Day Patrol
Chapter seventeen
Varia called the halt a little before midday, which meant I had survived another morning.
I would be sore tomorrow, but less so than before. Over the last two weeks, training had shifted from feeling like betrayal to something more steady—a dull ache of muscles resigning themselves to use.
Medieval vampire-killing fitness would make a great gym class if the gym had excellent lawyers and strong liability waivers.
“Better,” Varia said, which from Varia was high praise.
“My arms feel like noodles,” I said.
Varia laughed.
“That is the soreness leaving and the strength arriving. They pass each other on the way.” She tossed me the water flask. “Drink. All of it.”
I drank. Water was astonishingly delicious after training meant to fight vampires rather than to satisfy a calorie target on a fitness app.
***
We were putting the practice blades away when Flavia crossed the yard.
We knew each other pretty well by then. After that first meeting in the mess hall, she started sitting with me more often, usually bringing raunchy jokes and inappropriate comments.
Today, she had a bow across her back and a sword at her hip.
“Lady Meghan,” she said, grinning.
“We talked about this.”
“The claimed woman of the High Commander should be referred to properly.”
I rolled my eyes, but I was smiling.
It had become a running joke between us. Flavia liked calling me Lady because she knew it annoyed me. I had disliked it on principle at first, but it was growing on me.
“Flavia.” Varia returned the greeting with flat warmth. “You are riding out?”
“Day patrol. Gaius and I.” Flavia tipped her head toward the gate.
Gaius stepped closer.
He was tall, though not Skip tall, with sun-browned skin and dark blond hair cropped short at the sides.
He had a lean, athletic build rather than Skip’s battlefield-wall proportions, all compact strength and easy balance.
A sword hung at his hip, and a short hunter’s hook was strapped across his back.
Varia’s lips parted slightly, and she looked at him for half a second too long. Just long enough for her expression to change before she caught it and put it back where it belonged.
I made a mental note to become extremely annoying about that later.
“Well,” Varia said, reassembling herself into a lieutenant with impressive speed. “If you find anything, report it to me.”
“Always,” Flavia said.
Varia looked at me. “Meghan, same time tomorrow.”
I nodded.
Varia departed briskly.
“What does a day patrol actually do?” I asked.
“Mostly it is quiet,” Flavia said. “The sun does our work for us. Nothing that wants to drain you can be out in it for long.” She swung up into the saddle. “But quiet is not nothing. We check the places the sun does not reach.”
“Caves,” Gaius said. “The ruins out west. There are deep places where the dark holds all day. Now and then, something is hiding in one, waiting for the night.”
“And the sellswords,” Flavia said. For the first time, the humor left her voice. “That is the real problem. Sellswords. Anyone willing to take coin for a body. They snatch people off roads, from the remote villages.”
She looked toward the mountains.
“Then they move them toward Druvenfall. The captives are kept there, alive enough to suffer and weak enough not to run. Morvanna and her command layer drain them again and again, right up to the edge of death.” Her mouth tightened.
“They are not prisoners in the ordinary sense. They are stores of blood.”
“The handoffs happen at the edge of dark places,” Gaius said.
“Caves. Ruins. Somewhere the undead can remain in shadow, but the sellsword can stay in the light. No sane sellsword follows the undead into darkness. In daylight, at the mouth of a cave or ruin, both sides have limits. The undead can stay just inside the shadow. The sellsword can stay just outside it. Neither one has to trust the other more than necessary.”
Gaius looked toward the hills as if the whole arrangement had left a bad taste in his mouth.
“They target people at the fringes. Travelers. Orphans. Convicts. Debtors. Hired hands. Women without families. Men who took the wrong work in the wrong season. Anyone who can vanish without the disappearance becoming a political problem.”
His voice stayed even, which somehow made it worse.
“Then the sorcerers pass word through whatever system they use. A person disappears at the edge of one kingdom, and something in Morvanna’s reach knows when and where to collect them.”
I thought about that, and felt my stomach turn. An entire economy of humans is transported like contraband. People as cargo, moved at a markup, the supply chain optimized around one fixed constraint: the customer could not stand in the sun.
It was grotesque in a way my brain did not want to make room for. A system. People making decisions, taking payment, arranging routes, choosing who mattered least.
“Most days we find nothing,” Flavia said. “Some days we find tracks. Once a season, we find a handoff in progress, and we ruin somebody’s afternoon.” She smiled again, but it was a different smile. “I like those days.”
“Can I come?” I said.
Gaius and Flavia exchanged a look that contained an entire conversation.
“I am not proposing to fight anyone. I am merely proposing to ride along, observe, and get out of these walls for an afternoon.”
“Daytime loop is the safest thing we do,” Flavia said, considering. “Gaius?”
“She stays between us,” Gaius said. “She does what she is told. If I tell you to get down, you stay down.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“Then you can come.”
I took that as permission and went to get Velox.
***
The valley in daylight was more familiar than the one I had arrived in half-conscious on my first day. The wrongness I had felt then, the sky pitched at the wrong angle, visible stars in a blue sky, had not gone away so much as settled into the background.
We rode west, away from the mountains at first and then curving back toward them along a line of dry watercourses that Flavia called the draws. She and Gaius rode without much talk. I rode in the middle, as instructed, and watched them, which was its own education.
Autumn had begun to put its hands on the valley.
A thinning in the grass, a dry gold edge to the hills, a coolness under the sunlight that made the shade feel sharper than it should have.
The leaves on the scrub trees were yellow at the tips, and every time the wind moved through them, they sounded brittle.
It made the whole place feel beautiful in a way I did not entirely trust.
The land climbed. The grass thinned to scrub, then to bare ground broken by stone.
After a while, the stone stopped looking natural.
I saw it before Flavia named it. A line too straight to be accidental.
A block with a worked edge, half-swallowed by the hillside.
Then more of them. Cut stones were scattered up the slope.
Whatever this place was, it belonged to the same dead civilization that had built the arches I had seen on my first day.
“The old stones,” Flavia said. “We check the big one. There is a way down into it.”
I could not stop looking. Whatever had cut these had cared about the angles. There was a doorway, or the ruin of one, two uprights and a fallen stone support beam, and beyond it the ground sloped down into darkness.
“What is this?” I asked. “Who built it?”
“No one knows,” Gaius said. “It was here before the line. Before Newardia. The mages say they were built before our history.”
I wanted, very badly and very stupidly, to go inside.
I did not, because at that moment Gaius lifted a closed fist, and Flavia went still, and I remembered my one job and stopped my horse.
There were tracks in front of us. Fresh. And a smell I did not have a category for yet, but would never afterward forget, something underneath the cold stone smell, organic and wrong.
“Handoff,” Gaius said, very quietly. “In progress.”
Fear slid through me, cold and precise, locking my spine straight and my hands around the reins. It was the sudden, total awareness that the awful system we had been discussing in the abstract had become very real, very close, and currently had a location.
My fingers tightened on the reins.
Velox shifted beneath me, and I made myself stay still.
***
The sellsword came out from behind one of the larger stone formations.
He was big, broad through the shoulders, dressed in mismatched armor that looked stolen from three different dead men. A sword hung in one hand. His other hand was locked around the arm of a young woman.
She looked to be in her twenties. Her wrists were bound. A gag was tied across her mouth. Her eyes were enormous above it.
Behind them, the stone arch opened into darkness.
Something waited there. I could not see its body. I could only see two points of red at the edge of the shadow, low and steady and patient.
The old ruin made the air around them feel older and colder. Cut stone. Dead carvings. A black mouth in the hill. The kind of place that made every reasonable part of my brain want to file a formal objection and leave.
Flavia slid down from her horse with her bow already in her hands.
Gaius kicked his horse forward.
The sellsword shoved the young woman to the ground and turned to meet him.
Velox decided that this was the line. He shied. I came off.
The ground hit me hard enough to drive the breath out of my lungs and knock my glasses clean off my face. They flew somewhere into the scrub and stone.
The world went soft at the edges. My field of vision was blurred enough to make everything less trustworthy.
My prescription was not catastrophic, but it was real, and for one terrible second, my brain left the vampire-handoff situation entirely and went straight to the logistical nightmare of optometry in Mytharo.
The sellsword saw Gaius bearing down on him and roared, the sound scraping off the old stones and vanishing into the dark mouth of the ruin.
Right.
Mercenary first. Vision care later.