The Toll

Opening

The light caught it full in the face, and the thing that had just named their toll flinched from it.

Not far — a half step, the way a man turns his head from a lamp held too close. Then it set itself, and growled, and the saliva came off its jaw in ropes. Behind it the dark shapes came out onto the road. They did not rush. They came at a walk, spreading wide across the black earth, unhurried, the way animals move when nothing about the outcome is in doubt.

Telno held the front of the line with the Mirror burning on her wrist, and inside its sixty feet the world had edges and the rest of it was a white wall. Mira Ashveil stood somewhere in the middle of them holding a pencil. And the last thing any of them had heard from the road ahead was that bright things last the least time in here.

Then there was no more talking.

The Wolves' Toll

Yeltsu moved first, and he spent his first breath on speed — the double-strike of haste settling into his limbs — and his second on the crossbow.

The bolt was one of twenty-four he had carried out of a looted caravan and hoarded ever since against exactly this. It hit. It went in under the collarbone and stayed there, and there was no smoke, no crack, no scream — nothing but a bolt standing upright in a wound. The creature looked down at it. Then it looked back up the road at Yeltsu. And whatever consideration had been in that face since it stepped out of the treeline went out of it entirely, and did not come back that night.

Rathenfall closed and swung Lightbringer twice. One went wide. The other left a white scald on the shoulder where it landed — not a burn exactly, something cleaner than fire — and then he spoke the words of a searing smite and the fire took hold in the open wound and stayed there. The thing turned its head down to look at him. Rathenfall is a tall man. It was taller. It growled into his face from above and the saliva came down on him and he did not move.

When his light went up, Mira finally moved. She went backwards off the road in a straight line, twenty feet, because that was the direction in which there was nothing. Her sketchbook stayed where it fell. She got her surveyor's rod up in both hands the way a person holds a weapon, and it was not a weapon, and anyone looking at her could see that it was not.

Zuktind put haste on himself and brought the Mace of Disruption down twice on the alpha before he remembered what the mace was for — the holy fire in it was built for dead things and devils, and this was neither. He sent Rusty across to plant the construct's bulk in the gap on the northern flank where the wolves were working around them, and then he stepped back out of the thing's reach to bring the musket up instead.

The step cost him. Two jaws came after him as he moved. He threw a shield up and the spell landed and the spell was late; the mouth had already closed on his arm and shook him with it, hard enough that he felt the scales go. Eighteen points of it. Then the second set of teeth came at a natural twenty and glanced off the shield's new arithmetic by a single inch, and afterward it was the first attack nobody could forget.

Because there had been a saving throw after the bite, and Zuktind's die had come up a one.

Nothing happened. He waited, and asked, and nothing happened, and that was worse than something happening would have been. Then he said it out loud, the way he says everything out loud once he has arrived at it: he's a werewolf. And then, into the middle of a fight, with his arm running: "Does anyone have a remove curse? Please." Telno did not have it. Lissandra had not prepared it — she could, after a long rest, in the morning, if there was a morning to prepare it in. Nobody had an answer that was any good tonight.

The alpha burned where Rathenfall had set it, and failed to shrug the fire off, and looked down at its own wounds. Then it looked past Rathenfall. Past Zuktind. It turned its head to Telno's wrist and the light on it — and moved, and it was not walking anymore. It went up the ridge, around the line, and came off the height in a thirty-foot leap with both claws out. Rathenfall caught it on the way past. Rusty spoiled the first claw. The second landed across Yeltsu, nineteen points of it, and then he was on the ground with the weight of the thing on him and he was not getting up.

Telno did not fall back. She turned her shoulder into the thing coming down on Yeltsu and took two steps toward it, and the platinum circle came with her — not blazing, only steady, and in that valley steady was enough to see by. She saw Mira drifting toward the fog wall and called across the road: "Mira, Lissandra — Mira is isolated. Mira, get behind us." Her guiding bolt went wide. Lissandra fell back to put herself between the cartographer and the road and said, "Stand there, Mira. Do not move. We are with you." She weighed a wider working and set it aside; these were puny things, wolves and cursed men, and there would be worse later. Her fire bolt went into the ridge.

Then three of the wolves stood up.

They did not charge. They rose off their forepaws, forelegs lengthening into arms halfway through the motion, spines cracking upward, muzzles flattening into something with a jaw and a sheen and an expression. It took under a second and not one of them broke stride doing it. One was still finishing the change when it arrived.

"Werewolves," Zuktind said, and there was no floor under the word. "They were werewolves the whole time."

All three of them missed. One rang off Rathenfall's armour with the sound of something sharp on metal; one found Zuktind's shield still holding at twenty-five; one came at Telno and got nothing. It was the last clean thing that happened for a while.

Yeltsu, pinned, chose ice over fire — the pines were thick on both sides and he did not want to be the man who set the valley alight — and dropped a storm on two of the wolves working the road. One of them went down in it. Then his rapier missed, and his off-hand rapier did not, and somewhere in the middle of all that the haste went out of him: a save he needed and a six on the die, and he was suddenly slow, and still underneath a thing that was not. Rathenfall caught a werewolf in the jaw as it opened to bite, and they all heard the crack and saw the light flash once and go out. Zuktind hammered the one below him and it lived, and he wrapped himself in warm flame for whatever came next. Rusty rent the alpha with a natural twenty.

Mira started back toward Lissandra. Then she heard Yeltsu being shaken and turned around and went back to exactly where she had been standing.

The alpha burned again, and dragged Yeltsu with it as it went, and bit down. It found his belly. Thirty-six points, and the blood came out of him under the pressure of the jaw, and it shook him by the torso the way a dog kills something small. Then it made him roll for what the bite carried, and he rolled a nine, and — as before — nothing happened at all. Then the claws came down twice, one of them square, thirty-five more, and it still had him.

Turning Point

With the jaws still in him, Yeltsu looked up at the shoulder.

The hole his bolt had made was gone. Not closing — closed, and it had closed fast, faster than he had ever seen flesh do anything, faster than anything but magic can work. He had put one silvered bolt into it in the first ten seconds of the fight and had not been able to reach the quiver since, and everything they had spent in between — Rathenfall's radiant swings, Zuktind's mace and jolt, the storm, the fire — had been given to it and taken back at a price of one breath.

Telno heard him scream from forty feet away. A werewolf swung at her as she came and missed, and she got her hand up. "Yeltsu — no!" The sunbeam went down the road in a line five feet wide and sixty long, and two of the pack failed it and one of those did not get up. Lissandra's fire bolt landed for the first and only time all night.

After that it was arithmetic that would not come out. One of the werewolves simply dodged, and kept dodging, and Zuktind's lightning lure caught it once and then failed to catch it again. Another came in behind him and clawed him and took the fire shield's answer across its arms for the trouble. Rathenfall put twenty-three points into a thing that would not fall over and said, flatly, that it was a shame this stupid thing wasn't dead yet. Zuktind, penned in on two sides with Yeltsu on the ground beyond his reach, said what everyone already knew: that they needed to get to the others, and that they could not.

Mira went down onto one knee under Telno's light, the other leg under her, ready to run.

The alpha burned again on its turn, and shook Yeltsu once more, violently — and then broke off mid-motion. It looked down at him with its teeth still in his belly, and something arrived behind its eyes. A decision. The arms holding him opened, and he dropped onto ground already soaked with his own blood, and it did not look down again. It was already turning away. It went up the ridge and northwest, off the road, into the trees.

Yeltsu, flat on his back, had the chance to cut at its legs as it left. He watched it go instead. It could have finished him and had not wanted to, and he understood that about it before he understood anything else about that night.

Telno shouted, and a second ray of her sunbeam went out with the shout, and the last dire wolf in the valley died on the road. Lissandra's fire went into the ridge again. The two werewolves still standing broke after their alpha. Zuktind swung at the one that had been dodging him all fight and missed, and said he had at least tried to avenge his humiliation; Rusty's rend caught it and it kept running. Yeltsu got up, and put a cloud of daggers across the line they were running through, and one of them came apart in it — not the one that had been on top of him.

Closing

Three dire wolves lay on the black road, and one werewolf. The alpha was somewhere northwest with two of its pack and a hole in its shoulder that was no longer a hole and a fire in its arm that would go out on its own. Nobody chased it. It was faster than they were, and only Rusty could have kept pace, and Zuktind said plainly what mattered more than the chase: that he did not want to turn into a werewolf.

Nobody had gone down. Yeltsu stood at fifty-three points out of a hundred and forty-three with his belly opened and closed again. Zuktind's arm scales were broken where the jaw had held him. Mira Ashveil had not been touched once — no wolf had ever peeled off for her, though every one of them had walked past the space where she stood — and her sketchbook was still lying in the road where it had fallen in the first round, and nobody had picked it up yet.

Two of them had failed a saving throw against something that had not happened yet.

So they would camp. That was Zuktind's plan and he made it out loud: a hut raised against the dark, and a night inside it, and Lissandra in the morning with a spell she did not have tonight but could hold by dawn, for the two of them who had been bitten. Rathenfall took the job of finding the ground for it, and turned to look for a place along the road that would do.

And as he looked, they heard it: wheels turning in mud, and horses stamping, and a shadow coming up the road toward them out of the grey.

They had not left the valley. The gates were still somewhere ahead of them in the fog, and the howling had gone northwest, and the light on Telno's wrist reached sixty feet and no further — and whatever was on the road was still outside it.