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Corbin was not as practiced at medicine as Black. This wasn’t to say that he was incompetent; he clearly knew what he was doing. But he wasn’t nearly as smooth or quick about it as she had been, fumbling with the needle as he stitched the wounds I’d taken.

 

I didn’t particularly care. I was drifting on a cloud of alchemical sedative and distance and sheer exhaustion. I didn’t actually lose consciousness, this time. But I wouldn’t say that I was precisely awake, either. I just say there, watching the world pass around me without quite being cognizant of what was happening.

 

Once again, the inn was being used as a meeting place. This time, however, the tone was very different. Everyone had heard what happened to Hideo. Everyone knew that the empire’s plan had never involved saving us.

 

It hadn’t quite occurred to me, until I saw the reaction that news provoked, quite how much we all depended on it. Even the people who hated the empire. Even Ketill. We might not like it, but we’d gotten used to knowing it was there. Losing that sense of security, of being a part of something larger than just Branson’s Ford, was like walking a tightrope and having the safety net removed from underneath.

 

Everyone could feel it. I could see it in their eyes, in how they moved. Before the atmosphere in the village had been one of fear, dread, even desperation. But now there was an element of anxiety, of uncertainty, to it that hadn’t quite been there before.

 

By the time everyone had finished trickling in, Corbin was just finishing his work. He’d put bandages with some cool cream on the burns, and stitched the cuts and stabs on my back. Judging by his expression some of those were worse than I’d realized. Corbin looked concerned, and there was a darkness about his expression that worried me.

 

He picked me up, having no difficulty with my weight, and carried me over to a stool in the corner and set me down. He took a moment to fuss over me, making sure I wasn’t about to fall over or upset the bandages, and then went to start getting food and drink. He must have used a lower dose of anesthetic than before, because I was conscious enough to look around the taproom.

 

It was packed. Not that it hadn’t been busy the last time a meeting of this sort happened, but there were even more people there now. I wasn’t sure it would be exaggerating to say that every person in Branson’s Ford was there, from babes in arms to an old man who used two canes and still needed help walking.

 

No one wanted to miss this. No one.

 

The room was quiet as Corbin handed out food, once again refusing to take any kind of payment. There were some whispered conversations, people asking questions and sharing fears. But it was very hushed, very subdued. The talk didn’t so much break the silence as underline its presence.

 

I took my food with the rest. There was the usual bread and soup, but also two cheeses, sausage, and somehow, even with everything that was happening, Corbin had found the time to make apple pie. After a moment he came back and set a steaming cup of tea on the floor next to me.

 

It took a few minutes for him to pass out the food to everyone. I was just surprised he’d made enough for this crowd. Maybe he’d expected something like this to happen today.

 

If the room had been quiet before, though, it went dead silent as Sumi made his way to the front of the room. The legionnaire was understandably slow, hobbling along with one leg and crutches. In a way, it lent an air of dignity, of gravitas to the scene. It gave people time to realize what was happening and fall silent.

 

The other legionnaires were present, as well. I could see Marcus standing next to the door, expression carefully blank. Aelia, on the other hand, made her way over to sit next to me as Sumi walked up. He climbed onto the bar, slowly and with evident difficulty, giving him a sort of improvised stage from which to address the crowd. A flash of irritation went through me as I saw feet on the bar I’d put so much effort into keeping clean down the years, but I suppressed it. It didn’t matter anymore.

 

I largely ignored Sumi as he spoke. He was just explaining what had happened, and I didn’t need to hear it. I’d been there.

 

I focused on eating instead. Somewhat to my embarrassment, I needed to focus on it; my hands were shaky, and all my motions were uncertain. After a few false starts Aelia started helping me, holding my hand steady and keeping me from spilling broth on myself. I hated that I needed help to feed myself–that I was so badly off that the woman with one hand was helping me, and I needed it. But there was no sense in pretending otherwise.

 

When he finished laying out the basics of Hideo’s plan in coming here, and what had happened to him, Sumi stopped talking. The echoing silence left behind when his voice stopped was almost startling in its sheer emptiness.

 

It was broken by Egill. Or the mayor, I supposed, since with Hideo’s death we probably weren’t under martial law anymore. Not that it was likely to matter, since I was feeling rather confident there wouldn’t be anything to be the mayor of shortly.

 

But the role still showed in his bearing, his attitude, as he stood. There was a sort of pride in how he held himself that was lacking in the rest of the villagers, by and large.

 

“With all respect,” he said, and his tone actually was respectful. “I don’t know that this matters, particularly. We’re still in the same position that we were before, aren’t we? We need a way to deal with these things, and we don’t have one.”

 

“There’s a very clear difference,” Corbin said from behind the bar. “We’re committed now. The last time we were gathered here, we didn’t decide anything because we were waiting to hear the empire’s plan for solving this problem. Well, now we’ve heard it, and it’s unacceptable.” He shook his head. “We can’t put this off any longer,” he said. “Here, now, we have to make a decision.”

 

“Now hold a moment,” Ketill said from the crowd. The old farmer was standing at the front of the group, near the bar, and he had one hand on his knife in a posture that was a touch too casual to be a coincidence. “You skipped over somethin’ there, Corbin. These imperial bastards were going to throw us to the wolves. Why should we be helping you now, eh?” He pointed at Sumi, forcefully, looking like he was stabbing at the air and wishing it was the legionnaire.

 

“We’re all standing in the same fire, here,” Sumi said from his perch on the bar. He sounded tired. “This isn’t you helping us, or us helping you. This is all of us recognizing that we’re in the same place right now, and we’re all going to die if we can’t work together.”

 

“And you’re why,” Ketill said. “Or are you going to say you didn’t come here planning to kill us?”

 

“I knew it could happen, but I wasn’t planning on it,” the legionnaire said. He sighed heavily. “I’ve made my share of mistakes. I doubt you’ll find a man or woman in this room who hasn’t. But if you want to talk about who started this fire, maybe we should wait until we’re out of it first.”

 

Ketill seemed to consider arguing further, then gave Sumi a begrudging nod instead. “I reckon that’s fair,” he said, stepping back slightly into the crowd.

 

“That still leaves us where we were,” Egill said, taking back control of the conversation so smoothly that I doubted most of those present realized he’d done it at all. “We are in a dire position, and we need to do something about it. I think it’s clear we can’t stay here and wait this out.”

 

“Could we talk to the ghouls, if they’re that smart?” Gunnar asked. “Parlay, or make some kind of deal?”

 

Ketill snorted. “You want to try, be my guest,” he said. “I reckon if you go out there with a white flag, you’ll get killed before you can say hello. They ain’t interested in talking.”

 

“Even if they were, why would they make a deal? They’re winning.” This voice came from the midst of the crowd, and it took several seconds for me to place it as the mayor’s daughter. Livy, her name was. I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t recognized her voice at first. Livy had always been, to put it bluntly, one of the most sheltered people in town. She wasn’t wholly innocent–no one was–but there was a sort of optimism about her. Now she sounded bleak, hopeless.

 

“That’s a fair point,” Corbin said. “Whether we try to talk or not, it might be worth asking. What do these things want?”

 

“Seems pretty clear they want to kill us all,” one of the farmers said–not one I knew, I thought, not one that came to the inn regularly. Her voice had a trace of bone-dry humor in it.

 

“Seems that way,” Egill agreed. “I’m not sure it matters why. Like the legionnaire said, that’s a question for after we get out of this fire.”

 

I paused in the middle of finishing my bread, then pushed the last of it into my mouth, thinking. There was something…off here, something that Egill’s words had reminded me of.

 

“Can we just run for it?” Ilse asked. She was scared–I could hear it in her voice–but it was a tightly contained sort of fear. Ilse had lived through the war, some of the worst of it; if that hadn’t broken her, this wasn’t going to either.

 

“Could,” Marcus said, speaking up from his position by the door for the first time. The legionnaire’s voice was calm, almost bored. “We’d have to make good time, though. Leave the old and injured here, they’ll slow them down enough for us to get a head start.”

 

“We aren’t leaving anyone behind,” Egill said firmly.

 

“It’s better than all of us dying here,” Marcus said. “Which is what happens otherwise.”

 

“It’s not an option.”

 

Marcus looked around, and apparently didn’t care for his odds with the crowd he saw. He shrugged. “Suit yourselves,” he said. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The legionnaire pulled out a small knife and started trimming his nails, seeming to ignore the conversation entirely.

 

“I hate to say it,” another farmer said. This one was Changed, though subtly enough that I had to look twice to be sure. I didn’t think he’d ever come to the inn before. “But he might have a point. Otherwise we’re left with, what? Fight them? We don’t have the numbers for that to be anything but suicide.”

 

No one seemed to have an answer to that. The room went silent again, but it was a very different sort of silence than it had been earlier. Before Sumi started talking, the silence had been an almost respectful sort of hush, waiting for something. This silence was more…aware, I thought, conscious of the gravity of the moment. Whatever was chosen in the next few moments would spell life or death for everyone here, and everyone knew it.

 

In that pause, I realized what had been itching at me. “Who were they scared of?” I said, blurting the question out as it occurred to me. It wasn’t loud, but I was speaking into the calm before the storm, and everyone heard.

 

“I’m not sure they’re really scared of anyone right now,” someone said. I wasn’t sure who, and at the moment I couldn’t afford the attention to figure it out.

 

I shook my head, and paused before what I said next. It was important to get every word right. “Only attacked twice,” I said. “Once was messengers.”

 

“Which was obviously to keep us from bringing the legions down on them,” Egill said.

 

I nodded. “Reason to attack,” I said. “But other time, they killed Andrew.”

 

Egill was frowning. “That could have just been an attack on the center of government,” he said. “Strike at the legion headquarters, disrupt what little we had in the way of a coordinated response.”

 

“No,” Ketill said slowly. “No, she’s right. The second he went down, they started trying to run. Thought they were scared, but dying don’t seem to matter to these things, does it?”

 

“So you think they were scared of him?” Egill said. “Why? Not to speak ill of the dead, but he didn’t seem that impressive.”

 

“Fire,” I said simply.

 

There was a pause, and then Ketill said, “You know, when they attacked, one of ’em flinched when I swung a torch at it. Didn’t think anything of it.”

 

“Even animals are afraid of fire,” Sumi said. He sounded thoughtful. “Could be it’s basic enough that it overrides that…shared mind they have.”

 

“Does it matter?” Livy said from the crowd. The girl still sounded utterly hopeless, beaten down. “We only had one man who could have done something with it, and he’s dead.”

 

I looked at Corbin. So, I noted, did Sumi. The legionnaire knew, then, or at least suspected. There were a few others who likely did as well–the mayor, Ketill, maybe a few of the other farmers. The older ones, who’d lived through the war.

 

It was Sumi that said something, though, picking his words with extreme care. “Hideo was an alchemist,” he said. “He brought a full load of reagents with him, in case. I don’t know what they are, but he said something about fire-oil.”

 

I kept looking at Corbin. He didn’t look back, couldn’t meet my gaze; he was focused on the bar right in front of him, like if he didn’t look away the rest of the world would ignore him, too. The room was silent once again, waiting. Most of them probably didn’t know why, but those of us who did showed it enough to tell them that something important was happening, even if they didn’t know what or why.

 

Seconds ticked past like that. I suspected Corbin was in the same place I had been, so recently–balanced on a knife over the abyss, rapidly being forced to the point where he’d have to choose a side, and there would be no turning back.

 

When the moment broke, it did so all at once. Corbin crumpled in on himself, shoulders slumping, head bowing. It looked like he’d aged thirty years in a heartbeat, and when he spoke, he sounded so tired I could have believed it. “I can make fire-oil,” he said, in the tone of a man admitting a mortal sin. “If he brought the components, I can make it.”

 

“Is that really our plan?” Marcus said from the back of the crowd. “Hope they’re scared of fire based on what one girl thinks was behind some random coincidence?” He snorted. “Some plan.”

 

“It’s the best we have,” Egill said simply. “Corbin? How long will it take for you to be ready?”

 

The innkeeper–or, rather, the engineer, because like Black had said, what we needed now was an engineer–shrugged. “A few hours,” he said. “It’s not complicated.”

 

Egill nodded. “You heard the man,” he said. “You have a few hours, and then we’re going to end this once and for all. Do what you have to do, and we’ll meet back here at an hour past noon.” For a moment it seemed as though he would say something else, before he just stared walking towards the door. The rest of the room followed his example–including Corbin, likely going to check on whatever alchemical supplied Hideo had brought. Within minutes the taproom went from absolutely packed to empty.

 

I stayed where I was. I’d already made my preparations, before going to confront Hideo. There was nothing left but to do or die, for me.

 

Aelia stayed seated next to me, watching the rest leave. When it was just the two of us in the room, and everyone else was gone, she looked at me. “You know we’ll probably still lose,” she said bluntly. “Even if you’re right, we’re probably going to die. We just don’t have enough people.”

 

I nodded.

 

“So why do it?”

 

I thought for a moment, and then said, “Gave them something to hope for.”

 

Aelia opened her mouth, then closed it again, looking thoughtful. After another moment she stood and left.

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I was not much of a fighter. I knew that.

 

Oh, I’d been in a few, and I’d survived them. But I had no illusions about how. I’d lived this long because people underestimated me. I’d run when I could, fought back with more ferocity and ability than people anticipated, and only attacked those weaker than myself. In an outright fight, without cheating or distractions or a place to run and hide, I was not that remarkable.

 

Hideo, on the other hand, was an alchemist.

 

In the camps, I’d learned an important lesson that everyone who lives on the edges of society learns sooner or later. I’d been fortunate in having it explained to me rather than having to learn firsthand how it worked. I’d heard it over a small fire and a scrap of bread from a woman who’d looked like she was made of shoe leather and gristle. She’d clearly been living on the edge far longer than I had, and it showed.

 

The way she’d put it to me was very simple. There were some people in this world, she’d said, about with whom one did not fuck.

 

A legionnaire was one thing, and bad enough. They were trained, in most cases veteran, soldiers. They were armed and dangerous and the simple fact of the matter was that if you weren’t similarly trained and equipped, and if they wanted to kill you, you would probably die. But at the same time, the strength of the legions wasn’t in individual brilliance. They’d made it as far as they were, won the battles and crushed their enemies, because they were numerous and coordinated. Alone, many of their strengths didn’t apply; they were still dangerous, but they could be beaten.

 

A channeler was worse. Someone who was trained in using channeling in combat was an absolute nightmare in a fight, with the potential for sudden, massive destruction. One act, just a single thought on their part was enough to lay waste to a whole crowd of people. But still, it had its limits. As I was acutely aware, channeling was only a fraction as effective inside imperial wards. Even outside that, they could be outthought, outmaneuvered. It lent itself very well to big, flashy things, and not nearly so well to the small and precise.

 

An alchemist, though, was another story entirely, a story best left well alone. They weren’t always that impressive–it was an extremely versatile art, after all, and there were plenty of alchemists who’d never so much as been in a fistfight. Even if they were practiced at violence, there wasn’t a lot of alchemy that you could do on the spot, as I understood it. If they weren’t ready for it, they might not be any better off than anyone else.

 

But for all that, an imperially trained alchemist was generally regarded as the single worst sort of person in the world to pick a fight with. Because while they might not have anything on hand that could simply annihilate you, they also might. There was, essentially, no predicting what an alchemist could do, what they were capable of. If they had the knowledge and the materials there was almost nothing an alchemist couldn’t do. And an alchemist who had been trained at one of the great academies in Aseoto, who had the backing of the legions, had the knowledge and materials to do a great deal.

 

I’d known that Hideo used alchemical weapons. The fact that he’d blinded me with one earlier had been a bit of a hint for that. But there was an enormous difference between having alchemy and being an alchemist. I’d known that he couldn’t be just a surveyor, at this point, but I had not come here ready for an actual alchemist.

 

Short of actually running into one of the Dierkhlani, it was hard to imagine anyone I was less equipped to fight than an imperial alchemist. Had I any choice in the matter at all, I would never have voluntarily put myself in a position where I had to.

 

But I didn’t, and here I was.

 

All that being said, he wasn’t one of the Dierkhlani. He wasn’t even Changed. Hideo was, beneath everything else, human. And he was as fragile as any other human.

 

So I didn’t say a word, didn’t do anything to give him warning of what was about to happen. As he looked down at his work, as he looked away from me for that critical moment, I struck. It was the best, and usually the only, way to beat an alchemist. If I could kill Hideo before he knew there was a fight, he wouldn’t have a chance to use the weapons he’d prepared.

 

I tossed the coin into the air, watching as time stretched out. The coin hung there, balanced on nothing between us, catching the cold light of the alchemical lamps and throwing it back at me.

 

I felt like I was balancing on the blade of a knife, standing over an abyss. Whatever I did in the next few seconds, I would fall to one side or the other, and there would be no turning back.

 

Then I reached out, seizing the coin, and the moment shattered. I channeled magic into it, as hard and fast as I could, and the bit of metal shot across the room. It wasn’t a terribly large projectile, but it was moving fast, more than fast enough to blast straight through Hideo’s skull.

 

Or, alternatively, fast enough that when it swerved aside at the last moment, it slammed into the stone wall of the cellar hard enough to shatter almost into dust.

 

He looked up at me and sighed, his expression not so much angry as disappointed. “Did you know,” he said conversationally, “that you can make an alchemical shield of sorts that deflects channeling? It’s a fairly simple feedback mechanism, actually relatively cheap to make–wolframite, an alchemically active pewter alloy, charged magnetite for metal.”

 

I grimaced, snatched out another handful of coins and threw them at him. Every single one swept aside without even getting close.

 

“I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” Hideo said over the sound of metal clattering to the floor. “But I would have been a fool to ignore the possibility. I do apologize, Silf, it’s nothing personal.”

 

That was all he said before producing a small ceramic vial from his pocket and tossing it at me.

 

I was already moving, running towards the edge of the room, and it was the only reason I lived. When that vial hit the floor, it didn’t just break, it exploded, spraying a thick, oily liquid in a cloud. It had barely come into contact with the air when I saw a shimmer run over the surface of the liquid that was just slightly too bright to be the reflected light of the lamps.

 

Then, without warning, it burst into flame, a bright yellow flame that was more intense than it had any right to be.

 

I avoided the worst of it, but some of the oil got onto me, on my back and my arms. It ignited with the rest, a bright hot shock of heat on my skin. There was no pain, not at first, just heat.

 

I dove forward, helped along by the rush of hot air from behind me, and hit the ground in an awkward tumble. It put out the fires, at least, though it seemed that they were already dying all around. This wasn’t fire-oil, then, not the flames that clung and would not stop; this was something far shorter lived. Which made sense, if Hideo had been planning to use it down here; Corbin’s fire-oil would kill him, too, in this enclosed space.

 

The pain was hitting, now, making me gasp. But I tried to ignore it, pushing myself to my feet and stumbling forward, blinking back tears from the pain.

 

I couldn’t use channeling against him. That was a very, very big problem. I’d been counting on killing him with that first coin, or at the very least on having a weapon I could use against him.

 

I realized that I’d reached the edge of the room, and stumbled to a stop, turning to face Hideo. The hard, vicious side of me was taking over again, harsh and logical and brutal.

 

I was guessing that he’d used fire specifically because he knew that I was spooked by it, and he wanted to keep me from thinking rationally. If so, he’d made a mistake. He’d seen me panic at fire, but there was nowhere to run, and even a rabbit will bite if it’s cornered.

 

So. Consider, and plan. Hideo was holding that scalpel, but no other obvious weapons, not of the traditional sort. He was larger and stronger than me, most likely more experienced, but largely unarmed. I didn’t have to worry overly about that.

 

More concerning was what he was holding in his other hand. It was a bit of glass that had a spark of light caged inside it, along with some brilliant blue liquid. I’d seen something very similar right before a burst of light and sound and poison that had incapacitated me for several minutes, when I’d confronted Hideo in the night.

 

That time, he’d just left as I was lying moaning on the ground. I didn’t think I’d get as lucky this time if he incapacitated me again.

 

I looked around, trying to think of something I could do about it, and saw that I was standing right next to the spilled barrel of potatoes. It must have been largely empty already, because while there were only around a dozen potatoes on the floor, the barrel itself was virtually empty.

 

Not the best weapon I’d ever seen, but it would do. I heaved it off the ground, channeling enough through the metal bands around it to take some of the burden off my arms, and threw it at him at the same time as he threw his alchemical weapon at me.

 

I got lucky, and the two lined up how I’d hoped that they might. The bit of glass sailed into the barrel, and shattered there, rather than continuing on to me.

 

I heard a loud screech that made me want to curl up and whimper for a while, and saw bursts of light through the openings between the barrel staves. But I was spared from the worst of it by the obstacle between me and the detonation’s source, and it was only uncomfortable rather than debilitating.

 

The same could not be said of Hideo. The alchemist stumbled back a step with a shout of pain, raising his hands. The barrel crashed into his upraised arms–I wasn’t actively channeling through it since I’d thrown it, which seemed to be enough to keep his defense from deflecting it. Off balance as he was, it carried him straight off his feet and they crashed to the floor together.

 

I could have taken the opportunity to run. But that wouldn’t have settled anything, and this might be the most vulnerable I’d ever have Hideo.

 

I had to capitalize on this chance.

 

There were dozens of half-made pieces of alchemy around the room, and odds were good that many of them were weapons I could have used. But I didn’t know what they were, and using them without knowing that was just a fancy way to commit suicide. Better to rely on what I knew I could trust, and hope it was enough.

 

Hideo wasn’t affected anything like as badly as I had been. He was operating on merely human senses, after all; where the noise and light had crippled me, he was only inconvenienced. He was still coughing from whatever vapor was in that thing, shaking his head and blinking back tears, but he was standing as I reached him, tossing the barrel aside.

 

I dropped low and hit him at the knees, slamming my shoulders into his legs. It tore the freshly burned skin there, drawing another gasp of pain from me, but it worked, knocking him down again before he could finish standing.

 

I drew out the hatchet Black had given me and swung it at Hideo’s head, as hard as I could, as he was lying on the ground.

 

But I was off balance myself, and without thinking I channeled more force into the swing, putting just that little bit more behind the axe than muscle alone could provide. It was enough to trigger that protection, sending the hatchet swerving to the side. It still hit, biting into his shoulder rather than his skull, but it wasn’t anything like the decisive blow I’d hoped for.

 

Worse, that change to the direction of the swing caught me off guard, pulling me further off balance. I stumbled past him, and then my trailing foot caught his shoulder and I fell, hard. My grip clenched convulsively around the haft of the axe, and my fall had enough force to pull the weapon out of his shoulder, but when I hit the ground my hand slammed into the ground.

 

My hand went numb, and my grip went loose, and the hatchet spun off under one of the tables. I was unarmed with anything more impressive than a knife, and flat on my stomach on the floor.

 

Hideo was quick to capitalize on the sudden shift in fortunes. He was on his knees, still, but he had one hand in a pocket of his robes, likely pulling out some other bit of alchemy that would finish the job. I didn’t think I would be able to dodge this one, not in my current position.

 

If I’d been what I once was, just a normal human girl with a normal human life, that would have been the end of me.

 

But I wasn’t, and that mattered. My body was close enough to quadrupedal to fake it, at least a little. I got all four limbs under me and literally threw myself at Hideo, not bothering to stand first.

 

I was smaller than he was, but I had the advantage of momentum. I bowled him over, and the thing he’d been retrieving rolled away under another table. It looked like a bit of glass, but there was something wrong about it; it was twisted in ways that hurt to look at, like I couldn’t process everything I was seeing.

 

We rolled across the floor, locked together, and I ended up on top by pure luck. I drew the old legion-issue dagger I’d brought, and thrust it at his ribs.

 

Here, though, Hideo’s greater strength and experience showed. He twisted aside from the blade, and it did nothing more than graze his skin. Then he pulled some wrestler’s trick, easily overpowering any resistance I could muster, and ended up straddling me, pinning me to the floor. He was holding my knife hand down with one hand, and with the other he reached over and easily plucked the blade out of my grip.

 

I tried to squirm out, but he obviously knew this game better than I did, and he had no difficulty blocking any movement I could make. He took the dagger and drew back to thrust it into me. His teeth were bared in a snarl, any pretense of civility or humor shed now.

 

In doing so, though, he left an opening, one which the unusual articulation of my spine left me in a position to take advantage of. I lunged up towards him, teeth first, biting at his face.

 

My teeth weren’t as obviously inhuman as many of my other features. But they were still heavier and sharper than a person’s ought to be, somewhere between those of a human and a dog. They ripped into flesh and started tearing away chunks as I bit and bit again.

 

Hideo shouted in pain and surprise, caught off guard by that particular tactic. He tried to cut at me, but he didn’t have the position to do more than lightly slash at my back–wounds, certainly, but nothing that would kill me in a hurry. And all the while I was tearing at his face with my teeth. I could taste blood, and feel it flowing over my face, getting my fur wet.

 

He grabbed me and pulled me off him, slamming my head back into the floor hard enough to make me see stars.

 

But I’d seen worse, and now we were in my kind of fight. I squirmed again, and now he was too shaken up to stop me as I twisted and brought my arm up. My claws raked along the inside of his arm.

 

My claws were not as impressive as those of, say, a mountain lion. But they weren’t just decorative, either. The first stroke tore away the sleeve of his robe, ripping another of my claws out when it tangled in the fabric and I wasn’t willing to wait long enough to work it free. The second stroke, even without that claw, was enough to shred the arm underneath, cutting into the veins and tendons there.

 

He tried to cut my throat, but the damage I’d just done was enough that he could barely keep a grip on the dagger, let alone use it. I reached up and twisted it out of his hand as easily as he’d taken it from me, earlier. I took it, and set my feet on the floor.

 

When I stabbed him, I did it hard, arching my back up off the ground and pushing with my legs to put more force behind the blade. The dagger slammed home between his ribs, sinking deep enough that my hand was pressed tight to the blood-soaked fabric of his robes.

 

Hideo gasped and collapsed on top of me. But I didn’t stop there. I kept stabbing him, pulling the dagger out and slamming it back into him, again and again and again.

 

I wasn’t sure how long I spent like that. The next thing I was clearly aware, I was lying on the floor under the surveyor–the inquisitor’s–body, absolutely drenched in blood. He was most certainly dead, had likely been dead for some time now. My arm was tired from stabbing him so many times, and I hurt everywhere. It stank of blood and shit and smoke.

 

I was crying, a steady stream of tears running down my face. I thought I’d probably been crying for a while, too.

 

It felt like it took a year to lift my arms and slowly push the body off me, at least enough that I could slip out from underneath it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so tired, or so filthy.

 

And then I heard a very clear voice say, “Stop right there.”

 

I looked up through tired eyes, blurred by tears, and saw Marcus standing over me. He was wearing full legion armor, and had his sword drawn. He was looking directly at me, lying on the floor soaked in his commanding officer’s blood. And he did not look pleased.

 

I should probably have done what he told me. But it didn’t seem to matter. I was already exhausted, and hurt. I wouldn’t have bet on myself against a child at the moment, let alone a legionnaire. If he decided to kill me, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. So rather than stop, I slowly, painfully pushed myself to my feet.

 

Marcus snarled, and drew the sword back to swing at me. It was an overdramatic sort of strike, slow and obvious and far more than was necessary for someone like me. It didn’t matter, since I was far too tired and clumsy to dodge right now anyway.

 

And then there was a very simple, quietly threatening sort of click behind him. “Drop the sword,” Aelia said. I couldn’t see her from my angle, but from the sound of it she had to be a few feet behind him.

 

Marcus froze, but didn’t lower the blade. “She just killed an officer of the Crown,” he said, sounding more furious about that than Hideo had.

 

“And saved all our lives,” Sumi said from next to Aelia. “You heard the man. He was going to throw all of us away to cover his exit. If anything you should be thanking her for killing him before he could.”

 

Marcus grimaced, but didn’t argue.

 

“Drop the sword, Marcus,” Aelia said. “I won’t ask again.”

 

Marcus sighed, and threw the sword to the ground. The ring of steel on stone was shockingly loud. “Someone will have to answer for this,” he said, gesturing at the mangled corpse of the imperial inquisitor on the floor.

 

“Later,” I said in a thin rasp. “After.”

 

“We can settle all of this later,” Sumi said firmly. “Assuming any of us are alive to worry about it. For now, we have work to do.”

 

“I’ll get Silf patched up,” Aelia said, stepping around Marcus into view. She was carrying what looked like a lighter version of an arbalest in her one remaining hand. It should have been difficult, but her arm looked rock steady. “You two go get the village leaders. We still need a plan if any of us are going to make it out of here.”

 

They didn’t argue. I could hear Sumi’s crutches thumping on the floor as they left.

 

Aelia waited until they were out of earshot, then sighed and carefully returned the light arbalest to some sort of holster on her back. “Come on,” she said, offering me her hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

 

I didn’t argue as I let Aelia lead me up out of that cellar. I didn’t look back.

 

We left the broken body of Hideo Azukara, of His Imperial Majesty the August Emperor of Akitsuro’s Inquisition, forgotten on the ground behind us.

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I was, I had to admit, impressed at how much the legions had left their mark upon the house in just the short time they’d been occupying it. It had only been…I was losing track of time, but it could only have been a few days since they moved in here. Before that it had been a perfectly ordinary home for decades.

 

But to look at it now, without knowing better, I would not have guessed at that peaceful history at all. The place looked like a legion outpost, through and through. It smelled like blood, and sweat, and iron. Weapons were lying out almost at random, casually left sitting around the way that farming equipment might have been before–a sword leaning against the wall by the door, daggers on tables, a quiver of bolts spilled on the floor.

 

Marcus closed the door behind me, and locked it with a heavy, very final-sounding click. It was a new lock; the latch was very obviously newly added, bolted onto the door frame. It looked raw and ugly, but the lock itself was beautiful, black metal that shimmered like oil. When I felt for it, trying to channel, it had a slick feeling that could only belong to alchemical metal.

 

That lock wasn’t coming open without a key. I’d have an easier time breaking down a wall, I was guessing–and considering that they’d had days to work on them, I was guessing that the walls had been reinforced in some way too.

 

I was trapped here. My breathing quickened at that realization, and I realized that my hands were clenched, my claws digging into my own skin.

 

No way out but through, I reminded myself, forcing myself to let my grip relax.

 

“Wait here,” Marcus said, walking through the room to what looked like a kitchen.

 

It gave me a chance to look around the room, and see another side of it. I’d already noted that it was a legion building now, through and through. Now I saw how…mundane that could be. There were clothes lying out on the floor, most of them stained with blood. The weapons that were lying around all over the place had maintenance gear set out beside them–oils, sharpening stones, soft cloths. The table had a half eaten meal of bread and sausage sitting out on it; apparently I’d caught them in the middle of lunch.

 

Aelia was sitting at the table, watching me curiously. She waved vaguely at me with her one remaining hand as she noticed me noticing her. She was holding a hand of cards, and I could see what looked like a game of poker dealt on the table. The coins were all small–iron, for the most part, with here and there a glimmer of bronze.

 

Ah. So that was why they’d been slow to respond. They’d been in the middle of eating, gambling, trying to forget their circumstances.

 

Suddenly I resented Marcus less for having been an ass about it. I couldn’t say that I liked it, but I understood it now. As much as I hated the legions, as much as I loathed what they were doing here and everything it represented, it couldn’t be a picnic for them either. If I’d been in his position, trying to get away from that mess, and someone had interrupted me, I wasn’t sure I’d have taken it any better than he had.

 

I didn’t like following that line of thought. It was…easier, when you could tell yourself that the people you weren’t fond of were wholly in the wrong. It was easier when everything was black and white. Greys…complicated things.

 

After a few moments, Marcus walked back out, looking like he’d just bitten into a lemon. Possibly one which had just been sprayed by a skunk. “He’ll see you,” the legionnaire said, biting each word off like he was reluctant to let it leave his mouth. “Follow me.”

 

I moved towards him, as he turned and walked back into the other room. And then, as I passed the table where they’d been sitting, I beckoned for Aelia to follow me. It was something done on impulse, no pause between the initial thought and action for me to consider whether that initial thought had been insane. I hadn’t even finished the movement before I was regretting it.

 

I was guessing that it was going to be either a brilliant idea or a terrible one. It would depend on a lot of things that I couldn’t predict. Whether I’d correctly guessed what Hideo’s ultimate plan was, and how he’d react when I confronted him with it. Whether I’d judged Aelia’s character correctly. Whether, when push came to shove, her regret for the horrors she’d seen and the horrors she’d done would outweigh her fear.

 

It was a small gesture, little more than a twitch of my hand at my side. It would be easy to overlook. But Aelia was a career legionnaire, someone who’d spent years with her life riding on noticing small details. Distracted, with her edge dulled by drugs, she was still sharp enough to catch it.

 

She didn’t react overtly, though. I hadn’t said a word, and the gesture was tiny; it wasn’t hard to see that I didn’t want to make this obvious. And for whatever reason, whether it was because she wanted to help me or because she was suspicious already herself, she was willing to go along with that. I was watching her, and so I saw her eyes focus on my hand, and I noticed her head move in the tiniest of nods. But I was confident no one else noticed a thing.

 

The other room was, as it turned out, a kitchen, though it also showed the signs of its new inhabitants. I was confident that it had never, in all the time Ilse lived here, been quite this thorough of a mess. Dishes, cooking implements, and half-eaten food was lying on every available surface, weapons scattered through the room. It smelled vaguely foul, not so much a distinct stench as the generalized odor of careless use.

 

Marcus didn’t stop there, though, going to an open door at the side of the room and gesturing at it. He then promptly turned and went back to his meal, his expression one of mingled boredom and disdain. He didn’t bother to explain, or even wait for me to go in.

 

I went to the door, and found a set of stairs leading down into the earth. The masonry was old and worn smooth, but it had been fitted together with care, and what looked like some sort of alchemical mortar; it was sturdy. At the bottom was another door, also hanging open.

 

I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I shrugged and went down the stairs. I was, by this point, very thoroughly committed; there was no way out but through.

 

At the bottom, I went through the door and pulled it closed behind myself.

 

If I’d thought the rest of the house was changed, I’d had no idea. This space, now, this was changed from what it had been before the imperials came.

 

Before, it had been a cellar, not unlike that at the inn. I could still see the hints of that use in the barrels and sacks and crates which had been pushed carelessly to the edges of the space. One of the barrels had fallen and broken open, spilling potatoes across the floor which no one had bothered to pick up.

 

All of that, though, had been before. Now, it was something very different. Where before it had been a mundane storage area, now it was being turned to a far more exotic end. Tables had been dragged down here–they must have raided the other houses in the village to find so many. On these mismatched tables were dozens of vials and boxes of powders and dusts. A large iron brazier burned in the corner, making the room uncomfortably warm.

 

I wasn’t terribly well educated on the topic. But not even I could mistake this for anything other than an alchemical laboratory.

 

I hesitated as I realized that. It meant…well, it meant a great many things, most of which were distinctly ominous for my plans.

 

Hideo was standing at one of the tables, prodding at something with a scalpel. After a moment I realized that it was a chunk of meat, and judging by the claw it was attached to it must have come from one of the ghouls. The surveyor was wearing his usual heavy robes, his only concession to the heat being sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

 

“Hello there, Silf,” he said in his usual cheery tone. His broad, friendly smile didn’t touch his eyes at all. “Always a pleasure to see you, of course. I understand you wanted to talk to me about something?”

 

I licked my lips, listening closely. I could hear the cracking of the fire, the simmer of a liquid on the heat, Hideo’s calm breathing and my considerably faster breaths.

 

And, very faintly, a rustling outside the door.

 

Good.

 

“Questions,” I said.

 

“Excellent,” he said, laying the scalpel down on the desk with a quiet tap. “Questions are how we learn. Ask.”

 

I hesitated, and then said, “You’re not a surveyor.”

 

That wasn’t a question, but he answered it anyway. “I dabble in geography,” he said. “It’s better to know what you’re claiming to be, you understand. But no, I don’t primarily work with the Engineering Corps.” Still smiling that same mocking, false smile, he swept into an elaborate bow. “Hideo Azukara, with His Imperial Majesty the August Emperor of Akitsuro’s Inquisition, at your service.”

 

Well.

 

That was just great.

 

I nodded with a certain resignation. It was bad news, there was no doubt of that whatsoever, but it was ultimately not that surprising. It had been clear that he wasn’t a surveyor, not really; there was no reason to send a surveyor on this sort of job. But I could see why an inquisitor might end up with this sort of assignment.

 

We’d been doomed to fail from the start. If I’d had any lingering doubt of that, it was settled now. The imperial inquisition was a scary story told around the campfire, that special sort of myth that everyone secretly knows is real. No one really knew what they did, or how, or even why–which, in itself, spoke volumes about how seldom they acted openly. But everyone knew that inquisitors didn’t come out for good things. They didn’t come out for small things, either.

 

“Never had a chance,” I muttered, barely even aware of what I was saying.

 

“I did try to tell you that,” Hideo said helpfully. The smile he was wearing now was more honest, but not necessarily any better for it. It was a nasty sort of smirk, a smile that said he knew exactly how afraid this revelation made me and he wasn’t upset by it at all.

 

“What’s your out?”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“Your plan,” I said. “You want to watch the ghouls attack, this place get destroyed. What then?”

 

“Ah,” he said. “You want to know how I’m planning to leave after it happens?”

 

I nodded.

 

“Your friend Corbin isn’t the only one who knows how to make a portable ward,” Hideo said. “They aren’t as efficient as the warding posts, but they work well enough for short distances.”

 

I nodded again. I’d expected something like that. It was why I’d come here, after all.

 

It was the same plan that Sigmund had proposed to me, essentially. Take the protection and run, leaving the rest of the village to die. The difference being that this version of that plan was far more deliberate, carefully plotted from the start. And knowing that explained quite a few things.

 

“Just you,” I said, out loud. It made sense. Whatever the relative qualities of his ward and Corbin’s, I was confident that whatever he was using couldn’t protect all that much ground. It had to be based on the same design as the warding posts, and those covered a very limited area.

 

And besides, it would explain so much. Why Hideo had been so cavalier with the legionnaires, taking them out to roam the hills hunting for ghouls. It would explain why he hadn’t seemed terribly concerned as they were maimed and killed.

 

“I’m afraid so,” Hideo said. He sounded about as grieved as a man sitting down to a three-course meal with acrobats and courtesans all around. “Though I might extend you an offer to the contrary. You seem to be an exceptionally clever young woman, and the empire could use your service.” He smiled again, and actually winked at me. “Think on it,” he said, picking up his scalpel once more.

 

Was he being sincere, I wondered? It seemed…unlikely. It was too convenient that he would make that offer here and now, when it would be oh so convenient for him if I was too busy chasing that scrap of hope to act on what I’d just confirmed. And besides, if he was going to take people out of here, why not the legionnaires? He could easily have brought more wards to shield them on the way out if he wanted to.

 

No, the intention had to be that Branson’s Ford was going to disappear, completely. No one would live to carry news out of here. The emperor couldn’t want that, after all. He had enough problems with resistance in Skelland already; if word got out that he’d chosen to let an entire village die when he had the means to save them, that could only add fuel to the fire.

 

Not that it really mattered, either way. I wasn’t interested. If I’d been willing to just cut and run and leave everyone else to their fate, I would have taken Sigmund’s offer.

 

For a moment I entertained the possibility of talking him out of it, convincing him to change his mind. But no. That couldn’t happen, and I knew it. He’d made it clear already that he wasn’t interested in working to save this town–that he considered it already dead, in every way that mattered.

 

And besides. Would they have given Hideo this job if they didn’t think he had the fortitude to carry it out to the bitter end?

 

No, talking wasn’t going to solve this. There was nothing I could say that would sway him, nothing I could do that would make him see that things didn’t have to be this way.

 

But there was one thing that could settle our disagreement. The imperials had taught me that a long time ago, and while I was slow to learn, I did not forget.

 

I took a deep breath, and took out a coin, rolling the iron around in my hand.

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I wasn’t sure how to proceed, at that point. Any hope I might have had that this would end well, any lingering assumption I might have had that things would be all right, had been rather thoroughly quashed by that conversation.

 

It wasn’t just what Sumi had said. It was how he’d said it, the attitude he’d had, everything about how it had been presented. That wasn’t an act, or a passing reaction, or the influence of the drugs. It was the quiet despair of a man who’d fully recognized how hopeless his situation was. It was the attitude of someone who knew that he was going to die, knew it with a certainty that left him at peace with the fact.

 

I knew that kind of attitude. I’d seen it in the last days of the siege, when it was clear that we could only expect one thing when it broke. Afterwards, in the camps, occasionally someone would get sick in a way that wasn’t going to get better, not in that environment. It was the same attitude, a desperation that had gone so far it wrapped around and became a strange sort of calm.

 

In an individual fight, I knew what I was doing. But I didn’t know anything about fights that were larger than that, not really. I didn’t have the experience, the grounding to see just how badly off we were. I’d known that things were bad; I’d known that we had a chance of losing.

 

The naive thing had been assuming that we had a chance to win.

 

But now that Sumi had pointed it out, now that he’d torn that thoughtless optimism away, I could see what I’d failed to recognize before. We were surrounded, and likely outnumbered. The ghouls–or whatever these things were, but I had to call them something–were coordinated and organized, when we were neither. They had a very good idea of what we were capable of, and they’d demonstrated that they could predict how we would react; we knew nothing about what they could do or what they wanted.

 

Hideo had said that Branson’s Ford didn’t stand a chance of survival, with or without his help. I’d argued with him, said that you always–always–had to have hope. And I still believed that. But, while his assessment had been harsh, I was no longer certain it had been wrong.

 

There was always hope. You had to have hope, but part of what that meant was finding something that you could actually hope for.

 

It had taken a lot for me to recognize it. I’d had to be told by a lot of people. But I was finally starting to see, now, that the survival of Branson’s Ford was not one of those things. Keeping this village intact was, at this point, simply not something that I could hope to achieve. It would take a miracle, and the simple truth was that most causes which needed miracles didn’t get one.

 

So it was time to start hoping for something else.

 

I paused in my stride as I realized that. It wasn’t much. A hitch in my step, a momentary pause in my breathing, a blink that went on just a little bit too long. I was almost proud of how little it showed, from the outside.

 

Then I opened my eyes, which were not going to shed the tears that I could feel welling up in them, and I started walking more purposefully towards the inn.

 

Once again, I ignored the door and snuck in through my window, barely even slowing as I scrambled up the tree. My leg seemed to be more or less entirely recovered, at least.

 

Back in my room, I ignored everything that I would normally have done upon returning. I went straight to the locked box at the foot of the bed, and I knelt down next to it.

 

The box had been a gift from Corbin, shortly after I woke up. It was made of alchemically treated oak, plated with steel, and the tumbler lock was even more complex and difficult to pick than those on the doors. He’d told me that he was giving me the only key, and while at first I’d been sure that he had a copy, when I’d briefly lost mine the only way he’d had to get it open would have involved an axe.

 

In short, it was a remarkably secure box, the sort of thing that a wealthy merchant might use as a safe.

 

I knelt down next to it, and pulled out the key. It was a small silver key, very plain in appearance; I kept it on a chain around my neck, rather than with my other keys. I put it into the lock and turned it, being careful to keep pressure on the concealed switch next to the lock as I did. The poison on the dart that would otherwise have gone into my hand wouldn’t have killed me, according to Corbin. But it would have made me very sick, likely too much so to stand, let alone escape with the contents.

 

When I opened the box, the contents hardly seemed sufficient to justify the security measures. There was a simple copper necklace, the sort of jewelry that was so obviously cheap that no one would even bother to steal it. A scrap of cloth, black long since faded to grey. A small book, the leather cover of which had been so thoroughly stained that sorting out the boundaries of any of the marks was impossible. A bit of quartz–the sort of stone that was pretty, but ultimately valueless–which had been rubbed until it was almost polished.

 

They looked, in short, very much like what they were–the small treasures of a child. To anyone else, they were almost worthless. To me, they were priceless.

 

I hadn’t had much, when I fled the Whitewood. We didn’t exactly have time to pack. The attack had come suddenly, and at first we hadn’t even realized it was an attack at all. We’d been too panicked to think, to consider the future beyond the next heartbeat. Of what I had taken as I ran, most of it had been taken from me in the refugee camps. I might have been able to defend myself, but I’d still just been a young girl, not canny enough to keep thieves at bay. All else aside, I’d been all alone, and even the most paranoid person had to sleep sometimes.

 

So piece by piece I’d lost the pieces of my former life, and replaced them with pieces I’d taken from other refugees in turn. It hadn’t taken so long before my peaceful, happy existence in the Whitewood was nothing more than a distant memory from another life. If someone from back then had seen me, they would never have recognized Silf the merchant’s daughter in the filthy, half-starved girl I’d become.

 

This was all that was left. A necklace my mother had given me when I was a girl, shiny enough to make a good ornament but not valuable enough to matter if it was lost. A scrap of the shirt my father had been wearing as we fled; it had torn off in my grip as I tried to pull him out from under the rubble, and hours later I’d found it still clutched in my hand, unable to let go even if I’d wanted to. A pretty stone that I’d started carrying for no other reason than that I liked how it looked. And, finally, the journal that I’d kept when I was young.

 

The scribe who taught me to read and write had encouraged me to keep a journal to practice. I’d found that the process helped me to cope. Even in a civilized city being Changed as a child made things hard, and there were always trials and stresses; writing helped me to put things in order and keep them from eating at me. I’d gotten out of the habit in the camps, since there wasn’t exactly time to sit down and write when you were running for your life, and then never picked it up again.

 

Not much to show for a life, really. But I knew that I’d gotten lucky. There were plenty of people who’d fled with nothing at all. There were plenty more who never made it out at all.

 

I stared at the handful of objects in the box for a long, long moment. It felt…strange. I’d kept these things because they meant far too much to me to give them up. But I didn’t actually look at them much; I hadn’t even unlocked this box in months. Now that I did, I remembered why. They felt…distant, alien, unreal. It was hard to remember, hard to even believe that the life these things were a part of had once belonged to me.

 

Once again, I felt like I was almost watching myself move rather than actually moving as I reached in and took the small tokens out, one by one. I gently folded the cloth, and tucked it into my pocket. The necklace went over my head. It fit tightly now, almost more of a choker, but it fit. I tucked the stone into another pocket, and slipped the journal into a bag. I kept that bag packed with everything I would need if it ever became necessary to run–food, clothes, money, a good knife–and even after years living in Branson’s Ford I was still extremely conscientious about keeping it ready to go. I wasn’t going to be forced to flee with nothing again, not if I had anything to say about it.

 

I sat there for a moment, and then I took out the rest of the things in the box.

 

Unlike the others, these weren’t in here for sentimental reasons. They weren’t locked away because they were private. There were entirely more practical reasons why I wouldn’t want anyone else having access to this particular group of objects.

 

The most benign was a leather pouch full of small, sharp metal objects. For most people it was nothing more than a novel way to cut their hands if they accidentally reached into it. For someone who could channel metal, though, they made significantly more dangerous ammunition than coins.

 

After that came a spool of thin wire, some needles, a razor–all things that had perfectly respectable, legitimate uses. All of them were also metal, and it wasn’t hard to turn any of them into a weapon.

 

The legion-issue dagger didn’t have even that veneer of respectability. It was a thin, sturdy blade, designed to punch through the joints in armor. It was meant for killing and little else, and there was no mistaking it for anything but a weapon.

 

And, finally, a small glass vial full of a thick black liquid. It was a sedative–not the sort that Black had used on me, the precise formulae and exacting care of an imperial alchemist. No, this was a much murkier sort of medicine, a blend of alchemy and herbalism that was more art than science. Even the tinker I’d bought it from had warned me that the results could be unpredictable; one or two drops was safe, but three could have side effects, and more than four was liable to be lethal. Which, in a pinch, made it a perfectly serviceable poison.

 

I stared at these things for some time. I’d pieced this collection together in those first few months in the village, back when everything and everyone was a threat and I’d badly needed something to make me feel safe. I’d never, in all the time since, had any need of any of it, aside from occasionally using the sedative on myself when sleep was proving particularly difficult.

 

It had come to be almost funny, a private joke I told myself. Keeping these things on hand had become a sort of game. Keeping them hidden away had become a way of reminding myself that those days, the time when I needed them, was in the past.

 

I would have loved for it to stay there.

 

But wishes weren’t enough to change anything, and with times being what they were now, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t be needing all of this and more.

 

Once I had all of that situated to my satisfaction, I closed and locked the box, and then left the room by the window.

---

As I’d noted, the building which the imperials had taken over as their headquarters had almost an aura around it. There was a palpable feeling of dread hanging around it, and people were going out of their way not to walk too close to the place, or even look at it. I couldn’t blame them. Even without knowing what the legion’s plan for Branson’s Ford was, the reminder of the legion’s presence here was uncomfortable at best.

 

I tried to ignore that feeling as best I could as I walked up to the front door and rapped on it. I was only partially successful. I could make myself do it, but I was breathing hard as I did, and my hand was shaking as I knocked.

 

There was no response. I stood and waited for a minute or so before it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a response.

 

I knocked again. Still no answer.

 

For an instant I was irrationally concerned for the legionnaires, wondering whether a ghoul had somehow gotten through the wards, snuck through town, and killed them without anyone noticing. Then I heard something from inside–movement, a voice, a laugh. They were alive, all right, and they were in there. They were just ignoring me.

 

I grimaced at that, feeling a sudden and unexpected anger go through me. Bad enough that I had to listen to these people after everything they’d done to me. Now, with all our lives on the line, they couldn’t even be bothered to answer the door for me.

 

I debated doing something drastic, like breaking the window with a rock. I reconsidered quickly, though. That sort of thing wouldn’t exactly be inclined to cooperate with me.

 

Instead, I kept knocking. I pounded on the door with my fist until my arm got tired, and then I switched to the other arm. I even kicked it a few times, just to break up the monotony.

 

When the door finally opened, I was guessing it was mostly just to shut me up. I’d been standing there for several minutes by then, after all, and I was showing no signs of leaving any time soon.

 

It was Marcus standing in the door, which was disappointing. He was the only one of the legionnaires with whom I’d had no real interaction, which made it harder to guess how this would go.

 

Still, I’d come this far, and I didn’t have any other plans. So I just smiled sweetly at him as he opened the door and glowered.

 

“Go away,” he said, sounding distinctly grumpy.

 

“Need to talk to Hideo,” I said quickly, before he could close the door.

 

“The surveyor is busy,” Marcus said, smiling very slightly. “As you might have noticed, there’s a bit of an event going on. Come back later and maybe he’ll be less occupied.”

 

So he did have a sense of humor. Dry, perhaps, but there all the same. It made him seem more human.

 

“He wants to talk to me,” I said, insistently. It was, I thought, probably true. “He’s expecting me,” I added a moment later, which was definitely not true.

 

Marcus knew that, too. I could tell just looking at him that he knew I was making this up. But he couldn’t be sure, not absolutely sure, without actually checking. And if he was wrong, and Hideo somehow was expecting me, he could be sure that turning me away would not make his boss happy.

 

He didn’t really have a choice. I could see the change in his face as he realized it, too.

 

“Come inside,” he said gruffly, stepping back from the door the absolute minimum while leaving enough room for me to squeeze inside.

 

I froze for a moment, the mere notion of actually entering a legion headquarters momentarily leaving me in an absolute panic. My history with the legions had never been a good one, and knowing what I did about why they’d come here just made it worse.

 

But this was what I’d come here for. And as much as I hated this, I still couldn’t think of any other way to proceed.

 

So after a few seconds, I set my teeth, choked back the fear as best I could, and stepped inside.

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I slept poorly. It was starting to feel like I’d never slept any other way. I’d slept most of the previous day, but somehow I still woke feeling restless and uneasy. I went through my usual routine and left my room, stumbling slightly.

 

I actually forgot to lock my door, and had to turn around halfway down the hall to go and do it. That had never happened before.

 

Downstairs, things were somehow back to normal. Corbin was up before me, and now he was in the kitchen, building up the fire. I went past him to the taproom, and I unlocked the front door. The old, worn broom was in the corner like usual. It barely whispered against the floor as I started brushing the floor of the room. We hadn’t been keeping up the usual routine of fanatic cleanliness, so there was actually some dirt and debris to sweep out today.

 

With Black gone, and the mounting panic of the village safely outside the door, it felt almost normal. Like the chaos was gone, and we were back to our routine, our safe little world where everything was always the same. I could almost think that the past few days had been just a bad dream.

 

You’d expect the things that happened in that room to leave a mark. But there was nothing, not even a stain on the floor where I’d lied on it and come so close to bleeding out. Corbin had coated the floor with an alchemical sealant that kept it from staining, and he’d scrubbed everything after that night.

 

He came out and started to work on the fire in this room, not saying a word. That was also normal, but the silence didn’t feel the same. There was a tension to it, a wrongness. It wasn’t a comfortable silence anymore.

 

Just like usual, I walked past him into the kitchen, and went down to the cellar to get things for soup. By the dim light of the alchemical lamp, I wandered around, tossing things into a sack. Potatoes, sweet onions, beets and turnips. Rice. A few carrots, which weren’t there a few days earlier. Corbin must have bought them from one of the farmers while I was busy being maimed and lying around unconscious.

 

I bumped into one of the suits of armor, a particularly ugly thing with spikes on the shoulders and gauntlets. It startled me, even though it shouldn’t have, and I jumped away with a strangled squeak. I ended up next to the icebox, and opened it on a whim. There was a thick slab of venison inside. Black’s work.

 

I stared at the meat for a moment, then took it upstairs as well.

 

The work went by too fast. It wasn’t long at all before the soup was cooking, and the bread was rising, and everything was neatly cleaned and put away. Corbin and I were sitting in the taproom together, silently. On the surface, everything was the same as it always was.

 

Underneath, nothing could ever be the same again.

 

“Black’s gone,” I said, finally, breaking a silence that was starting to feel as confining as a cage made of glass.

 

Corbin nodded, not looking surprised. “She never stays,” he said. “It’s always been that way. She’ll help–she’ll do amazing things–but when things get hard she leaves. I’d hoped it might be different this time.” He paused. “I guess maybe she hoped so, too. But that’s how it goes.”

 

I nodded. I could understand what he meant by that. It seemed we never really changed.

 

“Sigmund got hurt the other day,” Corbin commented after a few moments. “Rather badly. Wouldn’t say what happened, but it looked familiar.”

 

I shrugged.

 

“What happened?”

 

I paused, considering how to answer that. “He said some things he shouldn’t have,” I said finally.

 

Corbin nodded, not looking terribly surprised. “Anything that needs to be dealt with?”

 

I shook my head. I wasn’t entirely sure whether that was true, since Sigmund had certainly been saying some…concerning things. Even leaving aside what he’d said about me, the idea of him taking the wards and leaving was something that could be a very serious problem. But I thought that I’d scared him and shamed him enough to keep him from doing that.

 

And regardless, I didn’t want Corbin helping with either of those things. Not right now.

 

He didn’t look entirely convinced, but he nodded.

 

I must have been showing the tension there more openly than I thought, though, because Corbin went silent. He was staring at the bar, the floor, the ceiling–anything at all to avoid looking at me. When he finally spoke, his voice was slow and halting, an awkward pause after every word. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For what I said the other day. If you want to leave, I understand.”

 

I shook my head, vehemently. “Not your fault,” I said.

 

He smiled. It was a sad, wry smile, one that made him look a great deal older than he was. “Oh, Silf,” he said. “I appreciate the thought. But there’s no denying what I did.”

 

I shook my head again, even more forcefully than before. “You tried to do good,” I said. “Did a good thing. Not your fault.”

 

His smile now was even more sad and broken than before. “You’re so young,” he said, gently. “But it’s kind of you to say that.”

 

I noted that he hadn’t agreed with me. But I couldn’t see a point in saying anything else. I truly didn’t believe that Corbin was guilty for what happened, now that I’d had a chance to think about it more. But I knew damned well how easy it was to feel guilty for things that weren’t your fault, and I knew how hard it was to argue against that feeling.

 

After all, even knowing that he hadn’t really done anything wrong, I still couldn’t look at him the same way, and I’d only had a matter of days for that to color my view. He’d had years to stew in it.

 

“I’m concerned about how things are developing,” he said after a few minutes of silence. It felt more comfortable than the choking, echoing silence earlier, though it still wasn’t comfortable. “Things can’t be good, but with no one coming around here, I can’t keep a finger on the pulse.”

 

I knew what he was getting at, and why. It made sense. Someone had to make sure that Branson’s Ford wasn’t actually tearing itself to pieces, and I was guessing Corbin didn’t want to be too visible right now. Not with everyone still so acutely aware that he’d pieced together one of the most complicated, secret bits of alchemy there was.

 

So when he said, “Would you go and take a look around?” I was already nodding. He laughed, wry and only slightly bitter, and shook his head. “All right,” he said. “Eat something before you go, at least.”

 

Any argument I could have made was overruled by a well-timed grumble from my stomach, and with a half-smile of my own I settled in to eat before I left.

 

Breakfast consisted of yesterday’s bread, a sharp cheese and a few slices of a spicy sausage, and a pair of fresh apples. I drank a cold hibiscus tea from Akitsuro that didn’t have any of the stimulants of actual tea, while Corbin had cider. It was richer than we would normally eat, but it was hard to care about that at this point.

 

Feeling somewhat better, I left Corbin sitting alone in a silent inn, and went for a walk.

---

Things were bad. About as bad as I’d ever seen, I was pretty sure. Even when the city was under siege, the atmosphere hadn’t been so…hopeless.

 

A few days earlier, the village had felt tense and scared, like a kicked dog. But there’d still been a bit of fight to it, a bit of optimism. People had been treating this menace as something that was bad, a hard time for Branson’s Ford, but ultimately no different than other disasters–a bad flood, a fire, a bout of pox. Things were hard, people died, but life went on. You put on a brave face for the kids, and went to work in the fields, and quietly hoped that you and your family would make it through.

 

Now that veneer of positivity was gone. No one, not a single person, was working in the fields that I could see. I saw a handful of people as I walked through town, but they weren’t going about their usual routines. Some of them hurried furtively from one building to another, while others were sitting around or wandering aimlessly, like they weren’t sure where to go or why to bother.

 

No one smiled, or waved, and everyone was armed. Even the few children I saw were carrying knives.

 

I shivered, and kept walking. I didn’t look too long at what was now the legion headquarters, though I did wonder what the family which had lived there was doing now. There were empty buildings to spare, so at least they probably had a place to stay, but still, it wasn’t easy losing your home and everything you’d built over your life.

 

I kept walking north, and soon found myself at the edge of the village again. I was about to turn around when I saw someone sitting on a rock, looking out at the river. I hesitated for a moment, unsure of what to think, and then I shrugged and went to join him.

 

The stump of Sumi’s leg was wrapped in bandages, and he had a pair of simple wooden crutches. But his eyes were very clear, with none of the unfocused look of someone on an alchemical sedative. He looked at me as I sat down next to him, and nodded. “Silf,” he said.

 

“Nothing to do with us,” I said, quoting what he’d told me about the legion’s purpose here.

 

He knew exactly what I was referring to. I could tell by the way he flinched away, and then went back to staring at the water. He looked almost ashamed. “Hadn’t realized quite what the plan was when I said that,” he said, apologetically. “I wouldn’t have led you wrong if I’d known.”

 

I considered that for a moment, then shrugged and nodded. On the whole, I thought I believed him. Sumi would, I was confident, stab me in a heartbeat if that was what he had to do. But he wouldn’t lie about it. He wasn’t that sort of man.

 

“I don’t care for this sort of thing,” he continued, still staring out over the river. “Doesn’t seem right to sacrifice people this way.”

 

“So stop it.”

 

Sumi snorted. “With what?” he asked. “Give me a full cohort and alchemical support, and I could do it, sure. But I might as well ask for a score of Dierkhlani warriors and a battery of channelers as to get that here.” He shook his head. “Saving this village isn’t in the cards, Silf.”

 

His words hit me like a punch to the gut. I thought it was the tone that did it. Sumi didn’t sound hostile, or despairing. He was almost…apologetic. He made it sound like he really, truly wished that what he was saying wasn’t true, but it was.

 

If a veteran legionnaire thought the situation was that hopeless, I wasn’t sure I could really argue with his analysis. Sumi had a great deal more in the way of military training and experience than I did, after all. I’d be a fool to ignore that.

 

“What will you do?” I asked.

 

He shrugged. “The plan was always for us to leave after this village was destroyed,” he said. “We can travel light when we need to, and we had enough force to handle anything short of a major assault. Now…I don’t know. I can’t exactly keep up like this.” He gestured vaguely at his missing leg. “And they can’t afford any delays if they’re going to outrun the ghouls. So I expect I’ll die here with the rest of you.” His tone was very calm, very casual.

 

I winced. There was something almost painful about hearing a man describe his own imminent death in the tone and words that someone else might use to talk about a not particularly interesting game of chess.

 

“Has to be a way out,” I muttered. The words were barely audible.

 

He smiled sadly. “Sometimes there isn’t,” he said. “I know it feels like there should be. But every battle I ever fought, the other side thought that. They thought they could find a way out, a way to beat us.” He paused. “They couldn’t.”

 

I grimaced, and nodded. It made sense. If there was anyone who was in a position to know about lost causes, it was a career legionnaire. He’d seen plenty of them, and they hadn’t found a miraculous route to victory at the last moment.

 

I didn’t have to ask about that. The history of the legions was right in front of me, writ large across the world. All the hopes and dreams of their enemies hadn’t ever amounted to much in the face of superior numbers and alchemical weapons.

 

“It isn’t hopeless,” he said, likely sensing where my thoughts were going. “You’re smart, and you can take care of yourself. I’m guessing you’ll be all right in the end. But you have to be realistic about these things. Getting you out alive, that’s a realistic goal. Getting everyone out alive? Less so. Actually winning?” He shook his head. “It isn’t going to happen.”

 

I nodded. I felt almost numb. It was…hard to accept that the village I’d made my home was doomed, damned, simply and utterly hopeless. But everything was pointing in that direction, and trying to pretend that facts weren’t real had never helped anyone.

 

Which, I supposed, just left one question. What did I do now?

 

I sat on the rock and stared silently over the river for a while. What were they doing out there, I wondered? Were they sitting and staring back at us, waiting for anyone to poke so much as a finger out of the wards? Were they sharpening their claws and licking their lips in anticipation of the coming feast?

 

Or perhaps they were doing the same thing we were, in the other direction. Maybe they were so confident of their victory that they didn’t need to worry about preparation. Maybe they were just…going about their lives, doing whatever it was that ghouls did when they weren’t tearing people to pieces. I didn’t actually know.

 

There was something oddly comforting about that idea. I wasn’t sure why.

 

After a while I stood, and looked at Sumi. “I’m sorry,” I said.

 

He just smiled, and watched the river. He didn’t seem to be thinking any of what I’d been considering. He was just…watching the water pass him by. “Life goes on,” he said. “Come what may, life goes on.”

 

I left him there, sitting on a stone and watching the river as he waited to die.

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I woke not long after sunset, feeling like I hadn’t rested at all. I was shaky, and scared, and I knew what was happening but that didn’t mean that I could do a thing about it. I felt like a mouse under the paw of a cat, knowing it could press down at any time but not knowing why it wasn’t. My fingers were shaking so badly that it took close to ten minutes to dress myself.

 

The inn was still and silent. It must have been silent all day, for me to have slept as well as I did. No wonder. No one would be out and about on a day like this. I could hear faint noises coming from down the hall, though. Corbin was in his room, likely doing something with his machines and his reagents. I wasn’t sure what he was making. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

 

I thought about moving the dresser barricading the door shut. Then I decided it was wiser to leave it where it was for the moment, and went out the window instead.

 

The front door of the inn was locked, but I had keys. I opened the locks, and let myself into the taproom, and then I locked it shut behind myself again. It was dark inside, and no one was there. There’d been a fire earlier in the day, though, and the banked coals still gave off plenty of heat.

 

By the dim light of a single alchemical lamp, I made tea. It was black, stronger than I liked, bitter and acrid. I drained the first cup in quick gulps and poured another. I drank that one more slowly, sitting on a stool at the bar. The bar was smudged and dirty; the floor was dusty. No one had cleaned today.

 

I was scared. I thought that I knew what was happening, but I didn’t have a clue of why. I couldn’t deal with this on my own and I didn’t know if I could trust anyone, not even myself. I couldn’t keep track of what was happening.

 

I drank a second cup of tea, and then a third. I had time. He wouldn’t want to move yet, not until it was fully dark.

 

When I left I was wired and jittery. I was slightly more calm, now, but my hands were still shaking as I locked the door behind myself. The tea had woken me up, but it came with a cost. My heart was racing, my breath coming too fast, my throat too tight. My legs felt like they were made of straw.

 

I gritted my teeth, and set my shoulders as best I could, and went into the trees anyway.

 

It was dark out, now, well past the point where you could make any case for it being twilight. But it wasn’t black. It was a clear night, crisp and calm with the promise of autumn on its way, and the moonlight was bright enough to cast shadows. I picked my way through the trees, not quite sneaking, but certainly not going out of my way to make noise.

 

And then I saw him, right where I’d known he would be. It was the only thing that made sense. By some quirk of luck I’d gotten just the right time, and he was standing there as I walked up. I didn’t think I was making much noise, nothing to show my approach, but he turned in my direction anyway as I got close.

 

“What are you doing out after dark?” Hideo asked. His voice was light, curious, just a touch mocking. “That’s against the rules, young lady.”

 

I got closer, so I could see him more clearly. He was dressed in his usual robes, crisp and sharp as though he were walking down an avenue in the capital rather than skulking around the forest at the edge of a village in the middle of the night. And he was standing, of course he was standing, right next to the ward Corbin had cobbled together to patch the hole in the net around Branson’s Ford.

 

“You broke the wards,” I said. I realized that I had a coin in my hand, palmed where he couldn’t see it, and then I wondered why that surprised me.

 

“And why would I do a thing like that?” he asked, with a touch of laughter in his voice. “Really, Silf, that’s quite a shocking accusation.”

 

“Test,” I said quietly. “See what they would do.”

 

It made sense. He’d come here knowing that these ghouls, or whatever they were, were out there. But he hadn’t been sent to kill them. Why send a surveyor to wipe out a nest of monsters? Why send him with just a handful of legionnaires?

 

“Are you accusing me of deliberately leaving a weakness in the defenses of this town just to see what would happen?” he asked. His voice was as quiet as mine, and deadly serious.

 

I nodded.

 

He laughed softly. “Well, good,” he said. “It’s about time someone said something. With how easily that mayor rolled over, I was starting to wonder whether anyone in this town had any fire in them at all.”

 

I paused, and stared at him in confusion. I’d been ready for a lot of things, when I said that. I’d been ready for blood and death, fire and screaming in the night, monsters and murderers and running from something I couldn’t fight.

 

Not a casual laugh, without even an attempt at denial. Not…this.

 

“What, cat got your tongue?” he asked, mocking.

 

I glowered at him. “Why?” I asked.

 

“Exactly what I said earlier,” he said easily. There wasn’t even a trace of shame in his voice. “We need to know about these things, Silf. How they think, how they function. And so I asked myself, what do they do when they see weakness?” He spread his hands. “And now we know. They attack, but they don’t attack in force all at once, no. They sent a small group–I suspect as small of a group as they can move in and still be reasonably intelligent. And look at how they attacked. A clear goal, and they went straight for it, no hesitation. Doesn’t seem that they hesitate at all to sacrifice themselves to achieve their aims, either. We learned a great deal from that attack, Silf.”

 

“And…this?” I asked, gesturing at the ward he was standing next to.

 

Hideo looked at me like he was a teacher, and I was the slow pupil in the class. “We saw how they start an attack with that,” he said. “But not how they finish one.”

 

I stared at him. He couldn’t be saying what I thought he was saying. He couldn’t be planning to let the entire village be destroyed.

 

Except I knew, even as I thought that, that he could.

 

“Knowing doesn’t help if they win.”

 

He sighed. “That’s what I hate about dealing with bumpkins,” he said. “Not to imply that you are one, I understand the situation is more complex than that, but you’ve let their mode of thought infect you. Living in a place like this makes you look at the world like it’s so small. Broaden your horizons, girl.”

 

I cocked my head to the side, confused. I didn’t understand what he meant.

 

He saw, and sighed again. “What on earth,” he asked, spacing the words out as though he were talking to an idiot, “makes you think this is the only group of these things?”

 

Oh.

 

Oh.

 

“Didn’t ask,” I said.

 

“Of course you didn’t,” Hideo said. “There was no reason for you to, any more than the rest of them did. Living in a place like this makes the world seem small. It makes you think that this is important. But the reality is that we’ve seen three other outbreaks of these things, all across the province. At first we thought they were isolated incidents, but at this point there’s clearly something going on.”

 

I stared at him, trying to adjust to that news. It was…quite a change in how I had to think of things.

 

“There’s your answer, Silf,” he said. His tone was mocking again, a wry smile bending one corner of his mouth. “That’s why we stand to gain by knowing more about them. The simple truth is that there’s far more to the world than this village. Our test is important for more than just you and me.”

 

“People died,” I said.

 

Hideo sighed. “Oh, don’t be naive,” he snapped. “You think they weren’t dead anyway? Please. If we weren’t here, what do you think would happen to this place? Would you really care to bet on them against the ghouls? This bunch of morons against that? There are a handful of people here who might be worth a damn–and I do count you in that group, for what that’s worth. But by and large, they’re too clueless and cowed to even fight back.” He snorted. “Face it, this town never had a chance. Even if the ghouls hadn’t come, it would have withered up and blown away. Bloody ashes, this place has been dead for years, it just hasn’t noticed.”

 

I frowned. What he was saying felt fundamentally, profoundly wrong to me. I wanted to find the words that would show him what he wasn’t seeing. And I could feel that I didn’t have many words left in me; my throat was already sore, and tight, and if I didn’t get it on the first try I probably wasn’t going to.

 

He just stood and waited as I gathered my thoughts, seeming infinitely patient.

 

“Have to hope things get better,” I said at last. “Sometimes hope’s all you have. Sometimes it’s enough.”

 

Hideo smiled again. As best I could read his expression in the half-light, it was a sad smile. “Oh,” he said. “You’re so young. It’s sweet.” He paused. “But I don’t deal in hopes and dreams. I deal in facts. And the fact of the matter is that the empire will gain more from me breaking that ward than this place can offer.”

 

“Can’t let you do that,” I said softly. I clutched the coin tighter in my hand, the edge digging into the skin.

 

“Your confidence is touching,” he said. “But, I’m afraid, misplaced.”

 

Before I could do anything else, he took something from his robe and threw it to the ground at my feet.

 

There was a flash of light, blinding and then some. I could hear a piercing noise at the edge of hearing, something that seemed to bypass my ears entirely and go straight to my spine, and a burning sensation in my nose and lungs as I breathed in some noxious bit of alchemy.

 

I fell, clutching at my face uselessly.

 

I wasn’t sure how long I spent like that, unable to see or move or breathe or think. Time never seemed to have much meaning when you felt that awful.

 

When my faculties did return, they did so gradually. I was curled up on my side on the ground, whimpering in pain. It was a weak sort of whimper, almost soundless. The air was clear, and while my ears were ringing, I could hear my breathing, so there probably wasn’t any permanent damage.

 

By the time my vision cleared, Hideo was gone. Of course he was. He’d had plenty of time to leave while I was lying there whimpering uselessly to myself. He could probably be on the other side of town by now.

 

But the ward was intact.

 

I smiled to myself through the pain, blinking back tears, and started back towards the inn. I was stumbling a bit, but I knew this ground, and I could probably have walked it completely blind. I made it to the inn, and I climbed up the tree, and I jumped over to the ledge outside my window.

 

And then I paused. The window wasn’t latched.

 

My heart started pounding again. I grabbed for the hatchet I was still carrying with one hand, and with the other I slowly pushed the window open. I crept inside.

 

The room was empty. But the desk I’d pushed against the door had been moved back to where it was earlier. A piece of paper was sitting on the desk, one that hadn’t been there before. It was impossible to overlook.

 

I took the paper, holding it gingerly in just the tips of my claws, and carried it to the window, into the moonlight. It was hard to read by light that dim, but I managed. The letter wasn’t complicated, anyway.

 

Silf, I have to go. Sorry. -Black

 

Well, at least she was clear.

 

I stared at the paper for a while before I folded it and set it back on the desk. And then I curled up on my bed, and went back to sleep.

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There was a disturbance when I got back to town. I wasn’t surprised. It was starting to feel like there was always a disturbance in town.

 

I could just hear voices as I reached the wards, and turned to follow them. I was just out of the trees when I saw the crowd gathered in the western fields. It looked like it had to be most of Branson’s Ford standing out there, and from the sounds of things they were not happy.

 

The crowd was too thick for me to see what they were upset about, at a distance, and the overlapping shouts and complaints were too chaotic for me to parse in any detail. I couldn’t make out words, just the emotions underneath–anger, fear, resentment. It sounded ugly. It sounded like there was about to be a riot.

 

I sped up, hurrying to get to a position where I could see what was going on. That put me in the thick of the crowd, which was more than slightly uncomfortable, but I wanted to know what was happening too much to let that stop me.

 

When I did get a good look at things, I was too stunned to even remember where I was for a moment.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the focus of the hostility was at the western edge of the crowd, and it was the imperials. Ketill was standing there with a glower that could melt steel, holding his scythe in a way that made it hard not to remember how efficiently he’d killed ghouls with it when we went on that disastrous hunting trip. Hideo, just a few feet away, looked smug and calm as ever. He had Marcus and, more surprisingly, Aelia with him, though, and both of the legionnaires were clearly on edge from the hostility.

 

All of that, though, was forgotten in a moment, completely overshadowed by what the imperials had with them.

 

The ghoul was on the small side, as such things went, certainly not as visually impressive as the ones I’d seen before. I thought it was probably shorter than I was, and it likely weighed only a little more. It wasn’t exactly intimidating, really. Its grey skin looked vaguely misshapen, like wax that had gotten soft in the sun and started to run, and rather than claws or talons its arms ended with three thick fingers that looked barely dexterous enough to grab a rock. The only threatening feature on its body was an oversized mouth with jagged yellow teeth, and even that was no more unsettling than a dog’s mouth.

 

Any thought that it was comical, though, was killed by the sheer, violent hate with which it moved. It was very thoroughly bound on the ground at Hideo’s feet, a full harness of rope that would keep it from moving any of its limbs more than an inch or two, but it still thrashed and strained at the restraints constantly. Glaring around itself, spitting, snapping at the air with those jaws…looking at it, I did not want it out of those bindings. Not in the least.

 

“All right,” Egill said, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. The villagers–even Ketill–were only too glad to give way, and let him be the one to deal with this. “Could you explain just what in hell you were thinking bringing that thing into the wards?”

 

“It’s quite simple, my good man,” Hideo said, with a perfectly calm, casual smile. You would never guess, from his expression and tone, that he was just a couple feet away from a violent monstrosity. “For some time now I’ve had a hypothesis about these things. This seemed to be the best way to test that particular hypothesis.”

 

“Testing a hypothesis?” Egill repeated. “That’s…you can’t be serious. People are dying here. We don’t have time for you to be running around playing at being a naturalist.”

 

“You had your chance to resolve the situation,” Hideo said. The playfulness had fled his voice entirely, leaving it positively icy. “I think we both recall how your approach ended. We clearly need to do something differently, and that means that we need to know more about the situation. The information we’ve gained from this is worth more than anything you could have done.”

 

“What are you talking about?” Egill snapped. The former mayor sounded frustrated.

 

“What, you can’t see it?” Hideo asked. He had a light, mocking smile playing about his lips.

 

I frowned, staring at the monster. Hideo was an ass, but my impression of him didn’t suggest that he would just make something like this up. If he said there was something important here that we weren’t seeing, there was something important here that we weren’t seeing.

 

And then I realized what he was talking about, and let out a faint, breathy laugh, more from shock than anything. “Stupid,” I said.

 

I didn’t say it very loudly. But even quiet speech is loud when no one else is talking at all. People turned to look at me. Some of them looked offended, others looked gratified. It took me a moment to realize that they thought I was talking about them, or possibly Hideo.

 

I swallowed tightly, and hurried to point at the ghoul-thing. “It’s stupid,” I said.

 

“Clever girl,” Hideo said with a broad smile. “I’m glad someone is paying attention.”

 

“I don’t get it,” someone in the crowd said.

 

“Look at this thing,” Hideo said, nudging the bound monster with his foot. It rolled over, snapping at him, but he was already well out of reach again. “It obviously wants out, but watch how it tries to get loose. It’s all brute force, no finesse or care to it at all. It doesn’t focus on weak points in the restraints, or try to undo the knots. It did when we first caught it, mind you, you’d have thought the thing was an eel from how hard of a time we had getting it tied up. But now it’s clumsy, no thought behind what it does at all.”

 

“So what changed?” Ketill asked.

 

“Exactly the right question,” Hideo said. The surveyor was positively beaming now. “And that brings us to my hypothesis. You see, we’re all aware that these creatures are more intelligent than ghouls should typically be. We’ve seen them plan and execute coordinated attacks; there’s plenty of evidence to show that they’re remarkably smart. But several times now I’ve noted that individual specimens don’t seem to have that intelligence. When there are just a few of them, or just one, they look like this.” He prodded the thing again, and again he drew away before it could bite him. “All mindless aggression, no thought or planning at all.”

 

Ketill snorted, but looked interested in spite of himself. “This is what a ghoul should look like,” he said. “They ain’t entirely stupid, but this is the kind of thing I’d expect from them. Smart like animals, not like people.”

 

“Precisely,” Hideo agreed. “And that’s the core of my hypothesis–which, with this experiment, I think I’ve found very strong evidence for. I don’t think this new strain of ghouls is actually smarter than what we’ve come to expect. Rather, they’re still roughly as intelligent as usual, but that intelligence is shared in some fashion. To put it crudely, if there are ten of them, each one is ten times as smart.”

 

“I still don’t see that that matters,” Egill said.

 

“No,” Ketill said, before Hideo could respond. “No, he’s right about this. If this is right, it changes how we got to think about this. They’ll want to stick together, won’t be spreading out. Changes how they’ll be approaching things.” The farmer grunted thoughtfully. “Might be a weakness we can use.”

 

“Just so,” Hideo agreed. The surveyor sounded almost surprised to be agreeing with Ketill. “This is, I think, the key we needed to start making progress on this problem.”

 

“So what do we do with that thing?” Ketill asked, jerking his chin at the monster on the ground.

 

Hideo glanced at it, and shrugged loosely. “I’d like to keep it around to study further,” he said. “Knowing what they’re doing isn’t enough without knowing how this new phenomenon works. But we don’t have the facilities to keep it contained safely, and I’d rather not take the chance of it escaping. So it’s probably for the best to simply put it down.”

 

Ketill nodded, and stepped forward, and slammed the blade of the scythe into the back of the creature’s head where it was lying helpless on the ground. It jerked, and twitched feebly, and went still. Ketill wrenched the scythe back out, and the monster was left limp on the ground, blood pouring out into the dust.

 

So quick, so easy, so simple to end a life. You thought, and you acted, and then something just…stopped. There was nothing to it.

 

Hideo left, saying something about having work to do. The legionnaires followed after him, without having said a word. Aelia had a glazed-over look to her eyes that suggested she was dosed with a sedative. Her mangled hand was, I noted, gone; there was just a stump there now, wrapped in blood-soaked bandages.

 

The villagers left as well, trickling away by ones and twos. Even now–even now–there was work to be done, after all. And you had to make hay when the sun was shining. It was the way of things.

 

I stood alone in that field for a time, staring at the corpse of the monster. Then I blinked, and came back to myself, almost like jolting awake. I started back towards the inn, stumbling only slightly. I needed to get some sleep. I thought I knew what would happen tonight, and I didn’t want to miss it.

 

I climbed a tree and jumped over to my window, rather than go through the taproom and take the chance of running into Corbin. Inside I checked that the door was locked, and I checked that the box was locked, and I checked that nothing had been disturbed. Everything seemed to be fine. I pulled the curtains tight, wrapping the room in darkness, and I stripped out of the clothes I’d been wearing since the monsters had attacked in the night, and I curled up on the mattress.

 

After a few minutes I got up again, and barricaded the door closed with my desk for the first time since those first months in Branson’s Ford.

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I wasn’t sure what to do, or what to think.

 

In the years since the fires consumed the Whitewood, I’d struggled with my demons in more ways than I could remember. Nightmares that left me shaking and soaked in cold sweat. Panic attacks. I couldn’t sleep if someone was moving in earshot. I was terrified of fire–for a time, looking at a candle had been enough to reduce me to an incoherent wreck, unable to stand or breathe. Being in a crowded room, or just hearing the wrong word said the wrong way, was enough to send me back to the refugee camps.

 

There were days it was too much to bear. Especially when I’d just been recovering from the infection. There had been days when I couldn’t get out of bed. Days when I sat in the corner and shook, struggling to breathe, struggling to remember where I was. Days when I thought I couldn’t take another moment of the agony, the fear and hate and pain and helplessness.

 

What had kept me going through it was the knowledge that that wasn’t my life now. I was safe, now. I was doing better. I could last out the fear, the memories, the nightmares, and once they were past I would be in a better place.

 

And Corbin was an enormous part of that. He was the one who saved me. When I was sick unto death, infected wounds and starvation and all the ills of life as a refugee, he was the one who took me in and nursed me back to health. When things were bad he was the one who was there–not pushing, just giving the me the space and the safety to work through it as best I could.

 

To a large extent I’d rebuilt my world around him.

 

And it had all been a lie. Every time I thought that he was there to help me, every time I used those thoughts to cope with the things that preyed on me, it had been a lie. Corbin wasn’t something that helped me with my demons. He was the reason for them.

 

Everything I’d ever known, everything I’d loved, was torn from me in a single day of fire and death. My family was murdered before my eyes, my home destroyed, my life destroyed. And the only person in the world whom I’d thought I could trust was revealed as the architect of that destruction.

 

Black gods. How was I supposed to cope with that? How was I supposed to handle learning that?

 

I should have listened when Corbin told me I didn’t want to know. For my picture of the world to have dark spots would have been better than setting it ablaze.

 

I was still moving, but I wasn’t at all sure where I was going, or why. The world felt blurry and distant, everything around me seen through a sort of haze. Once again, I had the experience of being almost a stranger in my body, watching with a sort of numb bemusement as it decided on its own what to do.

 

There were plenty of perfectly reasonable things that I could have done. But I wasn’t feeling reasonable. I wanted to feel safe, and I knew how to get that feeling. The fact that it was one of the stupider ideas I’d had didn’t seem to matter. So I left the inn, and stumbled out to the forest out back.

 

I could just see the ward Corbin had built to cover the gap, though I didn’t go to look at it closely. It looked nothing like the warding posts. Where they were small and simple, this was a strange, asymmetrical metal frame that sprawled across the ground. It was apparently effective, though. Or, at least, the monsters hadn’t come back yet.

 

I ignored that, and stumbled on through the trees. A part of me was expecting to be jumped by one of the ghoul-things. A part of me wasn’t sure whether I cared if I was.

 

A part of me was strangely, distantly proud that I made it to my secret place in the woods without breaking down. I found the rocks, and ducked through the bushes. The thorns tugged at me, tiny pinpricks of pain that I could barely notice. I stumbled into the pocket, and curled up on the rock in the sun, without losing my composure.

 

But when I did, my composure shattered. I lay there, curled up tight with my legs hugged to my chest, racked by silent sobs. I wasn’t aware of crying, but my cheeks were wet. I shook and trembled, whimpering just barely loud enough to hear. If there’d been anything in my stomach beyond tea and a few sips of blackwine, I would have been throwing it up.

 

I wasn’t sure how long that went on. It was hard to track time, hard to process anything through the misery and the fog that seemed to fill my mind. I knew that from experience. When I got like this seconds passed like minutes, and minutes passed like hours, and hours passed like days, and days blurred by in the blink of an eye.

 

Time flowed by. Eventually I opened my eyes again. The sun was bright and golden, and the world it lit was dark and grey. The rock beneath me was warm against my fur, and I felt cold inside.

 

It was an enormous effort to sit up. I was exhausted, terribly exhausted. It had been days since I’d gotten any real sleep, or eaten properly. Days of being battered and broken and cut and bruised and burned, and I wasn’t sure how much of that had happened and how much I was just remembering from nightmares, but it didn’t seem to matter.

 

I pushed myself up to a seated position, and took out an iron coin. This one wasn’t stained with blood, and I had to remind myself to add a yet to that statement. I rolled it around in my fingers, watching how it caught the light and threw it back. It was a dull metal, iron. It didn’t shine the way silver or copper or even steel might.

 

On one side was the flower of Akitsuro, the stylized blossom that was the most common symbol of the empire. On the other was a crudely drawn short sword. The weapon of the legions’ rank and file. It was a simple weapon. Easy to make, easy to use.

 

A sudden spike of anger hit me, cutting through the fog, and my hand seized around the coin. The magic flowed through me at the same time, channeling without thought or purpose or decision, and the iron penny in my grip snapped. It broke again, and then it shattered.

 

When I opened my hand the coin was in fragments. My hand stung; I’d gripped it too tightly, and the jagged edge of one of the pieces had dug into my skin. The frustration had faded, leaving me feeling exhausted and numb once again.

 

I heard a noise just outside the pocket, a rustling in the bushes. It was an effort to move my head enough to look in that direction. I felt like I should do something, but no thoughts of what to do were forming. No thoughts of anything were forming; my mind was dangerously blank, filled with fog and snow and white noise.

 

But it wasn’t a ghoul that walked into my sanctuary. It was Sigmund. The new blacksmith looked agitated, nervous, fearful, angry. He was holding a hammer in a too-tight grip, knuckles white. He relaxed slightly when he saw me, but only slightly.

 

“Silf,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

 

I shrugged listlessly. A part of me was both furious and terrified to see him here–in my place, my sanctuary, the one place in the world that was supposed to belong to me and me alone. But it seemed too hard to actually express any of that, or even feel it.

 

He took a deep breath and let it out, returning the hammer to the loop on his belt. “Maybe it’s just as well,” he said, as though I’d answered. “There’s something I needed to tell you. I have…I have a plan.”

 

I cocked my head to the side and looked at him. Even the curiosity felt muted and distant.

 

“Friedrich had some money cached in the smithy,” Sigmund said. “And supplies–food, weapons, that sort of thing. Now that he’s gone, it’s mine. We could take it and run, go to the city.”

 

“‘We?'” I echoed.

 

He nodded. “You and me,” he said. “We’d need a ward to get past the ghouls. You can’t move the warding posts, but I saw Corbin moving that thing he made around. We could take that.”

 

I stared at him. I was starting to understand what he was proposing, and the anger it aroused in me was enough that I could feel it through the fog. “They’d die,” I said. I realized that I was standing, that I’d moved closer to him.

 

To his–very slight–credit, Sigmund didn’t feign ignorance. “They’re dead anyway,” he said. “And we can’t all run. The ward wouldn’t cover all of us. But you and me, we could make it out.”

 

I stared at him. I wanted to yell at him, but I couldn’t think of what I could say that might even begin to convey what I felt in that moment, and even if I could have found the words, I couldn’t have said them. So I just stared.

 

Apparently my expression conveyed something of the revulsion I felt, though, because Sigmund flinched away. “I don’t like it either,” he said, defensively. “But we have to face facts. Branson’s Ford is doomed. The people here are doomed. But we can get away from it. We can make a life somewhere else.”

 

I didn’t quite spit in his face. But only because our relative heights made it difficult, and it ended up hitting him in the chest instead.

 

“With you?” I said contemptuously. I snorted.

 

Sigmund went bright red with embarrassment and anger. “You think you can do better?” he asked, too loud and harsh. “You’re just some Changed slut with no family or friends. You should be glad anyone would want you at all.”

 

Oh.

 

So that was how this was.

 

Even Sigmund seemed to realize that he’d gone too far. He froze, not saying anything else, not looking at me.

 

But as I pushed past him, he grabbed me.

 

That wasn’t a very good idea.

 

Sigmund was a good deal bigger than me. And as the blacksmith–the blacksmith’s apprentice, I reminded myself, because like hell was I going to give him the honor of the position Friedrich had earned now–it went without saying that he was stronger than I was. You couldn’t do that job without layering on muscle. Any direct contest of strength between us would be laughably one-sided.

 

But like I’d told Black, I was stronger than I looked, and I was fast. And I knew what I was doing. And at the moment I was worked up, my already delicate temper pushed to the breaking point.

 

So the instant he touched me, the old habits that I’d built up in the camps took over again. I moved with the grab, putting him off balance, and then lashed out at his face.

 

I’d forgotten that I was missing a claw on that hand, which was the only reason I didn’t actually tear his eye out. The other claws were enough to tear bloody gashes across his cheek, his brow. He flinched away, giving me a chance to break his grip.

 

I started for the hole leading out of that pocket in the rocks again, and would have left it at that. But Sigmund was recovering his balance and coming after me again, and I wasn’t sure I could outrun him in my current state, and I wasn’t sure I could count on getting away from him if he got his hands on me again.

 

So I threw the fragments of the shattered coin at him, putting more than just muscle behind them.

 

I didn’t see the details of where they hit, or how badly they hurt him. He fell. That was enough. I turned and fled without checking to see if he would live, not entirely sure whether I wanted him to or not.

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Corbin spent most of the night working on his replacement for the wards. By the time he finished the sun was peeking over the horizon, and the rain had stopped. He walked into the taproom with the expression of a man who was absolutely exhausted, and quite satisfied with himself.

 

He stopped short when he saw me waiting for him.

 

I’d tried to sleep, earlier. I knew that I should. But sleep had disagreed with me on that point, and after a few hours of lying awake and waiting for it I’d accepted that it wasn’t going to happen. There was no point in pretending otherwise.

 

Corbin stared at me. I sipped tea. I didn’t drink it often; I didn’t care for the side effects it produced in me. But when sleep was impossible tea was a decent substitute, and the energy it lent me was worth the jitters and the racing heart and the difficulty breathing.

 

“Silf?” he asked, after a few seconds. “What are you doing up?”

 

“You know alchemy,” I said, not answering the question. “Deep alchemy, not a lamp or an icebox.”

 

He nodded. “I studied when I was young,” he said. “Some things you don’t forget.”

 

“And the supplies?”

 

He hesitated at that, seeming unsure of how to answer. “Sometimes travelers don’t know what things are worth,” he said. “And I’ve had years to collect them.” His tone was feeble at best.

 

I stared at him, and he flinched away slightly. “You fought with the legions,” I said slowly. “You know alchemy.”

 

He nodded. It didn’t look like he could make himself look me in the eye.

 

“Why did you take me in?” I asked. My voice was a rough, low whisper. “Where were you when the Whitewood burned?”

 

He still couldn’t look at me. “There are some questions that are better left unanswered, Silf,” he said. “And sometimes the past should stay safely buried.”

 

“Do I deserve to know?”

 

He flinched away again, and then nodded. “I suppose you do,” he said. “Spirits have mercy on me, you do. But are you sure you want to?”

 

Now it was my turn to hesitate. I knew only too well that there were some things I was happier being ignorant of. If Corbin said that I didn’t want to know the answers to these questions, I wasn’t going to lightly assume that he was wrong.

 

But that wasn’t how it worked. That was never how it worked. I’d already seen too much, seen things that made me question. I couldn’t go back to living in blithe ignorance when I’d already seen enough of the puzzle to suspect the worst. It was better to know than to live with that quiet dread of uncertainty.

 

So, before I could convince myself otherwise, I nodded. One time, sharp and quick and scared.

 

Corbin sighed heavily. “All right, then,” he said. “But I’ll tell you now, it’s a long story.”

 

He walked behind the bar, and dug around in the bottles on the shelves until he eventually came up with the one he wanted. It was a small bottle, steel and silver, and very firmly sealed.

 

I’d asked him why that bottle was so different from its neighbors, most of which were made of glass and far more visually interesting than it was. He’d explained that it was imperial blackwine. It was made from carefully Changed grapes, and every step involved alchemical treatment and extremely precise techniques. It was one of the most complicated and delicate brewing processes in the world, he’d said.

 

In the high households of Akitsuro, a toast made with blackwine was customary at certain special events–the closing of a contract, births and funerals, a very few holidays. At any other time, and for anyone other than nobility and very wealthy merchants, it was impractically expensive. Corbin had certainly never had cause to open this particular bottle; no one in this part of the world was going to pay for it.

 

He brought it to the table I was sitting at, and opened it with a quiet hiss of escaping air. He poured a small cup of it. Then, to my surprise, he poured another cup and set it in front of me.

 

“You’ll want it by the end,” he said. “Trust me.”

 

I nodded, and looked at the liquid which commanded such high respect among the rich and powerful of the empire. It was…odd. A thick, viscous liquid, it was indeed black–not just dark, but black, with an odd shimmer to it. Its odor was sweet and subtle, vaguely reminiscent of lavender and cacao.

 

Corbin took a sip, his eyes closed, and then set the cup down and put the cap on the bottle again. “I’m going to explain some things, then,” he said. “But I’ll tell you now, it’s a long story. And please don’t interrupt. If I get interrupted, I don’t know that I’ll be able to start again.”

 

I nodded, staring raptly. He took one more sip of the wine, and then set it aside.

 

“I was born not so long after the warding posts were developed,” he said. He had that faraway look in his eyes again, like he wasn’t really seeing the room we were in. “Just a few years afterwards. This was in a small town a good ways north of Aseoto, a farming community not too different from this one. I was four years old when a legion engineer installed wards around our village.”

 

He paused. “It’s hard, now, to remember what things were like before the wards. We’re accustomed to them. They’re simply an accepted part of life, a part of how things are. But back then, it was…it’s hard to overstate how much it meant to have them.” He chuckled wryly. “Not that I understood that at the time, of course. I was just a small child, after all. But I remember the way my mother explained it to me. She said that we were safe now.”

 

Corbin looked at me seriously. “Imagine that moment, Silf,” he said. “Imagine living your whole life in fear. Imagine being afraid to leave your house without a weapon, afraid that you’d be turned into a monster even if you did everything right. My mother had already lost a son to ghouls, and a daughter to a drowner. She’d spent thirty years living in fear of the magic. And then she learned that we were safe, that this threat had been removed.”

 

I imagined it. It was…hard to picture just how profound her relief must have been.

 

“That was my first experience with alchemy,” he continued. “And of course I didn’t understand what it meant or how it worked. I didn’t understand the broader context that the wards existed in, the social and political implications. All I knew was that these people had made us safe. They’d made our lives better. That was the moment I knew I wanted to be an alchemist. I wanted to help people.”

 

In spite of myself, I snorted.

 

Corbin smiled sadly. “Yes, well, being an alchemist isn’t quite that simple. But that all came later. At the time, all I knew was that alchemists worked miracles and made the world a better place.” He sighed. “Of course, the wards didn’t protect us from everything. When I was sixteen the pox came through, a particularly virulent strain of it. I survived it, but I was in the minority; most folk who took ill died, including my whole family.”

 

I made an appropriately sympathetic noise, which Corbin ignored.

 

“Well, after that there was nothing keeping me there, and I still wanted to be an alchemist. So I packed my bags and went to the capital. It took some doing, but eventually I got into the Imperial Academy. I studied everything they taught there, history and linguistics and mathematics and medicine. Most especially, though, I studied alchemy. I wanted to work wonders.”

 

He smiled now, a distant and beatific expression. “And the wonders we built there, Silf,” he said. “Bones and ashes, the things we made were…magnificent. Beautiful. Not just the alchemy you’ve seen, lamps and iceboxes and heat-stones. We built clocks that could run for a week and not lose a second. Glass as hard as steel. Sculptures of light, caged and bent by lenses and mirrors. Pulleys that would let a child haul a wagon into the air. It seemed there was a new wonder being turned out every week.”

 

I could almost see the picture as he described it. Vast workshops manufacturing wonders and miracles en masse. Things that would be astonishing, genius works of art anywhere else becoming so casual and everyday that they were hardly even worth noticing.

 

“But to rise in the ranks as an alchemist, it wasn’t enough to repeat the designs of someone else,” Corbin continued. “You had to make something new, something original. You had to improve on the state of the art. And that’s where it all went wrong.” He took a drink of the wine. “I wasn’t the first to think of making alchemical fire, not by a long shot. It makes sense, after all. There are plenty of substances that burn–oil, coal, tallow, plant products, the list goes on. It made sense that alchemical reagents could produce something more effective. But every time someone had tried, it went badly.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Too volatile,” he said. “The magic would surge and set the mixture off. By the time I was born alchemists had given up on it as too dangerous. But with the warding posts, the magic was dampened enough to make experiments safe. Or, at least, not more dangerous than any number of other things we worked with. So I started working on developing an alchemical fuel. That’s where I met Black; she was working as a supplier, providing alchemical reagents, and I needed more than just the usual for my experiments?”

 

“What happened?” I whispered. There was a part of me that was starting to seriously doubt whether I wanted to know, but it was too late to quit. It was like watching a building burn; I didn’t want to stare, but couldn’t look away.

 

“It worked,” Corbin said simply. “Eventually, I got the mixture right. Fire-oil, I called it. It was…perfect. Simple to manufacture, and it didn’t require any particularly expensive or rare reagents. It burned very hot, and very long; a small bottle and a properly designed lamp could burn for days. It was almost impossible to put out, too. It would burn in a high wind, or underwater. It was everything that I wanted it to be.”

 

I shuddered.

 

He noticed, but didn’t comment. “Everyone was thrilled, of course,” he said. “It was praised as one of the greatest alchemical inventions in years. Within weeks it was being produced in enormous quantities. There were plans to use it as an energy source for alchemical engines…someone started experimenting with using fire-oil instead of coal to heat forges. Cheaper, more compact, cleaner air. The emperor personally congratulated me, and offered me a position as a legion engineer. I was thrilled.

 

“And then I went north, and things…changed.”

 

Corbin was silent for a long, long moment. I took a sip of the blackwine, and was startled at the complexity of the taste. It was a rich, layered flavor, sweet and tart and bitter and sharp, with hints of lavender and chocolate and sweet peppers and things I had no name for. The sharp bite of alcohol was almost an afterthought, a counterpoint to the intricate flavors of the wine.

 

“You have to understand,” he said at last. “It was supposed to be something good. The fire-oil, I mean. It was supposed to help people. And at first, even as I was marching north with the legions, it was. It was lighter than the fuels they usually carried, which made it easier to haul. Even the camp followers hunted me down to thank me, told me they’d never been on a march with so few people freezing.”

 

“‘Was?'”

 

“The legionnaires started using the fire-oil in other ways,” Corbin said softly. “At first, it was…benign, I suppose. When they burned out a section of forest to clear ground for the camp, I was…concerned, but it seemed harmless. Then they started using it for sabotage. Fire-oil burns quickly when it’s uncontrolled, and it’s very difficult to extinguish. So they would sneak into enemy encampments and use it to destroy their siege weapons, or their fortifications, or their supplies. And that was troubling, but I told myself it was a bloodless way to win, and that was better than the alternative.” He sighed. “And then we reached the Whitewood.”

 

He fell silent at that, and we both took a drink. We both had some memories that could use the dulling influence of alcohol, I was guessing. I was starting to feel pleasantly floaty by now. I didn’t have much of a head for liquor.

 

“It couldn’t be taken,” Corbin said. “Everyone said so. It was one of the great marvels of the world; a city that was grown instead of built, most everything made of living wood. It had never been taken by an enemy. It was likely the best-defended city in the world, after Aseoto. Even if the legions made it past the outer defenses, the city was a maze, and the defenders were extremely well-trained. Any battle on that ground would be a bloodbath. Everyone agreed that a siege was the only way, that any direct attack would end badly.”

 

“I remember that,” I said softly. The siege had gone on for…a few weeks, I thought. Not long.

 

He smiled. It was a crooked, warped expression with no joy in it. “I suppose you would,” he said. “Anyway. The smart thing to do would have been to wait. But the legate was a young nobleman who needed a dramatic victory to present to the emperor. A slow, drawn-out siege wasn’t what he had in mind. So he came up with a different plan.”

 

Corbin went to take another drink, and found that his cup was empty. He shrugged, opened the bottle again, and filled it before drinking it half away.

 

“The Whitewood was protected against fire,” he said softly. “Of course it was. They weren’t so foolish that they would overlook that, not in a city made of wood. The trees were Changed, and alchemically treated. But they hadn’t planned on fire-oil. How could they? It had only existed for a year. So the legate ordered them to load casks of fire-oil into the catapults and launch them over the walls. He ordered them to use it on people.”

 

I shuddered again. I remembered that. The fires that wouldn’t die, flame that clung and burned and would not stop. There was no way to put the fire out once it got on you. Water just spread it around, and trying to smother it usually just meant that whatever you were using to smother it caught on fire as well. There wasn’t much that fire-oil wouldn’t burn.

 

“I tried to stop it,” Corbin said. He was staring at the table now, unable to look at me. “Fire-oil was…it was supposed to help people. It was never meant to be a weapon. But I was just one man. The legate had me seized and put in irons, and the attack went forward.”

 

He closed his eyes, and his voice faded to a thin, rough whisper that sounded almost like mine. “They burned one of the greatest cities in the world,” he whispered. “Burned it to the ground, and sowed the ashes with salt. Tens of thousands of people burned to death, or killed trying to run from the fire. Hundreds of years of history wiped out. And it’s all because of me. Gods help me, I’m the man who made it all possible.”

 

I stared, and then pushed my chair away from the table. I stumbled for the door, almost running. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t think. The world was so distant and so blurred that I wasn’t even sure if it was me running, or I was just watching as my body ran without me.

 

Corbin did not try to stop me.

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The shocked silence that fell over the group when they saw the broken warding posts was so profound that I genuinely wondered whether I could hear the quick, panicked rhythm of the villagers’ hearts in the space it left.

 

Runners were quickly sent to check on the rest of the wards. I didn’t expect them to find anything out of the ordinary; if the wards as a whole were damaged, the monsters wouldn’t have all been so desperate to get back to this spot. I wasn’t disappointed, either. One warding post was completely missing, and one post on either side of the gap was shattered. The rest of them were all intact.

 

Most of the villagers stood around at that point, debating what might have happened in hushed voices. A handful were standing at the gap and staring alertly out into the darkness, weapons at the ready. I wasn’t expecting another attack tonight–it wouldn’t make much sense with us already on alert–but I supposed it wouldn’t be a good idea to count on that.

 

I was more interested in who wasn’t there, though. None of the imperials had showed themselves, which couldn’t possibly be an accident. And Black and Corbin had walked off while everyone was busy with their shock.

 

I decided to follow them. Something told me that whatever had drawn their attention was more important than listening to the villagers hash out the same speculations I’d already gone over when I first found that the post was missing.

 

They stopped in a small clearing directly behind the inn–and, I noted, well inside the wards. Lit only by moonlight, they were little more than dark blurs speaking in hushed voices. I was twenty feet away and thirty feet up, and while Black had demonstrated that she could tell when I was on the other side of a thick wall, I didn’t think either of them was aware of my presence.

 

“How bad is it?” Black asked, sounding grim.

 

“Bad.” Corbin didn’t sound any happier than she did. “The network is designed to be redundant; it can lose two posts with minimal problems. But three in a row is enough to leave a gap. Around fifteen feet, if they’re using the standard model.”

 

“Can we just…move the posts closer together?”

 

He shook his head. “That’s not how the wards work,” he said. “The geometry of the warding posts has to be tailored to the location. Move any one of them more than a couple inches and it will start functioning erratically. Moving them enough to close the gap would make the whole web collapse.”

 

“Damn,” she said. “Can you…I don’t know, fix them somehow?”

 

“I don’t know how they’re made. He’s only let that secret out to his own inspectors. I could fix a scuff, a bit of damaged geometry, but something on this scale? They’d have to be rebuilt completely, and I can’t do that.”

 

“I’m sensing some hesitation there,” Black said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

 

Corbin hesitated a moment longer, and then said, “I figured out how to build wards. From scratch, I mean.”

 

Black stared at him for a solid five seconds in silence. “Are you serious?” she asked, finally.

 

“Very.”

 

Black kept staring. “That’s huge,” she said. “The emperor is the only person who’s figured out how to make wards. The only one. And even with warding posts around every damned village in the empire for almost fifty years, nobody’s reverse engineered them.”

 

Corbin shrugged. “My design works off a different set of principles,” he said. “It’s stronger than his, but not nearly as efficient. The geometry isn’t nearly as elegant.”

 

“Still,” she said. “This is incredible. And…useful. You can patch the hole with that, right?”

 

Corbin was silent for a long enough time that I knew his answer wasn’t going to be good. I thought for a moment, and then I started climbing down out of the tree.

 

“I could,” Corbin said. “But I can’t. I’m just a simple innkeeper, remember? I did my time in the war, I know my way around an arbalest. I’ve traveled a bit, and I’ve let on that I have a bit of education. I don’t practice alchemy. I very definitely don’t make my own designs, or build things that are supposed to be state secrets.”

 

“These people don’t need an innkeeper.” Black’s voice was quiet, and very intense. “They don’t even need an arbalist. They need an engineer. They need you.”

 

Corbin sighed, long and soft as snow falling on the trees. “That was a long time ago,” he said. His voice was…not sad, precisely, but sorrowful. Melancholy. “A lot of water has gone by since then. It’s been a long time.” He was silent for a moment. “I’m not that man anymore, Black,” he said at last. “I don’t think I can be him again.”

 

“No one else can.” I said it just loud enough to hear, from the trees at the edge of the clearing.

 

Corbin flinched away as though he’d been struck. He looked in my direction, and then looked away, at the ground next to his feet.

 

When he looked up again, he stood a little straighter. Gone was the tired man who’d sat and drank in an empty inn, and talked of how he couldn’t save a single person. He had a spark in his eye, now–not a fire, but something that was once, and just might be again.

 

“All right, then,” he said. “Come on. I’ll need a hand carrying this.”

---

In the inn, Corbin unlocked the door to his room, and went in. For the first time, he didn’t immediately close the door behind himself. He gestured for me to follow.

 

I went in, and gaped.

 

Corbin’s rooms were larger than mine. They also managed to be even more ascetic. He had a bed, which looked like it could hardly be large enough to hold him. The rest of the space–all of it– was given over to what had to be an alchemical workshop. It was full of machines, glassware and metal, complicated arrangements of gears and tubes and wires. I couldn’t guess at the purpose of half of it.

 

And there were the reagents that were the foundation of alchemy. Jars of powders and fluids, strips of metal, lumps of stone that shimmered with more than just reflected light. There were dozens–hundreds– of vials, each neatly labeled in Corbin’s precise hand.

 

Alchemy was expensive. Everyone knew that. Some things, simple things, could be made cheaply–a decent alchemical lamp could be had for a few silver pennies, even here, and things like alchemical heat-stones and iceboxes were only a minor extravagance. But the rarer reagents were terribly, brutally expensive. Something as simple as a pinch of powder, or a few drops of oil, could easily cost gold.

 

A laboratory of this sort was…I couldn’t even fathom how much it was worth. It was a noble’s ransom in alchemical reagents. It had to be worth more than this inn, and the village it was in, and likely the lives of everyone in it, all put together.

 

It was incredible to think that this had been here all along, with just a locked door hiding it from view.

 

“Hurry up,” Corbin said, striding inside. He was moving with a purpose that I couldn’t remember ever seeing from him before. “Black, grab that crate, and hold it steady.”

 

She complied, without saying a word. Corbin barely even glanced in her direction, collecting things from the tables and setting them aside. A pair of metal braziers, a complex web of glass tubes that hurt my head to look at, a bellows, what looked like a miniature grinding-mill operated by turning a crank. Once he was satisfied with his selection he started placing the items into the crate. It had to be terribly heavy, but Black didn’t make a sound, or show any strain in holding it.

 

“That should be the tools,” Corbin muttered, taking a smaller box from the floor and handing it to me. I took it, unsure of what I was supposed to do with it, but he was already turning away. He started taking vials and boxes off the tables and shelves, and putting them in the box I was holding.

 

Ah. So that was what it was for.

 

By the time he was done, there were close to twenty containers in the box. It was…not heavy, exactly, but weighty. This was more money than I’d ever held before, in the same sense that Aseoto was a larger city than Branson’s Ford. And it was so very, very fragile. One false step could cost a literal fortune, right now.

 

The fact that all of our lives were riding on getting this right was…just a bit of added spice.

 

“That should be it,” he said, after several minutes. “Let’s go.”

 

Black and I obediently filed out of the room. Corbin locked the door behind us, locking that laboratory safely away again, and then we went back outside.

 

It didn’t look like much had changed, back at the breach. People were still standing around, arguing in circles. Some of them had fetched more alchemical lamps, and things were near as bright as day. A few were standing at the edge of the wards, staring into the darkness and clutching weapons with the too-tight grip of men and women trying to convince themselves they weren’t afraid, and failing badly. It was obvious that no one knew what to do. Tellingly, none of the villagers was trying to pretend otherwise.

 

Corbin walked up to the group, still with that quiet assurance in his stride, and said, “I can fix it.”

 

Egill looked at him askance. “Appreciate the thought,” he said. “You did a damn fine job fixing up that inn of yours, I know that, but this isn’t just a bit of repair work. There’s deep alchemy in these things.”

 

“I can fix it,” Corbin said again. “I know enough alchemy to patch a hole.”

 

“If he says he can do it, he can do it.” Ilse’s voice was as unexpected as it was welcome. I wouldn’t have expected her to speak on Corbin’s behalf, but her tone was deadly serious, and brooked no disagreement. Ilse had brought four children into the world; her stern tone could make a grown soldier look at the ground and mumble acquiescence.

 

“Guess we might as well,” Ketill said. “Ain’t like we’re losing much if he can’t. Ain’t anybody else around has a better chance at it, I don’t reckon.”

 

Egill didn’t look entirely convinced, but he hadn’t kept himself accepted as mayor for decades by not knowing how to read the crowd. He knew that the general opinion was against him in this, and he ceded the point gracefully, nodding and falling back a step.

 

“Clear out, then,” Corbin said authoritatively. “I need some clear space to work.”

 

“And what happens if them ghouls come back?” someone asked.

 

“They won’t.” Corbin sounded perfectly confident of that.

 

“But what if they do?” the voice pressed. I recognized it, now, as belonging to Livy. That made the shaking quality in her voice more understandable. Egill’s daughter was…not naive, precisely, but sheltered in a way that few people in Branson’s Ford had the luxury of being. The past few days must have been a particularly ugly shock to her.

 

“I can take care of things,” Corbin said, tapping the arbalest meaningfully. I hadn’t even realized he was still carrying it. I’d never seen him actually carrying the thing around before, but he had a way of making it look very…natural.

 

That seemed to settle the matter. People started to drift away in ones and twos, yawning and stumbling a bit. I was guessing that most of them were going back to their beds, and that none of them would get a moment’s sleep for the rest of the night. I would have joined them, but I still had the box of reagents, and Corbin shot me a look that made it very clear that he didn’t want me to just set it down and leave.

 

Once it was just him, Black, and I left standing there, he turned to us. “Set those down,” he said. “Black, I need you to catch something. A deer, some rabbits, something like that. And bring them back alive.”

 

She nodded sharply. “Will do,” she said, starting out into the forest.

 

“Watch yourself,” he called after her. “Not even you can count on being safe out there tonight.” Then he turned to me. “Are you feeling up to running an errand?”

 

My leg hurt, and my ribs hurt. Just breathing was enough to make my throat feel raspy and rough. My heart was still beating too fast, my mind still struggling to keep past from bleeding into present. It was hard not to keep my shoulders hunched, as though expecting a blow to fall at any moment. I had seldom in my life felt so thoroughly not up to running an errand.

 

I nodded.

 

“Thanks,” he said. “Go to the smithy, and get three lengths of rod-iron. Iron, not steel.”

 

I nodded again, and took off through town. I was stumbling a little, not quite steady on my feet, but I was moving.

 

To my surprise, the smithy wasn’t empty. Sigmund was standing near the cold forge, fixing arrowheads to shafts. He saw me coming, and then looked again. “Silf?” he asked. “Is that you?”

 

I nodded, and looked at what he was doing curiously.

 

“I didn’t think I could sleep,” he explained, somewhat sheepishly. “And it seemed like we might need more arrows now. What with…you know…everything.” He paused, seeming uncomfortable with that line of thinking, and then shook his head. “Anyway,” he said. “Did you need something?”

 

I nodded again. “Three lengths of rod-iron,” I said. “For Corbin.”

 

“We have some in the back,” he said. “Let me grab it.”

 

Sigmund vanished into the building attached to the forge, and returned a moment later carrying several metal rods. They were a little thicker around than my thumb, and probably almost as long as I was tall.

 

He started to hand them to me, then hesitated. “Do you want a hand with these?” he asked. “Not to say that you can’t take them, it’s just…you’ve had a long night. You don’t look quite well.”

 

A part of me wanted to lash out at him. But, well, he wasn’t wrong. And the notion of carrying the rod-iron back myself wasn’t exactly a tempting one just now. So I just nodded.

 

I tried to carry one of the rods myself on the way back to the wards, but Sigmund wouldn’t hear a word of it, insisting on carrying all three himself. He handed them off to Corbin, who barely seemed to note the blacksmith’s presence, and left.

 

I stood nearby and watched, fascinated, as Corbin worked. There was only one alchemical lamp now, but there was still plenty of light. He had two metal braziers burning with a pale, almost white flame, and they were startlingly bright.

 

By that light, I watched as the innkeeper went about the business of what I could only assume was alchemy. A complex arrangement of tubes and retorts over one of the brazier held dozens of liquids and vapors, everything from what looked like black mercury to a pale yellow vapor that clung tightly to the glass. The other brazier was empty, but a broad silver bowl sitting next to it suggested that might not be the case for long. The bowl had what looked like the pieces of the shattered warding posts in it.

 

Corbin selected a bottle from the box and poured a thin stream of some thick brown fluid into the bowl, then hung it from a tripod over the brazier. It was barely on the heat before he was turning to the rod-iron. Somehow he’d already taken a hammer and chisel from the box of implements.

 

Then he paused and turned towards me, seeming to register my presence for the first time in several minutes. “You should go to sleep, Silf,” he said. “This will take a while. And you need your rest after tonight.”

 

I nodded, and walked away towards the inn. I couldn’t keep myself from looking back one last time, though.

 

Corbin was in constant motion, cutting and carving and pouring and mixing and measuring. His hands were always moving, quick and utterly certain; it seemed he never had to pause and think about what he was doing, or go back to fix a mistake.

 

But his expression was blank, and cold, and empty, and his eyes were far away as he worked.

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