Valt watched as below, on the landing pads, technicians bustled about, servicing the heavy scaled hounds.
"Repeat," he pronounced. His voice was devoid of emotions.
The informant standing behind his back swallowed. His knees trembled finely, beating a drumroll on the parquet.
"Sector of Whispering Rocks... Subject 'Iron' made a jump into the canyon. The cart is destroyed from the inside. Richter... Richter is heavily wounded. He claims that the Subject broke the shackles."
Valt turned slowly. His eyes narrowed.
"To get into an operation in such a condition is idiocy."
"That is not all, Lord Valt," the informant's voice broke into a squeak. "Zeno... disappeared. When the capture group entered his block, it was empty. The alarm did not trigger. We do not know..."
"Disappeared? You say. You brought me news that we lost both the tool and the hostage in one day?"
"We... we are searching, my lord! We cordoned off Sector Four..."
Valt made a barely noticeable gesture with his hand.
From the shadow behind the shelving, Kane slid silently. The gleam of steel was instantaneous. The informant didn't even have time to cry out—a thin blade entered exactly into his throat. The body collapsed onto the carpet with a dull thud.
Valt stepped over the spreading pool of blood and looked at Kane.
"Richter—to the scrap. We won't need him anymore. Get on the search for Zeno. Turn over the entire technical wing, gut every master, but find him."
"And Subject Alpha?" Kane asked shortly, wiping the blade with a silk handkerchief. "Pursuit groups are already in the canyon."
Valt snorted dismissively.
"With his injuries? A jump from such a height, shattered bones. Our bloodhounds will find him in an instant."
Kane nodded and disappeared into the doorway.
I opened my eyes with the hope that everything that had happened was just a drawn-out nightmare. But... not a chance.
The world was crimson.
A red veil swayed before my eyes—the consequences of burst capillaries and high intracranial pressure. The outlines of stumps turned into blurred silhouettes of monsters, and the fog seemed like congealed blood.
"Alright..." I spat out salty mud. I need to find a safe place where there are herbs or clay.
And I began to crawl again. Dirt clogged under my nails, into the open wounds on my back, into my mouth. The mind, layer by layer cutting off the pain, isolated useful markers from the surrounding stench.
Hydrogen sulfide—deep soil, excess gas, can't go there.
Smell of iodine—roots of shield-leaf. This meant firmer ground and a natural antiseptic.
An eternity later I reached the edge of the Heart of the Marshes.
Here, beneath thick layers of moss, magical waste and toxic gases had accumulated. I stopped by an uprooted stump that, through the crimson haze clouding my vision, looked like the ribs of a dead titan.
I groped a layer of thick gray clay nearby. Sniffed it. A sharp smell of rotten eggs. High concentration of sulfur. In my past life I would have winced, now this was my only chance.
"Chemistry..." I muttered through clenched teeth, fighting the approaching nausea. "The only magic that doesn't need mana."
I started smearing the shoulder and the mangled hand. The feeling was as if I was sculpting a new form out of my own flesh. But this is better than dying here.
I crawled a little more, until I buried my forehead into something solid, smelling of tar and old leather.
A boot.
Heavy. Hobnailed. Plastered with brown algae.
Slowly—feeling how everything inside turns to ice from the realization of my own stupidity,—I raised my head.
A figure towered over me. Huge, shapeless under a heavy cloak of oiled skins. In his hands, the man held a long bone probe—a pole for checking the depth of the quagmire.
"Well, look at that..." the voice was low and dry, like the crackle of old bark. "Look here. And how did you stay alive in such a condition?"
I jerked toward the knife on my belt thinking that this was another bloodhound of the Order, but the fingers of my left hand simply refused to bend. The clay carapace bound them, and the nerves completely gave up.
Judging by the hoarse breathing, the old man leaned closer. From under the deep hood, cloudy, yellowish eyes looked at me. He smelled strongly of tobacco and smoke.
"A nursling of the Order?" he poked me with the end of the probe in the shattered shoulder.
I held back a scream, only digging my fingers harder into the mud. The old man grunted, examining my "sulfur glove".
"Guessed about the sulfur yourself?"
"Myself..." I looked at him from the bottom up, focusing my crimson vision. "Your... stove... in the hovel. No draft. You will poison yourself in a week. The damper is clogged with soot."
He froze. Thick eyebrows slowly crept up.
"What are you spouting, kid?"
"I see..." I closed my eyes, feeling how consciousness floats away. "And don't drink from the stream. You have stones in your kidneys. I hear how you breathe... through pain. Help me... and I won't let you die in this hole."
I didn't see his face, but I heard how he exhaled heavily.
"Half-dead, and still giving advice. Alright. Let's go. Call me Ephraim."
"It worked," flashed the last thought, before the world finally went out.
Calloused hands picked me up, tearing me away from the sticky swamp muck.
When I opened my eyes again, instead of the crimson fog there was darkness, softened by the orange light of the hearth. I lay on something hard, smelling of dry straw and old dust. Nearby was heard the measured bubbling of a pot and the dry crackle of firewood.
I tried to move my right hand. Pain echoed instantly.
"So, the nerves haven't burned out completely," I noted.
I was inside the hut. The blackened log walls were hung with bunches of dry herbs, skulls of small animals, and strange mechanisms assembled "on the knee." In the corner on a heavy stool sat the old man. His attention was chained to a strange object on the table: a hollow bird skull, wrapped with copper wire. Inside it pulsed a cloudy crystal, the light of which was uneven.
"Woke up?" Ephraim didn't turn around. "On the table is a jug. Drink, if you can reach."
The jug stood a couple of meters from me, on the very edge of the table.
I bit my lip so hard that fresh blood filled my mouth. Rolled onto my stomach, feeling how the bark splints on my left forearm dug into the skin. Every movement cost me a wave of cold sweat.
I reached with my right hand, centimeter by centimeter, until my fingers touched the cool clay. The water was clean, with a slight aftertaste of mint. My throat felt a little better.
"Now the most important thing is to show what I do best. In other words, become indispensable."
"Ephraim..." I called, when my breathing leveled out. "That crystal... in the skull."
"What about it?" the old man grumbled, not tearing himself away from work.
"It has... reverse resonance. You looped the winding incorrectly. In three hours it will overheat and burn your eyes out. Shift the third coil to the right. By half a millimeter."
Ephraim slowly shifted his gaze from the skull to me, then back. He took a thin wooden splinter and carefully nudged the copper wire.
The pulsation of the crystal instantly stabilized. The light became even, amber.
The old man laid down the tool and squatted before my pallet.
"Who are you?" he asked quietly. "Such brains at your age... that's gold."
"Iron," I rasped. "Iron Everfall."
Ephraim remained silent for a long time, rubbing his unshaven chin.
"Alright, Iron. You will stay in the hut. I will patch up your bones. But on one condition: you will help me with the work. My hands are not what they used to be, and my eyes only see a blur. Deal?"
"Manipulating people turned out to be easier than I thought," I thought mentally.
"Yeah, it's a deal," I answered quietly.
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