93. A PREVIOUS ENGAGEMENT

Talon’s story

The Marakori war camp

Starting the search for Anlyr

There’s nothing quite like a military camp in the middle of an attack. The enemy soldiers might be using portals for their main strikes against Atrine, but the actual locations of said camps weren’t so far from each other in terms of distance. The enemy’s main group was situated right at the bottom of Demon Falls. Presumably, they had magic in place to keep everyone in Jorat from dropping rocks on their heads, because otherwise … whew.

Otherwise, she had to assume that Nemesan was an idiot.

Anyway, it wasn’t difficult for Talon to find a soldier whose bladder didn’t care about battlegrounds but very much did care about the anxiety of being near one. After that, she could come and go through the rank and file as she wished. Talon made it look like she had somewhere to be, a soldier with a mission. She occasionally called out a name and at least twice had to declare it was the wrong person when it turned out that someone with that name answered.

It took her longer than she would have liked—valuable minutes—but she eventually found her target. An efficient, hyper-competent officer who was holding things together and radiated neither the endless fury of the average soldier nor the normal fears of someone expecting an attack from the Quuros Empire. In short, someone who wasn’t scared, and was good at his job.

Anyway, his aura was the giveaway.

He’d come up with a decent strategy. Anlyr had gone out of his way to develop a reputation as that weirdest of things: a mimic who didn’t shape-change. And then he’d made sure to let himself be seen, so if anyone keeping the camp under watch recognized Anlyr, later on, they would search for … Anlyr.

Which meant there was never a better time in the entirety of Anlyr’s existence for the man to bite down on a piece of leather, deal with the pain, and look like someone else. Talon had bet on someone else who was still capable, still competent, still effective, still pretty.

Every mimic had their tells.

She watched him check in with the group performing the ritual. The man leading the ceremony was no one Talon recognized: a middle-aged man dressed in the style of a Quuros Academy professor.

The professor wasn’t her target. Talon followed the soldier as he walked between two tents, then struck. She jumped up silently, and as she came down, she turned her arm into a long, sharp spike. This she tried to slam down into his skull, intent on skewering his brain, but the “soldier” moved unexpectedly at the last moment. Her attack caught him in the shoulder and then pierced downward, all the way through his lungs and liver.

But even as she started to rip the spike from his body, the flesh of her victim flowed backward, away from the spike, and then coagulated into the soldier again.

“Anlyr!” Talon said. “Ducky, it’s so nice to meet you!”

He tsked over the bloodstains, dropping the edge of a white shirt sodden with blood. “Now what if I’d just been a normal person?”

Talon shrugged like she was a little girl who’d just been caught picking flowers. “Oops?” She wasn’t about to feel guilty. If he hadn’t been Anlyr, he still would have been a competent officer working for the other side.

Otherwise known as fair game.

Anlyr checked his knives and the sword by his side as they circled each other, an interesting reminder that the items were genuine rather than extensions of his body. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I remember Talon from the old days. Pretentious brat. Most of us were. Thought we had to take names like Talon or Chameleon or, my personal favorite, Fang.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Fang? Seriously?”

“Yeah, those were simpler days.” Anlyr drew his sword. “You know, Talon was all the crazy. Nice to see you’re doing your best to keep up the standards.”

“Now you’re just being mean,” Talon said. And she hadn’t even done anything crazy lately. Or not massively crazy. Comparatively. She was trying! “Besides, it was a stupid question, ducky. If you’d been a normal person, I wouldn’t have attacked you. Now where’s the real ritual taking place, because we both know it isn’t anywhere near that extravagant bull’s-eye you’ve created over there.” She used a lock of her “hair” to point back toward the ritual site Anlyr was all but begging people to attack.

He seemed surprised. They continued to circle each other, searching for openings. “You honestly think I’ll tell you?”

Talon thought about that for a moment. “Okay, not really, no. Mostly, I just want to kick your ass for what you did to Galen.” She paused. “He’s my baby.”

Anlyr didn’t bother to respond to that. The two mimics stared at each other while standing between blood-splattered tents.

And then, upon some indeterminate signal that they both recognized, they attacked.

Talon was stunned by Anlyr’s speed. They exchanged a dozen blows in a second as the two mimics tried to kill each other. The only difference between the two was that Talon was using her own body, and Anlyr was using blades.

Anlyr pulled a dagger from his belt and slammed it into one of Talon’s tentacles. She felt a burst of tenyé. An unpleasant burning spread out from the entry point of the wound. Talon lashed out at Anlyr, hard. She felt something connect, something give, heard a grunt of pain. She pulled back the spiked tentacle, knowing if she didn’t, Anlyr would repeat whatever he’d already done.

And whatever he’d already done to one of her tentacles hurt so much.

Talon tried to change the appendage back into an arm, to heal over the wound—and couldn’t.

“What the fuck?” she muttered.

Anlyr snickered. She looked up to see him healing the hole she’d punched through his stomach. The dagger he’d used to stab her was gone.

“Funny thing about being a mimic,” Anlyr said, “is that I’ve had thousands of years to figure out how to kill one. Stings, doesn’t it?”

She tried to change the shape of a different tentacle—and couldn’t do that either.

“What have you done?” Fear shot through her. Nothing in any of Talon’s memories had even hinted that such a thing was possible. Teraeth had figured out a way to paralyze her, but that wasn’t the same as this.

“Mimics don’t carry talismans,” Anlyr reminded her. “That makes us highly vulnerable to certain kinds of magic. All I did was remind your cells that you shouldn’t be able to change their shape at all. Consider it a temporary vacation for your poor, tired body.”

Talon didn’t bother with denials or further questions. She knew from the uncomfortable fire rushing to fill every corner of her body that he was telling the truth.

“Fucking … bastard…” She cast her gaze around the alley, but there was nothing she could use as a weapon, which meant she’d have to use herself. Closing to striking distance of the other mimic with her physical body just became a much more worrying prospect than it had been previously.

Anlyr drew his sword.

“Let’s get this over with. I have eight gods to kill.”

Talon grinned her very best “fuck you.” “You can try, anyway.”

Talon ran.