Chương 140: Chapter 137. The First Mission - Part II

By the time the others reached him, Adom had the surrendered men kneeling in a loose row with their hands behind their heads, which had taken less arranging than he'd expected; most of them had assumed the position on their own initiative the moment the Northking went into the trees, and the rest had followed before he'd had to ask twice. Sam came over the lip of the rise first, breathing hard, his glasses fogged at the edges and his hood thrown back.

Karion was a step behind him, and Damus a few steps behind Karion, picking his way down the slope. Karion stopped at the edge of the kneeling row, took in the flattened tents, the scoured ground, the long furrow through the trees where the Northking had gone, and the bark stripped six feet up the trunk of an old pine. He put a hand over his heart.

"You know," he said, "this really hurts my feelings." Adom looked at him. Five years had done a great deal to Karion Dimitri. He'd grown into his shoulders, mostly, and somewhere in the last stretch he had decided to cultivate a mustache, which was at present less a mustache than a rumor of one, thin, uneven and patchier on the left than the right.

He had caught Adom looking at it more than once over the past weeks and had each time launched, unprompted, into a defense of it: that it would come in fully if simply given the chance, that a man could not arrive at the destination without passing through the awkward country in between, and that the only failure was the failure to commit. He committed to it daily, with great visible dignity.

"This was supposed to be ours," Karion went on, gesturing at the wreckage as though presenting evidence in a trial.

"You and me. Rivals for life. We were going to grow stronger together, push each other, trade the top spot back and forth for decades until we were two grizzled old legends who could only really talk to each other because no one else understood what we'd been through." He let his hand fall.

"And instead you do this to an entire camp, before any of us even cleared the pass. Where is the journey, Adom? Where is the struggle?" Sam, still catching his breath, started laughing.

"I think," he managed, "you might have been the only one in that rivalry." Karion turned to him with great wounded dignity. Then the dignity collapsed, by degrees, into something more honest.

"... Yeah," he admitted.

"Yeah, probably." Damus reached the bottom of the slope last. He did not look at Karion or Sam. He walked the length of the kneeling row once, counting, then took in the furrow through the trees and the unconscious shape at the end of it. He stood there a moment.

"Good job," he said. From Damus, that was roughly a parade and a medal.

"Thank you," Adom said. Sam straightened up a little, cleared his throat, and shifted into a different register entirely.

"So, uh. Magus Sylla." He began.

"With the camp secured, how would you like us to proceed regarding the prisoners and the, ah, the high-value target? Per protocol, I'd recommend we—" Adom looked at him. He did not say anything. He simply looked at him, both eyebrows raised a fraction, letting the silence do its best impression of really?

"What?" Sam said.

"Just because we're friends doesn't mean we should be casual during a mission. There's a difference between personal and professional conduct. Field Conduct Statute Twelve, Subsection Four, on the maintenance of command hierarchy in active operations, is actually very clear that the integrity of a chain of command depends on its consistent observ—""Booooring," Karion announced, already walking toward the tree line.

"Let's go look at the Northking."

"Right," Sam said, switching tracks.

"I'll keep watch on the prisoners, then. And the, ah—" he glanced at the scattered shapes Adom had left across the camp, several of them only beginning to stir in the snow, "—the others." He stepped in front of the kneeling row and stood up as straight as he could manage, which put him roughly at eye level with the men whose backs were straight even on their knees.

"Please don't move," he said. Then, a little less certainly, "I mean it. Stay where you are. It'll be easier for everyone." None of them answered. They watched Sam in a flat, level silence, eyes tracking him without anything behind them that could be called fear.

They were older than the four of them by a decade at least, weathered men with the sort of stillness that did not come from calm but from practice, and who were, even now, taking the measure of the boy in front of them and counting the seconds it would cost. Whatever else they were, they had killed before. It was in the way they held the quiet. So Adom stepped up beside Sam.

"Lethal methods aren't my preference," he said.

"I'd rather take all of you back breathing. But I want to be clear that the preference is mine to set aside, and I'll set it aside without much trouble if any of you decides to test how the afternoon goes. So comply, sit still, and don't get clever. We'll all have a better day for it." Adom had not quite finished the sentence before Karion made a sound. It started as a cough, an unconvincing one, and went downhill from there. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth while his shoulders shook once, then again.

So naturally, Adom turned and looked at him.

"Sorry. Sorry." Karion got most of it back under control, waving his free hand in apology.

"It's just... that was a little edgy, no? Test how the afternoon goes. You said that out loud to real people." As Adom kept staring at him, Karion cleared his throat and assembled his face into something more solemn, which lasted about a second.

"It was very cool. That's the problem. It was too cool."

"You're embarrassing me in front of the prisoners," Adom said.

"I mean, they already fear you," Karion said.

"Look at them. On their knees. Hands behind their heads. That's all you." Adom looked at Damus.

"Kind of, yes," Damus said. He looked at Sam.

"... It was a good speech," Sam offered.

"Maybe a little edgy. But coming from a stranger I think it lands fine." The soldiers had watched the entire exchange without a flicker, and Adom finally sighed.

"Please don't move," he told them, and left it there. He started toward the tree line with Damus and Karion falling in beside him. Sam stayed with the row. The man they were calling the Northking had gotten one gauntlet braced in the red snow and was trying to get back up, though it was not going well. He made it partway to a knee, swayed, and stayed there. Damus stopped a few paces off and looked down at him.

"Mervyn Ravencroft," he said.

"Fourth son of the Farmusian House of Ravencroft. They call you the Northking. Anti-mana specialist, which we've now seen firsthand, decorated in the border campaigns nine years ago, and quiet ever since." He let that sit a moment.

"Our people flagged movement matching your profile three weeks ago, eight days inside a border you've no business crossing. Command didn't quite believe it was you. That's half of why we came all this way." This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Ravencroft lifted his head enough to look at him, and said nothing. Adom crouched to the man's level.

"You're a fourth son of a great house," he said.

"Decorated. You've got better things to do than freeze in a valley this far past where you're allowed to be. So I'll ask plainly. What are you doing here?" Ravencroft looked at him for a moment. Then he turned his head and spat into the snow.

"Go fuck yourself," he said, the words shoved out thick and flat through the Farmusian accent. Adom sighed, and stood up out of the crouch.

"Leave him," Damus said.

"It's fine. We take him back to Arkhos and they get their answers there. People who do this kind of questioning for a living. That's not us."

"He's right," Karion said.

"This is above our pay. We bag him, we bring him in, we let the serious people frown at him in a stone room." It was reasonable. Adom knew that, but still, he did not move toward agreeing with it. The problem was that none of this had happened before. In his first life, the Farmus border had stayed quiet for years past this point, and there had been no Ravencroft on Sundarian soil, not this early, not at this age. But Adom knew the name. Everyone would, in time.

Mervyn Ravencroft was going to become the man they called the Horseman of Calamity. He rode a white horse, and where the white horse went, the reports followed. Villages put to the sword down to the infants. Women and non-combatant men handed to his men as a matter of policy and what was left of them thrown in the wells so the survivors would have nothing clean to drink. Prisoners flayed and staked along the roads as markers, alive when it started.

He took children from the border towns and sent the small bodies back to break the will of the parents who were still fighting, and in one campaign he burned a packed temple full of people who had surrendered, with the doors barred, because surrender had not come quickly enough to suit him. He had not done any of it yet. Right now he was a wounded fourth son face-down in the snow, decades from the name.

But Adom knew exactly where the road went, and finding the man this far ahead of schedule, in the wrong country, at the head of a camp that had no business existing, left him deeply uneasy. If Ravencroft was here, something was wrong. Adom could not yet see the shape of it, and that was the part that worried him. Hand the man to Arkhos, walk away clean, and they might walk right past the one thread that mattered. So he took Ravencroft by the collar.

The man came up off the snow with a shout, the wound in his side pulling, and started cursing in earnest, demanding to be put down, to be released, that they had no right. Adom dragged him across the scoured ground without much ceremony and set him down — not gently — in front of the kneeling row, where his own soldiers could see him.

"All right," Adom said. He was not playing now, and it carried.

"Why are you here? A full camp. Supply line. Anti-mana gear. Eight days inside Sundar with a Ravencroft at the head of it. That isn't a patrol that wandered. Somebody planned this. So somebody here can tell me what it was for." Unsurprisingly, no one spoke. The men in the row kept their eyes forward, and a few of them flicked, just once, toward Ravencroft, who was glaring down the line with a look that promised consequences.

He started saying something low in Farmusian, fast, the cadence of a threat, and Adom watched two of the kneeling men close up like doors. He let him get through it once, then he raised two fingers and cast [Zip]. The spell was a recent acquisition and, privately, one of his favorites. It did exactly one thing, and it did it cleanly: Ravencroft's mouth pulled shut and stayed shut, lips sealed as though they'd never been anything else. The man's eyes went wide.

The threat became a series of muffled sounds behind his own teeth, which was a substantial improvement.

"Farmus has no authority here," Adom told the row, calm again.

"None. Whatever he's promising you, he can't deliver it on this side of the border, and he certainly can't deliver it from a cell. Here's what I can tell you for certain. Whether you talk now or not, we're going to find out what this was. That part isn't in question. The only thing your silence changes is how the people who judge you decide to feel about it; and they tend to feel a great deal more generously about men who cooperated when they were given the chance than men who made everyone work for it."

Karion crouched down companionably at the end of the row, as though letting them in on something.

"You heard about the new place?" he said.

"Sundar's building it right now. Middle of the Thousand Seas, nothing around it for a few hundred miles in any direction. No walls to climb, because where would you go? They say a man could spend the whole rest of his life out there and never see another face he didn't already hate." He let it land.

"Be a shame to earn a spot there over loyalty to a man who isn't going to remember your name by spring." Still nothing. Adom drew a breath to wrap it up. He'd half-decided already: bind them, march them, sort it in Arkhos and hope the thread held. Then a small voice came from off to the side, rough at every joint.

"... Maybe I know." They all turned. A goblin stood a little way off, half behind a broken crate, hood pulled tight, both hands wringing the hem of his own ragged sleeve. He had crept out of the dome Adom had left over him and come closer, and now that everyone was looking at him he seemed to deeply regret the decision, shrinking into his own shoulders. Ravencroft saw it.

Something changed in his eyes, and he lunged against Adom's grip, sealed mouth and wound and all, one arm swinging for the small green shape with sudden murderous purpose. But Damus's hand was already up. The gravity spell took Ravencroft at the shoulders and put him flat into the snow, pinned, the weight of it holding him there so completely that only his fingers moved. Damus kept his hand raised and did not look especially troubled. The goblin had flinched back at the lunge, both arms thrown up over his head.

When nothing came, he lowered them, one at a time.

"I speak," he said, taking a shy step forward, but the shyness was on the surface; underneath it his eyes had fixed on Ravencroft, pinned in the snow, and stayed there.

"They take poor me from forest. Many days they keep me. They beat. They make me carry, make me dig, and when I am slow—" he touched two fingers to a crusted mark above his eye, "—this. The big angry men do not whisper away from a goblin. They think I am nothing. But I have ears, and eyes." He came another step closer, watching the sealed, helpless face of the man who had owned him a few minutes ago.

"I know what camp is for," he said.

"I tell you. I tell you everything, good masters." Adom straightened a little and met the goblin's eyes.

"Come here," he said.

"You're safe now. He can't reach you, and no one else here will lay a hand on you. You have my word." The goblin came, a step at a time, giving Ravencroft a wide berth even pinned and helpless as he was. Up close he was smaller than he'd looked, and the mark above his eye was older than today.

"They have a thing," he said.

"They carry it with them. Always covered. Always guarded. Two men awake on it through the night, every night, even when there is no danger anywhere." He wrung the sleeve.

"I do not know what it is for. I do not know what it does. But I hear them speak of it, when they think no one with ears is near." He looked up at Adom.

"They call it the weapon." Something went cold and quiet in Adom's chest.

"The weapon," Adom repeated.

"Yes. Just so. The weapon."

"Where is it?" The goblin turned and lifted one thin arm toward the far end of the camp, past the broken supply line, to where the picket horses still stamped and shifted in the snow. There was a tent there. A single one, set apart from the rest, and Adom saw now what he had not had reason to notice before: while everything around it had been flattened or scorched or thrown into the storm by the fight, that tent stood untouched. Not a guy-line out of place. The chaos had gone around it.

"There," the goblin said.

"In the tent that the fighting did not reach."

"I'll go and see." Adom straightened.

"Thank you. You've done well." He paused, realizing he didn't have it.

"What's your name?" The goblin drew himself up as much as a goblin could, with a small flicker of dignity surfacing through the fear.

"Grik son of Grull, of the Hollow-Under-Stone," he said.

"But the camp calls me only goblin."

"Then thank you, Grik son of Grull." Adom said, and saw a small shift it made in the creature's posture.

"Stay near Sam. You'll be safe with him." He turned to the others.

"Keep watch on all of them. I won't be long." Then he walked toward the far tent, and somewhere on the way his heart had begun to beat a little harder than the morning's work could account for. He did not have a name for what was waiting in there. He had a guess, and the guess was bad enough that he was already hoping to be wrong about it. The horses grew restless as he approached.

He could feel the spellwork on the tent from several paces out, layered thick, far more than a camp this size should have been carrying: wards stacked on wards, anchoring runes worked into the very canvas, the sort of protective lattice you put around something you could not afford to lose under any circumstances. Someone had spent a great deal on keeping this hidden and intact. Adom raised one hand and snapped his fingers in a [Dispel] spell. The whole structure came apart at once.

Every ward, every rune, every careful layer let go in the same instant, with a sound like a sheet of glass dropped onto stone. The runes worked into the canvas dimmed and went dead. Then he pushed the flap aside and stepped into the dark. It took his eyes a moment. The tent was unlit, the storm-light barely reaching past the entrance, and at first there was only shape and shadow. Then he found it, set on a low stand in the center, draped in heavy black cloth that should have hidden it completely.

But it was not hidden. Through the cloth, something was glowing in a faint and steady manner, throwing its dull light against the inside of the fabric from somewhere underneath. Adom crossed to it, took hold of the cloth, and pulled it down. The sphere underneath was the size of a cart, smooth and seamless, its surface threaded through with channels of slow-moving light that pulsed somewhere deep below the shell. He knew it on sight.

He had spent a good part of his first life learning exactly what it was and what it did, and learning, far too late, what it cost. Dragon's Breath. A prototype, by the look of the unfinished seam-work along the lower hemisphere, and inert for now, the core light banked and dim rather than live. But the build was sound. Most of the hard part was done. Whoever had made this had been very close to finishing it, and had left very little between this state and a working one. Adom let out a small nervous laugh.

"Fucking hell," he said, to the empty tent.