The fixer kept everything worth keeping — even a piece of a man, boxed and locked. Outside, in the dark, the ones who had failed the branch were coming home wrong.
Heyou brought Draz and Sylvie to rob Borek — the Syndicate fixer at Ulmira’s Step — of what he withheld and of the parts of Heyou he was known to keep, while Jamal, apart, worked at winning the collared beast. Draz held Borek at his table with a long, theatrical ramble, and Borek talked back through it: he charged Draz with the barrels of explosives, and pressed him on why Sarru and Savel — the two who had left Ulmira’s Step with Draz — had never come back. Then he took Draz’s arm and showed him the mark on it, a binding rune, a coercion that bound a company together and clouded what its members could remember; and he named Sylvie exactly, the witch at the center of them; and he offered Draz a translucent purple gem, and a place in the Syndicate against such influences. Draz put him off.
Heyou made Sylvie invisible and they went in through an unbarred window, into a room of six bunks where three were slept in and each kept a locked chest. A thing of smoke came together at the window — a corvid, larger than a crow, born out of the Umbra — and it answered Sylvie’s thoughts as though it were part of them. In the hall stood a guarded door and a dark, warded one; Sylvie threw a cold light through its keyhole and drew a guard’s eye, and Heyou picked the lock and put the ward to sleep. Beyond it was a hoard stacked to the rafters — crates, armor, bone helms, flags, weapons, tools — and through it all Sylvie felt the ache of Splendor lately carried off, like a limb gone but still felt.
In a rattling chest lay one of Heyou’s own missing legs, and cut into it the sign of Brathis — three fallen stalactites set in a triangle, the god of feral survival and the loss of the self. Heyou put the Devouring Dagger in Sylvie’s hand, a blade that drives fear into whatever it cuts, and set the Axe of Fortunus aside for Jamal. Out on the ridge Jamal had got the collar on the beast — it spurned the grass he offered and ate the thorns instead — and from there he watched the folk of Drosven’s Gate come up the night road toward Ulmira’s Step, mutated: a katari brewer gone to beast with spines down its back, an old councilman walking on four new legs. He held still, and watched, ready to ride if it came to it.
At the window on the way out a shadow — Borek — told them they would not leave without paying. Sylvie threw him through the wall with a word, and the hole let a simiah guard in after them; it tripped over what it could not see and went down atop her, and got the Devouring Dagger away from her and put it into her. Heyou loosed an area strike that killed the simiah and caught Sylvie in the edge of it, and they rolled the body off her. Borek climbed back through the hole and tried to bind Heyou and could not hold him. Then Sylvie called up a Horror — a giant, ghostly shape of herself — behind Borek, and it opened his throat, and he broke and fled deeper into the house, and the giant and the dwarf who guarded him ran.
Jamal roused the beast with a satchel of crushed thistle and bramble, took its neck by the collar, and turned for the road — and there Draz, drifting and distracted, was set upon by the mutated townsfolk, spears off his armor and an arrow into his shoulder, and broke for the trees. And in a later group on that road Jamal saw Sarru and Savel among the changed, shambling toward the town. The two who had left with them, and the branch, come back to this.
Sylvie and Heyou came out of Borek’s house with the leg, the dagger, and the axe, and got clear of Ulmira’s Step; and on the road that climbed to the town they met the monstrous crowd coming up it — faces they half-knew, gone wrong — and slipped past into the dark, the smoke-born corvid trailing Sylvie’s mind. The rune on Draz’s arm, the Syndicate’s anger to come, and Sarru and Savel walking with the ruined — the night gave them their winnings and a great deal else besides.