The Courtesy

Opening

"That bite placed a curse on Yeltsu and on me."

Zuktind said it standing over her in the dark, with the dire wolves still lying where they had died and his arm scales still broken from the jaw that had held him. He did not soften it and he did not lead up to it. "If it is not lifted, and lifted fast, it will turn the two of us into ones like them. When you have the chance — any spell, prepared or not, anything at all. Please. We do not want to become monsters."

Lissandra did not have it. She said so without apology, the way she says most things, and promised to try in the morning — and to try other things before that, because it was worth trying other things. Zuktind was certain there was only one answer. He had read about this. Asked, gently, what exactly he had read, he admitted it: storybooks. The kind written to make small children behave.

It is not because a thing is real that a storybook gets it right.

So there was nothing to do but the ordinary thing. Rathenfall went out to find them ground — flat ground, dry ground, anywhere seven of them could put their backs down for eight hours — and the rest of them stood in sixty feet of borrowed clear air and waited on him.

And down the road behind them, out of the fog they had spent two days walking through, something came up at a walking pace.

Guests of Quality

Black lacquer and silver fittings. Two horses the colour of coal smoke, breath steaming, hooves loud on the wet red road. Ordinary. Expensive. Entirely out of place in a country where nothing was any of those things.

The bench was empty. The reins lay slack across it, and the horses held a perfectly straight line anyway.

It did not stop beside them. It rolled past, unhurried, forty feet on, and then it turned slowly across the road and came to rest broadside — filling the way east from the fog on one side to the fog on the other. Every direction the valley had spent two days pushing them toward was now behind a carriage. The door on the side that faced them swung open on its own, and stopped, and stayed.

"Hello?" Zuktind called. "Who is there?"

A raven answered from a tree further up the road. It croaked twice more and said nothing else.

"If you want us to go inside," he called, "we need you to show yourself first."

The wind moved in the pines. Somewhere to the northwest the howling started again. The horses did not turn their heads. The door stayed open.

He lit a torch and went to it, and Rathenfall went with him, and in torchlight the thing was beautiful and old — fine work, well kept, old enough that it was hard to say whether it was still worth what it had cost. Inside was black velvet, and a small lamp already lit at the front of it, burning perfectly steady. And on the seat, squared to the edge as though set down by somebody with time to spare for the question of where to put it, a single cream envelope sealed in red wax.

Zuktind is eight feet tall. He worked out, carefully, that this meant he could take the letter without putting any part of himself inside the carriage, and he did exactly that, and opened the wax with a talon.

I so rarely receive guests of quality. The valley is long, the roads are poor, and my table is better than my reputation.

It was signed with a single fine letter. S.

Nothing else. No name for them, no place, no hour, no request.

They passed it around and it defeated them one by one. Yeltsu made nothing of it. Rathenfall made nothing of it. Zuktind read it three times and was left standing in the road genuinely dumbfounded — not frightened, confused, and saying so aloud, because he says everything aloud once he has arrived at it. "Why are we being called guests already? A thing like this gets said when you arrive somewhere. Not before." And then, turning it over: "Whoever wrote this knew we would be here."

Nobody could answer that, and nobody tried.

Lissandra gave it the only reading her craft could give. Costly stock. A practised hand, working calmly, in no hurry at all. No address on the outside and no addressee within. And that single elegant initial, which told her precisely nothing.

Telno read it last, and read it twice, and got closer to the shape of it than anyone.

"This is not a summoning," she said. "There is no place in it. No hour. No request. There is no name for us to answer to. It doesn't ask us to come." She turned the paper over in the light of the Mirror on her wrist, as though the back of it might argue. "It is a courtesy. Someone writing to say that the roads are poor, and that his table is good. The way you would write to a neighbour."

That was the thing about it. In two days the valley had shown them a hanged man's road, a village that would not open its doors, and a pack that had taken a toll out of them in the open. This was the first thing in it that wanted nothing.

Turning Point

"Well," Zuktind said, "if the roads are poor, I would like to try something."

He had been trained on land vehicles, back home, a long way from here and a long way from this. He explained it the way he explains everything: he would see whether he could work the thing himself, and if he could not, then they would take this S. up on the offer — whoever S. was, or her offer, since there was nothing in that letter to say which. Any objections? There were none.

So he climbed onto the empty driver's bench, took up the slack reins, snapped them, and said yaw to two horses that had walked forty feet up a road with nobody holding anything.

They went.

The carriage rolled forward — only a little, only as far as a man testing a thing wants it to go — and when he drew back on the leather they stopped for him too. He sat a moment with the reins in his hands, in the cold, above the steady lamp. Then he turned around to the road and told them.

"It looks like I can control it myself. Everyone — we have a ride."

"So we'll get into the carriage, I guess," Rathenfall said.

"Much safer," Zuktind said, "with a party member controlling it."

Yeltsu was first through the door and made no attempt to hide how pleased he was about it. It had been most of a lifetime since he had ridden in anything; the last time there had been a vehicle in this story he had been walking beside it as the escort, near the beginning of everything. Lissandra climbed in after him. Mira Ashveil climbed in after her. Rusty came up onto the bench and settled its bulk beside Zuktind — and all of them were aboard, and the plan was simple and sane and entirely their own: take the road until they found a place they could rest.

Telno was the last one to approach the step.

Her right hand got heavy. The bracelet on her wrist went cold — not the cold of the night, which they had all been standing in for hours, but a cold with weight in it — and then it got heavier, and heavier still, until it was leaning her arm down and her body after it, toward the ground, away from the open door.

"Telno. What's wrong?"

"The bracelet," she said. "It's getting so heavy."

Zuktind came off the driver's bench without finishing the thought aloud. "Something's wrong. If the bracelet says we shouldn't, we shouldn't. Everyone. Get out."

They got out. Yeltsu got out disappointed and said so — he had wanted, once, to arrive somewhere in style. Lissandra and Mira stepped back down into the mud. Nobody argued, because there was nothing to argue with: the argument was on Telno's arm and it had made itself without a word.

She was not convinced. That is worth saying plainly, because she never said the carriage was unsafe and nobody ever asked her to. All she knew was that the sign she had carried through three days of a country that ate signs had gone cold and heavy the moment she put her foot toward that step.

Zuktind did the reasoning aloud for the rest of them, and got there in his own way. "We were told the bracelet would guide us. So if it answers you trying to get in by pulling you away from it, then it is telling you not to get in. And that can only mean one thing." He looked at the open door, and the lamp, and the two patient horses. "The Mirror is telling us that whoever S. is, we cannot trust him. Or her."

And then, to Telno, and this was the part that mattered: "So long as the bracelet doesn't want you getting in, we're not getting in either. We are not leaving without you."

He raised his voice for whoever might be listening, and there was no reason to think nobody was.

"Well, S., whoever you are — we have it on other authority that we should not accept your invitation and your ride. We politely decline."

The only answer he got was the raven, ahead of them on the road east, perched on its branch. Lurking. Watching. Waiting.

Underneath all of it lay a fact none of them stopped to hold. Those horses had come up the road in a perfectly straight line with nothing on the bench and no hand on the reins. He had snapped a strip of leather at two animals that had never once needed it, and they had answered him.

It was not the leather that answered.

Nowhere to Lie Down

Rathenfall found them their ground in a turn of the road — a clearing with the earth as level as level gets, exactly what he had been sent to find. Then he went down on one knee and pressed his hand into it, and it gave. Soft, and wet, and wetter; anyone who stood on it long enough began, very slowly, to sink. Everything in that valley drained toward the road, and the flat places were flat because that is where the water went.

Yeltsu found the next one: a low opening under a hill, an entry into a cavern. Sturdy, he told them. Safe. Dry. Zuktind went in first because he was the one holding the torch, and the hole resolved in the light into a pit that was moving — vipers by the hundred, coiled over one another, wall to wall.

Yeltsu went straight down to the edge of them, delighted, and spoke to them in their own tongue, and told them to leave.

He was never made to try. Something in that valley stood between him and the thing he was asking for before he ever opened his mouth, and it was the first time in his life that had ever been true. The snakes answered him, and he understood every word. They did not obey and they did not attack — they questioned him. Leave? Why? Come in instead. Come into the nest. There were young down there, and the young needed feeding, and a body left at the mouth of a cave brings rats, and rats are what a snake eats.

He tried for a while to buy them off, and there was no version of it that fit inside one night. He straightened up and told the others they would leave the vipers where they were.

"That is the first time," he said, "that a snake of any kind has not listened to me."

The third search was Zuktind's, on borrowed luck, and it found a light through the trees.

They went to it, because that is what people do. The pines gave out and the clearing opened off the road, flat and dry and sheltered on three sides, everything they had spent hours failing to find — and standing broadside on the far side of it, black lacquer and silver fittings, two coal-smoke horses perfectly still, was the carriage. Door open. Lamp lit.

There was no road into that clearing at all.

"Whoever S. is," Zuktind said, "does not seem to understand that no means no."

The howling came again from the northwest. He turned his back on it and made the case for staying anyway: nothing can reach through the hut, and if the ground here would hold them they would be rested before they had to deal with those mutts again.

It was while they were deciding that they noticed the man sitting on the grass, looking at them.

He was busy. He was taking off a shoe, the way a man does at the end of a day, and he stopped with it half off to look at them, and then went back to what he was doing. Two more of them further out, laying bedding down. Then more, the longer anyone looked — the clearing was full of people quietly and carefully preparing themselves for bed, and not one of them said anything.

Close by, the grass was pressed flat in the shape of somebody lying in it. The place was empty. There were more places like it.

"Greetings," Zuktind tried. "Do any of you know this mysterious person who sent us a note? Named S.?"

His words did not touch them at all. A shoe came off. A blanket was drawn up. Somebody further out settled down and covered his face.

So they found a patch of grass that nobody had lain in, and Yeltsu began the ritual there.

It takes minutes to raise a hut that way, and there was no part of that clearing that did not watch him do it. Every single person bedding down turned to face the casting and stayed turned, with something not far from friendliness on all of their faces, and none of them ever stood up.

That was not the only audience. Two of them had eyes sharp enough for the treeline, and they were the same two who had been bitten. A lycanthrope was standing at the edge of the trees, not moving, staring directly at Zuktind.

He raised his musket and put it on the thing. "This will be loaded with silver in the morning," he said. "I suggest you leave."

It did not move. Behind it there was a second shape, and when he widened his attention there were more than two.

He laughed at them, which was a decision. "You seem to misunderstand. I can fire a thousand with a single pull — they will pepper an entire clearing. If you would rather not be riddled with silver, leave."

They watched him. He came back to the group and told them what would happen in the morning: he wanted every silver piece any of them carried, and once they were out of this wretched country he would turn whatever was left back into coin.

Then the dome came up — ten feet of somewhere else, in a clearing full of strangers who had come there to lie down, with a lit lamp forty feet off that never flickered and wolves standing in the trees. Zuktind set Rusty at the door with orders to wake him if anything true came, and they lay down inside it, and slept.

Nothing tried them. Nothing ever has.

The Grey That Came Back

Nobody caught the moment it happened. It was simply lighter — and there was no sun anywhere in that sky, and the fog still held most of the world out of sight.

Rusty had woken no one. Whatever had been outside the dome had been outside it all night, and had stayed exactly where it was.

Lissandra kept her word at the brightening. She put away Sending — the one spell she carried that could have reached anything outside that valley — and took Remove Curse in its place. Telno prepared it as well, in case one casting was not enough. It was. Lissandra cast it twice, and it took both times.

"Now," Zuktind said, when it was done, "we are not going to turn into monsters."

For the first time since the wolves came out of the treeline onto the black road, all of them were whole.

He got what he had promised the pack, too. Rathenfall was carrying fourteen hundred silver pieces; Zuktind borrowed a hundred of them, spent ten minutes on the work, and turned them into a hundred silver musket balls. He nearly spent them on something else first — Mira Ashveil had come the whole way into that country without a weapon of any kind, and he asked her about it, and worked out that he could make her a pair of daggers instead. He decided the pack mattered more, and said so, and then he unpacked his cook's utensils and turned the morning's rations into something worth sitting down for, because dried food is only dried food until somebody bothers.

They ate breakfast in a clearing that was not quite the clearing they had gone to sleep in.

The carriage was not there. Not driven off, not withdrawn — simply not there, and neither was the ground it had stood on. The road was still close by; they could see it. But the place had moved around them in the night, or they had moved through it, and there was no way to tell which and nothing to ask about it.

Twenty feet east down the road, the raven was waiting.

"Well," Zuktind said, packing up his kit, "we had better follow the road. There is nothing else we can do. And if we run into those mutts again, I will be ready."

They set off, and the bird took flight ahead of them and went out of sight to the east, which is the direction it had wanted them to go since the beginning.

Some way on, they realised they had been flanked. Three shapes on their back, in and out of the fog on both sides of the road — never far behind, never close enough to be anything.

Zuktind went to look, with Rusty at his shoulder, and it did not take long: the lycanthropes. He brought up the gun and drew one of the new balls where they could see it.

"I told you I would have these. Unless you want to feel the burn of silver against your cursed hides, I suggest you leave. Regardless of what your alpha wants."

They did not show themselves. There was a shape between two trunks, and then nothing, and then a shape further back — never enough of one to put a bullet into, and never enough absence to believe they had gone.

"Suit yourselves," he called. "If you ever attack us again, you will burn the way your leader burned."

They kept pace the whole way east. They came no closer. And they were not part of what happened next.

Closing

It resolved out of the fog all at once, the way large things do.

Two pillars of black stone, fifty feet tall, and hung between them a pair of iron gates — rusted, ancient, standing open. Statues crowned the pillars: armoured knights, weathered nearly smooth, and headless. Not eroded. Removed, cleanly, a long time ago. Their stone hands still held their swords up in salute to travellers on the road, and the salute went on, headless, through century after century, for whoever came.

Beyond the gates there was no road, no trees, no land. Only fog — and not the valley's fog, which boiled and drifted and had been at their shoulders for three days. This one stood like a held breath. Fog like a curtain the width of the world.

And it pulled. Every one of them felt it: an undertow behind the sternum, drawing them toward the opening the way a doorway draws a draft.

"Those people at the cottage were so frightened of us they would not open their door," Zuktind said. "And they told us the road leads to everything. Well — this must be that everything, because I see no other path. The road does not fork here." He looked at the white standing in the gateway. "If we want out of this accursed realm, I do not think we have a choice."

Then the howling stopped, mid-note.

Somewhere behind them on the road there was a shape sitting in the open, canine, patient. And as they turned to look at it, their eyes went past something they had all walked by.

He was sitting on a fallen milestone just off the road, ten feet from where every one of them had passed. None of them had seen him arrive.

An old man — old in the way the valley is old. A grey cloak. A spine curved like a question mark. Skin gone the colour of week-old ash. One palsied hand held out with the palm open, and seven ravens taking something out of it, big and glossy and greedy.

They made no sound at all. Ravens are never silent when they feed.

He did not look up.

"That door has opened for you," he said, and the voice was kindly and thin. "Doors like that do not stay open, little pilgrims."

Zuktind stepped toward him with the question already out of his mouth. "We received a letter. From one S. — no full name, only the initial on the invitation. Who is—"

"Best go through," the old man said, to his birds, "while the going is given."

"S.," Zuktind said again. "Does this gate lead to S.'s residence?"

The gates stood open on nothing. The pack sat somewhere behind them in the fog and came no closer. Seven ravens ate out of an open hand without making a sound, and the old man on the milestone did not raise his head, and nobody answered him.