Chapter 19: And You'll Hear The Whistle Blow
Commander Aldric Voss
Temerian Infantry, Third Garrison Checkpoint On The Trava Bridge
1253
The lousy lot were rushing through the garrison yard trying to get into what they apparently considered a proper formation. It was not a proper formation. It was twenty men in various states of undress tripping over each other's spear hafts in the fog.
"Get your spears ready, you whoresons!" I shouted at them. "We're going down there to kill that thieving beast and I'd like to do it before my boots fill with water!" I turned on Wyll, who had the good sense to already look like a man anticipating a thorough dressing down. "You especially. What in the name of Melitele were you thinking, sending someone down there alone? On the exaggerated word of some greenboy who'd never seen a troll in his life?"
"I swear commander, he had a magical sword, just as the lad said, and the head of a wyvern on his horse, I thought—"
"And what do you know of magic!" I stepped toward him and had the satisfaction of watching him step back. "You see some scribbling on a blade and you decide the man's a god because of it! Use your head, Wyll! A sword with runes on it and a monster's head doesn't make a man invincible!" I jabbed a finger at him. "You're supposed to be the brains of this lot, which I'll grant you is not a high bar to clear, but I am shocked you couldn't manage it! So since it's your cock-up, you'll be walking point. When that beast takes its first swing at someone it's going to be you."
Wyll opened his mouth.
"Shut it," I said. "Not another word."
He shut it.
I turned back to the yard and surveyed the formation, which had improved marginally now that the men had at least established which direction they were supposed to be pointing.
Surrounded by drunks and idiots, I thought, not for the first time this week. Not for the first time today, if I was being honest with myself.
Though in fairness to the men, the situation had been unusual from the start.
Apparently the knight had arrived out of nowhere, no advance notice, no livery I was educated enough to recognise from any house currently in good standing with the crown, just a man on a very good horse with a monster's head tied to the saddle and as Byrnn would tell it a face that looked like it was carved of stone, on a pallor that matched it. As his ward would tell it 'an affliction of his birth'
Speaking of his ward, the girl was another problem entirely, though a quieter one. Noble bearing, that much was obvious the moment she opened her mouth, the kind of diction that came from a childhood of being corrected by tutors rather than parents. Though frim the state of her, it was clear to see they had fallen on hard times, a deposed Noble and a overtly loyal Knight, almost certainly.
Probably sticks with her because no other house would have him, the poor pale bastard.
Under normal circumstances I would have detained them both and sent word to the nearest lord for instruction. Under these circumstances, with a troll blocking my supply route and half my garrison nursing wounded dignity, I had priorities.
The girl had watched the entire confrontation at the checkpoint with an unnerving calm of someone observing a mildly interesting market dispute rather than a standoff involving a monster. When I had caught her eye once, just briefly, she had looked back at me with an expression that didn't fit the situation at all, as though this 'Braver' succeeding was not even a question.
I did not particularly want to be responsible for her safe passage to wherever she was going. Finding an escort for an unidentified noblewoman of uncertain provenance in the middle of Angren while simultaneously managing a troll problem was exactly the kind of complication that ended careers.
Which was the only reason I had not left her knight to his own devices when Wyll told me what he had done.
That and the small, professionally inconvenient possibility that the man actually knew what he was doing.
I was revising that assessment downward by the minute.
"Mount up," I said. "We go down in formation, shields forward, and nobody does anything without my order. If that thing has already finished with him we pull back and wait for a witcher like we should have done three days ago." I looked at Wyll. "And if it hasn't finished with him yet, Wyll, you will have the honour of informing the man that his arrangement has been superseded by garrison authority. Understood?"
"Yes commander," Wyll said, with the tone of a man calculating whether desertion was still an option.
We were just mounting up when the bridge shook.
A big one first, the kind of impact that came up through the ground and into the soles of your boots, as though something very heavy had landed on the stonework from a height. Then the steady repeated thud of something massive walking. Deliberate. Unhurried.
My stomach dropped.
Too late then. Whatever had happened down there it was over, and now the thing was coming up to finish the rest of us.
Just my rotten luck.
"Look alive you bastards!" I drew my sword. "Archers, nock your arrows! Shields up, close the gap, nobody breaks formation or I'll have their hide!" The men scrambled, the loose approximation of a line tightening into something that might actually hold for thirty seconds before falling apart. "Wyll, front and center, this is your mess!"
Wyll moved to the front with the expression of a man who had made peace with his fate and found it wanting.
The shape came out of the mist slowly. Enormous. The silhouette of it wrong in all the ways a silhouette could be wrong, too wide, too tall, the movement of it carrying the particular weight of something that did not think about the ground it walked on because the ground had never been a problem for it.
"Archers ready!" I called, arm raised.
The shape kept coming. I drew breath to give the order. And then a voice called out from the bridge.
"I would appreciate it, if you didn't stick me and my new friend here full of holes, it took quiet an effort to have him agree to talking." A melodious, accented voice, the same, Toussaintouis accent as the lady behind me.
"It's him commander!" Wyll shouted, the relief in his voice almost offensive given that he was the one who had caused this entire situation. "The knight! The Braver!"
"I told you to hush up about that Braver nonsense!" I snapped, arm still raised, eyes fixed on the shapes in the mist. "This could be a trick of some sort, the beast could be using his voice, or his corpse, or—"
The figures stepped out of the fog.
I stopped talking.
The knight was taller than I thought he would be, or perhaps it was simply that the mist had compressed everything and now the full reality of him was reasserting itself. He walked with an easy unhurried confidence I had only seen on arrogant idiots, or overtly dangerous men, one hand loose at his side, the other leaning on the hilt of his sword handle.
Behind him, and this was the part that made several of my men take an involuntary step backward, was the troll.
It was not attacking, neither was it charging. It was walking, with a ponderous deliberate motion I'd only seen on domesticated animals, its enormous head moving slowly from side to side as it took in the garrison yard with what could only be described as cautious curiosity. Around its neck the tin cups and spoons clinked softly with each step. On its head, somehow, was a bucket.
I stared at it.
I stared at him.
He looked at me with those red eyes, calm and direct, and said, "I'm no trick, I assure you. Your men can attest to that." He gestured toward Wyll and the others who had been at the checkpoint earlier. "Now, if you would put away your weapons, I have a proposition I think you'd very much like to hear."
I became aware, somewhat belatedly, that my mouth was open.
I closed it.
I had been a soldier for twenty two years. I had served under three commanders, fought in two border campaigns, overseen garrison postings in four different provinces, and managed every variety of difficult situation that the Continent's roads and politics could produce. I had thought, going into this morning, that I had developed a reasonably comprehensive understanding of the range of things that could happen to a man.
I had not anticipated this specific thing.
"Lower your weapons," I said, after a moment.
The men hesitated.
"Lower them," I said again, with more authority, mostly because if I didn't establish authority in the next ten seconds I was going to lose it entirely. "The man is clearly alive and the beast is clearly not currently trying to kill anyone, so lower your gods-damned weapons and let's hear what he has to say."
The bows came down. The spears tilted back. Wyll, I noticed, had not so much lowered his spear as let it fall to his side on account of his hands apparently not working properly.
I sheathed my sword and walked forward to meet the knight, because someone had to and it was clearly going to be me, stopping a few paces short of where he stood.
Up close he was worse.
I had noticed it earlier, of course, the pallor, the eyes, the features that were arranged too precisely to be entirely comfortable. Up close, without the mist and the distance and the general chaos of the checkpoint to distribute the impact, it was considerably more immediate. I was not a man given to noticing such things, nor was I a pillowbiter but I had eyes and they were working perfectly well, and what they were telling me was that I had seen women at the Duke's court who would have wept with envy, at the prospect of being compared to this man.
I pushed that thought firmly to one side.
"Commander Aldric Voss," I said, with as much professional dignity as I could assemble on short notice. "Third Garrison, Trava Checkpoint, my men seem to think you're a Knight straight from myth, seeing you, I am starting to put more thought into what they've said." I looked at him, then, because there was no avoiding it, at the troll standing a respectful distance behind him. Then back at him. "With all due respect, sir, this had better be a very good proposition."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile.
"I think you'll find it solves most of your problems," he said. "Starting with the bridge."
Behind me I heard Wyll mutter something to the man beside him.
"Told you," he said.
"Wyll," I said, without turning around.
"Yes commander."
"If you say another word before I give you permission I will have you mucking out the latrines for a month."
Silence.
I turned back to the knight, trying not to stare. He stood with the relaxed stillness of someone who had never once in his life needed to think about where his hands were, and he was looking at me with those red eyes with an expression of patient, courteous attention that made me feel, absurdly, like I was the one who had requested this meeting.
He had gone down there alone and came back with the troll walking behind him like a very large, very ugly dog that had decided to follow someone home.
He didn't seem injured. Standing as he was in my garrison yard like he had not just tamed a bloody troll, looking for all the world like a man who had simply run a quick errand and was now ready to discuss the details.
What in the name of every god on the Continent is my day becoming.
"Let's go to my tent and I'll listen to what you have to say. I could do that much at least." I turned back to the troll, "You're...friend will have to wait outside. I need your word it won't cause trouble." I paused. "Or go near the infirmary. Vik might try something given that it bruised his ribs."
"Grul name Grul is." The beast suddenly spoke with a deep timber that made more than a few of my men, myself included stiffen up.
"Right...Grul will have to wait outside the tent." I said after catching my nerves.
They looked at each other briefly. The troll settled itself against the outside of the tent with a ponderous care, trying to take up less space than it naturally occupied, which was not a small ambition.
I caught the eye of the man nearest the tent flap and gave him a look that I hoped communicated, without words, that I wanted eyes on that troll at all times and hands ready if the situation changed.
He nodded once. Maybe they're not all idiots.
Inside the tent I gestured to the camp chair across from mine and took my own seat after him, reaching for the flask on the table out of habit. "Drink?"
"No, don't hold yourself back on my account" he said simply, settling into the chair with an easy demeanor.
I looked at him for a moment. Then I poured myself one, because if this conversation was going where I thought it was going I was going to want it.
"Well then ser," I said, leaning back and affecting an air of open-minded attention I did not entirely feel. "I'd be glad to hear your proposition."
I was, if I was being honest, more prepared to be entertained than persuaded. A man who went down to negotiate with a troll alone was either very capable or very lucky, and in my experience the two looked identical right up until the moment they didn't. The fact that he had come back breathing proved nothing except that the troll had chosen not to kill him, which was the troll's decision to make.
He talked.
It was, I would admit privately and to absolutely no one, an impressive proposition. Structured. Practical. The kind of argument a man constructed when he had already worked out every counter before he opened his mouth, which told me something about him that I added to the growing and slightly unsettling pile of things I had noted about him since he walked out of that fog.
The troll had maintained the bridge, he explained, it had repaired it, filling cracks the garrison had been overlooking for the better part of a year. It considered the repair work sufficient basis for a toll arrangement. The toll would be reduced to something reasonable going forward, food or small coin at the traveller's discretion. And then he laid out the numbers, quietly and without drama, the cost of a stonemason versus the cost of feeding a troll, the annual repair budget against a daily food toll, the savings over five years, ten, twenty.
I found myself doing the arithmetic against my will.
The matter of the stores was more delicate.
"And as for the theft, Grul left coin," the knight said, with the careful tone of a man delivering information he knew would not land well. "It was an attempt at purchasing from you, not a theft, he observed how commerce works at roadside establishments and applied the same logic here, albeit incorrectly."
I looked past the tent flap at the troll outside, which had been attempting to eavesdrop with a subtlety it was not physically built for. It looked back at me with small clear eyes and what might on a more familiar face have been described as an earnest expression.
"Grul sorry is." It rumbled from outside.
It had drunk our stores because it thought it was buying them.
Twenty two years. Never had this specific problem before.
"And the man it threw in the river," I said, keeping my voice professionally even through what I considered a significant personal achievement.
"Apparently provoked," the knight said. "Though I acknowledge that's the troll's account and your man may have a different version."
"And you propose," I said, "that I formally acknowledge a troll's claim to a bridge under garrison jurisdiction, authorize a food toll on a public crossing, and explain to my commander that the missing stores were not stolen but purchased. By a troll."
"I propose," he said pleasantly, "that you have a passable road again by this afternoon, a maintained bridge for the foreseeable future, and should the worst come to pass on this road, a troll willing to help defend the crossing in exchange for its arrangement being honoured."
I looked at him.
He looked back at me.
Annoyingly. Insufferably. Compellingly, his argument made sense. I turned my attention to the beast outside, looking at me through the flap, in an expression that on a dog would have been compelling.
Gods. What has this morning become.
I pressed two fingers against the bridge of my nose and held them there for a moment.
"Fine," I said. "I suppose I'm adding a troll to the garrison's unofficial roster." I glanced out at Grul, who had given up on subtle eavesdropping and was now simply watching the tent opening with open interest. "Should fit right in. About as smart as the rest of the platoon." I paused. "Better looking too, if I'm being honest."
I'd never heard a Troll cheer before, or clap its hands, but I guess I'll be seeing a troll do a lot of things from now on.
Matthias Harlow
The Pass of Klamat, Dur-tan-Orit, Amell Mountains, Temeria
1253
"Lord I'm one, Lord I'm two, Lord I'm three..."
My voice reverberated off the narrow walls of the pass, finding harmonics in the stone that no concert hall had ever offered me. It had been about a week since the Trava river and the troll and Commander Voss's expression of professional suffering, and we were roughly halfway through the mountain pass, the Amell range pressing close on either side, the road ahead still lost in the particular grey haze that this part of the world appeared to consider normal weather.
"Lord I'm four, Lord I'm five hundred miles...from my home."
Voss had been more than accommodating in the end. His requisition officer had restocked us properly, dried provisions, good rope, a spare blanket, even a small jar of rendered fat for the horses' hooves against the cold stone of the pass. The man had clearly decided that the most efficient resolution to his morning was to help us leave as quickly as possible and had thrown himself into that goal with admirable focus.
The pass itself was something else. Dur-tan-Orit, the Mouse Pass, the old name for it, when the elves still laid claim to these lands. The walls rose sheer on either side, pale grey stone streaked dark with old water, the road cut through them barely wide enough for a cart in places. Sound moved strangely here. Voices carried further than they should, came back altered, arrived from directions that didn't match where they had started.
I had been singing for most of the week, filling the silence of the trek when I could, just singing the way I used to when I was alone in my apartment, or taking a shower, except this time, my voice didn't sound like chicken been thrown into a dryer.
"What is that song?" Syanna asked, from beside me. "You've been singing it all week. I've never heard anything like it."
"Five Hundred Miles," I said. "It's a song about a lonely, penniless traveler overwhelmed by homesickness, longing to return home but ashamed to do so," I glanced at the grey walls around us. "I don't know...I just felt like singing it for some reason." I paused. "My father loved it. He used to sing it around the house, whenever he could, as much as mom and I liked to complain, that his voice could make a deaf man beg him to stop singing."
Syanna's mouth curved slightly. "And yet you know every word."
"Hard not to when you hear something often enough," I said. "Sixteen years of my father murdering that song in the kitchen every Sunday morning. I knew it word for word long before I ever learned to play." I turned the phrase over in my mouth once more, letting the pass walls do what they did to it. "Though I'll admit it sounds considerably better coming out of me now than it ever did coming from him."
"Was he a musician as well?" she asked. "Your father. You told me how his passing made you feel but not much of who he was."
I snorted. "Let's say I get my musical talent from my mother's side. My father was a historian, though he loved the arts deeply, even if he possessed absolutely no attributes for them himself." I smiled at the stone ahead of us. "That's actually how he and my mother met. A concert, of all things. He spent the whole first half trying to impress her by pretending to understand what he was listening to, and she spent the second half quietly explaining to him that he was wrong about everything, and apparently that was enough."
Syanna was quiet for a moment, watching me from the corner of her eye with that particular attentiveness she deployed when she thought she was being subtle about it.
"Do you miss home?" she asked. "That's what the song is about, isn't it? Being far from it."
I considered that honestly.
"I miss my parents," I said. "And the people there, the community, the neighbours who brought food and dragged me onto fishing boats when I was trying to be left alone with my grief." I exhaled. "But the place itself? Not exactly. It's hard to miss a place the way you miss a person." I looked at the pass walls, at the particular grey of the stone, the way the light came down thin and cold between the heights.
"And if I'm being truthful about it, and apparently that's what we do now, I was dying before I came here. My blood was killing me. I was moments away from dying...or actually died," I stared ahead in a moment of silence, before gathering myself and continuing. "my point is, if I was still back home there wouldn't have been much of me left to miss anything." I paused. "So not all bad, being here. Cannibalistic statue situation aside."
She looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite categorize. "That's a considerable change of attitude from you," she said. "All things considered."
"I did say I took your words to heart," I said. "About the lamenting. I still don't see myself running around feeding on people for sport or setting myself up as some eternal undying godking of the night, but spending every waking hour grieving something I can't undo is just punishing myself for something that was never in my control." I paused. "Which you pointed out rather forcefully, if I recall."
"You recalled correctly," she said, with the composure of someone not quite allowing themselves to look pleased.
We rode in silence for a moment, the pass amplifying the hoofbeats and sending them back to us from three different directions simultaneously.
"Speaking of feeding," I said. "What colour are my eyes right now?"
She looked at me. "Your eyes? What do they have to do with feeding?"
"The longer I go without drinking blood, the darker they get," I said. "Also, if I drink only from animals they go amber. Like a Witcher's, roughly, though I'd appreciate you not mentioning that particular comparison to one if we meet any." I glanced at her. "So. What colour?"
She studied my face for a moment with the focused assessment she usually reserved for negotiations. "Still red," she said. "Though now that you mention it they are darker than they were a week ago." She frowned. "Wouldn't you feel the hunger though? You haven't fed since before the bridge, I don't think."
"The ring," I said.
"Right," she said. "The ring."
A short silence. "It dulls everything," I said, after a moment. "The hunger, the senses, the constant noise of the world pressing in. When I wear it, it's almost like being human again. I can breathe through my nose without cataloguing everything within 300 hundred yards. I can sit in a room without being hyper focused on every heartbeat in it." I turned the ring on my finger slowly. "It's comfortable. That's the problem. It's insidiously, dangerously comfortable, He probably knew it would be, probably why He gave it to me without any hesitation at all."
The words settled between us. "You think that's why he gave it to you so readily," she said.
"I think it's part of it," I said. "A being that trades in dependency handing you something that creates dependency," I exhaled. "Yes. I think that's exactly why."
I turned the ring over on my finger once more, feeling the faint pulse of it, that artificial satiety sitting in my chest where hunger should have been.
"I still am unsure why you said we should avoid naming him directly, surely if he could see everything, calling his name would not be a prerequisite for him to be spying on us." She asks me with a skeptical lilt to her voice.
"Just humor me, please call it paranoia if you want to. Anyway I should stop wearing it at night," I said, referring to ring, thinking aloud rather than announcing. "Take it off when I don't need it, when there are no people around to lose control around. Get used to managing without it again." I paused. "And further down the road, wean myself off it entirely. However uncomfortable that is."
Syanna said nothing, but the quality of her silence was approving in the way that her silences sometimes were when she had decided something was the right call and didn't want to make a production of saying so.
"But first," I said, looking at the pass walls rising around us and the grey sky above them, "I should find something to kill. Take the ring off, feed properly, and remind myself what I actually am without it sitting on my finger telling me otherwise." I glanced at her. "And in the process, get you something to eat that isn't dried meat and a side of vegetables that have been in a saddlebag for a week. You deserve better than dry garrison rations."
She looked at me. "You're going to hunt something in a mountain pass."
"Something must live here," I said. "It is not so barren as there to be no life, probably a goat? We've seen a couple on the way, we'll see when we make camp."
She looked at the sheer walls around us, the narrow strip of sky above, the shadows gathering in the crevices of the stone. "Do you know anything about Maribor?" she asked. "I've never actually left Toussaint."
"Neither have I," I said. "Or rather, neither has de La Croix, which amounts to the same thing in practice." I thought for a moment, pulling at what I remembered. "From what I remember it's like most of the northern capitals, built on the ruins of an elven settlement. The Aen Seidhe had a city there once, before the great eastern expansion of humans roughly five hundred years ago. The elves abandoned it, humans moved in, and Maribor grew up over whatever was left." I paused. "The region and the city are governed by Duke Jurkast, a cousin and close friend to the king...there's a story about him and the dryads of Brokilon but the details escape me." I glanced at her. "It's also the birthplace of the current sorceress advisor to the crown, which may or may not be relevant depending on how long we end up staying."
She was quiet for a moment. Then, with the careful tone she used when she was approaching something she suspected I would push back on, "You seem to know a great deal about it. Is that from before? From what you read?"
I exhaled through my nose, out of habit, rather than necessity. "Syanna," I said.
"I know, I know," she said, quickly. "But you can not blame me for being curious."
"I don't blame you for being curious," I said. "I can however blame you for asking anyway after I've already explained why I'd rather you didn't." I kept my voice even. "What I remember could be misremembered. It could be wildly out of date. It could reflect a version of events that my presence here has already made impossible." I looked at her. "I've already altered your fate simply by existing in this world. Every piece of information I give you about what I think I know about your future is either going to be useless, misleading, or actively harmful. The only thing I'm confident I know is the broad shape of people, and even that I'm holding loosely."
She pressed her lips together. "I still don't quiet believe I would have threw my lot in with those bandit filth."
"Beyond all of that," I stressed, "I would ask you to consider, given your own history with prophecies, why you'd want to know."
That landed. She looked at the road ahead and said nothing for a moment.
"That's," she said finally, "an unfair point."
"It's an accurate one," I said.
"Yes," she said, with the crisp precision of someone conceding a thing they would rather not. "Yes, fine. No more questions about your prophetic dreams."
"Thank you."
"I do reserve the right to be frustrated about it."
"That's entirely your prerogative," I said.
She rode in silence for a few paces, apparently already exercising that prerogative.
"Also," I added, "I'd be grateful if you kept it between us. I've already told you more than I should have and most people won't take the explanation as graciously as you did. The last thing I need is a reputation as a madman on top of everything else."
"You already have a reputation if I recall correctly, what was it they called you? The Braver?" she said, laughter in her tone. "A dragon slaying, troll taming hero of Legend, won't be long before people start singing your praises."
"Don't remind me, please" I said. So much for keeping a low profile.
Again, I lamented my failed plan for keeping a low profile, though I would admit in the privacy of my own thoughts that plan had no chance of ever working out, unless I had chosen to live a life of total seclusion, with my abilities and appearance, there was no hope of going under the radar.
I should really get my armor replaced as soon as possible, this cloak isn't doing as good a job as my helm.
"But seriously, no mention of my other worldliness, remember the story, a wondering Knight and a fallen Noble Woman of the house he used to serve."
"Fine," she said. "I promise. No more asking."
"Good," I said. "Now come on, we should find a decent spot to make camp before the light goes. I need to take this ring off and find something to eat and you need a proper meal that didn't spend a week in a saddlebag."
She nudged her horse forward ahead of mine, the pass walls rising close on either side, the sound of the hooves coming back to us from three directions at once.
A comfortable silence settled.
Then, after a moment, she said, "Matthias."
"Yes?"
"What is a... train?" She had to take a moment to pronounce the word correctly.
I turned to look at her. She looked back at me question on her face.
"Lets make camp first," I said.
Authors Note: That's it for chapter 19, almost we're through the pass and Maribor is close now. The conversation in the pass was one of my favourites to write so far, it felt like the first time these two have just talked without something being on fire or at stake, which I think they both needed.
I have ideas for Maribor and I'm looking forward to getting there, given they face no trouble on the road. Things start moving again properly next chapter.
As always like and review if you enjoyed it, criticisms welcome.
And if you haven't already, Ko-fi and Patreon links are in my profile for anyone who wants to support the writing or read ahead.