The few hours of sleep Idrian managed to get were restless and unfulfilling, and he’d spent the last half hour before he was meant to meet with Demir scraping yellow glassrot scales off his arms and legs using his shaving razor. The process was relatively painless, which meant he hadn’t done any permanent damage. This time. He edged around the few spots of permanent glassrot on his calves and hips, and one on his left arm. They were scaly to the touch, and though they would come off with the straight razor it would be damned painful and they’d just grow right back.
People always assumed glazaliers were immune to glassrot. He wished it were the case. Resistance was not immunity, and glassrot could still be as painful to a glazalier as to anyone else.
A small scuffle brought him out of his tent, and he made his way to the edge of camp where Valient and a couple of his soldiers stood in a circle around Squeaks. It was the first time Idrian had seen her since helping drag her out of that collapsed tenement in Grent, and he walked over to join them, feeling cranky and defensive. “They bothering you, Squeaks?” he asked.
Squeaks sat on a stump in the center of the little group, Valient holding a lantern up to her face and examining her eyes. She turned away from him. “Thank piss. Idrian, can you tell them I’m not crazy?”
“She’s not crazy,” Idrian told Valient.
“Mmm,” Valient answered, grabbing Squeaks by the chin and steadying her to look in her eyes. “She might be.”
“She’s seeing things,” one of the other soldiers explained.
“I am not seeing things,” Squeaks insisted. She shook like a leaf, her eyes wide, pupils dilated. “There’s a glassdamned monster in the woods.”
Idrian frowned. He was sympathetic to seeing that which wasn’t there, but had spent his whole career judiciously analyzing what was and wasn’t real so that it didn’t affect his job. Was Squeaks mad as well? Did he need to take her aside and have a talk, away from everyone else? He aimed a boot at the closest infantryman. “Go on, get out of here. Leave her alone.” He waited until it was just him, Valient, and Squeaks before he turned back to her. “What did the monster look like?”
Squeaks shuddered. “Like a … Piss, I don’t know! Like a monster! Maybe five feet tall, thin and wispy with a long neck and beady little eyes.” She cast about her, as if looking for the right words, then pointed to her jaw. “It had long jagged teeth sticking out like, uh…”
“An underbite?” Valient asked.
“Yeah, that!”
Idrian grimaced. That sounded nothing like the shadows he saw due to his madness. Perhaps she’d injured her head in the rubble of that tenement, or during the defeat in the Copper Hills. He hoped not. The Ministry of the Legion made an exception for his mental state because he was a glazalier and a damned good breacher. They wouldn’t for Squeaks. She’d be kicked out no matter what anyone said, and then Fenny would be all alone.
“Probably a deformed dog,” Valient suggested.
Squeaks scowled at him. “It wasn’t a dog. I’ve been to the circus, I know what malformed animals look like.”
“What happened to the monster?” Idrian asked gently.
“Thing saw me, turned toward me with those little black eyes, and then poof! Disappeared.”
“All right,” Valient said, standing up. His eyes met Idrian’s over her head and Valient gave an irritated shake of his head. “Go see Glory for some dazeglass and then get some sleep. You’re off guard duty for the night.”
“I’m not trying to get out of it!” she objected. “I really did…”
“You didn’t see anything,” Valient assured her. “Let it go.”
Squeaks looked like she wanted to argue. After a few moments her shoulders slumped. “Yes, sir,” she replied, slinking away to find the battalion’s head surgeon.
Idrian waited until she was out of earshot before turning to Valient, who was staring after her with a scowl. “You okay?”
“Everyone’s just … not doing well,” Valient replied. “That loss to Kerite really shook us.”
“Did anyone else see a monster?”
“No. There’s no glassdamn monster in the woods, but Squeaks isn’t the first soldier to break down today. Morale is low, exhaustion is high.” Valient sighed. “I hope Demir genuinely has a plan.” Or they would all die unpleasantly was the silent implication.
Idrian nodded in agreement. He desperately wanted to believe in the Lightning Prince, but he still couldn’t tell which version of Demir had marched them down here, all on their own, while an entire division of crack enemy troops lurked somewhere in the vicinity. “Do you know where we are?”
“Vaguely,” Valient replied. “I think Tad has our exact location, but he went off with Mika about an hour ago, along with all that powder Demir brought with us.”
Now what the piss were they going to do with all that? Despite being somewhere just west of Ossa, they were in the large “wilderness” that provided hunting grounds for the guild-family elite. There was literally nothing to blow up out here, unless Demir’s grand plan was destroying a few hunting lodges. It didn’t make sense. Idrian bit his tongue before he could say so.
It was a good thing too, for Demir emerged from the darkness just a few moments later. He had a pistol and smallsword at his belt, and was wearing a piece of sightglass in his left ear. A glassdancer egg hovered over his shoulder in that disconcerting way that some of them liked to keep their glass at the ready. “Did I hear something going on?” he asked Valient.
“Just one of my soldiers having a bit of nerves, sir. I already took care of it.”
“Good. Idrian, armor.”
“Five minutes,” Idrian replied, and returned to his tent. He found Braileer and got help getting into his armor, then told the young armorer to take the rest of the night off, barring further orders. He returned to find Demir standing by himself on the edge of camp, looking out into the forest. With the sightglass in his armor, the world was lit up as if it were early morning, giving Idrian clear vision into the murkiness. Some hundred yards out he saw a fox trot by, pausing to look toward the camp before hurrying on. An owl swooped down, hitting the ground silently and then returning to the trees.
“Ready, sir,” Idrian said to Demir.
The younger Grappo did not move for several moments, then gave a sharp nod and a small sigh. He seemed more at ease here than he had been back at Bingham – but then again, this wasn’t an active war zone. At least, not yet. “Come with me.”
Idrian followed him out of the camp and down a narrow hunting track that forced him to walk behind Demir. Despite wearing sightglass, Demir seemed to be too confident with his movements, walking quickly, taking a fork in the path once, and then another fork a few hundred yards later. They came over a hill, down through a gully, and then up again to find themselves walking along the side of a small lake.
“I used to holiday here as a child,” Demir suddenly said, breaking the silence for the first time since leaving camp.
“Oh?”
“This is a man-made lake,” Demir explained, gesturing across the still water. “You can see a forester’s hut off behind those thick reeds if you look closely, and farther downriver is the Kirkovik’s ancestral hunting lodge. Which is a damned joke, since it’s almost as big as their city estate. My mother and I spent many summers here. Hammish Kirkovik used to take me into the woods and we’d draw up mock battles with sticks and trees. He’s the one who suggested that my mother get me a proper tactician as a tutor, even though I was only six.”
Idrian had never actually been to the Kirkovik’s hunting lodge – or any of these lodges for that matter – but he’d seen maps before. “Good place for an ambush?” he asked.