Harvesting the Shadows

A dead man had left four steel daggers beneath my floorboards, and none of them bore an arsenal stamp. That meant they were stolen from the First Assault Division before the crates ever reached a quartermaster's ledger. Sitting on the cold pine in the corner of my second-floor room, I tested the flat of the closest blade against my calloused thumb. The edge had been honed on an oiled river stone until it caught the lantern light like wet ice. I needed clean water and dried meat by tomorrow morning, but Souta's supply cart would only open for harvested rot-cores. If I wanted to eat without bowing to the Cordon's starvation timetable, I had to take down something substantial before dawn and keep the kill quiet enough that Naoto stayed on his own side of the courtyard.

Outside the iron-barred window, the Housen Grounds had stopped pretending to be an ordinary ruin.

The Shigai mist did not drift like river fog. It crawled over the courtyard flagstones in thick, oily ribbons, smelling of wet copper and rotten elderberries. Where the vapor brushed the dry stone of the perimeter wall, the lime mortar hissed and flaked away into gray dust.

Only the central canal held the rot at bay. Through the darkness, the continuous rush of black water churning through the stone sluices sounded like a steady, low respiration. The Shimi could not cross moving current. As long as the estate's heavy waterwheels turned and the gravity channels fed the moat, the courtyard was divided into distinct hunting lanes.

I set the dagger down and pulled the contraband case from beneath the floor joists.

Along with the four daggers, the previous occupant had packed three clay flash-pots, a spool of braided steel wire, and seven pristine Shimi cores packed in dry sawdust. The cores were small, no larger than plum pits, but their golden inner light pulsed faintly through the wood shavings. That was twenty-one days of survival stored in a wooden box. My predecessor had lasted twenty-two. Whoever he was, he had hoarded these instead of surrendering them to Souta at the morning muster.

I took three feet of the braided wire and six iron mason nails, wrapping the wire around my knuckles until it bit into the flesh.

My ribs still ached where the transport sergeant had kicked me off the wagon, a deep, yellowing bruise that flared every time I pulled a full breath. An injured soldier in an ordinary garrison was sent to the infirmary with a ration of willow bark. An injured occupant in the Housen Grounds was simply dead weight waiting for the mist to rise.

I slipped the steel dagger into my waistband, flat against the small of my back where the hilt would not catch on my coat hem. The nails went into my left pocket, cold and sharp against my thigh.

I blew out the candle stub.

In the sudden dark, my eyes adjusted to the pale blue luminescence weeping from the courtyard below.

The western corridor was pitch-black and reeked of wet cedar and moldering plaster. I kept my boots against the wall joists where the structural timber was thickest, stepping only when the distant groan of the water turbine masked the creak of the planks. In the barracks at Seta, recruits who stepped in the middle of a hallway were made to scrub latrines with coarse salt. In the assault units, recruits who stepped in the middle of a hallway died during night raids. Habits like that did not leave the blood simply because an officer stripped your rank and called you a deserter.

At the far end of the wing, the gallery hung over the western terrace like a broken ribcage.

Half the tiled roof had caved in three winters ago, leaving heavy rafters jutting into the foggy sky. Below it lay a narrow flagstone path pinned between the main estate foundation and a dry ornamental ditch. It was a natural funnel. Any predator entering from the outer orchard had to squeeze beneath the collapsed gallery to reach the inner courtyard.

I climbed into the shadow of a cracked support pillar and leaned over the stone railing.

Two stories down, the fog was already pooling in the ditch. The mist parted in slow, sluggish swirls, pushed aside by something heavy dragging its belly across the grit.

It was not another scout.

The creature creeping along the ditch was the size of an armored hound, its torso elongated and covered in overlapping scales of hardened black crust. Four jointed limbs ended in curved bone talons that clicked against the granite like butcher knives. Where its head should have been, the neck split into three blind sensory tendrils that tasted the air with wet, quivering twitches.

A mature Shimi stalker.

The core inside its chest cavity would be the size of a walnut, dense with concentrated sulfur-gold resin. Souta would pay two sacks of grain and five bundles of dried mutton for a core like that. On the black market in the lower districts, it was worth enough to buy a forged travel pass out of the southern province.

I knelt on the gallery floor, working swiftly with my hands in the dark.

Unwinding the braided wire from my knuckles, I knotted one end around the base of a rotting cedar pillar. I drew the line taut across the gap where the collapsed roof met the balcony edge, looping it twice through a rusted masonry hook before running the loose end down into the ditch below. At the bottom of the wall, I pegged the wire three inches off the flagstones with an iron spike driven into a soft mortar seam.

A standard Cordon patrol would have met the beast head-on with an eight-foot polearm, two lanterns, and three men shouting formation calls. That was how they lost seven recruits a month at the northern borders. You did not meet a rot-beast with brute force unless you had a wall of shields behind you. You gave it a false angle, let its own weight break its balance, and drove the blade where the shell had to flex.

I picked up a chunk of broken roof tile from the debris pile. I bounced it once in my palm to judge the heft, then tossed it into the dry reeds twenty paces past the tripwire.

The clay tile clattered against a stone planter.

The stalker froze. Its three neck tendrils whipped toward the sound, vibrating with a high, insectile buzz that made my teeth ache. Its hind legs coiled, the black chitin plates grinding together like iron shingles.

Then it charged.