The Ashen Ninth lived at the bottom of Fort Calder.
Not literally. The fort sat on a low rise, and the Ninth's camp sat at the foot of it, outside the red stone walls, in the strip of land between the outer ditch and the Burnt Mile. Downhill from the latrines. Downwind from the grave pits. Close enough to the front that a Varenhal catapult could have dropped a stone in the middle of it any night it wanted.
There was a wooden stockade around the camp, but it wasn't there to keep anyone out.
Marshal Vex's aide brought Ren to the gate at midmorning. He was a pinch faced young officer with a clean uniform and a handkerchief pressed over his nose.
"Warden of the Ninth," the aide announced to nobody in particular. He shoved a rolled up paper into Ren's hands. "Your commission. The Marshal sends his regards." He looked at the stockade gate and then back at Ren with something close to pity. "And his condolences."
Then he left. Fast.
Ren unrolled the paper. It was one line long, with Vex's seal at the bottom.
Kuroda Ren is appointed Warden of the Ashen Ninth until such time as he is no longer able to serve.
He rolled it back up and walked through the gate.
***
There were three hundred of them.
He could tell at a glance, because they were all looking at him. Men and women in black wool tabards gone gray with ash and mud, sitting on overturned buckets and broken crates around a dozen smoky fires. Tents that leaned. Laundry hung on spears. A smell of old sweat and wet ash and something burning that probably shouldn't be.
Nobody stood up.
He opened Read the Field and let it wash across the camp. Most of them were between Level 10 and 20. Common classes. Laborer. Footman. Thief. Brawler. A few higher ones scattered through the crowd. And one, right in the center, that made him look twice.
Garrick · Vanguard (Rare) · Level 23
Garrick was sitting on an upturned cart wheel by the biggest fire. He was the largest human being Ren had ever seen. Not fat. Just huge, like someone had built a regular man and then kept going. Bald head. Black beard down to his chest. Hands like shovels. He was eating something out of a bowl with his fingers, and he didn't look up when Ren came in.
Everyone else did. And then, one by one, they looked at Garrick.
Ren had been in enough school yards to know what that meant.
"Well, look at this," said a voice at his elbow.
A woman had appeared beside him. She was small and quick, with a shaved head and a crooked grin and three gold rings in one ear. She was already walking away when Ren noticed his pocket felt lighter. He checked. There'd been nothing in it but the folded map, and the map was gone.
"Give it back," he said.
She turned around, walking backward, and held up Ferren's map between two fingers. "This? Hand drawn. Very nice. Nobody's going to buy it, though." She tossed it. He caught it. "You're the new one? The demon?"
"I'm the new one."
"Huh." She looked him up and down. "Thought you'd be taller. I'm Sable. You've got two weeks, by the way."
"Two weeks until what?"
"Until they find you hanging from the tent pole." She grinned wider. "Eleven before you. The record's nineteen days. Most don't make ten."
"What happened to the last one?"
"Nobody knows." Sable put a hand on her heart. "Terrible mystery."
Ren looked at her. Then he looked past her, at the big fire, and at Garrick, who still hadn't looked up from his bowl.
He walked over.
***
"You're in my seat," Ren said.
The camp went quiet. Even the fires seemed to crackle softer.
Garrick finished his bowl. He set it down on the ground beside him, slowly. Then he looked up for the first time. His eyes were small and dark and not stupid at all.
"That right," he said. His voice was a rumble.
"The Warden's seat. By the main fire. I'm the Warden."
"Says the paper."
"Says the paper."
Garrick stood up.
It took a while. When he was done, he was a full head and a half taller than Ren. The cart wheel creaked with relief.
"Here's how it goes, Warden," Garrick said. "Eleven men walked in that gate before you with a paper from the Marshal. Every one of them came over to this fire and said something like that. And every one of them learned the same thing." He leaned down until his beard almost brushed Ren's face. "The paper doesn't run the Ninth."
"Who does?"
"Whoever's left standing."
Ren nodded. He took off Marta's coat, folded it, and handed it to Sable, who had followed him over. She took it, surprised.
"All right," said Ren.
Garrick hit him. New chapters come out on g.com first.
It was a good punch. Fast for a man that size. Ren saw it coming and still only half slipped it, and the edge of Garrick's fist clipped his ear and made the whole world ring like a bell. He stepped back. Garrick came after him.
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GarrickSTR 52 · AGI 22 · VIT 50 · INT 18 · WIL 28
Will 28. Ren's Authority was 38. It should work.
He waited until Garrick swung again, and as the big man committed his weight to it, said it quietly. "Kneel."
Garrick's knees buckled.
Not all the way. He caught himself on one knee, grunting, the muscles in his neck standing out like ropes. He was fighting it. Ren had never seen anyone fight it that hard. The big man's face went purple with strain, and then, slowly, impossibly, he began to stand up.
He was strong. Strong enough to push through it. Not fast enough.
Ren stepped in while he was still halfway up and hit him three times. Throat, jaw, the side of his knee. Not with the full strength of his arm. With his weight, his hips, his whole body behind it, the way Sovereign's Instinct told him to.
Garrick went down hard.
He tried to get up. Ren put a boot on his chest. Garrick looked up at him, blood coming out of his nose, and something in his small dark eyes shifted.
The whole camp was standing now. Three hundred people, around a dozen fires, absolutely silent.
Ren took his boot off Garrick's chest and stepped back.
"Get up," he said.
Garrick got up. It took him a moment. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and looked at the blood, then at Ren, like he was trying to figure out a word in a language he didn't know.
"You didn't finish it," he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I need you," said Ren.
He turned around to face the camp. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. They were all listening.
"I want you to know the truth," he said. "I'm going to tell you exactly what's going on, because I don't think anybody here has heard the truth in a long time."
He held up the commission.
"Marshal Vex put me here to die. He hates me because I'm from Varenhal. He hates you because you're the Ninth. He gave me to you because he thinks you'll kill me, or because he thinks you'll all die together on the next charge, and either way, he's rid of a problem."
Nobody said anything. A few of them glanced at each other.
"I'm not going to promise you pardons," Ren went on. "I can't give them. I'm not going to promise you money or glory. I don't have any of that." He looked around at them. "Here's what I can promise. If you follow me, you'll live longer than anyone who doesn't. And by the time this war is done, the people who sent you here will need you more than you ever needed them."
Silence.
Then Sable laughed. Short and sharp. "That's it? That's the speech?"
"That's the truth," Ren said. "I don't have a better one."
He took his coat back from her and went to sit down on the cart wheel by the fire.
Nobody stopped him.
***
He didn't sleep that night. He sat by the main fire with the sword across his knees and watched the camp.
They watched him back. Mostly from a distance. A few came close, hovered, then went away again.
An old man with gray hair and two fingers missing on his left hand came and sat across the fire from him, smoking a pipe.
Old Hob · Tactician (Rare) · Level 31
A Tactician, at Level 31, in a penal battalion. Ren looked at him a little longer.
"You want to know what's in the stores," the old man said, without looking up from his pipe. "Every new warden does. Takes most of them a week to ask."
"What's in the stores?"
"Nothing." Hob blew out a long stream of smoke. "Half rations, when the wagons remember us. Oats with weevils. Salt pork that's more salt than pork. No armor. Not a single shield in the whole camp. The swords are from the last war, and the war before that. Half of them would snap if you sneezed on them." He tapped the pipe against his knee. "We go first in every attack. They don't waste good steel on men who go first."
"How many of you were there in the spring?"
"Six hundred and forty."
Ren didn't say anything.
"They keep sending more," Hob said. "Every month. Deserters, thieves, men who owe money to the wrong lord. We're where the Empire puts things it wants to throw away." He looked up at Ren for the first time. His eyes were sharp and pale blue under heavy gray brows. "Now it's put you here too."
"You were an officer," Ren said. It wasn't a question.
"Colonel. Thirty years in the Second Army." Hob smiled faintly. "I struck a duke's nephew at a dinner. He'd said something about my wife. It was worth it." He knocked the pipe out on his boot. "The duke didn't think so." This chapter was copied from novelping dot com without permission.
"Is that the truth?"
"Most of it." Hob stood up, his knees cracking. "The rest is that I'd do it again. I'll see you in the morning, Warden. If you're still here, we'll talk about the swords."
He nodded once and went off into the dark.
It was past midnight when Garrick came.
He didn't come to the fire. He came to the edge of the light and stopped there, a huge black shape against the darker black of the tents.
"Warden," he said.
Ren looked up.
"I was a sergeant once," Garrick said. "In the Third Lancers. Eleven years. Then we got a new captain. Noble's son. He wanted a medal before he went home to his father." His voice didn't change. It stayed low and flat. "He sent my squad into a Varenhal crossbow line at Westmarch. Sixty of us. Told us there'd be cavalry behind. There wasn't any cavalry. He knew there wasn't."
Ren said nothing.
"Fourteen of us came back. I walked into his tent that night and threw him through the wall." Garrick shrugged his massive shoulders. "So they put me here. And every warden they send says the same things. Glory. Honor. Duty. All lies. You know what a lie sounds like after a while?"
"Yes," Ren said.
Garrick looked at him.
"You said the Marshal put you here to die," he said. "You said it in front of everybody. That's true. Everybody knows it's true. No warden ever said it before."
He came into the light. Then, slowly, with a grunt, he knelt in front of the fire.
Not because of any skill. Because he chose to.
"I don't know what you are," said Garrick. "I don't care. You tell the truth. I'll follow a man who tells the truth." He put his huge hand flat on the ground in front of him. "I swear to you, Warden. My oath. Whatever that's worth."
The System answered before Ren could.
It opened in front of his eyes, bigger than any screen he'd seen before. The letters were black edged with deep violet, and they burned.
Oath offered: Garrick, Vanguard (Rare), Level 23.Accept?
Ren looked at the giant man kneeling in the ash.
"Yes," he said.
And something opened inside his chest.
That was the only way he'd ever be able to describe it. Like a door he'd never known was there swinging wide. He felt Garrick. Not in his head. Deeper. A warm, steady weight, like a second pulse under his own. Like a candle someone had just lit in a dark room.
Then the power came.
Sworn souls: 1.Dominion awakened.First Oath: Authority +10.
Skill gained: Oath of Dominion (Active). Accept the sworn oath of another. Sworn souls share their strength with you.Skill gained: Command (Passive). Those under your direct command gain +5% to all stats.
Authority 38. Authority 48.
He could feel it settle into him. Heavy and clear and huge. He could feel the shape of the Ninth all around him, three hundred people in the dark, and for a second he knew, without knowing how he knew, that every one of them was a door too. Waiting.
Garrick looked up. His eyes were wide. "What was that?"
"You felt it?"
"Felt something." The big man put a hand on his own chest. "Like getting warm."
Ren didn't know what to say. So he just said, "Thank you, Garrick."
Garrick nodded, and stood, and went back into the dark.
***
Ren slept, finally, a little before dawn.
He slept in the Warden's tent, which had a hole in the roof and a cot with one leg shorter than the others and a dark stain on the center pole that someone had tried and failed to scrub off. He was so tired he didn't care.
He didn't hear anyone come in.
He woke up because something cold was touching his throat.
His eyes opened. It was still dark in the tent. Almost completely black. A shape was crouched beside the cot, so close he could feel its breath. A knife. He could feel the edge of it resting against the skin just under his jaw, right over the artery.
He didn't move.
He tried to open Read the Field. Nothing came. Whatever was crouching next to him, his skill couldn't see it. It was like trying to read a shadow.
Then the shape spoke. In Japanese. A soft, quiet voice that hadn't said his name in a year.
"Hey, Ren," said Nakano Sho. "Long time."