Yf Split City

Chapter 9

Chapter 9 · 2,791 words

# Chapter 9: The False Trail

The goblin-body moved through the treeline in a gait that was all its own.

It was past dusk now. The last grey light had drained from the sky hours ago, and the forest edge had gone dark save for the faint phosphorescence of lichen on the older oaks. Kael's human body crouched in the waste-pit alley, his back against the tannery wall, his knees drawn up. His palms were flat on the stones on either side of him. The stone was cold. The cold helped.

Through the goblin's eyes, the world was a different thing entirely.

Greens blown out and garish, the dark masses of trees in muddy blacks and browns, the sky a flat, depthless grey even in full daylight. At night the goblin saw heat, or something like it. The living wood of the trees glowed faintly, the ground beneath them cooler, the sky a void. The lichen on the bark was the brightest thing in the forest, pale green against the black trunks, and the goblin's feet found purchase on roots and stones with a certainty that came from a thousand nights of walking in this kind of dark.

Kael directed it south.

The goblin-body moved. Its lopsided gait carried it along the base of the treeline, away from the eastern wall, angling toward the drainage ditch that ran along the south side of the cleared ground. Its hands, heavier than Kael's, the fingers thick and the nails black and cracked, found a fallen branch. The branch was arm-thick, dead oak, brittle. The goblin snapped it against its knee, breaking it into a crude length, and dragged it through the dirt.

The branch left a wide, jagged groove.

Kael's human jaw tightened. The goblin's muscle memory was doing work his own mind couldn't have done. The drag pattern was wrong-footed and heavy, exactly the kind of mark a goblin war-band would leave. They didn't march in formation. They shuffled, they dragged, they broke things as they moved. The goblin-body's body knew how to move like a goblin because it was a goblin.

He sent it wider. The goblin-body churned the mud at the edge of the drainage ditch, its feet stamping deep prints into the soft ground. It broke another branch and dragged that too, the two lengths crossing in a rough V pointing south. A war-band approaching from the south would leave exactly this kind of sign: broken ground, snapped wood, the careless destruction of creatures that didn't know subtlety and didn't care to learn.

The trail was crude. It was also plausible.

Kael's human hands were shaking. He pressed them harder against the stone.

The goblin-body circled back through the treeline, retracing its steps in a wide arc, then withdrew to a dense patch of undergrowth near the base of the oldest oak. It crouched there, its grey-green skin blending with the shadow, its breathing slow. From this position it maintained the trail's origin point. Any scout following the false marks south would find them beginning here, at the edge of the forest, as though the war-band had approached from the drainage ditch rather than the east.

Done. The false trail was set.

Kael's human eyes closed. The goblin's memories surged.

A flash, then. The corrupted forest. Trees with black sap weeping from split bark. The air thick with spores. Something moving wrong in the undergrowth, a shape with too many limbs, a body that unfolded from behind a trunk like it had been waiting. The goblin's fear was a cold spike in Kael's chest, sharp and total, the kind of fear that made the body turn and run without thinking.

Kael's human eyes snapped open. His teeth were bared. His hands had clenched into fists around nothing. The aggression wasn't his. It was the goblin's, surging through the link, flooding his nervous system with a violence without purpose or direction. He ground his teeth until something behind his eyes ached.

The flash passed.

His hands unclenched. His breathing was ragged. He counted. One. Two. Three. Four. Himself. Rat-2. Rat-3. The goblin. Four bodies. He was Kael. He was the one against the wall. The others were extensions. They had to be.

He pushed himself up. His legs were unsteady but held. The wall reinforcement couldn't wait.

---

The eastern wall's inner face was worse than he'd estimated.

Kael's human body knelt at the base of the wall, his fingers finding the cracks in the mortar by touch. The stone was cold and damp. The outer face still looked sound. The Town Council's seasonal repairs kept the visible surface intact. But from below, from the inner face where the foundation met the packed earth of the wall's core, the damage was structural.

His fingers found a gap wide enough to fit three fingers into. The mortar crumbled under his touch, old and water-softened, falling away in chunks the size of his thumbnail. Behind the mortar, the stone itself was rough and pitted. Water had eaten into it.

"Left," he muttered. "Pack left."

He wasn't talking to himself.

Below, through the drainage channel, Rat-3 was already moving. The small female rat had climbed through the maintenance shaft and into the foundation gap from below, her body squeezing through spaces too tight for any human hand. She carried mud, cold, wet, heavy, packed against her fur, her paws working it into the cracks in the stone with a precision that came from Kael's direction guiding her whiskers toward the worst of the damage.

Rat-2 was somewhere above. Kael could feel it on the rooftop near the gate, its small body flat against the tiles, its whiskers reading the wind. A sentinel. Watching for guards, for movement, for anything that might see what he was doing.

Kael's human body hauled stone.

The waste-pit rubble beside the wall provided the material: broken chunks of old mortar, discarded stones from the tannery's crumbling foundations, fragments too small for building but large enough to stack. He carried them one at a time, his raw palms scraping against the rough edges, and pressed them into the wall's inner face. The stones were heavy. His arms trembled under the weight. Each one had to be positioned exactly, wedged into the gap, packed tight.

Below, Rat-3 worked. Mud and debris, packed into cracks by tiny paws. The rat's body was soaked through, its fur dark with wet earth, its claws scraping against stone. Kael could feel the cold seeping through the link. The rat's small body losing heat fast in the wet darkness below. The smell of old mortar and wet earth rose from the foundation gap, mineral and sharp, mixed with the tannery's chemical tang drifting from the yard above.

"More. Hold."

His voice was a rasp. Clipped. The words were commands. Directions. The minimum syllables needed to keep four bodies aligned. His speech was unrecognizable. Mechanical and stripped.

The wall was getting stronger. Marginally.

The foundation crack was wider than he'd thought. Water damage had eaten through mortar and into the stone itself over weeks of neglect. The rats could pack mud from below. His human hands could stack stone from above. But it was temporary. A bandage on a wound that needed surgery. When the war-band hit, the wall would hold or it wouldn't, and the difference might be a matter of hours.

Kael's nose started bleeding again.

A thin, warm trickle. He didn't wipe it. The blood ran down his upper lip and dried, cracking when he breathed. His hands kept working. Stone. Mud. Stone. The rhythm was simple. The effort was not.

Somewhere above, a guard's boot scraped cobblestone. The sound carried in the pre-dawn silence, close, then distant, then close again. A patrol. Kael's human body froze. His hands stopped mid-motion, a chunk of mortar half-pressed into the gap. Rat-3 froze below, her small body pressed flat against the wet stone in the foundation gap. Rat-2 on the rooftop went motionless, its whiskers still.

The boot sounds passed.

Kael exhaled. His breath was ragged. He resumed the work.

Stone. Mud. Stone.

His hands were shaking. His vision blurred at the edges, a grey creeping in from the periphery, the stone in front of him swimming in and out of focus. Four-body overlap was pushing past his established limit. He'd been working for hours. He hadn't eaten. He couldn't remember his last meal, yesterday, the day before. The thought surfaced and was discarded. Irrelevant. The wall wasn't finished.

He stacked another stone. His fingers found the gap. He pressed.

The mortar held.

---

The anonymous warning was the part that could go wrong.

Kael's human body had lowered himself against the wall. His legs had stopped working halfway through. The muscles refused. He slid down the stone until his back was flat, his knees bent, his head tilted against the cold surface. His nose was bleeding freely now. The dried blood on his lip cracked and started fresh. He could taste it, copper-sharp, thick.

He couldn't stop. Not yet.

Rat-2.

The larger rat left the rooftop and dropped to the cobblestones near the eastern watchpost. The movement was silent. Rat claws on stone, the soft pad of feet, the body low and fast. The watchpost was a simple structure: a wooden shelter built against the wall's inner face, with a raised platform where the guard stood watch. A helmet hung from a peg on the shelter's beam.

The guard was there.

Kael could see him through Rat-2's low-angle vision. Boots on cobblestone, the hem of a guard's tabard, the dull gleam of a sword hilt at the man's hip. The guard was young. Too young for the eastern watch. The eastern wall was the quiet post, the one they gave to the newest recruits, because nothing ever happened on the eastern side. Nothing ever happened except cracks in the wall and seasonal water damage.

The guard took off his helmet.

The metallic clatter of it hitting the wooden beam was too loud in the pre-dawn quiet. The guard muttered something, a curse, or just a breath of complaint, and rubbed his head. He turned his back to the shelter, looking out over the cleared ground beyond the wall. The first grey light of dawn was touching the horizon.

Rat-2 moved.

The rat climbed the wall's inner face, finding purchase in the same cracks Kael had been packing with mud hours ago. Its claws scraped stone, almost inaudible, a whisper of sound that the guard's own breathing covered. The rat reached the shelter's beam. The helmet sat there, upside down, the rim catching the first grey light.

Rat-2 kicked it.

The helmet fell. It hit the cobblestones with a sound like a bell, a flat, ringing clang that echoed off the wall and rolled across the cleared ground. Too loud. Far too loud.

The guard spun. His hand went to his sword. His eyes scanned the ground, the shelter, the wall.

"Gods damn—"

He didn't finish. He was looking at the helmet. Then he was looking at the wall. Then he was looking at the ground around the shelter, searching for whatever had knocked it down.

Rat-2 was already on the ground. It paused at the base of the wall, its small body still, its whiskers trembling. Then it ran.

It ran at a steady, deliberate pace toward the south, toward the drainage ditch, toward the false trail the goblin-body had created six hours ago. Every few paces it stopped. Turned. Looked back at the guard.

Waiting.

The guard's boots scraped cobblestone. He'd stepped forward. His hand was still on his sword. He was watching the rat.

Kael, through Rat-2's eyes from ground level and his own failing vision from the wall where his body was slumped, watched the guard's face. The man was confused. A rat. In the pre-dawn. Acting like no rat he'd ever seen, stopping, looking back, running a few more paces, stopping again.

The guard's hand tightened on his sword. Then loosened.

Then he followed.

---

The plan clicked into place.

Kael felt it. The guard's boots on cobblestone, following the rat south toward the drainage ditch, toward the false trail. Rat-2 led him at exactly the right pace: fast enough to seem purposeful, slow enough to seem like an animal curious about a follower rather than a creature with a destination. The rat stopped at the edge of the drainage ditch, its body turned toward the broken ground, the dragged branches, the stamped mud.

The guard stopped behind it.

Kael watched through Rat-2's eyes as the guard's gaze swept the scene. The broken branches. The V-pattern in the mud. The deep footprints stamping south. The trail that said: something came this way. Something large. Something with many feet.

The guard's face changed.

The confusion drained out. The colour left his cheeks. His hand went to his sword and stayed there.

He turned and ran back toward the watchpost.

Kael's human body was sliding down the wall.

The effort of holding four bodies through this final push, the false trail, the reinforcement, the warning, was the last straw. His vision went white at the edges. His knees buckled. His back scraped the stone as he went down, his head lolling, his hands falling open in his lap.

The rat continued without him.

Rat-2 darted from the drainage ditch back toward the eastern gate, disappearing into the shadows under the wall. The guard didn't see it go. The guard was at the watchpost, pulling the alarm rope, his mouth open, shouting something Kael couldn't hear from here, or maybe he could, maybe it was the goblin's hearing, distant and wrong, the sound arriving late and distorted.

Kael's own breathing was shallow. Each breath pulled at his chest. The stone against his back was cold. The dried blood on his lip cracked when his jaw moved. His hands wouldn't stop trembling, micro-muscle spasms, the fingers curling and uncurling in small, involuntary jerks.

He counted.

One. Himself. Against the wall. The worst of the four. Dehydrated. Bleeding. Running on nothing.

Two. Rat-2. Near the eastern gate, the guard having followed the false trail. Moving back to position.

Three. Rat-3. In the sewer below, returned to the eastern district monitoring point. Small. Wet. Alive.

Four. The goblin. Withdrawn to the treeline cover near the false trail's origin point. Maintaining the fiction.

Four bodies. One mind. Not enough. But it's what he had.

He touched the back of his left hand. The bite scar. His thumb found the ridge of raised flesh automatically, the gesture so familiar it was almost unconscious. He couldn't remember when it had started meaning something. The first rat. The first connection. The first time he'd understood that the mark on his hand was a door.

For one disorienting second, he didn't know which body he was.

The thought arrived without warning. A flash of vertigo. The wall wasn't there, he was in the treeline, the sewer, the rooftop, all at once, the names blurring and the faces blurred.

He was Kael.

He was the one against the wall.

The vertigo passed. His breathing steadied. His hands kept trembling, they wouldn't stop, but the world was singular again. One body. One perspective. The cold stone against his back. The copper taste of dried blood. Beyond the alley, the tannery's morning steam.

A normal morning. The town was waking.

Then the alarm horn.

It came from the eastern gate. A single, sharp blast that cut through the tannery sounds and the morning steam and the grey pre-dawn air. The guard had found the trail. The warning was spreading.

Kael closed his eyes.

The alarm horn sounded again. Two blasts this time. Closer.

Kael's lips moved. No sound came out. He was counting again. Four. Still four. The network hummed at the edge of his awareness, four bodies in four places, each one a thread of himself stretched thin across the town. The goblin's fear murmured in the back of his mind. The rats' small, bright alertness. His own body's failure.

He opened his eyes. The alley was bright now. Morning light over the tannery roof. The foreman's voice was closer. Someone would come to the waste-pit soon. Someone would find him here, slumped against the wall, bleeding, shaking, and they would ask questions he couldn't answer.

He pushed himself up. His arms shook. His legs shook. Everything shook. But he stood.

The alarm horn sounded a third time.

Kael started walking.