Chapter 129: The Convoy

The Veil convoy came down out of the hills above Hareby at dawn, and Aren was lying on a goat track on the cliff, waiting for it.

Four wagons, a captain and twelve riders in Veil green, and in the middle, drawn by six horses, a box of black iron the size of a small room. It rolled down onto the coast road with its wheels groaning, and the riders closed up around it without being told.

He let Iron Sense open.

It reached down the cliff and along the road, a hundred paces, and the convoy came into it piece by piece: the horseshoes, the wagon bands, the buckles and the swords. The captain rode at the front on a grey horse, and the silver band on his shoulder hummed against Aren’s mind, louder than anything else on the road. Everyone else wore bronze. Two of them rode beside the strongroom with heavier swords.

’One silver and twelve bronze. A B and twelve others, as Danner said.’

Then he sent Iron Sense inside the box.

The walls were iron a hand thick on an oak frame, and his sense went through them. Inside there was a steel chest bolted to the far wall. There were two men. One had a sword and a belt knife. The other had no weapon at all, only a flat iron flask on his belt, full of something that sloshed when the wagon jolted.

And around them, filling the rest of the box, was the hollow: a room of still air, four paces by three, shut in iron.

He could feel its shape from the cliff. He could feel its edges.

’I can get in.’

He lay on the goat track and watched the convoy roll west toward the city.

’Getting out is the problem.’

He followed it for two days along the cliffs, never closer than a quarter of a mile, and at the noon halts he practised Nullstep across the gaps where the path had fallen into the sea. It went where he could see or feel an empty place, and nowhere else. Iron Sense felt metal, not air. Inside the box, the iron walls gave the empty space a shape he could find. Outside, nothing metal outlined the ground, and from inside a box with a hand of iron on every side he wasn’t sure he would find anywhere to go.

On the second evening the convoy halted below him, and the captain’s voice came up the cliff on the wind.

"Water for the box! And trim that lamp!"

The door at the back of the strongroom opened for a jug of water, and he saw a lamp hanging inside. Later, when the convoy went on in the dark, he saw it again: a thin line of yellow light along the top of the box. It lay across the road and touched the trees.

’There. If I can see out through that, I can step out through it.’

On the third night the road came down off the cliffs into the long market gardens east of the city, two hours from the harbor. Aren took a strip of grey cloth out of his pack and tied it over his face, as he used to at the Academy, back when half the Academy laughed about a ghost called the Rag.

[False Face: Concealment active.]

He lay in the ditch at the edge of a lemon orchard and let the first wagons roll past. When the strongroom came level, eight paces off, he reached through the iron, found the hollow inside it, and stepped.

[Nullstep.]

He was standing on an oak floor with the lamp swinging in front of his face.

The guard was sitting on a bench by the door, a heavy, bored man in Veil green, and his sword lay across his knees. The other man was older, thin and grey, in a pale grey coat, with stained fingers: the steward who looked after the pill. He was sitting beside the steel chest with his hand resting on the iron flask at his belt.

They both looked up.

"Who the hell are you?" the guard said.

Everything that followed took about ten seconds.

The steward’s eyes went wide, and his thumb went to the stopper of the flask. Aren saw it before it moved. He saw the thumb and the shoulder rising behind it. He didn’t know what was in the flask, but he knew why a man with no sword sat beside a chest with one hand on it.

’Acid, or oil and a spark. The Veils would rather burn their own pills than lose them.’

The guard was coming up off the bench with his sword. That was slower, and it didn’t matter.

The Instinct filled the last gap.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct: 91% → 100%. Mastery complete.]

[Remade in core element: Void.]

[New skill: Fault Line (Lv. 1). The Host sees where anything is about to break.]

The box was full of lines.

He could see them on everything. One ran across the steward’s wrist, where the bone would give if it were turned the right way, and another down the guard’s left side, under the raised arm, where he would be open for a quarter of a heartbeat. The finest was a bright thread around the neck of the flask, just under the stopper.

He took the wrist first, and turned it along the line, and felt it go. The flask dropped. He caught it with his other hand before it hit the floor and pushed the stopper back in with his thumb.

The guard’s sword came across at his neck. He stepped in where the man was open and drove two fingers into his side, under the arm. The guard folded over them without a sound. Aren caught him by the collar, put an elbow behind his ear, and laid him down on the oak.

"Captain!"

The steward got the one word out, too thin to carry through a hand of iron, before Aren pressed his thumb into the side of the old man’s neck and held it there until the steward’s eyes rolled up and he slumped against the chest.

The wagon rolled on under them. Outside, hooves and harness, a rider at the front coughing. Nobody had heard anything. The iron was a hand thick.

Aren stood still and breathed.

His nose was bleeding. The lines were still on everything, and his eyes ached from looking at them.

’About ten seconds. Nobody dead. Danner owes me a better map.’

He set the flask down on the bench, upright, with great care. Then he went to the steel chest.

It had a lock the size of his fist, and Fault Line showed him where it would break: a thin bright line across the lock’s iron loop, where the metal had been worked too hard. He put the eel blade into it and twisted, and the loop came apart in two clean pieces.

Inside, packed in grey wool, lay a box of black lacquer the length of his hand, closed with a silver clasp. He didn’t open it. He tucked it inside his shirt and closed the lid of the chest on the wool.

Then he looked for a way out.

He had been right to worry. Iron Sense gave him the walls, the wagon bands and the riders’ swords, and nothing between them. Out there the ground was only air and dirt, with no metal to give it a shape.

But he could see.

He went to the left wall and put his eye to the seam where it met the roof. Iron plates never fit perfectly, and here they had left a crack the width of a knife. Through it he could see a sliver of the dark outside: the road, the edge of the orchard, the pale trunk of a lemon tree eight paces off, and the empty ground beside it.

It was enough.

[Nullstep.]

He came out of nothing beside the lemon tree with the lacquer box warm against his ribs. The convoy rolled away down the road toward the city with its lanterns lit, and the twelve riders around it never turned their heads.

In two hours the convoy would reach the Veil quay, and the captain would knock on the strongroom door, and nobody inside would answer.

Aren untied the rag and put it away.

He ran for an hour without stopping, up through the market gardens and the first streets of the lower town and onto the roofs, and only when the ropewalk was in sight and the harbor bells were ringing two did he let himself slow down. He found a flat roof with a chimney to lean against, and sat.

He took the lacquer box out of his shirt.

It was heavier than it looked, and the silver clasp was cold. He thumbed it open, and the lid came up on black silk. On the silk lay a pill the size of a pigeon’s egg, pale gold, with a faint pearly shimmer moving over its skin.

Beside it, in its own little hollow of silk, lay another.

He took Danner’s map out of his pocket and unfolded it. On the back, in the Tally’s fine clerk’s hand, was the job: Veil convoy. Ambar auction. One Marrow Pill, grade four. Twelve thousand crowns.

Only one pill mentioned.

He looked down again at the second pill.

’One crown of debt to the House, and already a pill the House doesn’t know about.’