Chương 85: Chapter 84 — Level One

Morning arrived without ceremony, a flat grey light that made the camp look worse than the dark had. Smoke still threaded up from three places nobody had bothered dousing. The yard smelled of cold char and turned mud, and under it, thicker every hour, the butcher-stink of the mammoth, which the crows had found at first light and were arguing over in numbers. Ant woke on the storehouse floor with Mahkir's tail across his legs and no memory of falling asleep.

Around him the others were surfacing in stages — Duncan already up and eating, Sam still flat with an arm over his face, Hazel folding blankets like the storehouse had personally offended her by being untidy. The Kithren woke slower. Bramble was the first, lifting his head from beside Thomas with his ears at half-mast, looking around the room as though checking his sums.

Shelly and Candice — the turtle and the Glacier Panther, names Ant had learnt somewhere last night and thought entirely typical of the brothers, practical to the bone, the talent folded right into the word — stirred within minutes of each other. Vulcan simply appeared at the door, scorched prints marking his path through the frost, having apparently decided sleeping was for creatures who hadn't guarded anything. Everyone's alive, Mahkir observed, not opening his eyes. Again. We're making a habit of it.

Don't say it like that. Like what? Like you're tempting something. Mahkir's tail thumped once against the boards, which was as close as he came to laughing before breakfast. Kalsar was outside already, sitting on the same upturned crate as last night, rebandaged and drinking something that steamed. He looked over the group as they filtered into the yard and gave his orders before anyone had finished chewing.

"Pairs. Sweep every building still standing. Weapons, armour, coin, papers, anything with writing on it. Stack it in the yard where I can see it." He tipped his mug toward the main building, the big one with the stone footing, the one they'd all been circling in their heads since last night.

"Hazel, that one's yours. Take the boy."

"Which boy," Duncan said.

"There's a selection."

"The one who owns the camp." The search took most of the morning. It turned up less than the camp's size promised. Shell Razor had lived lean or someone had stripped the place on the way out the door — most likely both. Sam and Duncan came back from the barracks ruin with an armload of blades, three shields, and a set of scale-and-leather cuirasses in decent repair, one of which Duncan held against his own chest, found wanting in every dimension, and passed to Maren without comment.

Ray emerged from what had been an officers' quarters carrying a strongbox under one arm and wearing an expression of enormous satisfaction.

"Recompense," he announced, setting it down with a clank of coin inside.

"For our incarceration and general inconvenience." The main building was where the morning earned itself. It had been part hall, part stores, part forge — the forge in a lean-to off the back, its roof intact, its coal bunker half full, the whole space smelling of oil and iron filings and old smoke sunk so deep into the timber it would outlast the timber.

The papers were a disappointment: a ledger of grain and boot orders, some correspondence about a debt owed by a mill in Coldwoof, nothing with Kris's name on it, nothing about cells or minerals or anyone's plans for anything. Either it had never been written down or it had left when he did. Hazel didn't care about the papers by then.

She was crouched over a row of crates against the forge's back wall, and she had gone very quiet, and Ant had known her long enough now to understand that Hazel quiet was Hazel at her loudest.

"Ant. Come here." The first crate held rock. Dull, grey-brown, unremarkable — until Ant's skin remembered it. The cellar. Four walls of exactly this, and Mahkir's voice thinned down to a thread on the far side of them.

"That's it." His mouth had gone dry.

"That's what the cell was lined with."

"Hushstone." Hazel picked up a fist-sized lump and turned it over without reverence.

"Quarried in maybe three places I've heard of, none of them close. Smothers the bond — the further inside it you are, the less gets through. Miners used to line sick-rooms with it, back when people thought a fevered Kithren could pass the fever down the bond." She weighed it in her palm.

"It's nasty and it's nearly useless. There's only one thing you build with stone like this, and you were inside it." She set the lump down and wiped her hand on her apron like the rock had left something on it.

"We take it anyway. Better in our cellar than anyone else's."

"And that's not what you called me over for."

"No." She'd already moved down the row — five more crates, packed with straw, stacked two and three — and when she folded the top layer back her hands did it gently, the way she handled nothing else in the world except finished blades." This is what I called you over for." The ore inside was dark, almost black, and threaded through with veins of a pale silver that didn't sit still. Ant leaned closer.

The veins caught the light from the doorway and carried it, a slow crawl of brightness moving through the stone like the light was being passed hand to hand along its length.

"Brightvein." Hazel said the word the way other people said names in church.

"I've read about it. I've heard smiths twice my age talk about seeing a piece once, at a distance, in somebody else's shop. I have never in my life had my hands on any." She lifted a chunk the size of two fists and the silver crawled faster, feeling her warmth.

"You forge with this — properly, mind, it fights you the whole way — and what comes off the anvil isn't ordinary gear anymore. It comes out enchanted. Holds a property of its own. And it comes out rare grade at the minimum, even from a hack. In the right hands—" she stopped herself, set the ore down, and stood there flexing her fingers like they itched.

"Rare grade," Ant said.

"Like Xylock now. Like the snakes." He looked down the row — five crates, every one of them packed to the straw.

"Gear has grades too?"

"Everything has grades. Same ladder as the Kithren climb." Hazel counted it off.

"Common's the floor — every piece of kit you've ever worn, everything I've ever forged, everything ninety-nine smiths in a hundred will make in their lives. That's common. Above it, rare. Above rare, epic. Above epic, legendary — and now you're talking about pieces with names, pieces that turn up in histories, pieces clans have gone to war over." She paused.

"And above legendary, if you believe the oldest stories, mythic. Except nobody's ever forged one. Nobody's ever held one, that anyone can prove. Half the trade thinks the word exists just to give legendary something to look up at." Ant's hand had found Soul Render's hilt somewhere in the middle of that speech without asking his permission.

"Pieces with names," he said.

"Soul Render has a name." Hazel looked at the sword for a long moment, and the look had years of held-off questions in it.

"Aye. It does. And it wasn't forged by anyone at our level, nor anyone rich enough that we've ever met them. I've said that from the start."

"One of the runes lit." It came out fast now there was finally room for it.

"In the fight. When I put the fire down the blade — Flame Fist, through the steel — one of them caught. Burned gold the whole time the fire held, faded out after." Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Hazel set down the ore she was holding. Slowly, like sudden movement might scare the words off.

"Say that again. The gold, the fading — all of it, slower." He said it again. She didn't interrupt once, which from Hazel was an event in itself.

"Since the day you brought that blade to my forge," she said at last, "I've known the scoring was true runework and not one thing more. Not what it did. Not why anyone put it there. I told myself it was dead craft — ornament from an age rich enough to waste it." Her eyes hadn't left the scabbard at his back.

"It's not ornament. It lit. That sword doesn't carry its runes, boy, it uses them — that's a channeling blade. Mage-work. Built for a hand that brings its own fire to the steel." She said the next part quieter, half to the forge around her.

"And there's the problem sitting inside the answer. Runework answers a human's magic. A mage's own mana, hand to hilt — every old text agrees on that much. Not a Kithren's. It can't, and that's half of why nobody's forged a working rune in three hundred years — nothing left alive to feed one." She looked at Ant. Looked at the sword. Looked back at Ant, and her voice came down to the one she used for measuring twice.

"So why did it answer you, I wonder." Outside, a crow said its piece into the quiet.

"Later," Hazel said, and turned back to the crate like a woman shelving a live coal.

"That conversation wants a locked door and a long evening, and this yard has neither." Duncan had drifted in at some point behind them and was staring at the crate over Hazel's shoulder.

"What's it worth?"

"Better question than you know." Hazel folded the straw back over the ore, tender as a woman tucking in a child, and stood there doing sums with her eyes closed.

"Five crates. Give me three of them and I'll put enchanted steel on every back in this clan — weapon and armour, all of you, Kithren fittings where they'll take them, and stock left over for whoever we recruit next." Her eyes opened.

"The other two, we sell. Quietly, to the right buyers, a piece at a time — and that, Duncan, is a small fortune. Not comfortable money. Building money. Walls-and-wages money." She fixed Ant with a look.

"That's me asking, by the way. Clan leader. Spoils are yours to assign."

"They're going to your forge, Hazel."

"Good lad. Correct answer." She was already sizing the crates for carrying. Ant left her to the packing. He crossed the yard with Mahkir at his shoulder and the forge still turning over in his head — the anvil, the fire, gear with grades — and the thought arrived where it had been headed the whole time, which was at the biggest change the fight had left behind.

He found them by the well: Kalsar sitting on the low wall of it, and Xylock standing over him, six-armed, half again the size he used to be, pale fire laid into his hide from wrist to throat, holding the bucket rope in one lower hand while an upper one tipped water over his own head like weather was something that happened to other creatures. Ant threw Appraisal at him before he'd decided to. Old habit. The screen came back instantly, no stutter, no strain, clean as reading a signpost. [Xylock — Rare Grade. Level: 1.] He stopped walking.

"Kalsar."

"Mm."

"During the fight, when he changed — my system couldn't read his level. It can now." Ant turned the words over once more before letting them out, because they sounded wrong every way he arranged them.

"It says he's level one." Kalsar didn't answer straight away. He looked up at Xylock. Xylock looked back down at him, water dripping off his chin, and set the bucket down on the well wall without being asked. Out past the buildings the crows were still arguing over the mammoth.

"One," Kalsar said.

"Ha." And then, quieter, " One."

"That can't be right. He broke a rare-grade snake over his knee."

"It's right." Kalsar patted the well wall beside him and Ant sat.

"Sit down, boy, this is the sort of thing somebody should have taught you at seventeen, and since your whole ceremony went sideways, it falls to me." He worked his bandaged side into a bearable position.

"Evolution resets the count. Everything the creature built stays built — the strength, the toughness, all of it, he keeps every scrap. But the level goes back to one, and the ceiling above it moves up. He's not weaker than yesterday. He's stronger than he's ever been, standing at the bottom of a taller ladder." He looked at his partner again.

"Forty-three years I've known him and I found that out for certain about an hour ago, same as you."

"You knew the lore, though."

"Everybody my age knows the lore. Arena's full of it — old men in the stands swearing they saw an evolution in some other city, some other decade, always somewhere you couldn't check." Kalsar snorted.

"I believed about half. And I never once thought I'd see it, because I thought Xylock was finished growing before you were born. He stopped gaining levels years back. Stopped getting stronger. I told myself he'd reached his maximum and I made my peace with it — good peace, mind, he was maximum enough." His voice roughened one degree and he cleared it.

"Turns out I was starving him. All those years. He didn't need more fights. He needed more than he could hold."

"The snakes gave him that."

"The snakes tried to kill everyone he loves and he decided to drink it rather than allow it, and somewhere past the top of what he could take, the top moved." Kalsar shook his head slowly.

"So no — levelling alone doesn't do it. Can't. If it could, every arena veteran in Cerlan would have evolved twice over. It wants something else on top. Pressure. A ceiling, and a reason to go through it. His was those runes — he'd worked his absorption to its absolute limit, further than I ever pushed him, and when the limit broke, all of him broke upward with it." Ant watched Xylock refill the bucket, one-handed, thoughtful.

"Is it the same for every Kithren? The reset, the new ceiling?"

"The rules are the same for all of them. The numbers never are." Kalsar held up fingers.

"Potential grade. Potential maximum level. The level where evolution even becomes possible. All three differ creature to creature, type to type — no two kinds of Kithren share the same set, and most bonded pairs die of old age never learning what theirs was." He let his hand drop.

"Which is the polite way of saying nobody can tell you what that fox of hers tops out at, or Bramble, or yours. You find out by getting there. Or you don't." Six arms, Mahkir said, studying Xylock with his head tilted. When it's my turn, I'd settle for wings. You'd be unbearable with wings. I'd be unbearable somewhere new. Variety. Kalsar planted both hands on his knees and stood, testing the side, accepting its verdict.

"Anyway. You see what it means. He's level one." A grin went across the old man's face, and it took twenty years off him and put them somewhere useful.

"Level one, with a taller ladder, and me with — what, another good decade if Rowan keeps nagging? We start over. We train harder. First time in years the training will actually go anywhere." He clapped one of Xylock's lower arms, and Xylock upended the last of the bucket over him, and Kalsar stood there dripping and swearing and grinning wider, and Ant decided this was a conversation that had finished itself.

They gathered in the yard at midday, the pile of salvage crated and counted, the carriages brought up from the treeline mile. Six Kithren on their feet, moving carefully but moving. Rebekah supervised her own transfer to a carriage bench with a running commentary on everyone's technique, Lem still poured bonelessly across her collarbone, asleep, rising and falling.

"Right," Kalsar said.

"We go home, and we go now. Everyone in this yard needs Rowan's hands on them, not mine — I bind wounds like a man tying firewood, and half of you are proof." Ray's tiger flowed up onto a carriage roof and arranged herself along it, and Rebekah pointed from her bench.

"And her? Everyone else I've been introduced to. She's the only one still a stranger."

"Striata." Ray produced the name the way a man lays down a winning card.

"Found it in a dictionary. Means striped." Ant waited for somebody to correct him. Nobody did. It meant, apparently, exactly that, and Striata's tail curled once along the roofline with the satisfaction of a creature whose name had never once been wrong.

"I'm staying." Thomas said it fast, before the agreement could set. He was looking at the main building, at the good stone footing, and the wanting was plain across his whole face.

"Somebody has to. I said an empty camp with a name attached is an invitation — well. I'm looking at the camp and I'm looking at the name, and I meant it."

"You did," Ant said.

"And you also said once we've gone home and mended. That's the version we're keeping." Thomas opened his mouth; Ant kept going, and heard his own voice settle into the register that ended things, the one he was still surprised to find he owned.

"Bramble fought a bear half a head bigger than him last night. He sees Rowan before he does anything else — that's not negotiable. And you're not running a holding alone, Thomas. Not this far out. You come home, you rest, you pick your people — ones who can build and ones who can hold a gate — and you come back and do it properly. The camp will keep two weeks. There's nothing left here to steal except rock, and we're taking the rock."

"The claim has to be filed before he holds anything anyway," Maren put in, ledger already open against her forearm, writing while she talked.

"Conquest or not, Cerlan wants it registered — boundaries, structures, the leadership deaths attested. Until that's stamped, Thomas wouldn't be a garrison, he'd be a squatter with excellent masonry." Bramble leaned against Thomas's leg and looked up at him, ears forward, entirely ready to be examined by Rowan and fed by anyone.

"Two weeks," Thomas said.

"Two weeks."

"I'm drawing up the repair schedule on the road, then. And I want the forge lean-to — Hazel, don't argue, you've got a whole forge at home—""Finish that sentence and walk back, Thomas." They loaded up. The carriages swung wide around the mammoth and its parliament of crows, and the camp — their camp now, on paper soon, in stone eventually — slid away behind the trees. Kalsar rapped his knuckles twice on the carriage wall.

"Home."