> **[STATUS]**
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> **[Level: 9.]**
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> **[EXP: 820/900.]**
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> **[Health: 340/340.]**
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> **[Mana: 230/240.]**
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> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 12.]**
Nine. Everything I got out of the Dullahan is still sitting there.
And a seventh line on the Ability list that was not there this morning.
---
"You have stopped."
Gideon, four metres to my right, with leaf mulch on one boot and his eyes on the treeline rather than on me.
"Root," I said.
I counted while I got moving again, because I always do now.
Gideon Rook. Declan O’Rourke, twelve metres ahead, spear across his back. Ewan Calder with his hand flat on a trunk as he passed it. Erik Lind. Clara Vogel cutting bark off a tree at shoulder height.
The same six. It is always the same six and it will be the same six in every version of this day, and I have stopped testing it.
Seven hours into the second layer. Two hours before we take the rise between the four trunks.
Erik has not opened the storage ring yet. Ewan has not produced the bottles. Nobody has said a word about a watch rotation.
---
Here is what I did not do.
I did not go to Gideon and tell him Ewan Calder is going to open his throat on the first watch tonight.
I have done that. It worked exactly as intended, which is the problem.
Ewan died in the leaves, Declan ran and died north-east of him, and eleven hours later I stood in a stone chamber with a broken leg while three men who were still alive took the raid apart.
Two of the five went into the ground before the boss and it changed nothing at the end, and it cost us something.
Because Declan O’Rourke put a hand into a Level Thirty-Seven Giant’s knee in Lycaon and opened it up like a bag, and Ewan Calder can cut things nobody else on that roster can cut.
We killed that Giant with five. It nearly took two of us.
We killed the Dullahan with eighteen and buried two more.
Those two men are murderers and I am going to need both of them.
---
I did not enjoy arriving at that.
But I have run this dungeon three times now and I know what the arithmetic looks like from the other end.
There is a version of this where I keep everybody standing until the boss goes down, and then deal with all five at once, in a lit chamber, in front of witnesses, with a Red Gate Player beside me.
They do not kill anybody before the exit opens. That is the whole condition.
If I can hold that line, they can carry shields for me until then.
---
I put Gideon behind a trunk about twenty minutes later while Clara was cutting her next mark.
"O’Rourke and Calder."
He did not ask me what about them.
"Go on."
"They are not what they look like. Neither of them. And they have worked together before, whatever they told Renard in the screening."
"How do you know that."
"I cannot give you that."
Something moved at the corner of his jaw and stayed there.
"Right," he said. "Then tell me what you want, since I am apparently doing this."
"Nothing. That is the point." I kept my voice under the sound of Clara’s knife. "Do not confront them. Do not test them. Do not let them see you looking at them differently."
"You want me to stand next to two men you have just told me are dangerous and do nothing at all."
"Until one of them moves first. Yes."
He looked at me for a while.
"And if one of them moves first?"
"Then you do whatever you want."
—
He gave me two conditions and I took both of them.
"Nobody goes anywhere alone from here. Not to relieve themselves, not for firewood, not to check a noise."
"Agreed."
"And you sleep between me and Lind."
I opened my mouth.
"That one is not negotiable, Nolan, and I am not interested in whether it insults you."
"Fine."
After that he went back to the group and did not once look at either of them for longer than he looked at anybody else, and if I had not been the person who told him, I would not have known anything had changed.
Except that he stopped taking the front position.
He walked the middle for the rest of the afternoon, where Declan and Ewan were both in front of him.
---
We covered the same ground.
Two more hours of trunks I have walked past three times, with the mulch giving under the boots and the mist lying in flat sheets between the roots and the light going grey by degrees under all that canopy.
The insects came up every time we stopped and cut out every time we started.
We found the four-toed track in the wet soil and Ewan crouched over it with his fingers spread beside it for scale, the same as always, and stood up without saying what he thought.
Then the rise between the four broad trunks, because it is the best ground and everybody can see it is the best ground.
Clara scraped the leaf litter back to bare soil in a ring.
Erik produced four kilos of meat and defended himself against the accusation of having done so, and I stood at the edge of the light and let him.
I have watched that man turn that meat on those coals twice now.
Once, he was proud of it and had his face lit orange, and forty minutes later there was a line across his throat and his axe was two and a half metres from his hand.