Chapter 6: The Varom Highlands

The Varom crossing was a stone bridge over a river that did not look like it needed a stone bridge.

The Varom River at this point was perhaps fifteen metres wide and appeared shallow — the kind of river that a confident person might attempt to ford on foot, and that an overconfident person would attempt to ford on horseback, and that both kinds of person would regret attempting because the Varom's depth was deceptive, its current was savage beneath the placid surface, and its bed was composed of stones that had been polished by centuries of water into surfaces as smooth and treacherous as oiled glass. The bridge existed because enough people had drowned attempting the crossing that the regional LoSC commander had authorised its construction, and the plaque on the bridge's northern abutment — weathered, barely legible — recorded the names of the eleven LoSC officers who had died in the river before the bridge was built, which was the kind of memorial that served simultaneously as a tribute to the dead and a rebuke to the living for not building the bridge sooner.

They crossed at midmorning. The bridge was deserted — no other travellers, no merchants, no LoSC patrols — and the absence of people in a place that should have had traffic produced in Kaito the same unease that silence produces in a room that should have sound. He said nothing about it, because Sumi's expression indicated that she had noticed it too, and because Ranger's ears were flat against his head, which was the shadow hound's physical manifestation of the low-grade alarm that Sumi could feel through their telepathic bond.

Beyond the bridge, the highway ended. Not gradually — there was no tapering, no transition from paved road to unpaved road to trail — but abruptly, as if the engineers who had built the highway had reached the river and decided that whatever lay beyond was someone else's problem. The highland trail began where the highway stopped: a narrow path of packed earth that wound upward through pine forest, marked at intervals by cairns of stacked stone that previous travellers had maintained over the years with the collaborative instinct of people who understood that keeping the trail marked was a form of kindness to strangers they would never meet.

The forest closed around them.

It was different from the forest that surrounded Central — older, denser, less managed. The pines here were enormous — trunks three metres in diameter, bark fissured into deep channels that harboured colonies of insects and small reptiles, canopy so thick that the sunlight reached the forest floor only in scattered patches that moved with the wind like spotlights operated by a stage manager who had not been given a script. The undergrowth was dense: ferns, moss, fallen branches crusted with lichen in shades of grey-green that suggested the lichen had been growing for longer than the trees and regarded the trees as recent arrivals.

The air was different too. Cooler by several degrees, heavy with moisture and the scent of pine resin and decomposing leaf matter — the particular smell of a forest that has been recycling itself for centuries and that has achieved, through the patient accumulation of dead things becoming soil becoming living things becoming dead things again, a closed-loop ecology that required nothing from the outside world except rain and light.

"Stay close," Sumi said. It was unnecessary — they were already close, the trail too narrow for anything else — but the instruction served a different purpose than its literal content. It was a reminder that they were in unfamiliar territory, that the rules of the highway no longer applied, and that the three of them were responsible for one another in a way that had been theoretical in the Sanctuary and was now immediate.

They walked for six hours on the first day in the highlands, covering twelve kilometres — less than Nigel had estimated, because the trail's gradient was steeper than the map indicated and because the stream crossings, of which there were four, required careful navigation over wet rocks that were exactly as treacherous as the Varom's riverbed and approximately one-tenth as lethal.

Camp that night was a clearing beside the trail, sheltered by a ring of pines that blocked the wind but admitted enough moonlight to cast working shadows. Kaito built the fire while Nigel cooked and Sumi established a perimeter with Ranger, directing the shadow hound in a wide patrol circle around the campsite.

"Anything?" Kaito asked when she returned.

"Ranger detected residual shadow energy to the northeast. Same signature as what I felt at the last waystation. Deliberate. Controlled. A caster."

"Following us?"

"I don't know. The energy is stationary. It could be a LoSC patrol. It could be a hermit caster — there are independent casters who live in the highlands outside LoSC jurisdiction. Or it could be someone else."

"The people Toshio warned us about."

"Possibly."

Nigel looked up from the cooking pot. "How far?"

"Three kilometres, maybe four. Far enough that we're not in immediate danger. Close enough that whoever it is could close the distance overnight if they wanted to."

They ate in silence — rice and dried fish, a meal that was functional rather than pleasurable and that tasted of salt and smoke and the particular flatness of food prepared by people who were thinking about something other than food. After dinner, they established the watch rotation and Kaito took first shift, sitting at the edge of the firelight with his caster beam ready and his eyes on the darkness of the forest.

The darkness looked back.

Not literally — there was nothing there that Kaito could see, no movement, no eyes, no shape in the shadows between the trees. But the feeling persisted: the sensation of being observed by an intelligence that was patient and deliberate and that was not in a hurry to reveal itself. Kaito had felt watched before — in the Sanctuary, during exercises, during the Daylight Trials — but those instances had been benign, the watchfulness of instructors and examiners. This was different. This watchfulness had intent.

He completed his shift without incident, woke Sumi for hers, and lay down on his bedroll with the canister tucked against his body. Sleep came slowly and brought dreams that were not quite nightmares but were not comfortable either — dreams of forests that were darker than forests should be, of shadows that moved without light to cast them, of a figure with a scarred face watching from a distance that was always the same no matter how far Kaito walked.

On the third day in the highlands, they encountered the bandits.

The trail had descended into a ravine — a narrow, steep-sided cut in the terrain where a stream had carved a path through the rock over millennia, creating a passage that was the only practical route through a ridge that was otherwise impassable without climbing equipment. The ravine was perhaps two hundred metres long, five metres wide, and thirty metres deep, with walls of exposed stone that were vertical and smooth and offered no handholds for climbing. It was, in tactical terms, a kill zone — a confined space with limited exits that any military strategist would have identified as an ambush site and that Nigel, who was reading the map, had identified as such approximately ten seconds before the ambush happened.

"This ravine is a problem," Nigel said, stopping at the entrance. "Single-file passage. High walls. Limited visibility around the bend. If someone wanted to trap us—"

"Too late," Sumi said, because Ranger had stopped and was growling, and the growl was not the low-grade warning that indicated distant shadow energy but the full-throated snarl that indicated immediate, close-range threat.

They appeared from both ends of the ravine simultaneously.

There were eight of them — four at each end of the passage, blocking the entrance and the exit. They were not shadow casters — Ranger's reaction was to the threat itself, not to shadow energy — but they were armed: short swords, crossbows, the kind of practical, well-maintained weapons that professional bandits carried, as opposed to the makeshift equipment of opportunistic thieves. Their clothing was nondescript — dark tunics, boots, hoods — and their movements were coordinated in the way that indicated training or, at minimum, extensive practice in the specific art of ambushing travellers in ravines.

The leader — identifiable by position rather than insignia, standing at the front of the group blocking the exit — was a heavyset man with a shaved head and a horizontal scar across his chin that suggested a past disagreement with a blade that had been resolved in the blade's favour. He held a crossbow aimed at Sumi's chest with the relaxed confidence of a person who had aimed crossbows at many people and who regarded the act as routine.

"LoSC officers," he said, noting their casting vests. "Junior officers, by the look of it. First commission?"

Nobody answered.

"Doesn't matter. Here's how this works. You give us everything in your packs — food, supplies, money, whatever you're carrying. Then you walk out of this ravine alive. Simple. Quick. Nobody gets hurt. Or," he tilted the crossbow slightly, "you try something heroic, and we find out whether LoSC training prepares you for getting shot. Your choice."

Kaito's hand was already at his caster beam. The light was poor in the ravine — the high walls blocked direct sunlight, leaving only the diffuse illumination of scattered reflections from the wet stone — but it was enough to cast. His shadows would be weak, less defined than in full light, but functional. He could summon his shreakle and his komodon simultaneously, use the shreakle to disable the crossbows and the komodon to create a barrier—

"Don't." Sumi's voice was low, steady, directed at Kaito without looking at him. "Eight of them. Four crossbows. Confined space. If we cast, someone gets shot before the shadows form."

She was right. The shadow symbols required hand movements that took two to three seconds to complete, and a crossbow bolt covered the five-metre distance between the bandits and the aspirants in approximately half a second. Even if Kaito's casting was faster than the trigger pulls — which was possible but not certain — the confined space of the ravine meant there was nowhere to dodge if the bolts came.

Sumi stepped forward. "We'll cooperate," she said. "No need for violence."

The leader smiled. "Smart girl. Pack—"

Ranger struck.

The shadow hound had not been dismissed. He had been positioned behind Sumi, out of the bandits' direct line of sight, and he had been waiting — not for Sumi's command but for the specific tactical moment that Sumi had identified and communicated to him through the telepathic bond: the instant when the bandit leader's attention was on Sumi's words and his trigger finger was relaxed.

Ranger's attack was not a lunge. It was a calculated displacement — the shadow hound barrelling into the leader's legs from the side, knocking him off balance and redirecting the crossbow skyward as the bolt released and struck the ravine wall twenty metres above, raining chips of stone on the passage below.

In the same instant, Sumi cast.

Her komodon materialised between the three officers and the rear group of bandits, its armoured bulk filling the ravine passage and creating a physical barrier that the four rear bandits could not pass. Simultaneously, Nigel cast his shreakle — the bird shooting down the ravine toward the front group, its shadow-form talons raking across the crossbow of the nearest bandit and knocking it from his hands.

Kaito did not wait for an opening. He made one.

His caster beam blazed to life and he cast his komodon — larger, less refined than Sumi's but faster to materialise because Kaito's casting speed compensated for his lack of precision — and directed it at the remaining armed bandits at the front, the shadow beast's charge scattering them against the ravine walls. Then his shreakle, which he sent high, above the ravine's walls, where the sunlight was strong and the shadow it cast on the bandits below was enormous, dark, and terrifying in the way that shadows are terrifying when they appear to come from something very large and very angry.

The fight lasted twelve seconds.

When it was over, six of the eight bandits had fled — scrambling up the ravine walls with an agility that suggested they had rehearsed their escape route as thoroughly as their ambush, which was the hallmark of professional bandits who understood that survival was more important than pride. The leader and one other were on the ground: the leader pinned under Ranger's weight, the other restrained by the combined bulk of Kaito's and Sumi's komodons.

Nigel collected the abandoned crossbows and short swords, bundling them efficiently. "We should move," he said. "The ones who ran will regroup. We don't want to be in this ravine when they do."

Sumi nodded. "Ranger, release." The shadow hound stepped off the bandit leader, who scrambled to his feet, his face a mask of fury and humiliation.

"You'll regret this," he said.

"Possibly," Sumi replied. "But not today."

They walked out of the ravine at a pace that was fast enough to be prudent and slow enough to be dignified, leaving the bandits behind in the narrow passage with their wounded pride and their absent weapons and the dawning realisation that three junior officers with shadow creatures had been considerably more than they had bargained for.

That night, they camped on high ground above the trail, in a position that was defensible rather than comfortable.

"Ranger's timing," Kaito said, replaying the fight in his mind. "You didn't command him. He moved before you—"

"I commanded him through the bond," Sumi said. "When I said 'We'll cooperate,' I was talking to the bandits. I was telling Ranger to wait for the moment. He knew."

"That was..." Kaito searched for the right word. "That was incredible."

Sumi shrugged, but the corner of her mouth twitched. "It was tactical. Ranger and I have practiced coordinated deception. The verbal compliance buys time while the telepathic command sets the ambush. Toshio taught us that the most effective defence often looks like surrender."

Nigel was examining the confiscated weapons, cataloguing them in his journal with the meticulous attention of a person who believed that information, even about mundane objects, might eventually prove useful. "These are professional-grade weapons," he said. "Maintained, balanced, expensive. These weren't desperate farmers turned bandits. They were hired."

The word hung in the air.

"Hired by whom?" Kaito asked, though the answer was already forming in his mind, and from the expression on his companions' faces, in theirs as well.

"We don't know," Nigel said carefully. "But Toshio warned us that parties outside LoSC are interested in the canister. And professional bandits in a ravine that happens to be on our exact route is... a coincidence that I'm not comfortable with."

"So someone knows where we are," Kaito said.

"Someone knows where we're going," Sumi corrected. "The route to Torcia is known. The ravine is a predictable ambush point. They didn't need to track us specifically — they just needed to position themselves along the route and wait."

"Which means there could be more," Nigel finished.

The fire was small — Sumi had insisted on minimal flame, enough for warmth but not enough to be visible from a distance — and its light cast their shadows on the pine trunks behind them, three shapes that moved when they moved and were still when they were still and that reminded Kaito, in the particular way that shadows remind shadow casters of their art, that the darkness was not their enemy but their material.

"Double watch tonight," Sumi said. "Two people awake at all times. We keep moving at first light."

Nobody argued. The highland trail stretched ahead of them, eight more days through forest that was beautiful and indifferent and populated by things — human and otherwise — that they could not see and could not predict and that were, somewhere in the darkness, waiting.