Book 3 Chapter 13: Blood Covered Muzzle
It wasn’t difficult to see what had happened. A group in the woods that looked so rough, he didn’t have any personal experience with their like, but he could tell that they were of a kind with him. Bandits though, rather than thieves. A distinction that was only to indicate that one group struck from shadows in the woods, and another from shadows in an alley. Same god as far as he knew, though he had a feeling the god of thieves favored those of Dantes’s ilk more, it was in the name after all. From what he could tell from above, the bandits had somehow captured Musk’s partner, the she-wolf they’d always seen him with, and were using threats to her life to control him.
The bandit camp was well kept, and the men and women in it seemed to be full and content. That meant that they’d been at least moderately successful in leveraging Murk for their uses. Dantes imagined that having any travelers surrounded by packs of wolves as they robbed them made things much easier.
Dantes sent out his senses across the woods, and very quickly located nearly twenty large cousins of Murk's prowling the forest nearby. He could feel frustration and annoyance emanating from them, but they didn’t take kindly to his attention so he withdrew it. As he did so, he could feel Murk’s attention briefly cross his own.
Murk sat up a bit more alertly and looked directly at the sky where Dantes and Jacopo were circling. He didn’t make any moves, but Dantes could feel a kind of pleading from him. He assumed that hurt his pride a bit.
Dantes clenched his beak. Murk was an asshole, and he didn’t give much of a shit about what might happen to him. He even knew that Murk had been aware of when he’d lost his hand and chosen not to come and help. He did not appreciate that his choices in the matter had been so limited. Still, he couldn’t always have complete agency over everything he did. The mortal plane wasn’t so fair as that, and with the game the gods seemed to playing with his life and everyone else's in the background, maybe there was no such thing.
He did a headcount of the bandits and noted at least twenty seven of them that were outside, and maybe ten more scattered throughout the tents and other ramshackle structures. He could probably take them on directly, but it would be risky so far from the terrain he was used to and without the same resources to call on. It would make more sense to play things cautiously.
He sent Jacopo the details of his plan, and they separated, with Jacopo landing within the camp and assuming his usual form to start sneaking his way toward Murk’s she-wolf companion.
Dantes landed in the darkest corner of the makeshift fence that they’d created, and shifted into himself as well. He pulled Tel’s finger from his jacket, smiling a bit as he thought of how amused Tel might have been about starting a fire in a bandit camp. He sent his will through the finger and a small flame appeared at its tip. Dantes ran the finger around the fence until it started to catch. Once that was done he shifted into rat form and started a fire at the edge of a small tent, and then a third one near a pile of wood that was under a tarp. All three fires were in the same corner of the camp, and they quickly started to spread. Dantes shifted back into a pigeon and landed on top of a tent to watch what happened next.
It took a good amount of time for the bandits to realize what was happening. They may have thought the smoke came from their other fires, or they were simply not very attentive. By the time the first of them had realized what was happening, that entire edge of their camp was ablaze.