Whose Army

Opening

The dagger was still wrapped. Yeltsu had bound it in the hem of his own coat an hour ago and it had not come off since, and now it sat in his left hand as blunt as the wooden sword in his right, and the girl across the packed earth from him had put down her water and picked up her practice blade and was waiting for him to begin.

The yard had not gone back to work. Twenty militia stood in the loose ring they had made for the paladin and kept for the artificer, and there was no pretending now that they were drilling. Sergeant Marroth had stopped pretending some time ago. Captain Ruskal stood at the corner of the range with his arms folded and the granite seam behind him, forty feet away, grey and unfinished, where the town had run out of masons. He had granted one day. It was past noon.

Zuktind stood at the rail with the black cloth still on his sleeve and told the recruit, because it was true and because nobody else was going to say it, what the third lesson was for. Rathenfall had taught her what a blade did in a seasoned hand. He had taught her what a gun did in one. Yeltsu was going to teach her the thing neither of them could: that some of the ferals in the valley cast, and that a sorcerer did not wait to be asked.

"Ready?" Yeltsu said.

Kessyth Vurr, nineteen, with a paladin's respect and a lieutenant's concession already in her pocket, said that she was.

The Second Spar

He came in with the sword first. He had thought about this — Yeltsu thought about most things before he did them — and the thinking had said swords first, because she has swords in her hands and magic in her head, and the lesson is that the two arrive together. The wooden blade took her on the sword-arm before she had it up. She stepped back. He was already turning the dagger.

It went wide. Wildly, ridiculously wide, the cloth-wrapped point sailing past her hip as if it had somewhere else to be, and Yeltsu backed off two paces with the sound of the yard's laughter at his shoulders and said, evenly, "You got lucky with that second hit."

"You hit me once," she said. "I haven't hit you at all."

She came at him. He put the wooden sword in the way and the shock of it went up his arm, and the yard, which had cheered her name against the paladin, made a low sound that was not quite a cheer and not quite anything else.

"It was not luck," Kessyth Vurr said.

"I can see that now."

He circled. She followed. And then Yeltsu made the mistake that the lesson had been built to teach — he began to explain. With your permission, he said, I am going to use a spell that has been very useful to us despite being very weak, one you should learn to recognise — and somewhere in the third clause the recruit, who had not been told to wait, closed the distance and put the wooden sword into his ribs.

The whole yard heard it land.

"Don't," Zuktind said from the rail, not loudly, "let your enemy monologue."

Yeltsu was already moving. He went back and to the side, out of her reach, and his hand came up, and the air beside her filled with knives.

They were small. They spun in a column no wider than a doorway, a foot from her left shoulder, and they made the sound a swarm of bees makes when it has decided something — and Kessyth Vurr, who had never seen a cloud of daggers in her life, went very still. He had not put it on her. He had thought about that, too, and decided that a level of restraint was part of the lesson: he put it beside her, where it would cut off half the ground she could stand on, and let her work out what that meant.

She worked it out. She moved. He moved with her, pressing, always on the side that pushed her toward the hum — and she would not be pushed. She turned him instead, kept the knives at her back and her eyes on his sword, and when he came in again she was ready, and when he came in a third time she was ready for that too.

"She's blocking very well," somebody in the ring said.

She was. And Yeltsu, who had come here to teach, found himself learning something about the recruit that the paladin and the artificer had learned before him, and did what he had told her sorcerers did: he stopped explaining and cast.

The haste hit him like cold water. The yard slowed. The knives slowed. He could see the grain in her practice sword. And instead of going for her again he turned, and ran.

He ran the whole yard. Past the range and the weapon rack and the granite seam, past twenty militia who turned their heads too slowly to follow him, around the ring and back to where he had started, and stopped in front of her before the first of them had finished saying where —

Then the yard laughed, and clapped, and Kessyth Vurr let the point of her sword drop to the earth and stood looking at a bard who had just been in two places at once.

"I admit, Master Yeltsu," she said. "You surprised me."

At the corner of the range, not loudly, for the handful who were near enough to hear: "He surprised us all."

Yeltsu let the knives go. They folded into nothing. He set his feet, and told her — carefully, because it was a real offer — that if she landed one more hit on him, they would call it hers.

She landed it. It was a clean stroke, quick and low, and it slid under his guard as if the haste were nothing, and touched his side, and stopped. For a moment nobody moved. Then Yeltsu stepped back and brought his hands together, and applauded her, alone, until the ring picked it up.

"You've done rather well," he said. "You hit me twice. I landed one blow on you. I'd say our dodging abilities are roughly equal." He held out his hand.

She took it. "It was an honour."

"The honour was mine."

She went to Rathenfall after, and to Zuktind, and said the things a recruit says to a paladin and a lieutenant, and then she saluted her sergeant, and her captain, and did not leave — stood a little way off among her friends, glowing, in case anyone had anything else to say to her.

Nobody did. Zuktind watched her and thought that he had already told her, that morning, that her brother's memory was proud, and that there was nothing he could add to it that would not be smaller.

What the Yard Heard

Yeltsu went to the sergeant instead.

He did it the way he did everything — as a case, laid out in order. The militia should train against magic. Not because ferals were clever, but because the ones who cast were: he had seen it. He had stood in the mirror of dead men and watched intelligent dragonkin do intelligent things, and there was one among the tribes below — he said this looking Marroth in the eye — so close to the line that a man would do a double take before he called it feral at all.

Marroth looked at the captain. The captain nodded, once. And the sergeant said, half to himself, "Intelligent ferals," in the voice of a man filing something under near.

The bard was not finished. He had a yard around him that had stopped being a yard, and he was the party's storyteller whether he liked the name or not, and Zuktind, at the rail, said quietly that if anyone was going to tell it, it was him.

So Yeltsu told it.

He told them about the two black dragons that had worn one skin between them — how the wounded one went into the swamp and the whole one came out, and how a party of seasoned killers had stood in the muck believing the water healed. He told them how many times the paladin had gone down. He told them about a hut in a wood where a thing that was not a man had been furious to find itself in a mortal's debt, and had paid its way out of that debt by making him proof against a rot that walked. He told them about a country where the maps refused to stay drawn — where a cartographer who could map anything had watched her own lines blur to grey overnight — and a hill with an old man on it who wore the Platinum Father's favourite face, and had seven ravens where the canaries should have been.

"Sister," Zuktind said, when the ravens had landed. "Perhaps you should show them what relic of our Lord we found among the spoils."

Telno had not planned on it. But she raised her wrist, and the bracelet caught the light the way a gem does, and then it was not a bracelet — it opened in her hands into a disc of pale metal with a mirror's face, and the yard made the sound a room makes when a thing in it turns out to be real.

"It has saved us," Telno said, "when we were dragged into a land of darkness and death."

The mirror had burned the false Bahamut off his hill. Yeltsu said so. And by then the ring had closed in as far as it could without treading on the party's feet, and the sergeants had come closer, and the captain had left his corner, and the bard, measured to the last, got to the part where they arrived.

"— through the teleportation circle," he said. "In the temple of Bahamut."

"There's one in the basement," Zuktind added, because it was his town and his temple and it had not occurred to him not to. "You know the old chapel almost nobody goes into? There's a circle in the floor."

Captain Ruskal's voice came from six feet away.

"Anybody can use that?"

And Zuktind, who was earnest before he was anything else, had the next sentence already in his mouth — our High Priestess has told us, sadly — and something stopped it there. It was not caution. It was arithmetic. He looked at the captain and past him at twenty recruits who would be home by supper, and at their families, and at a town that had not been attacked in five years and would believe by morning that it was about to be, and that the woman who had led the last attack now held a key to its innermost ring.

"There are a couple of problems," he said instead, slowly. "You need someone who can cast the spell that wakes it. And you need a sequence — secret symbols, a sequence that works like a key between one circle and the next. We had one, to come here." He chose the rest with care. "The ones we need next aren't accessible. Obtaining them means going down into the valley. There's an old temple there — our people's, before the mountain."

It was true. Every word of it was true. And the captain's shoulders came down a fraction, and the sergeant's did, and the yard went back to being a yard that had heard a good story.

Yeltsu finished it anyway — the white dragon; the day Zuktind had beaten a tribe's champion and its chief and made them allies against the wyrm; the Forge of Spells; and, when the crowd began to drift, Mount Celestia, and the god of justice, and the Platinum Dragon himself. Zuktind gave him something for that last one — a moment's brilliance across the yard, artificer to bard, the way he could — and the drifting stopped.

When it was over the party stood in the ring and looked at one another, and Zuktind said what all of them were thinking.

"We should go back to the temple. Speak to the High Priestess. About having some of the paladins guard the circle — since we can't tell everyone, or we'll have a panic." He glanced at the captain, who was watching him. "And afterward I'll stop at headquarters. About the patch."

They left the yard on their own feet. Nobody walked them out.

Four Doors Down

The street was the street he had grown up on, and it had been waiting.

Four doors down from his parents' house a woman sat on her step with a bowl in her lap and a basket at her feet, shelling something, and she had been there long enough to have watched him come all the way up from the corner. Chromatic. Red at the jaw, going dark along the neck. Older than his mother. He knew her the way he knew the shape of the door behind her.

"Zuktind," Orsza said, and did not look up from the bowl.

"…Yes."

"Boy. I have prayed to the Dragon Queen every day of my life on this mountain. And I have never once gone down into that valley." Now she looked up. "You've seen her. Haven't you."

He had not expected the question, and so he answered it.

"Yes. In Celestia — a band of ferals came at us in the holy mountain itself and dragged us into a furnace, to throw us before her. We were too far from her prison for her to reach. But she saw us." He stopped. Started again. "She screamed for her children to bring us to her. We fought hard to get out."

The bowl had gone still in her hands.

"I bet you did," Orsza said. Her voice had changed. "I'm surprised you're here at all. If you stood before her fury —"

"The sound of her voice still haunts my nightmares." A pause. "Voices, to be more accurate."

"Does she —" and it came out of her like a child's question, "does she really have the five heads? How does it —"

"We only saw her from a great distance. But she did."

She sat with that. Then she set the bowl down, and gathered her skirts, and went inside without another word, and through the open door they heard her moving things — a cloth, a dish, something small and hard set down on something wooden — and then her voice, low and quick, beginning a prayer to a goddess she had loved all her life and never once seen.

Zuktind stood on the street with his hands at his sides.

"She always was an odd one," he said finally, to the others, not to the door. "Even when Insa led the ferals up the trail. Everyone expected her to turn right then — and she just didn't. The town was leery of her for a while after. Waiting for the plot." He shook his head. "Nothing ever came of it. By now everyone's decided she's not a threat. She keeps to herself. Goes to market."

Yeltsu had been looking at the door too.

"Her situation," he said, in the careful way he had, "sounds very like mine. Except she didn't get thrown out."

Zuktind turned.

"I was the odd one in my community, for telling what I saw. She's suspected. I was called heretic. But there's kinship in it." He seemed to be deciding whether to go on, and then went on, because the street was quiet and the woman inside was praying and it was the right kind of silence to say a thing into. "And I am not a stranger to worshipping a god of darkness. Until I was cast out, I served one. Sseth. He came to me in a dream and told me not to — and I didn't shrug it off. Somehow I was open to it. That it might be more than a dream." He looked at the bowl on the step. "And it turned out I was right. I've parted ways with him. But I promised I would help him, because his worship is being stolen, and theft is theft. Even from a god of darkness. Even when the thief is a god of evil."

"It's going to be a long road," Zuktind said.

"It is. And for all I know, I won't be the one to walk the end of it." Yeltsu's voice did not change. "I might just be the catalyst. The one who lays the groundwork for the ones who come after." A breath. "Let's see what fate has for me."

Behind the door, Orsza's prayer went on.

The Stone

The temple was full of people and empty of the one they wanted. Dragonkin came and went between the pillars, a few knelt in the sanctuary, and the High Priestess of Bahamut was nowhere in it. Zuktind found a young cleric — a girl, hardly older than the recruit — and asked, with all the grace of a man who had been raised in this building, where Hugto had gone.

"She left," the girl said. And then, because he had been polite: "To the High Elder's."

"Thank you. May the grace of Bahamut be on you."

So they climbed.

The Elder's house sat at the top of the innermost ring, and beside its door the ground opened out into a flat shelf of bare rock, worn smooth, with the whole town below it and the sky over it. There was nothing on it. No rail, no platform, no mark of any kind. It was simply where things were said in Claw Ridge so that everyone could hear them.

Zuktind knew exactly where he had been standing.

He had been standing there, in the ranks, in this coat without the black on it, on the day the Elder had taken a woman's name away in front of the whole town and given her another to wear like a scar. He had not moved. Nobody had moved. And he felt it come up in him now, on the rock, the way it had come up then, and he did not try to stop it.

"I'm remembering," he said, to nobody. "I didn't leave right after."

Telno was beside him. She had been beside him all day, at the yard and on the street, and she asked the question the way she asked most things — as though she already knew the answer and wanted him to hear himself give it.

"Was that the day you left?"

"Not quite. I tried to stay. For a while. It just — it became too much. Being surrounded by everyone who —" He stopped. He was looking across the rock at nothing. "No one believed me. No one except Ghelka."

The name landed in the middle of the family like a coin.

"Ghelka," Telno said.

"She's the only one in this town who believes what I believe. That Insa wasn't acting of her own will. She's had that argument more times than I can count, with anyone who would stand still for it, and she's lost it every time. And she still believes it." He drew a breath. "Being surrounded by all the rest of them — everyone so sure that she was beyond redemption — I couldn't take it. That's why I resigned. I swore to the Elder that I would free her from whatever bound her." The next words came out flat and complete. "Or kill her, if I had to."

Telno let the silence run, the way she had learned to on this mountain.

"It's no surprise nobody believes Ghelka," she said at last. "She has no office. No authority. No family ties to anyone — she's not a Coce, either. She's just a woman who has said the same thing for five years to people who don't want to hear it." She looked at her brother. "Perhaps you should tell her she was right the whole time. I imagine she'd like to know."

He looked at the rock a moment longer.

"You're right," Zuktind said. "After we've seen the High Priestess."

He knocked. A voice inside called them in.

The Elder's Table

Hugto was at the table.

She was standing, not sitting — gold against the firelight, with one hand flat on a sheet of paper she had plainly just finished drawing on — and she looked up as the door opened with the face of a woman who has been talking about people and finds them in the room.

"Well," said the High Priestess of Bahamut. "Look who is here."

The Elder did not get up.

Ziesge Jennu Trothar was white — old-snow white, with the black at the edges of the scales that comes very late — and she was a hundred and sixty years old and she sat in a chair by a fire that had been hers longer than any of them had been alive, and she looked at each of them in turn and took her time about it, and looked at Zuktind neither longer nor shorter than the rest.

"Three walls," she said.

She counted them on the map with one claw. The map was old — older, Zuktind saw, than any map Mira carried — and the claw moved across it without hurry.

"Granite. Quartzite. Diabase. One gate through the first of them, and men on the wall whose entire duty is to put a bolt through anything that tries to come over the top instead. Four hundred years of that." She looked up. "And two afternoons ago, six people appeared standing in the middle of my innermost ring. Two of them mine. Four of them faces I had never seen. The first I heard of it was a novice with a broom. The second was a runner from my captain, this morning." Her eyes went to Hugto and back. "The third was my High Priestess. An hour ago."

There was no anger in it. That was worse.

"So it seems to me that there is a door in my town. It has been there longer than the town. And I did not know about it."

"To be honest," Hugto said, quietly, "we didn't think anybody knew how to use it. Until today."

The Door

Zuktind had been thinking about this since the yard, and he did what he always did with a thing he had been thinking about: he said it.

"Esteemed Elder. High Priestess. I believe I may have a solution to this gap in our security." He laid it out. "We can't involve the militia — not the ranks. If they learned what has happened to the sigils, and it got out, the town would panic. But the clergy could guard it. Paladins of Bahamut, at the circle, at all hours."

The Elder looked at the priestess. The priestess looked back. It was the kind of look that passes between two people who have just had this exact argument.

"And you think," Ziesge said, "that we should not tell our militia. Let them stand blind to a threat inside their own walls." She let it sit. "If we are invaded from within, boy — how can they be prepared?"

"It's a delicate issue." He was already turning it. "Perhaps the officers. The ones who wouldn't tell the whole town."

"Perhaps." She turned her head, and her eyes went past him, to the two who had said nothing since the door — the paladin on the bench with his arms folded and the bard beside him. "You two look like experienced soldiers. Do you have any thoughts on this?" A beat. "Or are you here as decoration for this one?"

Rathenfall, who had been sitting like a man not listening, unfolded his arms.

"A signal," he said. "Something secret. The militia learn it — drill it — and when it goes, they go. Straight to the circle." He shrugged. "They'd have to get used to it. But it would work."

Zuktind took it up at once — yes, train them, but sworn to secrecy, a confidential — and it was Telno, of all of them, who found the shape of the thing. She had been standing at his shoulder with her hands folded, and she said it to the Elder directly.

"The officers should know. That's all. And you don't need to tell the ranks why they're drilling." She glanced at the window, at the sky over the rock. "Dragonkin fly. Tell them the drill is for an enemy that comes over the walls from above and lands in the administrative ring. It's the same drill. They never need to hear the word circle."

Zuktind turned and looked at his sister as if he had not seen her all day. "That's a wonderful idea," he said. "I wish I weren't having such a bad afternoon, or I'd have thought of it."

The Elder and the priestess conferred, low, over the map. Then Ziesge nodded once. The officers would know. The recruits would not — we cannot trust them to be wise enough not to tell their mothers — and they would drill for an enemy from above.

"And the door itself," the Elder said. "Can it be shut?"

"I'm not versed in these things," Zuktind admitted.

Hugto was. She took a moment before she answered, and the answer, when it came, was the one thing in the room nobody had expected.

"The door was made by Bahamut himself," she said. "If a mortal had made it, by ordinary means, I still don't believe we could unmake it. Knowing the Platinum Lord's own hand engraved it —" she spread her fingers over the drawing, the rectangle, the circle, the hatching for the rug — "no. I doubt we can."

What they could do, she went on, was less than that and enough. Reinforce the chapel door, so that whatever came through the floor came into a locked room. Put a way to see in without opening it. And post a watch — the clergy, the paladins, in the chapel at every hour — so that the moment the circle woke, the temple would know.

"That'd be a good idea," Rathenfall said.

The Elder, who had listened to all of it with the patience of a woman who has outlived three captains, offered the other kind of wisdom.

"Or," she said, "we take a chisel to the thing and see what happens."

"That might not be the best idea." Rathenfall, flat, from the bench. "Break something like that and you get backlash. Magical." He shook his head. "Never good."

Nobody took a chisel to it.

And nobody, in that room, said the name of the woman who held the key. Zuktind had carried it up the hill from the yard and did not set it down; Hugto, who knew, said nothing that was not asked; and the Elder, who did not know, did not ask. The door would be watched. Who it was being watched for stayed in three people's heads and went no further.

"Is everything else about the door," Zuktind asked, "to your satisfaction? Besides that it goes on existing?"

"I don't think we can do much more about the door," Ziesge said. "Now the rest of it."

Whose Army

She did not look at him when she began.

"A son of this town left five years ago. He did not leave to see the world, and he did not leave for coin. He left because of her, and everyone on this mountain knows it, and half of them think he should have stayed and the other half think worse than that."

Now she looked at him.

"He comes back with four outsiders and a hole in my wall. So instead of hurrying to leave — what is it you want from Claw Ridge? And what does Claw Ridge get for helping you?"

Zuktind told her.

He told her all of it, standing, in front of Hugto, who had heard it in pieces across three days and now heard it whole. That they had come here because it was on the road to Vaasa, where they had been told to find Tamarand, the King of Justice. That they had learned since that there was a shorter road — a ruined temple in the valley below, their own people's, older than the town, that held the sigils for a circle in Vaasa. That they carried a letter from the Platinum Lord himself, an introduction, so that they might ask the King of Justice to call a council of the metallic dragons — because the Cult of the Dragon had begun to ally with and mobilise the children of their oldest enemy, and there was a portal in the Spine of the World and a clock on it, and whatever the cult meant to bring through it could not be anything but hers.

"So what we want," he said, "is to reach Tamarand quickly. And as for what Claw Ridge gets —" He knew security was not an answer. He said so. "First: when we go down, that valley will finally be mapped. Properly. It will be safer for everyone after. And second —" the earnestness was carrying him now, past the place where he should have stopped — "if you desired it of us, instead of avoiding the tribes as we intended, we could weaken them. On your behalf. So they would be in no condition to come up this trail for a long time."

The Elder let that hang in the firelight until it was cold.

"And this would be the six of you," she said. "And whose army?"

"Just the six of us. We wouldn't put the militia in danger. We have fought ferals before and won. We have felled a white dragon. Two adult blacks that were pretending to be one ancient —"

"This plan of yours is dangerous." She said it without heat. "Reckless, perhaps. The ferals have not attempted the treason we suffered — not once, in five years. And now you propose to go down into the valley and attack them." She leaned forward, and the chair creaked, and it was the first time she had moved. "And what if they retaliate against the town? You go into the valley. You teleport away. You leave." A pause. "We stay here."

"Only if you desired it," Zuktind said. "I said if —"

"Have you thought about that?"

He had not. It was in his face. "Then — since you don't wish us to engage, we won't engage. Instead —" and he reached for something else to offer and found nothing in his hands, and knew it, and the Elder knew it, and the fire burned down a little while everyone in the room watched him not find it.

"I'm not convinced," Ziesge Jennu Trothar said. "It doesn't seem like a good plan to me."

It was Rathenfall who spoke into that. He had not moved from the bench, and he sounded like a man who had been waiting for the argument to arrive at the only part of it that mattered.

"The sigils," he said. "The ones you lost. If we find them down there, we can copy them. For the town." He looked at the Elder, then at the fire. "You'd have your door back."

Something in the old woman's face shifted — and then more than a hair's width. She looked at the paladin for a long moment, the way she had looked at Zuktind when they came in, and this time she took longer.

"That," said Ziesge Jennu Trothar, "might be useful."

It was not a yes. It was the thing before a yes — the sound of a price being found acceptable by someone who had not expected to find one. Four hundred years of a door nobody could use, and a stranger on a bench had just offered to hand her the key back. Hugto, at the table, had gone very still.

And that was where it stood when the light went — the errand told, the first offer withdrawn, the second one taken up, and everything the town might give in return still unspoken in the old woman's mouth. The Elder had all the time in the world. She had had a hundred and sixty years of it. Zuktind, who had none, stood in front of her table and understood, a little late, that it had not been his argument that carried the room. It had been the one man in it who had said almost nothing all day.

Closing

They did not leave her house that day, and they did not finish in it.

Below the innermost ring, in a chapel almost nobody visited, a circle under a rug waited for a watch that had been agreed and not yet posted. In the yard, a recruit with three lessons in her went home to a father who would hear about every one of them by supper. Four doors down from the Darastrix Lexi house, a woman who had never seen her goddess was still praying to her, with a fresh offering on the shelf and a stranger's nightmares in her ears. Somewhere on the residential ring an old woman named Ghelka, who had lost the same argument for five years and never once conceded it, did not know that two people had stood on the Speaking Stone and decided she was owed a sentence.

And at the Elder's table, under survey sheets four hundred years old that nobody had yet thought to look at, the priestess who had walked up the hill an hour before them kept her own counsel, and the Elder waited, and the fire burned lower, and the paladin's offer lay where he had set it and where she had picked it up — the town's lost door, in exchange for a road to a king.

She had not yet said what the road would cost her. But she had stopped saying no.

The valley was still down there. So were the sigils, carved in stone. And the thing that had to be said to get past this table had not been said yet, by anyone, and would keep until morning.