“Then you were both careless and weak. You have lost respect for yourself and for the sect, and the young chief will punish you accordingly.”
The Sandviper man's hands curled into fists. He straightened his back, glaring. “Then I will hear as much from Kral's own mouth. He does not need an outsider speaking for him.”
Despite Lindon's expectations, Jai Long did not grow angry. He tilted his head back, looking up at thick, black branch hanging over the street. “I suppose he doesn't.”
A man jumped from the branch, landing with knees slightly bent as though he'd hopped off of a curb. It looked so easy. So natural.
The Sandvipers backed away at the sudden appearance of this man, who wore fine black furs and held his chin so high it looked as though he were about to issue a royal decree. He stared at the lead Sandviper like a emperor looking down upon a criminal.
Here was yet another sacred artist who could casually do the impossible, whose very presence overwhelmed lesser Golds.
“Young chief Kral,” the Sandviper greeted him, stuttering a little and bowing even more deeply than he had for Jai Long. “I intended no disrespect to you.”
“When you disrespect my friend, Jai Long, you dirty my honor,” Kral pronounced. Like Jai Long, he seemed to have no need to raise his voice to transfix the whole street. “How will you make amends?”
The Sandviper man dropped to his knees before Jai Long, bowing until his head hit the dirt. “My eyes were blind, honored Jai Long. I will never—”
Jai Long kicked him in the shoulder. The sound rang out in the night, even louder than the wood-on-wood impacts earlier, but the man wasn't visibly affected. He raised his head, confused.
“My pride is not worth our time,” Jai Long said. “Stand up.”
The man staggered to his feet, and abruptly Kral grinned. The smile transformed him, turning him from a haughty prince into a mischievous boy. He threw one arm around the man's shoulders.
“He says all's well, so it's well,” Kral said, patting the man on the back. “Now, what exactly are our friends the Fishers doing out here?”
He looked to the other camp as he said that, friendly grin still in place, but the green serpent on his arm hissed loudly.
The woman in charge of the Fishers held a hook in each hand now. She took an aggressive step forward, brandishing a weapon, but neither Jai Long nor Kral reacted. “This is our territory. What's strange is your presence.”
“Territory?” Without removing his arm from the Sandviper man's shoulders, Kral turned to Jai Long. “Is the camp divided into territories?”
“Not officially.”
“See?” Kral said to the woman. “Nothing official. So what I choose to believe is that my subordinates were walking back to the mines, tired after a hard day's work, and they were ambushed by some thieves looking for easy pickings.”
The Fisher woman turned red. “You dare to—”
“And these thieves,” Kral continued, riding over her words, “were courageously captured by you Fishers, who are now eager to return our stolen property to us. Like the young heroes that you are.”
The woman stopped, uncertain.
“How many scales did they take?” Kral asked the man under his arm.
“Sixty-two, young chief,” the man said nervously.
Kral leaned a little closer. “How many?”
“...sixty-two?”
Kral sighed. “How many stolen scales are these Fishers going to return to you?”
At last, the young man caught the point. “At least one hundred scales, young chief.”
Releasing him, Kral spread both hands. “See what an opportunity for goodwill we have here? Return the stolen one hundred scales to us now, and we'll trust your honor that the miners will be back in our camp come dawn.”
The Fisher woman gave a crooked smile that had no humor in it. “It’s the law of the Wilds, Sandviper. You take whatever you can keep. If you were too weak to keep it…”
Kral's smiled faded as though it had never been, and he drew an awl from beneath his furs with each hand. The heavy spikes gleamed with green light. “I have a sudden urge for some exercise. Will you oblige me, sister Fisher?”
Jai Long clapped a hand on his shoulder. “We've spent too long on this, young chief. Sister Fisher, we have other work to be about, as do you. Let our stolen property serve as a down payment for you to deliver this message, because our other messengers have yet to reach your sect: the Arelius family is coming. In no more than a month, their Underlord will take all prizes from us, and we will be left with only scraps.”
The Fisher turned, exchanging glances with someone in the crowd behind her. “We'd heard rumors,” she said.
“They are more than rumors,” Jai Long said. He produced a blue-and-white banner, which unfurled as he held it out in front of him. In the center loomed a single black crescent moon. “A Cloud Hammer sect long-runner returned bearing this, only a day gone. If Arelius hurries, they could be here in two weeks. At most, a month. Send word to your Fisher Ragahn that if we do not share the meal now, none of us will see a crumb.”
The man turned, red-wrapped face expressionless, though Lindon did catch a glimpse of gleaming eyes between the strips of cloth. At least he didn't have the power to see through his mask; that would have been too inhuman.
The Fisher woman's next words were less welcome than a stone through a pane of glass. “Carry the message of a Sandviper worm?” She spat on the ground. “I'd rather cut out my own tongue.”
Jai Long froze with his back to her. Slowly, he lifted his spear from his shoulder and grasped it in both hands. Beside him, Kral took a step to one side, chuckling.
“Is this your official response as a representative of the Fisher sect?” Jai Long asked, voice colder than steel in winter.
“This is my response,” she said with a sneer, and whipped her hook forward.
Lindon didn't see how it happened, but the blade detached from the hilt as she swung, but it didn't fly out wildly. The curved blade flew in a wide arc as though it were on the end of a whip—or a fisherman's line—but there was nothing visible connecting the handle to the blade. It descended toward Jai Long's neck like a headsman's axe.
The red spear spun in a blurring circle, the spearhead tracing a bright line like the tail of a falling star. His move caught the Fisher's hook, taking it out of the air and sweeping it to the ground.
When the curved blade started flying back toward the Fisher woman as though she were retracting it, Jai Long turned. He kept both hands on the haft of his spear, but now his whole air had changed. He crouched like a tiger about to pounce, and his shining spearhead was a deadly claw.
“If the Fishers will not listen to reason,” he said, “then they are not needed.”
Chapter 8
As Jai Long tensed and readied his spear to attack, shadows slid like dark water down the surface of the nearby buildings. Lindon wondered for an instant what technique Jai Long had used to summon them—maybe he had cultivated shadow madra, which sounded exciting to watch—but the shadows unfolded into eight-legged silhouettes.
A dozen spiders the size of small dogs sunk from the branches above. They hung from threads that were all but invisible in the darkness, and with each fraction of a second they were closer to landing on the back of the spearman's head.
Jai Long must have sensed something wrong, because he leaped back instead of forward, his gleaming spearhead held at high guard.
The spiders stopped about head-height, dangling from their delicate strings. Yerin kept her hand on the hilt of her sword, but they were far enough away that she didn't draw it.
All of the sacred artists in the street reacted differently to the sudden appearance of the creatures, but Lindon's eyes were stuck on the spiders themselves. They were made of dim color, a gray-purple that was the next best thing to black, so at first he'd taken them for Remnants. But he could see through the joints on each of their legs, like they were puppets assembled from Remnant pieces.