I wasted precious seconds in stunned realisation.

That noise I’d heard, not long after he’d opened the link. Stone on steel. The sound of someone scraping sparks onto dry tinder. He’d circled around me all right. Set his fires – probably many different ones, built with all his considerable woodcraft to funnel flames in the right direction, to set the very trees alight…

Opened the link as he set his last fire. Circled back under the cover of the conversation, knowing already what I was doing…

Of course I would stay put. It was my best chance to close. Time was on my side after all. Of course I would employ a defensive strategy against the greatest hunter in all Reality.

I was an idiot.

And now I was trapped, a forest fire sweeping towards my hiding place, and Esparatos no doubt in place not far from where we had last fought. I would be driven towards him, forced to abandon Danis just to survive.

An easy target.

He’d be somewhere high up, just beyond a break in the trees, a break I wouldn’t see until it was too late. I would run at him…

Laya would fire. Only once, but once was all it would take.

‘Think, Rukh! How do you win this?’

I stared at the approaching infernal glow. It would be on me soon, I knew. Already the air was searing my skin, the smoke rubbing against the lining of my throat.

Then I smiled.

Well, it’s worth a shot.

And I took off at a dead sprint towards the blaze.

* * *

On my home world of Ashmar, near where I’d lived as a child, there was a great forest known as the Crimson Woods. They were called so because the trees that grew there were forever in autumnal colours, their chlorophyll encompassing every shade of red and burnt orange but never showing a hint of green. But the woods had another name – the Wildfire Woods. For every year there would be at least one misplaced lightning strike in the middle of the dry season, or a traveller with a careless camp, or something.

The woods would burn. The smoke would scent the air for miles. We would go up the hill and watch the flames roaring in the distance, beautiful and savage. We would say prayers for those who had gone into the forest that morning, and who would not be coming out.

Such was life.

We certainly never went near the place while it was burning. We stayed on our own side of the firebreaks, patrolled the town for stray sparks or flaming debris carried to us by the winds.

Which, I guess, is a way of saying that while I had seen forest fires before and knew a fair bit about them, I had never been right up inside one before.

It looked a lot like I imagined Hell would look.

The wind was behind the flames, driving them forward. The advancing smoke made the air a blue-grey haze. It stung at the back of my throat. There would be no oxygen here, nothing to breathe.

I dropped Danis. It was a pointless luxury – Esparatos knew where I was in any case, and even he wouldn’t be able to sight a bullet on my chaos-taint alone. Not with the fire to give me cover. Besides, if I had any hope of surviving what came next, I would need power.

Bayis, first, to create clean, oxygenated air inside my mouth. Complex, fiddly, and expensive… and all simply to breathe.

Sansis, next. I hoped to just move the heat, but eventually I would have to quell it. A little used technique, since it was a damn sight harder to still thermally-agitated molecules than it was to agitate them in the first place.

Ensis, last of all. To heal my mistakes, where I let the heat slip through, to repair my flesh even as it seared. Depending on how deep the leading edge of the firestorm was, there was a good chance that I wouldn’t be able to shift or quell the heat fast enough to keep it off me.

I didn’t have a plan for what happened when I ran out of power. No plan beyond being burned to death, anyways.

‘This has got to be one of the craziest things I’ve ever done,’ I thought to myself.

It definitely made the top ten, that was for sure.

I was running through burning ferns, the heat more than I could take unaided, the air searing. I shifted it the same way I would shift an offensive pulse of Sansis, felt the ground beneath my feet warming as I ran.

A glance up showed the forest canopy as a carpet of flame. The trunks of the trees were slower to catch but I could hear, all around, the cracking of bark and the splitting of wood as the water within the trees flashed to steam.

The ferns were blackening, curling in seconds as the fire raced across them. Motes of fire spiralled out of the smoke at me, twigs and leaves all burning, all caught in the fire-fuelling wind. I dodged to the side as a great bough tumbled from one of the trees above me, slamming into the earth in a spray of sparks.

The flames roared.

Up ahead I could see something huge and scaled thrashing between the trees – one of Osha’s native fauna, caught in the fire. Its squeals were simultaneously mighty and pathetic, all its size and strength belittled by the immensity of the firestorm. I could see the scorch marks on its green scaled hide, the charred ruin of one of its forelimbs.

It would succumb to the heat in a moment, I knew. That it had lived this long was unlikely enough…

I ran on.

Here the tree trunks themselves were burning, flames wreathing the black bark. The canopy above was gone, burned to nothing, and ash lay thick across the ground. It was hotter here – my boots smoked as I ran through the embers of the groundcover, and there was no more shifting Sansis into the ground – I could have forced the issue with chaotic power but it was easier to quell the heat directly.

Easier, but not by much.

I was chewing through my reserve.

The Oshan jungle was not a dry forest. It was a rainforest, the plants regularly watered by daily cloudbursts, the warm air heavy with moisture. Fires like the one raging around me did not occur here naturally – and thus there was fuel in abundance.

Worse, the moisture-heavy nature of the forest had slowed the wildfire, each plant having to dry out before it would combust. A slower advance meant a thicker front for me to run through. Already it seemed I had been inside this flaming, smoking hell for hours, though rationally I knew that it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes…

One of the trees ahead was a charred husk. Embers glowed on its surface, but no flames.

Relief. I was pulling through.

More dead and burned trees around me now, the smoke thick still but the air cooler. I went back to shifting heat around with Sansis.

A few minutes later and I didn’t need Sansis anymore. The air was clearing, the smoke thinning. I could see more dead trees ahead of me, burned black towers, standing stark against the sky. The haze that hung above them seemed to stretch for miles.

A rocky rise a few hundred metres distant, its surface charred and adorned with the ruins of yet more trees. And beyond that…

The glitter of distant flames. The fire was burning outward in a ring then, charring through the rainforest in an irregular circle, like a flame held to the centre of a map.

I wondered, briefly, for how many hours or days it would burn for. These jungles stretched for thousands of miles after all, so there was plenty of fuel.

Perhaps there would be a rainstorm. They were frequent enough here.

I had slowed to a walk, breathing normally again without need for Bayis. The air tasted vile, but it had oxygen in it and that was all that was required.

I took stock of myself.

My bare arms were streaked with soot and ash. My jeans were near black with the same. The rubber soles of my boots were a mess of melt scars. The ends of my hair had burned away, and the reek of that was still very much present. Only Akeem and the scabbard that held it had remained untouched.

I bent down, intending to reshape the soles of my boots with Bayis. A deformed sole could throw me in a fight, cause me to stumble at a critical moment. I didn’t want that, and it was a comparatively modest expenditure of power…

Something went over my head, too fast to see, the air torn violently in its passage.

A split second later I heard the gunshot.

I threw myself, sideways, into the shadow of one of the burnt trees.

The next gunshot shattered the side of the trunk into glittering sticks of charcoal. I tucked my head down into the hollow of the roots.

Esparatos.

He’d outthought me.

And now he had me pinned down in a combat theatre that was squarely in his rifle sights, and from which every scrap of cover besides the trees had been burned away.

I was, in a word, fucked.

I could see it now. The scrape of stone on steel that he’d let slip over the link, he’d made that slip deliberately. It was obvious in hindsight. Lighting a fire with only the trickle of power that Danis afforded you was slow and tedious but still possible. You just focused the heat on a pile of kindling with Sansis and kept pouring it on until the wood caught. No way Esparatos would have risked tipping me off to his plan by using a proper tinderbox. And if he had wanted to use a proper tinderbox, he would have waited until he was done before contacting me.

He’d made the slip to so that I would get the timing wrong, assume that he had lit his fire and circled back around, whereas in reality he had lit his fire and stayed where he was. The rest of it, the use of Jakis, the whole conversation that followed, it had been to sell me on that single noise.

I need to stop underestimating him.

He knew me. He knew what I was like, knew what I would do. Had known that I would run through the flames rather than seek to flee them.

And how many times had he told me that knowledge of the target was critical to a hunter’s success?

Of course, like the Jakis link, that also cut both ways. He might know me, but I knew him, knew him better than anyone still living.

I knew, for instance, that Espartos was sitting on that rocky rise I’d spied in the distance, lying down for a better shot, Laya in his hands in the form of a big, fifty-calibre sniper rifle. I knew he’d be ready for my next move. He had me, could afford to wait for me to be impatient, for me to make that move…

He probably already knew what it was.

So maybe, instead of wondering about what he was doing or what he would do, I needed to think about what I would do. Think about it like I wasn’t me.

Then do something different.

Well, what I wanted to do was go full-body Kasis and skim towards him with Turis-assisted speed. Zigzag through the trees, pit my skill with the disciplines against his with the rifle. Close with him.

Kill him.

But the Helena Rukh way of doing things hadn’t got me very far against Esparatos. And those who are unable to change find themselves dying as the world changes around them.

* * *

To Esparatos, it looked like this:

I came around the tree on the left side, feet powering at the earth. His bullet slammed into my head and I dropped with the force of the impact, then stood again. Darted left…

My head came apart in burst of gore as the second round nailed me through the forehead, more force that I had power left to counter. My body flopped, limp, against the base of the tree.

To be fair, it looked kind of similar to me. Only I knew I wasn’t dead.

I had used Illumis.

It took a lot of power to make a realistic moving image – mainly because moving images were impossible. A disguise was one thing – that was an alteration in the way photons interacted with your skin and clothes – so the disguise moved as you did because in some sense, the disguise was you.

A projected illusion of the kind I’d thrown up was an alteration in the way photons interacted with the air. It was not something you could move like a marionette, unless you could reliably manipulate those air molecules, and you couldn’t. But what you could do was drop the image and imprint another, slightly different one in its place. Do that rapidly enough, fifty times a second, maybe, and you could make a moving animation.

The cost was staggering. It took nearly all the power I had left as I cast the two hundred or so separate illusions across several feet of space.

A trick I’d learned when still Dalarion’s disciple, experimenting with my powers near the inexhaustible supply of energy offered by the House’s chaos-rent. A trick only made possible from the thousands of hours of drawing lessons my father had imposed on me as a child, teaching me about imagery and perception and perspective all the other rules of the art.

All this, for a few seconds of animated image, projected onto the air.

Not something I’d ever expected to use on a battlefield – a momentary distraction was not worth such extravagant expenditure of power. Better to leave a disciple’s experiments in the past where they belonged. Better to rely on the holy trinity of Turis, Kasis, and Ensis…

Except this wasn’t just a distraction. This was a deception, and like all deceptions it had to be utterly sold or it would be useless. A momentary suspicion on Esparatos’s part would end me. His built-in caution might still end me.

I’d engaged Danis a few moments after his bullet had ripped my illusory head apart. Chaos taint vanished upon death. That was the weakness of the plan – my taint lay on me and not on my illusion, and I had not been able to engage Danis until I had my last image up. Would Esparatos, even from two hundred metres away, have been able to distinguish that my taint was a few feet to the side of the illusory me? Would he think it odd that the taint had vanished a few seconds after he’d vaporised my head with his rifle round rather than instantly?

Would he drop a hammer of Sansis on this area, just to make sure?

‘…but until we’ve seen her body she is not dead. Even then, I would make sure.’

His words to Shas, what seemed like an aeon ago. But would he really be sure, if he dropped Sansis on my corpse from a distance? Would he not want to check up close?

I lay there in the hollow of the burned tree, Danis engaged, breath held.

No wash of Sansis flame swept across me.

I breathed out slowly. He was coming to check on my body. Perhaps to take Akeem from its scabbard, to see if he could divine its properties for himself. He had always been curious about the blade.

And I would sit here, hidden and still, and at the right moment I would strike.

Another thought struck me:

“…its camouflage, its stillness, its timing, and its knowledge of its target…”

A smile, unbidden, formed on my lips.

Time to play the rock-fish.

* * *

If the run through the fire had felt like hours, lying in wait for Esparatos seemed to take forever. The adrenaline coursing through my veins prodded me to take action, to stand up and move, fight or flight. But if I moved I lost everything and so I waited, and I waited. The haze of the smoke-stained air hid the sun from view, making it hard to track the passage of time. Surely it should have darkened by now? Surely entire universes had been born and cooled to entropic darkness in the time since this had begun?

I glanced, from time to time, at where the perfect image of my corpse lay upon the ground, maintained from moment to moment despite the shifting air currents by the trickle of power I ran into it. For all that this image had been birthed in my imagination, it still hurt to look at it.

Helena Rukh, the Last Evil. Dead.

I had come too close too many times in the last few days.

Then, at last, footsteps.

Soft, betrayed only by the crunching of ash underfoot. I focused on the sound, tracking the approach.

A slow, even step…

It occurred to me, the way things sometimes do in the midst of a high-pressure situation, that I had forgotten to make use of my carefully faked limp. I’d discarded the idea once I’d closed with Esparatos, discarded it without even….

‘Ah, Rukh,’ said Esparatos from just out of my sightline, and for a panicked second I thought he had seen me. ‘I find myself at quite a loss for…’

I couldn’t go for him mid-strike, the way a rock-fish would. He had no target to strike at.

Mid-sentence would have to do.

I came up from the hollow and rolled around the tree, away from where my body seemed to lie, Akeem in my hands.

He was standing there, looking down at the illusion, still talking to my apparent corpse.

‘YES!’ said the sword, exultant.

I stepped forward without dropping Danis and rammed Akeem through his back, just as I’d done to Idigan back on Altain.

He spun…

And I let go of Akeem’s hilt and snatched at Laya, still a rifle in his hands, and I tore it from him, ripping my whole body around…

Laya spun free to bounce across the ash-covered ground, metres distant.

Yes!

With that thing in his hands Esparatos was to be feared. But without it? Against me?

He hadn’t a chance.

He tried to swing at me, but I stepped back and then kicked him flat with a Turis-assisted foot. He struggled to rise but my fist shattered the side of his beak and rammed his head back into the ashy earth.

I took hold of his throat with one hand, pinning him, and then reached under his body for Akeem’s hilt.

He struck at me with the Turis-loaded heel of one hand, but I redirected the force into his neck and his choked and spluttered as his larynx was crushed flat. My fingers closed around the grip of my blade.

I ripped it out of him, opening a great, bloody gash in his side from which his guts unspooled with liberal abandon. I stepped back from him as he desperately tried to gather them back in with one hand, Ensis already repairing the ruin of his neck.

I severed his left arm with a brutal downwards cut.

Akeem was laughing in my hands, white edge dripping red.

I lowered it.

I could read that he was done. He’d mostly healed the wound where I’d speared him through the back, but blood still flowed from where I’d severed his arm, and his other hand was still busy trying to pack his guts back into his torn open abdomen.

No need to drag this out any more.

I stepped forward,, kicking him flat once more, one of my boots grinding his remaining hand into the earth.

Placed Akeem’s tip between his eyes. The sword wasn’t laughing anymore.

‘Kill him. Kill him kill him kill him…’

I ignored it.

‘Well, Tollan,’ I said, using his first name for the first time in a long while, ‘I changed my mind.’ I paused, taking a breath. ‘Why?’

I kept my eyes on his limbs. One twitch and he was dead. By all rights I should’ve killed him already, but for all that this was the War, I needed to know.

Show no weakness…

Only here, and now, with him inches from death, I felt I could. Stupid, by a dozen metrics, but somehow necessary. Somehow inevitable.

‘You… you didn’t let… let me finish… my story.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t.’

He coughed, and blood poured from his mouth. Then, in a less broken voice, he said:

‘My master, Cernukan, he… he was not teaching me. Not properly. Because among Belian hunters it was common for the disciple to… to…’ His face was screwed up in pain.

‘To kill their sensei?’

‘Yes.’

It made a depressing amount of sense, I guessed. I’d run across similar things in mortal cultures before. It was the ultimate graduation, wasn’t it? The closing of the circle. How could one better prove that they had surpassed their teacher than by killing them? Validation of one’s own skills and a burying of the past, all together.

‘A hunter needs worthy prey,’ said Esparatos. ‘Always, we search for worthy prey. Cernukan was worthy prey. To learn, what he wouldn’t teach me I… I trained alone. I… I killed him.’

I shook my head. I could see where this was going, could see the shadow of my answer in his story. It made me feel old.

‘Idigan… he would have come for me, eventually. When he was… ready.’

I said nothing.

‘Cernukan is dead. But I still needed… needed worthy prey. The War provided, so when you asked…’

I closed my eyes briefly. So he hadn’t come for our friendship after all. I was trying to understand how I, of all people, could’ve been quite so naïve.

‘Saw what you did. Who you became.’

The ache of his betrayal, of Exan’s, of Trickster’s, it was so strong that I thought for a moment it might overcome me. That I might sway and fall, heedless of the enemy that, while currently at my mercy was still, nonetheless a threat.

‘Knew… that one day I would… would hunt you. Got to know you. Prepared. When Exan asked me to fight again…’

‘I’ve heard enough,’ I said, keeping the pain from my voice.

‘Gave you a chance. Chance to come over… to our side.’

I nearly killed him then and there. By his own admission, near enough, that so-called chance had been him throwing his conscience a bone rather than out of any real hope. As if he’d ever really thought I’d break my word. As if it wouldn’t have invalidated his whole reason for betraying me if I had gone and done it.

But I didn’t kill him, not then. He still had something I wanted.

‘So one more thing, Esparatos,’ I said aloud. ‘you owe me this much. Where is Trickster? Where are Sanjay and the others?’

For a moment I thought that he might deny me. I think he considered it.

But then he closed his eyes for a moment and said ‘Ilkan.’

Ilkan. So close I almost didn’t believe it.

‘And Exan? What’s his plan, Esparatos? If you talk I’ll…’

But he was shaking his head. In that shake I read it all. He was ready for death. It wasn’t like he’d even tried to use Ensis or go for me once last time… and I was certain he had the power left to try. For Esparatos this was the end, the right end, to try and hunt something truly dangerous, and to fail. It was the end for which he had always been destined, and he’d known that the same way I knew that my own end would come in single combat with someone tougher.

Inevitable.

I would get no more from him. He was too close to the brink to torture, and I wasn’t sure, vulnerable as I was feeling, that I’d have the stomach for it anyway.

So I just shrugged.

‘Nearly had you, Rukh. More than… more than once. You got…got lucky.’

I nodded. ‘Yes I did,’ I told him, and slammed Akeem into his brain.

The sword sighed with ecstasy. I nearly dropped it in disgust.

But I pulled it free instead, and shook the blood from that smooth, bone-white surface. Slid it back into its scabbard.

And then, though my reserves were almost empty and I had little power to spare, I stepped back and loosed that final burst of purifying Sansis flame. Respect and certainty, all in one.

I watched the body burn for a while, deep in thought.

And when Tollan Esparatos, one of my oldest and closest friends, was nothing more than another smear of ash in the ruin of a once great forest, I turned away.