The first thing that bit was the rope.
It had been cut from a mule line—coarse, stiff with sweat and grit—and whoever tied Ryn's wrists had hauled the knots down until the fibers groaned. Every time the cart hit a rut the rope abraded his skin and the pain ran up his forearms like heat, but the worst of it wasn't the scraping. It was the way his fingers had already begun to go numb. Wrong for a wheelwright's hand. Wrong for any hand that wanted to still be a hand tomorrow.
"Down," someone barked.
The caravan lurched to a halt. The old road slithered between low hills covered in scrub and late summer grass, gold and crackling dry. Ahead, a fallen tree blocked both ruts. It hadn't fallen; Ryn knew a cut when he saw one. He also knew a rope when he smelled it, and the smell clung to the stump—sap, an hour old. The blockade was fresh.
He turned his head and squinted under the brim of his hat. On the wagon's right side, Dorran slid from his saddle. The old guard's boots touched ground soft, shield up on reflex, eyes going for the high ground. Marla stood on the front bench of the lead wagon, reins in one fist, jaw set and eyes hard. She didn't look at Ryn. She looked at the block and the shadowed brush beyond it and shifted her weight just a hair, left foot back. She knew what this was. The mules did too—ears flat, white showing, tails twitching.
Ryn's wrists burned again under the rope for no good reason. He had asked to ride the tail of the second wagon so he could mind the lashings on the crates, the way he always did on rough stretches. He had not thought about what it meant to be nearest whatever ran up from behind.
Movement in the brush. Men. Brown and green and dirt, not uniforms, not militia. Long knives, two spears, three bows. One man stepped out first because there is always one man who thinks the world is a stage and he is old enough to play on it. He wore a clean shirt under a jerkin and a scarf around his throat. He smiled without humor and lifted his hands open, palms up; the universal gesture of someone who wanted to talk while everyone else drew breath to kill.
"Evening!" he called. "Road's not safe these days. Dangerous, even. Monsters out past the bend."
"Then you should get off it," Marla said. "We have places to be."
"Ah," the man said, like she'd made a joke together with him. "That's the problem. We all have places to be. Hard to be anywhere when your goods aren't taxed properly. Garron's lot keeps this stretch clean. You pay, you pass. Don't pay…" He shrugged. "You don't pass."
Ryn leaned forward, the rope grinding. There was a loose bolt in the right front yoke on the first wagon. He'd seen it when they broke camp at dawn and meant to ask for a pause to set it. He hadn't. It sat there like a curse, the square head just starting to fret out threads, the split pin bent.
Dorran's voice, low. "Bowmen in the brush," he murmured without turning his head. "Two on the east, one west. Spearmen by the log. More behind."
Marla flicked the reins, only enough to settle the mules. "How much tax?" she said.
"A fair rate," scarf-man said smoothly. He looked down the line, counted carts by eye, counted faces, assessed the weapons. He was good at this. He gestured with two fingers. "Two silver a head and five a mule."
Marla laughed, flat and short. "If your road were clean I'd pay you five and shake. As it is, you came late. We were already on it."
Scarf-man's eyes cooled. He didn't look at Ryn yet. He looked past him, down the back trail. No dust. No rescue. He motioned with his hand, not a command yet, the way a man does when he's timed something and likes the way the timing feels in his teeth.
Ryn curled his fingers, or tried to. The numbness crept another joint up. He could wiggle his thumbs. Not enough. The rope cut across the backs of his hands and under his wrists. The fiber bit into the swell of the bones. The knot was a wagoner's square, good enough to hold a load against a jerk. He should know; he'd tied a thousand. The man who tied him had pulled the free ends through until the rope whined.
Marla said, "Better man than you tried this last month on the north road. He went home limping and short five men. That was a good day. Pick another wagon, friend."
"Better men than me die all the time," scarf-man said. "So do worse. No shame in it. Last chance. Drop your blades and pay." He looked slightly past Marla then, eyes flicking to the far side of the wagon team, the way a man marks a flank with a glance. "Garron doesn't like his afternoon wasted."
Dorran shifted his shield, just a hair, and the boss edge scraped the wooden rim. Ryn heard it and heard something else under it. The wind had been steady all morning out of the west. Now it stuttered and turned. He lifted his head and sniffed. Under the dust and mule and rope and sweat there was a sweet rot stink, thin but getting thicker. His stomach dipped.
Marla's eyes narrowed. She'd smelled it too. For a heartbeat everything was very still. Even the mules froze, ears pricked.
From the treeline behind scarf-man came a sound like wet meat being flung against stones. Then a hiss. Something the size of a dog but wrong in all the important ways scrambled from the brush. Its limbs were too long and jointed too many times. Its head was a wedge covered in pallid plates, with a mouth that didn't close right. Its skin was the color of old fat and bruises. The arrows the bowmen loosed skittered off the plates and stuck in the meat between; the thing did not care. It slammed into a man in a vest and he went over backwards with a sound like a bag of flour dropped from a height. Blood sprayed across the crushed grass, and the smell of it… the smell turned the whole road.
Everything that was going to happen happened at once.
"Back!" Dorran shouted, but the mules went forward, panic moving them before commands. Marla yanked hard on the reins and the loose bolt in the yoke wobbled, and the wheel lifted, and the whole cart groaned. The bows snapped and a horse screamed and the men in the brush lost their line discipline because a monster does not care about your plans. Scarf-man's calm broke for one heartbeat and he snarled, a flash of teeth, and then he was screaming orders at his men, voice cracking like a whip.
Ryn didn't think. He snapped his wrists down and then up and twisted, and the rope bit harder, and the pain washed him clean and bright. He bent forward and bit the rope and tasted mule and spit and dirt and salt. He worked at the fibers with his teeth like a starving man working a bone and felt only the slightest give. The rope didn't care about his teeth either.
A body slammed against the side of the second wagon and Ryn's shoulder took the blow through pine boards. He looked down. A woman from the third cart—dark hair, greasy rag tied around it—had fallen and was scrambling on her hands and knees. She was saying something. Ryn couldn't hear. His hearing had narrowed to rope grinding and the warble of donkey panic and the insect-buzz scream of the thing in the road.
"Ryn!" Marla shouted. He looked up. She wasn't looking at him; she was looking at the rear wheel of the lead wagon, at the loose bolt, mouth shaping a curse. "Brace that—"
A man came from the side, a blur of brown and steel, and Dorran's shield came up and took him in the face, and Ryn saw the flat iron edge catch a cheekbone and the cheekbone gave. The man sagged and then slid down and Dorran kicked him and stepped over him and kept moving because there were three more.
The thing from the brush leaped again and hit a bandit on the spear line and they went down together, rolling in the dirt, one stabbing, one chewing. The chewing made a noise like gristle torn with teeth. The blood smell went copper-sweet and made Ryn's mouth water and he almost vomited.
He looked down again, at his hands, and the rope was still rope. There was a nail kern wedged under the seat plank where he had tucked it that morning when he re-slung the spare lashings. He couldn't get it. His hands were bound behind him and the angle was wrong. He leaned forward until his face touched the seat, forehead pressed against splintered grain, and worked his right wrist enough to hook the rope on a rusty screw head sticking up from the wood. He dragged. The fibers squealed and caught and something shifted. He dragged again and his skin peeled, and his head filled with the bright white scream of nerves, and then the rope slipped half a thumb and his right hand flicked like a fish.
Two more pulls and the screw tore a line in his flesh and the rope loosened. He yanked and the world narrowed to the point of his fingernails and his jaw clamped and his teeth ground and then the rope let go of his right wrist. His hand flopped, blood slick. He twisted and dragged the rope off the left and then he was free and the mules went sideways and the cart jerked and he slammed into the bench with his chest and saw stars.
"Ryn!" Marla again, somewhere to the left past the scream of the mules.
He slid off the bench and landed wrong but didn't care. The world was heat and dust and bodies and the thick smell of iron. He ducked under the wagon, grabbing for anything he could use. His fingers closed on something long and heavy. A pry bar, the one he'd set on the rack that morning and forgotten to tie.
He came out the other side and the carrion thing—that's what the hunters called the small ones in the markets, carrion whelps, fast and stupid—was on its feet with its jaws working like a hinge deep in something's shoulder. It turned its wedge head toward him and made a noise like a hiss dragged through a flute. It stank like meat that had been left in water too long.
Ryn brought the pry bar up and did what Dorran had told him once, years ago, outside a tavern where a man had run at him with a broken bottle: don't aim for a moving thing. Aim for where it will be when you finish. The whelp moved low and to his right. He swung like prying up a stuck wheel: firm and true. The bar caught it at the hinge where the plates didn't cover and there was a sound he would later hear in his dreams, a hard wet thock, and the pry bar skittered and the head of the thing stopped moving while the legs kept running for two steps and then fell.
A taste like pennies flooded his mouth.
Something cold slid behind his eyes, a little shock that was not fear, not exactly. A rectangle of pale light blinked at the edge of his vision the way a lantern reflected in a puddle does. He blinked. It didn't go away.
[You have slain: Carrion Whelp (L2). Experience gained: 14.]
The words were crisp and colorless, and they did not care about the blood on his hands or the man screaming somewhere to his right. They hung for a moment and then slid away like someone had pulled them down a page.
Ryn swallowed. He felt the pry bar in his bloody hand and the weight of it. He knew what the words meant because everyone knew the stories, but a story is a rope tied around someone else's waist. It does not feel like the knot biting your skin.
Behind him, under the first wagon, someone moved. Dorran. The shield boss scraped again. Ryn dropped to a crouch and saw the old guard's boots, one turning, one planted. Something grabbed Ryn's ankle and he yanked back and brought the pry bar down again, hard, and the hand that had grabbed him stopped being a hand.
"You—" Dorran grunted. He wasn't speaking to Ryn. His voice was directed at a wide world that didn't care. "On me! On—"
Arrows thunked into the wagon side above Ryn's head. He felt the vibration through the plank. He crawled under the wagon's belly, not caring about the grease and dirt now, not caring about the splinters. On the other side, the woman with the greasy rag around her hair had crawled under as well. He grabbed her arm and dragged and she bit his hand, hard enough to break skin, panicked as a rat. He slapped her, once, with the flat of his hand. "Under!" he shouted in her face. "Stay." Words were terrible things. Sometimes they worked.
She stilled. He saw her eyes focus. She slid farther under and made herself small. Good. He shoved himself out from under and the sun made his eyes water. The road was chaos.
Marla stood on the bench of the lead wagon, reins wrapped around her hand and looped around the brake post, face gray with effort. One of the mules had gone to its knees and the wheel had kissed its hock and the animal was screaming. The bolt in the yoke wobbled dangerously. Another few jerks and the friction would fret it loose and the wheel would come away and then the world would tilt and not come back.
"Ryn!" Marla. Her eyes found him now. He knew what she wanted without her saying it. The bolt. He shoved the pry bar through his belt and ran forward, bent low. An arrow grazed his hat brim and the straw fibers exploded. He flinched but kept running.
A figure stepped out from the brush to his right and Ryn saw him only as a blur at the edge of his eye, but the blur said something that cut through the noise around it like a blade: "Half-blood."
Ryn's stomach went cold.
He didn't turn. He had a job. He slid to his knees at the wagon's front and jammed his shoulder under the yoke to take some of the weight while he felt for the bolt with his bleeding fingers. The split pin was bent. He got two nails under it and wrenched and it came a little and then snapped and lodged. He needed a hammer. He didn't have a hammer. He had a pry bar and a desire not to die today.
He used the pry bar as a drift, wedged it under the bolt head, and hammered it with the heel of his hand. Pain flared up his arm and made his vision go narrow. He hammered again and the bolt shifted and then seated and the yoke bit down harder and the mule's scream changed tenor and then stuttered as the animal found its feet.
Marla's hand grabbed the back of his collar and hauled because she did not have a free hand and the reins were life and the brake was life and Ryn was not life to her yet. He didn't mind. He slid sideways and came up under the wheel and snatched his pry bar out and then something hit him from the side and he rolled and the bar went somewhere he couldn't see.
Another whelp burst from under the brush, smaller than the first, a juvenile, and went for the nearest moving thing that wasn't already killing it. A bandit stepped into its path and pinned it with a spear, to his credit, but as he did his eyes flipped up and looked over Ryn's shoulder and he smiled with his mouth and then his eyes. Ryn knew without turning that the thing he'd been trying not to see had arrived.
A man stood in the road as if it were a hall laid for him. He was not scarf-man. He wore no scarf. He wore graft.
The chitin plates shone on his left arm in a way no oil made shine. They grew out of his flesh at the edges, under the skin, like something foreign had been fit under muscle and bone and called friendly by scar. His other arm was normal, ropey and strong, veins ridged. He did not hold his shoulders like a man with something to prove. He held them like a man who knew exactly how much he weighed and where that weight would fall when he stepped.
He didn't wear a helmet. He didn't need to raise his voice. "Drop bows," he said, and the bowmen did, as if their bows had suddenly become heavy. He looked at Marla and then down at Ryn and then down at the bolt, and then he looked at Dorran, and in that one glance Ryn saw the way he measured men. "You've given my man a good lesson in stubborn today," he said. "Marla, is it? I've heard the name."
Marla didn't answer. Her jaw flexed.
Garron—because of course it was Garron, even if no one had said the name yet—turned his head just enough that Ryn knew he was looking at the fallen tree, the slope, the ruts. He stepped up on the cut stump as if it were a step to a different place. He swung his chitin arm one time, casual as a man testing a new hammer, and the plates flexed and clicked softly and the sound made Ryn's teeth hurt.
He looked at Ryn's ears. Ryn felt heat climb his neck. He knew what the man saw: a shade of a point under the hair, the odd cast to the cheekbones, the way Ryn's eyes went gold in a certain light. The word half-blood hung in the air, said once already by someone who wished he'd been the first to say it. Garron's face did not twist with disgust. That almost made it worse.
"Useful hands," Garron said, almost approving. "I need those." He looked to his left. "Bring him."
Two men started forward. Dorran shifted his weight and the line of his shoulders said he was about to make a very bad choice and then live with it or not live. Marla's mouth opened to shout something Ryn would later be angry about her saying and then never be able to be angry to her face about again. The world held its breath.
Something shrieked from the left, down in the ditch. It wasn't a whelp. It was bigger. The grass parted like water. The ditch collapsed under the wave of its body and black earth went up in a spray and the thing came over, pale and wet and covered in grit, and its mouth was a long slice and it had teeth like nails and its eyes were holes.
Chaos broke again. Garron didn't move, which was how Ryn knew he was the kind of dangerous that counted. He didn't step back or side. He twisted his torso slightly and brought up his chitin arm and the thing's bite slid across the plate and sparks flew, actual sparks, God help them. He put his other hand into its face and shoved, and its head went at a bad angle with a sound like a wet sack torn.
Ryn didn't watch the rest. He ran.
He didn't run away from Garron exactly. He ran along the wagon, which was a kind of away that might not cost his life yet. He ducked under the tail and grabbed the med satchel he'd seen Marla kick there an hour ago when the mules had skittered at a snake. He didn't grab the little chest with the wrapped coin. He thought about it and did not. He grabbed the satchel because Dorran was bleeding and because the woman under the wagon might be bleeding and because if he had thought about the coin he would have frozen and someone would have died and he had made promises to himself that had the shape of knots, not of words.
As he stood, the rectangular pale light slid into his vision again. The words were different this time. They felt like cold fingers touching his neck.
[Threat Response Engaged.]
[Instanced Skill Path available: Makeshift Trap I — Requirements met.]
It felt like a joke told at the wrong table. Somewhere under the words was a humming, low and steady, like a wire tugged tight in wind. He shook his head and the humming stayed. He shoved the satchel over his shoulder and felt the strap cut into skin he had already abraded against rope. He forced his hands to move. Hands first. Mind later. Marla had said it once when the axle pin seized on a cold morning: "Trust your hands. Your head will catch up."
He slid around the wheel and grabbed a jar of lamp oil from the crate where he'd lashed it. He dug into his pocket for the little bag of nodules he kept for making fire—old resin and a sliver of flint wrapped in cloth. He tore the cloth with his teeth. Create, don't invent. He jammed a rag into the oil jar's mouth and splashed his fingers down the side. He shoved the pry bar through his belt and grabbed a coil of light cord from the tool basket and tied the jar to it, double-twisting the knot without thinking, muscle memory faster than fear. He struck flint with his knife and the spark caught and then didn't and then did, and he breathed and it licked up the rag, and he swung the jar and threw it at the brush to the east where he had seen movement and heard a bow creak. The jar arced and hit and broke with a glass scream and the oil caught and ran like water along the ground and the brush went up with a whoomp. A man in the brush screamed because fire is a poor friend when you don't offer it a place.
The pale words came back, curt and clinical.
[Skill Acquired: Makeshift Trap I.]
[Skill Acquired: Quickstep I.]
He didn't feel faster. He felt like a man who had thrown a jar of fire and now had to live with the fact that he had made fire and it would do what fire does regardless of his hopes. He yanked the cord back in because cord is expensive and he would need it, and the end came back sodden and smoking and he hissed and dropped it and stomped the ember and smelled burned oil and his stomach told him that nothing is ever clean.
Dorran staggered into him. Blood sheeted down the old guard's left arm. His right hand still held the shield. His eyes were very bright and very far away. "Under," Dorran said, and Ryn understood he was being offered shelter, not given an order. He shoved Dorran toward the space under the wagon and Dorran went down on knees and his breath came hard through his teeth. Ryn tore open the med satchel and drew a roll of linen and shoved it against the cut. "Hold," he said, and Dorran laughed once, old and harsh, and pressed.
"Half-blood," someone said again, closer. Ryn turned.
The man with the scarf had lost his scarf. His face was slick with blood from a cut across the scalp and it made him look younger and stupider. He held a knife with a blade like a sliver of sky when clouds break and sun burns it bright. He grinned. "Garron'll pay for your ears," he said. "Two silver a—"
Ryn stepped into him and hit him in the throat with the heel of his hand because Dorran had once said, "Cut words short," and the man gagged and his knife drooped and Ryn brought his knee up and then his hand down and the knife came free and the man folded sideways. Ryn would later remember the smell of his breath more than the feel of the blade in his hand, onions and beer and hunger.
A shadow fell cold on Ryn's left. He turned and saw the chitin arm and the man attached to it and understood that even with fire and jars and dead small monsters, the road belonged to this one right now.
Garron's eyes moved the way a craftsman's do when he sees a tool he hasn't used and thinks of what it could do in his hand. He looked at the burned brush, at the jar shards, at the cord. He looked at the bolt he'd seated. His mouth didn't smile and his eyes didn't either.
"You work quick," Garron said. "Come along."
Ryn's hands tightened on the knife without him telling them to. He wanted to say no in a way that would make the man step back. He wanted to say no in a way that would not get Marla and Dorran killed. He had nothing. He had a satchel and a pry bar and a knife and blood on his hands. He had rope burns that would scar if he lived long enough to care.
He took a breath to buy one heartbeat of time, because sometimes a breath is a wedge you can get in where there is no seam. The breath was sour with smoke and iron.
There was a sound then, not the scream of a thing with a mouth but a kind of far-off chorus; not voices, not exactly. It came from down the road, around the bend where the grass grew taller and where, last week, Marla had stopped to let the mules drink because the ditch there held a little water. It came in pulses, like something thinking, like something counting, and each pulse tugged at the hairs on Ryn's forearms.
He looked past Garron's shoulder and saw, beyond the fallen tree, beyond the bodies and the blood and the smoke, a standing stone at the mile mark leaning a little to the west. He had rubbed his hand along it that morning in passing because the grain of the stone reminded him of wheel spokes, tight and true. Now the stone hummed, just audible under the shouting and the fire. The humming had the same pitch as the cold in his head. The rectangle of pale light flirted again at the edge of his vision and then vanished.
Ryn took one small step back. Garron didn't stop him. Garron looked toward the stone too. For the first time, something flickered across his face that might have been annoyance. He lifted his chin slightly, as if to taste the wind.
Marla swore, a word Ryn had only heard her use once, when a wheel slid off a rock shelf with a man under it. "No," she said. "Not now."
She wasn't talking to Garron.
"Bring him," Garron said again without looking away from the stone, and a man grabbed Ryn's shoulder and shoved, and the shove became a hard grip around his upper arm, the kind that says I will break this if you do not listen.
Ryn went. He could run. He could knife. He could throw and pray and burn and die. He wasn't ready to die because of a man who didn't know a square knot from a clove hitch. He walked, careful, mind flitting like a bird trapped in a house. He let the man's hand guide him because his own hands were doing sums and those sums needed more time.
They cleared the front of the wagon. The mile stone hummed again, louder. A new sliver of the pale-not-light traced the air in front of Ryn's eyes, fainter now, like chalk lines rubbed with a thumb. He swallowed.
Garron spoke without looking at him. "You going to make me teach you, boy?"
Ryn didn't answer. He adjusted his grip on the knife. He let his eyes go to the ditch beyond the standing stone. He pictured the stone up close. He pictured the crack at its base, the one he had seen yesterday while he pissed behind it because he had been too lazy to walk up the rise and do it out of sight of the road. There had been something glinting in the crack. He had thought about fishing it out and hadn't. He had saved his hands, not wanting to get cut for no reason.
Now the road and the cut and the crack and the hum and the pale words that had no business in his head made an ugly knot in his chest.
"Move," the man holding him said, and shoved, and Ryn stumbled forward, feet skidding in dust, and the hum from the stone climbed one thin notch. Above them, in the brush, a carrion whelp screamed—one note, abrupt—and stopped.
Chapter one ended with no clean break and no safety. It ended with Ryn being hauled toward a stone that hummed like a plucked wire, Garron's chitin arm a dark crescent at the edge of his sight, and in the moment before the next breath, the System cleared its throat in his skull and said something new.
[Directive Available: Interface with Local Node? Y/N]
He didn't answer. He couldn't. He did the only thing he knew mattered when the line is taut and the knot is untested. He lifted his eyes and measured the distance to the crack at the base of the stone, and the length of his own reach, and the time between pulses.
His fingers twitched and remembered rope. He counted, barely moving his lips. One. Two.
He stepped.