"The Goat and the Wolf"

Tom knelt to Sary's height. The mist was at his shins now, climbing, indifferent to him in a way that felt almost insulting.

"Listen. You run ahead. You scream for Mama Yves loud as you've got — her name, not mine. You tell her the brother's at the second door. Then you drop flat behind the table and you do not move, not for me, not for her, not for God. Understood?"

The girl's one good eye searched his face. "What about you."

"I'll be the second sound. The one he isn't listening for." He cut the hunter's cord from her wrist with the cutlass — a single short stroke, the knot falling away — and folded it into his own palm. The fine cord was warm from her skin. He felt the weight of it. A hunter's tool. A useful weight.

"Go."

She went. Bare feet on stone, fast and silent until the chamber doorway, and then her voice tore the dark — "Mama, Mama, the brother, the second door!" — shrill and ragged and entirely real.

Tom went after her low, hugging the wall, breathing through his teeth. The mist came with him. It did not part for him the way it had parted for the hunter on the dune, but neither did it climb him. It moved past, indifferent, hunting its own scent forward.

From the chamber: a man's voice cursing, sharp. The scrape of a curved blade on stone. Mama Yves answering in a tongue that was none of the three Tom knew, low and fast and final.

Tom reached the chamber's inner doorway and pressed flat against the carved frame. He could see the brother's back. Broad. Turned the wrong way — toward Mama Yves, toward the screaming child, away from him. The cord was in Tom's left hand. The cutlass in his right.

A hunter's tool. Used as a hunter would use it.