Chapter 261: The Hundred

Chapter 261: Chapter 261: The Hundred

The Confederation sent a train.

It was the oldest and quietest thing in Bern, a long, slate-gray locomotive with polished brass fittings and forty carriages, kept in a sealed depot for a century against a day no one had expected to come. It left the central station at dawn, with the one hundred representatives of Earth 1078 aboard, and wound up through the foothills in a silence that nobody dared to break.

They traveled in clusters, at first. The soldiers sat together, stiff and wary. The students huddled in the back, whispering. A few of the older volunteers kept to the windows, watching the Alpine valleys slide past, white with early snow. Rowan sat at the end of a carriage with the rest of Squad 07, the hoe across his knees and his Enchanted Straw Hat tilted low, and watched the faces of the strangers around him.

He had not expected how young they would be.

The Federal Training Grounds lay at the head of a high valley, where the road ended in a wall of rock and the glaciers glowed blue in the thin air.

They had been built in a hurry. Long timber halls stood in two rows along the valley floor, with smoke rising from their chimneys. A vast, flat parade field had been cleared of snow and sanded. Beyond it, a ring of sparring courts, a firing range, a cluster of low stone barracks, and, at the far end, a wide, steaming bathhouse built into the mountainside. Federal guards in gray coats stood at every corner. The wind smelled of pine and cold iron.

President V?geli was waiting at the gate.

She did not make a speech. She stood in the snow with her hands folded and watched the hundred filing out of the train, and when the last of them had stepped onto the platform, she said, quietly, "You have four days. I cannot teach you to survive. No one can. But I can give you a place to learn about one another, and a roof, and a hot meal. Use them."

She turned and walked away.

Nobody moved.

"That," said Barney, softly, "was the most terrifying thing anyone’s said to me all week."

The first day belonged to the awkwardness.

Nobody knew where to sit. The great dining hall, a timber cathedral of long benches and roaring hearths, filled slowly with a hundred strangers who studied their plates with fierce concentration. Translators in the Confederation’s gray bustled between the tables, and small, glowing crystals hung from every collar, murmuring the same sentences in forty languages. It was a clumsy, patchwork sort of conversation, full of pauses, and the laughter, when it came, was thin.

Rowan ate his soup and watched.

A broad, red-faced man in the uniform of the Baltic League, Tomasz Brzezinski, nineteen, Level 38, sat alone at the end of one bench, tearing a loaf of bread into very small pieces. Across the room, a slight, dark-haired young woman in a nurse’s apron, Lena Ostermann, twenty-one, Level 19, stared at the table with the fixed, glassy look of someone who had not slept in three days. Near the fire, a lean, tidy man in a gray suit sat bolt upright with his hands clasped, Andreas Keller, twenty-two, Level 31, the first name drawn. Rowan saw him look up, catch his eye, and look away.

And at the far end of the hall, by herself, with her round, plain face turned toward the window, sat Clara Winterbourne.

She was seventeen. She had stopped crying. She held a cup of tea in both hands and did not drink it.

Rowan set down his spoon.

"Boss," said Barney, warningly.

"I’ll be back."

He crossed the hall slowly, hat in hand, and stopped beside her bench. For a moment, she did not notice him. Then she looked up, and her eyes went very wide.

"Oh," she said. "You’re... I..."

"May I sit?"

She nodded, speechless.

He sat. For a minute, neither of them spoke. The fire popped. Somewhere behind them, a spoon clattered against a bowl.

"I’m sorry," said Rowan.

"For what?"

"I don’t know." He rubbed the back of his neck. "That it was you. That it was anyone." He glanced at her. "You cheered for me, at the lecture. I remember."

Clara let out a short, startled, tearful laugh. "I screamed. I cracked my voice."

"I remember that too."

"I thought you were a hero." She stared into her tea. "I think I still do."

"I’m not."

"You’re Level forty, and you went to the fortieth floor, and the whole world knows your name." She shook her head. "I’m Level twenty-six. I wanted to be a cartographer."

Rowan was quiet.

"I’m going to teach you to hold a line," he said at last. "All of you. Anyone who wants to learn. Everything I know. We have four days." He looked at her steadily. "I can’t promise you’ll survive. But I can promise you won’t be alone."

Clara looked up. Her eyes were red, and her jaw was set, and for the first time, there was something fierce under the fear.

"Okay," she said. "Teach me."

The second day began at dawn, on the parade field, in the snow.

Squad 07 had not planned to lead. It simply happened, the way a river finds its channel. Caelen walked out onto the frozen sand at first light with his cloak snapping behind him and his sword at his hip, and a hundred half-awake recruits, shivering in borrowed coats, found themselves falling into line without being told.

"We will begin with the basics," he said. His voice carried like a bell. "You have been drawn from every nation, every guild, and every walk of life. Some of you can fight. Some of you can heal. Some of you can barely lift a sword." He paused. "That does not matter. What matters is whether you can stand beside the person next to you, and not break."

He split them into twenty teams of five.

It was a delicate business. Seraphina walked the lines with her monocle and her notebook, assessing each recruit in a single glance, and Rowan watched her place them with the cool precision of a chess master. A sturdy soldier beside a nimble scout. A healer beside a bruiser. A student with a sharp tongue and a quiet fisherman’s son who could not stop checking the wind. When she had finished, she nodded to Caelen, and the teams broke apart and re-formed.

"Four days," said Caelen, to the whole field. "By the end of it, you will move as one. Or you will go into the First Round as a crowd, and die as one."

Nobody breathed.

"Formation drill," he said. "Again."

They fell into it clumsily. They tripped over one another. A teenage girl from the Southern Republics got turned around and walked straight into a man twice her size. A pair of brothers from the Baltic coast, both level thirty, bickered in whispers until Caelen stopped in front of them and gave them one long, silent look. The whispering stopped.

By noon, they could march in step. By dusk, they could break and re-form without collision. By the end of the second day, the clumsy crowd on the field had become something that, at a distance, looked almost like an army.

Barney took the smiths.

It turned out that a surprising number of the recruits knew something about metal. He found a half-dozen of them standing around the forge on the third morning, a tall, soot-streaked man from the Pyrenees, a wiry girl from the eastern mountains, and two old, broad, quiet brothers who had made horseshoes in a village that did not appear on any map. Barney stood in front of them with his hands on his hips and looked them up and down.

"Right," he said. "Who here can repair a shield in the middle of a fight?"

Silence.

"Nobody? Perfect. We start there."

By evening, he had taught them four field-repair techniques, three ways to reinforce a blade in under a minute, and the trick of folding scrap into temporary armor, and the forge had become the loudest, warmest, happiest place in the valley. A small, flickering fire elemental sat on the anvil rim, supervising with enormous dignity.

Seraphina took the healers and the alchemists.

She set up a laboratory in a long timber shed, where the steam from her water elemental fogged the windows, and she lectured for six hours without once looking at her notes. Lena Ostermann, the nurse, sat in the front row, and by the second hour, her hands had stopped shaking. "I knew a little," she said, quietly, to Seraphina, afterward. "Basic first aid. Bandages. But this..." She gestured at the rows of vials. "I didn’t know this was possible."

"It is possible," said Seraphina, almost gently. "And you are better at it than you think."

Lena looked at her for a long moment. Then, very slowly, she smiled.

Mirei took the scouts and the archers. She stood on a low ridge above the firing range with Zephyr whirling around her shoulders, and she shot at targets so far away that they looked like grains of rice. When the recruits stared, she grinned, and tapped her boots, and said, "They’re quiet. Let me show you how."

By the afternoon, a line of nervous recruits was gliding across the snow in silent boots, and she was laughing so hard she had to hold her ribs.

And Rowan took the rest.

He had never taught before. Not like this.

He found it surprisingly natural. He stood in the middle of a snow-covered clearing with a hundred curious faces turned toward him, and he did what he always did: he knelt, pressed his hand to the earth, and spoke.

"Everything starts with the ground," he said. "You can’t fight if you can’t stand. You can’t stand if you don’t know what’s beneath you." He looked up. "Feel the soil. Don’t reach. Just listen."

They tried. Some of them failed. A few, to their own astonishment, felt something, a slow, faint pulse beneath the snow, and gasped aloud. A grim-faced soldier from the Eastern Republic sat back on his heels with tears in his eyes, whispering, "It’s alive."

On the third afternoon, a small group stayed behind. Andreas Keller was among them, with his tidy suit and his careful hands. Clara. Tomasz. A thin, intense young woman named Ilse Brandt, nineteen, Level 29, who had put her name forward on the first day with the words Because my brother can’t. A tall, silent healer called Mei-Ling Zhao. Five strangers, standing in a loose ring in the snow.

"Can I ask something?" said Andreas, hesitantly.

"Anything."

"The elementals." He hesitated. "I saw one. In the garden at the farm. Your own." His eyes were sharp and a little afraid. "How did you get it?"

Rowan told him. He told them all, plainly, about the guardian on floor forty, and the drum, and the reward. When he had finished, there was a long silence.

"So the Tower gives out powers," said Tomasz, slowly.

"For clearing floors. Yes."

"And the Wars?"

"I don’t know." Rowan looked at the faces around him. "But I’d guess the Wars give out more."

The mock battle was held on the fourth afternoon.

It was Caelen’s idea, and it was brilliant, and half the camp hated it. The twenty teams would fight one another in a series of staged skirmishes on the open field, with blunted weapons, dulled arrows, and Seraphina’s alchemists standing by with sealed vials of healing mist. The rules were simple. Hold your ground. Protect your own. Win.

Rowan’s team was called last.

He walked onto the snow with Clara, Andreas, Tomasz, and a small, silent girl from the coast named Marta, whom he had picked, quite deliberately, from the group nobody else had wanted. He carried his new hoe over one shoulder. His hat was tipped low. Across the field, the opposing team, five tall, hard-eyed soldiers of the Eastern Republic, stood waiting with their swords drawn and their shields raised.

"Tomasz," said Rowan, quietly. "Front."

"Of course."

"Andreas, left. Marta, the high ground. Clara, stay close to me."

"What do I do?" Clara whispered.

"What you’re best at." He glanced at her. "Read the field. Tell me where they’ll move."

She stared. "I’m... I’m a cartographer."

"Exactly."

The horn sounded.

The soldiers charged.

It was over in four minutes. Tomasz held the front line like a boulder in a stream, bellowing in Baltic, taking every blow on his shield. Andreas, to everyone’s surprise, turned out to be a brilliant skirmisher, light on his feet, with a long, thin sword that flickered like a needle. Marta, perched on a snowdrift, lofted blunted bolts at the enemy flanks with the calm of a woman threading a loom. And Clara, white-faced and trembling, standing at Rowan’s elbow, shouted, "Left! They’re going left! Now!" in a voice so clear and sharp that three of the soldiers turned, startled, and walked into a snare of Rowan’s thorns.

When the horn sounded again, the field was silent.

The Eastern Republic’s soldiers stood motionless, tangled in a thicket of brambles. Rowan’s team had not lost a man. Clara looked at her own hands, then at the field, then at Rowan.

"Did I do that?" she whispered.

"You did."

"I called it."

"You did," he said, and smiled. "You’re a very good cartographer."

She laughed, a wild, helpless, shaking laugh, and then, abruptly, burst into tears. Rowan caught her by the shoulder, steadied her, and let her cry. All around them, the other teams had stopped to watch. No one spoke. But in the silence, one by one, they began to clap.

That night, the hundred sat down to dinner together.

It was the first time they had all been in a single room. The long timber hall rang with voices, shouted, laughed, argued over, in every language and dialect on Earth. Barney was in the middle of a story about a bonecrusher ape, with a dozen new friends gaping at him open-mouthed. Mirei was teaching a table of archers a drinking song. Seraphina sat at the end of a bench, quietly, patiently explaining the properties of a single silver leaf to Lena Ostermann, who was taking notes.

Caelen sat alone at the head of the hall, not eating, watching it all with an expression Rowan could not quite read.

"You don’t look happy," said Rowan, sliding onto the bench beside him.

"I am not," said Caelen. "I am proud." He paused. "They are not ready. None of us is. But they are together. In four days, a hundred strangers have become a unit. I did not think it possible."

"You did it."

"We did it." He turned his head. For the first time in a long while, he smiled, small and weary and true. "You taught them to listen. That is the real work."

Rowan did not answer. He looked out over the long, noisy, lamplit hall, over the hundred faces and the hundred voices, and felt something settle in his chest, quiet and heavy and warm.

A hundred of us, he thought.

A hundred, from a world that was fighting itself a week ago.

At the far end of the hall, President V?geli had entered, silent as a ghost. She stood by the door with her hands folded, looking at them. No one saw her at first. Then a few of the recruits noticed, and fell quiet, and the quiet spread, until the whole hall had gone still.

"You have done well," she said.

It was not a speech. She did not smile. But her voice, as it rolled across the room, carried a weight that was neither stern nor cold.

"Tomorrow, at dawn, the Tower will come for you. I will not wish you luck. Luck is for lotteries." She looked around the room, one face at a time. "I will say only this. Whatever you find out there, remember that you did not go alone."

She turned, and walked out into the snow.

The hundred sat in silence for a long time.

Then Barney, with great solemnity, lifted his mug.

"To the hundred," he said.

"To the hundred," said Mirei.

"To the hundred," said Seraphina.

One by one, the others took it up, voice after voice, rolling around the hall like thunder in a valley, until the whole room was shouting it, a hundred strangers on their feet, a hundred mugs raised, a hundred hearts hammering, in the warm, flickering light of the hearths.

"To the hundred!"

Outside, in the dark above the glaciers, a faint blue light had begun to pulse.