Chapter 20 | The Finale

The official account, as agreed upon between Joseph and the Romanian field commander in the back of a military vehicle on the road back from the castle, was straightforward: a coordinated rapid-response operation by Romanian armed forces had successfully neutralised a domestic terror cell operating out of a fortified position in the Carpathians. All primary targets had been apprehended. The commander had been, in Joseph's professional assessment, a practical man, the kind who understood that certain details served reports and certain details served truth, and that these two categories did not always share members. The account was accurate in everything that mattered and silent on everything that would generate questions without useful answers.

Matthias, when told of the official account, said it sounded about right.

They stayed in Romania for four days.

This was Yuki's contribution to the itinerary, proposed at the debrief breakfast and seconded with a speed that suggested the vote was going to pass regardless of what anyone said. The country, she pointed out, had done nothing to deserve being associated exclusively with an underground cult and a deteriorating castle. There were things worth seeing. She had a list. Joseph accepted the delay with the expression of a man who had pending business and had decided that pending was a stable enough condition to hold for four days.

They saw things worth seeing.

The old city in the morning, and the mountain roads in the afternoon, and the food in the evenings, which Belial approached with the systematic enthusiasm she brought to any cuisine she hadn't catalogued yet. Astreal took photographs, a habit that still struck Matthias as incongruous with everything else about her, until he thought about it and realised that someone who had been alive for three thousand years and watched everything change had probably developed a relationship with documentation that most people never needed. Aki found a local who wanted to arm wrestle and won four times before the local's friends got involved, at which point Aki declared the evening a success. Yuki bought a hat.

It was, by most measurable criteria, a normal few days.

Matthias noted this, and found it satisfying, and did not say so because it was the kind of thing that was diminished by being said.

The flight home had the quality of all return flights, the specific relief of moving toward a known quantity rather than away from it, the way the familiar assembled itself in your mind slightly before you arrived and made the destination real again. Matthias slept for most of it, which he hadn't been able to do on the way out.

The party was Belial's idea, which was apparent to everyone who knew her and had not been announced as such. It simply manifested, in the state of the kitchen when Matthias came downstairs two days after arriving home, in the list of things that needed to be collected from the shops, in the way Astreal was setting the table with the efficiency of someone executing a plan that had already been fully formed. Matthias looked at the preparation underway and looked at Belial, who looked back at him with the expression of someone who had decided that a party was the correct response to the current situation and did not require external confirmation.

"Alright," Matthias said.

"I haven't said anything," Belial said.

"You didn't need to."

She smiled, which was the smile she used when things were going as she'd intended.

It was a good party, in the specific way that gatherings were good when the people in them had been through something together and the gathering was the first interval since the something in which nobody needed to be anywhere or do anything. The house held the sound of it well, the three floors and the good walls absorbing the volume so that it felt full without feeling pressured. Aki had contributed to the food supply in the form of showing up early and taking over a section of the kitchen with the quiet authority of a man who had strong opinions about preparation. Yuki arrived in a dress that was slightly too formal for the occasion, which was very much in character.

At some point in the evening, Matthias found himself in the chair by the window with a drink he was not actively consuming, looking at the room.

He thought about Chaos, the weight of the thing in Teutoburg, the specific quality of the air when something ancient and genuinely malevolent was present. Gone now. Shattered, in Joseph's assessment, in a way that the historical record had never recorded before, and the mechanism for its return was not clear, but its absence was clear, and he lived in its absence now.

He thought about Sylvia, the flat, contained face of her across every encounter, and the last image of her: bound, unconscious, led away across the dead garden by people whose job it was to process what she was through systems built for that purpose. She was in a Romanian facility now, answering the questions that the Romanian authorities had assembled. She would be for a long time.

He exhaled slowly.

"You look peaceful," Belial said, appearing at his shoulder with the uncanny timing she had always had for arriving at the moment he was thinking something he hadn't said.

"I am, approximately," he said.

She looked at him with the expression she used when she was confirming something she already knew and was simply glad to have confirmed.

"Chaos is gone," he said. "Sylvia is in a prison on the other side of the continent. The people who were trying to ruin my life through the mechanism of large-scale supernatural catastrophe are, as a category, temporarily out of operation." He looked at the room, Aki and Yuki in the middle of what appeared to be a competitive disagreement about something, Astreal near the kitchen, Joseph by the wall with a glass and the patient quality he carried everywhere. "I can sleep."

"You slept on the plane."

"That was the first time in approximately..." He thought about it. "A while."

Belial made a soft sound that was technically not a word but communicated clearly enough, and she settled beside him, and the evening continued.

"Now that things are safe," Yuki said, at the table, in the tone she used when she was positioning a statement carefully before deploying it, "the matter of a mistress position..."

"No," Belial said.

"No," Astreal said.

Yuki accepted this with a serene expression and refilled her glass.

Joseph left after the dishes were done.

He shook hands with Aki, which was the gesture they used between them for things that didn't need to be named. He told Yuki to behave, and Yuki said that she would consider it, which was the best offer available. He looked at Matthias for a moment with the expression he carried when he was assessing something and finding it satisfactory, and then he nodded once, the economical nod of a person who has said what needed to be said across all the preceding months and doesn't require an addition.

"Unfinished business," he said.

"You always have unfinished business," Matthias said.

"Yes," Joseph said, and left.

The Taiga in late autumn had the quality of a place that had been imposing its terms on visitors for longer than the concept of visiting had existed. The trees were enormous and the silence under them was the particular silence of something vast choosing not to make noise rather than the silence of emptiness. The cold was the dry, specific cold of a latitude that didn't negotiate.

Bolward's men had set up in a clearing, fires going, the camp arranged with the functional efficiency of people who had been living like this long enough to have stopped treating it as temporary. Fifty of them, roughly, in the disposition of a group with nowhere pressing to be and a great deal to discuss.

Bolward himself stood at the edge of the firelight.

He was, as he had always been, the most composed person in any given space. Forty years old and carrying them the way someone carried a set of tools, practically, without sentiment. He had been going over the Romania outcome for the past week with the specific attention of someone who believed that a failed plan was only wasted if you didn't extract the information from it.

"He didn't turn," Vasco said, from across the fire. It was not new information. It was the shape of the problem being restated.

"He didn't turn," Bolward confirmed.

"He shouldn't have been able to hold it," he said. "That volume of dark energy, that degree of grief trigger, the historical precedent is unambiguous. He should not have been able to pull back from that."

"And yet," Bolward said.

The fire moved. Somewhere in the tree line, the wind pushed through the upper branches and the sound of it was very far away.

"We adapt," Bolward said.

He turned it over with the patience of someone who had been adapting to adverse information for most of his adult life.

"Belial and Astreal are the primary protection. The hero families are the secondary layer. But Matthias is not always with all of them simultaneously. He has a life, an ordinary one, apparently. Work. Routine. The gaps in the routine are where we..."

The figure landed without a sound.

It came from the tree directly behind Bolward, dropped the full distance to the frozen ground and arrived without the physics of the drop showing in the landing, and the light from the fires found the blade of the Sun Blade before it found the face above it, and the face was Joseph Marco's, and the expression on it was not one that had appeared in any of the preceding months in Matthias's company.

Joseph was smiling.

It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of a person who has been working toward a specific conclusion for a considerable amount of time and has just arrived at it.

"You caused my people a great deal of trouble," he said.

His voice had the same calm authority it always had. The tone underneath the calm was different.

"Tipping Sylvia to use the grief mechanism. The Romanian government needed to be briefed afterward. A colleague spent three days in an uncomfortable conversation explaining certain things to the interior ministry." He looked at Bolward with the direct, unhurried attention of someone for whom the next several minutes held no uncertainty. "That was administratively inconvenient."

The fifty men in the clearing were on their feet.

Weapons, the assembled toolkit of a mercenary group that had been operating in wilderness conditions: blades, batons, a few firearms, the improvised hardware of people who had learned to work with what they could carry. Fifty to one were numbers that communicated something specific and that specific thing was currently being communicated.

Bolward looked at Joseph with the composure that was his most consistent quality. "You came here alone," he said. It was not quite a question.

"Did I," Joseph said.

He raised his free hand.

The tree line moved.

They came in from three sides, in the specific, practiced formation of people who had trained for exactly this kind of enclosure and had been waiting in the cold of the Taiga for however long it had taken Joseph to finish his conversation. The Spetsnaz moved with the efficient purposefulness of a unit that had been briefed thoroughly and had no outstanding questions about what they were here to do. They were armed with batons, a choice that communicated the operational objective without requiring it to be stated.

Alive. All of them.

The melee was loud and brief and went in one direction.

Fifty mercenaries against a coordinated unit of Russian special forces in an enclosed space, at night, on the unit's chosen terms, was not a contest that required extended analysis to predict. The fires got knocked over. Someone went into the tree line and was collected from the tree line. Duncan made a genuine effort and was on the ground within forty seconds. Bolward did not resist, he stood, assessed the arithmetic, and put his hands forward for the restraints with the composure of a man who had already begun the next calculation.

When it was done, the clearing was full of restrained people and the Spetsnaz were methodical in their processing.

The squad leader came to Joseph.

"The location was accurate," he said. "Thank you for the intelligence."

"I have a network," Joseph said. "It produces information."

"These men have been on several watch lists," he said. "We are glad to have them."

"I expect you are," Joseph said.

He watched as Bolward's group was assembled, Bolward himself upright and still, the one-armed man and the one-eyed man near the back of the formation with the specific quality of people who were revising their understanding of how their life had arrived at its current configuration, Duncan somewhere in the middle with the sullen energy of someone who had not yet finished being angry about the arithmetic. They moved through the tree line in the ordered procession of a problem being taken somewhere it would be dealt with.

Joseph watched them go.

"You should not have walked your ancestor's path," he said, to no one in particular, or to all of them equally. "It didn't end well for him. It hasn't ended well for you."

The clearing was quiet.

The fires were mostly out.

The phone screen showed two faces: Yuki, who had clearly been watching the feed with the focused attention she dropped into when things were interesting, and Aki beside her with the expression of a person who had been informed of the plan in advance and had found the execution satisfactory.

"Efficient," Aki said.

"The one-armed one made an impressive effort," Yuki said. "Before being put on the ground."

"He has had practice against difficult opponents," Joseph said.

"Are you coming back?"

"I have several things to do first." He looked at the tree line, which was just trees now. "Do not tell Matthias about this."

Yuki raised an eyebrow. "You don't think he'd want to know?"

"He would want to know," Joseph said. "And then he would feel responsible, and then he would spend time thinking about threats that have now been neutralised rather than doing what he should be doing." He paused. "He is not a dark lord. He is not a god. He is a person who fought for the right to have an ordinary life and has earned it." The cold of the Taiga was very present and very honest. "He should have it. With the two of them, and the routine, and whatever it is he does at that office of his."

Yuki was quiet for a moment.

"Alright," she said. And she said it in the register she used when something had landed, and she was choosing not to add anything to it.

Aki nodded once.

Joseph ended the call.

Above the Taiga, the sky was the specific dark of a place far from any city, deep and full of things that had been there longer than the concerns of anyone currently on the ground, and entirely indifferent to all of them. Joseph stood in the clearing for a moment, his breath visible in the cold air.

Then he picked up his green backpack from where he had left it against the base of the tree, settled it on his shoulders, and walked into the forest.

He had other things to do.

He always had other things to do.