40. Cut by Cut #3
It hit the edge of the clearing hard enough to put a tremor through the ground under Kain’s boots. The wings folded into the body. Wet leaves and pine needles came up around it where it landed.
Kain went.
He ran through the rain with the sword level in his right hand. The cut went inside the beak, close enough that the beak couldn’t reach him, because a beak that long can’t bring its point into the space inside its own reach.
He’d been thinking about that since the cliff.
He drove the sword into the side of the neck where the feathers gave way to skin.
The blade went in.
The gryphon’s head came down on top of him. He took the weight against his good shoulder and let his knees take the rest.
He set the sword and pulled it up the long way through the neck and out. The blade dragged a piece of the throat with it.
Hot blood came out of the wound less like a fountain and more like a tipped bucket, all at once, soaking him from the chest down. He turned his face away.
The gryphon bucked under him once. Twice. He came off it and rolled clear before the third.
It lay there on its side, the remaining eye open and looking nowhere, the muscles of its limbs running and twitching as if they hadn’t been told yet. The talons raked the ground.
The wings worked once, half-open. Then less. Then not at all.
It went still.
「Gryphon: slain.」
「Quest Completed: Gryphon Hunt」
「+1 Strength | +1 Constitution」
「Combat Readiness: Operational」
He stood there a moment longer with the sword in his hand. There’d been another stroke ready in him. There wasn’t going to be a need.
The sword came down to his side.
Ghost came up out of the smoke at his hip. The wolf moved slow now, in a way that said its body had been through what Kain’s body had been through.
There was blood through the fur along the side where the talon had taken it back at the boulders, and the breathing of it was working too hard for an animal at rest. But it was on its feet.
The wolf went past him to the dead gryphon.
It went around the body, slow, the way a creature does when it is reading a thing with its nose and its ears at once. Three circles. On the third, it came up to the side of the gryphon’s head and stopped.
The wolf was one-eyed. So was what lay on the ground.
The two of them lined up in profile, the side of Ghost’s good eye facing the side of the gryphon’s good eye, which was open and not seeing.
Ghost pressed its flank against the side of the gryphon’s head. Then it closed its one good eye.
For a count.
Then the eye opened, and Ghost stepped back from the body, and stood looking down at it.
One predator looking at what another predator had been. Nothing else to call it.
Kain looked at the wolf and looked at the gryphon and stood there in the rain.
The rain was coming down hard now. The slope behind them was still burning in pieces but the fires were giving up.
Where the rain hit the embers a steady hiss came up across the whole slope, a long sound like a man drawing breath through his teeth, and steam rose between the standing trunks of the trees that hadn’t gone all the way down.
His left arm hung at his side. He couldn’t feel his hand. The shoulder was a dull steady pain he couldn’t put a number on.
He walked to the edge of the clearing and lowered himself onto a stump that had been a tree before today, where the cut showed the rings of the wood.
The sword went across his thighs. The blade was wet with rain and gryphon blood, and the rain was washing the blood off the steel and down onto the wood and from there down into the wet ground.
His ribs ached where they had aged. His leg ached where the talon had glanced. His shoulder ached where the joint was out. His hands ached. The skin of his face ached where the heat of the fire had been on it. His feet ached, because he’d been on them.
He sat there.
The rain came down through the smoke. It hit his face. It ran into his hair. It went under the collar of the armor and down his spine.
He didn’t move from it.
He’d been here before. The end of a long contract. The body of a thing that had been trying to kill him on the ground. The work done.
The body of him kept going. The mercenary’s quiet, the one Mark had never been any good at.
Mark.
The thought went back where it lived. There was time for it later.
He watched the rain hit the gryphon’s open wing, where the membrane was torn, and run through. He watched it pool in the curve of one of the talons and overflow. He watched the steam rising from the slope, thinning as the fire died under it.
Ghost came back across the clearing and stopped at his good side, and lowered itself down onto the wet ground. It put its head against the side of his boot.
His good hand came down on the wolf’s neck.
He breathed.
◇ ◆ ◇
He didn’t sit. He collapsed.
His back hit the gryphon’s flank and stayed. The body was still warm against his shoulder blades.
The ribs of the thing pressed through the leather of his armor. The talons that had nearly taken him a few minutes back were curled inward against the chest of it where it had fallen. No threat to anyone now.
He stayed where he was.
Ghost padded up and lay down at his good side, ears forward, the wolf’s one good eye on the dark of the trees beyond the kill-ground.
He looked at himself.
His left arm wasn’t doing anything. He tried to lift it. It came up six inches and stopped, and pain washed up through the shoulder and made him stop trying.
The arm hung wrong from the shoulder.
His left thigh had taken a talon-strike. He could see the gash in the last of the firelight: a long opening down the outside of the leg, the leather greave torn through, blood running into his boot at a rate that wasn’t going to stop on its own.
He’d thought he’d dodged that one. He hadn’t.
His ribs were the third concern. He counted along his left side with his good hand.
Two places didn’t feel right when he breathed. A third he couldn’t be sure of because everything in his chest hurt about the same.
His head felt thick. The edges of his vision weren’t sharp.
He worked the small leather pack from his hip with his good hand. The bandage roll inside was the simple linen every mercenary’s pack carried. He pulled it out and started on the thigh.
“Tend to the arm next.”
His hand stopped.
He held still and let the woods around him be still too.
Then he started winding the linen again. He didn’t speak. He didn’t look up.
“Three loops,” Sarah said. “Then bite it off. Knot under.”
He did three loops. He bit the linen off. He set the knot under, the way Darien had shown him to set it the second winter on the circuit when he’d broken a finger and couldn’t dress himself.
“Strap goes up under the arm,” Darien said. The cook’s voice, close, the way it came when Darien was crouched at a man’s left working on a wound. “Up under the armpit, captain. Like I showed you.”
Kain found the leather strap at the bottom of the pack. He worked it under his armpit with his good hand and his teeth.
He looped it across his chest. He pulled the bad arm in tight to his ribs.
He pulled the strap tight with his teeth.
The arm screamed at him. He kept his own scream behind his teeth.
When the strap was set he let his head back against the gryphon.
His eyes wanted to close. He let them.
“He’ll do,” Sarah said, somewhere above him. “Get him to sleep some, he’ll come back.”
“Sleep, captain,” Darien said.
There was a third thing. It might’ve been a hand on his good shoulder. It didn’t speak.
Then it did.
“You’ll get home, Kain.”
Mark.
The last thing he knew was Ghost shifting weight against his good leg and settling there, and the warmth of three people who weren’t there closing the circle around him the way they used to on a cold night on the road.
Then nothing.
He came back at some count.
The sky between the trees had gone to the deep blue-black of late night. The moon was somewhere east of him, low and bright enough through the broken cloud to throw his shadow across the gryphon’s body.
The body was cold now. The fires were out.
The fever was on him.
He felt it the way a man feels weather. Hot from the inside, cold on the skin, the rain cold on top of that.
His sweat was running with the rain. He couldn’t tell which was which.
“Up.”
Sarah, at his ear.
“Up, Kain. We’re moving.”
He got his good hand against the gryphon’s body and pushed.
The corpse was a wall. He climbed it inch by inch.
“Easy,” Darien said. “Don’t pop the wrap on the thigh. Use the body as the brace. Up.”
He came up. The world swayed. He set his good hand against the flank and waited until it stilled.
“Good,” Sarah said. “Now move.”
He took a step.
There wasn’t a piece of him that didn’t hurt. He took another step.
“That’s it. One foot, the next foot. You’ve done this.”
He’d done this. He’d done it once in the dark of a collapsed dungeon with the dust of the rock-fall in his mouth and the bodies of the three of them somewhere down there with the wyvern.
He didn’t think the thought all the way through. He didn’t have to.
The sword was on the ground a few feet away where he’d set it down after the kill. He worked it up into his good hand.
“Leave the rest,” Sarah said. “The bow, the kit. Town first. Gear later.”
He thought about the camp. The block of poison. The bow on the branch. The climbing kit.
“Leave it,” she said again.
He left it.
Ghost rose with him. The wolf was on his good side, limping, but on its feet.
“Good wolf,” Darien said, behind him.
Kain almost answered. He kept it behind his teeth.
He left the kill-ground.
The trees took him in, in the late dark and the fever and the rain.
He’d had fever twice before in his life. Once after a knife-wound on a job that hadn’t been worth the coin. Once after a bite from something on a road south of Greyhaven that shouldn’t have been on a road.
He knew what fever did. Fever blurred. Fever took time off the page and gave you a different time back. Fever brought the dead.