The Blood God System

Chapter Seven below

Below The Threshold The path behind the woodpile ran northeast through low brush and I took it fast with Corren behind

me and the Blood Sage moving beside me in the grey morning light.

The horse sound from the road had not multiplied yet. Just the one.

That was worse in a way I did not explain to either of them, because a single rider moving fast

toward a specific location was not a patrol. It was a message arriving ahead of something larger.

"How much time," I said to the Blood Sage.

"If that rider reports back and Elara has teams staged, an hour. Perhaps less."

"Then we move and talk at the same time," I said.

We moved.

The brush thinned after a quarter mile into older trees, tall and close together, and the ground under

them was soft enough to muffle our steps which helped.

I was thinking about the sigil.

More specifically I was thinking about what Vael had said and running the numbers the way I ran

numbers after a fight. Every absorption since the operative had marked me. Corren's associate on

the execution ground. The thin contact with the operative himself. The seal under the city wall.

What had gone through that door while I was busy believing I was building something.

I put it aside because I could not fix it yet and carrying it would slow me down.

"The controlled absorption," I said, still walking. "Vael mentioned it. A threshold below which the

door stays closed. How does that work in a real fight."

The Blood Sage moved through a gap in the trees before she answered.

"The warmth changes quality just before the threshold. Absorption pulls inward. When the sigil

activates it begins pulling through. That shift is the line." She paused. "In a calm environment you

can feel it clearly. In a fight with adrenaline and damage and the system pushing you to take

more…

"It will be harder," I said."Considerably."

I thought about that.

"The system pushes me toward the threshold deliberately," I said. "Because feeding Shikakiro is

part of what it was built for."

"Yes."

"So I am managing two things at once in every fight. The enemy in front of me and the system

trying to make me cross a line."

"That is what carrying this costs," she said simply.

Corren had been quiet since we left the house but now he said, without slowing down, that he had

something to offer.

We both looked at him.

"Elara tracks all her field operatives through the identification seal," he said. "Secondary trace.

Location read every six hours, sent to the palace district." He reached into his inner pocket while

walking and produced a small flat disc of dark metal. "I pulled mine an hour ago in the house.

While you were talking."

I looked at the disc.

"You had that the entire time we were in that house and said nothing," I said.

"I was deciding," he said.

"Deciding what."

He looked at the disc in his hand and then at the treeline ahead.

"Which side of this is going to be standing when it ends," he said.

It was honest. I could work with honest.

"Does Elara know your last read location.""The last read was two hours ago. Before we left the house in the city. She knows I was somewhere

in the back quarter of Voldimore. She does not know I left the city."

"When does it read again."

"Four hours from the last one. Two hours from now."

I held out my hand and he gave me the disc without hesitating and I looked at it for a moment, this

small piece of metal that Elara had used to keep track of every person she sent into the world, and I

thought about her sitting in the palace district reading the location grid and seeing a blank where

Corren should be.

She would not panic. She would calculate.

She was always calculating.

I put the disc in my pocket.

"We cannot destroy it here," I said. "No fire. But if I keep it moving it gives her a false trail for two

more hours and that is two hours she spends looking in the wrong direction."

The Blood Sage looked at me with something that was not quite approval but was in the same

direction.

We walked.

The trees went on and the morning got fully bright and the sound of the road faded behind us and I

was three miles into the northeast when the system text arrived.

It came the way the intrusion in Vael's house had come. No bracket. No format. Slipping into my

vision sideways.

But this time I felt it arrive.

A cold pull from somewhere below the place where the clan voices lived, below the void layer,

from deeper than I had known the system went, and it moved up through my chest slowly and

settled behind my sternum like something sitting down.

Then the text.Corruption: 5 / 10 — Clan Frequency: Moderate

she was going to say it cannot wait

she was going to say it is already awake

hello draven

i remember your mother too

i remember everything

[ERROR — UNAUTHORIZED TEXT IN NOTIFICATION LAYER]

"That was not me."

"That should not be possible."

"Move faster."

I stopped walking.

The cold thing in my chest had not moved. It was still sitting behind my sternum, patient, like it had

put itself there and was comfortable and had no plans to leave.

The Blood Sage turned and looked at my face and whatever she saw there made her close the

distance between us.

"What happened," she said quietly.

"It wrote through the system again," I said. "And this time I felt it arrive."

She looked at my chest. Not at my face. At my chest, where the wound from the Sovereign Blade

had closed, where the system lived, where something older than the system apparently also now

lived.

"Did you feel it before the text appeared or after," she said.

"Before," I said.

She nodded slowly in the way people nod when a thing they feared has been confirmed.

"It is gaining access from inside," she said. "Not through the notification layer. Through you."I stood in the trees with the morning fully up and the cold thing sitting in my chest and I thought

about Vael saying it has been waiting a very long time and I thought about what that meant now

that it had apparently decided to stop waiting.

Then Corren said, very quietly, that he could hear horses.

More than one this time.

Coming from the northeast.

Not behind us. Ahead.

Someone had not been following us out of Drenmoor.

Someone had been waiting for us to leave.