The Brat's Final Gambit

Davin felt uneasy. When the three of them met early in the morning, he was the only one that seemed to be in a decent mood. Niam stared out through puffy, swollen eyes, and Maerillus had a withdrawn and inward look. The walk to the Vandin camp took the entire day and part of the next, with Maerillus and Niam bickering the whole way.

At one point, Maerillus made an obvious effort to put a better face on his mood and joked about how the trip was probably for nothing.

“I hope it was just Bode’s mouth leaking,” Davin said earnestly.

“Hey! I know what I heard!” Niam said reactively. “I think he was telling the truth.”

“I can always hope,” Davin said.

When Niam lapsed into more silence, which wasn’t usually like him, Maerillus spoke up. “With things as strange as they have been lately, it would be nice if fate would cut us some slack.”

Davin nodded his head in agreement. “Speaking of strange things, have you heard that the nods seems to be getting worse?

Niam grunted an affirmative.

“I’ve seen several servants with it,” Maerillus said. “Dad sent the head butler home to get some sleep several days ago.”

“I caught the apothecary asleep at the counter two days ago,” Davin added. “Pretty bad when he can’t fix something to keep himself awake!”

About two years ago, the strange sleeping sickness had begun to affect the people around Pirim Village. No one suffered symptoms long. The worst of it involved a heavy drowsiness to come over anyone sick with the disease. People stricken with it sometimes grew so enervated that they fell asleep in the middle of simple tasks.

“If that were the worst thing going on in town, I’d throw a party—with your dad’s money,” Davin joked.

Maerillus laughed and even Niam cracked a smile.

As they walked, Davin became increasingly unsettled. He initially hoped this was because Maer and Niam were constantly sucking the good mood out of him. Now, he was not so certain. The feeling hung like a massive tree leaning above him, about to fall down at any moment. He could only remember feeling an impending sense of danger this strongly one time before, and that was on a hunting trip with his brother Trev as they stalked a large ram. Trev’s arrow had taken the animal high in the haunches. The wounded animal left a zigzagging trail of blood through rough countryside as it fled. When Davin climbed a tall outcropping in order to get a better view of the terrain, he suddenly felt a ferocious presence boring into him. Trev called to him in an alarmed voice to stand completely still.

As Davin froze, the hair on the nape of his neck stood on end and goose bumps coursed down his arm.

A high-pitched twang sounded as Trev loosed an arrow. Davin heard its angry hiss through the air, followed by a flat thud and a high, keening scream of rage. Not eight feet away, a mountain lion fell dead to the ground from a tree branch just above his head. It must have been tracking the ram as well.

That was how Davin felt right now.

He looked around. The woods here were open and the thickly carpeted ground free of dense undergrowth. If anyone or anything were nearby watching, he ought to be able to make it out.

“What’s wrong?” Maerillus asked.

Davin gave a shrug. “Nothing,” he muttered.

Finally, the forest opened into a large clearing where dry grass seemed to lap at its edge like an immense lake of autumn yellow. The swell of a low hill rose gently ahead of them, clear and grassy. Although Davin had never ventured this way before, he knew that the Vandin camp ought to lie just on the other side. To both sides of them, the land began to rise into a two long ridges that ran parallel to one another like long, immense, sinuous snakes of earth. North, tall mountains lifted their cragged heads. Their profiles stabbed at the sky, all sharp edges and broken-off angles where the rock seemed to protest against whatever force had lifted them so high into the air.

“Bet it’s really cold up there,” Davin said. He needed time to think now that he knew the camp was near. The last thing he wanted to do if there were people there was to walk up on them unannounced. While the Vandin were by all accounts a peaceful people, they worshiped strange gods, and were supposedly quite odd, and that made Davin leery. Regardless of whether the rumors he had heard were true or not, he knew very little of them. And right now, he didn’t like not knowing.

“Probably freezes at night up there. Snow will cover those peaks pretty soon,” Maerillus said.

As Davin thought, his gaze settled beyond the on the distant ridges. Dark stains were clearly visible where water leaked from damp fissures running in deep, furrowed veins across the jagged stone torsos. The mountains here weep, he thought to himself, and the thought brought a shiver. He still had the sense that something was about to come down on his head. And at that moment, not only did the forest behind them feel oppressive; the highlands themselves seemed to loom over them. Davin shook himself. Now that they were almost there, he was unable to keep up the pretense that everything was going to be fine. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. The knowledge came at him like an itch in the back of his mind, and now all he wanted to do was scratch at it furiously.

“It’s too quiet,” Niam said in a voice barely above a whisper.

Davin nodded his head. He had expected to see or hear someone by now.

“Yeah.” Davin agreed. They all grew quiet and Davin now gazed ahead. The only thing he heard was the exhalation of air through tall tassels of yellow grass. Not even autumn birds whistled or twittered from the forest canopy behind them.

Before Davin had a chance to talk about what to do now, Niam grunted and began walking toward the hill. He and Maerillus looked at one another dumbfounded. Niam turned his head back as he strode away. “Bode wouldn’t let a thing like silence stop him. Might as well get on with it. I mean, either the Vandin are there or they aren’t.”

“Not so fast!” Davin grumbled and hurried along with Maerillus to catch up with him.

Maerillus grabbed Niam’s shirtsleeve. Their smaller friend’s face was set with a stony determination. Quickly, he pushed Maerillus’s hand away. “We might as well be about it,” he said again. “Bode could already be up there doing who knows what.”

“And you want to just barge up there in plain view if he is?” Maerillus asked impatiently. “What if he sees you? What if his gang is with him?”

“We’ll handle it,” Niam said bitterly.

“What’s gotten into you?” Maerillus demanded. “You’ve been acting like you had a stone in your hoof ever since we met up yesterday morning!”

“Nothing,” Niam replied sullenly, his face tinged red.

Davin could tell Maerillus didn’t buy it. All he said was, “Your ‘nothing’ could get us into a situation I’d rather not have to ‘handle’ if I can help it.”

Niam looked away.

Davin moved between the two of them. “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it smartly,” he said to Niam.

“I think me standing up on that hilltop like a piece of red meet before a pack of hungry wolves and telling them dinner’s on sounds like a fine plan. Then the two of you can beat them until they cry for their mommas,” he retorted. His face was steadily growing redder by the second. “I mean, isn’t that what the two of you do best?” he asked hotly.

“What are you talking about?” Maerillus barked in exasperation.

“What I’m talking about is how you get to do that thing you do where no one can see you and he gets to beat the cold snot out of people like Bode while all I get to do is see stupid dead dogs.”

“What would you prefer to do, Niam?” The anger in Maerillus’s voice was unmistakable.

“Well that’s really it, isn’t it?” Niam flashed. “I can’t really do anything, can I?”

“That’s ENOUGH!” Davin interjected. Both went suddenly and sullenly quiet. “You are doing something, Niam. We all are,” he said evenly. His friend looked as if he was about to say more, but Davin held up his hand to keep him quiet. “I know you want to get back at Bode, but that’s not quite why we’re here, and you know it.”

“It’s about a lot more than that,” Niam said under his breath.

“Later,” Davin replied curtly, and laid a hand on Niam’s shoulder to keep him still. “We’ll get to that later.” Niam said nothing and Davin looked at them both. “I can’t play peacekeeper. Not at a time like this,” he said sternly, and shook his head. “I can’t believe the two of you.”

Maerillus let out a long breath. “You’re right.”

“Yeah,” Niam said tightly.

Both shuffled their feet and avoided one another’s gaze.

Davin looked at them both, and several long seconds passed while the tension ebbed away. “We’ve all had a rough time lately, it seems” he began again. “But right now I need you two to focus.”

When they nodded, he could tell they were done.

“Maer, Niam and I are going to wait down here. I need you to go up there and have a look. Once you’ve done that, we’ll go from there.”

“I figured that’s what you were going to say,” Maerillus said.

“All I want you to do is see what we might be facing. We’re here to prove the story Niam overheard Bode talking about. If there’s anything to it, we’ll let Lord Joachim’s men sort it out.”

“Bet it’s not gonna work out that way,” Niam said in a sing-song voice.

“Cut it!” Davin and Maerillus said in unison.

“Oh . . . I’m just saying,” Niam shot back, his voice tinged with an I-told-you-so tone. “Nothing’s that simple with us anymore.”

As Davin watched Maerillus walk away, the air seemed to fold around his friend. The spat between his two friends hadn’t helped his edginess at all. After a long wait, Davin began to grow worried when he heard the sound of grass whisking against someone’s pant legs. Slowly the shape of Maerillus unfolded into view.

“Well?” Davin asked eagerly.

With a courtesy nod in Niam’s direction, Maerillus said, “Looks like what Niam heard was right. There’s nobody up there. Place looks completely abandoned—like they left in a hurry.”

“That’s more than a bit troubling,” Davin said. What had Bode gotten himself mixed up with? This seemed far too big for his kind of trouble.

“It gets even stranger. There are odd boxes laying around some of the tents.”

“Boxes? Any idea what they’re for?

“No idea. But I do know that there is something that’s just not right about them.” As he said it, he shivered.

“Any signs of Bode?” Niam asked.

“Not that I could tell, but the camp is big.”

Davin thought for a moment. He wanted to leave right now, but the more he had thought about it as they waited for Maerillus to return, the more surely he knew he was going to have to give some accounting for what had happened. Especially with Maerillus’s news about the boxes. “I think we need to go up there and have a quick look.”

“See! This is how it always starts,” Niam said with a dry, humorless laugh. They both turned to him with looks that should have wilted flowers, but Niam just shrugged his shoulders and replied, “I’m just saying.”

With that, Maerillus took his bow from where he had sat it and quickly leaned against it with one knee and strung it. Niam took up his walking staff and Davin held the hatchet he had brought with him to chop firewood tightly in his hands. The walk was a short one. As soon as they crested the top of the hill, they saw that they were in a long, flat valley between two ridges stretching nearly parallel to one another for what seemed like nearly three miles. At the valley’s distant end, the land rose abruptly, and where it ended, the earth gave birth to the highlands good and proper.

Heavy silence lay across the camp as they approached the first ring of large tents. To Davin it felt as if someone had cut through the trunk of a towering forest pine at a flat angle so that everyone knew that it was going to fall, but no one knew when. As they moved into the camp, they saw that the tents were arranged in small, circular “communities,” each with a central clearing with large pits where fires had been lit.

Davin moved silently. Grass swished at his feet as he slowly made his way around the tents. Great tripods had been set up over some of the pits, and here and there sat spits, some with the charred lamb carcasses. What the crows had not been able to prize away was still stuck to the bones and skewers. When Davin leaned over and looked into a pot and a wave of flies launched up at his face. He jerked back as the smell of putrefying meat hit him with the swarming bugs.

“There’s still food on the pits.” He gagged involuntarily and looked around.

No one moved. Only the random swell of tent flaps stirred where the wind breathed in and out of the openings. Flies alone now called this place home.

Maerillus’s voice held an uncomfortable edge. “There are still chests full of clothes, blankets, and personal belongings in these.”

Davin understood. This place was creepy. With a tight face, he asked, “Where are those boxes?” No sooner were the words were out than the feeling that a tree was about to crash down on top of him grew more palpable.

“Over there,” he said with a shiver. “I don’t like them,” Davin—there’s something wrong about them.”

“Great Lord!” Niam exclaimed from another tent, breaking into their conversation. “Everything’s in a jumble. Someone here tried to pack in a hurry.”

Davin and Maerillus nodded grimly.

“Look at this. Somebody just rolled out a bed mat. It was for a child,” Niam said. “There was a doll in the covers.”

A spasm of sorrow lanced through Davin’s chest. Images of the little girl—Jaela in Kalavere—flashed through his mind. At least there were no bodies in those tents. At least there was that.

“Whatever happened here happened in the evening,” Davin said. “When they were getting ready to bed down.”

“But why would they run off like this?” Maerillus asked, tensely.

“Whatever it was scared them enough to leave everything behind,” Davin said.

“You think it’s like this all over?” Maerillus asked, though by the look on his face he already knew the answer. The silence said it all.

“I think we are about to find out,” Davin said roughly.

Niam looked around cautiously. There ought to be people everywhere around the camp, but only silence filled the tents and gnawed at his nerves like he was a piece of meat and the heavy, brooding hush were a hungry dog. Odd how a lack of something had its own kind of presence. With a glance back into the tent’s dim interior, he spared one more long moment to look at the doll. Thick wool covers of a small blanket cut to fit the toy had been lovingly tucked around it. A mother might have put her toddler to bed that way. Now it was all alone. I am that doll. Niam tried to shut the thought out. But thoughts like those, once they rose, took him along their dark currents. And there was no getting off of a river like that. His brother and sister were gone. His parents barely seemed to notice him. Maybe he existed in an in-between state, as an absence waiting to happen, an unconsummated eventuality.

Niam walked slowly around the circle of tents where nothing else moved, trying to push away the dark thoughts in his mind. The only sound he heard was the low murmur of Davin and Maerillus talking quietly behind him. Suddenly, he stopped. Before him an object lay in the grass. It was small, only a bit larger than a jewelry box, and it was black—the kind of black that formed on the sick skin of rotting fruit.

A pressure began to build between Niam’s temples as he stood there staring, not knowing why he remained frozen. Slowly he forced his lips to open. Words stalled out before passing through his mouth. Niam wanted to tell Davin that he had found something he should look at. But the words got stuck. Something about that box was familiar in a darkly comforting way. He stood there, knowing that he needed to tell Davin what he had found. Somewhere between the command for his lips to move and the muscles that did the moving, he felt all snarled up.

Niam strained with all his might until slowly his mouth opened. “Think I’ve found something.” It came out as a croak. Part of him wondered if anyone heard him. For several moments more he stood there. A scintillating wave of color flickered across the box’s surface. Shapes of some sinister script appeared and then licked across the sides of the thing like wet eels in muddy water. At first the script reminded him of drawings he had seen of ancient runes in the ruined cities of Elb and Sorin on the continent. But then these flowed, as if they were alive and struggling to write themselves. The pressure in his head continued to build. He needed to get closer.

The object on the ground called to him. Involuntarily, Niam took a step toward the box. Once again a flicker of light and colors coruscated across the thing’s surface, like light bent by the scales of moth’s wings in sunlight. Shapes twisted, straining into dark and forbidden words. Dimly, a part of Niam screamed at his disobedient limbs to turn back.

Instead, he took another step toward it.

Niam strained. He fought. He took another step.

Then he looked down at the box. All he had to do was reach down and touch it. He could almost tell what the flowing runes said, if only they would stay still long enough for him to read them. But they writhed and wriggled . . . worms feasting inside a ripe corpse. For the life of him, he could not figure out why he wanted to touch it. His hand slowly moved out to grasp it. Maybe if he touched it, he could make the script stop long enough to read it. Maybe that’s what this was all about. Maybe it wanted to be read.

Niam grunted as a great force suddenly jerked his body back. For an instant he stared around, dazed. Something hard gripped his shoulder. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Davin’s steady voice held a note of concern in it.

Niam staggered and straightened up. Davin still had a firm hold on him. Niam batted him away and stumbled. His arms flailed about as he lost balance and fell several feet away. Quickly, he scrambled several more feet away from the thing. “Don’t get any closer!” he barked. His heart raced in his chest. The farther he got away from the box, the more the pressure that had built inside his skull eased. “There’s something very wrong with those things!” he stammered.

Davin and Maerillus gathered around him as he stood and composed himself. Both kept wary eyes on the box as he told them about what happened. When he was done, Davin led them farther away from the thing. Maerillus whistled. “I felt like something was wrong with them from the moment I saw the first one,” he said wonderingly. “But none of them affected me like that.”

“Me either,” Davin said.

“And you said you could read some kind of writing?” Maerillus asked. But there was a note in his voice Niam didn’t like.

“Don’t you say that!” Niam nearly shouted.

Maerillus looked taken aback.

“I’d bet that’s sorcery,” Niam growled. “And I never said I could actually read it. It was like it wanted to be read.” A lump of dread grew in his stomach at the thought of reading something like that. Everyone had heard stories of people touched by the Lord of the Grave. It was said they were chosen from birth by him, that they were born into his arts the way mothers swaddled their children in warm linens. They had been down this road of discussion already because of the ghost dog, and he wasn’t ready to revisit it. “I’m not a damned sorcerer!”

“Oh.” A look of dawning realization spread across Maerillus’s face. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

“Well, I just want to keep away from those things.”

Maerillus deliberately shot back, “I told all of you that they made me uneasy,” and Niam gave him a sour look.

Niam’s stomach clenched in a solid ball of disgust. “I feel like I could jump into a bathing tub right now with an entire cask of soap,” he spat. At that moment he felt soiled. Whatever it was that had reached out from the box and tried to lure him to it left a residue like a snail left a trail behind it on the early morning lawn.

“It didn’t affect either of us as strongly as it did you,” Davin said quietly, but there was an emphatic tone in his voice. “But we both get the point. These are bad things. Let’s look around some of the other tent rings, just to be sure. I don’t want anyone to drop out of sight.” Then he looked at Maerillus and caught his eyes with his own. “Even if that means you have to stay right by Niam. I don’t want you disappearing on us because of your gift. Not when these things can do what they did to Niam. Hopefully this is the worst we’ll find here.”

Niam saw through Davin’s words.

What Davin really meant was that he didn’t want Niam to be left alone with those boxes. Niam didn’t like feeling like he needed a babysitter and began to say something to that effect, but he had to admit that having Maerillus nearby did make him feel better. Especially when the alternative was being drawn toward another one of those things.

As they made their way around the circular encampments, Niam saw carts abandoned here and there, as if the inhabitants had spared no time to hitch them to their horses. In some tents, saddles still remained. The Vandin had been in such a hurry they hadn’t even bothered to do that much!

It didn’t take long for Davin to find something worse. “Hey guys!” He called out, alarmed.

Niam felt another lump of dread from in his guts as they sprinted over to Davin’s side. It didn’t take long to discover what had driven the Vandin fleeing in all directions. An open space had been set aside in the middle of the encampment. Niam guessed this was where everyone gathered as a village. Davin was staring into the expanse of trampled grass with a mixture of fear and disgust. Misshapen lumps teeming with crows dotted the ground. The mass of birds quivered and shivered with a hitching, furtive, nauseating effect. In a way, it reminded him of the discordant movement of script across the unhealthy black surface of the box that nearly drew him to touch it. Moments passed before it dawned on him what he was seeing.

“Great lord! Those are bodies, aren’t they?” Niam gasped.

“Yeah,” Davin said miserably.

They stared for several long moments as what their next course of action had to be.

“We’ve got to see what killed the people under there, don’t we?

“Yeah,” Davin said miserably.

As he watched the seething surface of hungry feathers twitching as the birds beneath gorged themselves on carrion, Niam could only imagine what the bodies looked like. “And that means walking over there and scaring the crows off, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Davin said miserably.

“Were going to have to look at them and smell them, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Davin said miserably.

“That’s not all you’re going to say, is it?”

Davin clapped him on the shoulder and motioned toward the bodies. “What are you waiting for, buddy?”

Niam grimaced. “Oooh no I’m bloody well not going over there and smelling that!”

“Somebody’s got to do it.”

“We’ll all do it, Maerillus said, and they moved forward toward the bodies. When the smell finally DID hit him, it hit with the force of a mallet. Niam almost turned back. One crow hopped off of the nearest body with a flap of darkly mottled flesh dangling from its beak. It looked at Niam through a sullen, gimlet eye. How dare you interrupt my feast foolish boy?

Just knowing what the flesh hanging from its beak came from made him want to wretch. “Get out of here!” Niam shouted with revulsion. The bird gave an indignant scream and lifted into the air. Niam began waving his arms. The others did too. An angry cloud of birdlike shapes bellowed into the air like a grave robber lifting a pall from a corpse. Dozens came to ground yards away, where the formed a restive mob of starving ghouls that cawed angrily at Niam and his friends.

Now laid bare, the twisted shape of a man lay in an impossibly contorted posture. The work of the birds had not completely picked the copse clean. Charred tatters of clothing still clung to parts of the body, which had been stripped clean to the bone in places along the legs and arms. A skinless skull stared out at him through empty sockets. Hair-tufted bits of flesh still clung to it in places. The abdominal cavity lay open where something had crawled inside and begun eating.

Niam’s gorge began to touch the back of his throat. Quickly, he turned away and became sick. Maerillus bent and vomited, too. With a snarl of disgust, Davin ran at two other corpses. His charge drove the stubborn birds away only briefly. They quickly returned as a raucous rabble of murderous mendicants that, in Niam’s mind, begged to continue their crime after the kill was done.

“It’s the same with these two,” Davin choked. Niam and Maerillus kept their distance. Several more corpses lay half-devoured in the central clearing. In places the earth had been scorched free of grass. Where the ground had been burned barren of everything, they saw that in places the soil had been melted into dull, dirty runnels of glass. It looked to Niam as if a short rain of molten fire had fallen into the heart of the Vandin camp.

“This reminds me,” Maerillus began—

“—Of the burned animals I found out at the barrens,” Niam finished.

As they backed away from the grisly scene, Davin gnawed at his lip.

“I think I have an idea what may have happened here.”

Niam and Maerillus looked at him expectantly.

“Did you notice how trampled the grass is in the clearing looked?”

Both of them nodded. “Looked like there was a large gathering there,” Niam said.

“Exactly. I think whoever did this hit them when they were all together. I wouldn’t be surprised to find more bodies and more burned ground in some of the other tent rings. Looks to me like someone—”

“—Or something,” Niam corrected him.

“Or something,” Davin averred “Like someone or something wanted to run these people off,” he finished.

“Why,” Maerillus asked, perplexed. “There’s really nothing of value here.”

“Maybe we’ll find out in the big buildings back there past the camp,” Niam told them. “There are rooftops over there.”

When they left the camp behind to investigate, the rest of the circling crows descended to renew their meal in peace. Niam felt a pang of regret that they could not bury the bodies in a good and proper grave.

As he walked cautiously through the grass, Niam kept his senses open to the faintest sign of danger. When he reached the edge of one of the buildings, he saw that the structures resembled tall barns and storage buildings. Looking down as he stepped carefully through the thick grass, he let out an involuntary yelp.

“Gold!”

Necklaces, bracelets, and rings were strewn all across ground. Broken shards of pottery lay where several crates had been all but torn open. Maerillus bent down and rifled through several of the necklaces. “Brass. Copper. Bronze,” he said like a merchant counting off his wares for sale. “No gold, though there is plenty of silver.”

Davin took a small necklace and looked it over. “This looks a lot like the jewelry Dad buys Mom in Kalavere,” he said thoughtfully. Niam walked through some of the debris, and suddenly froze.

“Another box! I can see the bloody writing moving across the thing!” His chest grew tight, and his head grew heavy. “And I can feel it again.”

“Let’s get back!” Davin all but pulled him, and everyone hurried to what felt like a safer distance. “What are those things?” Niam growled in frustration.

From the side of the camp they hadn’t explored yet, another sort of answer made itself known—the sound of grunting laughter.

“Looks like we’re not alone,” Maerillus said.

Niam scowled, and a white-hot surge of hatred blossomed inside his chest. He recognized the sound of that laughter—had heard it in countless bad dreams. “Bode!” he snarled.

More laughter erupted from the camp, and the sound of things being broken carried all too clearly. Niam saw several horses tied up near Bode and his gang.

“Where did they come form?” Maerillus whispered.

“There’s a road behind this barn heading east,” Davin said. “I saw it as we walked up. It hugs the bottom of this rise where the ridge begins. If this place is what I think it actually is, then there will be another one on the opposite side of the camp. And good thing for it. They’d have come right up on us if they had taken the road that comes out on your property, Maerillus.”

“What do you mean?”

“This isn’t a winter camp,” Davin said with certainty. “At least not like everyone believed. I’ve been thinking about it. There’s not enough grazing room for all the animals that the Vandin would need to bring with them if they come here to winter over.”

Maerillus slapped his knee. “You’re right. I should have seen it before anyone else.”

Niam looked at them both expectantly.

“It’s a trading camp. The wagons left behind, the jewelry . . . were all supposed to be for winter markets. They probably had only just started hauling their goods down here. All of those people were here to spread out into the larger cities and sale their crafts. I think each circle of tents represents different markets or artisans. The road Davin saw goes to Kalavere.”

“Oh,” was all Niam could say. His mind was focused on Bode’s group. That was when a troubling thought occurred to him. He closed his eyes, trying to push the thought back. Not for the first time, Niam wished he didn’t think so much. “We’ve got to go over there and stop them,” he said urgently.

“Why on earth do we have to do that?” Maerillus asked incredulously. “I think we’ve seen more than enough to get Lord Joachim to send his men up here and deal with this. We’ve done our part and the sooner we’re away from here, the better.”

“No,” Davin said emphatically. “They’re up there with those boxes.”

Maerillus looked at him blankly for a moment.

“What happens if they get ahold of them?” Niam complained.

Davin closed his eyes and said, “That’s easy enough to answer. What always happens where Bode is concerned—nothing good.”