Kai lowered the scarf.
A year in the Rift had changed his face. Sun had darkened it, hunger had sharpened it, and something in his eyes had grown older than twenty-three. If the captain had ever seen a portrait of the third prince, nothing in his slit amber eyes said so.
It didn't matter. Varon wasn't looking at his face.
"No shadow," the captain said. "In my experience, a thing with no shadow is either a ghost or one of the Death Panel's toys. And I don't believe in ghosts."
Twenty spears came level along the road. Behind Kai, the Bedalshiies reached for their weapons. Oliver raised a hand to stop them, his eyes flicking to Old Richard, who had not moved from his wagon seat at all.
Kai kept his hands open and his voice calm.
"If I'm one of their things, Captain, you'll know in one exchange." He took his spear from the wagon. "Their things don't hold back. And they don't bleed red."
Varon studied him for a long moment. Something shifted behind those amber eyes, not trust exactly, but recognition. Kai had seen that look on him earlier, when the muttering ran down the Bedalshiie line. It was the look of a man who had been judged by his skin before he ever opened his mouth.
The captain drew the greatsword from his back. It was nearly as long as Kai was tall.
"One exchange," he said.
He came in like a falling wall.
The greatsword moved far faster than anything that size had a right to. Kai caught the first blow on the spear shaft and felt it all the way to his teeth, slid under the second, and turned the third aside with a twist that cost him skin off both palms. Varon was stronger. Much stronger. Every swing hit like a landslide.
Let me out, the voice urged. One breath of me and he's finished.
No.
Kai thought of a cup of water lying flat as glass, and kept his anger down where it belonged. He didn't reach for the shadow's rage. He reached for its quiet. Dark threads ran up his spear, steady and obedient, and when the greatsword came around again, he didn't block it.
He stepped inside it.
The spearhead stopped a finger's width from Varon's throat. At the same moment, the greatsword's edge stopped against Kai's ribs, just deep enough to open the skin.
Neither of them moved.
Blood ran down Kai's side and dripped onto the road. Red, bright in the noon sun.
Varon's nostrils flared. He breathed in the scent of it, and something in his shoulders eased.
"You bleed red," he said quietly. "Their things don't."
He lowered the greatsword. After a moment, Kai lowered the spear.
"You'll register," the captain told Oliver. "All of you. And you'll go on to Kharvos." His eyes went to the crate, still crusted with white frost in the midday heat. "But Kharvos is in my sector, and something on that road has been eating my patrols. I'm riding with you." He turned to the soldier beside him. "Hask, the tower's yours until I'm back." Then, to Oliver: "Me and five of my soldiers. Whatever's in that box, I want to see who comes to collect it."
* * *
Deep in the east wing of the imperial palace, General Marcus Thorne stood at attention before a desk he could barely see.
The study was dark, every curtain drawn. A single candle burned on the desk, lighting only a pair of gloved hands and the papers beneath them. The person who owned those hands sat beyond the light, a shape and nothing more. Thorne had made his reports in this room for two years and had never once seen a face.
But he could see the wall behind the chair. The candle caught just enough of it: a great crimson banner, and on it the golden lion of the Raytingbergh dynasty, wings spread, mouth open in its eternal roar.
And on the desk, beneath that royal lion, lay a letter sealed in black wax: a closed eye inside a ring of thorns.
"The proxy emperor trusts you," said the voice from the dark. It was soft, unhurried, impossible to place. "Good. Now, the south."
"The experiment is ahead of schedule." Thorne kept his eyes fixed on the lion. "The Merthen harvest gave them enough material for a new strain. They're testing it in the Rift. Three Barazian patrols so far, no survivors, no bodies. The creatures take everything."
"And the collared ones?"
"Four stable beyonders. The collars hold." He hesitated. "But there was a loss. The hunting pack left to guard Helverton. Twelve hybrids, destroyed in under a minute. Burned to ash, collars and all. No witnesses."
The gloved fingers went still on the page.
"Burned," the voice repeated thoughtfully. "How interesting. Find out by whom."
"Barazia is also closing its border. The old duke means to have twelve towers by spring."
"Let him build. Walls keep things in as well as out." A page turned. "Is there anything else?"
There was. Thorne had carried it for a year.
"I went back to Helverton," he said. "The day after. To make sure of the prince." His jaw tightened. "His body was gone. Just the crater. Nothing in it."
He did not say what he had seen at that crater the morning before: the lips moving with no breath behind them, the shadow thinning like ink in water until the body cast none at all. He had told no one. Some nights, he still woke reaching for his sword.
The gloved hands paused. For a moment, the only sound was the candle.
Then the voice laughed, very softly, beneath the golden lion.
"Bodies wander, General. It hardly matters now." A finger tapped the black seal. "The cargo reaches Kharvos in six days. After that, it won't matter at all where the prince went."
* * *
The road north ran through the last of the canyons, and Dani Varon made himself unpopular within a day.
He told Edrik his stance was lazy. Edrik bet him a silver he could disarm him before supper, and lost, and then bet him two silvers he couldn't do it twice, and won. Neither of them would say how.
Wren, terrified of him, apologized every time he looked in her direction, which only made him look in her direction more.
Veyra, on the other hand, followed him around the camp with a notebook. "Natural-born beast-kin," she murmured. "Second-generation at least. Would you mind terribly if I took a little blood?"
"Yes."
"Everyone always says yes." She sighed. "I mean no. Everyone says no."
But it was Old Richard that Dani watched most. He watched the old man limp, and complain, and fall asleep with his mouth open, and his amber eyes never stopped narrowing.
He smells it too, the voice murmured. Whatever the old man is hiding.
That night, by the fire, Dani finally said what he'd been carrying since the watchtower.
"Three of my patrols went to Kharvos this season. Twelve soldiers each." He stared into the flames. "None came back. No bodies. No blood. No tracks. My superiors think they deserted." His jaw set. "My people don't desert."
Nobody said anything after that.
* * *
They came at midday, out of the canyon floor itself.
The sand at the edge of the road heaved, and the first one burst up beside the second wagon: a pale, hairless thing, long-limbed and eyeless, its grey skin cracked all over with curse marks that glowed a sick, dim violet. It took a Bedalshiie by the leg and dragged him screaming toward the sand before Edrik's sword took its arm off.
Then there were more. A dozen. Twenty. Pouring out of the ground on both sides of the road, mouths opening far wider than mouths should.
"Rings!" Oliver bellowed. "Back to back!"
They hunted everything. Mules, soldiers, mercenaries, anything with a heartbeat. They turned toward the living the way flowers turn toward the sun, and they did not stop when they were cut. Dani's greatsword clove one in half, and both halves kept crawling toward him.
Kai drove his spear through the nearest one and wrenched it free, turning for the next.
It was coming straight at him. Then it went past him.
It flowed by close enough to touch, close enough that he smelled the grave-stink on it, and it went on to throw itself at a Barazian soldier three paces behind him. It hadn't even turned its head.
Another one came. Then another. They swerved around Kai the way water swerves around a stone, hunting everything alive on that road.
Everything except him.
Kai stood frozen in the middle of the slaughter, untouched, while the cursed things poured past him on every side.
They can't see you, the voice whispered, almost reverent.
Why? Why can't they see me?
Because they hunt the living, Prince. A cold, slow pleasure crept into it. And as far as anything cursed can tell... you died in that crater.