Chapter 167: Nowhere to Run

The door swung inward on night air, and beyond it ran a track of beaten earth. Past that, canvas and rough timber stood in ordered rows going back into the dark, with cook fires, drying racks, and a palisade of unstripped trunks fifty yards out, torches burning along its inside face. Somewhere off to the left a crowd was making noise, with men shouting at some sort of spectacle.

Two Mycari stood posted a yard to either side of the doorframe. Both had steel half clear of the scabbard before Cal finished crossing the sill, and he instinctually activated [Liminal Breath]. The nearer guard's drawing blade crawled up out of the wood, catching a lazy smear of torchlight along its edge. He spent the borrowed moment on a maximum-power [Spiritual Pulse] and a moment of self-recrimination.

You idiot! Two days! You held the line for two days, and then you dropped your guard at the very end because someone dangled a shiny new Spell in front of you?

The blastwave of bolstered spiritual senses tore over his surroundings and the spiritual map unrolled behind his eyes, forcing him into desperate focus. It was terrible. This definitely wasn't Deadfall, but it was a town. Hundreds of auras packed into rows and patrolling the perimeter, with a dense knot in the direction of the shouting, and among them a great many that burned with the brightness of D-tier. Then, somewhere near the center of the population, one presence swelled upwards and beyond even that.

Ohhh crumb, I've gotta get out of here!

A plan assembled itself in a panicked instant: flee. Use everything at his disposal to get as far away as quickly as possible. Make it into the trees and put enough distance between himself and anyone else that he could get [Portal] off and make this whole region nothing more than a bad memory. The Spell just needed a few seconds of breathing room to draw the runes and open the scrying preview—he had to make space.

[Liminal Breath] released him and the world came back at full speed. [Dash] fired. Cal split the doorway and the gap between the two guards beyond, moving close enough to feel the drag of the near one's sleeve. The shout that went up behind him was already too late to matter. He hit the beaten track at a dead run, and [Crimson Overdrive] caught in his channels like a match dropped into oil. He fed it everything he could and let the scarlet prominence flare off him like a signal fire, because subtlety had died at the door. He went up the avenue faster than he had ever run in his life.

The camp came at him in flashes. A cook stumbling backward off a plank table, ladle still raised. A pen of goats. A pit down a hill and sunk further into the earth on his left, forty yards across and ringed five deep with Mycari standing on benches, and inside it two figures locked together while somebody's fist rose and fell. Racks of spears. A smithy shed with its coals banked orange. Huts of mud and lashed poles, and canvas beyond them, and painted on the canvas in white pigment, there and gone: a potion vial with a snake wound around it, the snake's head reared to strike at the cork.

It showed again on a hut wall, then on a tarpaulin over a stack of crates. He knew that symbol, and the sight of it raised the hairs on his neck and added more fuel to his flight.

People scattered out of his path. A woman hauled a man stumbling with drink out of the way. Two guards with spears turned to watch him go and only started running after he was past, shouting a question into the night.

Magic lit up at his back, and he knew the shape of it instantly: Ondrel. He had watched that man pin a charging basilisk in the time it took the thing to blink.

The first eruption came up out of the ground eight feet ahead—a shaft of living wood punching through packed earth and throwing dirt in a fan. Then more, and more, wrapping together in a hedge of living timber trying to funnel his path back towards the center of camp.

Cal couldn't beat the man and was grateful the wood mage wasn't trying to kill him. There was still hope. But he needed to be practical and plan for the worst-case scenario.

At full speed, with his back to every set of eyes that mattered, Cal jammed his fingers down the neck of his armor, hooked the leather cord and tore it. He brought the void ring up and put it in his mouth, tucking it against the inside of his cheek. Then he flicked the ruined cord away into the dark between two huts while at a full sprint.

The ground was suddenly alive.

[Mana Sense] gave him each root a heartbeat before it broke the surface as dense lines of nature Mana shooting under the earth. He learned to read the roots with the first three and lived off it for the next twenty. [Flicker Step] hopped him across the mouth of a rising cage. [Dash] carried him through gaps between shafts as they crossed behind and knitted, trying to trap him. He vaulted a water trough, landed, and something erupted where his other foot should have come down, yet he wasn't there for it. Another low hop, a hard cut right and a backspin, then three strides at absolute top speed while a thicket of wood grew shut behind him with a groan of straining timber.

A tendril caught his upper arm and stripped metal off the reinforcement plate, as Ondrel started trying to stake him in non-vital locations. Another took his ankle for half a stride and he ripped free, leaving skin behind.

He was holding his lead, if barely. Ondrel was working now in a way the dungeon had never forced him, spending real effort, and behind Cal half the camp had come up out of its fires and benches to bellow at a runner nobody could catch.

Then the palisade gave him a gift. Ahead, two runs of timber failed to meet where a cart track went out through the wall, the gap wide enough for a wagon and standing open and lightly guarded. Past it was only darkness, and the first trunks of the Virethane rising into shadow.

Thirty strides. Twenty. Cal poured everything he had left into his legs and the glare off him bathed his surroundings in red.

Something came off the top of the palisade twenty feet above the gap.

It fell the whole way without a sound and hit the cart track hard enough to flatten the ruts, mud bursting out from the landing in a ring as Leylith rose out of a crouch inside it with her spear ready before her. Emerald light was already answering, climbing out of the earth around her boots to wrap up her legs and torso, into her arms.

Behind and around Cal, the ground continued shutting.

He drew the plain shortsword without breaking stride and rebuilt the technique around the smaller weapon while he closed. At four yards, he converted every drop of his forward momentum into a desperate lunge.

[Lancing River]

Leylith lifted two fingers off the spear shaft.

The emerald light surged up her body and condensed in the space in front of her, folding in on itself and packing down into a half sphere shield. Point of shortsword met magic, and twenty inches of dulled steel came apart into six pieces with a metallic snap, and everything Cal had put down his arms was forced back onto him. Wrist, elbow, shoulder, torso; all of it returning at once. Cal bounced off the sphere backwards with a foot of ruined hilt still in his fist and got three staggering steps away only to drop to one knee, pieces of his blade still raining into the dirt around him.

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He got his feet under him and let the hilt fall, quickly drawing his harvesting knife into one hand and stumbling forward again.

Wood shot up around his legs and closed to the waist before he'd made it two steps, and he stood there as the cage of roots rose to wrap his arms, while the void ring was finally swallowed down his throat like a badly chewed grape. He was glad he'd kept it secret. Even with his primary weapons, he knew he wouldn't have made it through Leylith's defenses.

The rest of his captors were a long time reaching him as things went, which he took as a compliment. Skarn arrived first and slapped the back of his head above the wooden cage for no other reason except that he could. Then guards came with rope and a collar chain. Ondrel's magic opened one section at a time as they worked, so that Cal's arms came free only after his ankles were bound. Even bent double he registered the control and care in it, the way each shaft withdrew into the earth without breaking, and barely disturbing the dirt.

They stripped him where he stood. Armor first with buckles cut open, the high-quality reinforced leather peeled off him and thrown in a heap. His few remaining weapons and pack came next. A guard ran fingers over Cal's linens but found nothing under his clothes.

Harl watched the pile grow with a smirk that grew right along with it. "Can you believe that? He actually stepped through the door under his own power. Just… walked right through, without a care in the world. I had good coin bet against Vesk—" he jabbed a finger at Ondrel "—that you were going to have to throw him through the portal like you did the last one."

"You shouldn't bet against me when it comes to slave stock," Vesk said cheerfully. "You'll never win."

Skarn crouched to Cal's eye level, breathing hard from the run. "Two days of your mouth, dull-ear." He tipped his head toward the noise still coming from the pit. "You hear that? Not long from now I'll get to stand down there and watch you bleed for my enjoyment. Shite, I might even pay for a good seat."

Cal looked at him but could barely muster a response, his mind still reeling from everything that had just happened as his lungs tried to catch up with what he'd asked of them.

"What—" Cal stopped to gulp a breath. "What do you think you're doing here? I'm a chartered guide and the Ordo were right there. They saw the whole thing and will report—"

Skarn backhanded him hard across the mouth, rocking his head to the side. A cut in Cal's gums started to bleed into his mouth.

"Quiet, mutt. No more of your lip. The Ordo are bought and paid for and you're nothing more than another lost guide. Nothing will be done for you. You're going to spend the rest of your miserable life in service to your betters, as is your place." The man grinned devilishly as he leaned closer, putting himself almost nose-to-nose with Cal. "How long that life extends remains to be seen."

They marched him back up the avenue with a rope at his neck and his wrists bound behind him, and the processing of his surroundings he'd deferred for the length of an escape attempt came due all at once.

There were slaves everywhere. Half-elves, mostly, but humans too. A chain of six hauling water on a pole yoke at an hour when people should be in their beds. A boy scraping hides by runelamp, and two men splitting wood, no restraints in sight as their axes rose and fell.

Every one of them had the rounded ears or not-green skin Cal wore himself. Not one Mycari among them.

Vesk asked me about my family on the road and I gave him nothing, and nothing was likely the answer he wanted. A guide who works alone, sleeps alone, and won't be missed by anyone. Cal gritted his teeth. I was gathered. Like firewood.

The pit came up on his right, closer now, and the sound of it reminded him of the coliseum in Mirathra. Two hundred voices at least, packed on plank benches under torch poles even at this hour, and in the sunken ring a man on his knees in front of another, and the crowd's noise climbing as the end came into sight.

Then they walked him past a work gang stacking sacks, and he saw the brand.

The nearest one had it on the forehead above the right eye, palm-sized and healed over, a runic construct scarred into the skin in an interlocking circle.

Cal knew what he was looking at. He had seen the Dominion's void-bound at the Chancellery. And he had seen a far more elaborate glyph than this one, close enough to count its lines, glowing red on Selara's forehead.

Written runework was a whole discipline apart from what he did in open air, and he could no more understand that scar than a fish could understand the sky. What it gave him was a picture of the near future, however. His future. A shiver ran down his back.

They passed another hut, and there it was again on the canvas awning: a snake-wrapped vial, with its head reared at the cork, painted in white and freshly done. He had found that exact mark on a bandit captain's collar by the eastern road, and matched it instantly to an amulet and a signet ring he had sold to Jakob for coin, taken off Zarven Mault's own enforcer.

He remembered standing over Gasto's corpse and deciding, with what had felt at the time like enormous maturity, that this particular thread belonged to future Cal.

Well. Future Cal has arrived, and he'd like a word with past Cal about his life choices.

The humor lasted about as long as it took to draw breath. Then he was back to counting collars.

Intake sat at the head of the avenue near what looked like a large cage, with a plank table, a runelamp, a ledger, and a Mycari with a shaved skull who looked at Cal the way Harl looked at his precious consumables.

"Another dull-ear." He took Cal's chin in his fingers and turned his head to the lamp, then thumbed the hair back off his forehead. "He's not shackled, so where's his brand?"

"He's new," Vesk said, "and a fighter too. Log him and put him in the pens until he learns his place."

The ledger man grunted and turned to write in his book, while Cal was handed off to another guard. The delver team turned to walk away.

"Leylith."

Cal said it steadier than he'd expected, but she didn't stop.

"Ondrel. Harl. Skarn. Vesk." He said each one in its own time, and the man writing at the table went still. "I don't forget things."

Some of the group paused, while Leylith and Ondrel continued on. Skarn turned and barked a laugh while Cal continued.

"Every moment of the last two days is in my head exactly as it happened, and it isn't going anywhere."

Harl snorted and went back to rifling through Cal's pack.

"You hired a guide." Cal spat blood into the dirt and got his shoulders square under the ropes. "I worked for you in good faith and got you through the dungeon and you betrayed me. That doesn't go unanswered."

The look on Skarn's green face started to turn ugly.

"Every one of you has a final resting place waiting for you. I'm going to take you to it, just like I took you to the core. One at a time, on my own feet, and you'll all remember me when you get there."

Vesk turned back. He was smiling, and it reached his eyes about as far as it ever did.

"They all say a version of that, friend," he remarked kindly. "The good stock, at least. I told Harl you'd fetch a premium and listen to you—you're proving me right." He gave Cal a thumbs up. "Do try to keep that up in the pit. It sells."

"Yeah, I think you'll be first."

Vesk cocked his head slightly at that, and something in his expression began to darken.

"Not Skarn, or Harl, who'd sell my teeth by the ounce. You. When I get off this leash, I'll find you first, and you'll—"

In his fury, Cal missed the guard blindsiding him and caught a fist across the mouth, momentarily knocking him senseless. The ground came up and hit his shoulder, and the ropes kept him from breaking the fall, so his cheek took the rest. He tasted iron once more, spat, and got a knee under himself, and then got up, which took longer than he liked. Blood ran off his chin and dripped onto the beaten earth between his boots.

Vesk stayed where he was, back to being pleasant as ever, looking Cal over like he had on the road. Cal looked back and didn't blink, and the moment went on long enough that the man at the table cleared his throat.

Then Vesk turned and left, and the other two went with him, and Cal watched them leave until they rounded a corner that led deeper into the camp.

Eventually the guards shackled his wrists and ankles with heavy metal and walked him the last twenty yards to the pens: a compound of driven stakes and crossbeams, roofed in canvas at one end with the ground inside turned to mud. A guard unhooked the neck rope, put a boot into his hip, and shoved Cal through the gate onto his knees.

Shapes shifted in the dark around him. A few dozen of them, maybe more, sitting or lying against the stakes, and not one said a word to him. Somebody's chain rattled as they moved in fitful sleep. Somebody else was taking short, catching breaths around what were likely broken ribs.

Cal turned on his knees toward the gate and watched the guards walk away, coiling the rope they'd bound him in as they went. Behind them, past the huts with the painted snakes, the pit's noise climbed.