CHAPTER 8: Tempering

  "Sunfire berries," Thorne muttered, dropping a handful of deep red clusters into the cauldron.

  "Breezeleaf herbs. Hundred-year wall tree bark." He held up a small bundle of the latter and turned it over in his hands before adding it to the rest.

  "These bandits robbed an extraordinary quantity of extraordinary things from an extraordinary number of people over what must have been an extraordinary length of time."

  Tunde stood inside the cauldron and watched the water begin to move.

  It did not yet boil, not quite, but it was beginning to have intentions in that direction, the surface disturbing in small, restless patterns as the heat climbed and the ingredients dissolved into it, releasing colors and smells that layered over each other in a combination that was simultaneously appealing and deeply alarming.

  His feet were already warm. The warmth was already migrating upward.

  Elyria stood at the cauldron's edge with the expression of someone who had agreed to a thing and was only now fully processing what that thing was.

  She had asked Thorne whether he knew what he was doing approximately nine times over the course of the preparation.

  The number had not changed his answer, which was either reassuring or not, depending on how one felt about certainty as a concept.

  "You're certain," she said.

  The tenth time.

  Thorne sighed with the depth of a man who has been asked the same question nine times and finds the tenth no more welcome than the first.

  "Yes. Possibly. The essences and herbs in combination cannot produce an outcome worse than the sum of their individual effects, and their individual effects are all beneficial." He paused.

  "In appropriate quantities."

  "You keep adding more," Elyria said.

  "Because appropriate quantities are, in this case, larger than one might initially assume." He dropped another handful of something into the cauldron without looking at it.

  "I trust Thorne," Tunde said.

  Both of them looked at him.

  Thorne's expression was the specific expression of someone who has been given a compliment they find uncomfortable for philosophical reasons.

  "Then you are probably stupid," Thorne said, not unkindly.

  "I have told you this before. In this world, trust is a resource that should be spent with the same care you'd give your last lumen coin. I have told you I was part of an organization of people who sold me to my enemies. The lesson there is not subtle."

  He tossed another item into the cauldron with more force than was strictly necessary, as though the item had personally offended him.

  "You trust people who have earned it," he continued,

  "And even then, you trust them in proportion to what you actually know about them. Not out of gratitude. Not out of proximity. What you earn with gratitude is a debt, and debts can be called in." He looked at Tunde with something behind his eyes that was not visible long enough to identify.

  "Don't trust me. Pay attention to me. There's a difference."

  Tunde considered this.

  "All right," he said, and meant it.

  Elyria had drifted into her own deliberation, her single hand turning something over in her mind as she reached into her void ring.

  What she withdrew was a bone, and the moment it cleared the ring, the air around it changed in a way Tunde's sight immediately confirmed as significant.

  The Ethra radiating from it was a dense, interlocking combination of earth and strength essence, the two woven together in a pattern that suggested the creature this had come from had been doing something very specific with its Ethra for a very long time.

  Thorne went still.

  He looked at the bone with the professional attention of someone pricing something in a market they know well.

  "Earth and strength essence at that density," he said carefully.

  "Where did you get something like that?"

  "My continent," Elyria said, with the particular brevity of someone closing a door.

  "It's something I found." She dropped the bone into the cauldron before he could ask anything further.

  Thorne watched it sink into the bubbling water. Something moved through his expression that was not quite satisfaction and not quite calculation, but lived in the space between the two.

  "Count yourself fortunate," he said to Tunde.

  "That bone belonged to something in the Tier 3 to Tier 4 range, at conservative estimate. It's extravagantly generous for an Initiate's tempering." He paused.

  "Not that I'm complaining."

  "You just did," Elyria said.

  "I noted it. There's a distinction."

  He reached into his own coat, and what came out were three small spheres, each one resting in his palm with the comfortable weight of something that took considerable work to produce.

  One glowed a deep, arterial red. The second pulsed softly green, the color of something growing in low light. The third was yellow, the particular yellow of late afternoon, warm and concentrated.

  "Since generous seems to be the theme," Thorne said, with the tone of a man who has decided to commit to a position he found himself in rather than argue his way out of it.

  Tunde looked at the three orbs through his Ethra sight, and the colors confirmed what the light suggested.

  "Blood essence, plant essence, and earth essence," he said, before he fully thought about saying it.

  Thorne's eyes moved to him.

  "Essence," he said.

  "Not Ethra. The distinction matters to anyone who has spent serious time with the art of cultivation, and you should develop the habit of precision now rather than having to unlearn imprecision later."

  "But you said Ethra when describing Elyria's bone," Tunde pointed out.

  Thorne opened his mouth. He closed it. He appeared to perform a brief internal review of recent statements.

  "The principle still stands," he said finally, which was not quite an answer, and Elyria made a sound that was absolutely a laugh disguised as something else.

  "The distinction is largely academic among rankers who haven't specialized," she said to Tunde, with the tone of someone mediating.

  "You'll encounter it more rigorously when you encounter alchemists, who treat the terminology as a matter of professional identity. With them, use the correct terms or prepare for a lengthy and passionate correction."

  "Noted," Tunde said.

  Thorne was looking at his three orbs with the expression of someone preparing a caveat.

  "The blood essence orb. Standard applications are for Adepts and peak Disciples. The concentration is too high for most Initiates to process without damage."

  Tunde felt his understanding of the situation revise itself significantly.

  "Then why,"

  "Because the cauldron is not a direct delivery mechanism," Thorne said.

  "It dilutes. It buffers. The water and the existing ingredients create an environment that your body absorbs from gradually rather than receiving everything at once. The process is slower, and the body has time to accommodate what it takes in." He looked at Tunde steadily.

  "It is still going to be significant. Your Ethra will be pushed. Your heart will be pushed. You will use the cultivation method I taught you throughout, without stopping, and you will not lose focus regardless of what your body is telling you."

  "And if I lose focus?" Tunde asked.

  "Then the power becomes something your body has to contain rather than channel, and the difference between those two outcomes is not pleasant," Thorne said simply.

  "So don't."

  Tunde looked at the cauldron, which was now fully boiling, the surface moving with the complexity of something that was several things at once.

  The heat had climbed past warm and past hot into something more fundamental, a pervasive seeping warmth that was already pressing against the Ethra in his body in ways that felt less like temperature and more like attention.

  "It's starting," Thorne said, dropping all three orbs into Tunde's palm simultaneously.

  "Sit. Cultivation posture. Now."

  Tunde folded his legs beneath him, the water coming to his chest in this position, and opened his mouth to say something about the temperature.

  "You're an Initiate," Thorne said, before the words formed.

  "It will sting. Control your breathing and maintain your focus before you lose the ability to do either."

  He pushed all three orbs into Tunde's mouth simultaneously, without particular ceremony.

  ****

  The dissolution was immediate.

  Tunde had time to register that the three orbs had flavors, each distinct, and then the flavors became irrelevant because the energy released by their dissolution went directly to his heart in a single concentrated surge that bypassed any notion of gradual delivery and arrived all at once.

  His heart contracted. Then it expanded.

  Then it did both at once, which should not have been physically possible, and the result was a pressure that radiated outward from his chest through every channel his body possessed, following his veins and his bones and the spaces between his bones, looking for anywhere it had not yet been.

  He sat in the lotus position and breathed, and breathing was the entirety of what he had the capacity for.

  The cultivation method Thorne had taught him was a rhythm.

  Inhale with intention, direct the breath inward past the lungs toward the heart, let each heartbeat draw the ambient Ethra from the air before the exhale released what the heart could not use.

  It was a simple rhythm, and simple rhythms become anchors when everything else becomes too complex to hold on to. He found it and held it and let everything else arrange itself around it.

  The heat came in waves.

  Not the heat of the water, though the water was genuinely very hot and he was aware of that fact, but the heat of the essence moving through him, opening channels as it went the way fast moving water opens channels in earth, finding the paths of least resistance first and then widening them and then finding the paths that were not paths yet and making them into something they had not been before.

  He felt his bones in a way that people do not ordinarily feel their bones, as specific, individual structures with their own character and their own capacity for sensation, as the strength and earth essence from Elyria's bone reached them and began the work the cauldron had prepared them for.

  Small cracks opened in the bone matrix, places where the density of years of unchallenged formation suddenly encountered something pushing against it with deliberate intent, and into those cracks the essence pressed itself, filling them, changing the composition of what it filled.

  He understood, distantly, through the haze of sensation and the tight focus of the cultivation rhythm, that this was the tempering Elyria had described, and that it was working, and that working felt considerably like being remade from the inside by something that had not asked his opinion about the process.

  He bit through the sound he wanted to make. He kept it in his chest, where it became pressure, and he converted the pressure into the next breath.

  "Pain comes before strength," Thorne's voice came from somewhere outside the experience, calm and deliberate, the words landing in Tunde's mind not quite as sound but as meaning.

  "Strength comes before power. That is the cycle, and there is no other cycle, and no version of strength that arrived without pain is worth the name. This is not philosophy. This is the truth. Let it work."

  Tunde let it work.

  He lost track of the individual sensations after a while, the specific locations and specific qualities of discomfort blurring together into a general and comprehensive state that simply was, the way weather simply is, something one was inside of rather than observing.

  His heart kept its rhythm.

  The manacle on his wrist hummed, and he was dimly aware of its participation, the familiar filtering presence intercepting the essence as it moved through him and doing something to it that made the subsequent delivery to his heart more orderly, less like flooding and more like irrigation, directing the flow rather than simply allowing it.

  He breathed.

  He kept breathing.

  Time became a concept he was not currently attending to.

  ****

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "He's been in there an hour," Elyria said.

  Thorne was adding to the cauldron, the Disciple-grade ingredients going in now with the calm precision of someone executing a plan they had been revising in real time for the last sixty minutes.

  "His body is handling it," he said, watching the black veins that had appeared through Tunde's skin pulse and fade and pulse again, the pigment of his body shifting in waves beneath the influence of what was moving through it.

  "You're certain?" Elyria asked.

  "No," Thorne said, which was the most honest answer he had given to that question all afternoon.

  She watched Tunde's face, which was entirely composed in the specific way of someone who has gone somewhere internal and is managing to stay there.

  The veins were the most visually striking element, the dark traceries spreading and contracting in patterns that corresponded to the movement of essence through his body, a map of the process drawn on the outside.

  "The relic," Elyria said.

  Thorne nodded, not looking away from the cauldron.

  "Nothing else explains the efficiency. A relic that can absorb Ethra, project it as a weapon, change form, force a heart to open without a resource, and now refine and regulate essence during a body tempering that should be significantly beyond this stage." He paused.

  "I am, genuinely and without qualification, jealous."

  Elyria was quiet for a moment.

  "It belonged to someone," she said softly.

  "Something of that grade belongs to someone. A Master, a Paragon, possibly," she stopped, and started again at a lower volume,

  "Possibly a Regent."

  "If it's a Regent's weapon," Thorne said, his voice dropping to match hers without being asked,

  "Then whatever hand placed it in that pit intended it to be found. And whoever or whatever it was that placed it there is not a category of problem you introduce an Initiate to without significant preparation."

  They stood together in the silence of that conclusion for a moment.

  "If anyone traces it to him," Elyria said.

  "Then whoever finds it will want it more than they'll want him alive," Thorne finished.

  "Which is why neither of us will speak of it, and we'll spend whatever portion of the journey remains impressing that fact on him with appropriate urgency."

  The Disciple grade pile was diminishing. Tunde's body had absorbed the entirety of the Initiate grade materials and was working steadily into the next category with the unhurried efficiency of something that had found its appetite and intended to satisfy it.

  The cauldron water, which had started clear and become progressively more complex in color and composition, was now running thin.

  Then Tunde's heart gave a single beat that Thorne and Elyria both felt through the soles of their feet.

  It was not loud. It was not multiple beats or a rapid sequence. It was one beat, resonant and final, the sound a bell makes when it has been properly struck, the sound of something that has reached what it was building toward.

  "There," Thorne said.

  What followed was the purge, and the purge was everything a purge promises to be in terms of smell and nothing any preparation could have made welcome.

  ****

  The smell was what returned Tunde to himself.

  He had been somewhere else, fully inside the rhythm of the cultivation and the process of the tempering, existing as little more than the intention to keep breathing, and then the smell arrived with such comprehensive authority that it bypassed every layer of concentration and reached him directly.

  He came out of the cauldron faster than he had gone into it.

  His head connected with the cave ceiling before he had fully processed that he was moving, the impact brief and sharp and significantly less damaging than it should have been, which was itself a data point he filed away for later.

  He landed in a heap on the cave floor, momentum carrying him sideways, and before he had finished landing, Thorne and Elyria were pouring water on him.

  The buckets appeared from somewhere he did not track, and they were thorough, and the scrubbing that followed was also thorough, and Elyria excused herself at the point where she realized she was washing a person rather than an object, and Tunde dressed himself in the clean clothes that had been set out and stood up.

  He stood up.

  He was aware, in the moment of standing, that this action had a different quality from every other time he had performed it in his life.

  Not dramatically different, not the way stories describe transformation, with visible light and audible consequence. Simply different the way a door feels different when the lock has been properly seated, a rightness to the mechanism that had not previously been there.

  He breathed.

  The Ethra in his heart was not full in the way he had experienced before, where full meant the reservoir had been topped off.

  It was full in a different way, as though the reservoir had expanded, the container itself larger than it had been, the Ethra moving through his veins with a thickness and a warmth that was new.

  He felt his bones, not because they were in pain but because they were present in a way they had not been before, dense and solid and specifically his in a way that suggested they were now something different from what they had been this morning.

  Thorne hit him in the chest.

  He was across the cave before he finished processing the motion, the wall cracking behind him, and then he was standing up from the rubble with a rib that was sending very clear messages about its current state, and the messages were fading, the bone closing its complaint as the healing that had always been present in his body but had never been this efficient did its work in a matter of seconds.

  He looked at Thorne.

  "Anything broken?" Thorne asked, with the mild interest of a craftsman testing a finished piece.

  "Not anymore," Tunde said, and the awe in his voice was not something he tried to contain.

  Thorne nodded with something that was satisfaction kept at a professional distance.

  "You can thank Elyria for the bone specifically. Your skeletal foundation is now somewhere in the upper range of what an Initiate's body can be. Disciples will need to commit to breaking it. Initiates will need to get very lucky."

  Elyria had re-entered, her silver eyes moving over him with the assessment of someone checking their work. When she seemed satisfied with what she found, she looked away.

  Tunde turned to her and bowed, lower than he had intended to, his body moving with a smoothness that the previous version of it would not have managed at that angle.

  "Thank you," he said.

  "Both of you. For all of it."

  Elyria murmured something he did not fully catch, but the shape of her expression was warm.

  Thorne snorted.

  "Repay it by not dying pointlessly. Gratitude is a feeling. Survival is a practice. Focus on the practice."

  Tunde straightened. He felt the resolve that had been forming in him over the past days, the thing that had started as determination and was becoming something with more structure, a framework rather than a feeling.

  "I won't fail," he said.

  "I am going to find the truth of what happened to my people. I am going to find a way to understand why we were brought to this place and left to die. And I am going to grow strong enough that whatever answers I find can't be taken from me."

  The words landed in the cave with more weight than he expected. Thorne looked at him for a long moment.

  "Good," he said.

  "Now show me what you can do with that blade."

  ****

  The sword felt different in his hand than it had before the cauldron.

  Not because the sword had changed, but because the hand holding it had, the grip carrying a steadiness and a surety that was new, his arm conducting the weight of the blade without the minor compensations his body had previously required, without informing him it was making them.

  He held it and felt it as an extension, which was not something a sword felt like when you had never been trained to use one and were holding one for the second time in your life.

  "Attack me," Thorne said.

  Tunde attacked.

  He activated his Ethra sight as he moved, the world resolving into the familiar layered vision of colors and lines, and he looked for what his sight always looked for, the specific points on an opponent's body where the Ethra was thinner or more concentrated, the structural vulnerabilities that presented as brighter or darker areas against the general glow.

  There were none.

  He looked at Thorne and saw nothing that could be called a weak point, because Thorne's Ethra was not distributed the way other people's was, not a network of stronger and weaker concentrations but a uniform density that his sight could not find the edges of, the way one cannot find the edge of a material that simply continues beyond the boundary of vision in every direction. He pushed harder, narrowing his focus, and the effort produced nothing useful.

  He aimed for the skull out of frustration, which was, he recognized even as he did it, not a strategy.

  Thorne's bare hand intercepted the blade, which should have produced a consequence and did not.

  His other hand connected with Tunde's midsection, and the resulting impact introduced Tunde to the cave floor in the comprehensive way of something that has happened too fast for the body to brace against.

  He lay there and re learned how to breathe for a few seconds.

  "Disruption," Thorne said, standing over him with the clinical calm of a person who has explained this concept to many people in many caves and still finds it worth explaining correctly.

  "Any skilled ranker you face will attempt to interrupt your breathing. Your breathing controls your Ethra flow. Your Ethra flow controls your techniques, your sight, your body enhancement, everything that makes you more than an ordinary person with a blade. Break the breathing, and you break the ranker." He paused.

  "You die."

  Tunde got up.

  "What do I do about it?" he asked.

  "Develop the ability to maintain your breathing under conditions that make it difficult," Thorne said.

  "Which means fighting under those conditions until you can. That's the method. There is no other method."

  "And your fighting style?" Tunde asked. He looked at the man who had just deflected a blade with an unprotected hand and knocked him across a cave with a single casual strike.

  "What style allows for that?"

  "It doesn't, currently," Thorne said.

  "What you see is what remains after the style I was trained in was stripped away, and what was underneath was what continued. Don't concern yourself with my case. Concern yourself with yours."

  Elyria had finished returning the remaining items to her void ring and spoke from where she stood.

  "I follow the iron metal fighting style. It suits the Ethra type and the applications that come from it. Everything in my approach is built around the Ethra I use and what that Ethra allows me to do."

  "Your style should suit your Ethra," Thorne added, looking at Tunde with the considering expression of someone working through a problem they do not yet have all the variables for.

  "Which is the difficulty, because we are not entirely certain what your Ethra is. We've assumed light, based on what we've seen, but the relic's influence complicates the reading. The sight affinity. The absorption. The refinement. Whether any of those are the relic's function or yours is not something I can determine with confidence."

  "That determination happens in the city," Elyria said.

  "There are methods for precise Ethra identification. We'll get a clearer reading once we're somewhere that has the equipment for it."

  Tunde accepted this and put it aside, returning his attention to the sword in his hand and what Thorne had said about disruption and breathing, and the specific quality of failure that his last attack had represented. He raised the blade.

  "Again," he said.

  Thorne's expression shifted by a fraction. He settled into a stance that communicated nothing specific about his intentions, which Tunde understood was itself information.

  "Better," he said. "Come."

  ****

  The wasteland outside the bandit cave received them with its usual indifference.

  They moved north and the landscape maintained its commitment to sameness, sand and rock and the bones of large things and the occasional movement at the boundary of visibility that Tunde's sight identified as alive and tracked as a precaution until it resolved into something that was not approaching them.

  Thorne set a pace that was sustainable for all three of them, which was notably slower than his preference and notably faster than Tunde's comfort zone, a compromise that functioned as training for both parties.

  Water breaks became the rhythm of the day, Elyria and Tunde stopping while Thorne waited with the patience of something that had made a decision about waiting and felt no particular need to revisit it.

  The sun climbed and flattened and began its descent, and the heat it produced between those two points was the particular, personal heat of a landscape that had decided the concept of shade was not its responsibility.

  The creatures came.

  Tier 1 first, the wasteland's baseline, things that had evolved in an environment where resources were scarce and competition for them was absolute, which had produced in them an aggression that was disproportionate to their size and a durability that was disproportionate to their apparent fragility.

  Thorne stepped back. Elyria positioned herself in a supporting role. Tunde stepped forward and handled it, badly at first and then with increasing competence as the day moved and his body learned the specific lessons that fighting things trying to kill you provides.

  Near the end of the first afternoon, a Sandshard's pincers came within a width of removing his left arm.

  He moved the arm in time, but the proximity of the miss produced a clarity in his understanding of his own reaction time that no amount of sparring with Thorne had managed; the difference between a controlled training environment and a situation with an actual consequence being apparently significant in how the body chose to respond.

  He noted this. He filed it. He kept going.

  Thorne gave him the cultivating while fighting task on the second morning, which he described as simple, but which was not.

  "What happens when your Ethra runs out mid-fight?" Thorne asked.

  Tunde knew the answer he was not going to give, which was that he ran, and said nothing while he worked out what the actual answer was, which was that nothing good happened and therefore the supply of Ethra should not be permitted to run out.

  The only method for not running out was continuous replenishment, and continuous replenishment during a fight meant maintaining the cultivation rhythm while simultaneously attending to an opponent who was also attending to you, which meant splitting his attention in a way that initially produced worse results at both tasks.

  Then, gradually, not worse.

  The nights brought sparring with Thorne, who tested the tempering's results with the systematic thoroughness of a craftsman evaluating a piece of work, finding the limits and applying force precisely at them to determine their location.

  Tunde's body held where it held and broke where it broke, and where it broke it healed, and where it healed, it came back slightly different from what it had been, which was the mechanism Thorne had described and which was working exactly as described.

  He also coaxed sessions from Elyria, who taught differently from Thorne.

  Where Thorne taught through application, placing Tunde in situations and observing what he did with them, Elyria taught through explanation, building the understanding before the execution, giving him frameworks that the execution could then fill.

  Both approaches produced things the other did not, and the combination of them produced something that was beginning, tentatively, to resemble a ranker.

  The night on the third day, when the bandits came, happened fast.

  His body knew before his mind did, some integration of the battle instincts Thorne and Elyria had been cultivating in him communicating urgency to his limbs before his conscious mind had finished processing the sound that had woken him.

  He was rolling away from the sand pike before he identified it as a sand pike, and he was standing with his blade in hand before he had a complete inventory of the situation.

  Two Disciples. Ten Initiates. No Adept.

  No Thorne, who was handling the Disciples with the efficient disinterest of someone performing a task below their practical capability.

  No Elyria, who was engaged with two Initiates and appeared to be doing considerably more than handling them.

  Which left Tunde with eight, which was a number he addressed not by strategy, because he did not yet have strategy, but by momentum.

  He moved into the group rather than away from it, which was the opposite of what instinct suggested, and which he did because Thorne had made a point of identifying instinct as the opponent's greatest advantage over an untrained fighter, and the way to neutralize that advantage was to do the thing that instinct did not anticipate.

  Inside the group, the reach advantages of their weapons diminished.

  His sight marked the weak points on each form as he passed through it, and he struck at the marks, and some of the strikes connected and some did not, and the ones that connected produced the outcomes the sight had marked them for.

  When the last Initiate was down, he stepped back from the result of the fight and stood very still for a moment, and then walked away from it and was sick, because the fight being over meant his mind had caught up with his body and his body had done things his mind needed a moment to reconcile.

  Thorne's voice came from somewhere to his left.

  "Injuries healed. You maintained your breathing. You kept your composure under actual night raid conditions." A pause, and the pause had a quality to it.

  "Good."

  Elyria's hand found his back, a brief, steady pressure.

  "Thank you," Tunde managed, straightening.

  He went through the bodies because Thorne had told him to and because the practical case for it was sound, regardless of how he felt about the process.

  Lumens, which he counted and did not feel attached to. Pills, which he identified by the colors his sight gave them.

  A void sack, small and worn and bound to whoever had carried it by a drop of blood that was no longer present in a living person, which meant it could be rebound.

  He dripped his blood on it and the sack opened, and he looked at what the previous owner had accumulated and felt none of the triumph he suspected he was supposed to feel.

  He offered the contents to Thorne and Elyria. They declined.

  "Yours," Elyria said.

  "You'll need them before we do."

  "Your advancement to Disciple requires your heart to follow where your body has already gone," Thorne said, settling back against the cave wall.

  "The body tempering put you ahead. Your heart is catching up. The Initiate grade fruits and elixirs in that sack are what closes the remaining gap."

  Tunde sat with the sack in his lap and thought about the distance between where he was and where he needed to be, and found that for the first time, the distance looked like something with a beginning and an end rather than something that simply continued beyond the horizon.

  He began to meditate.

  ****

  By the third day's end, the wasteland offered them something it had not offered them before.

  They had been moving across the same flat sand and rock and bone for long enough that Tunde's eyes had adjusted to treating the horizon as empty by default, his Ethra sight doing the actual work of detection while his ordinary vision handled the immediate environment.

  Which was why the shapes on the horizon registered through his sight before his eyes found them, small and distinct and moving with the specific pattern of things that had been built rather than grown.

  He focused.

  Not shapes on the horizon. Objects in the air above it, moving in patterns that suggested intentional navigation rather than natural drift.

  "There," Thorne said, at the same moment Tunde was drawing breath to speak.

  They were still far, the distance would take time to close.

  But they were there, unmistakably there, and the fact of them produced in Tunde a feeling he had not expected, something that was not quite hope but occupied the same space, the understanding that the world contained more than the wasteland he had been moving through and that he was approaching the boundary between one and the other.

  "How far?" Elyria asked.

  "Half a day at our pace," Thorne said, looking at the sky where the objects moved in their deliberate patterns.

  "Red Crown City. The first outpost of something that could be called civilization, at least by the standards of this continent."

  He looked at Tunde.

  "When we arrive," he said,

  "Everything we've discussed about drawing attention to yourself applies more, not less. A city is a concentration of rankers of various motivations and capabilities. The relic stays dormant and covered. Your void sack stays inside your robe. You are a new Initiate traveling with companions, nothing more notable than that."

  Tunde nodded.

  "And," Thorne added,

  "You might want to decide what you intend to do once we're inside. We'll be parting ways. Elyria has her destination. I have mine." He paused.

  "You need one."

  Tunde looked at the distant horizon where the flying objects moved against the sky, carrying whoever and whatever they carried toward the city, and thought about that.

  He had a direction. He had always had a direction, it was simply very far away and very high up, and currently entirely beyond his reach.

  The question was what the next step toward it looked like when the step was being taken by an Initiate with a void sack full of pills and a sword he was still learning, in a city he had never seen, on a continent he had arrived on by dying.

  He looked at the relic on his wrist, dormant and cool and patient.

  He looked ahead.

  He kept walking.