Chapter 60: Toll

There were seven of them.

They came up out of the frozen heather on both sides of the road, slowly, like men who had done this many times and knew there was no hurry. Six had crossbows, loaded and raised. The one in front had no crossbow at all, only a heavy iron axe resting on his shoulder.

The one with the axe was smiling broadly.

[Unknown. Rank D: Blood.][Class: Ironbreaker (Grade C).]

The others were E, two of them barely. Aren looked at them the way Street Fighter’s Instinct let him look at everyone now, and saw more than he wanted to.

They were cold. Their lips were cracked and their fingers on the crossbows were stiff and white at the knuckles. They were hungry, with thin faces and eyes that kept going to the bundles on Aren’s and Roderick’s backs. They wore mismatched furs, and under the furs, on four of them, he saw the grey wool and brass buttons of Aldermere army coats with the regiment badges cut off.

They were deserters, hungry deserters on a frozen road, a long way from anywhere.

’Which makes them more dangerous, not less. Hungry men don’t negotiate.’

"The toll," said the man with the axe pleasantly. He was big, with a broken nose and a beard full of frost. "Everything you’re carrying. Coats included. Boots too, if they fit."

"We’ll pay," Aren offered through the scarf. "Silver. A fair toll for the road."

"Fair." The big man laughed, and some of the others laughed with him, thinly. "Fair is what I say it is." His eyes moved to Roderick, to the long black cloak of petals, and narrowed. "That’s a pretty coat, friend. Never seen one like it. What’s it made of?"

Roderick said nothing.

"I’ll take that one first," the big man said.

Beside Aren, Roderick stopped breathing.

That cloak was the only thing between Roderick and the sun. Without it he would have one morning, maybe two, before the light began to unmake him, and there was no field of black lilies on the moor.

"No," Aren said.

The big man stopped smiling.

It was over very fast.

The big man moved his hand and the crossbows came up together, six bolts pointed at two hooded strangers. And Roderick was already gone.

Aren had seen him fight eels and Bell-Eaters and his own ghosts, but never men. Roderick didn’t even draw his bone blade. He went low and sideways into the heather, so fast that the crossbowmen were still aiming at the place where he had been, came up behind the nearest one, took the crossbow out of his hands and broke it across his knee, and then broke the man’s arm the same way.

Two bolts came at Aren. Street Fighter’s Instinct showed him where they were going before the strings were released, and he turned half a step and let them go past his chest. Four more crossbows were swinging toward him.

He breathed in, reached in, and cut once, wide and flat, across the heather.

There was nothing to see. But along the edge of the black crescent, four crossbow strings lost all their strength for one heartbeat, and four bolts slid out of their grooves and dropped into the frost. The men stared stupidly down at their weapons, pulling at triggers that did nothing.

If any of them ever told it in a tavern, they would blame bad strings and cold weather. Nobody would talk about moonlight. A dead man could fight, as long as he left nothing behind to see.

[New Moon. Mastery: 54% → 55%.]

The Moonlit Step carried him through the heather toward the big man, and he drew the eel blade.

The big man swung the axe. As it came, its iron head went dull and dark, like metal does when a class skill wakes in it, and the air around it grew heavy. It was a good swing, the swing of a soldier who had been taught properly once, a long time ago. It would have gone through a shield and the arm behind it. Aren watched it come, saw the man’s weight shift onto his front foot, stepped inside the swing, and put his bare left hand flat on the iron head as it went past.

’Zero.’

For one second the axe weighed nothing, and the big man’s whole body was thrown forward by a swing with nothing on the end of it, like a man hauling on a rope that’s just snapped. He stumbled helplessly with his arms flying wide. In the same second Aren’s own body went light as paper, and he stood perfectly still and felt the cold in his side drink the weight of the iron down, quickly and greedily.

Then the axe was heavy again, and the big man was falling onto his knees in the frost with a curved white blade resting against the side of his neck.

"Tell them to stop," Aren said.

"Stop! Drop them!"

Behind him, Roderick stood in the heather with a crossbowman’s throat in each hand, holding two men off the ground like a pair of rabbits. Three more lay in the frost. The last one had dropped his crossbow and was running across the moor toward the smoke on the hill.

Aren let him go deliberately.

The bandits’ camp was in a hollow between two big grey rocks on that hill, out of the wind. There was a fire, a cooking pot, a few rough shelters of hide and branches, and under a canvas tarp a pile of things that had obviously come out of the burned wagons. Bolts of wool, barrels of salt fish, two crates of iron nails, a chest of tools.

And a bundle of arrows.

Aren pulled one out. It was long and black, with a heavy leaf-shaped iron head and grey goose feathers dyed at the tips. He couldn’t see what color, only that they were darker at the ends, but he knew that kind of arrow. Everyone in Aldermere did. They hung over the doors of taverns near the border, taken from dead men in old wars.

"My uncle had one of those over his door." Roderick eyed it. "He told everyone he took it off an Imperial scout." He snorted. "He bought it from a peddler for two coppers."

Imperial arrows, from the Iron Empire.

He looked down at the burned wagons on the road and thought about what an Aldermere patrol would find if it came this way tomorrow. Four merchant wagons from Highcrest, burned and robbed. Dead horses. Imperial arrows scattered in the frost.

He turned to the big man, sitting by the fire with his hands tied behind his back and his broken nose bleeding into his beard.

"Who paid you?"

The big man’s name was Brask. He had been a sergeant in a border regiment of the King’s army, until his captain sold the company’s winter pay and blamed the sergeants. Most of the men around this fire had been in that company, and they had been on the moor for a year.

He didn’t want to talk at first. Then Roderick crouched down in front of him, very close, and looked at him with tired, steady eyes, and Brask decided he did.

"Men in grey. Three months ago. Came to the camp at night. Very polite. Said they’d pay us to do what we were already doing." He spat into the fire. "Hit the caravans from the south. Burn them. Take what we like. And leave those." He nodded at the black arrows. "Make it look like the Empire’s raiders came over the mountains."

"Why?"

"Didn’t ask. They paid." Brask looked away. "Old gold. Heavy coins. Never seen the like."

Aren reached into the big man’s coat and found what he was looking for in an inside pocket. A heavy gold coin, worn smooth at the edges. A tower with seven windows. A crowned woman’s face. VARN.

He held it up in the firelight.

"When did they come last?"

"Two weeks back. Maybe less. Different ones this time. One had grey eyes. He was in a hurry." Brask hesitated. "He said we had to hit as many as we could before the Summit."

"What Summit?"

Brask looked at him very strangely. "You really are from far away." He nodded north, toward the dark line of the mountains. "The fortress at Kharn, in the pass. Eighteen days from now, our lords and the Emperor’s lords are meeting there to talk peace." He laughed without any humor at all. "Peace. With every merchant in Highcrest screaming that the Empire’s burning their wagons on the North Road."

Aren looked at the coin in his hand, and the black arrows by the fire.

The Night of Bells. Seven Rifts in a circle around the city. A cathedral that ordered its repairs before the damage was done. Someone who planned a long way ahead and paid in a dead kingdom’s gold.

’Someone wants a war. And they’re very good at buying one.’

He stood by the fire after Brask stopped talking.

Six men tied up in the frost. In a few days the men in grey would come back to collect their work, find a camp of tied-up bandits, and hear everything. Two hooded strangers, one very strong and one very fast, asking about old gold and grey eyes. The men in grey already knew someone had broken their ring. They wouldn’t need more than that.

He went through the other choices the way he had once gone through a bad portfolio, looking for anything worth keeping. Let them go, and they’d talk to the first person who paid them. Take them along, and they’d slow down two men who had to travel by night and hide by day. Leave them tied, and the cold would do the work slower and worse.

There was nothing worth keeping. He checked twice, the way he’d always checked a losing position before closing it, hoping he’d missed something. He hadn’t. He had only wanted to.

"Roddy."

Roderick looked at Aren’s face, then at the six men, and nodded once. He had understood before Aren had.

Brask understood too. He started talking again, very fast, about money, about a sister in the south, about leaving the Marches tonight and never coming back. Aren let him finish. Then he knelt in front of the deserter sergeant with frost in his beard, who’d been taught to fight properly once, and looked at him for a moment.

Then he did it, quickly and cleanly, with the eel blade. Brask first, then the others, one after another, while the fire crackled and the wind moved over the moor.

When it was over, he cleaned the blade in the frost and stood with his back to the bodies.

In his first life he’d killed a man to protect his money. In this one he’d killed four to protect a secret, and now six to keep two dead men dead. He waited to feel something. He felt the cold, and the weight of the gold coin in his pocket, and nothing else.

He looked down at his hands, and they were perfectly steady.

That frightened him more than anything Brask had said.

"One ran. Toward this camp."

Aren had completely forgotten.

"He’ll have seen us coming up the hill and gone the other way." Roderick pulled his black cloak around his shoulders and stood. "I’ll find him before dawn."

He went out into the heather, low and silent, and the dark swallowed him.

He came back an hour before sunrise, sat down by the dying fire, held his hands out to the last of the heat, and took a strip of dried meat from his pack.

"Done." He started eating.

His face was calm and his hands were steady. He chewed slowly, just as he had eaten raw eel under a bridge at the bottom of the world, and watched the embers.

"He hid in a gully," he finally said. "Thought the dark would cover him." He shrugged. "It’s not very dark up here."

That was all he said about it.

"Are you all right?" Aren asked.

Roderick considered the question as if it were in a foreign language. "I’m warm," he said. "And I’m not hungry. That’s more than most nights." He looked across the fire. "Are you?"

Aren didn’t answer that. He wasn’t sure the honest answer was one either of them wanted to hear, out here, with the bodies still warm behind the rocks.

He watched Roderick eat and thought that seven hundred days in the Abyss had taken a great many things from the boy who used to share Mira’s bread. He wasn’t sure Roderick had noticed which ones. He wasn’t entirely sure he had noticed his own.

They walked north until dawn, found a hollow under an overhanging rock, and lay down in it. Roderick pulled his cloak over his head.

"Eighteen days," came his voice from under it.

"Eighteen days," Aren agreed.

Eighteen days to reach a fortress in a mountain pass he had never seen, full of lords from two countries who would happily hang a commoner for walking through the wrong door, and somewhere among them a man with grey eyes who wanted it all to burn.

He lay awake in the cold grey light with the gold coin in one hand and the dragon’s scale in the other, and did the only thing he knew how to do. He counted.