Ecdysis

My forehead barely touched the carpet in prostration when I heard his rumbling voice.

“Lift up your head, traveller, and break bread with us.”

“Thank you, wise chieftain, for your hospitality.” I bowed and took a piece of warm flatbread and a mug of milk from a nearby servant. The soft crumb and fresh milk quickly pushed away the chill of the night. Not that I craved the recently milked mare milk, but most of our supplies were growing pretty stale by now. Especially the common ale that was made who knows how long ago and without any preservatives like hops to keep it decent. Besides, when a suspicious uncle is giving you food, you take it and thank him very much. Because food is delicious.

“I see that you still remember the taste of your homeland despite forgetting her tongue,” the chieftain smirked and gestured someone over. “Look how thin she is! It appears that the thieving dogs can’t even keep their people fed. Bring meat for our guest.”

The other men sitting on the carpet laughed at his words, eagerly raising toasts to the chieftain’s generosity and Emanai greed.

I pressed my hands to my chest. “You have my sincere gratitude, but you need not rush on my behalf. All I need is a horse to continue my travels. I have many tales to tell to our Lord.”

The sheyda was a sight to behold. Especially here, without heavy armour or hidden by other riders. The first thing that drew my attention were his nostrils. Not on his face — those were quite human. He had another set at the transition area between the human and the tiger part of his body. They looked almost like gills but I saw them flutter every time his lower rib cage expanded. His short hide jacket and cloak over his shoulders left a convenient gap not to obstruct his breathing. Two individual pulmonary tracts! Considering the size of his body, they were quite a boon to have. He did appear to have a single digestive tract, for I could discern nothing more, but this was me thinking murk thoughts. For all I knew, he could have a portal in his ass or something.

The human part had no real outliers. A male in his late thirties, or hundreds if he lived as long as other wermages, and long dark sideburns tied into braids. He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t shredded either. Plenty of gold around his body: rings, bracelets, and aglets for his braids. The hair… his hair was relatively short, albeit it appeared to grow along the length of his human spine into the tiger’s torso. It was, however, heavily braided with multicoloured locks of hair. And many of those locks were still attached to a tori of Emanai design. Most of those locks were dark or grey-white of Kishava, Kosenya, and Kamshad origin, but a few were Kiymetl red.

‘Return the lost honour’, my ass! Fucking Sophia, did she really think that I would march into the camp and scalp the nearest sheyda?

Beyond that, his appearance wasn’t more unusual than that of a lamia. Perhaps Shahin’s physiology was just as complex as his and I simply assumed that her tail was merely a human coccyx on magical snake hormones. The less said about Amir, the better. I would learn the secrets of her head snakes!

“Nonsense!” Trymr boomed. “What kind of host would I be if I let a weary traveller leave in the middle of the night!? You will have a swift horse, yes, but you will also have warm food and good rest. You will see The Great Lord’s camp quicker in the light of the day and on full stomach.”

I watched the servant pile my plate with food and raised my cup to the host. My milk was already replaced by kumis. I drank it all and showed him my empty cup. “There are thousands of stars in the sky, but one moon. There are great warriors in the tribe, but one wise chieftain.”

Now that the common pleasantries were uttered, everyone resumed their feast. Although it was more of a late-night party where guests did more talking and drinking than eating, the kumis was light so I couldn’t count on them getting hungover tomorrow. Most of them ignored me outright. Some were enjoying their food and drink too much while others were busy with their personal conversations. Surprisingly enough, the discussions gravitated toward grazing pastures rather than the current battle. The recent chain of victories by Bragge Archomilea resulted in sizeable gains of land, and the tribes under his banners were rightfully expecting the upcoming land distribution. A few glanced at me now and again but their gazes didn’t linger. The only ones watching me were the sheyda and his shaman nearby.

A cat approached me with a quiet purr, eager to play with the tassel of my pouch and claw at the tip of the lash that was poking outside. I gave her a bit of meat and a scratch between the ears but shooed her away. “You are too young, little lioness, to play with the gifts for your great ancestor.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the shaman whispering to Trymr but I kept my attention to the food in front of me. The night was young and I had no intention to spook my target by appearing too eager. Meanwhile, the other conversations provided me with useful, albeit unwelcome insight. Recent overwhelming victories meant elevated morale across the entire nomad army, while an upcoming distribution of land guaranteed eager if not fanatical commanders and chieftains, willing to showcase their loyalty and bravery. And receive more land for their tribes in turn.

I could see why the Chasya twins were wary of this Bragge. The man knew how to stack chips in his favour. Was this all a part of his plan? Or did he simply leave the toughest opponent for when his armies were the most motivated to fight? Considering how much attention was already given to the hour-to-hour levels of morale and stamina among the troops, I could see something like this being a common part of the local warlord’s skill repertoire.

“Share your tales with us,” Trymr finally prompted me. “Tell us of what you’ve seen in their camp and the treacheries they plot against the warriors of our Lord.”

“Yes, tell us about that bull bladder in the sky!” someone shouted from the side.

“Hah, so you did get scared!”

“Fool! I want to be the one to take it down! It is made out of silk, I am telling you — I could dress all my daughters and the daughters of my daughters. It also took down two hawks of the Chahar tribe.”

“You just want the daughter of Chahar’s hawk-shaman as one of your wives!”

The sheyda glanced at the tipsy warriors but didn’t stop their bickering. His gaze returned to me.

“That is the sky chariot of Enoch. For now, it acts as their eyes in the sky.”

His tail twitched. “For now?”

“For now. Their general is waiting for an opportune moment to unleash it,” I lied through my teeth. “Just as our Lord predicted, she is too arrogant in her delusions of power and does not even consider the six raksat of warriors present here as a real threat. Her eyes look for our Lord and no one else.”

Trymr narrowed his eyes. “Yet she isn’t heading straight for the city. Why?”

“Your horses are swift, but they can’t gallop on water. She is planning to march to Bayan Gol while hugging the river. It would allow her to concentrate all defences on one flank and limit your ability to move. ”

After some deliberation, I’d decided that it was better to present our forces as incapable yet in a plausible manner. I wasn’t delivering my ‘report’ in front of the whole army and Trymr, while being one of the local chiefs, wasn’t the sole general either for me to affect everyone with my speech. Try as I might, I couldn’t break the morale of a motivated force and would only make it harder for Sophia to deal with a wary opponent. At the same time, an eager enemy would be more likely to attack and take riskier actions now when their army was still divided.

“There is one House I fear I have to warn you and your warriors about. The Kiymetl.”

Anaise’s spellwork was an open secret by now. All I could do was steer the knowledge in the most comfortable direction.

“The traders-” someone started to speak only to be immediately shushed by the sheyda.

Trymr leaned forward. “You know of their new spell.”

I nodded. “I’ve managed to spy on their secluded training. That spell’s power changes with range. The closer it is cast, the more powerful its effect becomes. I saw it crush runed steel and stone and heard the wermage cursing the luck of sheydayan. If he got five paces closer before turning away, that spell would have ripped him apart.”

“You speak as if you know every wermage power. Do you think that some fox could grievously harm a sheyda?” the shaman voiced an almost silent accusation.

“I speak in a manner instructed to me by our Lord. I say what I saw and repeat what I heard, nothing more. For He is wise enough to gleam the green of opportunity under the snow blanket of tribulations. This situation is no different.”

“An opportunity? You believe that the Kiymetl can be bought?”

I shook my head. “They are too few in number to change the course of a battle by themselves and, once their arms crumble, they will fall just as quickly as the siege arusak-at. Attack them head on and they will decimate your forces just as their murk spears would stop a cavalry charge, keep them at a distance and they are nothing but a fart in the wind. It does not matter if they have ten or a hundred Kiymetl wermages, they can’t be everywhere at once to stop even a single raksat of your horse archers. For a raksat is a thousand.”

Compared to the rest of the Emanai forces that I was painting as weak and inept, I wasn’t going to do the same for Anaise. Just as her spell caused waves through Manipulars and resulted in a blindingly fast promotion, the enemy was also on the lookout for that new upset they had experienced yesterday. And the last thing I wanted was to see my wife swarmed by hundreds, eager to be the one to claim such an important kill.

I continued to weave my narrative, taking my time to strategically exhaust their supplies via the brazen consumption of food while tactically steering their perception of Emanai strength. The shaman was suspicious but, as long as I steered away from making too many unprompted statements, she left me alone.

Not that she had any other choice. I didn’t choose that particular messenger to intercept just because she was the first to try. Nor did I demand to be seen by sheyda just to reinforce my act. Trymr Rurkha was expecting my arrival, just as the late girl without a name, the Whisper of Bragge Archomilea, knew where to go and who was her link with the main army. I inserted myself into the system and the system supported my act in turn. All I had to do was keep my act at least somewhat believable.

I also had to keep the sheyda wanting without being obvious about it. I knew that once he was satisfied with my report, his welcome would be mostly over for the lowly murk. I would be ushered to my sleeping place for the night, given a horse in the morning, and forgotten about by the end of the day. At most I could count on was some token gift so that I would deliver an additional message to the Lord. Perhaps some praise for the generous host. In my view, it would be a lacklustre end for an opportunity that wouldn’t happen again. But there was a slight gap between entertaining a powerful sheyda with insider information about his enemy and me somehow giving said sheyda a haircut, let alone taking a few samples for experimentation.

For that, I had the pouch by my side that the sheyda had been eyeing from the beginning of our conversation. Full of secret goodies I was apparently carrying to the Lord himself. Unfortunately for him, the bronze arrow in my possession kept me safe from him simply demanding everything I had on me or skimming from the top. I wasn’t some delegate carrying gifts, I was a messenger that was carrying His property and taking it meant stealing from the Lord himself.

That didn’t stop Trymr from making a few offhand remarks, but I kept ignoring them throughout the party. Even my cup that never dried throughout the meal couldn’t loosen my grip on my package. So the sheyda took the task into his paws.

I glanced around his personal yurt, the hides on the outside protected from weather but it was the inner woollen felt that kept the place pleasantly warm. Carpets covered the ground everywhere and the yurt was so large that it had four pillars in the centre just to keep the roof from collapsing. It also had a latticework of runed planks to give shape to the walls and provide additional magical perks to the lodging. Warmth, chill, something against bloodsuckers, reinforcement to keep them strong and support the enormous ornately-carved door frame with an equally impressive wooden door. Considering the half-tiger resident, this was almost a whole circus.

Oh, and there were runes of silence.

“You don’t need to worry about others listening in,” he purred while placing his hand on my shoulder.

“Even your shaman? She didn’t look particularly pleased with your decision.”

His purr turned into a growl. “Who do you think I am, that a mere shaman could act as she pleases!?”

That was probably as far as I could push his eagerness for. I glanced at the glowing runes across the yurt and pulled the lash from my pouch. “Fearful of losing their status to the upstarts like Enoch and Kiymetl, the Houses of War were quick to brandish their own previously hidden Secrets. This is a recently revealed arusak of the Kishava, I do not know how they managed to craft a snake from a Creature’s carapace or if their Goddess crafted it for them as a Gift, but it can move even in the hands of a murk.”

The lash twisted in my hands and snapped its teeth on my wrist. I hissed in pain but didn’t yank it away. “It doesn’t like me very much, but I saw their masters instruct them to grow in size in but a single heartbeat and snatch wer and wermage alike faster than their grasping spell could. From longer distances too. The slavers of Emanai are very eager to use them in the upcoming battles.”

“An arusak, you say?” His hand brushed against the scales on my lash and it quickly detached itself from me and gently snuggled around his forearm.

I frowned. “They said it takes years for a Kishava wermage to control one of those, to think that you could do it with a single touch…”

Trymr harrumphed, curiously inspecting the new bracelet. “No matter how much they try to keep their blood pure, no Emanai wermage could match a sheyda. Do you even know what an arusak means?”

“A doll?” I half-asked, not even bothering to hide my uncertainty; the clock was ticking already. “The Kishava would never reveal the details of their Secrets, all I have are the scant few mentions I’ve managed to overhear.”

“A doll does not move by itself.”

“So it is an actual Gift?” I gasped.

The sheyda hummed. “It is not. Gifts sing in Flow but few wermages can hear it. Especially if those wermages are brought up in smelly cities and know little else but loud cries of rabble all around them. There is no song of Flow within this thing.”

I cursed internally. Trying to peddle it as a Gift was apparently too much, but there was no way I could’ve gotten sheyda interested in some murk animal. “So Kishava are using trickery to hide even more of their weaknesses?”

The worst part was — Trymr remained active despite the lash slowly pumping him full of sedatives. Granted, his bodyweight alone was enormous and the lash wasn’t as effective at chemical synthesis as my grub once was, but this was getting ridiculous. There was some magical body enhancement at work. The only reason why I wasn’t scrapping the current plan and resorting to brute force — or a swift retreat — was that he was still keeping the lash on his forearm.

“Or they have seen through you, fed you nothing but lies, and let you escape so that your corrupted words could poison our Lord’s plans,” he murmured.

The lash was still on.

I vigorously shook my head at his accusation. “I saw that snake stretch across a hundred paces and yank a wermage like a child plucks the blade of grass from the ground. And not just any wermage but the daughter of the Kamshad Matriarch herself. There is some power in those snakes and the Lord needs to know. If it is a trick, He will uncover it.”

“How unfortunate.”

Before I could say anything, a clawed paw slashed at me, rending my clothes and throwing me to the side. I leapt back, trying to reach the satchel but the same paw pressed me into the carpet.

“Do you know why your lord is so powerful?”

I froze. Did he just…?

“The Divine blood, the daimon son…” Trymr scoffed. “All sheydayan carry the Divine blood! All of us hold power, unthinkable to mere wermages! So why is he the Great Lord while the rest of us are mere war chiefs? I’ve been watching him for years, observing his campaigns, listening to his demands. And there was always one thing that he kept looking for. Artefacts.”

He opened the satchel, sniffed at the wineskin full of pulped alien grass — the ‘Kiymetl Secret mixture to create thunder spells’ — and threw it aside in disgust. “A different type of artefacts. Not Gifts. The ones that don’t sing in Flow.”

“What?” I croaked. Was Bragge on the lookout for living tech? Did he know about the Collective? Was he a Navigator himself?

No. That was very unlikely. I would have heard him by now. Even if he intentionally kept himself blank, he would have heard me. Heard Lif. It wouldn’t be me sneaking into this camp but him sneaking into ours. Probably yesterday if not weeks ago.

“And he found it, of course. And suddenly, he was Bragge the Unbeatable. Bragge the Unpredictable! Yet he never stopped looking for more. Did you know that other chieftains tried to discourage him from attacking Bayan Gol during this season and let our armies swell in numbers first for a more decisive attack? Of course, you wouldn’t — you were amongst the robbers all this time. Yet he persisted, and now I know why.”

He glanced down at me, shaking his head. “I would have given you so much if only you weren’t so stubborn. Wealth, fame, status… Strong children. Things that Bragge will never give you, no matter how hard you try and how eagerly you throw your life at his paws-”

Either the sheyda liked the sound of his voice, or he considered me so stupid that I wouldn’t recognise his decision to get rid of me by the end of this night. It didn’t matter if he thought now was the perfect time to start a coup or if he was growing his strength while trying to prevent Bragge from doing the same — for him, I was a liability. I was the proof of his betrayal. And now he was starting to blabber about irrelevant parts. “Tell me of his artefact.”

Trymr actually stumbled mid-speech. “What?”

“His artefact. What has he found? Where has he found it?”

His hand grabbed my face. “Who do you think you are, worm?”

I grabbed his arm, letting the lash link up with me again. The sheyda screamed in pain as my lash tried to burrow under his skin. The skin won — the damned magical tissue was simply too tough for my lash to penetrate, but I could still keep triggering his pain receptors.

A plume of fire hit my face, evaporating the hair and blistering the skin.

“How dare you!” he roared.

I ignored the pain and temporary blindness while my other lash grabbed me the knife from a nearby table. The hastily sharpened blade plunged into his flank to its hilt and gouged a deep wound. I swung again but the blade was wrenched out of my fingers and immediately found itself deep inside my own guts. Trymr stabbed me a few more times, but I already shifted my attention back to my lashes. The skinsuit and Harald would deal with superficial damage while I had an entrance to properly connect to his body.

“What manner of Creature are you!?” Lacking the ability to use my eyes and trying to protect my brain and the rest of the face, I shifted to my skinsuit ocular system and that clearly unnerved him. “Or is that another artefact you’ve found? Speak, worm!”

The knife’s new edge pierced through the scales of my skinsuit two more times. On a third attempt, the blade got stuck and on the fourth — it glanced away with a screeching sound. Trymr threw it aside and pulled his own sabre, only to find that it fared even worse than the shoddy kitchen utensil. My lash kept burrowing deeper into his body; now that I was in control, I knew that the sedatives were working but only for a very short time. It wasn’t just muscles and skin that were magical in his body, his liver was too.

Livers. If wermages were bullshit, sheydayan were twice as much.

“I don’t know how you got all those artefacts,” he growled at my shielded face, “but I will rip them one by one from your flesh! Pray that you don’t survive the experience!”

I gritted my teeth as another grabbing attempt went nowhere; Trymr was clearly above Lita’af in wrestling and grappling skills and he had up to four ‘arms’ to my two. After getting surprised a few times, resulting in one broken arm and losing a decent chunk of his fur on his left forepaw, he quickly adjusted himself to prevent that from happening again. Worse — his arm was almost healed back to full while I was still trying to solve the issue of his supernatural metabolism. If this continued, my plan to quietly deal with the sheyda in the privacy of his yurt would go up in literal flames. His ‘human’ liver was beyond normal, but I had no time to perform biopsies in battle. All I had to do was create a tiny bypass for a little while…

The sabre thumped on the carpet as Trymr’s eyes grew wide. “My Spark!? What did y-”

With a sound between a hiccup and a gasp, he lunged toward the door of the yurt but collapsed mid-step.

The runes went dark.

I froze in place, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. Keenly aware that I could now hear the muted sounds coming from outside. That… wasn’t a liver failure. No, that was a liver failure along with many other organs failing all at once, including the heart but… did I break his Spark, dantian, magic core, what have you while tinkering with his liver? Or was his Spark conveniently parked in his liver?

The fight ended up being quite ugly and I made too many mistakes with my overly complicated plots. Those mistakes cost me — most of my face was throbbing from the skinsuit performing massive debridement of burned tissues and Harald was still stitching my own guts together — but I had walked into this yurt willing to accept this level of damage. My original hope to sedate the sheyda and peruse his knowledge was now a pipe dream, however, and that was quite annoying. But there was no time to waste so I grabbed the dining knife again. A fresh sheyda corpse was right in front of me, full of secrets.

Well, fresh was a strong word by now. It didn’t pull a Creature’s act and go full liquid, nor did it rapidly grow old to match his actual age in human years, but there was some large-scale tissue damage going on. A quick swipe of the blade shaved off the ‘braids of lost honour’ and confirmed my first hypothesis. Whatever he was before, now it was a mundane corpse without any magical resilience. Probably why his collapse was so sudden and terminal — as his liver suddenly went from magical to normal, he had enough sedatives in his body to kill an elephant.

His abdomen was next; I had to see what was going on inside in order to make heads or tails of the magical biology and lashes simply weren’t enough for this job. Especially after the unintentional damage I’d done to the sheyda with them. Deep inside of me, I was happy that I didn’t risk poking inside Irje or Anaise. Aikerim would’ve burned me at the stake if I turned her daughter into a murk due to my curiosity, or worse — if I killed her outright.

Compared to a baseline human, there were obvious differences which could be attributed to his highly irregular body shape. While he indeed had two separate pulmonary systems as I’d expected, the digestive tract went with a specialisation route and split the tasks among the two parts of the body. That and many other similar observations were catalogued in my mind and immediately put aside once the necessary samples were collected and stored — I had a more pressing research than general sheyda anatomy. So far, most of my attention was drawn to a very unusual growth right below the liver itself.

It didn’t look magical by any means — it wasn’t glowing nor was it floating in midair. What it had instead was an absolutely enormous blood supply and an equally eyebrow-raising level of neural connections. Oh, it was also directly in the path of my lash as it burrowed toward his liver. This was big. Very very big. Even if this subhepatic gland wasn’t the main and only source of wermage Sparks and magical abilities themselves, it was somehow involved in the process. It was also fully organic and not some magical crystal surrounded by human tissue nor was it an energy container of some sort either. At least not to my eyes and the eyes of my skinsuit. This meant that I now held a tangible link between wermage magic and human biology.

And I — with my knowledge of biology, anatomy, and bio-engineering as well as access to living tech, specifically bio-printers and gestation vats — was likely the most qualified murk in this stellar system to trace this connection. It might not happen overnight but eventually was a lot more enticing than never.

Hearing approaching footsteps, I quickly began to wrap up my gruesome task — the steps were too hurried for them to simply stop and wait outside.

The door swung open, and the shaman poked her head inside. “Chiefta-”

Our eyes met and she let out a shrill scream. Here we went again. My lash whipped toward her but her bone dagger was faster — it smashed into my chest hard enough to lift me up and throw me straight into the yurt’s wall and beyond.

I didn’t dally. My lashes ripped apart the felt of the collapsing yurt and I bolted into the darkness of the night. The absolutely last thing I wanted right now was to get stuck in another brawl and not only get surrounded but have my precious discovery smashed into useless giblets in the process. And I could already hear other shouts joining the shrieking wermage.

A set of loud whistles pierced the camp, stirring the hornet’s nest all around me. “Forest Walker!”

I glanced down at the scales of my skinsuit. I could see where the comparison was coming from, but that didn’t make my situation easier. I needed cover, especially as warriors started lighting torches and mages — casting fire spells for illumination. Chirp swooshed in and I immediately threw it at the bird taking to the air, changing the course of my run immediately after. It would deal with the shaman’s eyes in the sky looking specifically for me, while I now had my own target to intercept. A sharp dash between two yurts, a quick hop over the third, and I crashlanded onto a lone wer getting ready.

This wasn’t a place to play nice anymore. Before he could figure out what was going on, let alone raise another alarm to pinpoint my location, my lash snapped his neck. Taking his pants was going to take too long but his jacket and hat were quite sufficient to keep me from getting spotted with a single glance.

“Ready the horses!” I mimicked the yells I kept hearing around me and dashed toward the corrals, pulling my new hat as low as I could. “Strike the enemy!”

The camp was in deep turmoil. People were running around, screaming commands at one another and seeking the enemy that they couldn’t find. The most vocal ones were the warriors from the Rurkha tribe. By now, the news of their chieftain getting killed by a ‘Creature’ had spread beyond their circle of yurts; their cries for vengeance and roars of anger further fanned the flames of confusion.

“Protect the sheydayan!” I yelled, waving an enormous sabre that I ‘borrowed’ from yet another wer.

I wasn’t yelling at anyone nearby in particular but my voice was intentionally loud to steer those who could hear me away from the periphery where I was and deeper into the camp where the remaining sheydayan were rallying their defence formations and attack wings. Leaving me alone with their horse supplies.

A dashing wermage paused for a second and pulled me in with a spell. “Who are you? What is a warrior of the Shakt tribe doing near our corrals?”

“You see…”

The feline ears twitched from my words. “Impostor!”

Her magic yanked my head hard enough for my skinsuit to creak. I pinched the blade of my sabre and swung it away from my fingertips, cleaving the glowing armour and a surprised wermage behind it in half. Quickly emptying the rest of the poison into the horse fodder, I dulled the blade and cast it aside. The wermages were starting to get too twitchy and I’d done as much as I could. It was time to get out.

After stuffing myself into a dark corner, away from prying eyes and high-traffic areas, I pulled my hat off and glanced at the night sky to gauge my chances — hundreds of birds were circling the camp. Not ideal. Was I able to slingshot myself away and keep moving fast enough not to be caught by the cavalry? Yes. Was I able to do so without every shaman in the camp spotting my low-flying ass? Unlikely. Up until this moment, my biggest trump card was ignorance about my powers. Trymr chose to invite me for some ‘alone time’ because he was certain that I could do him no harm. I wouldn’t be surprised if sheydayan were seen as impervious to Procurers and Collectors in general. Their supernatural ability to metabolise poisons and their duplicates of most major organs meant that suicide strikes against them weren’t very effective. The last wermage was paranoid enough to try and kill me as soon as she heard a mere hiccup in my pronunciation, but she still trusted her runed armour to withstand my attack. Even now, the camp was looking for a rampaging Creature or a fleeing something, not a patient murk waiting for the next opportunity.

Bragge’s henchmen thought themselves wise by trying to poke me and observe my subsequent reactions. They learned a lot but they also made the mistake of revealing their existence to me. Unfortunately for them, I knew how to wage an information war. I knew it a lot better than the first generation of warfare their armies and arms engaged in. As such, rather than attacking the henchmen themselves as they were expecting me to do, I waited until I had enough information to go after their boss. After their network.

They tried to steal my blade and besmirched my name and all they achieved was to give me a golden ticket to enter the enemy camp and collect my rewards. My previous patience allowed me to intercept their report about me and my sadaq, as well as uncover a few very important morsels of information. Depending on how much Yeva and I could discover from the sheyda’s tissue samples, one of those morsels might end up being an entire horn of plenty.

Or doom us all, but that was science for you.

And now I needed to patiently wait for a gap in their surveillance so that I could deny Bragge any further information about myself. The longer he and his ilk remained unaware of the connection between me and this incident — the better. Staying still while almost six thousand men were looking to kill you felt like a suicide waiting to happen, but Chirp kept me aware of what was going on. At the same time, the trail of bodies I’d left behind — especially the bisected wermage at the horse corral — made it look like I had stolen a horse and left the camp already. So I stayed hidden as shamans sent their birds into the field and riders galloped into the night. A glance at the moon told me that I still had about three to four hours of darkness available to me. About three hours before the Procurers would return from their…

I grimaced. There was no way the Procurers would stay put when the enemy camp was essentially gearing up for a night raid. Maybe my current plan wasn’t such a good idea after all, but it was likely too late to change anything by now. If they hadn’t done so already, the Procurers were in the process of delivering their report to a bleary-eyed General, including the part where the new Companion murk had deserted from his task. Knowing Sophia, I will never hear the end of this. Hopefully, the braid would be a sufficient distraction.

The yells and whistles rapidly changed their tune and I stilled myself. Those weren’t calling for general readiness but an outright attack. But they still haven’t spotted me from what I could gather. Was this a retaliatory attack on our camp due to my acts of sabotage? Something along the lines of ‘we were forced awake, might as well disturb your sleep too’? That would be yet another uncomfortable conversation with Sophia. But it was also an opportunity for me to sneak out unseen.

Chirp’s report made me blink in surprise. A chariot attack? Now? Were they crazy?

I bolted from the pile of hay, quickly gaining speed and momentum with my lashes. By the time I passed the lone guard patrolling the outskirts of the camp, I was moving at more than a hundred kilometres an hour. By the time his lifeless grip let go of the torch and it fell on the ground, I was approaching two. When other guards would spot the gap I would be nowhere close. Yet another body in my wake but it wasn’t like we were playing make-believe during the day either. My plans to enter and leave without making too many waves disappeared as soon as Trymr started melting my face.

If I was honest with myself — they were doomed from the beginning. I just hadn’t known it yet.

I took a large detour across the empty fields, double- and triple-checking that I was neither followed nor watched, until I came back to the spot where I intercepted the messenger. Only then did I allow my skinsuit to retreat from my head. The new skin felt a bit raw but I had my face again. I quickly changed into my original clothes, packed my spoils into my bag, and allowed myself to look around. Specifically — at the force brazen enough to launch a night attack.

While a surprise night assault had its merits, the current issue was that the nomads were no longer surprised. My actions had stirred the hornet’s nest and, while they were woefully unprepared for a single Navigator using a fake identity to assassinate one of their chiefs, their army knew how to get ready to repel Creatures and arm assaults. By now, the chariots were riding not into sleepy soldiers still in their yurts, nor into confused masses burdened by internal strife. They were riding into fully formed regiments with a bone to pick and a score to settle.

I gritted my teeth and took off again. Our arms had their own share of idiots and rank-chasers. Just as Trymr was eager to cross his lord in the hopes of claiming his title, there were Manipulars who slept and saw themselves as Generals. I would approach our forces as much as I could-

Chirp trilled nearby and I palmed my face.

“Why am I not surprised, Chirp?”

My lash stabbed into the ground, decelerating me in the blink of an eye. My feet hit the ground as I shifted from groundvaulting to running but I didn’t slow down further. There was some ground to cover.

A thick wer bolt smashed right between my feet.

“Another step and the next one goes between your eyes! Name yourself!”

I sighed, “Ask the spear beside you — I treated his camp fever less than a tenday ago. Unless he is ungrateful enough to forget my face already.”

The pavise beside the archer shifted the the side, revealing a surprised face. “Erf? What are you doing here?”

“I am the messenger of my finger, remember? Take me to your Manipular.”

The wermage frowned. “You wish to see Azhar Hatay Mesud? State your reason.”

“To smack him so that we can go back to the camp and get some sleep.”