Travel was slow without Swick’s skyship, but he’d gotten enough time to adjust. It bothered him, but it didn’t stun him. Not anymore. This was just the state he’d left for himself with his drunken manoeuvre.

The Hand, at least, had been willing to use Shaiagrazni’s provided transportation. The special carriages Swick had first used to reach Kaltan. They moved autonomously, grinding away at the earth and dragging their passengers along fast enough to clear scores of miles within the span of an hour, slowing only when particularly difficult terrain forced them too.

Satisfyingly, the Hand was rather perturbed by them. Most people were.

A life of living, fighting and potentially dying atop the back of a skyship had probably inoculated Swick to the fears he’d seen so commonly directed at Shaiagrazni’s carriages. In theory, they really weren’t that different from his own vessel. Self-powered, automated, controlled via thought and instinct as much as steered through mechanical means. That tended to make newer crewmen uncomfortable, too, when they first found out. Had the ship been made from living tissue, Swick imagined the effect would have been a great deal more intense.

Intense or no, they’d have been idiots to pass up the chance at one. Anyone would. And Swick was reminded of that no more than when he rode on one of Shaiagrazni’s genius carriages, and felt how slow it moved compared to his own.

That movement took the better part of two days to take Swick and the Hand as far as they needed to travel. Far from Kaltan, and almost as far back as Elkatin. Elkatin, the first city Shaiagrazni set foot in. The birthplace of their latest allies. Were Swick a poetic man, he might have had something to comment on regarding that. Instead he just kept his eyes ahead and waited for them to reach their destination.

“Torib is a larger city.” The Hand told him. “A few dozen leagues from Elkatin, it was actually inadvertently saved by Shaiagrazni as the Dark Lord’s forces attacked this region. Had he not made such a fierce defence with the Paladins, the Dark Lord’s Liches would likely have taken their time emptying its streets into more undead. Instead they had to act quickly, to keep an enemy Dark Caster from bolstering his own forces.”

Swick thought about that.

“You’re not expecting them to be grateful to him surely.”

“Of course not.” The Hand snorted. “In moments of fortune, people think of God. It’s only moments of ill fortune that they think of others.”

That actually sounded about right to Swick, and he shifted his opinion of the Hand somewhat. This was a man who did know something of others, at least.

“Torib.” He murmured, thinking on the name and not taking long to draw up the relevant information. “Ah, city of outlaws. One of the bigger ones. It used to be a favourite spot of mine.”

“Back before you lost the ability to travel the world without being arrested.” The Hand noted, and Swick scowled.

“Yes.”

They sat out the remainder of their journey in silence, which was rather uncomfortable for Swick, but a great deal better than constantly being reminded of his little accident by everyone around him. Their carriage closed to within a mile of its walls before they stopped it behind a hill. It was not the black silt local to Kaltan’s area, rather a more mundane dirt and grassy covering, but the cover it provided would serve just as well.

“Best not to let our transport be seen.” Swick explained as they began their walk. “It’d be nice to have it nearby in case we need to escape, but not worth the attention it’ll bring. Even criminals don’t tend to like Fleshcrafters.”

The Hand nodded in swift understanding.

A mile’s walk was nothing for Swick, but he’d expected to see some difficulty in the Hand’s own trek. Apparently, Arbite men- even the chair-hogging administrators- were made of sturdier stuff than was common to other lands. Even well into his middle years he kept a brisk pace, and the two of them closed in on the city’s gates in under five minutes. Swick wondered how quickly they might have run the distance.

After so long spent around the most extreme of militarism, Swick had almost forgotten what a normal city looked like. Its wall, twenty feet high, seemed somehow petty and insubstantial, stony barricade striking him as pitiably thin and fragile. One hit from Shaiagrazni’s cannons would blast clean through, one swing from the Godblade would sweep away an entire section. Even Baird’s bow wouldn’t take long to drill through, albeit with a smaller opening.

The Hand seemed to share his impression.

“Lucky indeed that Shaiagrazni made so many issues for the Dark Lord in Elkatin.” He noted. “Or else he would have a million more servitors shambling about in his hordes.”

Swick was in agreement. He wasn’t a siege fighter by any means, but one didn’t serve as so prolific a mercenary as him without understanding the basics at least. If an army even one twentieth the size of the one Kaltan had driven away were to attack this city, they’d be fucked.

Stolen novel; please report.

The guards seemed to know it, too, because they kept their eyes down and their faces turned carefully away as Swick and the Hand made their way in past the outer gate. It was a familiar set of behaviours- those carried out by dangerous men. Dogs that barked didn’t bite, and all that. Swick felt a mix of apprehension and familiarity to be walking through such a place.

Mud streets met them inside, embracing Swick’s every footfall with a celebratory chorus of squelching deformation. He looked around. The buildings were wood for the most part, squat and grimy, the streets uncomfortably crowded. He felt fingers graze his pockets twice, and confounded both attempts with fractional leans too small to break his stride.

He was used to that, and he was used to the stares, too. Fame was a problem, sometimes, after all. And Swick’s fame was never so strongly felt as in disreputable surroundings. The longer they walked, the more eyes he found tilting towards him with recognition. Some with avarice, others with the premonitions of violence.

There was a price on his head. He’d known that for years, and yet he’d not had to get used to wandering around relatively on his own until recently. His apprehension was soon vindicated.

A corner turned, a moment’s delay, and the sound of heavy boots grinding against dirt. In moments Swick and the Hand were surrounded on all sides. Ten men, all big, all moving in that light, loping way men did when their bodies were twitching with unused Vigour. He forced a smile, and didn’t go for his knife. Better to draw it all at once in the instant he attacked, and leave them all the more confounded about where it came from.

“Hello there, mister Swick.” One of them grinned, revealing a copper tooth and a half-healed jawbone. “I almost didn’t recognise you, now wouldn’t that have been a shame?”

“It would.” Swick agreed, smiling back, “I’d have missed out on your wonderful conversation.”

Eleven men, he realised, not ten. One was creeping on a rooftop, bow in hand. The Hand was shifting, fingers twitching for a shortsword. The men who saw that were growing tense, things were drawing close to an incendiary escalation.

“You know why we’re speaking, don’t you?” The leader asked. “Just make this easy and-”

Swick’s lunge came at the same exact moment as the drawing of his first knife, the dragging of his finger along its edge, and the flicking of his hand behind him. He’d already buried the blade hilt-deep into the speaker’s skull before even a single of his allies could move. Then he translocated to the flicked ichor as it splashed against one of the men who’d been behind him.

It had been so long since Swick had fought anything other than undead or superhumans that he’d almost forgotten the grade of power actually commonplace among mercenaries, even those with a touch of Vigour in them. The edge of his blade parted scalp and skull as if they were cloth, biting down deep to split the man’s head down to his upper lip. He twisted the weapon out and spun, taking off another at the neck to mark his third kill. By then, others were moving.

The Hand was as impressive in battle as he had been in the mile-walk, because he was the first to attack. His shortsword took a man at his shoulder, hacking the arm entirely off and continuing to open another’s belly with the backswing. The noble just barely darted back from a nasty-looking axe, and into the path of another which bit down into his back, but bounced off the superior musculature protecting it. Then the arrow was flying.

Compared to Baird’s arrows- or even any other Kaltan Ranger’s- the projectile was pitifully slow. Swick had all the time in the world to watch it shoot for the Hand, carefully aiming his dagger before hurling it to smash the wooden shaft to pieces, then continue and stick into the chest of a fourth enemy for good measure. Before the man had even finished crumpling to the dirt, he’d rolled from the path of another swing and lashed out with his remaining knife to open all the big veins in the attacker’s thigh.

That made five kills for Swick, and now only four mercenaries remained.

But that was no mercenaries, really, because the last few took one look at what had happened to their comrades in so tiny a span of time and turned to sprint away. Swick let them go, even as he saw the Hand half-wavering to give chase.

“Bastards.” The noble growled.

“They are.” Swick agreed. “You’ll be seeing a lot of their types in my circles, given what a bastard I am too. Turn around, let me take a look at that back wound of yours.”

The noble grumbled, but obliged. Swick was well used to checking wounds, and he was quick about it. The enemy had done him a favour by parting expensive fabrics to expose the injury.

Below the cloth, there was steel. Carefully worked into mail links which fell in fractals as he parted the ruined clothing atop. Beneath that Swick saw the blood, and he probed around in the gory mess for a few moments- ignoring the winces and hissed pains of the noble- to be sure of his assessment.

“You’ll be fine.” He told the man. “It’s nothing, he would’ve cut wood deeper than he did your flesh.”

Which was impressive. Swick found himself reassessing the man once more. Not a Hero, not even close to a Hero, but he was…Something, at least. In physical prowess alone he might have been a match for Collin Baird, before Shaiagrazni strengthened his biology with Fleshcrafting. There weren’t many who could say that much.

“King Galukar insisted on a certain martial ability for all his council.” The Hand explained. “Even those without a martial role.”

“Makes sense.” Swick shrugged. “Captain needs to be able to deal with a mutiny, even if he’s alone. Otherwise he’s too easy to pick off.”

The Hand did not seem impressed by his feedback.

“Perhaps things are different on a ship than they are in a city, sir.” He sniffed. “But I will bear you in mind if I ever seek the advice of one who’s experience of leadership involves herding drunkards towards a common victim.”

Prick.

Swick might have even said something about it, had the voice not rung out and turned his eyes down across the alley.

“Impressive work, but then people don’t get half your bounty without that sort of performance, do they Captain?”

He turned, instantly, and his heart sank at the sight of the speaking men. Two dozen of them now, not eleven, and all uniformed. Uniformed with clothes emblazoned with etchings of long, red hands. The speaker was a towering man with a hair, and right hand, just as red as the fabric on their clothes. Eyepatched and glaring. One-Eyed Red, the man whose brother had died serving Swick.

“Friends of yours?” The Hand asked, not knowing even a tenth of what rabbit hole he was jumping down.

Swick did know them. He knew the Red Finger Crew like few others. After all, once upon a time…They’d been his own men.