Chương 140: How to Get Through a Wall

His communicator buzzed again in his coat pocket. Ant looked at it a second before pulling it out. His clan didn't call him mid-trip. They knew where he was, knew what he was doing, and knew better than to interrupt it unless something was actually wrong. He answered anyway, because that was exactly the point.

"Ant." Natalia's voice came through steady, no wasted breath on a greeting.

"We just heard back from the recon team. Marigolds have called every patrol home. They're building defensive structures around their main HQ. Walls, turrets, the lot. And we're seeing teams from at least two of their other sites moving in to reinforce it."

"How sure are we that's what it is."

"Sure enough. Nobody digs in like that for no reason." A pause, not for effect, just her actually thinking it through before she said it.

"The only read I've got right now is they're waiting for us."

"Numbers?"

"Recon's still counting. What we know for certain is it's more than we saw the night Grant's people ambushed Raven's patrol, and none of it's moving toward us. Every last body they've got is pulling inward." She let that sit a second.

"They know we're coming eventually. This tells me they've decided eventually is close." Ant stood in the middle of the road with the communicator pressed to his ear and said nothing for long enough that Mahkir's ears turned toward him. Just over a year ago he'd formed the clan with nothing but Mahkir and a handful of people willing to bet on both of them.

Now a woman he trusted with his life was on the other end of a line telling him a clan was fortifying against him personally, and the only thing he could think about was whether a week was enough time or too much. Standing here won't change it, Mahkir said. Whatever the number is, it's the number.

"I know."

"Ant?" Natalia again.

"Tell the clan they've got another week." He was already moving, waving Mahkir toward the road out of town.

"I'm heading back now. Five hours to Coldwoof, then a portal home from there."

"Understood." A breath, and then, further from the mic, not quite hidden: Kalsar's voice, low and satisfied. Told you the boy was ready.

"Ok," Natalia said, her voice back to its normal volume, giving no sign she'd heard it at all.

"Speak soon." The line went dead. Ant put the communicator away and didn't say anything about what he'd just heard Kalsar say, mostly because he didn't know what he'd say if he tried. A week, Mahkir said, once they were moving again. You picked that number fast.

"Somebody had to pick one." I'm not arguing the number. I'm asking if it was the right one, or just the first one that came to you. Ant didn't answer that straight away. A week gave the clan time to gear up and rest, but Marigolds would use every one of those seven days to dig in deeper behind their own walls. Every day he waited made the walls harder to get through, not easier. He didn't know if that trade was worth it. He wouldn't know until he'd actually seen the place for himself.

"Ask me again once I've had eyes on it." The ride back was long enough to think in, which wasn't always a mercy. He was Level 17 now. Mahkir was Level 10, at the actual peak for him as a Common-grade Kithren, and no amount of further training was going to improve on that. He'd wanted the evolution sorted before Marigolds forced his hand. He hadn't got it. What he had instead was a book with a page torn deliberately out of it, a gem that threw an error instead of a number, and questions he had no way to answer.

He pulled the book out of storage without really deciding to and let it sit on his knee as the carriage rocked. He hadn't read past the torn page, hadn't been able to, not until he had time to sit with the rest of it properly, and there'd been no time for that since. Now there was even less. But the book wasn't going anywhere. Whatever was in it would still be in it once this was done.

You're not going to read it now, Mahkir said, from where he lay stretched across the opposite bench, eyes half-shut and not remotely asleep.

"No." Good. You'll fall out of the carriage.

"I've read in worse conditions than this." You've also fallen out of worse carriages than this. Doesn't mean I want to watch it happen twice. Ant put the book away instead of arguing the point. He was more tired than he'd let himself notice until right then.

He watched the tree line go by for a while, the light dropping fast now that they were well clear of any city, and let himself think about the gem instead: the drift of orange inside it, indifferent to which way he'd turned it, and the flat little error it had thrown at him with no explanation offered alongside it.

"Two somethings," he said, half under his breath. You said that already, Mahkir said. In the cave. It wasn't cleverer the second time. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"I wasn't going for clever." Good. You'd have missed. The walls of Coldwoof came up out of the dusk sooner than Ant expected, torchlight already lit along the gate, and two figures stood waiting at it. Thomas, hands shoved in his coat pockets against the cold. And beside him, smaller, seventeen and only just past her own ceremony, arms wrapped around herself, Rikku, the dog-sized toad planted at her side not moving at all. Ant climbed down before the carriage had fully stopped.

"Thomas. What's wrong?"

"Nothing." It came too fast to be true.

"I'm coming with you. To look at what they've put up. Might be able to find a way around it, or at least take some of the sting out."

"And you?" Ant looked at Rikku, who still hadn't lifted her eyes past his boots.

"Maren asked me to wait for you, sir. Said I'm to come through the portal with you." She said it to the ground.

"It's Ant. None of the 'sir.'"" Yes, sir." She was already turning, already walking back through the gate toward the portal, and Ant let her go rather than push it a second time. The three of them went through the gate without much said between them, Mahkir a step behind Rikku the entire crossing, keeping himself between her and the open yard. HQ didn't look like the place he'd left.

People moved through the courtyard at a pace he hadn't seen since the Shell Razor war, weapons and fresh-forged armor laid out in rows across the stone with no thought given to where any of it would live once this was over, speed prioritized over storage, every rack and table given over to getting people equipped fast rather than equipped tidy. Hazel had clearly not slept.

Somewhere off past the stables Duncan's voice carried over everything else, counting cadence for a drill line loud enough to be heard three buildings over. How long had he actually been gone, chasing Mahkir's evolution through a mountain that had taken nothing but time and given him back two riddles? Long enough for this. That was the only answer he had.

Ant went straight in, Thomas beside him, Rikku and Mahkir trailing a few paces back, and by the time he reached the briefing room the rest of the leadership had already filled it. The digital screens along the far wall showed Marigolds' HQ from three angles at once: an aerial sweep, courtesy of Raven's osprey circling somewhere overhead, and two ground-level passes moving slowly along the new wall line. It was strange seeing it broken down into angles and measurements. Until a few months ago that had been home.

Ethan's home, not his. But he still remembered walking those same halls, no matter whose name had been on the chip at the time.

"What do you think?" Ant asked Thomas first, before anyone else could start.

"Because right now this is pointless if we can't get past the wall." Thomas studied the images without answering straight away, the same careful pause he always gave a structure once it was actually in front of him instead of a hypothetical.

"Everything's got a weakness. Here." He pointed to a narrow drain cut into the base of one wall section.

"That's naturally the soft point. But look at the turrets ringing it. They know it too. They've already covered it."

"So that's out," Kalsar said.

"That's out." Thomas kept scanning.

"Well, possible, maybe, if we wanted to fight our way up to it in the open, which we don't. There's a better one." His finger moved to a low building built flush against the inside of the wall, close enough that its roofline and the top of the wall nearly touched.

"I don't see anything," Kalsar said.

"Looks the same as the rest to me."

"The house." Thomas said it plainly, sounding faintly surprised he had to.

"They've built it right up against the wall."

"So?" Maren, arms folded, already out of patience with the pace of the explanation.

"It's still behind the wall. That doesn't get us in."

"It does if the wall isn't there anymore." Thomas exhaled, gathering the explanation before he gave it, the same pause he always took before laying out something he understood completely and knew the room didn't yet.

"We've still got the mineral we pulled from the Shell Razor stores. The one that lined Ant's cell. Blocked the bond while he was in there."

"Hushstone," Maren said automatically.

"Hushstone. Useless for almost everything, which is why nobody bothers with it. Except it's got one property builders learn to avoid: extreme heat sets off a reaction in it, and ambient warmth won't do that. Ant spent days in a cell lined with the stuff and it never so much as got warm." Thomas tapped the screen.

"A hearth won't touch it. A cookfire won't touch it. It takes real, sustained fire against it, which means somebody has to put it there on purpose."

"Cindermaw, then," Kalsar said.

"Or Hazel's Vulcan. Maybe even Mahkir, if we're desperate enough to risk it."

"Any of them would do it," Thomas said.

"Once the heat's enough, the reaction starts, and it doesn't stop once it's started. Releases a gas. Doesn't matter if the fire's put out after."

"And the gas just sits there," Kalsar said.

"Building."

"Building, in a sealed space, with nowhere to go. Given long enough, it goes up all at once." Thomas traced a finger along where the house's roofline met the wall.

"And because they built it flush against the wall instead of a few feet clear of it, the house and the wall are sharing timber and stone right at the join. When that pressure finally has to go somewhere, it's not going to punch through its own roof. It's going to take the weakest connected structure with it, and that's the wall. They put that house against the wall for us. That's our way in."

"Why not just put it straight on the wall?" Ant asked.

"Isn't that simpler?"

"Simpler, but obvious. Someone spreads powder across a wall in the open, guards are going to walk over and look closer at it, whatever it is. But if we grind it fine and scatter it over the house at night, from the air, they'll either miss it entirely or, if anyone does spot it, they'll write it off as us aiming for the wall and missing." He shrugged, one shoulder, almost apologetic about how neat it was.

"I'm no tactician. That's just how I'd read it if I were them."

"And you call yourself not a tactician," Kalsar said, and clapped him hard enough on the back that Thomas stumbled a half step forward.

"It's the only plan we've got," Thomas said, recovering.

"How long to grind the mineral fine enough to scatter, and how much do we actually have," Maren said, already writing before anyone answered.

"I want real numbers before you say 'a day or two' and mean four."

"A day. Maybe less, if Hazel lets me near her tools instead of standing over every one of them herself."

"They might as well be," Kalsar said, and nobody in the room disagreed. Natalia, who'd said nothing since Ant walked in, spoke now, arms folded, watching the screen rather than the room.

"And if they've thought of this too. Hushstone's not exactly a secret material."

"Then it doesn't work and we're no worse off than we were an hour ago," Thomas said.

"But nobody builds a house flush against their own defensive wall unless they've stopped thinking of it as a weakness. People stop seeing the thing they live next to every day. That's not a guess about the mineral. That's a guess about people." Nobody had an answer for that. Ant gave it a few seconds, then moved on.

"How many can we get in the air without being seen."

"Two, maybe three," Natalia said, arms still folded.

"Any more than that and we're relying on luck instead of a plan."

"Then two, maybe three." Ant took one more look at the screens, the wall, the house, the drain they weren't going to use, then let out a breath through his nose.

"I didn't follow half of what you just said, Thomas. But when it comes to walls, I trust you over anyone else in this room."

"Just walls?" Thomas said, and for once there was something close to a grin under it.

"Don't push it." Ant looked around the room, at every face turned toward him, waiting on the word he was about to give whether he felt ready to give it or not.

"Do it."