"Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak." — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The third night of being grey ended at a herbalist’s counter in the lower Rustward, where Joel spent forty minutes doing the one thing a pharmacist could not stop himself from doing in any world, which was auditing other people’s medicine.
The Weeping Caverns hunted with venom, according to every bestiary rhyme a Caelmont childhood contained, so he had come down the hill after evening bell to buy antidotes for the trip, and the Rustward’s only apothecary had sold him three vials of what the label promised was universal antivenin.
Joel had held the third vial up to the lamp in the doorway, read the sediment line, and concluded that the mixture was roughly one part actual medicine to four parts flour and regret, because the district’s apothecary cut his product the same way the district’s fences cut their prices.
He had bought the raw reagents instead, and he was carrying the little paper parcels home through the alleys, along with rope, lamp oil, and two days of rations, when the street around him began to empty in a way that streets only emptied on purpose.
He catalogued it the way he catalogued everything, without slowing his walk. The drain kids who begged the culvert corner on Foundry Lane were gone an hour before their usual bedtime.
The lamp at the mouth of the next alley was burning low. The foundry shift bell had rung ten minutes ago, and not one worker had crossed the alley ahead of him, which meant that someone had politely cleared his route in both directions.
And behind him, twice, he had heard a whistle pass along the rooftops, two low notes that were answered from further up the slope, and the Rustward used whistles for exactly one industry, because the industry had learned that runners attracted the garrison.
’A net,’ Joel thought, and something in his chest went as quiet and settled. ’Not a mugging. A mugging shows you steel early, because fear does half the work. This is a closing pattern, and it was laid by somebody who wanted the street empty first, which means the client paid for quiet.’
Three people in the world knew that Joel Carrow still breathed.
One of them was Miss Albright, who had burned evidence into her own console to keep it that way, and the other two were whoever had read the outer gate’s exit log on the morning he had strolled out of the Spire.
The archive belonged to the Mayor’s administration down to its last brass key, and the scanner that morning had read him exactly as the Null-Band intended, a Level 1 Flesh-Guide in a hood.
The disguise had protected him from every scanner in the city, and it had simultaneously delivered his name, his class, and his district to whoever read the logs, because a dead boy who walks is a loose end, and a Level 1 loose end is a cheap one.
The mistake Joel chose was deliberate, and it was the same mistake he had chosen in a gorge full of Ash-Crawlers a week and a lifetime ago.
The alley was a throat, an old drying lane between two dead foundries, barely two shoulders wide, with a wall of stacked slag bricks closing the far end, and he walked thirty paces down its length and stopped with his back to the bricks, holding his paper parcels like a boy caught out after curfew.
Twelve monsters in a stone throat had been simple arithmetic on the first day.
Three men in the same stone throat were the same arithmetic with better posture.
The lane was too narrow for anything wider than a man to move side by side, and the wrapped polearm was the only long weapon in sight.
The net followed him in, and Joel read all three of them as they came, head to toe, out of professional habit.
The leader came first, and he came like a man arriving at work. Ferro was somewhere past forty, tall and grey-stubbled, with two fingers missing from his left hand and the flat eyes of a butcher pricing meat by the kilogram.
He wore a long waxed apron of the kind the slaughter rows used, over boiled leather that had been patched and re-patched for twenty years, and at his hip hung a falchion of true Spire-steel with a grip worn to the shape of his hand.
Behind him came the weight, a barrel of a man called Cask, bald, with a black iron hound tattooed across his scalp and a boarding axe slung across his back beside a belly that said he did his killing at arm’s length.
The third was the youngest, a skinny man of twenty or so with a patchy beard, boots too new for the district, and a cheap sword held in white-knuckled fists, and his collar tag was fresh and unscratched, which meant he was new enough that tonight was probably his graduation.
"Evening, friend," the young one said. "Purse, the parcels, and the wrapped stick. Hand them up nice, and the night stays friendly."
Joel played it exactly as the file said he should. He shrank against the slag bricks, hugged the parcels to his chest, and let his shoulders shake, and inside the performance his mind sat cold and still behind his eyes, savoring the rare professional pleasure of a dosage prepared to the milligram.
The leader had not spoken at all, which was the correct way to do this work, and Joel noted with distant respect that Ferro’s eyes had already done their own arithmetic and dismissed the parcel, the hood, and the shaking, and settled on the wrapped polearm as the only item in the lane worth a second look.
"Quiet, now," Ferro said, mostly to the young one, and then he did the thing, which was to stop talking and work.
The falchion came in low, then drove straight through the front of Joel’s hooded coat, aimed at the heart of a Level 1 support class with twenty years of steady accuracy.
At the same moment, Cask’s boarding axe swung toward Joel’s collarbone from the other side.
The two attacks came together like a practiced execution, the same move that had ended a hundred quiet contracts in a hundred quiet places.
Both strikes stopped.
The falchion stopped first, and it stopped dead, the way a blade stops when it is driven into the pier of a bridge.
There was no give in the chest under it, and no blood, and no sound of entry, and Ferro had one full second to watch his own wrists absorb an impact that had gone somewhere, because the vibration that should have run up the steel into his hands had been drunk out of the blade entirely.
Cask’s axe arrived a half beat later, and the heavy head struck the boy’s shoulder and simply halted there, resting against the coat as though it had been laid down by a tired man.
[Ding!]
[Aegis Frame: incoming kinetic force absorbed. 1,860 units. Host damage: 0.]
[Aegis Frame: incoming kinetic force absorbed. 2,340 units. Host damage: 0.]
[Charge stored: 4,200 units.]
[System Note: the band says Level 1. The sternum disagrees.]
Ferro stepped back off the thrust with his balance still perfect, which told Joel everything about the man’s tier of professionalism, because a lesser fighter would have leaned on the frozen blade and died confused.
The young one was still standing in his practiced stance, his cheap sword half-raised and his mouth open around a question his experience had no answer for.
Cask stared at the axe resting against an unharmed shoulder, like a man staring at a door that had suddenly stopped being a door.
"Gentlemen," Joel said quietly, and his voice had nothing shaking in it anymore. "You have the wrong file."
The counterattack began as the form began, because the Meteor Piercer did not ask his opinion about the schedule.
The lane was too narrow for the full four-step rotation, so the technique amputated itself the way it had against the Chieftain, loading a half-turn through hips that now carried Epic-tier specifications, and the wrapped halberd came around in the compressed space with the chitin disguise shredding off the crescent head in a spray of grey flakes, and 4,200 units of stolen Charge rode out along the shortened arc like a passenger that had been waiting for the bus.
[Ding!]
[Meteor Piercer executed (shortened arc). Kinetic discharge: 34,700 units. Stored Charge released.]
It took Cask through the center of his leather apron, and the apron did not so much fail as cease to be a concept, and the enormous man left the ground and went the length of the lane into the slag bricks, and the bricks accepted him.
Joel did not watch him land, because triage runs backward, and the remaining threats were processed in order of threat, not in order of sympathy.
The young one swung in raw panic.
The cheap sword struck Joel’s raised forearm and stopped dead, another small deposit in the account.
Joel answered with the butt of the halberd, smashing into the boy’s elbow and breaking the arm.
The boy dropped into the lane, staring blankly as if he no longer understood what was happening.
Joel knew he would not be getting up to find out.
Ferro ran through the entire catalogue in the time it took to breathe.
Joel watched the professional’s eyes move—to the blocked end of the alley, the height of the walls, and the boy still standing between him and escape.
Then those flat butcher’s eyes settled on the only choice left.
Ferro came forward.
He would die fighting rather than die running.
The falchion came in a fast low pair, and Joel took the first on his thigh and the second on his ribs, both absorbed, both painless, both paid into the Charge, and then the crescent came around once more and the lane went quiet.
[Ding!]
[Iron Hound Mercenary (Lv. 15, 13, 12) x3 eliminated.]
[EXP gained. Marginal.]
[Lethal engagement survived (numerically superior hostiles).]
[Survival Accumulation: 6%.]
[System Note: the Wheel does not pay for theater.]
Joel stood in the settling ash with the disguise wrap hanging off his weapon in ribbons, and he listened to the district.
Somewhere above the lane, out in the smog, the relay whistle was still waiting for an all-clear that was never going to come, and somewhere across the city a man with four rings and a dead smile was waiting for a quiet confirmation that had just become a complication.
He crouched beside the leader, and his fingers found the collar tags, iron tags cut from garrison badges, souvenirs of soldiers who had not retired.
The new question arrived exactly on schedule, cold and patient as everything else the week had taught him, which was what the Wheel would do with a corpse that already knew how to work.