Yena had been counting screams.
Not deliberately; her mind had started doing it on its own sometime in the first hour, a way of staying anchored to something countable while the rest of it, the chain on her wrist, the cold of the cavern floor, the smell of unwashed bodies and pitch torches, stayed in the category of things she wasn't ready to face directly. There had been forty-three so far, and none of them sounded like men winning anything.
The cavern she was in was deep enough into the rock that the wind didn't reach them, but the screams did. They rolled up through the tunnel from outside, distorted by stone, sometimes one at a time and sometimes several at once.
There had been a long stretch around the twentieth or so where it had sounded like something exploding, a single crack of pressure that had loosened dust from the ceiling and left Yena's ears ringing for a full minute afterward. Two of the boys chained against the opposite wall had started crying then, and one of the older women had quietly told them to stop, not unkindly, just because crying wouldn't help and silence might.
She'd looked at the children when they'd been first dragged in. Four boys, the youngest probably nine, the oldest maybe twelve. The bandits had separated them from the women and chained them along the far wall, and Yena had understood without anyone explaining what the boys were for. Not labour. They were too small for that, but inventory, the sort that traveled south to the markets near the coast where buyers didn't ask questions about provenance.
She'd decided then that she was going to find a way to kill the chief, even if it killed her, and that decision had given her something to do with her hands while she waited.
But now she didn't have to do anything. Now there were screams coming up the tunnel, and the bandits in the cavern had stopped pretending they weren't afraid.
There were four of them. Two guards at the entrance, with swords they hadn't drawn but kept touching, and two others further back; one a thin man with a notched ear who had been pacing back and forth across the same six feet of stone for the better part of an hour, and the last one a heavyset man sitting cross-legged in the corner with his eyes open and seeing nothing.
That last one was a warg.
Yena had figured it out maybe twenty minutes ago, when one of the guards had crouched next to him and asked, in a low voice, what was happening. The warg hadn't answered, because he wasn't there, exactly.
His body was but his attention wasn't. He came back to himself every so often, blinked, said a few words, then closed his eyes and went back out. Whatever he'd been seeing had been getting worse each time, because each time he came back he was quieter and faster about going out again.
The thin man stopped pacing.
"Desh."
The warg didn't respond.
"Desh!"
There was a long beat, then the warg opened his eyes, and he was breathing harder than he had been any of the previous times.
"They wiped out the rest," he said.
The cavern went very still.
"What do you mean the rest?"
"I mean the rest. The whole lower line. Forty-six of our men. They're done."
"That can't—"
"There's a priest." The warg interrupted. "A priest with battle gauntlets, and a girl with a sword opening men at the joints faster than I can track. There's also a feytouched with a crossbow who hasn't missed yet, and a boy with a staff who called down lightning twice."
The warg suddenly gasped, his whole body jerking once where he sat.
"What," the thin man said. "What is it?"
"I-it's the chicken, chief." The warg's voice had gone thinner. "The chicken is coming this way."
The thin man stared at him.
"Are you mocking me, Desh?"
"I swear on every god you want to name," the warg said, "there is a chicken with them, and out of all of them, he is the most eager to kill. He has done more than the others combined, and he is heading up the pass toward us right now!"
The thin man's jaw worked. He looked at the warg with surprise, suspicion, and the very small possibility that this was, against all reason, something to take at face value.
"Keep looking," he said. "Tell me when we beat them."
The warg closed his eyes as his body settled back into stillness. His breathing slowed and for a long moment the cavern held nothing but the muffled noise from the pass and the soft scrape of one of the boys against the chain at his wrist.
The warg's lips moved, but Yena couldn't make out the words. Then the mountain shook in a low rumble that came up through the stone of the cavern floor and into Yena's spine, and dust sifted down from the ceiling in thin streams.
One of the women cried out while the smallest boy made a high sound and clamped both his hands over his mouth. Outside, beyond the boulder, the screaming rose in a wave and didn't fall back down, voices on top of voices, and underneath them a noise like rock cracking.
"Quiet!" one of the guards shouted at the hostages. "Quiet, all of you!"
A second tremor hit, this time even stronger and the chain rattled against the wall behind Yena. A loose stone the size of a fist dislodged from somewhere above and clattered down onto the floor near the boys, and one of them screamed, prompting the bandit nearest to him to step forward and slap him across the face so hard the boy's head snapped sideways.
"Silence! All of you!"
The merchant's wife next to Yena had started praying out loud now, the words tumbling over each other, and Yena reached for her hand without thinking about it and squeezed hard enough to hurt.
It was then that the warg jerked.
His whole body came back into itself at once, and he made a sound like he'd been struck in the chest, his hand flying up to his temple. His eyes opened wide, and the breath he took afterward was uneven.
"Desh, what happened?"
"It's the m-mage, the white-haired one!" The warg's voice was unsteady in a way it hadn't been before. "I went after him as a crow, and he saw me. I don't know how, but he knew I was a warg, and k-killed the link before I could get out. Pulled me right back into my body." He swallowed. "He's coming straight here. He's almost on top of us."
The thin man stood very still as a third tremor happened, this time closer. The cavern walls groaned around them, and more stone fell from the ceiling, larger pieces this time, and one of them struck the floor near the second guard's foot and made him flinch back.
The screams from outside were closer too, or maybe they only seemed closer because they were louder; the difference was hard to tell from inside the stone, and Yena's heart was hammering hard enough that her hearing was going strange at the edges.
Then the thin man moved.
"Up," he said, to the cavern at large, and louder, into the side tunnel where the rest of the bandits were stationed, "UP! Everyone, we're going! Tell Haran to bring the relics! Veiling and silencing both! We take the prisoners and we go through the back tunnel for the second position! NOW!"
A shout came back from the tunnel, far enough away that it sounded thin. With boots running, and voices shouting at each other.
"Quiet, I said!" The bandit nearest the boys had his sword out now, the flat of it pressed against the wall above the smallest boy's head. The boy had not made any sound since being struck, but two of the older women were crying openly, and one of the bandit guards rounded on them with his blade raised. "I will gut the next one of you who makes a noise! I swear it!"
But the screaming outside only got louder and Yena understood after a moment that something was working its way up the line out there and it was working fast.
There was a fourth tremor, and this one didn't stop. The cavern floor shuddered for a full two seconds and dust came down in a sheet from the ceiling. Yena tasted grit in her mouth and the boy who had been slapped started crying again, which made a bandit turn toward him with murder in his face.
"GO!" the thin man shouted at the guards by the boulder. "OPEN IT, NOW!"
At his command, the two guards threw themselves at the stone, shoulders down, putting everything they had into it, and they were almost done when the boulder exploded, coming apart inward in a spray of fragments that scattered across the floor and rattled against the opposite wall hard enough to break things. The two guards were flung backward off their feet.
The thin man simply stood his ground; a chunk of stone the size of a man's chest struck him square across the body and broke apart against him, yet he did not move so much as an inch.
Only then did all the hostages screamed at once, instinct firing faster than thought, and Yena was screaming too, she realized, her throat raw with it, and she could not have stopped if she'd tried.
The dust hung in the air where the boulder had been, and through it walked a chicken.
There really was a chicken...
The screaming died almost immediately when it came in, and everyone was looking at the bird.
She had heard the warg say the word and assumed she'd misunderstood. There was no reading of forty-three screams in which the source was a domestic bird, and somewhere in the back of her head she'd made the quiet decision that the warg had meant a familiar, or one of the lesser things from children's stories that resembled an animal in name only. She had been preparing herself, without thinking about it, to see a thing. Not... this.
The only thing about it that was not ordinary was the blood. It had a great deal of it on its feathers, and probably very little of it his own.
The warg in the corner had pressed himself back against the rock. He hadn't blinked since the boulder came apart and his hand was still at his temple where it had been since the link broke, while he was looking at the rooster.
As for the main character, it simply looked around, its gaze passing across the hostages without interest. For a chicken, it was capable of a surprising range of expressions; Yena identified disdain immediately, and underneath it something that took her a second longer to place and that she did not enjoy identifying once she had: Viciousness, of the kind that you would not want pointed at you under any circumstances Yena could think of.
It kept looking around until its gaze finally settled on the thin man with the notched ear.
"Which of you is in charge here?" Said the chicken, in a surprisingly deep voice, startling everyone.
Then the thin man drew his swords.
He had two of them; one at each hip, drawn together in a single motion as he stepped over the broken stone where the boulder had been and stopped a few paces from the rooster, both blades held low and angled outward.
"Who are you?" The thin man asked.
"Stand ready for his arrival, worm." Said the chicken. "I will deal with you quickly."
The thin man seemed to be about to say something when footsteps came through the ruined entrance, in a calm and unhurried fashion, and Yena thought for an irrational moment that the screams outside had stopped, before she realized that they hadn't, the screams were still going on, the man walking into the cavern was simply not affected by them.
He was tall and young looking, with white hair. His robes were blue, and they had not picked up a speck of dust on the climb up. He was carrying nothing in his hands, stopped beside the chicken, and then he raised one hand in a small acknowledging gesture toward the hostages along the wall.
"Hello, everyone."
The cavern, which had been silent already, became even more silent.
"...Erm... my apologies for the manner in which we've had to handle this. It was not how I would have preferred, but it became necessary. Please remain where you are for a few minutes longer. It will be over very soon, and then we'll see you home."
He seemed to be waiting for an answer after that, but nobody answered him. Everyone just stared and Yena watched something shift in his face that surprised her; the white-haired man, the one who had just walked through a mountain pass full of his own ongoing violence, looked, of all things, embarrassed.
He glanced briefly at the rooster as if for help, which the rooster did not provide, and feeling she was the only one to have picked up on it, Yena spoke without deciding to.
"T-thank you, kind sir. For, uh, coming for us..."
He looked at her, and his shoulders eased slightly, then he nodded, and smiled at her, transforming his face entirely for the half second it lasted.
Then he turned to the rooster.
"He is a few levels beneath your current form, Oz. Nine hundred and ninety-six."
"And?" the rooster said.
"And the fight would not end quickly. There would be casualties." He tipped his head toward the hostages, which Yena realized after a half second included her. "I will handle this."
The rooster's feathers rose, and for a moment it seemed as though it might actually attack the white-haired man. But then they began to argue, or rather, the rooster began to rant and the white-haired man began responding in different intonations of "hmm," each one probably meaning something specific to the rooster.
It went on for the better part of a minute. The screaming of the remaining bandits outside, which had been a constant the whole time, began to thin out somewhere in the middle of it, fewer voices, further apart, until the cavern was the loudest thing in the pass and the rooster and the wizard were still going until...
"ENOUGH!"
The thin man's voice cracked across the cavern as both Oz and the white-haired man looked at him.
"ENOUGH!" he shouted again. "Do you have any idea — any — who you are talking to? Either of you?"
The white-haired man looked confused. "...No?"
"My name is Kalrik! I am the head of the Hollow Wolves of the Greyspine, and I have held this pass for nine years! NINE! I burned the Tessavar garrison patrol in the spring of the wolfmoon and walked away with the captain's signet ring on my thumb. I broke the back of the Eredori royal expedition in the gorge below Vex's Spire. I have killed seventy-four men with these blades, of which fourteen were knights and three were—"
"Have you ever heard of this man, Oz?"
The white-haired man had turned to the rooster mid-sentence, and the latter seemed to consider.
"No." the rooster said. "I would have remembered. He is not worth remembering."
Kalrik had small twitch in his jaw and a flicker behind his eyes as he raised both swords and prepared to charge at the two newcomers.
"YOU—"
Suddenly there was a violent wind, followed by an even more violent sound, and for some reason, Kalrik was now firmly embedded into the wall behind them, his head bouncing forward off it a second later, and his swords clattering to the ground at his feet, with a line of blood already running from his hairline down past his eyebrow.
He slid halfway down the wall before catching himself, and everyone in the cavern stared.
Nobody had seen what had happened, Yena had been watching directly and there had simply been no in-between; he had been here, and then he had been there.
"My apologies," the white-haired man said, looking genuinely chagrined. "I had meant to knock you out in one go. Let me correct that."
Kalrik, still half against the wall, swaying and blood on his face, raised one trembling hand and shook his head.
"W— no, no, no, wait, wait wai—"
BOOM.
Now he was on the ground. He hit it so hard the stone cracked under his back in a starburst pattern that ran six feet in three directions, and then he was in the air again, hanging there with his arms loose, his mouth open and a long thread of saliva mixed with blood running down from his lower lip.
"...Hhhhh," was all Yena could hear coming out of his mouth.
The white-haired man glanced down at the rooster.
"You see? He would have been a problem if you'd taken him."
"Tsk, he is a cockroach." The rooster's feathers settled. "Disgusting."
Around the cavern, nobody was breathing properly. The hostages were frozen against the wall, the warg had pressed himself flatter against the rock if such a thing was possible, one of the unconscious guards stirred slightly, made a small noise, and then settled again, which struck Yena, in some distant part of her mind, as a remarkably good decision.
There was a final BOOM, and Kalrik came back down. The crack in the stone widened, a fresh starburst overlapping the first, and Yena felt the shock of it through the soles of her shoes. Kalrik did not move afterward. His chest was moving, but his eyes were closed and his mouth was open.
The white-haired man looked at the cracked stone and frowned faintly. "That was more force than I intended," he said, to no one in particular.