If they couldn't see him, he could go anywhere.
The thought cut through Kai's shock like cold water. All around him, the Bedalshiies fought in tight rings, back to back, while the pale things threw themselves at every beating heart on the road. Edrik's sword was a blur. Dani's greatsword rose and fell like a woodsman's axe. Somewhere, Wren was a flicker between bodies.
And none of it was enough. Cut them in half, and the halves kept crawling.
Kai stopped fighting and watched.
They weren't moving randomly. They surged together, paused together, turned together, like a flock of starlings. Like dancers following music only they could hear. And every surge came from the same direction: the canyon ridge to the east.
Something is conducting them, the voice said, and for once it sounded interested instead of amused.
Kai ran.
He went straight through the swarm. The creatures parted around him without a glance, close enough to brush his sleeves with their cracked grey skin, and he climbed the ridge in a dozen bounding steps.
At the top, crouched behind a boulder, sat a man in a robe stitched with curse marks. He was chanting under his breath, both hands wrapped around a staff of carved bone that pulsed violet with every word. Each pulse sent a shudder through the swarm below.
The handler never looked up. He couldn't sense Kai either.
Kai's spear went through his back and out of his chest before he finished the next word.
The bone staff hit the rock and cracked. Below, all at once, every creature on the road simply stopped. They stood swaying for one long heartbeat, and then they collapsed, falling in heaps like puppets with their strings cut.
Silence rolled down the canyon.
* * *
They buried three people that afternoon.
Two were Dani's soldiers, both young, both from the same village near Midory. The third was Tobben, the recruit Oliver had shouted at for holding his shield like a dinner plate. He had held it properly today. It hadn't been enough.
Oliver stood over the grave for a long time after the others had left.
Dani Varon found Kai sitting alone on the ridge, beside the dead handler.
"They walked past you," the captain said quietly. "I watched them do it. They walked past you like you were a corpse."
Kai didn't deny it. There was no point.
"I don't know what you are," Dani said. "But I know what you did." He looked down at the road. "Come and see what she found."
Veyra was kneeling beside one of the dead creatures with her sleeves rolled up and her face very pale. For once, there was no hunger in her eyes.
"They were people," she said. "All of them. The curse marks are layered over the skin like a second hide, but underneath..." She lifted one long grey hand. A thin ring still circled one finger, half-grown into the flesh. "Someone's wedding band."
Dani had gone very still.
He was looking at another body, a few paces away. Around its throat, sunk deep into the grey skin, was a leather cord, and on the cord hung a small bronze disc stamped with the lion of Barazia.
A border-watch insignia.
The captain knelt and unfastened it with hands that weren't quite steady. He turned it over. A name was scratched into the back.
"Corporal Fenna Hale," he read aloud. "Second patrol." His voice cracked on the last word. "She had a daughter."
He closed his fist around the disc. When he stood, he looked at Kai, and something in his amber eyes had changed for good.
"My people didn't desert," Dani Varon said. "They were made into this. And you're the only one who could walk up to the thing that did it."
* * *
In the imperial palace, Queen Martta Tairanesse wore crimson to visit the infirmary wing, as she had worn crimson every day for a year.
Grand Healer Soraya Nemarov met her in a small, windowless study and closed the door behind them. She was a thin woman with tired eyes and ink-stained fingers, and she looked like someone who hadn't slept properly since the Emperor fell.
"The investigation into His Majesty's poison," Martta said, without sitting. "Where is it?"
Soraya hesitated. "Closed, Your Majesty. Seven months ago. By order of the palace. Grand Magician Tobaios and I were told the matter was beyond recovery and our efforts were better spent elsewhere."
"Whose order?"
"It came sealed. No name."
Martta smiled, and it was not a pleasant thing to see.
"My husband is not dead, Grand Healer. He is sleeping. And as long as he sleeps, my stepson wears a crown that does not belong to him." She set a heavy purse on the desk. "Reopen it. Quietly. Under my protection. If anyone asks, you are treating my headaches."
Soraya looked at the purse, then at the queen. Slowly, she nodded.
That night, Martta wrote a single letter in her own hand and sealed it with the Tairanesse crest. It went south by her most trusted rider, bound for Midory.
Father. Keep Barazia's levies ready. And keep them loyal to me.
* * *
Kharvos was nothing like the Rift.
It sat where the red canyons finally opened onto the northern plains, a walled border city that should have been sleepy. Instead, it was roaring. Duke Welson's call for levies and hired swords had drawn every mercenary company for a hundred miles, and the streets were packed with them: banners, tents, recruiting tables, taverns spilling noise into the road. Nobody looked twice at thirty more mercenaries and a frost-covered wagon.
Nobody, that is, except the people waiting for them in the square beneath the north gate.
They were impossible to miss. Two hundred soldiers in matched grey-and-silver armor, standing in perfect ranks. Kai felt the Taqa coming off them before he'd crossed the square: seventy beyonders at least, most of them at the 1st and 2nd Star.
At the front stood two figures.
One was a slender man in the deep blue robes of the Magician Union, a proxy messenger's silver chain around his neck. The other was a knight in polished plate with a 3rd Star's steady presence, a tall, handsome man with a neatly trimmed beard and the green-and-gold crest of the Jeruva family on his breastplate.
"Sir Corvin Jeruva," the knight announced. "You're two days early. My family appreciates efficiency." He gestured, and a steward came forward with a chest that clinked heavily. "Payment in full, as promised."
Oliver opened it, looked inside, and closed it again very carefully. Behind him, Old Richard let out a low whistle.
Eight of the Jeruva soldiers lifted the crate down from the wagon. The frost on its iron spread up their gauntlets, and two of them gasped, but they held on.
Good riddance, the voice muttered in Kai's chest.
Kai was turning away when he noticed the Magician Union messenger wasn't watching the crate at all.
He was staring past Kai, at Veyra.
And Veyra, who had faced forty raiders alone in a dry gorge without blinking, had gone white to the lips.
"Well," the messenger said softly, and a slow, delighted smile spread across his face. "Veyra Lancet. The Union has been looking for you for a very long time."