First, we have to decide what to do with Rworg. He sleeps on the hard ground, breath slow and shallow.

  Mandollel grabs hold of a tent and shakes it, testing the strength of the cloth. “Maybe we can make a stretcher. I can take one end and you two take the other.”

  Rworg must weigh twice as much as I do. My arms would fall off. “Reaching the place the teratome was would take half the night. We’d have to take constant breaks to be in any kind of fighting shape once we found it.” We had eight people moving Ral when he got injured and it was still grueling for everyone.

  Mandollel scoffs, but doesn’t argue against me. Saying carrying someone is different than actually thinking it through. “We could build a travois?”

  That might make sense. Instead of carrying him, we would drag him over the ground. We’d need basically the same materials as we would for a stretcher: two long poles, some wood for cross-members, cloth, rope. We could harness Mandollel in front, use him like a mule, if he’s so enthusiastic. The paths are relatively well-trodden, so maybe it could be done.

  “Build a what? Can’t we just leave him here?” Finna asks. “All these guys are dead.”

  That’s pretty grim. True, though. “Finding the teratome and backtracking would be faster than bringing him with us. We’d be gone for a couple of hours.”

  Mandollel crouches and lifts Rworg’s head with his left hand. The sides of Rworg’s head are shaved bald, but he has a long tail of coppery hair in the middle. Mandollel gathers it with his right hand and places it on Rworg’s chest instead of being stuck under him on the dusty ground. “Leaving him here doesn’t feel right. Surrounded by his dead kinsmen.”

  “Come on, you’d rather drag him all around the forest? With our luck, the teratome would fall on him or something when we kill it.”

  “Our luck isn’t that bad!”

  I leave them to bicker to go look through the tents. The bed in the command tent has collapsed and is sticky with blood, a dead soldier thrown on it. There are other large tents around the clearing. They aren’t small tents like you use on a camping trip, but large, house-like structures, vibrant with deep colors and decorated with tassels and bronze discs hanging and tingling on threads. One tent has two bodies in it, so I close the flap without even going inside. The Kertharians look taken by surprise, their armor and weapons still piled in the corner of the tent. One wall has a large clean cut from top to bottom, so it was probably Mandollel who got them.

  The third tent is what I’m looking for. It’s smaller, but still big. Meant for a single, important person. The bed is a simple construction, but the bedding looks soft and shiny. The material like something Ral would wear to meet important guests at the village. This one belongs to one of the mages, probably. It smells even more strongly of the exotic mix of spices than the command tent did. I wonder if it’s their food or some incense that they use. Rworg would know. I hope it makes him feel at home. At least it covers the smell of sweat and iron from outside.

  I lift the flap and wave at the others. “In here!”

  Mandollel carves out a large rectangular piece of cloth from one of the tents. His sword flicks through the cloth like it’s nothing, and he grabs the piece as it’s falling. He chucks it at Finna, who spreads it out next to Rworg.

  “We’ll need you too,” she shouts at me.

  Mandollel grabs Rworg by the shoulders and Finna and I take a leg each. We both have one hand below his hips and another below his knee.

  “Now!” Mandollel says and we lift. He’s so damn heavy. It makes no sense. Rworg groans in his sleep, but we manage to wiggle him onto the cloth. Finna stays to keep his head from bumping on the ground and Mandollel and I drag the cloth over to the tent. That’s the easy part. I’m sure I’ll be sore tomorrow only for hoisting him onto the bed, even if there are three of us doing it.

  He’s too big. His feet dangle over the end of the bed and he hardly fits in sideways either. Finna pushes him with both hands on his upper arm to move him to the edge of the bed and Mandollel lifts his knees so his feet stay on the bed.

  They really do take good care of him. “How long did you train together?” I ask.

  Finna leaves Rworg on the bed and starts to rummage through the chest at the foot of the bed. She doesn’t even seem to realize she’s doing it, her hands working on their own as she talks. “The bastard took us on maybe ten Rides. How come?”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Ten? All of you together?”

  Mandollel peers out of the tent. He waves the air with his hand, like the smell is too much for him. “Ten on which we were together. We also did personal Rides to polish some details.”

  I can’t believe it. Lictor said we were all bad at using the artifact. That going in together would turn us into goo already on the first try. I went on maybe eight Rides in total and the last one made me see into the future while my skin burned off. “Was… was I part of those Rides too?”

  “No, Lictor said it was too much of a burden to fetch you every time. He said you would blend in nevertheless.”

  Finna snickers. “He did grab you a couple of times. You were pretty lost every time.”

  I sit on the bed next to Rworg. There’s barely enough room next to his waist for half of my butt. Lictor really didn’t tell me a single complete truth about anything over the whole time I was in Tenorsbridge, did he? Mandollel, Finna, and Rworg have had so much more time to practice and get to know each other than me. “What did you do on your Rides? You didn’t come here?”

  Mandollel shakes his head. “No, we didn’t. But if you really want to do this, shouldn’t we move after this teratome already? I’ll ward the tent to keep off scavengers. I’ll catch up.”

  Finna is already out of the tent when I look up. I shake my head to clear it. Rworg makes a small noise as I rise up. Rides, Rides, Rides. All that is behind me. Everything now is deadly serious. What may have happened or what someone has seen doesn’t count anymore. Rworg is hurt and I have to make sure we win against the teratome this time.

  I can’t believe I missed it the last time. No birds sing or rustle in the canopies. No rabbits huddle in the bushes, trying to be invisible by keeping still. Even the trees seem like they are holding their breaths. The forest goes still around a teratome. It’s like the rest of nature is hiding, trying to keep out of sight.

  Finna has her daggers out, eyes darting left and right. “I can’t believe we’re going to it.”

  “This teratome is not that dangerous.” It’s not completely true, but it’s not as dangerous as it could be or what it seems like if you don’t know how to hunt one. “It’s stupid. It senses vibrations and attacks anything that moves near it. It doesn’t care about damage to the main body, but hitting the main arm on its front enrages it. Also, don’t try to cut the swinging spikes at the joints. There’s something inside that can’t be cut. Instead, you can take them out by hitting the very base where they connect to the body.”

  Mandollel listens. He opens his mouth and closes it again, licks his lips. “What… what in blazes are you taking us to fight?”

  Right, he hasn’t seen the teratome before. I guess the explanation might sound outlandish if you haven’t. This teratome was like a large black slug, plated in thick armor with pulsing flesh squeezing out from between the plates. Dozens of small legs at its bottom for movement and three longer bony spikes on both sides of its body for stabbing at anything coming near. At the front dangled a large protrusion of flesh, like a huge arm, unnaturally strong muscles bunching under its rubbery skin.

  The arm is its weakest point and what makes it dangerous. The teratome could throw itself around using the arm. Mandollel and Finna could protect themselves against the spikes. I couldn’t. I have to stay far, but if I do, I can strike both the arm and the bases of the spikes with my bow. Even if teratome physiology is wild and unpredictable, they can’t ignore the laws of nature. A muscle with an arrow through it can’t flex or extend. They heal fast, but once they’re hurt enough that they can’t fight back, it’s just a matter of cutting them up faster than they can regenerate.

  That’s the reason we’re going after it. Teratome blood can be purified to get rid of the cancer in it, leaving behind what is basically ambrosia. Liquid mana. It knits wounds, mends bones. Some say it can even raise people from the dead, if there’s enough of it available. We took as many water skins from the camp as we could carry. The fire pit is large enough, we can get a hot enough fire going to finish it.

  But first we have to kill the teratome.

  “You haven’t seen a teratome before?” I ask Mandollel. I have no idea how old he is, but he seems like a guy who has seen everything multiple times over. At least he acts that way.

  “Not often enough, it seems,” he says.

  “Ah.” I have no idea what else to say, so I continue with the briefing. “You’ll understand once you see it. I think it’s deaf, so we can shout at each other as much as we want. It can launch itself into the air with its arm for stupid distances, but it can’t jump forward.”

  “Don’t cut at the joints,” Finna says to Mandollel.

  “He said it already.”

  “Yet you always do. Don’t.”

  Mandollel harrumphs, but for his credit, seems to take it seriously. He doesn’t roll his eyes or smirk in a way that Lille does when Ral tells her to do something his way. It must be weird for him, taking orders from two kids. Human kids, especially.

  The teratome skitters further ahead. In the eerie silence, the sound is unmistakeable. Chitinous legs on bark and leaves and rock, pressed down by a massive weight, far beyond what should be possible. The scraping intuitively making sense, yet impossible at the same time.

  Mandollel draws a fractal of runes in the air. His hands move like the fingers of a fiddler on his instrument, playing the air, leaving behind symbols of light. “I’ll try to disable the arm.”

  “Let me start. You can get its attention after I do, because I can’t do anything if it gets close to me.” Last time got me killed. My heart thumps in my chest. It’s hard to speak from the adrenaline making my tongue thick.

  Finna slaps me on the back. “I’ll stick close. My daggers are not worth crap against it, but I can distract it a bit.”

  I nod, not trusting myself to speak anymore. I’ve taken down two teratomes, but that was with Lille. Nothing could have happened when she was around. Or that was what I believed then. I now have first-hand experience of how dangerous a teratome can be, how slight the mistake that leads to death. I understand why everyone in the village hesitated so long before letting us go hunt one.

  It doesn’t matter. We need the blood.

  Do or die.

  If you’re wondering where the second teratome hunt Folke mentions happens, it’s in the bonus chapters that I haven’t yet released ??