The Ghost

Gesbiek stopped just short of the Bone Perimeter and looked at the camp through the last of the trees.

Cooking fires going low in the haze. The smell of smoke and rot. Somebody shouting somewhere in the outer ring, and nobody answering.

He found he was not feeling anything he could name about the place. He had expected to. He had spent months out in the Darkwood assuming that arriving here would come with something attached.

He opened the Admin Tools instead.

Fighting his way in would work and would also be stupid. Noise brought attention, and attention meant Grolm would have time to arrange himself, and a warlord who had arranged himself was a different problem from a warlord who had not.

[VANISH]
[COST: 20% MANA | DURATION: 5:00]
[OPTICAL CAMOUFLAGE + PERCEPTION FILTER]

He took it.

Cold came out of his core and went over him like poured mercury, numbing as it went. His hands went translucent first, then to a blue wireframe, then to nothing at all, and the last part of him he could see went with the rest.

[VANISH: 05:00]

Five minutes to walk a hundred yards, kill a chief, and eat a totem.

He stepped out of the trees onto the road.

* * * *

Two 2-Blue Elites stood at the main gate with their breath showing in the night air. Veterans, both of them, the kind who had survived enough raids to develop instincts.

Gesbiek walked between them with a foot of clearance on either side and did not slow down or hold his breath, because there was no point in either.

The one on the left shuddered as he went past and dragged his cloak closed.

"Did it just get colder?"

He was looking directly at the space Gesbiek occupied while he said it.

"That is wind," said the other, staring through Gesbiek's chest at the road behind him. "Stop it."

Gesbiek considered flicking one of them on the nose, remembered he had a schedule, and went through the gate.

Inside, the Sight came up on its own and painted the camp for him.

There were readouts over every goblin in view, and almost all of them were amber or worse. Eight percent. Fifteen. Twenty-three.

The mud had got deeper and had things in it. The fires were burning wet rot-wood and producing smoke instead of heat. In the lee of the huts, 1-Greens sat chewing boiled leather straps and strips of bark, working at them slowly, the way you eat something you know is not food but must be chewed anyway.

[CLAN STATUS: STARVATION]
[MORALE: 5%]
[PROJECTED SURVIVAL: 2 WEEKS]

Gesbiek stood in the middle of it and processed the figures, and the conclusion his mind produced was that this was appalling resource management.

He noticed himself producing it, and did not correct it, and walked on.

* * * *

The Bone Pit was where it had always been.

Forty-odd goblins in the trench. Runts, and the old, and one or two who had simply stopped being useful. They lay in the clay in the positions of things waiting rather than resting.

He stopped at the lip of it.

[VANISH: 03:45]

Some part of him, quite far down and mostly buried under two years of levels, recognised the shape of a small green body lying in mud with its arms over its head.

The core in his chest sorted the feeling and put it somewhere.

Then he found a face he knew.

Meska was against the near wall with her back to the clay and her hands in her lap, and her hands were the thing that gave her away, because he had watched those hands set a finger once behind the drying racks and had never forgotten the shape of them.

She was old now in a way she had not been. A healer went into the Bone Pit when she stopped producing more than she consumed, and by the look of her that had been a while ago.

He held the Sight on her for four seconds.

[MESKA | 1-GREEN]
[HP: 11% | STATUS: STARVATION]

Eleven percent.

He looked at the trench and tagged the group instead.

[QUANTITY: 42 | AVERAGE RANK: 1-GREEN]
[COMBAT VALUE: NEGLIGIBLE]

Forty-two bodies. If the throne room went badly, forty-two desperate bodies moving all at once in a confined space would be a great deal of visual noise for a warlord to sort through.

That was what they were for. That was the entire content of the thought.

It was not, in fact, the entire content of the thought. There was a second one underneath it, unwelcome and specific, which was that eleven percent would not last the week.

Gesbiek stood there a good deal longer than the arithmetic required.

Then he moved on and left them in the mud.

* * * *

The warrior ring smelled of roasting meat.

The tents in here had iron plate on the frames and furs across the openings, and around a proper fire a group of 2-Blues were working through the leg of something large. They were loud, and heavy across the middle, and drunk on root-wine, and twenty feet away from goblins eating bark.

Gesbiek walked directly through their circle. One of them sneezed as he passed.

"That is disgusting," the warrior said, rubbing his arms. "Felt like standing in a river."

"You are drunk, Kruk. Eat."

Gesbiek glanced at the fire, and the Sight tagged what was in it without being asked.

[GOBLIN FEMUR (1-GREEN)]
[ORIGIN: CLAN MEMBER | AGE: 2-3 DAYS]

He stopped walking.

He read it again, because reading a thing twice is what you do when the first reading produces a result you would prefer to have misunderstood.

Grolm had not been hoarding the food. Grolm had been reclassifying the population.

The weak went into the pit, and the pit fed the strong, and the strong sat around a fire twenty feet from the pit and complained about draughts.

What went through Gesbiek was not exactly outrage. It was closer to the feeling of an engineer opening a machine and finding it has been built to consume its own working parts, and calculating how long it can run that way, and getting a small number.

Deleting the entire arrangement was, on the evidence, the correct maintenance action.

He was aware, once again, that he was thinking in a vocabulary which let him arrive at conclusions he already wanted. He noted it, and kept moving, because the timer was running.

* * * *

He took a detour that cost him seconds he could not spare.

[VANISH: 02:30]

Snarl's tent stood open with no guard on it, which told him most of what he had come for before he stepped inside.

The weapon rack was gone, taken apart for the iron. The sleeping furs had been dragged out. Someone had gone through the whole thing thoroughly and then a second person had gone through it after that, and then everybody had stopped bothering, and dust had settled over the floor undisturbed for weeks.

Gesbiek stood in the middle of it.

He had imagined this differently, on the long walk in. He had constructed, without quite admitting he was doing it, a scene in which Snarl saw what the Grey Runt had become and had a moment to understand it.

Instead there was a looted tent and some dust.

The bear had not known anything about revenge. The bear had known about territory and had acted accordingly, and the whole five-year account had been settled by an animal that had never learned Gesbiek's name either.

He waited to see whether anything would arrive.

Nothing did. There was simply a space where a thing used to be, and the shape of the space was slightly disappointing.

He went out.

* * * *

The nearer he got to the mountain, the harder his core pulled.

It was not fear and it was not nerves. It was resonance, and it came up through his ribs in a rhythm he could feel in his teeth.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

The half-empty part of him ached toward it. The goblins he passed stopped registering as goblins somewhere around the inner ring and became terrain, and Gesbiek noticed this happening and did not have the attention to spare on it.

Two Ogres stood at the mouth of the Throne Room, one either side of the drake ribs.

Eight feet each. Grey stone skin, cable muscle, and Orange Shards burning in their chests like open furnace doors. Mercenaries, then. Grolm had been hiring from outside, which was the first genuinely surprising thing Gesbiek had seen tonight.

[OGRE MERCENARY | 1-ORANGE]
[THREAT: SEVERE]

[WARNING: TARGET DENSITY TOO HIGH]
[STEALTH EFFECTIVENESS: 67%]

His skill was built to fold light and attention away from creatures whose attention was worth folding. Against Tier-4 it thinned out considerably. Get close enough for long enough and they would feel the wrongness of the place he was standing in.

[VANISH: 01:15]

He put his back to a hut and waited, and watched the left one shift its weight and reach around to scratch between its shoulder blades, and a two-foot gap opened at the threshold.

Gesbiek went through it.

Three feet inside the tunnel the Ogre stopped scratching.

It lifted its head and drew a long breath through its nose and made a sound in its chest like something heavy moving underground.

"Wrong," it said, in bad Common. "Smell wrong. Cold."

Gesbiek did not move at all.

"Smell nothing," said the other. "Cave is cold. Always cold. You are a coward with a big neck."

The first Ogre stood there a moment longer, unconvinced, and then went back to its post, because there was nothing to point at.

Gesbiek let his breath out and went down the tunnel.

* * * *

The walls were lined with skulls on iron spikes. Hundreds of them, human and goblin and things that were neither, bleached white by time and by whatever the mana in here did to bone over a few decades.

He had been dragged past all of these once with a hand around the back of his neck, and had not seen a single one.

[VANISH: 00:45]

He needed to be behind a pillar before this ran out. Appearing in open floor in front of Grolm would remove the only advantage he had, which was that nobody in this mountain knew he existed.

He ran, silently, and the tunnel opened out, and he threw himself behind the nearest column of stone.

The Throne Room went up fifty feet into the dark, lit blue by braziers burning something that had never been wood, stalactites hanging down out of the black like an unfinished thought.

The Throne of Skulls sat in the middle of it.

Behind it stood the Ancestral Totem, and it was larger than he had ever been allowed close enough to see. Twenty feet of ironwood gone black with centuries of absorption, and set into it in a perfect vertical line, five Red Shards, each one throwing crimson across the whole back wall in slow waves.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

Gesbiek's mouth was watering. He became aware of it distantly, the way you become aware of weather.

Then he made himself look at the rest of the room, because almost forgetting to check was the sort of error that ended careers, and looking anyway had kept him alive more times than he had bothered to count.

Grolm was not on the throne.

He was standing at a stone table by the brazier with his back to the room, and he was eating.

The carcass on the table was eight feet long with grey stone skin and an Orange Shard still glowing dully in the open chest. One of his own door guards, about half gone.

Grolm had grown. Taller by the better part of two feet, and denser with it, muscle laid down in cords over a frame that had been substantial to begin with, and his skin had gone from olive to a deep blood-red that read almost purple under the blue fire. The air around him shimmered the way air shimmers over hot stone.

Gesbiek pointed the Sight at him, and the Sight came back damaged.

[CHIEF GROLM]
[RANK: 2-RED]
[THREAT: ????????]

Two Red shards, beating in step. And a threat assessment the System had declined to produce, which it had never once declined for anything in the Darkwood, including a Chimera with three heads.

Grolm had not spent these months sitting on a chair. He had been climbing too, and he had found a way to do it that did not require leaving the mountain.

[VANISH: 00:15]

Thirty feet from the pillar to that table. His Agility would close it inside a second.

One leap, claws out, the back of the neck. Something carrying two Red did not need to be fought, provided it was never given the chance to be in a fight.

It was insane. It was also the only window that was going to open, and it was open now.

[00:10]

Grolm tore off another piece and chewed slowly, facing the wall.

[00:05]

Gesbiek came up onto the balls of his feet.

[00:03]

He pushed off the pillar.

He was in the air, invisible, thirty feet from the neck of the most dangerous thing he had ever seen, and it was going to work.

[00:02]

Ten feet.

[00:01]

Five.

[00:00]
[SKILL EXPIRED]

The Vanish let go with a sound like a seal breaking, and Gesbiek came into existence in mid-air with his silver aura blazing off him in a room lit by nothing but blue.

Grolm stopped chewing.

He came round from that table faster than a body of that size had any business moving, and his eyes found Gesbiek before Gesbiek had finished travelling. Red, and wide, and entirely aware.

"You," Grolm said.

Gesbiek was airborne, visible, four feet away, and out of plan.