Gomen Ji was slow to react, and he took an arrow in the meat of his upper thigh because of it. He gasped, crouched down, and rolled to the side for the half cover of a few rocks. Kuei’s cudgel appeared in her hand in time to knock away the missile meant for her, and Timu reacted with a wind stance maneuver that disrupted most of the other shots. A soft white glow manifested around Dappo’s hands and feet, and he flicked the arrow he was holding back into the trees like a dart.

There was a scream.

"Behind me," Timu commanded, and began to move forward while maintaining his wind stance. Everyone but Ji and Dappo fell in behind him. Janna hadn’t been targeted, but she flinched every time an arrow went by. The fat cultivator ran ahead of them, trailing white mist, and burst through the line of trees.

The sounds that followed were sharp and brief. By the time Sunwhisper was past the line of the trees, the bandits, such as they were, had been subdued.

There were ten men and three women in ragged clothes lining up and getting on their knees before Dappo, who was glowering down at them, still exuding white mana like a morning mist.

Their leader was a long haired man with a nasty scar along his cheek, and he pressed his forehead against the ground three times before speaking in another a foreign tongue.

Dappo snorted, and the man continued to speak. The language had different roots than what they had been using, closer to germanic structures than indo, and Sunwhisper quickly got the gist.

"...spare us."

Dappo finally deigned to respond.

"It is not a matter of sparing or not sparing, your lives were forfeit the moment you decided to raid our lands."

The reaction to this was an outcry of wailing from the bandits, and more tapping of foreheads to the ground.

"I will not kill you, however."

Silence.

"You are all my servants now."

So it was that the hunting party grew three sizes that day.

Dappo and Sunwhisper were the only ones who could understand the bandits. They had come from the region beyond the mountains, which was called Goth, and the people there were considered barbarians by the denizens of Fringe. This was somewhat confusing to Sunwhisper, because the names Hollow and the Blessed Lands were used seemingly interchangeably by the scholars who had written Makoto’s scrolls, but apparently, Hollow included regions outside of the Blessed Lands as well.

These bandits were not under any recognized form of government, they were not citizens, and they were not cultivators. Hollow was larger than Sunwhisper had assumed, and populated by peoples the cultivators deemed too unimportant to mention.

Ji wanted to kill whoever had shot him, but it was impossible to say which of the bandits was personally responsible for his indignity. Dappo told him he would compensate him if he survived the hunt, and apart from removing the arrow and wrapping the leg, that was the end of it.

"What is your name?" Sunwhisper asked the bandit leader.

"Godfrey." His voice was gruff.

"Why are you in the mountains?" The bandit looked suspicious, but at least for the moment, he seemed to have accepted his subservient position. All the cultivators were above him, so he would talk if he was asked to talk.

"We were driven out. There is a warlord, Titanus, he takes and he kills. We could not stay."

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"How do you survive out here without cultivating? We were attacked on our first night."

"It has been hard," Godfrey agreed, "but we have hunted and we have fed. You are the first magicians we have seen."

"What about the monsters?"

"Monsters?"

The bandits had been in the mountains for nearly a month, but they had not once been troubled by krenshar, tree squids, hawk bears, or any of the other sacred beasts that were known to endanger travelers in Jigoku. They had encountered only natural animals.

Sunwhisper asked Dappo about this, and he nodded sagely.

"It is the Red Spider," he said, "he drinks mana from the hearts of beasts and cultivators alike, but these barbarians would be nothing to him. They might as well be flowers in the field for all they would slake his hunger."

The Red Spider’s territory had been made safer only because the spider had eaten everything that could possibly be a threat already. Sunwhisper did not find that comforting.

When the day came to an end, the bandits were tasked with preparing the camp and the perimeter and the nightly meal, leaving the cultivators to devote their full attention to channeling. It was a comfortable arrangement, though a watch still had to be set, as no one trusted the honor of the bandits that far.

Sunwhisper volunteered to take the first shift again, and he continued his conversation with Godfrey, who did not look like he would sleep for some time.

"You called us magicians. Do you have cultivators where you come from?"

The scarred man nodded. "They are not exactly like you starlords, but they use magic like you do."

"Starlords?"

"Your lords mark themselves with stars. The magicians I have known do not have marks like these." He gestured at the tattoos on Sunwhisper’s forearm. His criminal sentence, to a foreigner, would appear just as magisterial as the actual stars of rank. "Our magicians speak words of power to bend the world. Your starlords use dancing to do the same."

"Dancing?"

"Yes, your motions. You move your bodies to move the magic."

"I had not thought of it that way." Many cultivators did move their bodies during meditations, and their fighting styles could be as graceful as a dance. Makoto was as good an example of that as any, beautiful even as he destroyed. Sunwhisper pushed away the thought, changing the subject. "Is Titanus a magician?"

"No, but the warlord has magicians who serve him."

How odd. So far, the hierarchies Sunwhisper had observed had been organized strictly along the lines of personal power. The First Elder was the only three-star cultivator in Fringe that he was aware of. If Makoto ever advanced, it would likely lead to a struggle for influence between the two of them. How could a warlord maintain control if he was only a mortal? Why didn’t the cultivators at his side seize the lordship for themselves? The politics of Goth had to be very different from the rest of Hollow to accommodate that situation. Religious strictures were probably involved. Maybe magicians were only allowed to use their magic for certain ends, and they policed each other. Sunwhisper made a mental note to investigate a possible alternative form of cultivation, as well as how those who used it could have been made to submit to a mere warlord.

"Do you know anything about the Red Spider?"

Godfrey furrowed his brow, he was unfamiliar with the phrase. "Nothing. That is what you hunt here? Yes?"

"It is."

"Well, don’t worry," Godfrey patted him on the back. "You are traveling with great starlords. They won’t let you get hurt, will they?"

"Yes, they will."

"Oh," Godfrey looked down. Sunwhisper's response spoke volumes about his own prospects for the future, and that of his people.

The following day, they came to a gap in the side of the mountain lined with stalactites arranged like the fangs of a yawning dragon. The wind was at their backs. It had been pressing them all morning, and when it came to the gap, the result was a ceaseless moan that set them all on edge.

"Spirits preserve us," Janna said quietly. All around the gap, there were remains. Dried skins, bones and bodies, dozens of sacred beasts at least, all in various states of decay. It was like the demon’s graveyard, but far messier. Whatever had done this had taken something from each of the bodies and discarded the rest. It was a casual and callous surgery that left little to the imagination.

"He steals their cores," Dappo said.

It was not so different from what cultivators did, what they had done to the krenshar, but the cores of these creatures were not stored neatly in jars, preserved for future use. They had been drained on the spot. These beasts had all been killed by a single creature, one of such tremendous hunger that it would see their entire party as a welcome meal.

Beyond the bodies were the webs.