Chapter 3: Chapter two

Small-minded bigotry is the root cause of much of the tension between peoples in my experience. Everyone has heard it said that the Lhintish are fanatical, Salitians are warlike, Tavatians are stupid, and delkin all live in trees and speak in rhyme. But this is all talk. When you come right down to it, everyone of all nations, human and not, are just people trying to get by.

Except the Yarrlish. They’re a bunch of brutish, death-obsessed lunatics, the lot of them.

• Many Peoples, One World.

 

The Yarrlish had done little but sit around camp picking their teeth for the last two days and Kalissa was beginning to think she should consider a career change to something more exciting, like maybe inspecting paint while it dried.

She had known, of course, that the life of a Shadow involved a lot of waiting and watching, but she had been stuck up a tree for two days and she was beginning to stink. When Master Vondash had given her the assignment to follow a group of Yarrls that had come through town and report back, she had been excited. It was her first real mission as a Shadow and while it was a simple one, it certainly beat asking fatuous questions of equally fatuous professors as a training exercise. Unfortunately, the Yarrls hadn’t stayed in the city long, and had instead set up camp in the nearby woods.

Some of Inveritus’s citizens, generally the kind with too much money and too little to occupy their time, would sometimes complain that Inveritus had stripped all the nature from its lands. If that were true, Kalissa had seen little evidence of it from her tree. The woods seemed just as thick and dark as any other, and the multitude of insects that crawled over and around her as she hid in her tree seemed just as plentiful as anywhere else. The only difference was that the Inveritus woods had a surplus of Yarrls.

Because the Yarrls were still in Inveritus territory, Kalissa couldn’t report back that they had left the country peacefully. But they also didn’t seem to be doing anything. They were obviously waiting for something, but for what and how long they planned to wait was anybody’s guess.

As Kalissa watched, one of the Yarrls got up to relieve himself in the woods. It was the large one, who stood half a head higher than the other two and had a much more pronounced gut. That left the two small ones, one with a terrible combover, at camp. Kalissa had nicknamed them Big, Small and Bald and filled her time inventing ridiculous backstories and petty dramas that could play out between the three of them. In her mind, Small was sleeping with Bald’s wife, but what Small didn’t know was that Bald and his wife were running a game on him to make off with his rich uncle’s inheritance, all the while Big was showing both the other two’s wives how he got his nickname.

It would be fair to say that Kalissa was bored.

Big came back to camp and addressed the other two. Kalissa couldn’t hear what they were saying from where she was perched, which made it harder to gather information on them, but she couldn’t get closer without risking being seen.

It was only her peculiar abilities that allowed her to get as close as she was without being spotted. Her mother had been a skard and had passed a measure of the race’s shapeshifting on to her. That was about all she had gotten from her mother, who had left her soon after she was born. Kalissa had once thought this was a skard thing, but she had later learned that skard could stay and raise children the same as anyone else. Worse, their abilities meant they could stop themselves getting pregnant if they chose to. Which meant that Kalissa’s mother had either wanted to conceive, or hadn’t cared either way, but hadn’t wanted to raise the child. Or, to put it another way, she was an arsehole.

Not that Kalissa was bitter or anything.

So, Kalissa could shapeshift, at least a bit. She couldn’t turn into a whole different animal or anything, but changing the colour of her skin and hair to better blend into the trees wasn’t beyond her. Being a changeling was a big part of what had caused Vondash to recruit her to train as a Shadow in the first place, though being brilliant hadn’t hurt either.

Whatever Big said to the others, it was apparently important enough to make them all follow him off into the woods.

Kalissa cursed quietly and briefly debated what to do. If she followed them on foot into a part of the woods that she wasn’t familiar with, there was a good chance she would be spotted. If that happened, she would have three armed and angry Yarrls on her hands and the best she could hope for would be to get away before they skinned her alive. On the other hand, if she didn’t follow, there was a chance she would miss crucial information.

Well, nobody said becoming a Shadow would be without risks. She clambered down from her perch, stretching out her tired muscles as she went, and followed the Yarrls into the woods.

The Yarrls stopped just outside a clearing filled with tall grass that must have strangled the roots of any trees trying to grow in it. They positioned themselves on either side of a wide break in the trees that made an obvious path for anyone approaching. So, it was to be an ambush then. The Yarrls settled down to wait where they wouldn’t be visible, but had a clear view of the path and the clearing. Kalissa found a tree with a good view of the whole affair and clambered up to see what she could see.

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After about an hour—which was a mercifully short time after the interminable torpor that had been Kalissa’s last two days—someone came by. That someone was a greasy-looking man in robes that marked him as Salitian nobility. He was weak of chin and round of belly. A soft man. Kalissa was too far away to be sure, but she would have bet good money that he would be sweating through his robes from the walk out of town. The noble was accompanied by six hard men with crossbows. They wore leather armour that looked to have cost about as much as a decent drink. Local mercenaries by the look of them, and not the reputable kind.

The Yarrls made no move against the group as they passed into the clearing. The mercenaries spread out in a loose line behind the noble. The noble looked as if he was trying to maintain an air of calm composure but was tired, sweaty and thinking he really should have sent a servant to do this kind of work.

After a few minutes, a man approached from the other side of the clearing. He wore a brown cloak and walked up to the noble as though there weren’t six men holding crossbows a short distance away. The newcomer stopped about ten feet from the nobleman and produced a dagger. It looked expensive, with a sheath decorated with gold filigree and a huge black gemstone set into the pommel. And, it could have been Kalissa’s imagination, but it almost looked like the thing was smoking.

Kalissa took note of that. It seemed the sort of thing that might be significant.

The two men were having a conversation and, though Kalissa was too far away to hear what was being said, it didn’t look to be going well. The nobleman’s body language looked like he was going for intimidation but wasn’t very good at it. The other man’s body language looked like he was annoyed and could strike the nobleman at any moment. He put the dagger back into his cloak and moved to leave. Then things got violent.

The nobleman gave a signal and two of the mercenaries with clear lines of fire shot the man in brown with their crossbows. Or, they would have shot him. Their aim seemed to be good, they weren’t standing very far away, and they looked like they knew what they were doing when it came to the task of putting quarrels in unarmed men. But the man in brown raised his hand and both bolts curved around him and into the woods.

Kalissa’s eyebrows went up. Inveritus was a big city, so it wasn’t like she had never seen a forceshaper before, but the man had turned the arrows aside in mid-flight. That was a new one on her. From what she knew of forceshaping, the amount of precision involved in an act like that must have been tremendous. Likewise, the ego involved in bothering with a stunt like that, rather than a simple blast of force, must have been equally tremendous. This man must be both very skilled and very arrogant, which struck Kalissa has a dangerous combination.

The nobleman seemed to agree with Kalissa’s assessment of the man as dangerous, because he practically fell over himself running away from him. The man in brown wasn’t chasing him though, he was backing away from the men with crossbows, his hand still raised. As for the mercenaries, they seemed indecisive. On the one hand, they had been given an order. On the other, the simple “guard the idiot” job was quickly turning into a fight with an unusually skilled forceshaper, and they didn’t seem that enthusiastic about the prospect.

One of the mercenaries seemed to decide that orders were orders, because he raised his crossbow to fire, but before he could an arrow took him through the eye and he fell down dead. One of the other mercenaries broke at that point and ran for it. A moment later, one of his comrades followed suit. The others scanned the forest, looking for whoever had fired the shot so they could return the favour.

Two more arrows took a second mercenary through the neck at the same time and he went down choking on his own blood.

The remaining mercenaries ran for it and the man in the brown cloak faded into the forest on the other side of the clearing.

The Yarrlish didn’t pursue, which made sense. It looked like they had been planning to steal that knife, but presumably they had been planning on ambushing the nobleman after he bought the knife and taking it from him via the expedient of murder. And, since the Yarrls didn’t seem to be morons, Kalissa was pretty sure they liked the idea of lying in wait and jumping people a lot more than they liked the idea of charging across a clearing under fire from an unknown number of archers. Better to stay put and try to pick up the man in brown’s trail later.

And that’s exactly what they did. They lay in wait for a good quarter hour before prowling off the way the man had gone.

Kalissa considered following them, she was sent to observe their behaviour after all, but ultimately decided against it. That plan seemed both dangerous and unproductive. She didn’t know who the Yarrlish were, who the man in brown was, who the nobleman was, or why anyone wanted the knife. Best to report back and get more information before taking further action. Besides, the Yarrlish would raise eyebrows wherever they went, so they should be easy enough to track down again if need be.

Kalissa returned to town to report to Master Vondash on what had happened. Well, to report to Master Vondash and take a much-needed bath.

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