I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1461: Rian The Mercenary

Baletta Fransca had not slept in two days, and she was fairly sure it was the Captain’s fault.

He had gone missing on the morning after the twentieth night. Peaker had knocked on his door at first light and found the bed made and cold, and nobody on the Keep had seen him leave. The sentries on the western postern remembered a lantern and a black-haired boy who said he was checking on them. That was all anyone knew.

"He’s a Sage," Commander Vanessa had said when Peaker brought it to her. "Sages wander. He’ll be back by supper."

He was not back by supper.

He was not back by the next morning either, and by then the Eleventh Squad had stopped pretending not to worry. Iren had run the river road all the way to Hollin’s Ford and back, certain the Captain had gone there, and come back with nothing. Doron had not said a word all day, which for Doron was not unusual, but he had also not eaten, which was. Jalsket’s hair had been white since breakfast, and he had stopped trying to hide it.

And Tema had spent the whole day on the western rampart with her eyes closed, listening, and getting nothing from the north but silence.

Then, a little after noon on the second day, she had come down off the wall so fast she nearly fell.

"The birds! Baletta, the birds up north, they can see again!" She had grabbed Baletta by both arms. "There was a mist over the whole north forest, there’s been a mist for weeks and they couldn’t see through it, and it’s gone, it’s just gone, and they’re all screaming the same thing—"

"What thing?"

Tema’s face had been very pale.

"That the forest is full of dead."

Baletta was still thinking about the way she had said it when the light came.

Everyone on the Keep saw it. It was the middle of the afternoon and the whole garrison was in the yard when, far away on the northern horizon, farther than any of them had ever walked, a pillar of white came straight down out of the clear sky. It stood there for one long heartbeat, so bright that it threw shadows across the yard of the Castle Keep from forty miles away.

Then it was gone.

’Captain... what did you do?’

Nobody in the yard said anything. There was no need to. Every soldier in the North Guards had seen that exact white before, on a training ground, on a rubble slope, and on a rooftop above the second ground.

Vanessa had her sword on her hip before the light had even faded.

The stables of the Castle Keep were still empty, so they went on foot. The Commander took the Eleventh Squad, the big captain in the earthen plates with his arm still bound, and twenty volunteers from the other squads who would not be told no. Tema walked at the front with her eyes half closed, following the birds. Iren ran ahead and came back and ran ahead again, like a dog that cannot bear the pace of its owners.

They walked through the afternoon and into the dark, north and north again, through a forest that grew older and blacker with every mile. The trunks thickened until three men could not have linked arms around them, and the undergrowth thinned away to bare black earth. They lit torches. Nobody complained.

It was a little before midnight when they found the ice.

It stood across a narrow gorge where a stream should have been running, a wall of pale blue ice from the floor of the gorge to its lip, so tall that their torchlight did not reach the top. It steamed faintly in the cold. At its foot, the stream had frozen solid, ripples and all.

The big captain put his good hand flat against it and snatched it away again.

"That’s not a Sage’s work."

Vanessa said nothing. She only studied the wall for a long moment with her pipe unlit between her teeth. Then she turned and led them up the side of the gorge and over the rim.

And stopped.

Baletta came up behind her and stopped too, and so did everyone else, one by one, all along the rim of the valley, until nearly thirty soldiers of the North Guards stood in a line in the torchlight, looking down.

The moon was up. It was enough to see by.

The valley below was full of enormous trees, and between their roots, from one end of the valley floor to the other, lay the Forest Hunters. There were so many of them that at first Baletta’s eyes refused to understand what they were seeing and tried to make them into rocks, or fallen branches, or snow. They lay in heaps between the roots. They lay in long drifts against a second wall of ice at the far end of the valley. They lay in rings, great circles of them, one inside another, as though they had all fallen outward at once from some point in the middle.

Near the far end, stretched across the mouth of a hollow beneath the biggest tree, lay something grey and enormous that Baletta decided, quite firmly, not to look at for too long.

And in the middle of it all there was a hill.

It was higher than the lowest roots of the trees. It was made of the dead.

On top of it, a black-haired young man sat with his elbows on his knees, looking down at them.

’Good stars.’

He was soaked. There was no other word for it. He was soaked from his hair to his boots in something black that shone under the moon, and his uniform hung off him in rags. Even from the rim of the valley, Baletta could see the holes in it. Holes in the thigh. In the shoulder. In the arm.

He raised one hand and waved.

"Commander," he called, and his voice carried clearly across the silent valley. "You took your time."

Nobody moved.

Then Iren went down the slope. He did not run. He walked slowly, picking his way between the dead, and the rest of them followed him in a long, straggling line with their torches held high. None of them said a single word the whole way down. Baletta stepped over a Hunter with a hole punched straight through the middle of its chest. Then another. The black blood had frozen where it pooled, and it cracked under her boots like skin ice on a puddle. Soon enough she stopped looking where she was stepping, since there was nowhere left to step that was not a Hunter.

At the foot of the hill, Vanessa stopped and looked up at him.

He looked down at her.

"How many?" she said at last.

The Captain thought about it.

"All of them."

The big captain in the earthen plates made a sound in his throat that was not quite a word. Behind Baletta, one of the volunteers from the Second Squad sat down very suddenly in the snow. Jalsket’s hair, which had been white since breakfast, went slowly and completely black.

Vanessa did not take her eyes off him.

"The ice."

"It was here when I arrived."

"Was it."

"Terrible weather they have up here."

The silence stretched. Baletta, standing at the Commander’s shoulder, watched her face in the torchlight and could not read a single thing in it. Then Vanessa took the unlit pipe out of her mouth, snapped her fingers over the bowl, and drew on it until the black smoke came.

"You told me the day you came," she said. "You wanted to kill as many of them as you could."

"I did say that."

"I thought you were a boastful little shit."

"That’s fair."

The big captain was staring up at the hill with his mouth hanging open. His eyes went to the dead, to the ice walls, to the thing lying across the mouth of the hollow, and then back up to the black-haired boy sitting on top of it all. When he finally found his voice again, it came out hoarse.

"What in the stars are you, boy?"

The Captain seemed to find that funny. He tipped his head to one side and considered the question as though nobody had ever asked it before.

"A mercenary," he said. "I came north for the Forest Hunters." He spread his bloody hands at the valley. "Well. I found them."

For a moment the big captain’s jaw only worked.

"A mercenary," he repeated slowly, as if he were tasting the word.

And that was how it started.

The soldiers who went down into that valley that night marched back to the Castle Keep the next morning and told the ones who had stayed. The ones who had stayed told the Gate Wardens, who did not believe a word of it until they walked forty miles north to see for themselves and came back very quiet. The Gate Wardens told the carters. The carters told Hollin’s Ford, and Hollin’s Ford told every village along the river, and every village along the river told every traveller who passed through, and the travellers went south.

They went south a great deal faster than any letter the Castle Keep had ever sent.

Within a month, in inns and markets in towns that had never seen a Forest Hunter in their lives, people who could not have found the northern wall on a map were telling each other about the black-haired Sage up north who had walked into the forest alone, and come back, and left eleven thousand of them dead behind him in a single day.

They did not know his full name. Most of them did not know the Castle Keep’s name either.

But they all knew what to call him.

Rian the Mercenary.

And for once, the south was listening to the north.