"Yes," said Ren.
The door opened.
It was different from the others. Garrick, Sable and Hob burned close and bright, like candles in the same room. Sho was far away. A tiny point of light at the very edge of what Ren could feel, faint and flickering, like a match someone was holding up in a field at night, miles off.
But it was there. And it was steady.
Sworn souls: 4.
Ren sat on the edge of his cot in the dark for a long time, looking north through the canvas wall at nothing.
He didn't know what had made Sho do it. Guilt, maybe. Fear. The sound of Ilvane's promise about going home, getting thinner every mile he walked. Maybe he'd just been tired of being on the side that lied.
It didn't matter. Ren had a man in Solenne now.
He lay back down. For the first time since the summoning, he fell asleep fast.
***
The next evening, he sat with Old Hob over a map spread across two barrels in the armory tent, with a lantern hanging from the ridgepole and rain ticking on the canvas.
"Here," Hob said. His finger traced a line north across the Burnt Mile. "There's an old drainage ditch that runs most of the way to the Varenhal camps. Dug before the war, for the fields. It'll be half full of water, but it's deep enough to walk in without your head showing. Then here, around the east side of their hill, where the ground is too marshy for tents." He tapped a spot. "Then the road to Halden's Ford. Eight miles. No cover, but no reason for anyone to be on it at night."
Ren studied it. He could see it the way he'd started seeing the drills. Not the lines on the paper. The shape of the thing. Three hundred people moving through the dark like one long animal, and all the places where that animal could get caught.
"Why does Vex hate foreigners?" he asked.
Hob looked up from the map. "Where'd that come from?"
"He looked at me in that tent like he'd already decided what I was. Before I said a word."
The old colonel was quiet for a while. Rain drummed on the canvas.
"He had a son," Hob said finally. "Tomas. Good lad. Captain in the Lancers, at twenty two. Eleven years ago, at the siege of Tollan, the boy led a charge against the Varenhal lines. Got cut down by a knight from Solenne. Some champion of the Holy Kingdom." He rolled his pipe between his fingers without lighting it. "Gorran was there. He watched it happen from the hill."
"I'm sorry."
"So was everyone. Then it got worse." Hob put the pipe in his mouth and talked around it. "The old Emperor took Gorran's command away after Tollan. Said grief had made him reckless. Gave the army to a young general from the south. Gorran spent five years in a desert fort with a hundred men, waiting. When the young general died, they brought him back." He looked at Ren. "He's never forgiven Varenhal. Not one stone of it. Not one person from it."
"I'm not from Varenhal."
"You came out of their crystal, Warden," said Hob. "To him, that's the same thing."
Ren looked down at the map for a long time.
"Do you know the name of the knight?" he asked. "The one who killed Tomas?"
"Never heard it." Hob shrugged. "Just a big man on a gray horse. Gorran knows. He'd never forget it."
***
Three nights later, the Ashen Ninth crossed the Burnt Mile.
They went in the dark, with no torches and no moon. Three hundred people moving in a long single line, black tabards over their armor, faces smeared with ash. Old Hob had walked the route himself, years ago, during the last offensive. He knew where the ground was solid and where it would swallow a man to the waist. He went first, with a stick, feeling for the path.
Ren went second.
He could feel the whole column stretched out behind him in the dark. Not through the bond. Only four of them were sworn, and only three of those were here. It was Command. He'd never noticed it at night before. A faint sense of the battalion as one thing, the way you know where your own feet are without looking at them. He knew when the line was bunching up. He knew when someone fell.
They passed the Varenhal camps at the third hour. Close enough to hear a sentry singing to himself, off key. Close enough to smell bread baking for the morning. Nobody saw them.
At the sixth hour, they reached Halden's Ford.
***
It was bigger than Ren had expected.
He lay on his stomach on a low rise above the river with Hob on one side and Sable on the other and looked down at it. A wooden stockade, maybe two hundred yards on a side, built on a flat bend where the river ran shallow over gravel. Long low warehouses inside. Corrals full of oxen and mules. Rows of wagons, dozens of them, lined up wheel to wheel. A watchtower at each corner, with a lantern burning in each.
And a gate, closed, with two men standing in front of it, leaning on their spears.
Ren opened Read the Field and let it sweep across the depot.
Most of the soldiers inside were low. Level 10, 12, 15. Supply troops. Teamsters. But in a stone building by the gate, he picked out six names that were different.
Radiant Knight · Level 22
Radiant Knight · Level 24
Radiant Knight · Level 21 Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Radiant Knight Lieutenant · Level 27
"Church knights," he said quietly. "Six of them. Why would Church knights be guarding a supply depot?"
"They wouldn't," said Hob. "Unless they're guarding something else."
Ren looked at the stone building for a long moment. Then he looked at Sable.
"How many of your people can get over that wall?"
She grinned in the dark. "All of them."
***
It went the way Hob had planned it.
Sable and fourteen others went over the stockade on the river side, where the wall was lowest and the watchtower lantern was out. Ren never saw them move. Three minutes later, the two guards at the front gate both went down without a sound. Two minutes after that, the gate swung slowly open.
Garrick's company went through it at a run.
Ren went with them.
The depot woke up all at once. Shouting. Bells. Doors slamming open. Teamsters stumbling out of the warehouses in their nightshirts. Soldiers grabbing spears. And in the doorway of the stone building, armor already half on, six Radiant Knights with drawn swords.
Ren went straight at them.
"Kneel."
His Authority was 48 now. Two of the knights went down flat. Three stumbled to their knees. Only the lieutenant stayed on his feet, swaying, teeth clenched, his face red with the effort.
Garrick hit the three who were stumbling. It wasn't a fight. It was a wall falling on them.
Ren took the lieutenant.
The man was good. He was Level 27, and his blade work was clean and quick, and he'd clearly trained for years in some white yard in Solenne the same way Brannoc's knights had. For maybe ten seconds, he and Ren traded blows in the doorway, and Ren had to work.
Then Ren saw it. A hitch in the lieutenant's guard on the left, every time he stepped back. An old injury, maybe. A bad knee.
Ren made him step back. Once. Twice. On the third time, he went for the knee.
The lieutenant went down.
All around the depot, the Ninth was winning. Ren could feel it through Command, the whole battalion moving like one animal, five percent stronger and five percent faster and two hundred percent angrier than anyone who'd ever fought them. The supply troops broke almost immediately. Most of them ran for the river. Some of them threw down their spears and lay flat on the ground with their hands over their heads.
It was over in less than a quarter of an hour.
Level up. Level 15.
Level up. Level 16.
Level up. Level 17.
***
Ren found Dobbs by the corral.
He was lying on his back in the mud with a spear in his chest. The man who'd lifted the log. His eyes were open and surprised. Someone had closed one of his hands around the hilt of one of Sable's new swords.
Ren knelt beside him.
He waited to feel something. He'd felt Garrick wake up in the night across the camp. He'd felt Sho's oath sixty one miles away.
He hadn't felt Dobbs die. Dobbs had never sworn. Dobbs had just been one of three hundred, five percent stronger, standing in a line.
Ren closed his eyes. He stayed there a moment longer.
"Warden." Hob's voice, behind him. Low and strange. "You need to see this."
***
The wagons with the Church sunburst on the side were parked in a row behind the stone building, away from the others. Eight of them. Big ones, with high wooden walls and iron bars across the backs.
Ren had thought, from the hill, that they were for prisoners of war. Imperial soldiers, maybe.
They weren't.
He looked through the bars of the first one. Faces looked back at him. A woman with a baby wrapped in a shawl. An old man with a white beard down to his belt. Two boys, maybe ten, holding hands. Farmers. Their clothes were plain brown wool, and their wrists were chained to an iron rail that ran down the center of the wagon floor.
"Who are you?" Ren asked.
"They're ours," said Sable quietly, coming up beside him. Her voice had lost its edge. "Imperial. From the border villages. Look at the clothes. That's Marrowby weave. And those two are from Felling, see the little knots on the sleeves? Felling got raided a month back. We thought everyone was killed."
"Get them out," said Ren.
It took an hour. The keys were in the stone building. There were forty three of them, in five of the wagons. Men, women, children, old people. Most of them could barely walk. They'd been in the wagons for days.
The other three wagons held crates.
Ren pried one open with the tip of his sword. Inside, packed in straw, were crystals. Dozens of them. Each one clear as water and about the size of a fist, and each one humming, so low he felt it in his teeth.
He'd felt that hum once before. In the Hall of Radiance. On the first day.
The Radiant Knight lieutenant was still alive. They'd tied him up and left him by the stone building with a cloth over his knee. Ren crouched down in front of him.
"Where were you taking these people?"
The lieutenant looked at him with flat, tired eyes. He didn't say anything.
"I'm not going to hurt you," said Ren. "I'm going to ask you once, and you'll either answer or you won't. Where?"
The man stared at him. Then, quietly, he said, "Solenne."
"Why?"
The lieutenant looked away.
Ren stood up and walked into the stone building.
It was an office. A desk, a cot, a shelf of ledgers. The lieutenant's things. Ren went through the papers on the desk one at a time, and most of them were nothing. Supply lists. Rosters. A letter to a woman named Avela that he didn't read past the first line.
Then he found the manifest.
It was on Church paper, thick and cream colored, with the gold sunburst pressed into the top. Clean, careful script. A list of names, forty three of them, with ages beside each one. Under the list, in a different hand, small and neat:
Received at Halden's Ford for transport to the Hall of Radiance.
Forty three souls for the Second Calling.
To be delivered by the new moon.
Ilvane, High Seraph.
Ren read it three times.
The Second Calling.
He thought about the crates of crystals. He thought about the chains, and the iron rail, and the woman with the baby. He thought about Ilvane in the chapel, telling the king the Calling only opened one way. About Hana in the yard of Fort Calder, six years in this world, telling him there was no way home.
He thought about how many priests had stood around the summoning circle that first day, in the Hall of Radiance. He hadn't counted them. He'd been too busy counting doors.
He thought about how many there would have needed to be.
Old Hob was standing in the doorway behind him. Ren didn't turn around.
"Hob," he said. "What does it cost? The Calling. To bring a hero from another world."
"Nobody knows, Warden. The Church keeps it secret."
"Guess."
Hob was quiet for a long time.
"Old soldiers say it costs a life," he said finally. "One life for every hero who comes through. They say the priests volunteer. Holy martyrs, giving themselves to the light." He paused. "I never believed that part."
Ren looked down at the manifest in his hands.
Forty three souls.
And then he thought about the first day, and the cold stone under his knees, and the gold circle fading around him. He'd noticed something about it at the time, without understanding it. He'd been too stunned to think about it since.
The circle had been warm.
Not hot. Warm. Like skin. Like something that had been alive a minute ago.
Twenty of them had come through it.
Ren set the paper down very carefully on the desk, like it might break.
"Who paid for us?" he said.