Eryndor

It took the four of them nearly an hour to stop touching their own bodies.

They sat in a loose circle in the long grass while the sun climbed toward noon, and every few minutes one of them would do something small and foolish: press a palm flat against a ribcage, stretch a finger, breathe in until the lungs ached and let it out in a laugh. Venn lay on his back with both boots in the air, rotating his ankles like a man testing a pair of rented skis. Jin took off one glove, studied his knuckles, put the glove back on, and took it off again. Zoe sat cross-legged with her face turned up to the two moons, eyes closed, and did not say anything at all.

Archie did the arithmetic of it, because arithmetic was what he did when he could not afford to feel something.

Thirty-five years old. Eleven months of cough. Four hours ago I was lying in a glass coffin in New Hampshire and now I can inhale to the bottom of my ribs.

It did not feel like a trick. That was the unnerving part. A trick would have had seams.

"All right," said Jin at last, in the tone of a man calling a meeting to order. "Inventory."

They laid it out on a flat stone. Archie had a shortsword, a dagger, a leather breastplate, and a purse with eleven copper coins stamped with a stag's head. Venn had a single-bladed axe that he kept hefting and grinning at, a round shield painted with a faded red hawk, and, inexplicably, a small brass trumpet. Jin had two short daggers, a dark canvas cloak, and a folded square of vellum. Zoe had a recurve bow, a quiver of fourteen arrows with gray goose fletching, and a pair of fingerless gloves that fit as though they had been cut from her own hands.

"Anyone know how to use any of this?" said Archie.

"Kendo," Jin said. "Four years in college. It is completely unlike this, and I will probably stab myself, but at least I know which end is which."

"Archery club, sophomore year," said Zoe. "I was bad. Very photogenic, though."

"I once held a sword in a Balmain campaign shoot," Venn offered. "I looked incredible. I was holding it upside down."

"Great," said Archie. "We're a fighting force."

"We're a company," said Venn, delighted. He lifted the vellum from Jin's hands and unfolded it with a flourish. "Look at this. It's a contract."

It was, in a cramped brown script that none of them should have been able to read and all of them somehow could. The Ashen Company, four blades, hired by the Reeve of Briarwood for the term of one season, at the rate of six silver pennies a head. To be paid on completion. There was a seal at the bottom, a stag's head in green wax, and below it a line of smaller print that Jin read aloud and then read again.

"Completion," he said, "being the lifting of the Dark from Thornkeep, or the death of the Company, whichever shall first occur."

Nobody said anything.

"They write a nice contract," said Venn faintly, "in the Middle Ages."

…

Briarwood lay two miles down the valley, and they walked it in a loose knot with the ground rolling pleasantly under their boots.

Archie had expected the Dimension to feel like a stage set. It did not. It felt like a place that had been going on for a very long time before they arrived. The road was a pair of ruts packed hard by carts, with a ribbon of wild thyme growing down the middle that released a sharp sweetness whenever a boot crushed it. There were drystone walls, mossed and sagging in places, and sheep behind them with blue marks daubed on their flanks. A boy herding geese looked up at the strangers in armor, said "Morning, sers," with no particular awe, and went back to shouting at a gander named, as far as Archie could make out, Bishop.

Real, he thought. Not a simulation. Somebody's whole life happens here.

Luca said they were genuine places. I did not understand what that meant.

The town itself was a huddle of timber-framed houses climbing a low hill, with a stone church at the top and a market square in the middle where fishwives and tinkers were just beginning to pack up. It smelled of woodsmoke, wet wool, and fried onions. People turned to look as the four of them came in under the gate, and Archie caught the particular quality of those looks: not hostility, and not welcome either, but a flat, tired appraisal, the look you give a hired man whose usefulness you have not yet decided.

Then an old woman at a bread stall said, loudly, to nobody, "More of them. Gods help us," and went back to her loaves.

"I'm sensing a theme," said Venn.

A man was waiting for them at the foot of the church steps.

He was perhaps sixty, broad and stooped, with a white beard cropped short and a face as weathered as a fence post. He wore a mail shirt that had been mended so many times it looked more like patchwork than armor, and a long scar ran from the corner of his left eye down into his collar. When he saw them, he did not smile. He stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt, looked each of them over in turn, and said:

"Four. The Reeve said four. I'd hoped for more."

"We have a contract," said Jin, producing the vellum.

"Aye, you have. I wrote half of it." He took it, glanced at it without reading, and handed it back. "Ser Halbert Voss. I command what's left of the Briarwood levy, which is eleven men and a goat. I'll tell you what I tell every company that comes through. Don't go to Thornkeep. If you must go, don't go at night. If you go at night, don't go alone." His eyes, small and pale blue, rested on Archie. "And if you hear someone weeping inside the walls, don't go toward it."

"What's in there?" said Archie.

"We call it the Shade." Voss said it flatly, as one names an illness. "It came twenty winters back. Before that, Thornkeep was a good keep. The Queen's Warden held it, old Lord Everard, and he'd a daughter who played the lute. Then one autumn night the lamps went out all along the south road, and in the morning there was a dark standing over the castle like a thundercloud that had forgotten how to rain. It has crept outward since. A hand's breadth a year. Last winter it took Harrow's Mill. The winter before, the whole of Oddby, forty souls, and not a body found." He shrugged one heavy shoulder. "I've sent thirty companies up that hill. Two came back. One of them couldn't speak. The other asked me, very politely, if I knew where he'd left his lungs."

Zoe said, quietly, "His lungs?"

"It does something to the breath, lass." Voss's expression did not change, but something moved behind it. "People who've been touched by it, they walk about a month, gray and wheezing, drowning in the dry air. Then they stop." He cleared his throat. "Reeve's put up a purse. It's six silver a head, and the Crown's promised a hundred gold for the one who ends it. I'd not be doing my duty if I said any of you were likely to see a penny."

"Appreciate the honesty," said Archie.

"Don't. It's the only thing I've got left to give." Voss gave them a nod that was almost a bow. "The Weeping Stag has beds and a fire. Tell Maren I sent you. And whatever else, be inside by dark."

…

The Weeping Stag was a long low inn with a sagging roof and a sign that appeared to depict a deer in the grip of a great personal sorrow, and its landlady turned out to be a woman in her forties with forearms like a blacksmith's and a voice that could have stripped paint.

"Ashen Company!" Maren Holloway bellowed, to the empty room. "Four of you! Skinny lot. Sit. You'll have pottage and ale and I don't want to hear a word about the pottage."

It was good pottage. It was barley and leek and some kind of smoked sausage, thick enough to stand a spoon in, and Archie, who had spent most of the past year unable to finish a bowl of soup, ate all of his and half of Jin's. Venn ate three bowls and told Maren she was the finest chef in the western kingdoms, to which she replied that she had never been further west than the pig market and he could keep his flattery for the girls. Venn put a hand over his heart. "Ma'am, I have been called a lot of things—"

"I'm sure."

"—but finest chef in the western kingdoms was my best work."

"Eat your pottage."

By evening the common room had filled with locals who had come to look at the new mercenaries over their ale. They did so carefully, in the manner of people who have been disappointed before. There was a young carter with a bandaged hand, and two old men playing at some game with painted bones, and a girl of nine or ten who sat under a table with a rag doll and stared at Venn with an expression of deep suspicion. Archie heard bits of talk drift past: the price of wool, a cousin gone missing near Oddby, a rumor that the dark had crept another hand's breadth in the night. Nobody raised their voice. They had the air of people who had been waiting a long time for something terrible and had decided in the meantime to get on with the washing.

It's an entire world, he thought. They'll go on living when we leave. Or when we die.

If the Shade takes the valley, they'll go on living for a little while longer, and then they won't.

He did not like the way that thought lodged in him. He had not come here to care about anyone's wool.

Venn had cornered the carter and was asking, with great sincerity, whether the local women preferred to be wooed with poetry or armor polish. Jin had spread a rough map of the valley on a table and was marking it up with a charcoal stub, his lips moving slightly, like a man doing sums in a language he had only just learned. Zoe sat on the settle by the fire with her feet drawn up under her, a scrap of vellum and a bit of charcoal in her hands.

Archie watched her, and did not look away quickly enough.

She was drawing. Her hand moved in short, sure strokes, a collar, a high waist, a sleeve cut in a long falling curve. It was a coat, he realized. A heavy winter coat with a hooded cowl, designed for a woman who might have to walk a long way in bad weather. She had given it a clasp shaped like a stag's head.

She looked up, and caught him.

"What?" said Zoe.

"Nothing. You draw."

"I design. It's different. I'm very precious about it." She tilted the scrap toward him. "Fashion habit. When the world ends, I'd like to be wearing something that fits."

"It looks warm."

"It is warm. I'm an excellent coat." She held his eyes a beat too long, and some small thing in her expression changed, as though she were reaching over a wall to see what was on the other side of it. "You draw too. I saw your sketchbook in the pod. Before the lid came down."

"Architecture. Buildings, mostly."

"Buildings." She smiled. "So you draw houses and I draw clothes. We could go into business. You build the house, I decorate."

"I think you'd decorate it with a coat."

"Obviously. Every room should have a coat." She went back to her scrap of vellum, but she was still smiling, and so, he discovered with surprise, was he. It was not a small smile. It went all the way up, an uncomplicated unguarded thing he could not remember having used in months, and he felt it sit oddly on his face, like a borrowed hat.

…

It was Zoe who found the necklace.

She found it late, when the common room had emptied and the fire had burned to a red bed and the rest of them were on their way up the narrow stairs. She had stopped at the bottom to watch the embers, one hand rising absently to her throat, and then she stopped moving at all.

"Archie."

He turned on the third stair. She was standing with her fingers curled around something at the base of her collar, her face gone quiet.

"I didn't have this," she said. "Did I? In the pod, Otis took everything off. My earrings, my watch. This too."

She drew it out. It was a thin silver chain, and on it a small round pendant, no bigger than a coin, dark with old tarnish, etched in a tight spiral that wound inward to a single point. It was warm. Even from the stairs, Archie could see the spiral catch the firelight and hold it a moment longer than silver should.

"It's my mother's," said Zoe. "She gave it to me the day I started chemo. She said it was for luck. She said, Wear it against the skin." Her voice was careful. "But it was in a plastic tray in the lab. I watched Otis put it there."

"Maybe it's part of the transfer. Personal objects."

"Maybe." She turned it over in her fingers. It seemed to hum, very faintly, like a held note. "It's never done that before."

"Done what?"

"Hum."

Upstairs, Venn was already snoring, loud and contented, in a bed that he had declared to be, on balance, better than a Four Seasons. Jin's candle burned in the next room. Through the window at the stair's head, the two moons stood over the valley, the pale one and the small green one, and on the black ridge to the north, a long way off, a darker patch lay against the stars like a bruise.

Thornkeep.

Zoe tucked the pendant back inside her collar, and the hum, if it was a hum, went out of the air.

"Goodnight, architect," she said.

"Goodnight."

She went up past him, and her shoulder brushed his sleeve, and neither of them said anything about it.

…

Far away, in a chapel in New Hampshire, a gray-haired man sat beside four glass pods with a blanket round his shoulders and watched four sets of brain waves move across a bank of monitors.

"Day one," said Otis Brennan, in a low voice, not looking up from his screen. He had not gone to dinner. A cold coffee sat at his elbow, and a cardigan he had not noticed slipping off his chair. "Time ratio's holding at about six-to-one. That's, uh. That's good. That's better than the model. They've been in there four hours and by their clocks it's about a day." He cleared his throat. "Venn's heart rate's a bit high. Probably the legs. I'd say it's the legs."

"I would say so," said Luca Ferrara.

He had been sitting very still for a long time. His hands lay folded on his knees, and they were shaking, with the fine steady tremor that he no longer bothered to hide. On the wall above him, the photograph of a young man with gray eyes watched them both.

At the back of the room, a tall man in a gray suit stood at the glass of the observation suite with a tablet in his hand. William Cross had been there since the pods sealed. He had not once looked at the people inside them. He was looking at the numbers, and on the screen the time ratio ticked slowly upward, six to one, six point one, six point two, and as it did he smiled, very slightly, the way a man smiles when a figure he has been waiting on turns out to be a little better than he'd hoped.

"Mr. Cross?" said Otis, without turning.

"Yes?"

"Did you, um. Did you adjust the sensor array? On the fourth pod? Archie's. There's a, a secondary channel on it I don't remember wiring."

"A backup monitoring feed," said William pleasantly. "Standard safety protocol. I had the technicians add it last night. You were asleep."

"Oh." Otis blinked. "Right. Okay. That's, yeah. Great. Thanks."

"Of course," said William. "We can't be too careful, can we?"

He turned a page on his tablet. Beside the glass, Luca did not look up, and the old man's fingers shook against his knee, and in the pods below the four sleepers breathed in time, and the two moons of Eryndor rose, and the dark on the northern ridge crept, in the night, one more hand's breadth toward the town.