The hand on Ryn's arm tightened as the pulse from the mile stone climbed again, a tremor you could have mistaken for a change in wind if you hadn't felt it in your teeth. Dust hung in the air. The ditch beyond the stone was churned black where the bigger thing had wriggled through; the clay there sweated, slick and gleaming. Garron moved without hurry, a step to the stump, the stump to the road, bringing the weight of his men's eyes with him like a tide.
"Move," the bandit snarled, and shoved Ryn again.
Ryn's heel slid on a smear of blood. He shifted his weight, not fighting the momentum but angling it, letting the shove carry him a half-step farther toward the stone's base. He didn't look at Garron. He didn't look at the man holding him. He looked at the crack at the bottom of the leaning marker where water and frost had worried the stone for years until it had a mouth. Something metallic wavered in there, thin and sharp, like a shard of mirror set into mud.
The System's cold rectangle whispered again at the edge of his vision.
[Directive Available: Interface with Local Node? Y/N]
It felt like someone asking if he wanted to drink from a cup while he was drowning. He breathed, and the breath went shallow and fast.
The man's fingers dug into his bicep hard enough to bruise. "I said—"
Ryn dropped like a sack with a cut bottom.
He let his knees go. He let his wrists go loose. He twisted under the man's grip and slid, shoulder almost popping in its socket. The hand snatched for him and got his sleeve and tore it and then there was nothing in the hand but cloth. Ryn's knees hit dirt and he felt the impact in his teeth and then he pushed with both feet and slid the last half-yard on his side like a boy playing at ice, and his left hand went for the crack.
The stone's hum jumped. It was not a sound you could hear with ears alone; it was a sensation in the bones. When his palm touched the lip of the crack, the hum changed again, up and thinner, high wire stretched one notch more.
His fingers found the shard. Cold. Smoother than stone. The edge of it bit his fingertip as if it had been waiting to bite. He wedged two fingers behind it and hauled.
"Get him!" someone screamed, and boots scraped, and a bow twanged. Dorran shouted something wordless behind him. A mule's brief hysterical bray cut off like a torch snuffed with a wet hand.
The shard tore free with a feeling like pulling a nail out of green wood. Ryn's hand came back with it. It looked wrong—thin as glass, not glass; pale as quartz, not stone; run through with hair-thin lines that moved like water. For an instant, the thing was just a thing in a dirty hand. Then it was not a thing. It was a mouth opening near his face and taking air.
The world tilted.
His vision went double and then treble. The lines in the shard crawled and settled and crawled again. Where skin met shard, cold ran up his arm—cold like a winter wheel when you forgot your gloves and grabbed iron with bare hands, cold that bites and doesn't care. He sucked in a breath, and the breath had edges.
Someone grabbed his shoulder again, hard, to haul him upright. Garron leaned a fraction, muscles indexing under gear, eyes on the shard now. "Hold," he snapped, and for one heartbeat the hands on Ryn obeyed the other man's voice rather than the urge to punch and drag. Garron's head tilted. The air was a taut string between the three of them—Ryn, the shard, the man who wore chitin like clothing under skin.
The System made a noise inside Ryn's head that felt like a door opening on oiled hinges. The clinical text slid into his sight, closer than his own breath.
[Local Node (Fragment) detected.]
[Warning: Node integrity compromised. Interface unstable.]
[User: Unregistered. Eligibility: Conditional.]
[Partial Synchronization available via Peripheral Conduit (Manual). Risk: Corruption strain.]
[Proceed? Y/N]
His left hand shook. He could say no. He could drop it. He could hope the thing fell back into its crack and the hum went away and the road went back to knife-noise and mule panic and men grunting. He could hope to live in that world, and not in this new one, for one more minute.
Marla's voice cut through his scrambled thinking. "Ryn!"
He looked, reflex, and saw her: still on the wagon bench, reins wrapped around her hand, blood streaking her face from a cut in the hairline, jaw set. Her eyes were on him, not the shard, not Garron. She did not look afraid, which was how Ryn knew she was.
He didn't have minutes.
He turned the shard, point toward his own palm, felt the cut open like a mouth and take his blood.
"Yes," he said, not aloud, not with the mouth that could make sound here. The answer went down his bones.
There was no pain at first. The cold surged so hot it burned and then burned so cold it numbed. The hum leapt into his teeth and his ears and the joints in his fingers; each pulse was a footstep on a staircase he couldn't see, going down into a place he didn't have words for. The lines inside the shard lit white, then dimmed, then lit again—iterative, like someone testing a lever. Ryn felt the lever test him back.
A floor lifted under his thoughts. The rectangle of text slid into a column, then a lattice. Crisp words came and clamped down like braces on a broken beam.
[Partial Synchronization established.]
[Shard Sync: 9%.]
[Warning: Corruption strain detected. Threshold: 25%.]
[Passive Unlock: Linework I — Basic understanding of tension, anchor points, and pathing improves. +5% efficiency to line-based placements. +Minor proprioceptive feedback on anchored lines.]
[Temporary Interface Stabilization: 45s.]
Someone hit him.
A fist—no, a boot—caught his ribs and he folded. The shard skittered in his palm but did not leave his skin; it stuck like a burr and like iron filings to a magnet both. He rolled. His vision snapped back to here-now: Garron pivoting to face the bigger thing that had come up from the ditch earlier—its body twitching with the last of bad life, Dorran under a wagon with blood soaking linen, scarf-man dying quietly with his hand clawing at his throat. Nearer, the man who'd grabbed Ryn's sleeve reached down to make up for the minute he'd hesitated at his captain's "hold," face pinched and angry. Ryn didn't think. He moved.
Linework. The word wasn't a word; it was a feel. The world offered him routes, and the routes were not roads. They were the paths tension wanted to take, from anchor to anchor. The rope on the wagon. The brake lever looking like a handle. The man's balance on his heels. The cord he had dropped earlier that lay in a lazy curve in dust.
He pushed up on a breath, let the man's grab glance off his shoulder, put his palm under the brake lever as if it were a friend's hand, and shoved. The lever jumped and the brake bit and the wheel groaned and the cart shifted a half-inch. The cord on the ground skated and the man's foot stepped on it just as Ryn tugged. The foot slid. The man's weight went where Ryn knew it was going to go, because weight is a liar only when men lie to themselves.
He brought his elbow up into the man's throat. The breath made the right kind of sound—wet, distressed. Ryn twisted, knife in his right hand, and stabbed once, quick, at meat he knew wasn't covered by good ribs. The blade went in. The man coughed red onto Ryn's cheek and went down.
Ryn felt it when the shard noticed. Not judgment. More like a click of abacus beads.
[Technique Prompt: Anchor Exploit (Contextual).]
[Requirement chain: Path established — Anchor -> Weight -> Disruption.]
[Execution success. Minor bonus applied.]
He didn't have time to laugh at the idea of a machine that mouthed praise. He did not want its praise. He wanted out.
Garron's chitin arm flashed in the corner of his eye. The bandit leader took the big thing's next bite on plates and shoved and something broke that wasn't the arm, wasn't the thing's jaw, was maybe the part of the world that pretended there were rules for who got bit today. Garron roared then, a sound less human than he'd made so far. He planted a boot on the creature's shoulder and drove it down into the mud of the churned ditch until its head went under and then he ground, slow and without show, and the body spasmed and shuddered and stopped.
He looked up and saw Ryn, hand bleeding, shard bright. Their eyes met. For the first time since he'd stepped onto the road, Garron smiled. It wasn't nice and it wasn't cruel. It was the smile of a man who liked a thing that fit his hand.
"Bring him," he said a third time, quiet.
Everything wanted to converge on Ryn then—Garron's will, the man he'd just dropped trying to crawl back up with one hand pressed to his side, a whelp that had lost interest in a dead man and wanted new meat, Dorran's reach from under the wagon, Marla's lines creaking as she fought the mules and weight, the stone's humming counting down apathy to zero.
Ryn threw.
Not the knife. The pry bar was gone. He grabbed the oil jar crate and banged it against the wheel and a jar hopped like a fish. He snatched it and a rag at random, jammed rag in mouth, and flicked the flint against the knife spine one-handed. Nothing. Again. Spark, smolder. He blew, saw his breath nudge ember into glow, smelled oil already in the rag, saw hair on his hands singe. He hurled.
The jar didn't go toward a man. It went toward the ditch side where the brush lid over the culvert was thick and dry. When it hit, the wet slap of oil and then the whoomp of fire was a clean version of the nasty mess around them. Flame ran along the brush like a desperate animal. Heat hit Ryn's face and the smell turned rich and awful. Smoke went up and out.
He didn't expect to kill anyone with it. He expected to subtract somewhere. The fire pushed one section of men back and made the ditch a line between now and a worse now. The whelp that had started for him howled and ducked, avoiding the heat; a man who'd been moving in from that side checked, eyes going to the edge of flame. One heartbeat.
Ryn took it.
"Under," he said to himself this time, and dove.
He slid under the front of the second wagon. Dorran's hand grabbed his shirt without force and then let go. Ryn dragged the med satchel after him with his foot, dirt clogging the strap. The world outside the little box under the cart narrowed to boot-trees and legs and falling gray ash.
"Don't you dare," Dorran said, voice a strip of leather stretched hard. He had his shoulder braced against the axle, trying to take some of the weight off as if the wood cared about an old man's good intentions. Blood made a pool, seeping under the rut's ridge. His face was ash-smeared and weirdly calm. "You go when there's a gap. You don't make one. You hear me?"
"I hear you," Ryn said, and meant, I am not good at promises, but I will try.
He pulled a second linen roll free and shoved it into Dorran's hand. "Press there," he said, voice gone sharp with the energy that had nowhere else to go, pointing to where the cut welled thickest. Dorran made a face at him that might have been humor in a different life and pressed.
Someone's boots pounded past close enough to rock the wagon. Garron's voice came, nearer, cool.
"Hold. Push left. Don't crowd the ditch."
Marla's breath was a saw above them. Ryn looked at the brake lever and thought about what wheels did and what weight did and what men did when wheels moved without their permission. He reached up and eased the brake. Two turns. Not enough to send the wagon rolling uncontrolled, enough to give the next yank on the reins a little more bite in the right direction. He felt the lever's teeth in his palm and the little hiss that his skin made on seasoned wood. The shard warmed slightly against his other hand, as if it had a thought about what he was doing and was writing it down.
The cold rectangle slid into his vision again, insistence now more than suggestion.
[You have performed: On-the-fly environmental manipulation under hostile pressure.]
[Skill Progression: Makeshift Trap — 47% -> 100%.]
[Skill: Makeshift Trap I increased. Minor bonus to trap assembly speed and trigger placement.]
[Status: Level Up available.]
The absurdity of it—here, now, with a man's blood under his elbow—made a bitter laugh go up in Ryn's throat and die there because he did not have breath to spare. "Later," he hissed at no one, and then realized he was hissing at it. He closed his eyes and for a count of two imagined the rectangle banished like a fly. When he opened them again it had receded a little. The hum from the stone was less loud. The synchronization timer had fallen quiet or run out. Good. Bad. He didn't know.
The shadow under the wagon shifted and something smacked the dust near Ryn's face, throwing grit into his eyes. An arrow, shaft quivering, fletching black with soot. Ryn jerked back, blinked tears, and scrubbed at his face with his forearm, only smearing more mud and blood across his skin. Shapes moved on the far side. He watched boots, counted paces by feel through the timber. He didn't think about Garron's eyes. He thought about gaps in boots.
"Now," Dorran said, and Ryn didn't ask how the old man knew. He slid out the back, low, hands on dirt, felt the earth's coolness under the top layer of heat.
He came up behind the rear wheel, used it as a blind, then flicked his head left and right like a sparrow. The fire on the ditch edge had caught well, climbing the brush lid and running up the trunk of a low willow. The heat had pushed men off that side ten paces; smart ones watched it in case the wind shifted, dumb ones watched it because fire told prettier lies than knives do. On the other flank, a choke of bodies fought for space in the ruts. There was a path not for long: between the wheel of the second wagon and the exposed roots of a hawthorn.
Ryn moved. He felt the world in lines again—rope to brake to wheel to his calf to his toes. He went through the gap like thread through a split needle. A hand snatched for him and missed. A knife flashed and his shirt tugged and then a section of it flapped free behind him and he could feel air on his side where there hadn't been air a blink before.
He hit the ditch wall with both hands and slid, heel-first, body length. Slick muck took him halfway to his knees. The smell stung the back of his throat. A dead whelp lay half-submerged three steps away, its skin sloughing, plates pried up where someone had tried to cut them off for a bounty. Flies already stitched the space above its eyes. Ryn grit his teeth and planted his left foot against a root and pushed up the other side.
The world on the far side of the ditch had less dust. Smoke from the brush fire drifted along the ground, sweet and bitter and making his eyes stream. A raw bank of scrub oaks climbed the rise, their trunks close-set. Beyond them the land ran down to a hummock with a ruined mile marker. The hum from the node was quieter now, but it was still there, like a wire under his thoughts. He didn't go for the oaks. He went for the ruin.
The crack in the stone had been a mouth. Behind it, now open instead of shut, a sloping crawlspace led down into darkness. Old masonry held a lid over void. He could smell damp and the faint sour of long-closed places where air grows old. He could also hear, faintly, tiny noises like fingers drumming on wood, except the fingers were not fingers and the wood was not wood.
The System noticed where his eyes went. Of course it did.
[Structure Identified: Way-Station Sublevel (Collapsed).]
[Hazard Probability: High. Biological activity detected. Structural instability likely.]
[Optional: Secure entry and establish temporary shelter? Reward: Micro-Milestone.]
Ryn almost spat. It was offering him a quest, as if coin and food and skin were coins and food and skins to be counted somewhere else. But the crawlspace was real and shelter was real and the way the road had gone was not survivable for long. He looked back.
He saw this: Marla, hair matted, face set, bracing herself on the brake with both feet, jaw clenched so hard a muscle in her neck jittered. Dorran half under the wagon, hands pressed to his side, eyes clear and locked on Ryn's. A bandit with a polearm leveraging it to pry up the rear of the third wagon to make room for something to scramble under. The someone under was a child, eyes huge, a boy too young to understand politics but old enough to understand men with knives. Garron in the fore, stepping through the mess like it was a training ground he'd paid for with quiet coin, an expression on his face like this was the sort of bad that taught good.
Ryn made a call.
He slid into the crawlspace.
The first body he encountered was not human. It was a thing that had tried to be a rat and failed. Its skull had too many sutures and its teeth sprouted in bands. He put his palm against the worn stone and tried not to think about how the cold from the shard and the cold from the stone felt like the same river. He pulled his knife and cut the ragged webbing that had grown across the entrance from the inside—thin, viscous stuff that stuck to the blade and his fingers and did not want to let go. He snapped it as if breaking old glue.
He wriggled in on his elbows, small stones grinding into the scabs across his wrists. The space opened enough after a yard to squirm to knees. The air cooled by two degrees. The hum in his teeth eased. The faint drumming grew louder. Ryn swallowed. He reached back, grabbed the wagon cord he'd looped over his shoulder somehow without meaning to, and tied it off on an iron ring set into the lintel. Anchor first. He dragged it down the tunnel as a lifeline.
Behind him, voices blurred into a smear. A roar—the big thing dying. A shriek—a whelp being introduced to fire. Garron's low order. A note that wasn't a voice—Marla's voice pitched too high? No. A whistle, thin and wrong, repeating the same four syllables in the same cadence. "Ryn—help—Ryn—help—" Over and over, only the words climbing and falling on the same steps. The hair stood up under the grime on his forearms.
The System did something it had not done yet: it gave him bad news without a carriage return.
[Audio pattern detected: Lure mimicry likely. Do not respond.]
As if he would. As if he hadn't already heard the cadence wrong. He bit the inside of his cheek and tasted blood and let it be real.
The tunnel bent. His knees banged old stone. He smelled something ammoniac. He paused and let his fingers feel the floor. Grit. A smear. He rubbed some between forefinger and thumb. Not rat. Not even the wrong rats. Something else had been dragged in the last day. And then, a footprint over the smear: boot. Not his. Not anyone from the caravan. The print pointed in. It came out again? He counted backwards in his head and hated himself for it.
His fingers found a cold lump under the stone jutting from the wall. He froze, pulled back, squinted. Not a lump. An iron spike hammered into mortar at some old time to hold a lantern bracket that had long since eaten itself. Good. He pulled the cord tight around it. The Linework sense made the anchor feel good in his palm in a way that almost made him shake. The knotted rope vibrated against his skin when he let it go, as if it was a string tuned to a note only he could hear.
The drumming grew into a quiet scratching. He smelled damp. He smelled the small of bone dust. He smelled a gush of something new: old oil, turned. He rounded the bend and the space opened wider, enough to sit on his heels. A low ceiling of coarse brick. The floor sloped down to a pool that had once been a cistern. The pool's surface dimpled as something touched it from beneath.
Eyes. Too many or not enough, he could not tell; dots in darkness. He lifted his knife and held it low and waited to see if they moved closer. They did not. They held where the light from the mouth of the tunnel could not quite turn them into shapes. He had nothing to throw that wouldn't teach the things how to get him, nothing to make the back of the tunnel safer than the front.
He breathed. In the breath there were possibilities. Makeshift Trap. Quickstep.
He backed up, slow, until his shoulder blades touched the rough lip where the tunnel widened near the entrance. He unshouldered the coil of cord and made a snare he could set with a twitch—simple, a loop, a twist, a thrown hitch over a rough stone spur. He pulled two short nails from his pocket and bit one in his teeth and used the other as a peg to set a trip-line at shin height just before the snare, so that a body that rushed low would hit the line, stumble, and then present weight to the loop. He pulled both lines taut and the shard in his palm buzzed with the rightness of tension.
[Trap constructed: Line Snare — Improvised.]
[Trigger: Trip-line.]
[Placement: Narrow Choke.]
[Efficiency: +7% (Linework synergy).]
He did not want to think about what a percentage meant in here. He tied off the snare loop to the iron spike, fingers working blind by habit. Hands first. He left the end of the line in his palm, a feeler.
He needed noise. He dug into the med satchel—bad choice, good tools—and came up with a packet of small glass ampoules sealed with wax: smelling salts. Marla swore by them on winter mornings when men refused to get up. Ryn hated them. He cracked one under his nose and cursed as his sinus caught fire. He wedged two more into a crevice by the snare. A body stumbling into them would shatter glass and make an awful stink that told other bodies to think twice.
He looked down at himself, at his hands, at the ragged shirt, at the blood and mud and the line of rope leading out like a vein. He hissed again, not at anyone. He breathed once more. The hum in his teeth matched his pulse. He was ready as he could be in this narrow breath of time.
Behind him, at the tunnel mouth, the wrong-cadence voice repeated: "Ryn—help—Ryn—help—" and then, in a shift that made something in his chest lurch, the voice said, "Please," in Marla's tone. Then, in his own.
"Ryn." His own voice, pleading. "Help."
He pressed the back of his head against the stone so hard it hurt and let the pain be a thing to hang himself on so he didn't say anything back.
Bootsteps scuffed the dirt outside. A shape blocked light for a heartbeat and then was gone. A hand reached around, testing the air. Fingers brushed old web. Pulled back. The hand came again, this time lower, aiming to hook.
Ryn yanked the snare line.
The loop bit. A wrist bone cracked. Someone swore with a stifled cry and a body lurched forward into the trip-line and the smelling salts ampoules popped under a knee and the stench went off like a slap. The figure gagged and fell and Ryn shot forward and hit him with the pommel of his knife behind the ear because Dorran had once told him that if a thing must be done in quiet, do it where skull meets spine. The man went slack with a shudder and lay half in, half out of the tunnel. Ryn hauled him fully in by the collar and rolled him onto his stomach and bound his hands with the loop that had been meant for his wrists. He tucked a rag in the man's mouth and tied it behind his head. He did it fast and mean and tried not to think about the fact that he'd learned to tie people as well as loads.
He searched him with quick hands. Pouch. Knife. Three nails. A curious brass whistle with a shaping he didn't recognize. He pocketed the nails, the knife, the whistle. He left the pouch. He was not greedy; he was moving.
The System, satisfied with the obedience of a dog, wagged its cold tail.
[You have subdued: Human (Bandit). Experience gained: 6.]
[Status: Level Up available.]
[New Item: Brass Whistle (Unknown).]
[Note: Item exhibits resonance when near Node fragments.]
Resonance. He felt it in his palm, in the shard, when his fingers brushed the whistle—the faint twinning hum a degree removed from the stone's voice. He filed it away under later. If he lived to have a later.
Something moved at the pool—quick, low. He froze. The eyes in the darkness blinked in different time. Then there were more eyes. Then they moved back. Not brave, those. Good. Or smart. Both meant he could leave and not die in a tight place where his knife would be an argument he had no words for.
He took one end of the line and flipped it so that the snare sat ready around the stone spur. He took the other end and looped it around his waist twice and tied and retied until the knot felt right to his fingers even if the System never recognized it as anything but habit. He gripped the bound man by the collar and dragged him two feet deeper to keep him out of reach of hands that might feel for him. Then he turned and slid back toward the entrance as smoke bled down the tunnel in a slow gray ribbon.
Outside, voices were louder but more spread. Garron was not shouting now. He was talking, the way good captains do when the worst of the break has passed and the men need to be reset to work. Ryn caught phrases as he crawled: "Left line." "Don't crowd." "Cut loose the dead." "Water, small. Don't drink like fools."
He reached the lip and paused, listening for footsteps. The wrong-cadence voice had ceased. Through the slotted daylight he could see the road's new anatomy: blackened brush, cut bodies, a mule twitching in the traces. Marla still on her bench, lips white, eyes up. Dorran still under, shield now wedged at an angle to give him cover; his eyes were shut, but the lines at their corners were not settled, which meant he was still listening.
"Ryn," Marla said, not the lure; Marla, herself, voice raw. "If you can hear me—"
He spoke before she could ask the thing he didn't want to hear. "Here." He made it clear and quiet.
Her head turned like a weathervane catching a different wind. Relief cracked her face for a breath before iron moved back over it. "Go," she said. "Go, boy. If you live, you carry it forward."
It took him a heartbeat to understand what she meant. Then his deathless habit of counting ran through what she was offering. She meant the satchel. She meant the knowledge of the road. She meant the way she had run a wagon in bad weather in a bad place. She meant she didn't expect to keep any of it after today.
"No," he said. His throat closed on it. He swallowed and made it come out right this time. "Yes. If I live."
He had no gift to give her back. He had nothing.
He had one thing.
The System offered a shape of thought like a log barged into a channel: [Fast Craft available: Overclock Array — Temporary.] It came with a small tail of warning like a scorpion's sting: [Corruption strain +?]. He tasted metal. He did not want to be here and also somewhere else. He needed to be here with these hands and this rope.
"Not yet," he said through his teeth. To the System. To himself. To a world that wanted him to do the wrong thing quickly.
He slid out from the lip, rolled, and sprinted low for the hawthorn. He grabbed the root, pulled himself up, and then ducked as an arrow flickered over him. He lifted his head and saw the man who'd shot it—one of the bowmen in the brush, sweat slicking his face, mouth open in a grimace that might have been a grin when he'd thought he had Ryn. Ryn made the shape of "No" with his shoulders without words, because no one believed you when you said it with your mouth. He slid behind the trunk and waited for the next breath of wind.
It came from the west, as it should. The smoke shifted, eddied, and he ran when the bowman's eyes burned from the stinging and tears made men mortal again. He ran toward the tollhouse he knew sat a half-mile down past the bend, because he had cleaned its hearth last winter when Marla had taken a slow night there to ride out hail. He ran because shelter when the road broke was not a luxury, it was a choice in a triage. He ran and did not look back again until he reached the rise.
When he looked back, he saw Garron's men forming a rough line, nothing like an army but enough. He saw the way Garron gestured men into slots like he was seating wedges in a balky axle. He saw Marla half-standing on the bench, shouting something he couldn't hear over the distance. He saw Dorran's hand lift, just a little, two fingers. He'd said "I'll try to be there by sunrise" often enough that Ryn knew it as a promise in a dead tongue.
On the rise, he bent over and put his hands on his thighs and breathed until the world came back into focus. The shard under his skin pulsed once, slow, and then subsided to a presence.
The System, patient and insistent both, unfurled its ledger.
[Level Up: 2.]
[Stat Growth: Agility +1, Perception +1.]
[Skill Progression: Improvised Weapon II (sustained); Quickstep I (minor gain).]
[New Passive: Pain Gate I — Minor reduction in pain signal intensity under adrenaline. Caution: Injury remains.]
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Level: 2
Strength: 7
Agility: 9
Vitality: 8
Mind: 8
Perception: 9
Tenacity: 8
Corruption: 3% (Shard Sync: 9%)
He wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the numbers not like a boy at a market counting for curiosity, but like a man deciding how much wood to cut because a winter had to be got through. Agility and perception—sure. That made sense. Pain Gate, he understood intimately: a dimming of signals in his body, a baffle over the worst edges. He tried it, focusing on the rope burn across his wrists, and the hurt softened—not gone, less bright. He exhaled. "Stay honest," he muttered to himself. "Pain lies, but broken is still broken."
He checked the med satchel. Bandages left. Salve. Needles. Two vials of poppy tincture. A bone needle he'd ground true last winter. The brass whistle he had pocketed vibrated faintly against his palm. He held it up. The humming was stronger toward the stone he had left. It would be useful later. Or a curse. He wrapped it in cloth and tucked it deep.
He touched the buckler Marla had given him—just a brush with his fingers, like he was checking a line's tension—and then his legs moved again without consulting his head. Down the slope. Around the bend. The tollhouse rose from the side of the road like a headland, stone and wood fitted twelve eyes more carefully than most things this far from town. Its door hung slightly askew. The window shutters were closed, boarded inside. The little bell on the post for petitioners lay in the dust, green with corrosion.
He circled once, quick. The ditch here widened into a culvert under the road and passed under the tollhouse foundation. The grating was still in place—good iron, thick—but wrenched at one side, enough to admit a small body or many small bodies. Had anything gone in that way today? The mud was scuffed and flattened and carried the ghost of tracks that might have been rat and might have been something else. He grimaced. He checked the back wall. Ivy here, dead now from summer heat, but the wall itself solid. The side yard held a tangle of nettles and an abandoned bee box tilted on a bad leg.
He stepped up to the front door, put his ear to it, listened. Nothing but an old house's breath. He lifted the latch, pushed, and felt the resistance of a bar. He stepped back and looked at the seam. He looked at the hinges. He looked at the plank joinery. He breathed in the shape of the wood and learned where it wanted to flex. He picked up a stone and set it under the door edge, then put his pry bar between jamb and door near the lower hinge and leaned hard. The bar flexed. The hinge wrenched. Wood complained. The bar squealed. He leaned more. The hinge screws tore out with a lovely ugly sound and the bar slipped and he stumbled and the door swung inward bumping the stone and then was a door again.
He went in low, knife ready, buckler up.
Dust. The smell of old coals. A rolled map on the wall with a knife stuck into it—some keeper had once wanted to remember a point. A chair fallen on its side. A ledger book on the desk, leather swollen with damp. A spill of coins on the floor, dull with patina, scattered like the story that went with them had been cut off mid-sentence. A small pile of gnawed bones under the table. He eyed the bones. Not human. The wrong rats then, or something like them.
He closed the door and set the bar back, quietly. He propped the busted hinge with a chair back wedged under it. He went window to window, checking shutters and pegs. He sprinkled a handful of nails across the threshold outside, glittering like fish scales in the dim. He took a coil of thin cord from his satchel and strung it ankle-height across the main room between table leg and beam, tied off with a knot only he liked. He hung tin mugs on the cord. A touch would jingle them. A heavy hand would break the cord and the sound would tell him who and what.
The System, uninvited and still invited, noted the work with a cool clean line.
[Milestone: Holdfast Established (Improvised).]
[Progress: Trapper path +1.]
[Bonus: Small regeneration to stamina when within secured perimeter.]
He felt none of the regeneration yet, only sweat drying on skin and the steady ache of rope burns and cuts that would need cleaning if he wanted to keep his fingers. He stripped his shirt and hissed when the cloth stuck to the worst places, then poured a little of the water in the corner crock into a bowl and washed himself with sharp, small movements. He wiped his knife and buckler and bar. He put his fingers in his mouth and pulled out the tiny slivers of wood they'd collected and spat them in a neat pile on the hearth.
He went back to the door and stood with his palms on it, feeling not wood now but the way the vibrations in the grain told him when feet came down outside. The line from the anchor to his own hands ran through. He breathed until the shaking in his hands subsided enough to let him work more.
He forced himself to eat—a heel of bread broken off the hard loaf from earlier, a slab of salted meat he'd meant to save for when he finished repairing the cheap wagon latch at camp that morning. He chewed until his jaw stopped clenching on its own. He drank water and made himself stop before he felt full because thirst tells lies too.
Then he opened the med satchel and did the thing he didn't want to do. He threaded a needle. He cleaned the cut on his forearm. He sewed three stitches. He set his jaw and worked at the rope burn until it was as clean as he could make it, teeth clenched so hard his temples ached. Pain Gate dulled the worst of it, but his hands shook anyway. Good, he thought. Let them. Hands that shake remember to be careful.
On the desk, he found a box of old toll tokens. He pocketed a few as fidgets. He found a jar of rendered bear fat with mold on the lid. He scraped the mold off and sniffed. Rancid. Better than dry. He rubbed a thin smear into the leather of his boots where the stitching had started to fray. Habit. The world was falling in around him. He greased boots. He had to keep something in true.
Outside, a horse whickered. Not close. His hands went still. He went to the window, lifted the edge of the shutter and peered through the slat. Down the road, over the rise, smoke pooled in the low places. He could see flickers of men moving. He could see the broken brush. He could not see Marla. He could not see Dorran. He pushed breath in and out as if it were a job.
He turned to the room again. He needed layers. Tripwires, jangle lines, a deadfall he could spring if someone forced the door. He needed a place to sleep that he could roll out of fast without tripping over his own ropes. The tollhouse had an inner cellar door. He lifted it carefully. The air that puffed up was cold and stank faintly of old water and something else—ammonia again. He closed it and wedged it with a chair leg.
He moved through the back room. A narrow bed. A wall peg with a coat gone to lace at the elbows from mice. He took the coat and used it to wrap his med satchel. He took the bed's stuffed mattress and slid it against the door as a kind of muffler. Every little thing would add to the total.
When he had done all the small things a man can do against a larger world, he put his back to the wall under the window where the frame was thick, set the buckler beside him, and let his chin drop onto his chest just long enough to blink. He didn't mean to sleep. He didn't.
He woke to silence broken by tiny scratching under the floor.
He held his breath and listened. The scratching came and went, small and hesitant now. He had set no lines down there. He had only fear and guessing. He drew his legs up, put his feet under him, sat like a man ready to spring.
The System slid in with no tact at all.
[Optional: Investigate sub-floor movement.]
[Reward: Material salvage (unknown), XP.]
"I know," he whispered, because his mouth needed sound. He looked at his hands. He looked at the door. He stood.
A shadow fell across the slat of light at the window.
A face pressed briefly to the gap and withdrew. Not a whelp. A human face. Then a voice, very soft, so soft he would not have heard it if his hands were not on the frame, if his skin were not translating the world into lines. "Ryn," the voice said.
He went very still. He did not answer.
The voice at the gap this time did not have the wrong cadence. It had a scrape in it from smoke and a sadness he had heard once when Marla had found a child's shoe on a road going nowhere. "It's me," Tamsin said. "Don't throw anything. I'm alone."
He didn't move for a heartbeat. He let the next breath pass. Then he straightened, slow, unbarred the door and opened it just enough that a woman could slip in and a knife could be thrown out. Tamsin slid through sideways, smelling of sun and metal and a little of blood.
She looked at his face with the sort of flat professional interest that says how are your edges, will you cut me if I press. She saw the shard under his skin and did not comment, which was where Ryn put her above most men he had met. She looked around his lines, saw what they did, and her mouth twitched.
"You work quick," she said.
"Fire buys time," he said. He closed and barred the door again.
She nodded. "Garron's not there. He left men to gut the slow ones and moved on the road past the bend. He likes to keep the line from reforming. He hates knots."
Ryn sat. His knees told him he'd been running. "Marla?"
Tamsin's mouth went hard. She shook her head. "She said some useful things to some people and then the knife that wanted to have an opinion found her. I pulled the boy under the third wagon out before that happened because I am superstitious about children. Dorran bleeds slowly very well. He had help, then the help went away."
Ryn's chest hollowed. He had known; his body knew before his head said it aloud. He wanted to go back and kill a man for it. He wanted to go back and hold a braid of gray hair and say thank you. He could not do either.
He looked at Tamsin and saw the way her eyes rested on his hands. "Your wrists," she said. "Let me see."
He held them out without thinking. She took them, turned them, sniffed the cuts. "You cleaned. Good. You sewed. Good. You'll have a scar you'll show women and pretend you got it climbing a castle."
He didn't say anything. She shrugged and let his hands go. "You have coin?" she asked.
"Not today."
"Good," she said, as if that made him braver than she had thought. "He'll come here with a few men. He likes high points. He likes to turn tax houses into examples. He'll want your hands."
The shard in Ryn's palm pulsed once, faint. He pressed his thumb to it through skin. "He'll get nothing easy," he said.
"Good," Tamsin said again. She reached into her vest and pulled a folded scrap of paper. She handed it over. "He'll come west, then north, then he'll tuck under the weir because he thinks no one remembers it. He thinks the Guild forgets everything. He likes to be right."
Ryn opened the paper. It was a rough map, not of roads, of hours. Circles with arrows. Marks at turns. A cross near the tollhouse. He nodded. "You?"
"I owe him nettle tea and a split lip. I'll pay one today." She rolled her shoulders. "You have salt?"
Ryn blinked. "What?"
She made a little impatient noise. "For purging. The cellar will have burrowers. They hate a line of brine. You put some there, and there, and there." She pointed at the floor as if she could see through it. "You set a snare where it makes them stall. Then you can sleep an hour. If you do not sleep an hour, you'll die when he comes because you'll be stupid."
He stared at her face. He wanted to laugh because she was right. He did not. He got up, went to the shelf, took the sack of coarse salt he had stolen from the bandit he'd snared in the ruin, and put it in her hands. "Make your art," he said.
She did. She moved through his lines with an ease that did not fight them. She poured a little salt in old mouse runs and in cracks and in a thin line under the cellar door. She took two of his nails and hammered them into the jamb with the butt of her knife and tied a hair-fine trip between. She stole one of his good knots and left him a different one in trade. When she had finished, she sat on the floor and looked up at him.
"You have a plan," she said, as if saying, You have a fever.
"I have a tax house," he said. He lifted his head. The light outside had gone flatter. Afternoon leaning into whatever came next. "He'll come."
She nodded. "He'll come."
The bell that lay green by the door did a small, pure thing as wind moved it on the ground. It rang once. Not warning. Not mourning. Just true.
Ryn put his hand on the bar across the door, felt the wood's grain, felt the line of his cord in the room, felt the little tug of the shard under his skin. He did not cry. He did not speak. He counted knots on the bar.
One. Two. Three.
From the road outside came the soft pad of cautious feet and the faint chime of something metal on leather. Tamsin's eyes flicked to the window and then to Ryn. She didn't ask if he was ready.
He wasn't. He moved anyway.
The System slid in then, helpful as an uncle when a beam needs lifting and an ankle is already crushed under it.
[Approach detected: Hostile (2–4).]
[Suggestion: Use of layered trap arrays recommended.]
[Warning: Corruption strain elevated by recent sync. Overclock options available. Cost: Unclear.]
He put his palm flat against the wood. He spoke without moving his mouth. "Not yet," he said again.
Then he lifted the bar, quiet, and Tamsin's coin walked across her knuckles in a line like water, and the men outside the door who thought a house was a box began to learn what a box could be when lines are set true.