After the kill Radeon lifted his eyes. Sure enough the cultist had Todd and Simeon pinned hard.
Blood arts crawled over them like constricting serpents, stalling every breath, stealing what crimson it could from skin and open cuts.
It was not a matter of skill now. It was whose art was better crafted.
Simeon bared his teeth and fought for one clean motion.
He struck a tube in his hand and the signal flare spat fire into the night, a wordless plea for help.
Radeon felt the answer coming already. It would not take long.
He went for the collapsed ship. The cloak swallowed his face and left only a moving patch of night.
The deck's planks could not complain under his boots, thanks to the cloak's ability. He dropped into the hull's belly, a pocket of darkness.
There, in the stale stink of old tar and rot, his face warped. Skin wrinkled and tightened. Teeth withdrew, then yellowed.
Radeon wore Sail Skin. Daggers rode easy in his hands.
Not yet. He circulated energy from the lumen ginger to his dantian and let the sharp heat bloom.
It stung, then it sang. He breathed slow and pushed the pulse through his limbs. Down the arms, across the ribs, into the legs.
His body went light, as if someone had cut his straps. The spark inside him multiplied, one strand splitting into three.
Not the full set, not the clean kind. A breakthrough all the same, settling with a click he felt in his bones.
Cornerstone Setting. A sloppy climb, but a breakthrough nonetheless.
'I'll rebuild this body anyway. Doesn't matter right now.'
Radeon moved. He drew his cloak tight and slipped back out into the teeth of it.
He did not start with the loud ones. He started with the weakest cultist.
The one still crouched in the junipers like a rabbit convinced the hawk had gone blind.
Radeon pierced the nape and caught the body before it thumped.
He closed the youth's eyes with two fingers, almost gentle.
Then he peeled the face away. As he did, Sail Knife's memories rose with the skin.
In youth he had been a hired blade. Murder had been his craft until his hands met the sails and learned different work.
Radeon borrowed the history as he pulled the cultist's hood up and swapped weapons.
He hunched his back into an awkward curve and let his steps turn quick and light, the gait of a younger man with less weight on his shoulders.
A familiar shape settled over him, borrowed and believable, and he did it without calling on any of his own higher arts.
The other three cultists never looked his way. The blood Radeon let seep and stench from his cloak read to them as injury.
'Fools trust the stink of their own,' Radeon thought.
He swung the sword once, hard and true. Arteries opened in one swift motion.
He did not let the moment stretch. He drank it all before anyone else could claim it. Blood, bone, soul.
'None of this came easy. None of it came free.'
Radeon flickered at the edge of sight, there and not there, the cloak taking him like a held breath.
Yet he never lingered on its power. A few seconds at most, only enough to step past a swing, but enough to appear on another man's shoulder.
Radeon sheathed his dagger and drew needles instead. Faster. Cleaner.
He took the cloak for a breath, crossed open ground, and came up behind a cluster of five.
His hand snapped. Needles left his fingers in bursts and struck necks and throats. Five bodies jerked at once. Air died in them.
They tried to shout and could not. Radeon stepped in and siphoned them dry, pulling the strength out through the punctures until their skin dulled and their limbs went slack.
He moved on without stopping. Another knot of cultists. Another release. Another drain.
The work stayed quick, all angles and timing. Each batch dropped in seconds.
With every pull, his muscles swelled, visible even under Sail Skin's aging visage.
Breath came easier. The heat in his core climbed and held.
When the twentieth cultist went down with a gasp, Radeon stopped and listened.
Clangs carried through the trees ahead. Iron on iron. Loud and close.
Radeon slipped forward and found Blacksmith Hoggs locked in the press of it.
Behind the old man clustered his disciples, thick in the shoulders, thick in the arms, and still only mortals.
For a heartbeat, Radeon let the thought rise. Let the old man die.
It would be simpler. It would be quieter. It would be one less pair of eyes.
Then he looked back at the trail behind him. Bodies gone warped and dried, men he dismantled in ways an ordinary fight did not leave behind.
If Hoggs fell here, and his crew with him, there would be no one left to swear what happened.
Only questions. Only suspicion that would follow Radeon like a dog that had learned his scent.
He swallowed it down and moved. Radeon slid into the angle where assassins like Sail Knife liked to live.
Half shadow, half scrub, close enough to strike and far enough to vanish.
He palmed a throwing knife, breathed once, and sent it low.
The blade punched into a cultist's leg. The man screamed and buckled.
Heads snapped toward Radeon. They roared, and two broke off to chase him.
The opening drew the ship's crew in, converging under the blacksmith's discipline.
Radeon dashed between them, daggers flashing in brief tight arcs.
He caught strikes that would have gutted a sailor, and turned them with a jolt up his wrists.
The men could feel Radeon's sacrifice. He made it look hard, desperate even. Let them think so.
A cultist lunged for Hoggs's back. Radeon was there first, steel in, steel out.
The blacksmith did not look at him, but the old man's hammer hit with more certainty after that.
Hoggs had decided Sail Knife was a fact worth using.
Above in the air, the gilded core cultist paused. His eyes did not stay on the dead.
They slid past them, calculating, measuring. Then he found the supply crates on the galleon.