Please note that the chapter below is an early draft. Names and world-building details subject to change.

Isa dreamed of Ever.

The Spirit of Death had appeared to him before—a mirage at the height of his fever, a flash the first time he had been shot, a soundless shape among the wild dogs who once circled him in contemplation before moving off to find easier prey—but ze had never appeared so clearly.

A hunter and taker of life had to have a stable relationship with Ever, a healthy mixture of fear, respect, and gratitude. When an Inkarnam passed close to Death, it was like passing a lion out in the Wilds. You held yourself straight and calm. One predator recognized another and moved on.

This time, the Spirit of Death stepped closer than ever, right over the border into the Gray, and Isa saw their relationship in all its primal clarity. There was only one predator here and Isa… Isa was prey. His feet were frozen in place as Ever glided toward him, close enough that Isa could see the shafts and barbs of each feather and count those crocodilian teeth. Ever was a skeleton beneath the black of that vulture cloak, ravenous but ever empty. Other spirits all made some noise but Ever was utterly silent. A kind of silence that seemed to absorb all other sounds.

Isa heaved in a breath to scream—for Aer, for Endra, for Osu, for Alkem, for Theid, for anyone—help!

Death opened zir jaws and ate the sound.

Isa lurched awake with the rocking of the Waning Ibis, sweat itching between his bandages and freshly tattooed skin. Shaken, he checked his body for injuries—none except the prickle of tattoos—listened hard for danger—nothing but the dawn clamor of birds waking. Through process of elimination, Isa’s gaze snapped to the most immediate potential danger, but Nath of the Iron Valley was still sound asleep on the bunk opposite, snoring, broad-brimmed hat covering his face.

Many warriors slept with their swords in the bed with them—including Isa when he was sharing a cabin with the most dangerous man he had ever met. Nath didn’t. His massive scorpion sword lay sheathed underneath his bunk, though Isa imagined the metalmancer could feel its presence and have it in his hand in an instant. More than a sword, it seemed a predator in wait beneath still water.

Why? Isa asked Aer as he eyed the sword like prey at the pool’s edge. Why was Death standing so close?

Of course, Aer didn’t know. Only Alkem can know that. You’ve submitted to the Water’s whims and windings. Maybe ze’s trying to tell you something.

Tell me what? Isa wanted to ask. Is it Nath? Did he bring Death with him? But this was a fruitless thing to demand of Aer or Alkem. The Spirit of Truth didn’t know and the Spirit of Change didn’t speak—or if ze did, it was only to prophets. Instead, he asked, what can I do?

In the swirls of the Gray, Aer made a noncommittal movement like a shrug. You can be ready.

Isa looked down at his bandaged hands. His skin still hurt, but the tattoos would be fully functional as long as he took care of them. His muscles had mostly recovered from the days of rowing. They were stronger than they had been, but what good would that do against a metalmancer?

You may be formidable, Isa, but you’ve willingly put yourself in company much more dangerous than yourself. You’ve been away from this kind of hunting for a long time, but you remember life among wild men and wild dogs… You remember that it’s not enough to be alright with living. It’s not even enough to want to live. You have to be ready to fight Ever tooth and saber for that life.

Even if it means letting Theid closer? Isa asked in apprehension. Can you keep zir back?

Theid moves on your will and want, not mine, Aer said, And anyway, has Theid been keeping you alive of late or driving you closer to Death?

It wasn’t a question Isa had really considered. Theid, in zir animalistic desire, was supposed to keep a man alive; all animals, after all, wanted to live. But as much as the base animal didn’t want to die, it also didn’t want to feel pain. And Ever, for all zir terrifying emptiness, was the absence of pain. Who had really been making Isa pause and eye viper fangs with longing? Aer or Theid?

Slowly, not wanting to wake the metalmancer, Isa sat up and peeled the bandages from his tattoos. He started by salving the tag runes on the tops of his feet and slowly worked his way up, hoping he still had the flexibility to reach the larger trigger rune between his shoulder blades; it had been so long since he had done this.

“Pretty runes,” Nath said and Isa started. When had the metalmancer sat up? And how had Isa missed it? “What do they do? Or is it a trade secret?”

It wasn’t a secret, but only because getting runes to do what they did took a lifetime of training under the High Inkarnai. Then again, Isa had no idea what kind of magic metalmancers learned. He was debating whether or not it was safe to explain his runes to Nath, when the metalmancer glanced over the tattoos and said, “I see.”

“See what?”

“They’re just tag runes,” Nath said. “I use a similar kind on my sword.”

Dragging out his fabled scorpion sword, Nath drew the weapon partway out of its sheath to reveal a tag rune of the Daraxean numeral ‘one’ etched into the flat of the blade.

Isa had a cursory knowledge of how metalmancy worked. The tag runes on the sword were written into Nath’s core spell, as Isa’s were written into his. But instead of transferring the tagged items to pocket space, Nath’s allowed him to move them with his mind. It was an adaptation of the same pre-River osseomancy that formed the basis of Isa’s magic.

“Guessin’ you don’t use your tag runes to make stuff fly around,” Nath said, “or you wouldn’t have the same rune on your belt, your swords, your boots, and your body.”

“I exchange them for the python form.”

“Exchange them?”

“When the spell activates, everything tagged with this rune goes into pocket space.”

“Pocket space…” Nath repeated. “Like a storage space outside our material reality? Extra material reality?”

“Yes,” Isa said in surprise. People tended not to believe the concept of pocket space, their minds bound in the confines of Osu’s domain. They assumed that shape-shifters somehow instantaneously transmuted their human bodies into animal ones—never mind the vast differences in sizes and chemical makeup. This was why people like Damored always called Inkarnai corporomancers when the crux of their magic was really animancy.

“There were metalmages who used pocket space—or what they called ‘the mirror world’—back in the day.”

“Really?” Isa’s surprise turned to outright shock. He had thought that pocket space was a secret only known among Wildermyn and the Inkarnai cults. “I didn’t think that sort of magic was known outside the Riverlands.”

“Not widely. But the mages of the Iron Valley dabbled in all sorts of weird and dicey shit. Why’d you think Daraxes dropped its hammer so hard? They were afraid of what the metalmages were up to. All that filthy southern magic…” Nath gave Isa a conspiratorial smile. “Dangerous stuff."

“Were you one of those mages?” Isa asked, suddenly worried for the integrity of his own magic.

“Doin' the weird experimentation? Nah. I made my name bein’ the very best at the simplest form of a tough discipline, good old-fashioned telekinesis. My magic is tag-based, just like yours. But word of advice, Inkarnam: be more reserved about your tag runes around strange mages.”

“Why?”

“Well, I don’t get too much into the doings of osseomages or animages, but speakin’ as a metalmage, if I really wanted to fuck with you, I’d swap some of my originator dust with yours before you refreshed your tattoos.”

“And what would that do?”

“Well, I move my metal nodes around with my mind, so, by modifyin’ my own core spell a bit, I could just… move you around as I willed. You could resist, I suppose, but it would rip your skin off. Not pleasant.”

Unbidden, Isa’s eyes darted nervously to the bag, where he had stowed his originator dust.

“Ah,” Nath grimaced as though Isa had just disappointed him profoundly. “And now I know where you’re keepin’ your dust, genius. A mercenary like you oughtta be a little more careful than that.”

“I…” The truth was, Isa wasn’t used to being guarded about his magic. It was so far beyond the understanding of most Riverlanders—and even Wildermyn shape-shifters, who employed their spells very differently. However, if he was entering an arena with metalmages, osseomages, and Raba damned Nazaru, he was going to have to start being careful.

“In the spirit of fairness…” The older mercenary unsheathed his sword. “Here are all of my tags.”

Breath stuttered to a stop in Isa’s chest. It was one thing to know that the sword of legend was there in its unassuming leather sheath, another to see it up close. At first glance, it really did just look like a lovingly engraved greatsword. Upon closer inspection, there were seams in the metal where the blade could come apart, transforming into the fluid killing machine that made Nath feared throughout the known world.

“It needs oilin’ anyway.” Nath lay the weapon—as long as some men were tall—across his knee and reached back into his bag for a jar of sword oil.

“Twenty-three?” Isa said as he counted the pieces of the scorpion sword.

“Yep.”

“But the needle you had last night said ‘fifty’… Where are twenty-four through forty-nine?”

“Right here.” Nath lifted a finger and Isa jumped as the sword changed. Teeth unfolded from the back edge, one extending from each segment except the very tip. He stared, as sometimes one had to stare at a dangerous creature in the Wilds even as it passed far too close for comfort. Each four-inch tooth had its own tag rune, allowing Nath to fold it in or out independently of the rest of the weapon.

“But…” Isa said, “there are only twenty-two. That’s twenty-four through forty-five. Where are the other four?”

“That,” Nath said, unscrewing the cap on his sword oil, “is a secret.”

“You told me to be more guarded about my tag runes. You’re not worried about showing me yours?” Isa asked. “What if I do something sketchy with them?”

“Well, my tag runes aren’t as high stakes as yours. They’re just bits of metal, totally reparable and replaceable with a good forge at my disposal. Someone fucks with your tag runes, your whole body is at risk. I suppose that’s why that same tag repeats so many times?”

“Yes,” and Isa needed to stop being surprised that Nath understood his magic so well. The man was clearly a mage on the level of a Bone Lord or the highest of High Inkarnam if he had been able to practice and improve his metalmancy on his own for so many years.

“I figured. All my nodes are tagged twice.” Nath flipped the sword over to reveal a second row of tag runes along its opposite flat.

“What about your core spell?” Isa asked. His was etched in bone and stored in the deepest vaults of the Temple Inkarnam. A second copy was buried in an acacia grove outside of Azenkar, where only he could find it. The result was that Isa’s powers could only be stripped away if both he and his Temple willed it. If Nath had no home base and no ruling order to protect his power, where did he keep the source of his magic?

“The only materials to make metalmantic spell tablets were back in the Iron Valley, and you better believe Daraxes blew up the whole mountain range to destroy them.”

“Then… where…?”

“My core spell is right here.” Turning his back to Isa, Nath scooped his dreadlocks up, so Isa could see a dizzyingly complex network of tattoos emerging from the hair at the nape of his neck to extend down his spine and out over each shoulder blade. “‘Course to get to the meat’a the spell—the telekinetic machinery, so to speak—you’d have to shave the back of my head and no one’s ever gotten a blade that close to my brain stem.”

When he had finished oiling his sword, Nath tugged his tunic on and crossed the cabin to leave.

“Mr. Vendan…” Isa said as he reached the door.

“Ain’t you the well-mannered little monster?” the metalmancer laughed. “It’s just Nath.”

“Nath… Why are you being so nice to me?” Isa didn’t think Nath was going to kill him, but after the dream of Ever, he was wary.

“Why not?”

“The songs say—and you said last night—that you’re a monster.”

“So, I am. But even monsters have their moments of sentimentality.”

Did they? Aer damn it, then what was the point of being a monster?

“You remind me of someone,” Nath said after a moment. “That’s all.”

“The man with the metal arm?” Isa said, and Nath’s silence seemed to say ‘yes.’ “Should I take that as a compliment?”

“God Ascended, no. He was deeply miserable—and somehow without ever growing the cynicism to protect himself from monsters like me. You want to live, you’ll want to do far better than that. Develop some healthy mistrust and try a damn smile every once in a while.”

Isa might not be up to smiling, but the rest of the Waning Ibis was a different story when he wandered out onto the deck. There was a lightness to the crew after the dancing the previous night. The men, having let go of their fear of Nath, rowed with vigor, even singing along with the drumbeat as they went.

“You’re sure that lu—guitar—isn’t magic?” Captain Xabres asked Nath as he and the mercenaries listened to the songs floating from below.

“Positive,” Nath said.

“I just… I don’t understand how you got all of them to agree to take three dangerous criminals downriver. I’m still not sure how you got me to agree to it if I’m totally honest.”

“People aren’t that complicated if you know what to look for, Captain. You Riverlanders, for instance, are all deeply repressed.”

“We’re… what?”

“Damored knows.” Nath nodded to Damo, who was busy feeding dried fruit treats to the lemur on her shoulder. “Sometimes, Riverlanders just need a rough tumble. Sometimes they just need a fuckin’ cry. Balm to the soul and they’re forever grateful.”

“Eh, probably also has somethin’ to do with the economy,” Captain Xabres said.

“What do you mean?”

“Freemen haven’t been able to get jobs as oarsmen for the last ten years,” Isa chimed in, “especially in Krell. They were undercut by slave crews. Since the plague hit the slaves hardest, freemen have been back in a lot of businesses where they couldn’t make it before.”

“Alright,” Nath said, “so why leave the place where the business happens?”

“Because it won’t last.”

“The Inkarnam is right,” Captain Xabres said. “These rowers will only have jobs as long it takes the population of slaves to get back to normal.” And Krellish trade lords could be conspicuously good at finding ‘debtors’ and ‘criminals’ when demand for slaves outstripped supply. It always started with the lowest class, the class to which all these oarsmen belonged.

“I see,” Nath said. “They’re fleein’ obsolescence… or slavery. That’s why so many’a the Krellish ones’ve stuck around past Azenkar… although, I wonder what they expect to find at the end of the river in a place that doesn’t exist.”

Captain Xabres shrugged. “In a place that doesn’t exist, there might be jobs that don’t exist, no?”

The mercenaries spent the rest of the day comparing maps with Captain Xabres, trying to anticipate where their voyage might meet with trouble—at least Damo and Nath did. Isa, never having been south of Azenkar, just listened.

Altogether, it did not seem like a day to worry about death…

Until that evening, shortly after the Waning Ibis docked at a small fishing town. Someone might have caught it earlier if the mercenaries had been out on the deck. But Damo, Isa, and Nath were still together in the men’s cabin, discussing the maps when there was a knock on the doorframe.

It was Torrinas, the oarsman Damo had thrown from his seat that first day on the River.

“Oh, hi,” Damo said coldly, “We’re busy.”

But Isa asked, “What is it?” because Torrinas didn’t look the least bit confrontational at being brushed off by a woman. He looked afraid.

“I-I don’t know if any of you know them, but there are some men out on the bank.”

“Some men?” Nath repeated.

“Private Azenkari militia,” Torrinas specified. “They say they were sent by the High Librarian’s wife. They’re asking for one of our passengers, a…” He cast a nervous glance at Damo. “A mercenary who slept with her husband?”

Isa also looked to Damored then, but the Sazuman turned to Nath with rage in her eyes. “Vendan! You said you weren’t followed!”

“Well, in my defense, I did not expect them to be smart enough to track me.”

“Are you kidding me right now?”

“Alright, I don’t need judgment from you of all people,” Nath snapped.

“Me of all people!” Damo’s voice rose in incredulity. “I know what I’m doing! There is a very specific reason I don’t piss off anyone with the funds to send a small fuckin’ militia after me!”

“Um,” Torrinas said, with an anxious look over his shoulder toward the docks. “They seem kind of impatient…"

“Look, I really needed some records from the High Librarian’s collection,” Nath said, ignoring the oarsman. “I didn’t expect his wife to be such a spoilsport about it.”

“How could you not see that coming?” Damo said. “You’re out here saying ‘oh, Riverlanders are so repressed.’ You didn’t stop to think about why they’re so damn repressed? It didn’t cross your mind that their aggressive monogamy fetish might cause problems?

“Sorry,” Isa said, pulled from dread for a moment by sheer affront. “Monogamy what?”

Before the three bounty hunters could come to blows, a bang sprayed blood across the doorframe. The gunshot had blown through Torrinas’ right shoulder.

Nath reacted fastest, grabbing the injured oarsman before he even started to buckle and hauling him into the safety of the cabin.

“Hit the deck!” The metalmancer bellowed out the cabin door as he threw Torrinas into Damored’s arms. “Or whatever you people say! Cover! Everyone cover if you want to live!”

The crewmen did as they were told as another shot rang over the rail and Damo’s poor lemur went ricocheting around the cabin in panic.

“Nath Vendan!” A voice called in the kind of over-articulated Azenkari contrived to advertise a good upbringing. “You are outgunned! Come out with your hands where we can see them!”

The cabin door opened perpendicular to the bank, cutting off the mercenaries’ view of the shooters. The first bullet had caught Torrinas only because he was standing just outside it; no bullets fired from the dock were actually going to make it into the cabin. As long as they stayed inside—

“Be warned!” the Azenkari voice called out again, “If you choose not to comply, we have more than enough men and ammunition to put this galley at the bottom of the river!”

“Unbelievable!” Damo growled as she hauled Torrinas onto one of the bunks and pressed a handful of blankets to the gunshot wound.

“How many?” Nath asked Torrinas, who appeared to be going into shock. “Hey.” Nath took the man’s face between his hands and gave him a slap. “Hey, big guy, stay with us now. You saw the fuckwits. How many are there?”

“I… dunno…” Torrinas blinked, brown eyes unfocused. “Forty… fifty?”

“Fifty!” Isa said in horror.

“And some bounty hunters… three of ‘em, I think.”

“Guns?” Damo said urgently. “How many guns?”

“I, uh… Probably a hundred?”

“I thought you said fifty guards and three mercenaries,” Nath said. “How does that add up to a hundred guns?”

“One’a the mercenaries is Ro’aan of Zarkae.”

“Who?” Nath said impatiently but Damo’s mouth made a grimacing “oh” of recognition.

“He really likes his guns,” she offered.

“Who were the other mercenaries?” Nath asked. “Hey…” But Torrinas had passed out. “Can you give him a boost, wake him up?” He asked Damored.

“Not if we have to fight our way outta this,” she said with an accusing glare. “I’m not packin’ that much.”

“Great,” Nath sighed. It wasn’t the resigned sigh of a man steeling himself for death. It was more the mildly miffed sigh of a man waking up to realize his slippers were on the other side of the room. “I’ll take care of them.”

“Are you crazy?” Damo demanded. “We can’t take that many.”

“Did I say ‘we’? You kids sit tight.”

“Sit tight?” Isa repeated. How was one man—even Nath—supposed to face fifty gunmen?

“Just for a minute. This shouldn’t take—”

“No, no, hold on!” Damo grabbed Nath’s sword strap and hauled him back before he could leave the cabin. “There’s a better way to play this.”

“Is there, Sunshine? Enlighten me.”

Damo’s full lips were pressed into a thin line, her brow screwed up in thought.

“Surrender, Nath Vendan Ehldesa, or we will open fire!”

“Shit, you know they mean business when they learn your full native name. Just let me take care of this.”

“No, shhh,” Damo hushed him in annoyance, still thinking. “Just… let me try something first.”

“This is your last warning!”

“Alright!” Damored shouted loud enough for the Azenkari to hear, then cleared her throat and tried again, with a more classically feminine inflection, “Alright! We have Nath Vendan—and he’s yours if you want him. Just please, please, don’t shoot!”

It was a smart move. Upstanding Azenkari wouldn’t open fire knowing there was a woman aboard.

“Hold your fire,” a commanding voice ordered outside.

“Down, Tapia,” Damo crooned to her agitated lemur, “stay, sweet girl,” before lifting her voice again. “We’re coming out! Please, don’t shoot!”

“So, this is your plan?” Nath whispered. “Just turn me in?”

“No,” Damo hissed. “Both of you just stay behind me, okay?”

Nath rolled his eyes and snapped to a Sazuman salute. “Reya, yes, Reya.”

“Come out slowly! Any sudden moves and you die!”

Damored exited the cabin first, her hands in the air. Nath, as instructed, positioned himself directly behind her, with Isa behind him.

“Nath Vendan, you will answer for disgracing the High Librarian’s good name!”

And Torrinas hadn’t been kidding. A solid wall of bayonets awaited them at the end of the dock… and behind that kneeling front row, a second row, and a third. They were clearly a High Scholar’s guard, pristine blue uniform coats over black armor and military stillness to their formation.

The mercenary called Ro’aan stood out dramatically among the other gunmen, his head fiery red among all the black and brown-haired Azenkari, his body strapped with a ludicrous excess of guns that made Isa wonder how he moved.

Beside Ro’aan stood two Wildermyn, one sharp-eyed and young, one graying with age, both wrapped in tattered robes. Like most Wildermyn, they were childlike in stature, scarcely reaching the shoulders of the shortest Azenkari, but Isa knew not to underestimate smallfolk based on their size. Most were stronger than an adult Riverlander and those who got work as mercenaries were usually shape-shifters.

Damo managed to keep herself between Nath and the guns as their party of three carefully descended the gangplank onto the dock. She wasn’t really big enough to cover two other people at once, but even the best muskets had a margin for error and the Azenkari wouldn’t shoot while there was even a chance of hitting a woman.

Isa had no idea about the gun-toting mercenary, but Damo had apparently accounted for that. As Isa kept an eye on Ro’aan, the Zarkadian’s expression changed in recognition.

“Damored?” He lowered his rifle a fraction. A former tumble then. Of course.

“Ro'aan,” Damored nodded to the red-headed Barrowlander and then to each of the Wildermyn in turn. “Lygdaz… Strandwraith… nice to see all of you here and havin' landed a job with such an upscale client! Congratulations!”

“This doesn’t concern you, whore!” snapped one of the men in uniform. “We’re only here for Nath of the Iron Valley.”

“Right, right,” Damo said with her most radiant smile, “and I’m happy to let you have him—”

“Sunshine, I swear to God—” Nath started darkly, but she made a shushing motion in his direction.

“First, I just need to ask one thing…” Without turning back to Ro’aan and the Wildermyn, Damo switched to Hunter’s Pidgin, which the guards wouldn’t understand. “How much is this Librarian’s wife payin’ you?”

“What?” the lead guard snapped.

At the same time, Lygdaz answered, “Five thousand.”

“Each,” Ro’aan added, his chest puffing a little as though he expected the figure to impress her.

“That crazy bitch,” Nath muttered.

“Why?” Lygdaz asked with an incredulous but not uninterested look at Damo. “You offerin’ to top it?”

“Yes,” Damo lied. Split three ways, the Lothmedi monster’s bounty came to well over six thousand each. Split six ways, it was less than four thousand.

“What are you saying?” the guard repeated angrily. “Lygdaz, what is she saying?”

The Wildermyn called Lygdaz ignored the guard, zir dark gaze fixed on Damored in suspicion. “You’re lying,” ze said with affectless certainty.

“Am I?”

“This ain’t workin’, Freckles,” Nath whispered at Damo’s shoulder. “My turn.”

“Nath, no—!” Damo reached out to stop him, but the metalmancer moved faster than a man in his forties had any business moving.

In a single lightning turn, he ducked Damo’s outstretched hand, threw a kick into her chest, and drew his weapon. As Damo flew backwards off the dock, fifty guns fired with a crash that shook the world like thunder at the height of the wet season. Isa flinched, fully expecting bullets to tear through Nath and into him, but in the breath after the bang, he felt nothing. As the thunder broke into echoes across the darkening scrubland, Isa opened his eyes and saw what looked like a giant steel flower between Nath and the Azenkari. It took him a moment to realize that it was the scorpion sword, transformed, its twenty-three segments arrayed in a circular shield.

Before Isa—or any of the gunmen for that matter—could process what had happened, Nath’s sword changed again, unfurling into a silver ribbon. As it uncoiled, Isa could see that all the pieces were connected by a cable of twisted steel, though each moved with its own power—like a snake’s vertebrae. In the Age of Heroes, osseomancer kings had wielded the spines of pre-Ascension megafauna as swords. Those weapons were all lost now, but an echo of their design still sang in Nath’s steel—a marriage of antique magic and modern metallurgy.

The weapon lashed out like a viper, twenty-two razor teeth extending, and like that—five Azenkari guards dropped from the first row, their throats slashed and spraying blood.

Another flash of the scorpion sword, the tip braced against the dock, and the cable unfurled to its full length, sending Nath high into the air. He landed smoothly high up on the bank, behind the last row of guards. Before they could turn, four of them crumpled, steel teeth tearing clean through their spines.

While some of the guards scrambled to reload, a few took a different tactic, charging toward Isa, though the dock was only wide enough to accommodate two at a time. Isa just had drawn his sabers and started to calculate his first move, when a dripping wet Damored burst from the River to land on the wood planks in front of him.

Sodden and furious, she charged to meet the guards. Isa supposed she was probably angrier with Nath than anyone else, but Damo wasn’t as choosy about violence as she was with sex. If there was an opportunity to break some bones, she would take it—even jump the queue to get there first.

Dodging between those first two clumsy bayonets, she caught both men by the hair and crashed their heads together. As they staggered from the impact, she grabbed a face in each hand and drained them. Her freckles blazed bright gold in the blue of evening as she sucked the strength from their bodies into her own.

With the fresh power of two people—or five, depending on how much she had retained from the previous night’s tumble—she shoved both men back into the pair of guards behind them. One went straight onto his comrade’s bayonet, the blade crunching grotesquely through his black leather armor and out of his chest. The other crashed bodily into his comrade, sending them both off the edge of the dock into the water.

Isa thought the dock was probably a good place to stay and make a stand against so many; while there wasn’t much cover, it meant facing no more than two opponents at a time. Damo thought different—or perhaps wasn’t thinking much at all with the high of fresh power coursing through her body. Without waiting for more of the Azenkari to come to her, she charged into them, fists flying. The head breaker in all her golden glory.

The disoriented Azenkari, under supernatural attack from both sides, scattered as she plowed into them, struggling to react under the weight of their unwieldy weapons. Even if they had had time to reload their muskets, there would have been nowhere for them to fire without hitting their own. The Azenkari, at least, were on their back foot—but that was when it occurred to Isa that they weren’t the only gunmen in this fight.

He scanned for red hair and found it; Ro’aan of Zarkae, having withdrawn from the thick of the carnage, lifted a rifle to his shoulder and took aim at Nath. That morning, Isa had figured Nath was the most likely person to kill him. Well, Nath might have brought Death right up to the gangplank of the Waning Ibis, but the metalmancer was also the only way any of them were making it out of this fight alive.

Isa sprinted for Ro’aan. A pale finger had already reached the trigger and Isa knew he wouldn’t reach the Barrowlander in time to tackle him. So, in what Elder Thrask had always said was a spectacularly stupid maneuver, he drew a saber back and threw it.

Outside metalmancy blade-throwing rarely went well. The saber spun through the dusk and hit Ro’aan’s arm messily, probably bruising more than drawing blood. But it did the job. Ro’aan jerked sideways with the impact and the shot went wide.

By the time the young mercenary turned to find the source of the disruption, Isa was on him, his second saber slashing for the kill. Ro’aan reacted with respectable speed for someone weighed down with so many pounds of weaponry, just getting the rifle between himself and Isa.

Far heavier than a saber, the gun deflected Isa’s blade, but Isa still had the advantage of maneuverability. Changing tactics, he grabbed the middle of Ro’aan’s rifle in his right hand and yanked on the pretense of wresting it away. As he had hoped, the Zarkadian didn’t let go. As the two men jerked toward each other, Isa drove his saber hard beneath Ro’aan’s ribs—only to meet solid stone.

At least solid stone was what it felt like.

Wrist screaming with pain from the inexplicable impact, Isa looked down to find that his blade had gone through Ro’aan’s dark maroon shirt—and no further. In addition to all those guns, the bastard was also wearing armor? How in Osu’s name did he move at all?

Isa looked up at Ro’aan, both of them still clutched hard to the rifle, their faces close.

The Zarkadian smirked a rather Nazaru-ish smirk. So, Isa head-butted him.

The brat’s head snapped back in a flame-like swish of red hair and the next stroke of Isa’s saber was aimed at his throat. Again, annoyingly, Ro’aan managed to get that rifle in the way. The maneuver effectively blocked the saber but it left Ro’aan’s middle exposed and Isa threw a kick into his stomach. The armor still felt like solid rock against the sole of Isa’s boot but the kick did send the awful Zarkadian over backwards down the river bank.

Isa started toward the slope to see if the fall had broken the man’s neck—and if not, to make sure that it did—but a fast-moving shape in his periphery made him turn.

The younger of the two Wildermyn was sprinting toward him, dark eyes cold with a focus Isa knew well. Ze was about to transform. Isa stepped into a crouch, his first impulse to spring forward and meet the other shapeshifter, transformation to transformation. If he snapped his coils closed in that first split second, there were few animals that could escape his embrace.

Then, for the second time that night, Damo appeared in front of him, bright gold in the dark. A bruisingly powerful hand closed on his arm.

“No,” she said and threw Isa clear just as the Wildermyn reached them.

In a rush of golden fur, a lion fell on Damored.

“Fuck!” Isa reeled backward onto the dock, incalculably glad he hadn’t taken his chances with the other animancer. Big prey, he could handle. Big prey with scale-piercing, spine-crushing jaws, not so much.

All he could do was watch as woman and lion rolled, struggling for the upper hand. Weight and size fought Damo’s strength. Tactomancy worked on animals, but only through skin-to-skin contact, which the lion’s thick fur prevented. All Damo had was the strength she had sapped from the Azenkari guards and her tumbles from the previous night, and even ten men might not match a lion.

“Isa!” Damo roared from beneath the lion’s bulk, both her hands fisted in its mane to keep those jaws from her neck. “Take the strandwolf!”

“The—” The what? Isa didn’t get a chance to say before the second Wildermyn transformed and came snarling down the slope toward the dock, all evil jaws and raised hackles.

Strandwolves were really hyenas, misidentified as wolves by city folk who didn’t know a hyaenid from a canine when it bit them in the face—a deadly distinction to miss considering that the brown hyena was bigger, meaner, and stronger than any wolf of the South Wilds.

Isa had just shifted his stance to take on the hyena when—

BANG!

—a gunshot tore through his right arm, splattering a chunk of it across the wood planks and knocking him off balance. He still had hold of his left saber but it was too late.

The hyena was on him.

A hundred pounds of pure muscle slammed into his chest as bone-brushing jaws closed on his left arm, tearing muscle. And Isa knew better than anyone the folly of a human—at least one without tactomancy—trying to wrestle a creature built for the kill. Teeth gritted, he transformed.

It was a fresh disaster. The hyena’s teeth sank into him all over again when the thing in its jaws turned from a man’s arm into a python. The snake’s slower metabolism meant that the agony didn’t catch up to Isa immediately, but when it did, he would be in danger of slipping into shock. Somehow, he needed to overcome his opponent before that debilitating pain set in.

Isa knew the moment he constricted that this was a losing battle. A hyena was too muscular to asphyxiate quickly and ze wouldn’t stop biting. If the Wildermyn’s teeth didn’t kill him, one of those Azenkari fucks would walk up and bayonet him while he was occupied. Isa wouldn’t win this struggle unless he found another way to tip the playing field in his favor…

Alkem have mercy. Bracing one of his coils against the dock, he pushed, rolling them over the side.

Water crashed closed over the embracing predators.

Isa had hoped that panic would cause Akkila to revert back to zir original innately crushable human form, but he should have known better. This was an old Wildermyn, wise enough to have survived many such encounters. In the water, the hyena only redoubled zir efforts, jaws ripping painfully at Isa’s coils until they found purchase and sank in hard, puncturing scales and flesh. Akkila was now the one with limited time; ze had to win this fight before zir mammalian lungs ran out of oxygen—and ze meant to win.

Isa writhed against the hyena’s hold as the pain of those first bites caught up to him. In the frothing, increasingly bloody darkness, Isa found the Strandwraith’s neck and clamped his jaws around it. It was laughably ineffectual. His teeth—numerous though they were—barely pierced the creature’s mane to lodge in its hide. If it even registered, the pain wasn’t enough to get the Wildermyn to release zir crushing jaws.

Through cold agony, Isa struggled to weigh his options. He could break out of that unbreakable bite with a thrash of his equally powerful coils, but he hesitated, worrying that the amount of flesh the hyena took with zir would be more than he could afford. Dying as a snake would be a hideous experience; a python’s sluggish metabolism meant that it would stay awake and capable of feeling pain long after its body came to pieces—and the Strandwraith seemed determined that there would be many, many pieces. Hyena cubs often killed each other in the den and, in Isa’s experience, hyena shifters weren’t much gentler with each other. This was a will to live far older than Isa’s, tested by decades.

Who was Isa to contend with such a creature?

He felt his strength leaving him like blood in the dark water, his coils loosening—

when Alkem introduced a third party, one neither Isa nor the Strandwraith could match. The movement vibrating Isa’s pit organs was terrifying—but just the thing he had been hoping for. Sightless in the dark, he knew they were coming, their ridged tails sending distinctive reverberations through the water.

Crocodiles.

Alkem had brought the only jaws that could kill even other monsters with brutal efficiency. This was the mercy Isa had asked of the River. If he could detach from the hyena, the crocs would take the prey they could drown. If he stayed, Death would take both his forms quickly.

In a split second, Isa chose probable death over certain death and ripped free of the hyena’s jaws. Before the new pain could register, he propelled himself toward the bank. Ever’s jaws crashed closed dangerously close to his scales in the dark, but with his pit organs allowing him to ‘see’ through the chaos, he wove between the other reptiles. Ridged armor slid right up against his body, as the crocs surged for the hyena, and a powerful lash of his spine carried him in the opposite direction, out of the tangle.

The Wildermyn had no such power of senses or mobility—and caught in the crocs’ jaws with a yowl. Another stroke of Isa’s tail brought him up onto the bank, out of range of the River’s teeth. Before shock could take him, robbing him of the ability to access his magic, he transformed.

It was like rolling from a fire onto a bed of nails.

The earlier hyena bite and gunshot wound slammed hard into Isa’s arms as they came back into physical existence.

A horribly human shriek split the air as the Wildermyn, zir hyena form lost, transformed in a last-ditch attempt to fight free of the River’s jaws. Isa had seen many horrors, but even he didn’t want to look back as the crocs clamped onto the old Wildermyn’s limbs and laid into a death roll.

Instead, he looked up the bank to see how the battle had gone—and found steel teeth rushing toward him. His body twitched back but he didn’t quite have command of his arms yet. No chance to draw his sabers and stop those steel.

“Oh.” Nath’s scorpion sword stopped, mid-swing, inches from Isa’s neck. “It’s just you.”

“J-just me,” Isa said, eyes wide as he processed the scene before him.

The ground was strewn with dead and unconscious guards. It seemed that, at some point, the oarsmen had joined the fight in support of their criminal passengers. Perhaps spurred on by the shooting of one of their own, they had rushed from the Waning Ibis with oars in hand to engage the remaining Azenkari. The Librarian’s guard might have guns, but they took time to load and there was no soldier in Azenkar as strong as a full-time oarsman.

As Isa watched, a Krellish rower cracked one of the last standing guards over the head with an oar, splitting his skull. But there was one figure conspicuously missing from the gunmen on the ground.

Where was that head of red hair?

A gun clicked against the back of Nath’s head, the barrel right up against his brain stem.

“Drop your weapon,” Ro’aan growled.

But Nath was smiling. “You first.”

In a glint of metal, Isa realized what Nath’s nodes forty-six through forty-nine were. A pair of curved knives hovered at Ro’aan’s throat—casually, as though they had been there the whole time. A second pair of blades pressed gently at the seams of the Zarkadian’s chest armor exposed when Isa’s saber had torn through his shirt.

Ro’aan dropped the gun.

“Very good,” Nath said and Isa noticed that his smile was faintly strained, eyes focused hard on the ground, as the twenty-three segments of the serpent sword coiled back to their original shape. His focus had to be at capacity, manipulating forty-nine pieces at once. “Now, the rest of them darlin’.”

The scorpion sword was slow to fold back together into its original shape but the daggers stayed steady at Ro’aan’s throat. As the scowling Zarkadian began unstrapping his arsenal, Damored staggered into view, blinding gold, dragging a ratty shape behind her. It was Lygdaz, the lion-shifter, unconscious. Unlike Inkarnai, Wildermyn reverted back to their human forms when they lost consciousness; it prevented unintentional homicide and cannibalism out in the Wilds.

“How?” Nath looked impressed as Damo deposited the cloaked Wildermyn in the hands of a pair of oarsmen.

“Mouth and paw pad,” she said, gingerly prodding her own palm. “No fur.”

Isa supposed that explained the blood running freely from her hands. Considering that she must have spent a good few seconds grabbing onto the lion’s paw or mouth, she was lucky to still have hands at all.

“But you didn’t kill zir?” Nath asked.

“Nah. Just made zir very sleepy,” Damo said, sounding profoundly exhausted herself. “Ze’s still alive.”

“Do we want zir alive? Or this lemur’s ass, for that matter?” Nath nodded to Ro’aan as the Zarkadian dropped what had to be his last gun on the pile at his feet.

“Ro’aan can be smart, can’t you, love?” Damo gave the Zarkadian a threateningly sweet smile.

“And the shifter?”

“I know Lygdaz. Ze goes where the money is and, no offense, Isa, but we could use another big predator if…” Damo trailed off as she looked more closely at Isa. “Shit, Isa, are you okay?”

“Yeah, why?” Isa pushed to his feet and…

“Oh, Goddess!” one of the oarsmen exclaimed, which wouldn’t have meant much had Damo not echoed the man’s words with matching horror.

“Oh, Goddess!”

After the agony of hyena’s teeth on his coils, Isa had lost track of the wounds to his human body—or at least not registered their extent. Now, he looked down at himself and found a fleshy mess. Not only was part of his right arm missing, there was a deep wound in his side where the Strandwraith’s teeth had torn into his hip and lower abdomen.

And, Osu, the blood…

Elder Thrask would have said, Get this one something for the pain, Isa. It’s over for him.

Isa realized he was fainting the moment before he started to fall. The ground rushed up to meet him and it was only a gold-freckled arm around his shoulders that kept him from eating the muddy riverbank.

“Hey, hey!” Damo turned him onto his back and gripped his shoulders.

“Damo…” he said, vision swimming, “Aer… I…”

“Shh, shh, just focus on me,” she said and grabbed his hands in hers, skin slick with blood and river water. “Focus, Isa! Don’t pass out! Not yet!”

Her freckles glowed as she poured strength into Isa—or tried to.

Damored specialized in sapping people of their strength, not giving them hers. She could drain a man dry against his will, but she couldn’t push strength into a person the same way; the recipient had to want it. She was still shouting for Isa’s attention, glowing bright, but her touch, her voice, her face all faded, absorbed into utter silence…

Isa didn’t need to look to know that Ever stood at his back.

A vulture feathered cloak slowly flared, wrapping around him, skeletal arms pulling him tenderly toward the emptiness of non-existence. The six other Spirits stood by as if to offer their companionship, but none stepped forward to rescue Isa. All of them should want him to live—Endra, who had given him life, Raba, who knew that he still had duties to his wife and Temple—but they were all frozen at the edge of the Gray as Ever overtook it. Even Theid. The Spirit of Desire was transfixed in the presence of Death, unsure. Wistful.

Isa looked to Aer, who spoke in a voice quickly fading into nothingness, Theid moves on your will and want. What do you want, Isa?

Help! Isa tried and failed to say through the smothering quiet, I want you to help me!

But silenced Aer shook zir head.

Help wasn’t what Isa needed. Alkem had sent help in the form of crocodiles. Osu had sent help in the form of Damo’s hands on his, offering the strength he needed to keep breathing through the blood loss. What he needed was willpower—not just to accept his pain but to hold onto it.

It was safe behind those feathers. No pain. No regret… no Spensa.

No! Isa told Ever, breaking the silence. No! I am going to live! Not even that he wanted to, just that— I am going to.

It wasn’t Theid who clawed for Isa’s survival this time. It was something beyond Desire—beyond Aer, even—that gave Isa the strength to push free of Ever’s grasp and cling hard to Damo’s hands. Not a want but a grim need that was part Spensa, part Gray, part River, and part this formless monster that still needed killing.

I am going to live.

That simple conviction—or truth, or inevitability, or whatever it was—cracked Isa open to Damo’s tactomancy.

The strength of a lion poured into him and he pitched from Death’s grip back to Osu’s Domain in a vital crash like gunshots and splintering bone. The pain hit quickly but, for a moment of surging gold, all Isa felt was a flavor of loneliness not quite his own. This was a homeless hurt… like missing someone who had never been.

This is not of the Gray, Aer observed, zir voice restored as Isa dragged breath into his savaged body. It belongs to Damored.

Borrowed strength, it seemed, came with borrowed emotion.

Being the tactomancer, I control the locks and dams, Damo had said back in Krell. Catch me half conscious and you might get some mental backwash…

In that backwash, Isa ached for shapes of siblings who were not quite Kendiri and Nazaru, not quite anyone. The shapes whispered behind their hands, words indiscernible but somehow deeply cutting. The whispers slid cold under the skin, turning to a fear Isa had never tasted… the fear of never really belonging anywhere.

Damo’s hands released his, and he was Isa again. His own pain rushed into the absence—gaping wounds where flesh, blood, and Taniri should have been—all utterly raw now that he had decided not to let Death take them. But Spirits, it had been soothing, for a moment, to move outside his own suffering into someone else’s… though he didn’t know if he would survive a life with the evil whispers of Damo’s past.

“Okay…” The Sazuman’s face came into focus above Isa, freckles drained to dark gold, eyelids flickering as if to beat back tears. She was shuddering from the effort of forcing so much strength past Isa’s weakness, barely supporting herself with both hands braced in the mud on either side of him. “Okay…” Listing more than leaning forward, she placed a kiss on his forehead. “Now, you can pass out.”

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