SSS Primeval Devourer: Every Path I Devour Becomes Mine

The eastern survey road ran through broken rock half an hour beyond the last house Hessa’s crews had rebuilt. Its walls pinched close enough in places to scrape a wagon’s hubs. Insects rasped in the scrub. Far behind them, cart wheels still worked the mill road. Vhar heard the smaller sounds under both: a heel dragged through dust, a scuff beside the ditch, the horse’s tracks turning once and then breaking hard for Kessendrel.

The first survey stake still stood at the bend. The second had been sliced across its painted face. Pale wood showed beneath the whitewash. Fenn’s horse had gone past it. Its hoofprints kept east until the gully.

Fenn’s trail left the road at the gully.

Vhar found the print where a boot had dug in beside the shoulder. Another heel mark lay on top of it. Someone had stopped the rider there. Someone else had stood close enough to keep him from drawing steel.

Fenn’s left heel had cut deeper than the right. He had pulled backward. The second set of prints faced him from the road, and a third had pressed into the scrub above the gully.

"Elara, take the shelf," Vhar said. "Nyra, with me."

Elara took the road’s high side with her shield forward, watching the scrub and loose rock above the hollow. She swept the shield rim through the nearest brush before planting her feet where the shelf gave her the widest view. "Stay where I can cover you," she said. Nyra moved with Vhar into the gully, spear in one hand. Scrub covered the gully, but the stems lay in one direction. They had been cut and packed there by hand.

Aldous Fenn lay beneath it.

He was still warm.

Vhar went down beside him and put two fingers against the man’s throat. No pulse. The body had not yet lost the heat under its shirt. Fenn’s knife remained in its sheath. A narrow puncture sat above his left wrist, dark at the edges. Bruising ringed the mark where someone had held him still while the blood came out.

Fenn’s throat was whole. His chest bore no blade wound. The puncture had been opened along its lower edge after the first entry, a narrow vein laid bare beneath the wrist. The inside of his sleeve was soaked dark, yet no blood had pooled in the dirt beneath him. His killers had collected it in a vessel and taken the vessel away.

The cuff of his riding coat was torn where his arm had been pinned, and the fingers of his free hand were ground full of road dust. He had fought after the wire or needle found him. He had not gotten free.

Nyra crouched on Fenn’s other side. She slid a folded transit paper from inside his coat without moving the body. The seal was provincial blue. The crown pressed into its wax leaned left.

"Copied," she said. "A real transit seal doesn’t lean."

"He read it," Vhar said.

"He let the bearer close." Nyra folded the paper once and kept it in her fist. "Fenn knew the road. He would have checked a stranger before he let one walk past him."

Vhar looked again at the wrist. The puncture had taken blood. Fenn had been left in the gully to die.

"A road thief wouldn’t bring a seal for one survey rider," he said.

"No," Nyra said. "They knew who rode here."

Vhar’s thumb stopped beside the puncture. "Fenn was the target. They wanted his blood."

Nyra’s eyes lifted to his. "They took some. That is all this body tells us."

Vhar looked to the road. Elara had not moved from her place above the gully.

Elara did not look down at the corpse. Her eyes stayed on the rock above them. "The cover was laid days ago. The cut ends have dried." She tapped one exposed stem with the rim of her shield. "They wanted this hollow to look empty. The shelf folds back under itself. I can cover the road, not see into every cut beneath it."

She stepped backward until her boots found the road’s hard center. "Use our tracks. Don’t give them fresh ground to read."

Vhar rose. His gaze followed the shelf above the gully, past a loose stone and the scrub caught against it.

A man rose from the rock shelf with one end of barbed wire hooked around a stone behind him.

TWANG!

He cast the loose bight low across the gully and yanked both hands upward. The loop rose beneath Nyra’s chin and drew tight toward her throat.

Vhar’s ribs pulled when he drove off the road. He ignored the pain. Four strides took him up the shelf. The scout had one hand-width left before the wire closed.

Elara drove her shield into the gully mouth as Vhar passed. It covered Nyra from the road. The scout’s eyes followed Vhar too late.

Vhar’s fist struck the man’s right temple.

CRACK!

Bone went inward under his knuckles. Blood and white fragments struck the rock behind the scout. The man’s knees failed. He dropped where he had risen, his hands opening around the wire as his skull tipped against the shelf.

The barbs stopped short of Nyra’s throat.

Vhar stepped over the corpse and ground the wire under his boot. It had missed Nyra’s throat. He kept seeing that distance when he looked at the dead man’s ruined head.

The scout’s blood ran into the shallow grooves of the shelf. It reached the barbs first. Vhar watched the metal darken and pictured it drawn tight around a living wrist. His heel twisted harder until the wire bent flat against the rock.

"You cut?" he asked.

"No." Nyra had already moved clear of the wire. She wiped Fenn’s paper clean of the blood splashed across its corner and looked back at the hook. "That was meant to open a vein. Slow."

Vhar bent, pulled the wire from the scout’s fingers, and dropped it beside the corpse. Its hooks had been filed to points. He did not touch the body again.

The scout’s other hand had locked around a second length of wire. Vhar pried it loose. The loop was smaller. It would have closed around a wrist.

A boot scraped at the gully’s far lip.

Another man ran.

Vhar turned after him. Pain pulled hard at his cracked ribs. He had the runner’s back for one breath, then two. Nyra was still in the gully with Fenn’s papers. Elara was alone on the road, shield raised toward the shelf where more men could be lying flat under the scrub.

He stayed.

The runner disappeared beyond the bend.

One clean print remained in the dry dust beside the turn. The outer edge of its right heel was worn flat, and one nail head shone bare. Vhar fixed it in his mind.

Nyra took the gully mouth with her spear toward the bend. Elara shifted her shield toward the shelf. Neither woman gave the runner a second way back through them.

"Teeth," Elara said.

A leather pouch had burst at the dead scout’s hip. Small metal-and-bone pieces lay across the rock beside his blood. Elara pointed with her shield, not her hand.

Vhar crouched beside them without touching them. Blood dulled the metal on the stamped plates.

"Same tool," Nyra said. "That doesn’t give us the hand behind it."

Vhar had enough. Someone had equipped Corvain. Someone else carried the same numbered teeth on this road. The scout had tried to draw barbed wire across Nyra’s throat.

Elara nudged one plate with the lower edge of her shield. A stamped four showed through the blood. Vhar had seen that mark among Corvain’s effects in Kessendrel’s yard that morning. The metal had reached Fenn before any of them came east.

Wheels turned east of the gully.

Elara’s head snapped toward the sound. "East exit."

Vhar ran to the road. A loaded wagon was being forced nose-first into its narrowest throat, filling the road from rock face to rock face. Men rolled fist-sized stones under its wheels and drove chain pins into both walls as they worked. Beyond it, no faces showed above the wagon bed.

West answered with chain against rock.

Elara backed toward the middle of the cut, shield up. Nyra came with her, spear low in one hand and Fenn’s papers folded inside her coat. The western wagon had been backed nose-first into the road’s throat as well. Chains ran from both axles to iron pins driven into the rock faces. A rider could not jump either block. A wagon could not force one apart.

Iron rang again at the western block. The men behind it worked below the wagon bed, hidden by its loaded slats. Vhar could see their boots beneath the axle. Four pairs at least. East held more than that. He could hear stone dragged into place and the short grunt of men taking weight together.

The eastern wagon settled as its wheels found the rocks beneath them. Dust shook free from the road wall. A chain slid through an iron ring on the western side and snapped tight against the axle. The noise traveled through the cut and died there. No order followed it. Whoever had set the blocks wanted the three of them waiting on sounds they could not see.

"They left Fenn where a search party would find him," Vhar said.

"They came for blood," Nyra said.

The rock walls left no fast climb. No head rose above either wagon bed. The men who had sealed the road knew better than to give him a target.

Vhar took the ground between Nyra, Elara, and the nearer wagon. His arms hung loose at his sides. The wagon blocked half the road ahead, its wheels locked against the stones beneath them.

Both exits stood closed in stone, chain, and iron.

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