Only Villains Do That

“This is a Spirit?”

“This one isn’t exactly…typical,” Aster admitted.

“These are the things that hand out spells and artifacts.”

“Well…among other things. And, not all of them. Not this one, obviously.”

Four days after my unexpected but profitable visit from the goblins, I was standing in a pleasant little meadow surrounded on three sides by the khora forest but carpeted with nice, normal field grass and even a smattering of flowers. The last days had been spent helping clean the fortress, having Goose teach me to fight, and learning more facts about Ephemera, Fflyr Dlemathlys, and Dount from Biribo. That, and worrying about what was happening in Gwyllthean with Gilder, Clan Olumnach and Lady Gray. All of these activities were productive except the worrying, but they had in common that there was a lot of progress to be made on every front and none of my efforts felt like I was really getting anywhere yet. It was quite a relief to be here, now, in this nearly pastoral scene, even if I’d come to study more Ephemera nonsense.

In the exact center of this little meadow was a small and gently sloping hill barely taller than me, and right at the apex of that sat the Spirit.

The Spirit resembled a white stone pillar no more than chest-high, rounded in style and worn further by time and weather, deeply engraved with geometric patterns that in some cases looked faded from erosion. And it was definitely stone, not akorthist. It only activated when approached; this one was inert until someone drew within about two meters of it.

I studied the Spirit in silence, then set off back up the hill for my second visit to it. Biribo buzzed along at my shoulder as usual, though Aster opted to remain behind this time.

As before, once I got close enough it lit up. The deep lines engraved in the alter began to glow with a shifting, chromatic luminescence, and a slowly rotating ring of symbols made of light appeared in a circle around its peak, like a halo. From this rose an image like a hologram, forming the shape of a somewhat stylized old woman’s face.

“Why, hello, dearie,” the Spirit said in a creaking voice which matched the image, and additionally sounded like it had been electronically processed somehow. Electronic music isn’t my forte but I recognized the presence of deliberate audio filters that gave it an unearthly quality. “What is your favorite color?”

“Still gray,” I replied.

“How lovely!” the Spirit said with apparent enthusiasm. Just like on my previous attempt, holographic butterflies and sparkling effects like tiny fireworks burst into being around the whole hill, dancing and flashing in the sunlight. It was pretty, I had to admit. Probably would’ve looked downright breathtaking at night. But…

“And that’s it,” I said, as the lights around the altar itself and the projection of the Spirit’s face disappeared, leaving it dark and inert once more. Glowing butterflies continued to dance on the breeze around us, letting off little trails of glitter in the air.

“That’s all you get from old Granny Sparkles,” Aster said. “That’s what she’s called, locally.”

“Every Spirit’s different,” Biribo added. “They all have their own task, and their own reward. The task can be just about anything; the reward is usually something related to Blessings, but there are more whimsical ones like this. Also, most of the ones with more concrete rewards will only let you complete their task once.”

“Oh, but I can tell it my favorite color and get a light show as many times as I like? Usefulandfair.”

“Also, you gotta be careful if you attempt a Spirit’s task. Not all of them will punish a failed attempt, but when they do the punishments can get…exotic.” He flicked out his tongue teasingly.

I descended back down the hill toward Aster. “Right. So when you were so insistent that I absolutely must tell the Spirit my real favorite color…?”

“Yeah, if you lie to Granny Sparkles you get struck by lightning,” she said, her delivery remarkably blasé for such an announcement. “That’s why we’ve got privacy up here, Lord Seiji. This particular Spirit isn’t good for anything except getting children and stupid people killed. Everybody on Dount knows to avoid it. More important ones are either tucked away in dangerous places or one of the Clans has built a castle around them. So, wait, your favorite color is gray? Seriously?”

“I like simplicity,” I replied. “Free lightning, huh. If only I had the faintest fucking clue how to build a battery or generator or anything electrical, I could start getting some real shit done.”

“Well,” Aster offered, falling into step beside me as we set off back out of the meadow, “maybe if today’s plan works out you can start buying some more scrolls! There’s gotta be a lightning spell somewhere.”

“Wait, you can buy scrolls?” I exclaimed, turning an accusing look on Biribo. “You said they were only rewards from dungeons and Spirits!”

“Not only,” he retorted. “Of course you can buy scrolls, you got yours from a dead peddler. How do you think that happened?”

“You said Virya planted those!”

“I said she probably planted the Heal scroll among the rest of them. Remember, I made a whole big point about how it didn’t fit in with the others in the selection, which I wasn’t surprised to find there? You gotta start paying attention to details, boss, the nuance’ll getcha killed.”

Now that I thought back, he had said something like that. In my defense, it was in my first minutes on Ephemera, people were trying to kill me, and I was awash in a bunch of isekai exposition trying to pick out which bits would help me survive another hour. He wasn’t wrong about the other part, either; I really was trying to be more detail-oriented.

“Well…you can’t exactly…just buy scrolls,” Aster said more hesitantly.

This time I stopped walking and rounded on her. “You literally just said—”

“Sorry!” she winced, raising her hands. “I was trying to be encouraging! You can theoretically buy scrolls, but in practice it’s more…complicated.”

“There are very rare spells that’ll let you create scrolls,” Biribo explained. “Other than that, they’ll be dungeon or Spirit rewards and only go to market if they’re earned by somebody who doesn’t need or want them for themselves. So they’re either handcrafted by one of a half dozen sorcerers on the planet who can do that, or somebody with very in-demand skills risked their life to get them. You’re not gonna find commodities like that just sitting on shelves in a shop. A lot of the time, there aren’t even middlemen; if you wanna buy a scroll, you gotta do it directly from whoever its first owner is. That means not only having a shitload of money, but connections. There’s a reason I didn’t prompt you to try it when we were in town, boss.”

“Yeah, joining the King’s Guild would be just the first step toward that,” Aster added. “You’d also have to build up a good reputation, get some impressive quests under your belt…”

“So what the hell was that peddler doing with them?”

“He’s too dead to explain himself, but he probably stole them,” said Biribo. We had passed into one of the arms of khora forest semi-encircling the Spirit’s meadow, and I could see the rest of my bandits up ahead; Sakin waved to me from his perch in a branch of khora. “That kinda theft gets at least a Clan’s private army after you, if not the King’s Guild itself. He was probably heading for the lake to trade the scrolls for sanctuary among the dark elves, got lost in the khora forest, stumbled onto the old road and ended up at North Watch. Wouldn’t’ve been the first to try that, but he wasn’t gonna survive in any event. The naga would’ve just killed him and taken the scrolls anyway.”

“That reminds me,” I said, suddenly feeling a little guilty for having forgotten about this till now, “you lot did give him a respectful send-off while I was in Gwyllthean?”

“Just as you ordered, Lord Seiji,” Harold said nervously, eyeing me as if expecting an attack, as usual. So far I wasn’t sure if he was nervous in general or just nervous around me, which I wouldn’t have blamed him for considering I’d Immolated him twice. “None of us is a priest, but we had a service. Sakin said some words.”

“He did it properly, Lord Seiji,” Goose added, seeing my expression. “Honestly, it was quite moving. I won’t lie, I’m still a bit weirded out after hearing something that profound from Sakin of all people.”

“And that would be exactly why he did it, Goose,” I said with a sigh.

“Have I mentioned lately how much happier I am under your leadership, Lord Seiji?” Sakin asked from above us. “You get me.”

“You’re not that complicated, man.” He just laughed, and I privately reminded myself to ask somebody about funerary customs here; they obviously didn’t bury people if they were afraid to dig up the ground. Later, though, when we weren’t doing something more important.

I made my way to the other edge of our little encampment among the khora, where Twigs was keeping watch over the distant road with the pocket-sized collapsible spyglass I’d taken from Lord Arider’s corpse, while Donon kept watch over her. Twigs tended to get stuck with watch duties, because she had the ability to focus for long periods in silence and didn’t mind doing it. I had entrusted her with this task due to that, and also because my suspicions about her background suggested she would have more experience than the rest of this rabble in handling fragile and expensive objects.

“Anything?” I asked, stepping up to her perch behind a low-hanging fan of khora and leaning against it. In the raw, the stuff had an almost velvety texture over the hardness beneath. This kind, anyway.

“Looks like another caravan coming, Lord Seiji,” Twigs reported quietly. “I can’t tell if it’s the one you want yet.”

She handed me the spyglass and I settled in to examine our potential target.

According to Maugro’s hot tip, the soonest we could expect a merchant caravan which met the specifications I’d listed was today, now, this morning. The sun was still just barely over the broken horizon, but already we’d seen and let one caravan pass as it didn’t look like the size or composition of the one he’d described, was earlier than expected, and I hadn’t seen the emblem of the Auldmaer Trading Company on the wagons as predicted. I really hoped that hadn’t been our target. Maugro was surprisingly specific about the details; apparently shipping between Dount and the adjacent islands was monitored with more precision than I would have thought possible for the general level of technology here, and where information existed, it could be had for a price by people like me who had no business knowing it.

It was a good spyglass, too, clear and with decent magnification. Raising it to my eye, I could see the caravan emerging around a bend in the road with patches of khora forest on both sides. At this angle I couldn’t even count the number of wagons yet, nor see if anything was printed on their sides.

They were the only traffic to be seen and only the second appearance of anyone since we’d arrived an hour before dawn; unlike the well-traveled main road, this smaller one was on the private lands of Clan Yldyllich, yet another preposterous Fflyr name I wasn’t going to try saying aloud. As I understood it, the private road was unpopular with merchant trains both because it added a detour to the route and because Clan Yldyllich charged a toll for using their road. On the other hand, this road was even more unpopular with bandits because of the general lack of prey and the fact that while the Kingsguard would rough criminals up pretty badly in the process of arresting them, the Yldyllich Clansguard just turned inconvenient people into inconvenient corpses and threw those into the khora forest. The way Maugro told it, merchants only brought their goods along this road if they weren’t in a hurry and were willing to pay extra for another layer of security. Apparently that was unusual; the merchant class were known for valuing their coin more than their blood.

Which also meant, of course, that we were in deep shit if the Clansguard caught us out here. Once our actual target arrived, we needed to get this finished fast and be gone faster. I wasn’t anxious to find out whether professional soldiers would stand up to seeing a few of their number Immolated.

“Hmmm.” I tracked their steady progress up the road as it curved slightly, bringing more of the formation into view. “Four wagons… I think these are our marks. Covered wagons, so it’s not like I can check what they’re hauling. Wait—there, I can see the logo painted on the side of the lead wagon. It looks close enough to what Maugro drew. Twigs, double-check me on this?”

“Of course, Lord Seiji,” she said in her soft voice, accepting the telescope back and peering through it. Then she looked at the scrap of paper I offered, whereupon the goblin info broker had sketched the sigil of the Auldmaer Trading Company. Apparently every Clan and guild and significant organization in Fflyr culture had to have its own sigil, which was constructed out of the pictographic element of their writing system. I could only read the language thanks to the Blessing of Wisdom and didn’t even begin to understand cultural minutiae like this, but I suspected Twigs had the education. “The goblin’s rendition is rough, but I believe it’s the correct emblem.”

“Then it’s time for action,” I said, cracking my knuckles. “Stand ready, everybody.”

They did, quietly moving forward to cluster around me and readying weapons, though there wasn’t much for them to actually do at this juncture. If all went according to plan, the bandits wouldn’t need to intervene at all. And since I wasn’t crazy enough to bank on everything going to plan, I had brought them as backup.

I reached out with my mind, a weird sensation I was only able to handle at all thanks to the practice I’d gotten in over the last few days, and felt it connect to the recipients of all the Tame Beast spells I’d cast. Way too many to use this spell the way it was probably intended, and the reason we’d gotten here so early in the morning, well before sunrise and in sufficient darkness that I’d needed the bandits then because apparently there were nocturnal predators in the khora forest that weren’t shy about ambushing a lone person. All that preparation had paid off: they were still there, all the little lumps of almost-consciousness I had meticulously created and placed under my magical control, all still following the last compulsion I had laid on them to lie still and silent in the ditch which ran alongside the road.

Now I gave them a new order, and at my mental command, hundreds of slimes boiled up out of the ditch, burbling across the road and miring the wheels, animals, and feet of the merchant caravan like a gooey, molasses-slow, strangely cute tsunami.

We could hear the yelling even from our distant vantage.

Making that many slimes obey me didn’t exactly…work. Once Tame Beast was applied, I could move a single slime around just by paying attention to it, as intuitively as I moved my own fingers. It required active thought; presumably with practice it would grow more instinctive, but I wasn’t there yet. The human brain, however, was not designed to control roughly three hundred extra limbs independently. With a cluster of my tamed slimes in the same general area, I could sort of push a broad urging on them and that was it. I compelled them to just generally occupy the road and climb up things. Wheels, legs, whatever; things in general. Even that vague directive required all of my concentration, though, and resulted in twice as many slimes burbling around in confusion as managed to crawl up someone’s leg, and quite a few slipping my control entirely to wander off into the grass.

The difference, apparently, was inherent nature. Slimes were scavengers; they had no natural predators, but weren’t inclined to get aggressive with anything bigger than themselves and alive. They’d been happy enough to lie still in the ditch, especially because there was vegetation and other decaying biomatter down there for them to absorb, but they weren’t interested in attacking a merchant caravan and pushing them to do so was rapidly giving me a headache.

It did the job, though. The caravan was well and truly stopped.

Guards and teamsters were shouting, stomping, and trying to get rid of their attackers with various weapons and tools, which of course was ineffective. You could neither bludgeon nor cut a slime; killing them required either magic or to trap one in a pot and boil it. The dhawls, those shaggy goat-ox things with lizardlike faces being used to pull the wagons, had a much more stolid temperament than horses and didn’t panic at unfamiliar sights, but I’d been warned that they would adamantly refuse to step on anything they didn’t recognize or like, so covering the road with slimes was an effective way to stop them. The creatures didn’t much care for the slimes trying to ooze up their legs, either, stomping several into splatters and kicking them off, but even then their instinct was to stand in one place and do that.

No one was in danger, yet. The worst a slime could do to you was cause a chemical burn if it sat unmoving on your skin for several minutes, long enough for it to start trying to digest you. Against people actively resisting them, they were just annoying.

“Hell’s revels,” Kasser muttered. “How many of those can he summon?”

“As many as he needs to,” Aster replied, just as quietly. “Hush.”

Trying to wrangle slimes, I had enough concentration free to follow the conversation but not participate, but based on what Biribo had told me about Blessings he was right to be impressed. The way he described it, Blessings were like muscles: the more you exercised one, the stronger it became, and not everyone had the same starting capacity. A fresh Blessing was usually pretty weak—able to use one artifact at a limited capacity, say, or cast a simple spell at a pretty low intensity. Someone who had just gotten Blessed with Magic and learned Summon Slime could summon…a slime.

The cheat code here was the Blessing of Wisdom, which among other things magnified the other two Blessings straight to their maximum effectiveness. Obviously this didn’t affect anyone but the Hero and the Dark Lord. Another example of Sanora and Virya tweaking their magic system to give their chosen Champions the greatest possible advantage without wrecking the system entirely. So yes, I could summon more or less infinite slimes; in fact I’d used this morning’s activities as a chance to test my magical capacity by summoning and then taming each one rather than using Summon Bound Slime, which I’d created from those two separate effects with spell combination. I had stopped somewhere around three hundred because I had lost count and was losing patience, and still felt like I’d done basically no work and could continue all day.

Unlike now.

“C’mon,” I growled against the mental strain, “this would be a good time to start chickening out…”

“I don’t think they’re going to, Lord Seiji,” Aster murmured from the position she’d taken at my right. “Merchant trains deal with much more dangerous stuff than this, and possibly weirder.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, relaxing my mental hold. With only a distracted afterthought of influence keeping them on task, the slimes became noticeably less assertive and the caravan crew started to make headway in driving them off the road. Silently, I held out my left hand and Twigs placed the spyglass back in it.

It took me just seconds of scanning to find my quarry. “There you are.” Master Auldmaer himself, in the fashion of all managers since time immemorial, was supervising the messy work from a comfortable height. He stood on the seat of the lead wagon, well out of slime range, gesticulating and shouting at his staff without placing himself in the line of…slime. I could faintly her his voice even from back here, though it was too distant to make out the words. Mostly the guards and wagon drivers seemed to be ignoring him. The man was just as Maugro described: well-dressed, with the light tan skin and medium brown hair of middle caste blood, and young to be the owner of a trading company. Actually he didn’t look much older than me, and definitely under thirty.

I had figured it would be the lead wagon, but now that I was certain, it was time for phase two. Focusing my mind, I shifted the spyglass to zero in on clear spots on the road around the wagon and began silently casting. Another nice benefit of having my Blessing of Magic augmented by the Blessing of Wisdom: my spells didn’t have an upper range. If I could see something, I could cast targeted magic on it. Hence the ability to begin dropping more surprises on the distant road thanks to the aid of Arider’s trusty spyglass.

Summon Fire Slime. Tame Beast. Summon Fire Slime. Tame Beast. Summon Fire Slime. Tame Beast.

A chorus of exasperated outcries rose at this fresh nonsense, a sentiment to which I could relate. Releasing the bulk of the normal slimes to do as they would left at least half of them oozing about on the road continuing to make nuisances of themselves, even as others began slowly scattering in every direction. My focus was now on the fire slimes even as I continued to summon more; controlling a handful of them wasn’t neat or easy, but it was worlds better than trying to control hundreds. I was able to nudge them without too much difficulty into a roughly circular formation, slowly closing in on the lead wagon and cutting off Auldmaer’s escape.

The guards were having a much harder time dealing with this. I winced as one brought a giant mace down right on a fire slime, utterly splattering it—sending droplets of burning goo flying in every direction, followed by a shower of curses and blows from his compatriots discouraging him from trying that again. Slimes were just inexorable, in the way they couldn’t be smashed or cut, even the pieces continuing about their business if you dismantled them. Without magic or heat, you couldn’t kill a slime, just make more, smaller slimes. But set that same nuisance on fire, and what was just annoying became a real nightmare. Even burning them wouldn’t work anymore.

There was no one Blessed with Magic among the guards, hence their failure to disperse the normal slimes, but I spied one woman with an artifact sword apparently directing them. From what I’d learned of Fflyr culture, a woman was very unlikely to be in charge of anything unless she had a Blessing to start with. This one kept a cool head, and seeing that their conventional methods weren’t getting anywhere, tried a more effective tactic of gently prodding and nudging a fire slime away toward the edge of the road with the tip of her weapon.

I put a stop to that by directing the slime to latch onto the blade and begin crawling up it toward her hands. The sensible thing to do at that point was to drop the sword, but she wasn’t willing to relinquish the artifact and stepped back, frantically flailing with it to dislodge the encroaching slime. I suspected that sword had strength-enhancing powers, to judge by how hard she was able to swing it. The slime was ripped free and went sailing away, landing beside the road and starting a small grass fire. Fortunately it was in the ditch, in which there were a few centimeters of muddy water at the bottom, an ideal environment for the slimes to hide in, and a way for me to extinguish the fiery ones when I was done here.

“That’s it,” I muttered. “You don’t want any more of this. Come on, you bastards, time to break and run.”

They weren’t, though. Auldmaer was growing more frantic by the minute, nearly all the teamsters and a couple of the guards had retreated from the front wagon where the fire slimes were concentrated, and even the placid dhawls hitched to it were growing agitated. Fire has that effect on animals. Still, they were staying on task, even if for most of them that meant milling about helplessly outside of scorching range, kicking stray slimes into the ditch.

Then the adventurer discovered that with her sword’s strength boost, swinging it like a golf club would wreck most of a slime and send its pieces flying. She began industriously scything them into the ditch, setting it on fire and getting rid of maybe half a slime per swing. I could tell at a glance that this wasn’t a winning strategy in the long run; under my direction, the pieces of slimes just crawled back up, joining back together and returning to their place in the circle. Slow as they were, that process took a lot longer than it took her to smack them, but I was also summoning more slimes onto the road; the numbers made hers an impossible task.

Until, at her apparent exhortation, some of the other guards found their nerve and started to copy her method. The guy who’d splattered the first fire slime dashed forward with his mace and hucked an entire slime clear over the ditch and into the grass beyond.

So now I was in a war of attrition with a less than certain outcome, and there was a grass fire creeping steadily closer to my position. Perfect.

“Uh, boss?” Biribo asked. “What’re you waiting for?”

“Quiet!” I hissed. “Let me concentrate.”

Finally, the first of the caravan personnel started to run—but, to my extreme annoyance, he wasn’t fleeing. The adventurer in charge of the guards pointed back up the road the way they had come, shouting something indistinct from this distance, but I was definitely seeing someone dispatched to bring help.

Shit. How long would it take him to reach the Clan Yldyllich toll post from here? I’d planned to terrorize the entire staff into fleeing at once and have that much time to do what I needed to and depart before reinforcements arrived. The rest of them were swinging gamely on, though, swatting slimes as fast as I could summon them, and faster than the splattered fire slimes could re-form and rejoin the fray. Already there were enough fire slimes in play that it was beginning to strain my concentration just to keep them in a rough circle around the wagon, and they still weren’t enough to make the guards or even the teamsters give this up as a bad job, much less the adventurer. Also, all the grass on both sides of the road was now on fire. Khora wasn’t flammable so it would only be the grass that burned, but that was already going to be more collateral damage than I’d wanted, not to mention a hazard to me.

Why did none of my plans ever work? It was almost as if I had no experience or aptitude for this kind of thing.

There was still phase three… The theoretical phase three. The last step I had told myself it probably wouldn’t come to, but I could still break out in an emergency. This was quickly approaching emergency status, but now that the time was at hand I was frozen.

My spyglass remained fixed on the adventurer, the one in charge and the only source of both backbone and direction for the caravan guards; Auldmaer was even more useless than I in a situation like this. All I had to do…

It wasn’t even a weapon. I think it wouldn’t have been as bad if my only option had been to throw deadly fireballs. It was just…torture. Every previous time I’d used it had been on some murderer attempting to do violence which I urgently needed to stop. This, though, was just a woman doing her job and doing it well, and being in my way.

I couldn’t, not like this.

Goose’s substantial muscular bulk settled in uncomfortably close on my left, between me and Twigs, resting a familiar hand on my shoulder. I’d come to like Goose over the last few days; like most of my crew except probably Sakin she was one of those driven to banditry by desperate circumstances whose details I didn’t know, rather than any desire to prey on other people. She had been teaching me sword fighting, knife fighting and bare-handed fighting, and had warmed up to me considerably once I made it clear I didn’t mind being smacked around when it was for a good cause.

Now she leaned in close to my ear and spoke so quietly none of the others could hear.

“It speaks well of you that you don’t want to hurt anyone unnecessarily, Lord Seiji. But like it or not, you’re a bandit now, and you have to make peace with the necessity. You chose to attack the caravan; letting it draw out any further is only going to make all this messier, and if we don’t get what you came for, all of it was for nothing. We all have to make our choices and take responsibility for the consequences. If I’m speaking out of turn…well, you’ll do what you need to. I understand.”

What I needed to? I was not going to start punishing people for telling me uncomfortable truth when I needed to hear it, that was a strategy for quick self-destruction. I shifted my head from the spyglass to glance over my shoulder and give her a small nod; Goose withdrew, leaving only Twigs in my view looking performatively oblivious.

I looked through the lens again, once more fixing my view on the adventurer bravely smacking flaming monsters off the road, rallying her meager troops, and generally being the source of my problems right now.

God damn it. Someday, Virya was going to pay for putting me in this situation.

Immolate.

We could all hear her scream clearly across that distance.

I lowered the spyglass and closed my eyes, then immediately made myself open them and look. No, Seiji, you chose to do this. You will watch it happen.

She had fallen and dropped her sword, and was already curled into a fetal ball in the road, blazing like a bonfire and no longer able to scream. I shifted my concentration, moving the fire slimes away from her so this wouldn’t get any worse than it had to be.

That had finally done the trick; the other guards had stopped playing slime golf to back up, staring in horror. Between the distance and the angle I couldn’t see the woman’s entire body disintegrating into charcoal and constantly re-forming so as to keep suffering, but I well remembered what a grotesque thing that was to see. However hardened these guys might be, that was too much. The wagon drivers were already fleeing in both directions along the road, and the guards took that as permission. Nobody wanted to stay and be the next. To a man they bolted, ignoring Mr. Auldmaer’s shouted imprecations.

As Immolate faded and the healing effect started to overtake the fire, my victim’s long shrieks of pain became audible again, once she had intact lungs and vocal cords. I forced myself to keep the glass fixed on her and watch the entire process. It was just a few more seconds before she was lying shivering in the road with her clothes gently smoking, but to her it probably felt like years. It was at least a couple of hours for me, and I was only watching.

Tremulously, she stumbled to her feet, taking stock of the mostly-departed slimes, the still very much present fire slimes encircling the wagon with her employer trapped on it, and her now-complete lack of backup.

Pausing only to bend and grab her artifact sword, she turned and ran without even dignifying Auldmaer’s yelling with an acknowledgment. Smart woman.

“Damn,” Sakin breathed. “That is a neat trick.”

Everyone turned to stare at him.

“What?” He shrugged. “I’m not wrong, and I didn’t say it was pleasant. Pretty fucking impressive, though.”

I finally stood from my own crouched position behind the low blade of khora that had been sheltering me and Twigs, only belatedly noting that my body was uncomfortably stiff after all that. At the moment, I was more concerned with how sick to my stomach I felt.

“All of you hold position until we beckon you over,” I said. “Come on, Aster, we have an appointment with Mr. Auldmaer. It’s rude to keep a businessman waiting.”