"Osric!"
"Ready, my lord!"
"Then close it."
Osric Vane drove both hands down into the turf.
Sito felt it come up through the soles of his boots before he saw it. A deep grinding shudder, like something enormous was rising from its grave, and then the ground on the north side of the camp broke open and stood up.
It came out of the moor in a long curving slab, twenty feet of packed earth and rock heaving up out of the heather and locking into place with a sound like a portcullis dropping.
Dirt rained off the top of it. The whole thing went up in about two seconds and when it stopped, the open ground where the hollow had come from was a wall.
Then Osric turned on his heel and did it again on the east side, and a third time behind the wagons.
He left one gap. It was about fifteen feet wide and it faced the fire, and every man in that camp could see it.
"He's leaving it a door," said Sito.
"He's leaving us one door," said Willem, "which means we only have to watch one."
Marcus stood in the middle of the camp with the orange light burning steady forty feet over his head, and he was breathing slowly and deliberately, and his hands were open at his sides.
"North gap," he said. "It will come through the north gap."
"How do you know?"
"Because I have left it the shortest route to the brightest thing here, and the brightest thing here is me."
---
It came through the north gap.
It did not come cautiously. It came at a flat run with its head down, seven feet at the shoulder and grey and hairless and wet-looking, and Sito, with his back pressed against the wagon wheel with both blades out, had time to think exactly one thing.
'That's too fast. Nothing that size moves that fast.'
Marcus's hands came up.
The light overhead did not brighten. It *narrowed*. Two hundred yards of soft orange collapsed inward in the space of a breath into a single white line no thicker than a wrist, and that line came down out of the sky and hit the ground where the hollow was.
The moor exploded.
Peat and turf and a spray of superheated water went up in a wall, and the line kept coming, dragging sideways across the ground with a noise like a hot iron in a bucket, cutting a trench eight feet long and a foot deep through solid earth as Marcus swept it after the thing.
It missed.
It missed by about a yard and a half, because in the half second the light had taken to come down, the hollow had already changed direction twice.
"Willem!"
Willem was moving before the name finished.
He came off Sito's left at a dead sprint and his sword came up as he ran, and Sito saw the blade go from grey to a hard bright silver as the metal answered him.
Every edge on it drawing itself finer, the steel going rigid all the way through the way nothing steel does on its own.
He hit it clean. He hit it across the shoulder with everything a Third Circle body could put behind an arm, and the blade went in.
It went in about four inches, which was four inches more than Sito had expected, and the hollow screamed.
That was the first sound it had made all night, and it was a horrible one, high and wet and far too loud.
Then it turned inside its own length and threw him.
Willem went eleven feet backward through the air and hit the side of the wagon and came off it onto his knees, and got straight back up, which made Sito see him in a new light.
"It bleeds!" Ramsey shouted. "My lord, it bleeds!"
"Of course it bleeds," said Marcus. "Everything bleeds. Keep it off the elves."
---
Ramsey's affinity was wind, and Ramsey's wind was not impressive.
He could not throw a man. He could not knock a horse down. What he could do, twice a minute at Third Circle, was put about four hundred pounds of shove into a space six feet wide, and he had spent nineteen years learning exactly where to put it.
He put it under the hollow's forelegs as it came around the fire.
It did not fall. It skidded — one long ugly sideways slide across the wet turf with its claws tearing furrows, four feet off the line it had wanted, and for about a quarter of a second it was not going anywhere in particular.
Marcus's second line came down.
This one caught it. Not cleanly, not the center of it, but the edge of that white line went across the thing's flank and wounded it.
There was a smell in the air like a farrier's shop, and the hollow went over sideways into the heather with its whole left side smoking.
Sito's heart came up into his throat.
"It's down—"
It was not down.
It was up and moving before the words were out of him, and it went from lying in the grass to full speed in under a second, and the wound along its flank was already closing.
Sito saw it happen. In the orange light, he watched eight inches of open, burned, smoking flesh pull itself shut like a purse being drawn.
"Marcus—"
"I saw it."
"It's healing—"
"I saw it, your highness."
---
They fought it for eleven minutes.
Sito counted afterward, from the fire, because the logs Corbin had built up before dark burned down to almost nothing in the time it took, and he had watched a hundred campfires burn down and knew roughly what that was worth.
Eleven minutes. It felt like a great deal longer than that.
Osric never once tried to hit it. That was the thing Sito could not stop watching.
He threw boulders the size of a man's chest, six and eight at a time, ripping them up out of the moor and flinging them across the camp — and every single one of them missed, and every single one of them was meant to miss.
He was not throwing them at the hollow. He was throwing them at the place he did not want it to be. He walled off the elves, and then dropped a slab behind it to cut its retreat, and then blew the slab apart when it turned to go and made it come back through the fire instead.
Sito watched a Fourth Circle captain fight a beast he could not touch by simply refusing to let it be anywhere it wanted to be, and understood that he was watching something he had no name for.
'He's not fighting it,' Sito thought. 'He's fighting the ground. Ithriel said — he's doing what Ithriel said, he's doing it with the whole field—'
Willem hit it twice more. Both were good. Both went in.
Ramsey shoved it four more times, and one of those saved Sereth's life, because the thing had committed at the elves and Ramsey put his four hundred pounds of air into its shoulder at the exact moment it left the ground, and it landed two feet short and ate a boulder for its trouble.
And Marcus put eighteen more lines down out of the sky, and the moor around the camp began to look like something had been ploughing it with a hot bar, and seven of the twenty hit.
Seven hits out of twenty, from a Master of Epiria.
By the twenty fourth, Sito noticed that Marcus was slower.
Not much. The wind-up before each line had gone from about a second to about a second and a half, and the light overhead had dropped from orange to a deep sullen red, and Marcus had begun to breathe through his mouth.
---
"It's a race," said Osric.
He had come back to the fire to stand over the elves, and there was blood coming out of his nose that he had not noticed.
"My lord. It's a race and we're losing it."
"I am aware."
"You're burning out." Osric wiped his face with the back of his wrist and looked at the blood as if it belonged to somebody else. "I've got maybe six more walls in me and then I'm a man with a sword. Willem's cut it three times and it shut every one of them inside a minute. It's eating the difference, my lord. Every second we don't kill it, it'll keep absorbing mana from the cores in its belly and get further ahead."
Marcus did not answer immediately.
He was watching the dark past the wall, where a thing that never stopped moving was circling them at a speed no animal on the continent had any business achieving.
"It will not hold still," he said. "That is the entire problem and there is nothing else to it. If it stands anywhere at all for one full second, I will cut it in half. I have the reach and I have the power, but I do not have a target that stays where I put it."
"So we need it still."
"We need it still," Marcus agreed. "For one second. And nothing on this hill can make it stand still, because it does not have to stand still for anything. It cannot be threatened. It cannot be cornered. It does not care about the light and it does not care about the fire and it has no reason in the world to stop."
Sito, sitting against the wagon wheel twelve feet away with his blades across his knees, went very cold.
Because he had just worked out that he was the only one who could make it stop.
---
He had been thinking about it for nine minutes, and he had not wanted to be right.
It had come past him twice.
The first time he had assumed he was lucky. The second time it had come through the gap between the wagon and the horse line, close enough that he had felt the air move on his face, and it had slowed.
It had checked, and swung that smooth plate of bone across the space where he was standing, and hung there for most of a second with its head moving in small searching arcs, like a man patting a dark table for something he knows he put down.
And then it had given up. And gone past him.
'It doesn't find them. It finds the core.'
'A core is the only thing in creation shaped like a place you could bite.'
Sito looked at his own hands.
There was nothing in him. There had never been anything in him. In every fight he had ever had, that had been the thing that made him weak — no enhancement, no mana, no ice to freeze somebody's arm with when he had them beaten.
Out there in the dark was a creature that hunted by finding the one thing he did not have.
He stood up.
"Marcus."
"Stay where you are, your highness."
"It can't find me."
Marcus turned around.
"It came past me twice," Sito said. The words were coming fast and he made himself slow them down, because he needed to be believed and he had about four seconds to do it.
"The second time it stopped. It stopped four feet away from me and it hunted around for me and it couldn't work out where I was and gave up. Sereth said it only sees cores. I haven't got one. I'm haze. I'm the same as the grass to it."
Marcus was absolutely still.
"You want it to stop," Sito said, "for one second. I can make it stop."
"No."
"Marcus—"
"No." Marcus's voice cracked across the camp like a slate breaking. "Do you understand what I am holding here? I am holding a treaty, four elven officials, eleven men and the heir to the Epirian throne, and I have already lost one of those tonight. You are barely eight years old. Absolutely not."
"Then we die here."
The words came out flat and hard and did not sound like a child at all, and Sito watched them land on Marcus like a thrown stone.
"Osric's got six walls left. You're slowing down — I can see you slowing down, the light's gone red and you're breathing through your mouth. That thing's got everything it's eaten tonight and it's healing faster than we're hurting it."
Sito's hands were shaking and he let them. "You said it yourself. Nothing on this hill can make it stand still. Nothing on this hill except me, and you know that, and you knew it before I said it."
Nobody moved.
Marcus Benedictus looked down at the boy for what could not have been more than two seconds.
"What do you need," he said.
"I need it to not know where it came from," said Sito.
He pulled the belt off his shoulder — Ithriel's belt, adjustable, six flat palm-length knives in it, keyed to the leather so they came back the moment they stopped moving.
"If I stab it, it knows where I am. It's right there and it turns around and it works out there's something in that spot even if it can't see it, and then I'm dead and you're no better off."
He was talking fast again. "But if it's coming at you, at the light, at the front, and a knife goes into the side of its head out of nowhere—"
"It stops," said Marcus.
"It has to stop. It's blind. Something just hurt it from a direction it cannot check and it has no idea what's there or how big it is." Sito swallowed. "It'll turn. It'll put its head up and it'll hunt for it. That's what it did with me. That's exactly what it did with me and it took almost a full second."
Marcus looked at the north gap, and at the fifteen feet of open ground in front of it, and Sito watched him do arithmetic.
"Osric," he said. "Can you put a wall behind the gap after it comes through?"
"Aye."
"Then it comes in and it does not go back out, and it comes at me, and it crosses that ground there."
Marcus pointed at a patch of turf about twenty feet from where he stood. "Your highness. You will be on the west side, on the ground, flat, and you will not move and you will not make a sound until it is past you and going away from you. When it is past, you throw once. Once."
"Once."
"Once, and at the head, and then you do not move again for any reason at all." Marcus crouched down so they were level, and took him by both shoulders. "Listen to me. It is blind and it is not deaf. It cannot see you and it can absolutely hear you. If you throw and then move, it will find you on the sound, and I will not reach you in time. Do you understand me?"
"Throw and don't move."
"Throw," said Marcus, "and do not move."
---
Sito lay flat in the heather on the west side of the gap with his face turned sideways against the cold wet ground and one knife in his right hand.
He could hear his own heart. That was all he could hear.
'Don't move. It's going to come past you close and you are not going to move.'
Marcus stood alone in the middle of the camp, twenty-two feet away, and let the light come back up.
It went from sullen red to white. All of it, everything he had left, poured up into the point over his head, and the hillside went bright as noon again, and Marcus Benedictus stood in the middle of it with his arms loose and made himself the single largest, brightest, most obvious thing for two miles in any direction.
"Come on, then," he said.
It came.
It came through the north gap at a full run, and Sito — nine feet from its path, flat on his face in the heather — felt the ground shake under his ribs as it went by.
Behind it, Osric threw a wall up across the gap.
'Now.'
Sito came up onto one knee and threw.
He had thrown ten thousand things in two lifetimes. He had thrown practice slugs back at the Old Master's students in a dodgeball match that had gone on for two years, and he had been practicing every chance he had since receiving them. His arm knew what to do without being asked.
The knife went into the side of the hollow's skull, just behind the bone plate, and buried itself to the grip.
The beast lost its mind.
It went up off the ground in a twisting convulsion and came down hard and stopped.
Its head came up and swung around back toward the west, back toward the empty heather, hunting for whatever had just put a knife in its head from a place where nothing was.
It found nothing.
There was nothing to find. There was wet grass and cold stone and a boy with no core in him lying nine feet away with his eyes shut and his face in the dirt, and to a thing that hunted by looking for points of light, there was no difference between those things at all.
It stood there.
It stood absolutely still for one entire second, casting around for something that was not there.
Then the sky split.
The beam came down out of the sky and silently blew apart the top of the hollow's skull and out through the ground beneath, followed by skull shaking sound akin to a clap of thunder.
It did not stop there. Marcus dragged the beam, screaming with the effort, through the whole length of the thing, and cut it open from crown to hip.
The two halves came apart and fell in opposite directions.
There was a trench in the moor underneath where it had been standing, dozens of feet deep, glowing dull red at the bottom.
Then the light went out, all of it, everywhere, and Marcus Benedictus dropped to his hands and knees in the dark and let out a shaky breath.
---
Nobody said anything for a while.
Sito lay in the heather with his face in the dirt and did not move, because he had been told not to move and he had to process what just happened.
Then Ramsey was there, hauling him up bodily with one arm under his middle like a sack of flour,
"You mad little bastard," he said while laughing in disbelief.
Willem got to Marcus.
Osric stood in the middle of his own ruined moorland, looking at the two halves of the thing, with blood running freely down his chin.
"Gods," he said. "Gods, look at the size of it."
---
The core came out of the base of its throat, where it had kept the ones it stole.
It was not a normal core.
Sito counted eleven that were still distinct enough to count, and stopped, because the middle of it had fused into something else entirely. A lumpy, ugly, fist-sized mass, still faintly warm, with two of the biggest sitting in it like stones set in a riverbed.
Osric turned it over under the lantern.
"That's the elk," he said, touching one. "That'll be the hog. And that lump in the middle there is nine ash-wolves."
Ramsey looked at it for a long moment.
"What's it worth?"
Osric glanced up the hill, to where Bertram Ault was lying under a cloak with two men beside him, waiting for the light so they could dig.
"Not enough," he said.