Dunmoor’s Manifestation was three times as wide as Mav’s.
It was a country of dry yellow hills, and it covered the whole start of the causeway. Sixteen rams came down from it. They were as big as ponies, with gray wool like wire and horns as thick as a man’s leg. Eight black crows rose above them.
The four hired men cast smaller pieces of ground on each side of it. Twenty-four dogs ran out of two of them. Six brown bears walked out of the third. A dark cloud rose out of the fourth, and it was made of wasps as long as fingers.
"His rams have two skills," Tamsin said quickly. "They charge like Ronald’s boars, and their wool can turn to iron. I don’t know about the others."
Mav had no time to answer, because the sky was already full of wings.
Dunmoor had sent the crows and the wasps first, and he had sent them over everyone’s heads. They were flying straight at Tamsin’s forest. It was the clever thing to do. Without the light of her moths, the three of them would be half blind.
"Tamsin, now!"
All 15 moths opened their wings together.
The flash was as white as Seven’s. Every crow and every wasp had been looking straight at it. The crows flew into the black trees and into each other, and the wasps scattered like sparks.
Then two thin jets of water rose out of the left channel, one after the other. Each of them knocked a wasp out of the air.
It was Twenty-three and Twenty-four. They were the weakest fighters that Mav owned, and they were shooting as fast as they could. Wherever a blind wasp or a crow fell on the water, a needlefish was waiting for it.
The thin man with the net began to scream.
-----
The dogs came next, and the bears came with them.
The two brothers were no fools. They sent half of their dogs along the causeway, and the other half into the left channel, to swim around the ditch. The bald man sent his six bears into the right channel to do the same.
None of them knew what was in that water.
The left channel turned silver. Twelve’s needlefish hit the swimming dogs from below, and Eighteen’s spines made them slow. Then Seven rose under them, and her flash went through the water. Not one dog reached the bank.
In the right channel, the first bear simply disappeared. Two great jaws had closed on it from below, and Log took it down in a slow roll. The second bear tried to turn back, and the needlefish found it. But the last four were strong swimmers, and they got through. They climbed onto the bank behind the wall, and they ran at the dark forest.
"Ronald, behind you!"
It was too late to stop the first one. It reached the trees, and it roared. The roar was its skill, and it hit like a wall. Two moths were thrown out of the air with their wings torn. Tamsin was standing in front of them, and it threw her against a root as if she weighed nothing.
She didn’t get up.
Mav was terrified. He took one step toward her, and then he made himself stand still, because 12 dogs had just reached the ditch in front of him.
’Ivy, Oak, Six, go to her! Keep them off her!’
The two wolves were already running. They didn’t attack the bear from the front. They went for its back legs, one on each side, the way a pack does, and it turned around to snap at them. Then half a dozen of Ronald’s boars hit it with their Charge, and Six arrived behind them. The other three bears ran into the rest of the boars at the edge of the trees, and Ronald held them there.
Mav turned back to the ditch. The 12 dogs had jumped into it, and they were climbing the wall, right under his feet.
[You have borrowed a skill: Discharge.]
He had never been given a better target. All 12 dogs were packed into a ditch that was four steps wide, and every one of them was inside his reach. The blue light filled the ditch from one end to the other, and the whole pack fell back into the mud.
They never reached the top. Three flat shapes rose out of the reeds behind them. Moss, Fern and Reed had let the whole pack run past, and now they took it from the back, one dog at a time.
One of the two brothers had followed his dogs. He came over the wall with a short spear in his hand, at the far end, where nobody was looking. He saw Tamsin lying under the trees, and he ran at her.
Mav saw him.
[You have borrowed a skill: Dart.]
He crossed 10 meters in a blink. The man was still five steps ahead of him, with his spear raised over Tamsin, so Mav threw his harpoon.
It hit the man between the shoulders, and he fell on his face in the mud.
Mav pulled the harpoon free without looking at him. He knelt beside Tamsin. She was breathing. Her left arm was broken, and there was blood in her hair, but she opened her eyes when he said her name.
"Stay down," he told her. His voice wasn’t steady. "It’s almost over."
It wasn’t true, and they both knew it.
-----
"Enough!" Dunmoor shouted.
He had lost his crows, and he had watched the hired men lose most of their beasts in a few minutes. He wasn’t laughing anymore. He raised his hammer, and his 16 rams lowered their heads.
Their gray wool turned dark and hard, and it rang like metal. Then they charged down the causeway, four at a time. The ground shook. Mav understood at once that the ditch wouldn’t stop them, and neither would a wall of mud.
He ran back to the wall, and he jumped down in front of it, alone, into the path of the charge.
"Mav, no!" Ronald shouted.
Mav reached for two points at the same time. One was Six, and the other was resting in the right channel with a bear in his belly.
[You have borrowed a skill: Stone Shell.]
[You have borrowed a skill: Mire.]
The firm mud of the causeway turned to soup for five steps around him.
The first four rams ran into it at full speed. They were as heavy as iron, because their wool was iron, and they sank to their chests. The next four couldn’t stop. They ran into the first ones, and the ones behind ran into them. The causeway was only six steps wide, so the rams at the edges were pushed off it on both sides.
Seven was waiting on the left, and Log was waiting on the right.
In 20 seconds, the charge of House Dunmoor became a heap of trapped, screaming beasts. Mav stood in the middle of it with his stone skin, and nothing could hurt him.
Then his stone skin ended, and Dunmoor came through the heap himself.
He had turned his own skin to iron, as his rams did, and he ran over their backs. Mav had never seen a man move so fast. The hammer hit him in the chest before he could raise his harpoon. He flew five steps through the air, and he felt his ribs break again.
"Alive, if possible," Dunmoor said. He was walking toward him, and he wasn’t even out of breath. "It isn’t always possible."
Mav couldn’t stand up. He was rank E+, and this man was a full letter above him. In a fair fight, it would have been over already.
But he had never fought a fair fight in his life.
[You have borrowed a skill: Discharge.]
The blue light jumped from his hand into Dunmoor’s iron skin. Iron carried lightning even better than water. Dunmoor locked in the middle of a step, with his hammer in the air.
It only held him for two seconds. But Mav used them to roll into the mud at the edge of the causeway, and to lie still.
[You have borrowed a skill: Lurk.]
When Dunmoor could move again, there was nobody in front of him.
"Where are you?" he shouted. His iron skin was turning soft again, because it only lasted 10 seconds. "Come out, you..."
He didn’t finish. Ivy and Oak had come back along the causeway, low and silent, and they took him by the back of both knees at the same moment.
Dunmoor fell on his hands. Mav rose out of the mud beside him.
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say to a man who had come to sell him and to kill his friends. He drove his harpoon into the back of Dunmoor’s neck, where the iron had already turned back into skin.
Leoric Dunmoor died in the mud of a World that wasn’t his. Behind him, his yellow hills faded, and the rams that were still alive faded with them.
-----
After that, it ended very quickly.
The bald man had been standing at the edge of the right channel, shouting at his last bear. He was the third man to die that day. Log came out of the water behind him and dragged him under by the legs, and he never came up. The second brother and the thin man looked at what was left. Then they ran back down the causeway as fast as they could. Neither of them had even used his second skill. A builder’s skill was made for building, and it was no help in a fight like this one.
Mav watched them go, with his harpoon in his hand. He could have sent the wolves after them. They had seen his beasts and his skills, but all of that would be seen in an arena sooner or later. They hadn’t seen a seaweed go into anything.
And Tamsin needed a healing room far more than he needed two more dead men.
When he looked for the woman in gray, the fallen tree was empty.
They had won, but nobody felt like celebrating. Two of Ronald’s boars were dead, and so were two of Tamsin’s moths. Mav had lost six young needlefish, and Fern had a deep cut along her side. Ronald carried Tamsin in his arms, as gently as if she were made of glass, and he was crying without a sound.
Mav walked behind them with his broken ribs. His hands were shaking, because he kept seeing Tamsin fly through the air.
They were almost at the landing island when Ivy and Oak stopped.
They both lifted their heads. Then they ran into the reeds beside the path, and Mav heard them begin to cry, the way wolves do.
He followed them. A third marsh wolf was lying in the reeds. A ram’s horn had opened its side, and it had dragged itself this far. It was the one that had bitten his shoulder and run away. It had been following the smell of its pack for a week.
It was dying. Ivy lay down beside it and licked its face.
Mav knelt in the mud. He had one free seaweed left, and he didn’t even have to think about it. He opened the last canteen.
The lock turned at once, as if the wolf had been waiting. A green thread crossed the wound and began to close it. A minute later, the wolf lifted its head, and it licked his hand.
’You’re Elm. Welcome back to your pack.’
On the landing island, he let go of his Manifestation. His dome faded, and his fish, his crab, his stalkers, Log and three wolves all faded with it.
His hour of Scent had ended long ago, and he was too tired to think of using it again. So he never knew that someone was watching.
On a dead tree, 300 steps away, a woman in a gray coat lowered a small brass spyglass.
Rhea Calder had been paid to learn one thing. She had just watched a boy lay something green on the neck of a dying wolf. She had watched the wolf stand up and lick his hand. And when his dome of water faded, she had watched the wolf fade with it, like any other Subject.
She closed her notebook. She finally had what Aldric Ashgrove had asked her for.