Chapter 13 | Other Conspiracy

While the fire in the Strauss castle great hall burned high and warm, another fire burned.

This one burned cold.

The forest in northern Canada had not been chosen for comfort. It had been chosen because nothing lived here willingly in November, not people, not infrastructure, not the kind of attention that found things it wasn't looking for. The spruce trees stood black against the white of the snow, their branches carrying ice that had not melted in weeks. The temperature, in the dark of a night that came early and stayed late at this latitude, registered in the way that cold registered when it had become the dominant fact of an environment: absolutely, without negotiation.

Fifty men gathered around a fire that was large enough to survive the wind and nothing more. They wore coats that had been in use for many years, furred, heavy, patched in places, the clothes of people who had long ago stopped making decisions about appearance and made them entirely about function. Their weapons were present on their persons the way that keys were present on persons: habitually, without decision, simply always there.

They were not a military unit. They were something older than that and considerably less legible, a group that organised by proximity and shared resentment rather than rank, that deferred to its leader not through hierarchy but through the recognition that he had been right more often than the alternatives.

Bolward sat on a log at the fire's edge and did not particularly look like the kind of man who led fifty people anywhere. He was forty years old in the way that forty years of this life looked: weathered, economical, the excess worn off long ago and only the useful parts remaining. He had a face that had stopped making expressions it didn't mean some time in his late twenties and hadn't started again. He was watching the fire when the young man came through the trees.

The young man was running. He had been running for some time, the frost was on his breath in sharp, rapid clouds, and his legs carried the specific loose quality of someone whose muscles had been working past their available resources.

He stopped at the fire's edge and caught enough air to speak.

"It's gone," he said.

Bolward did not look up immediately. He let the fire occupy him for another moment, in the manner of a man concluding a thought before answering a question.

"The Chaos," the young man said. "Destroyed. Not pushed back. Destroyed." He was getting his breathing under control. "The reincarnation, Matthias, he was there. With the hero families. They did it together."

The fifty men around the fire were very quiet.

Bolward looked up. His expression arranged itself into something that was not surprise, he was a man for whom surprise had become largely theoretical, and was not quite a smile, but occupied the same general territory as one. The coldest kind.

"Sylvia failed," he said.

It was not a question.

The man called Vasco was sitting three logs to Bolward's left, and the grinding of his teeth was audible in the quiet.

"We put her in that seat," he said.

His voice had the specific quality of a man who has invested something and watched it depreciate.

"Three years of work. Finding the right people. Getting close enough to Bzekoz to know his schedule." He was staring at the fire. "All of it, and she couldn't hold the Chaos for one eclipse."

"She was never holding it," said Froid, from the opposite side of the fire.

He was a narrow man with a narrow opinion, and he delivered it with the precision of someone who had thought it before and was now saying it for the record.

"A woman who couldn't even keep her husband from walking out couldn't hold an eclipse." He spat into the snow beside him. "I said it when we were deciding. I said it."

"You say things after they go wrong," said a man who was missing his left arm below the elbow, the coat sleeve pinned and folded, "and before. It all sounds the same."

Froid said nothing further.

Bolward raised one hand. The group quieted the way groups quieted around him, not because anyone had decreed it, but because the hand meant he had something that was worth hearing.

"The Chaos is gone," he said. "The entity is destroyed. The dark amplification that gave us a purpose, the reason any of our ancestors picked up a weapon and kept picking it up, is no longer present." He lowered his hand. "The whole architecture of it. Gone."

"The Marco cast us out," he said. "Three thousand years ago, they cast out our ancestors for doing what soldiers do after a war ends. Our families have been outside the line ever since. And now the Marco, the last of the line, helps destroy the one thing that would have put us back inside it." He laughed, and the laugh was not warm. "Hypocrites."

"We can't blame the Marco," he said. "They made their decision. Our ancestors made theirs." He looked at the fire. "What we can blame is the situation."

"The situation," said the man with the eyepatch, positioned at the fire's edge, turned slightly so that his remaining eye could watch the tree line, which was the habit of a man who had learned something specific from losing the other one, "has been the situation for three thousand years. Our bloodline chasing purpose at the edges of something we're no longer allowed inside."

A silence settled over the fire, heavy with the particular quality of something that everyone present had been carrying for a long time and had gotten no lighter.

Duncan, who was the youngest of the named men and the most direct, said what the silence was holding: "We eliminate Matthias. Without him, the reincarnation cycle resets. Maybe the next vessel is less, human."

"No," Bolward said, and said it without any particular emphasis, in the tone of someone who has already done this arithmetic.

"If we move against him..."

"We die," Bolward said. "All of us. Or most of us. The remainder wishes it had." He looked at the fire. "Some of you were there the last time."

The one-armed man said nothing. He was looking at the pinned sleeve.

The man with the eyepatch touched the patch with one finger, reflexively, and then stopped doing it.

That encounter had been a year and a half ago, before Matthias had known what he was, before he had the training or the Sun Blade. Belial and Astreal had been conducting their own surveillance in the region, and they had found the group in the course of it, and the group had made the decision to engage. Fifty men, well-armed, twenty years of accumulated bitter experience against two women who had been doing this for three thousand of them.

The accounting had been very one-sided.

"Belial's range suppression doesn't leave you room to close," Bolward said, with the flat register of someone reciting a lesson learned at significant cost. "Astreal gets inside your guard before you know she's moved. You cannot cover both simultaneously and there is no positioning that doesn't expose you to one of them." He looked around the fire. "So. We do not engage Matthias, Belial or Astreal."

Duncan leaned forward. "Then what?"

Bolward was quiet for a moment.

When he spoke, his voice had the careful quality of a man walking out a line of reasoning he had assembled in private and was now presenting for the first time:

"Sylvia is weakened. The destruction of the Chaos cost her resources and likely a portion of her network. But she is not finished, and she is not rational, and those two things together make her useful." He paused. "She still wants a dark lord. She will act again. What she does next, how she does it, that's information we don't have yet." He looked at Vasco. "We tip her."

Vasco looked at him with the expression of a man who has been disappointed before. "You want to use her again."

"I want to observe her. There's a difference." Bolward laced his fingers. "We don't trust Sylvia. We don't trust her judgment, her approach, or her understanding of what she's dealing with. But she will move against Matthias again, and the method she chooses will tell us things." He looked at the fire. "Specifically, she might choose the right kind of pressure."

The fire crackled. The tree line was dark and still.

"The dark lord candidates across history," Bolward said, and his voice had the quality of someone reciting something they had studied carefully, "were not primarily created by power or by circumstance. They were created by grief." He let that sit for a moment. "Men and women who lost something irreplaceable. A family burned at the stake on a heresy charge. A village gone because a lord needed the land and the army to take it. A lover, a child, a home, gone by violence or by the machinery of power. And in the aftermath of that loss, the Chaos found the opening. Every time." He looked around the fire. "You don't make a dark lord by threatening them. You make a dark lord by taking something from them."

"Matthias has Belial and Astreal," the one-armed man said, slowly.

"Yes," Bolward said.

"And the hero families. Cronqvist, Strauss, Marco."

"Yes."

The one-armed man was quiet for a moment, working through what that meant. "So if Sylvia were to move against one of those..."

"I'm not directing Sylvia," Bolward said, and said it with a precision that was important to him. "I am watching what she does. And if what she does creates a Matthias who is no longer stable, who is operating from grief rather than reason, then we are in a position to observe what that version of him looks like, and whether it creates an opportunity." He leaned back. "I am not asking anyone to do anything tonight except wait and watch."

"I hate this work," he said.

Not to Bolward specifically. To the fire, to the snow, to the cold of a Canadian forest in November that didn't care about his opinion of it.

"Mercenary jobs. Racketing at the edges of things we're not allowed inside anymore. Barely surviving." He looked at his hands. "Our ancestors fought alongside heroes. They stood on the field where the dark lord was defeated. And we..." he gestured at the fire, at the patched coats, at the missing arm and the missing eye and the fifty men in a forest that no one was looking for. "We're here."

No one disagreed with this.

"We need something to fight," Duncan said. "That's what this is, at its foundation. We need something to fight that is large enough to mean something. A dark lord, even one we might not survive, at least gives us a reason to pick up the weapon." He looked at Bolward. "I'm not saying I want to die. I'm saying I want to die for something."

The fire burned.

"I know," he said.

It was the quietest thing he'd said all evening.

"I know."

The fifty men around the fire were still.

Above them, through the spruce branches, the Canadian sky was clear and cold and full of stars that were very far away and had no opinion about any of this.

"We wait," Bolward said. "We watch. And we see what Sylvia does."

Nobody had a better plan.

The fire burned on in the cold.