“Weeds.”
“The seepage spread south into the water supply for industrial farms in Centervale. Have you ever farmed?”
“Not as such.”
“Trust me, it’s hard enough when you kill weeds and they stay dead. Imagine what happens when they come back.” She pointed to the newspaper headlines reproduced on the back of the Two Serpents brochure. “Northern farms were the first hit. Crop strangled under rotting vegetable matter. The unblight spreads slowly, but it does spread, and it started soon after KCMC began their core extraction op. KCMC stopped digging two weeks ago and called in the Two Serpents Group, who have sent their executive staff to address the problem.”
“Is that normal?”
“Small organization. Not much redundancy. Like playing small-stack poker—you fold or go all in when the odds are right. On the plus side, that means all their execs are in the same place. We go in, convince them to give up their sky rights, cab back to the airport, and make Alt Coulumb by dawn. A whole day to spare, even with this detour.” They crested a low ridge. The many-named mountain’s stone rose in sheer barren cliffs. Eyewateringly brilliant ghostlights blasted through the trees. “That’s them.” The howls rose again, prolonged, gurgling, and punctuated by bowstrings’ twang. The carriage horse reared and shied.
They emerged from the tree line into a broad field of clear-cut earth that swarmed with—well, “wildlife” was no longer an accurate term.
There were wolves after all—or anyway the rotting half skeletons of wolves caught in death spasms of hunger, fear, and rage. Mound-shouldered bears stalked the clearing, hides hedgehogged with arrows that seemed to have inflicted at best cosmetic damage. Weasels and stoats and mice swarmed the barricade at the field’s edge. The smaller creatures could not pass in the silvered razorwire with which some perspicacious soul had draped the barrier, but the wire wouldn’t stop bears.
A blink told her the creatures weren’t bound to any Craftswoman, and that the camp’s territorial ward remained intact, if dormant. The blind and ravenous fought the blind and desperate.
“Those wolves are looking our way,” Shale said.
“Not a problem.”
“They’re running now.”
“On it.” She opened the carriage door. Cool night air rolled in. Pine and putrescine fumes burned her throat. She tossed the travel guide to Shale. “Hold this.” She clutched the door with one hand and the empty driver’s bench with the other and pulled herself up, ignoring the approaching wolves and the pain in her side.
The horse reared as she reached the driver’s seat. She offered it more soul, and it mastered itself again. Hooves dug into dirt and pushed. Bowstrings thrummed to her left, wolves fell, bears shambled—but one wolf dodged the arrows and sprinted toward the barricade. Meanwhile, a rodent tide scurried toward Tara, smelling meat.
No problem.
The mining camp’s spotlights were an issue, so she killed them. No time for elegance: glass shattered in a puff of expanding gas and freed spirits. Night reclaimed the mountain, and stars bathed the field in glory.
She gobbled stellar light, funneling power and pattern through glyphs that woke on her skin. She seized the mining camp’s ward. She had been sent by the King in Red (technically correct), and the King in Red was a Kovak Central Mining investor, along with Alphan Securities, Grimwald Holdings, and a half-dozen other firms. On the King in Red’s behalf she could invoke the wards and extend their protection to the private access road leading to the camp. The rat-revenants were in essence tiny, unprofitable Concerns, simple consumption-action loops trespassing on KCMC territory.
Shadow charged with blue fire rolled out from her carriage. The fire caught at the access road’s edges, and undead rodents screamed. Their tide broke into a burning wave as warded soil repelled them. Across the field, the wolf leapt—only to slam against an invisible barrier and fall. A streak of blood and grime sizzled in midair. The wolf twitched to rest.
After days of boardroom wrangling and terse, tense arguments with recalcitrant deities, Tara had to admit she enjoyed entering a besieged camp to cheers and applause. From the carriage driver’s seat she surveyed the people she had saved: miners and aid workers in vests embroidered with the Two Serpents logo. She bowed, though she felt their celebration premature, since the creatures outside were not so much gone as temporarily repulsed. She didn’t say as much.
A Quechal woman in slacks and sweat-stained blouse approached her from the barricade. “Thanks for the help. Took you long enough to get here.”