Chapter 2: The Battle's End and the Man in White
The fight at the obelisk ends, the raiders' marks are read, and a figure in white arrives to set the six on a path.
Chapter 2: The Battle's End and the Man in White
The last of the small raiders had fallen, and only the two big ones were still on their feet: the wolfman, and the tusked warleader who had brought the whole pack down on the obelisk in the first place.
Alara took the wolfman. She had been watching him the way she watched everything, patient and a little cold, and when the gap in his guard finally opened she did not rush it. One step inside the reach of his claws. One hard strike to the soft point beneath the ear, where the jaw hinges on the skull. The wolfman's legs forgot what they were for, and he was dead before he had finished falling — and Alara had already turned away, looking for the next thing that wanted doing.
The warleader did not die so cleanly. He stood a head and shoulders above anything else on the field, slab-muscled, swinging a spiked mace that had done for better-armed men than these, and the wounds the six had already opened in him only seemed to make him meaner. They closed on him together, because there was nothing else left to do. Magmaw kept the fire on him — a low, stubborn burn that caught in his hide and would not be beaten out, until the warleader was fighting inside a private weather of his own smoke. Darian called the angles of it, and somehow the calling put an edge on every blade and every spell, so that they all bit a little deeper than they should have.
Cornered, the thing threw back its head and bayed — a sound with weight in it, a sound they felt behind their teeth — and for one bad moment the fear of it got into them, and its hide turned their worst blows aside. The moment passed. They pushed in through it, and the roar bought the warleader nothing but a little more time. Barney finished him: met the charge head-on, set his sword up into the great body as it came down, and let the creature's own weight do the rest, so that it all but tore itself open on the blade and went over backwards into the dark. When it landed, it stayed down.
And then it was quiet — the strange, too-sudden quiet that comes after a fight, with the noise of it still ringing in ears that no longer need to flinch. The six of them stood in that silence and breathed. An hour ago they had been strangers, and some of them still did not have each other's names. Magmaw was bleeding freely from a long gash down one arm and seemed not to have noticed. Somebody laughed, once — the way people laugh when the other choice is to think too hard about how close it had been. They had come here chasing a dream, and instead they had put a whole warband in the grass, and lived, and done it shoulder to shoulder with strangers.
Reading the Dead
It was Tar who started in on the bodies — old habit, and somebody had to. He did not expect much, and the dead did not give him much; these had gone hungry under their leathers, and carried less than most. But three or four corpses in, he stopped, tilted a shoulder toward the last of the light, and found the mark.
Once he knew to look for it, it was on all of them: three short lines crossed over one another in red, crude as something scratched on a wall, daubed on rather than stitched or branded. It was the sign of Nikros — god of death and war, whose name the politer quarters of the Vale would rather not say over dinner. Why a war-god's mark should ride this far north on the backs of starving raiders out of the Ashlands, none of them could yet say.
The maps were Darian's to read. One of the dead had been carrying a sheaf of them, the same stretch of country drawn and drawn again in more than one hand. Laid side by side, they did not add up to a single gang working a single road. They added up to a search — many parties, the same routes copied between them, spread to cover ground rather than to rob it, every line bending back the same way: south, toward the Ashlands. Whatever these people were after, they wanted it badly enough to comb half the Vale for it, and they were not doing it alone. Somebody, somewhere, was sending them out in numbers.
Out of the Cloud
They were still bent over the maps when the air beside the obelisk began to gather. A wisp of cloud formed where there had been nothing, low and pale against the dusk, and a figure stepped out of it as though through a door only he could see. He was tall, in a white overcoat. He was bald, in a way that looked chosen rather than suffered. He leaned on a cane whose tip never quite met the grass, and he was smiling, and the smile did not entirely set them at ease.
"Oroboros, gentlemen and lady." The word meant nothing to any of them, and he saw that it meant nothing. "A greeting, from where I am from. It is nice to meet you all."
For a moment nobody answered. Then Barney, who had no use for cloud and ceremony, said it plainly.
"Explain yourself."
"I am assembling a team." The stranger offered it as though it were a whole answer, and seemed mildly puzzled that it landed as anything less.
His name, when they pressed him for one, was Dalfon. The dream had been his doing — he admitted it without embarrassment, almost with warmth. They would remember the green ring from the Crucible; he had come to know of that ring as well, and it was a thing of great power and greater danger, wanted by people who must not be allowed to close their hands on it. Finding it was past his reach. He had too many other concerns already in motion, too many pieces in play, to walk this road beside them — and so he had gone down into their sleep and gathered the six of them here, to walk it in his place.
Alara looked at the dead, and then back at him. "Did they dream it too?"
"No." For a breath he was not quite smiling. "They were searching. And I fear they are searching for the very thing I would have you find first." The mark they wore was Nikros's, he told them, and the people who wore it were part of the force that hunted the ring. When one of them asked, half-joking, whether he was some god of war himself, he only spread his hands.
"You flatter me. I'm not a god." He followed the ordered gods, he said, the way many in the Vale did, and claimed nothing more than that. In any case, no one ever heard from the gods directly; their power came down through their saints, and it was the saints who did the rest.
Tar believed none of it. While the others listened, he tried to take the man's measure another way — letting a hand drift toward the empty air beneath the floating cane, feeling for whatever it was that held him off the ground. Dalfon drew back before he reached it, unhurried, unoffended, the way a man steps around a pickpocket without losing the thread of his sentence. What little Tar caught was no comfort at all. Either there was almost no magic on the man, or there was so much of it that the whole size of the thing slid straight past a mortal sense and left nothing to take hold of. He could not have said which — and that troubled him more than either answer should have.
The Chest in the Grass
He had brought them a gift, he said, by way of good faith, and passed a hand through the air in front of him. The grass parted; and a chest sat in the gap where a breath before there had been only ground.
What was in it was practical. Three vials of a thick red draught that smelled of sour beer and would, he said, call a second wind out of a body that had spent its last. Three more of a sluggish ochre oil that stank of sulphur and burnt hair, meant to be smeared along a blade and lit, so the steel would burn and not be eaten by its own fire until the bearer put it out. Magmaw had claimed all three of those before anyone could so much as discuss it, and tasted one to be sure of what it was.
"My tongue is now half a centimetre shorter," he reported, "but I'm happy."
Under the vials lay a loose weight of coin — no fortune, but enough that none of them would go hungry or sleep in the wet between here and wherever the road ended. He did not pretend any of it had bought their trust. "Consider it a first step," he said, and told them what he wanted in return.
There was a temple somewhere near Crownhold, bound up with the green ring. He had not been able to find exactly where, but someone in the city would know; the Great Library might hold the answer, if they could get into it, for it sat behind the Concordate's own doors and did not open them to everyone who knocked. And if they had need of him, he would leave an enchantment on the obelisk, here in this quiet and little-visited place. Come back to it, he said, and he would know, and he would come.
Six Temples
The word temple had caught on something in Squam. He had a memory he had not thought to offer aloud: his old mentor Gerald, years gone now, speaking more than once of six temples — connected, somehow, and raised in the long bruised aftermath of the Sundering. One temple near Crownhold, six temples in a dead man's stories. It might mean nothing. Squam did not think it meant nothing, and a great deal of what he did, and where he went, was still shaped by the things Gerald had once thought worth saying. He kept most of it behind his teeth for the moment. "I know where to go," was all he allowed the others. "Trust me on this."
What the Fire Showed
Magmaw went looking for answers in the only book he trusted. He pulled up a bush and burned it the way he had burned the marker that first pointed him toward the lake — a small, deliberate rite, feeding a thread of his own magic into the smoke to see where it would lead. What came was not a direction. In the heart of the little fire a vision opened. He saw the green ring, hanging as it had hung in the dream, and then breaking: orange light spilling from the cracks in it, brighter and brighter, until the whole of it came apart in one enormous detonation and went still. Whatever the green ring was, it did not look like a thing anyone was meant to keep.
Across the clearing, Dalfon turned his head and watched the goblin work. The smile did not move, and he said nothing at all.
Darian had been watching the tree line. Low in the dark of the undergrowth a small pair of eyes watched back — the spirit that had kept to the edge of his life since the corruption came to his homeland, here now, and paying attention. He read in it the thing he had come hoping to read: that this was his road, and that he should stop circling it and walk. When he looked again for the man in white, the obelisk stood alone. Dalfon had gone the way he came, into a cloud and out of the world, and left them with a ring they had only ever seen in a dream and a temple no one could name.
Toward Crownhold
That left Barney. Tar, who had already taken the berserker's measure, did not trouble him with rings or temples.
"I could use someone to watch my back," he said.
Barney weighed the one part of it that spoke to him. "Sounds like we're going up against followers of the Black War God." He nodded, slowly. "That's got to be some good fighting."
It was, in the end, reason enough.
They counted themselves then, half in jest and half not. Six of them, drawn out of the corners of the Vale into one place; six temples in the stories of Squam's dead mentor; and on the bodies in the grass, three lines crossed into six points. The numbers seemed to want to mean something. Whether they did, none of them could say — and the one being who might have known had already gone.
It was not a plan. It was only a direction, which was still more than they had carried into the evening. The ring was real enough to be worth the people hunting it; the temple was somewhere near Crownhold; and Crownhold was a day's walk north. It would do. So they gathered what was theirs and left the obelisk to its silence — Magmaw trailing after the rest, a thin smoke of his own still rising off him, well content. Strangers a day before, the six of them turned toward the city, and the road that would take them there.