Despite the growing darkness, and with no Ana-deprived Parties to slow them down, Ana and her ten hunters moved fast. She started them off slow to warm up, but soon set the same six-minute mile pace as when she’d taken Deni, Lesirell, Perrion, and Petra to run down the Stolen, and nobody complained. If anything, those of the Party who hadn’t yet experienced the full benefit of the Endurance bonus she gave them along with Indefatigable were outright enjoying themselves.
“Why’d you never have us just run like this?” Kaira asked over her shoulder, skipping and twirling mid-step as she practically flew down the narrow southward trail. She was barely even breathing hard. “Fucking awesome! Next best thing to flying!”
“There wasn’t any reason to,” Ana said.
“Hah! I know that can’t be the whole reason. You’re not the no fun type.”
“Nah, you’re right,” Ana admitted. “The comedown’s brutal. But I’ve got something that should help us all with that. Which reminds me…” She half-twisted to call back over her shoulder, squinting as the bright, white orb above Jancia’s head came into sight. “You’re all going to feel like you can just keep this up forever, but that’s an Enhancement I’m sharing with you. Listen to your bodies! If you feel like you really should be dying, let me know and we’ll take a short break! Darr, Yna, Omda, that goes for you too!”
She’d sent Darr and Yna far out to the sides to look for any tracks they may have missed on their way north, just in case, and Omda was ranging ahead of the main group. Ana relied on those three to have the Perception to hear her despite the distance — especially with Darr, who Evolved his class from Hunter, providing most of them with Pack Vigilance and raising the Attribute by 4.
Tellak, who was right behind Ana, pulled up next to her, dodging rocks and trees and skipping over fallen logs with ease. “You wanted to talk about the Craft of Earth,” the pale woman stated, with the same easy cadence as Kaira.
“Yeah. We know what Crafts the mages had, both the captives and the invaders. No Air or anything else that would let them actually fly, right? All Earth, Fire, and Death that we’ve seen. Our Fire-mages insist there’s no way their Craft could be used to hide tracks beyond just scorching the whole area, so what about Earth? Any ideas?”
“Tunneling, maybe,” Tellak suggested, “though that would leave a rather noticeable entrance somewhere, even if they sealed it behind them. Other than that, I imagine some of them may have learned the same weight-modifying Shaping as I.”
“How would that help?”
“Think about it. If someone were light enough and knew how to step, they’d leave far less of a trace. And if they were very light, and strong enough, they may be able to leap high and far, leaving even less of a coherent track.”
Ana swore under her breath. “You’re right,” she said to her friend. “I even considered how useful the Shaping was for lengthening my stride when I was running. I never thought about using it for stealth!”
“You’re still new at the Craft,” Tellak said. “Most people don’t consider the many uses of any Craft they’re not dedicated to. Don’t worry. I spoke to the scouts yesterday, to give them some ideas of what to look for. Patches of disturbed soil and such. Not that they don’t know their business better than I do.”
“Right. Thanks.” Ana paused for a few strides then asked, “Could you do that? Make us all lighter, I mean? You did it to me back in the Delve, right? It’d be another edge.”
“Not the whole Party, and not for long. Three or four of us, maybe.”
“Not an option, then.”
“Not at present,” Tellaks agreed. “As for what I can do, I’ve asked the mages among us to stay vigilant for disturbances in the ambient mana.” Tellak looked ahead dubiously, where Kaira was still frolicking along with every sign of enjoying herself. “I hope you’re not miffed if I say that I expect Jancia and myself to have the best chance of detecting anything. Especially Jancia; she’s much more perceptive than I am when it comes to mana, and that’s besides her higher Connection. But we’re both absolute amateurs when it comes to tracking mages. I know what to do in theory, but I’ve never had to do it before.”
“If this Earthbreaker’s used to war, like Kaira thinks, he may know how to go undetected,” Ana observed.
“He may well,” Tellak agreed. “But it can’t hurt to try.”
They were about ten miles to the south, and the full dark of night had fallen, when Darr finally found something.
They’d reached the spot where the Stolen had died — where they’d been killed, and where their revenants had been bound and sent at their pursuers. Ana stood in the small glade, looking thoughtfully at a broken ritual circle together with the six members of her Party who weren’t circling the area looking for tracks. In the direct light of Jancia’s floating orb, everything was cast in sharp, sinister relief.
Perhaps it was the ambiance, but standing there, Ana got an unpleasant idea. “How long does it take for a corpse to rise as a revenant?” she asked no one in particular. “Has to take a while, right?”
“Usually takes hours at the very least before a spirit comes along that’s strong enough to possess the body,” Kaira said. “Could take a day or longer. You’ve seen the state of some of them.”
“Yeah. So how likely is it that six people would die and rise as revenants in a few hours? They couldn’t have been far ahead of us when they set this up.”
“Not likely,” Kaira said sourly. “Please tell me you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking. Not now, with the shadows as dark as they are.”
“We’re all thinking that,” Jancia said, not even asking what she meant.
“There was that pack of wolves in the Delve,” Ana said, not at all happy about the conclusion they were all coming to. “And the Binders can control demons. What’s to say they can’t make them?”
“I really fucking hate this idea,” Kaira groaned.
“No!” Deni gasped, catching up to the rest of them. “No, you’re not saying…”
“What?” Perrion asked, as she got a round of grim nods in return. “What’re you all saying?”
“They killed the Stolen,” Wandak said, wide-eyed and almost breathless with anger, “and they called spirits into them, binding the revenants!”
“Oh, gods.” Perrion looked like he might be about to be sick. “I knew they were crazy, but… how could the Sentinel allow that? I mean, everything else they’ve done, if you look at it in a certain way it makes a weird, twisted sense. You know, if you believe their bullshit about the Splinters killing the world, or whatever. But creating demons? Sapient revenants?”
“Sapient revenants under the control of devout mages, used against his enemies,” Wandak spat, the multitude of rings and chains decorating his face rustling as his face contorted in disgust. “There is little I’m not prepared to believe of the Sentinel these days.”
“What I find hardest to believe is that Karti would allow it,” Ana said. “I talked to him. He said that one of the things they wanted to prevent was spirits getting strong enough to invade the Primes in greater numbers. And that’s what demons do, right? They take bodies, consume mana, and grow stronger. Then they die and do it all over again.”
“Not quite,” Jancia said. “Not if they’re killed. If the body deteriorates naturally it’s as you say; the spirit’s set free, stronger than it was. But killing them disperses the spirit. I guess… as long as they expect their demons to die, they may be able to justify it?”
“Either way,” a voice rumbled from behind them, “they did it.”
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Ana was the only one who didn’t jump at Omda’s sudden appearance. She was quite pleased, even if he’d gotten much closer than she was comfortable with before she heard his feather-light steps.
“Come,” he said. “We found tracks.”
Darr had, through sheer bloody-mindedness, come upon a single footprint among some ferns. The way he described it, he’d had time on his hands and a shedload of frustration about “a bunch of fucking mages evading us. Wayfarer’s arse, we’re Scouts!” So on a hunch he’d started scouring every patch of dense undergrowth he could find that led south from the ritual circle, crawling on hands and knees to look closely at the debris-strewn forest floor hidden by fronds and low bushes.
“So finally, finally, I found this one clear footprint!” he said, pointing at the impression in question. He’d cleared away the ferns around it, and there it was, unmistakable in the bright light of Jancia’s orb. “Big enough that I figure it’s got to be an elf, right? And you can clearly see which way it was going, so I followed it, and…” he trailed off, leading them almost a hundred feet before crouching and indicating another impression. “Bam! See how it’s not directly in line with the first one, and how the direction’s changed? I figure they must’ve taken a couple of steps, or bounds I suppose, in between. But from here it’s a straight line! Continue the same that way, all five hundred feet that I checked. That’s an actual gods-damn track! We’ve got them!”
“Brilliant!” Ana said, clapping Darr on the back hard enough to send him stumbling forward a step. “Can you tell how old they are?”
Darr turned his face toward the south, frowning slightly as he said, “Yna? You’re better at that. You want to…?”
“That’s the bad news,” Yna said, squatting by the print. “I’d say this were made eight and a half, nine hours ago. Which would be while we were busy fighting the revenants not far from here.”
Ana muttered some choice curses at that.
“Took the words out of my mouth,” the Scout said, pulling out some short, thin grass and rolling the blades between her fingers. “My guess is the revenants were a distraction, keeping us busy while they slipped away.”
“Headed south,” Omda observed. “To the outpost?”
“Toward it for sure,” Yna said. “Doesn’t mean they’re heading to it. There could be sites in the south we don’t know about. Karti knows about the militia, yeah? They wouldn’t try to take that on with just the six of them, would they?”
“Depends on their goal,” Ana said grimly. “You saw what they did at the stockade? Cracked the damn earth open. It’s kind of in the guy’s Class name, right? Earthbreaker? What if they hit the Waystone with that?”
The group fell silent at her question, but the way several heartbeats sped up was as clear to Ana’s Perception and Keen Hearing as the soft breeze in the treetops and the calls and flutters of bats and night birds.
It was Jancia who broke the silence. “I’ve never heard of that happening,” she said hoarsely. “But the Waystone is the linchpin of the entire Splinter. That’s why they… why the disease made me infect it. The permanent Shapings around and inside it, the amount of mana that goes through it every moment, they’re… gods!” She let out a nervous giggle, then covered her mouth with her hand as her eyes widened in horror.
“That’s what I thought,” Ana said. “Right. They have a nine-hour head start on us, and we don’t know how fast they’re moving. I want everyone to rest — really relax — for five minutes. Eat and drink something light. Then we’re moving again. Om, can you follow the track?”
“I know what to look for,” the Ranger replied, and that was good enough for Ana. If he wasn’t confident he would have said so.
Kaira threw her questioning look, and Ana shook her head. “I’m not taking off like last time. That was twenty miles with enough light to see by, and I might have literally killed myself if not thanks to Touanne. Tonight we have over thirty miles to cover in total darkness. Even if I didn’t hit a goddamn tree at forty miles an hour, I’d be utterly useless by the time I got there. No, I’m staying with you all.”
A short time later, as they were on their way again, Ana asked the Wayfarer, Well? What would happen? If the earth just opened up and swallowed the Waystone, how done would we be?
When the goddess replied, she didn’t sugarcoat her answer. Entirely. Even I couldn’t fix that. Though it’s not a trivial matter. The mana is weak near the Waystone, and I’ve built safeguards into my Shapings. It absorbs outside mana, and the older the Splinter, the grander and more resilient the Waystone is. Most Shapings would fail as they approached… to a point.
So they can’t just sneak in, drop one Shaping, and kill us all. That’s good to know.
That’s not to say that it’s impossible, the goddess added solemnly. Given time, and with the support of his mages and Karti, this Earthbreaker may be able to do it. Don’t give him that time.
Wasn’t planning to. Ana ran on in silence for another several seconds. She knew that speaking to her directly too a lot out of the goddess, but she had to ask. What do you think about the revenants? About them being created, I mean? Would the Sentinel allow that? I know you absolutely loathe the guy, but fucking zombies? Isn’t that, I don’t know, against the natural order or something? Something he should care about?
Control. He has become more and more about the order of control as I’ve known him, the goddess replied, her voice flagging. Social order. Hierarchy. Enforcement. Natural order is chaos to him. Creating a demon, binding it into the body you wish instead of letting it roam to find one on its own, that is control. Yes. Yes, the bastard would love that.
Great. Goddamn great, Ana grumbled, not actively directing it at the Wayfarer and not sure if the deity could hear her or not. In any case, the goddess did not respond.
Really, Ana wasn’t sure how much of her thoughts the Wayfarer could hear, and at this point she was both embarrassed and a little afraid to ask. The goddess sometimes responded unprompted; was she always listening? Was that true for all of the Wayfarer’s followers, or just Ana, because she was Chosen, or because of her Enhancement, Connected, which let deities communicate with her directly? Or did Ana simply not have the discipline to separate private and public inside her own mind? After all, how could she? The idea that someone might be listening to her thoughts had never even occurred to her, no matter what some of the more out-there homeless people she’d known had believed.
There was a part or area of her mind — sort of above and a bit to the left — that she thought of as being where the goddess spoke from, and where sensations came from when she just felt intent rather than words. When she was actively trying to speak to the Wayfarer she directed her words there the best she could, but she honestly had no idea if that made any difference. The Wayfarer had already admitted that she saw and heard pretty much everything that happened around Ana, even if she didn’t always watch or listen, which was apparently an important distinction. Did that apply to thoughts as well?
It wasn’t something she was entirely comfortable thinking about. It also wasn’t something she could do anything about, or important enough to worry about until this latest shit-show had been dealt with.
She was even less comfortable with the deep-seated worry she’d had, even before Karti spoke it aloud, that she didn’t know if the Wayfarer could be trusted. Not in the sense that Ana feared the goddess might betray her; she’d invested a lot of time and effort into Ana, and Ana, in her own opinion, was far too useful as a weapon to be thrown away lightly. No, Ana was almost entirely sure that the goddess was honest about wanting to help her Ascend. She just had no way of determining how much or what of what the Wayfarer told her was objective fact, and what was just her own opinions. The goddess had admitted quite happily to not being omniscient. Nor, she’d claimed, were the other deities. In fact, everything Ana had heard, from the Wayfarer, from her priests, and from regular people, pointed to the fact that the deities, for all their power, were people. And like all people they were fallible, opinionated, and driven by their own beliefs and agendas.
In the Wayfarer’s case, that agenda was simple: she never wanted people to lose their sense of adventure. She wanted for there to always be another frontier, another new, untamed land on the horizon. It was the Age of Discovery, forever, without the genocide.
Ana was completely on board with that. The very Splinter Ana was in had provided a place for Messy and Ray and many others to make a new life for themselves. If Splinters had been a thing on Earth ten years ago, when the man who was supposed to be Ana’s guardian beat her so badly that she’d taken the first opportunity to flee to the streets of New York rather than stay another day, she herself would have emigrated in a heartbeat. The fact that they were the Wayfarer’s initiative, her legacy, and her eternal life’s work made Ana want very badly to trust her.
But she also knew how blind people could be to their most dearly held beliefs and pet issues, especially when it came to the idea that they may be causing more harm than good. And as much as she wanted to dismiss her enemies as malevolent fanatics, she couldn’t. She’d spoken to too many of them, and for all that Ana despised them, Ana couldn’t convince herself that the majority of the Sentinel’s followers acted out of malice. They’d done indisputably evil things, unforgivable things, but Ana believed that Karti’s pain and regret over what he saw as necessary evils were real. In his eyes, he’d led his followers to commit unspeakable crimes in the name of the survival of all Existence. Summerland, the Ascender, was entirely convinced as well, and the Sentinel had spoken to him directly. And one thing everyone seemed to agree on was that the Sentinel didn’t lie.
Either everyone was wrong about the Sentinel’s nature, or the Sentinel was wrong about the Splinters. Or, the worst option, the Wayfarer was wrong, and the Splinters really were a poison, slowly killing everything.
Ana truly didn’t envy anyone with a conscience. Perhaps giving up, allowing this Splinter to collapse and herself and her friends to die, would save untold millions of people. The fact that she could simply choose not to care made things so much simpler. Ana was going to survive. She was going to make sure that her friends did as well. Then, and only then, was she going to worry about the long term and the big picture. For now, she had a pack of mages to run down.
They were an hour north of the Outpost when her bond with Messy came alight with fear.
and read 8 chapters ahead of both Splinter Angel and Draka! You also get to read anything else I’m trying out — which is how Splinter Angel got started.
Join us if you want to chat with other readers, or just hang out!
