7. Leif
Leif
Something’s ringing.
I don’t move. Moving is a decision and I haven’t made it. It can ring.
It rings again, longer — the tone that doesn’t quit on its own. I open one eye. The comm sits lit on the far table, throwing blue across the wall. I leave it. Most things that want me in the dark want something I’m not going to give them, and they give up faster than they think they will.
Then the second tone. The one that isn’t a request.
I’m up before I’ve decided to be, across the room, the thing already in my hand that I already don’t want there.
No greeting. The line never wastes one on me.
“ásp Móra. The Vestry requires your unit. Fifteen minutes.”
It cuts before I can answer, and the quiet after it tells me more than the words did. Fifteen minutes is nothing. I’ve moved this unit on less, out a window and across a border with the order still warm. The fifteen minutes was never going to be the problem.
The Vestry calling me is the problem.
They don’t call units. They call the Legion.
The Legion calls us. That chain exists so anything the Vestry wants runs through enough hands to go quiet before it ever reaches mine — softened, shaped how they want it, and made survivable.
When they reach past all of it and put the order in my ear raw, it’s because someone decided I should have it before it had a chance to become something I could stand to hear.
So I’m already moving.
I run the next ten minutes in my head while my body handles the first one.
Who I wake and in what order. What I tell them and what I hold.
How fast I can have four men underground and composed in front of people who will read every flicker we fail to hide.
The list assembles itself the same way it has the ten thousand times I’ve built it.
It’s the one thing I never have to think about.
Brock’s door is open before I reach it. He was up with the second tone — he sleeps the way other men keep watch, one layer down, always listening.
He’s dressed. Ready. Already knows it’s bad, because Brock has never once stopped at bad when worse was sitting right next to it, and the maddening thing about him is that he’s usually right.
“Vestry,” he says. Not a question.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Directly?”
“Directly.”
Something moves behind his eyes and goes still. He’s already two conclusions ahead of me and he won’t say either one until he’s sure. I let him keep them. I’ve got my own.
Gunnar I have to wake, and Gunnar is loud. He’s talking before he’s upright. It’s the most honest thing about him — everyone else collects themselves on the way to consciousness and Gunnar just arrives mid-complaint. I have to fight a smile. If he catches it the whole thing’s over, so I don’t.
“Whatever it is, no.” Half-dressed and offended to be awake. “Middle of the night. I have a rule. Nothing good has ever come for me in the dark.”
“Vestry. Fifteen minutes.”
“Fuck.”
He goes quiet for three full seconds. I watch for it every time, because a loud Gunnar is performing and a quiet Gunnar is the only one telling the truth. And that truth on his face right now is the same fear that’s sitting in my chest. Then he’s back out of it, faster, reaching for his boots.
“Why us? Why directly? What did we do?” He points a boot at me. “What did you do? That’s the better question. Is this the records thing? Tell me you didn’t fix their records again.”
“I didn’t fix anything.”
“You change one date, they call it tampering. I told you that.”
“It’s not the records, Gunnar.”
He’s still grumbling when I step out, and I let him. The grumbling means he’s scared and the scared means he’s paying attention, and I want all four of them paying attention walking into that room.
Rayner’s already in the corridor, and he’s the first thing tonight I can’t place.
I read these men for a living. It’s the work under the work.
Before I command anyone, I need to know what’s running through them.
Four hundred years is long enough to learn Rayner’s tells.
The easy read comes clean: he’s dressed, he’s waiting, he’s calm.
It’s the next layer that’s wrong. He’s too still.
His back is to a hall full of men he should have heard coming three rooms ago, because Rayner hears everything, Rayner has never once been surprised by a footstep in his life, and tonight he didn’t turn.
Something’s got hold of him.
“You sleep?” I ask.
He takes too long. “Enough.”
A lie. A small, useless one, and that’s what makes this worse than I first suspected — Rayner doesn’t bother lying to me about things that don’t mean anything, which means this one means something.
I could push, but I’ve got the time for exactly none of it and the Vestry is counting down behind my ribs. So it’ll have to wait.
“Head out.”
They’re behind me before I clear the door.
We move. Out through the gallery, down the back ways — the route that runs under everything, the one most of Teth has forgotten and I’ve never let myself forget, because tonight is exactly the kind of night you reach the Vestry without being seen arriving.
I set the pace. Fast enough to make fifteen minutes, even enough that four men walk in looking like they were never afraid.
The look is half the work, and I build it into them on the way down, one corridor at a time.
They let me.
In that room the look is the only thing that’ll be ours to keep.
The stairs take us deeper below the surface and keep curving, swallowing their own ends in the dark.
The unit stays close at my back without being told.
That part I never have to manage. Whatever else is wrong with these men, they know how to fall in behind me, and there are nights that’s the only thing holding me up.
“It’s Erik,” Gunnar says, three flights down. He can’t hold quiet on a staircase any more than he can hold it anywhere else. “Three years of nothing, and the one night I actually sleep, he surfaces. Has to be him.”
“You don’t know that,” Brock says.
“It’s Erik until it isn’t. That’s probability.”
“That’s not probability.”
“It’s mine.”
I let them run. It costs nothing and it keeps their minds busy, and a unit that’s talking is a unit that hasn’t started bracing for the worst yet. I’ll take every moment of that I can give them.
“Maybe they finally remembered he exists,” Gunnar says, a flight later. “Dug his file out from under a rock. Oh, right. We had a fifth.”
Nobody laughs.
The Vestry let three years pass on one of ours. Most of Teth wrote Erik off before any of us were anywhere close to ready. They filed him under lost because lost is tidy and a man still out there is a question nobody wanted to keep answering.
I never filed him anywhere.
I still set his place.
Not one of these men has ever told me to stop, which is its own kind of loyalty.
“Or he’s dead,” Gunnar says, quieter now.
“No.” Brock, flat and certain. “I don’t believe that.”
We take the rest of the stairs down in silence.
The whole way, Rayner hasn’t said a word.
That’s not strange by itself — he’s the quiet one, the still water the rest of us make noise around. But he’s not still like he usually is. Something happened between lights out and the call. I drop back a step to put us shoulder to shoulder, low enough it stays between us.
“Where are you?”
He comes back from a long way off. “Here.”
“You sure about that.”
He breathes out, drags a hand down his face. “Bad sleep. Strange dreams.”
It’s the most he’s given me and it’s still nothing. I can usually read every man on this staircase before he opens his mouth. Tonight Rayner gives me a lie about sleep and there’s nothing underneath it I can reach.
I’ve never once had to wonder about this man.
I can’t afford to start right now.
The doors to the Embers stand open.
I don’t like that.
Four hundred years, and I’ve stood at these doors eight times.
Eight. I keep the count the way I keep all my counts, because the number is information and information is the only thing that’s ever kept these men alive.
Eight times, and the doors have never once been open before we reached them.
You wait. They decide. The waiting is the message.
There’s no waiting tonight. That’s a message too.
We walk in.
It’s never been all of them. In eight visits I’ve seen three, four, once five of the Vestry seated, never the full circle.
Tonight the circle is closed. Every seat filled.
And in the place at the center that I’d half-decided was a story they tell to frighten the young — Ezra.
Her gray hair lifting in a wind that isn’t moving anywhere else in the room.
I didn’t believe she was real.
Four hundred years, and I still don’t have a name for what sits in this room.
The Legion knows dragons. The Orders know how the world is put together.
Nobody knows the Vestry. I’ve never needed a category badly enough to invent one, and I don’t reach for it now.
They’re the Vestry. That’s the whole of what anyone can say.
Her eyes find mine the second we clear the threshold and they do not let go. Every instinct I’ve spent four centuries sharpening stands up at once and says the same word.
Bad.
No one offers us anything. No seats, no names, no softening.
They don’t explain themselves to men like us and we’ve never been fools enough to expect it.
For a long moment nobody speaks. They take us in the way I take in a room before I commit men to it — measuring, sorting, deciding what we are and what we’ll cost — and it is a deeply strange thing to stand on the receiving end of.
I read people for a living. In this room I’m the one being read, opened up and turned over, and I cannot read a single face back.
That’s never happened to me. I’d prefer it never happen again.
Ezra stands. Her eyes don’t leave mine.
“We have located Erik.”
My pulse kicks once, hard. My face doesn’t move. My face is the only part of me that takes orders without arguing, and I need it now more than I’ve ever needed it.
Beside me Brock goes rigid.
“Alive.” She says it before the question can fill the room, before any of us has to be the one to ask it and risk the answer. “He is alive.”
Gunnar’s shoulders come down. The breath I didn’t know I was holding goes out of me slow. Alive. Three years, and the word still does something to a man’s knees.
And still I can’t settle, because the Embers do not wake a unit in the dark and open their doors and seat their eldest to tell four men their friend is breathing.
Good news comes by messenger. You’re only brought into this room for the part that comes after the good news, and I already don’t want it.
“Where?” Quiet. You don’t raise your voice in here.
“Beyond the crossing.” Ezra’s voice is unhurried, like she has all the time the rest of us are running out of. “He has been beyond the crossing since the night we lost him.”
Three years. One crossing away. Close enough to walk to, in the scheme of things, and it took the oldest powers in Teth this long to find him.
I don’t like that. If he was that close, either no one looked, or something kept him from being found.
Neither answer is one I want to carry out of this room.
“Then we bring him home,” I say.
“That,” Ezra says, “is the difficulty.”
She doesn’t continue right away. She’s watching me, looking for something. She has outlasted more of us than I will ever meet, and she is choosing her next words with care. That, more than anything tonight, is what cools the room.
“There is a disturbance around him.” Her eyes stay on mine, only mine, and I feel the rest of the circle watching her watch me. “We cannot name it. We have looked, and the looking comes back empty. We know only that it surrounds him, and it is unlike anything we have read in an age of this world.”
The corner of her mouth lifts. Not a smile. Something older and stranger than a smile, aimed at me like she can see a road I’m standing at the foot of and haven’t noticed yet.
I don’t ask what the disturbance is. They’ve already told me they don’t know, and a commander doesn’t waste questions on answers that don’t exist. I ask the only thing that’s mine to decide.
“When do we leave.”
“Immediately.”