They Wanted a Hero; They Got a Legatus of the Thousand Sons

The circle had been blessed by three popes, warded by a mage from the capital, and paid for by a duke who had sold off two daughters worth of dowries to find the money. They had tried it nine times. On the eighth attempt it had produced a smell.

The ninth was a boy of fifteen, the son of a charcoal burner, chosen because he was standing there.

The light took him and turned him inside out.

What came up out of the flagstones was ceramite and about four hundred pounds of meat.

Then the screaming started, which was the correct response.

Varkos counted the room before he had finished standing up. Twenty three people. One door, high and iron, at the wrong end of the nave. Six painted windows, all shut. Nineteen of the twenty three carrying weapons, and eleven of those already backing toward that one door, which meant that if it shut they would have had four feet of space between themselves and the answer to three hundred years of prayer.

He could have killed all twenty three inside the time it took the boy to stop breathing. He did not, and it was not restraint. None of them were the problem.

The boy was on his side on the flagstones. Still breathing. Nothing behind the eyes.

Varkos crouched, put two fingers against his throat, and left them there a while, and the screaming carried on without him.

"Out," said a voice from the altar. "All of you. Out. Weapons down."

That was the bishop, and it was the most competent thing Varkos had seen since the transit.

The room emptied at a run. Not all of it. The bishop stayed, and a woman, and an old man with a staff, and a young man by the door who had armed himself with a censer.

"Did you hear me," said the bishop. "Weapons down."

They went down.

He came off the altar and down the steps. Sixty years, a purple cloak he had not chosen, and hands shaking badly enough that he had to hold them in front of himself. He stopped eight feet short, which was four feet further than anybody else in the building had managed.

"I am Derevin," he said. "We are afraid."

"Yes."

"We are extremely afraid and there is no procedure for it."

"There is no procedure."

"There is no procedure," said Derevin. "I have been in this Order for thirty eight years. I have run every rite in this building and there is no procedure for what has just happened on my floor, and I am going to tell you what I am going to do about it, and I would like you to let me finish."

Varkos looked at him for a while.

"Finish."

"The Order summoned a Champion. Something else answered. I have three hundred years of doctrine and not one of them covers this, and I am not going to pretend to you that I have an answer, because you will know." Derevin swallowed. "What I have is a Chapter, and a wall in the north with a hole in it, and eighteen months. If you are going to help us I would like to do it now. If you are not, I would like you to say so now, and I would like it to be quick."

Varkos sat down.

He sat down on the second step of the altar, which put him above the bishop for the first time since the transit and was the first thing he did in this world that was not strictly necessary.

"Send everyone out. The woman stays, the old man stays, the one with the censer stays. They can look. It saves you having to describe me badly later."

"You are not going to hurt them."

"I am not going to hurt anybody in this building," said Varkos, "and I would like to be clear that this is an allocation of my attention and not a promise about my capabilities. I have killed every person in this room four times over without standing up. I have not done it because you are not worth the effort. Try not to make me revise that."

The room did not make any sound at all.

"I am aware that sounds like a threat," he said. "It is a budget. Get used to it."

He stood and walked to the wall.

Eleven feet up, in letters the size of a man's thigh. A language he could read.

From beyond the Counting, the Champion comes. He bears no crown, and no name of any realm. He does not fear the Gate, for the Gate is a door and he is a door's opposite. He takes up the wage that is no wage. And the Last Enemy will know him.

He read it twice, standing back from it the way you stand back from a diagram.

"Your Order built a Gate," he said. "In a wall. And then waited three hundred years for it to go off on its own."

"The Verse does not describe a..."

"Your Verse describes a mechanism and you have spent three hundred years reading it as a description of a man." He put a finger under the third line without touching the stone. "This is not poetry. This is somebody who watched a door kill people and worked out what you have to put on the far side of one so the door stops killing people. It is an engineering note. Someone with a good hand and a bad temperament."

The woman said, "It is scripture."

"It is a set of working notes," said Varkos, "and your Order has spent three centuries trying to find a man's name in them."

He tapped the fourth line.

"The wage that is no wage. Mechanism. Not doctrine. What moves, where it goes, and who is standing at the end of it."

"The tithe," said the bishop. "Coin and grain, twice a year. It goes to the Order."

"And where does the Order send it?"

"Into the vaults under the north tower."

"That is where it stops being your money and not where it goes. Where does it go."

"It funds the Order."

"It funds the poorhouse at Corrance," said Derevin. "It funds the wards and the Chapter and the nine summoning attempts. That is all it funds. I have been in this Order for thirty eight years and it is all it funds, and I have never once asked what the levy is for, and I have never once been told."

Varkos looked at him.

That was the first genuinely interesting thing anybody had said to him since he arrived.

"A rank," he said. "A wage. A seal on it. Quarters with a lock on the door."

"You have no authority to set conditions."

"I have the only thing in this building that matters and you know it." He said it the way you would read a number off a gauge. "You will offer me a rank and a seal and you will not enjoy it, and I will take Iron, because Iron is the rank nobody asks questions of. Iron is furniture. In eighteen months I intend to need a claim rather than a reputation, and a man with a seal is a man with a claim."

"Iron is the lowest rank there is."

"Yes. That is the point of it."

The old man with the staff made a small sound. The woman had not moved and had not blinked.

"You will be named at the Feast of Wards," said Derevin. "You will stand where the hero stands."

"Fine."

"You are aware what that will mean."

"I am aware that in four months there will be a great many people who have decided what I am, and that by then I will have a rank, a wage and a seal, and that none of them will be able to take those back off me without a fight." Varkos looked at the wall again. "Yes. I am aware."

They gave him the north transept and a room with a lock.

He did not sleep in it and he did not sleep anywhere, and when the Chapter's cleric offered him a consecrated cell for devotions Varkos said "perhaps" and went out to walk the wall, because the order in which he had decided to say that word was going to matter later and for now he needed the hours.

The ring was four hundred years old and had a hole in it where he had come through, and the hole was in him, and he wanted to be somewhere that was not made of the same stone for a while.

He did not sleep because he did not need to. He had not needed to in some centuries, and the Long Oath took the rest away, because it does not permit him to stop, and it has not permitted him to stop in nine hundred years, and it fired on its own now rather than on his word, which was the part that had stopped being funny a long time ago.

At the fourth hour he sat on the north wall with his back to the Counting and put his hands flat on the stone and tried to do the one thing he had come here to do.

He reached for the future the way a man reaches for a door handle in the dark.

It was not there.

Not blocked, not dark. Not there. Nine hundred years of a seam in his skull that had fed him the shape of things four hundred seconds before he walked into them, and the handle turned and the door was not a door.

He tried a third time, out of habit, the way a man tries a light switch that has already failed.

Behind his sternum, the elbow said a word in the old bad dialect.

Contact.

Varkos stopped.

The elbow had been quiet for nine hundred years. It had spoken to him when he was in the Eye. It had spoken twice, both times, and both times it had been to warn him.

This was not a warning.

Something had put its hand on the other end of a nine hundred year old bond and had pulled, once, to see if anybody was home.

And he was home.

He sat on a wall three hundred miles from a Gate with his hands flat on the stone and worked out what had been done to him, and the working out took him until dawn, and it was not a complicated working out, and that was the worst of it.

There was a hole in the warp behind him where the transit should have been, and the hole had been made from the far side, which meant something large had pushed and missed.

The damage had a shape. He had seen that shape before, in the last few centuries, more than once, and it had always been the same hand, always doing the same thing, which was reaching further into the machinery than the mathematics would carry.

"Ahriman," said Varkos, to nobody, on a wall, at dawn.

Somewhere on the far side of a hole he could not see, a warp operation that had cost three hundred years of somebody's prayers and one charcoal burner's son had missed by an amount that would have been funny if it had been anyone else's.

And the elbow was an open door now, and something had tested it, and had found him in it.

The Guild hall in Corrance smelled of wet wool, boiled cabbage, and the sour note of forty men who had all come back from something and were being told they were not heroes.

Every one of them was frightened of him, and it was in the room like weather.

He had walked in at dawn, in full plate, and the hall had gone quiet in the way a hall goes quiet, and then a very large man by the door had walked backwards into the notice board and had stood there holding the frame for some time. A woman selling rope had put her hand flat on her stock. Two men who had been arguing about a contract stopped arguing.

Nobody had run. That was the part he had expected and did not get.

They did not run because they had decided to be brave. They had stood still because the arithmetic had already been done, somewhere at the back of the skull, in the place where a body keeps the answer to questions it has not been asked yet. Something that large had come into a hall where the largest man present was wearing mail, and it had gone to the board and started reading contracts.

The registrar looked up when he reached the counter and put down her quill.

"Name."

"Varkos."

"Rank."

"I have not got one."

"Guild rank."

"Whatever is lowest."

She wrote it down. Her hand was steady, which he noticed, because everybody else's in the building was not.

"Test?"

"No."

"Then you are Iron," she said, and did not look up again, and did not ask a single follow up question about a nine foot plate marine asking for the lowest rank in the building.

He liked her enormously for that.

Iron meant shared cots, communal rations, and the right to be sent anywhere. Iron meant nobody looked at him twice. He had wanted Iron since before he had crossed the room, and Iron had given it to him instantly and without argument, and the reason was not respect.

It was that she was frightened enough to fill in the form and frightened enough not to ask what any of the boxes meant.

Iron was furniture.

He read four hundred notices on the claim board. Wolf packs in the Weights. A bridge at Bell Heather wanting carrying teams. Two complaints about a miller cheating on the flour weight. A Silver pin for a river wyrm payable in silver, which meant it was a lie.

A notice four days old, bottom row, in the corner:

CONTRACT 1187. HOLLOWMERE. BOARS, LARGE, WELL ABOVE NORMAL. GOLD, DULLED. RIDER ESCORT PREFERRED.

Four days old and unclaimed, in a hall where men fought over work.

He read it twice and then reached for the future out of habit, because that was still what he did before deciding anything, and for nine hundred years it had answered.

The valley came instead. Unasked. Trees and a ford and a barn with a good roof and eleven houses with no smoke coming out of any of them, and six shapes moving through the dark at a walking pace, none of which he had ever seen.

He stood at the board and looked at a contract for a village he had never heard of, and the valley was in his head, and he had not decided to go there.

That was not prescience. He knew the difference now the way he knew the difference between a wound and a scar. Prescience does not show you a place you have not chosen. Prescience shows you the four hundred seconds before the choice you were always going to make, wearing the shape of the choice so that you do not look at the choice.

What had come instead was a picture with a hole cut in the middle of it.

He filed contract eleven eighty seven and did not move for some time.

A woman came and stood beside him and read it upside down without moving her head.

"Boars," she said. "Three seasons running, if it is. That is not a boar. That is something wearing a boar."

He did not answer.

"Terrel," she said. "That is not a question."

"No."

"You can have the contract. I would have taken it anyway." She said it fast and flat, the way people talk to something they have decided to be calm at. "And I am not asking what you are. I want you to know that I am not asking. I have a rate of not asking and I am spending it on this."

"Noted."

"Good." She was already walking away.

He took the contract.

He took a second one four days later that bought a horse, and a third four days after that which bought a second horse. He was aware that a man of his obvious size buying horses at speed was a thing people would notice, and he did it anyway, because he needed to cover ground and because the alternative was asking permission from people who would say yes.

He took Terrel. A monk named Ash, who had looked at Varkos once, in daylight, at the edge of the yard, and had then gone and packed and said nothing about it. And a boy called Wick who had lied about his age and been let through because the Guild was short and the boy was fast.

Nine iron raiders. Quiet, and no banners, and not one of them in armour they were born in.

Terrel noticed in the first hour. Ash noticed in the second. Wick noticed nothing, being sixteen and having a horse.

They rode twelve miles and made camp and Ash put down a bedroll for him, and Varkos stood over it.

"You are not using that."

"No."

"That is a bedroll."

"Yes."

"You have not closed your eyes since Corrance," said Terrel. "Ash has been counting. It is four days."

"Yes."

"Does the oath need you to keep moving?"

Varkos looked at her. She had a way of landing questions that was very difficult to argue with and that he suspected was entirely unconscious.

"Yes," he said. "And I do not sleep because I do not need to. Those are two different problems and only one of them is the oath."

"That is not remotely reassuring."

"It was not meant to be."

In the morning he was in exactly the same place, sitting with his back to a stone, facing the road, with nothing whatsoever wrong with him.

Hollowmere sat in a fold of the hills with the look of a place that had been fine and had then been left alone.

Eleven farms. A chapel. A grain barn with a good roof. A road that came in from the west and stopped at a ford somebody had engineered, which meant there had been a plan here once.

The farms were empty. Not looted. Emptied, in the way that means people left with time to pack, and they had all left the same direction, which was west.

"Not a monster," said Ash. "This is a warning."

"Yes."

"Six of them at the ford," said Varkos. "Wait for my first hit, then hold the high ground. Nobody comes down. Nobody fires until I fire."

"Six is a good deal of work."

"It is not six. It is one thing six times."

They did not ask him how he knew. That was the correct decision and he noted it privately and did not use it.

The boars came out of the treeline and they were wrong from the first stride. Boar shape, boar proportions, and a movement in the shoulder that belonged to something that had read about shoulders. Under the noise there was a note, low and underneath, that he felt in his teeth before his spine.

Wick stood up. Terrel pulled him flat without looking.

The lead animal reached the ford.

Varkos put a stone through the head of the second one and kept running.

The stone took the top of its skull in and it ran on nine feet and did not fall, and it turned, and it saw him, and he was already past it and going down the bank into the water.

What happened in the ford was not a battle. Battles have winners and they take some time and they get decided. This was a question about how long a body can be asked to continue.

He was a Moroshen. Six days of running and then he could fight on the fifth. He could hold a position until the position gave up. He had been built for one narrow purpose by men who understood exactly what they were for and had not cared in the slightest.

The first died of a throat, which was clean. The second did not die, and he broke its neck on the stones anyway and moved on because there were five more. The third charged and he took it on the edge of his shield and put it into the water and stood on it until it stopped having opinions.

The fourth and fifth came at once from two sides, which meant they had learned something, and that cost him a second and a half he had not budgeted.

The sixth one he did not kill.

He caught it on the forearm and did not hit it. He simply stayed where he was, in front of it, feet moving, and would not close, and would not leave, and the thing that had spent eleven years learning that nothing which runs ever comes back began to run.

The note under the sound stopped. All at once. The way a hand closes.

Then the sixth went into the treeline and did not come out.

Terrel arrived at a run and stopped well back from the water, because there is a piece of training nobody teaches and everybody learns, about not walking into a place where something has just stopped making noise.

"Five," she said.

"Six. One is in the trees and it will come back, and it will be faster than it was, and it will not use the ford."

"How long have you been doing this?"

He looked at his hands. They were steady.

"A long time," he said. "Everything I do is not stopping. It is the only trick I have and it is not even clever."

Terrel looked at him for a long moment, and he watched her rebuild the whole estimate, and he watched her understand, in real time, what Iron rank was and what she had been walking next to for nine days.

She did not step back. He had not thought she would, and he had not much cared either way, and the fact that she had managed it was a piece of information he filed as useful.

"Wick," said Varkos. "Unhurt. Sit down and stay sitting down."

The boy sat down.

"He goes back to Corrance with a written account," Varkos said. "Ash goes with him. You stay."

"I stay."

"You will send Wick in first and you will not be in the room when he does it, and he will hand the paper over himself." He looked at her. "He lied about his age. If he hands over a report himself, he is a person who lied about his age and did a day's work. If you hand it in for him, he is a child you are managing."

Terrel looked at Wick, and then at Varkos, and then she went and crouched by the boy and said something to him that he did not hear.

Varkos went up the ridge alone.

The picture had been sent to him four days before he read the notice, and it had had a hole cut in the middle of it, and now he was standing in the valley it had described, in the exact weather, at exactly the hour the shapes had been moving in it.

Behind his sternum, the elbow sat up.

It had been dead quiet since the cathedral. Since Varkos had put his shoulder against it and slammed the door it had been leaning on, it had said nothing at all, and Varkos had spent four days listening to the nothing and had decided that a silence he had caused was a thing he could work with.

It was not nothing.

Something was leaning on it, the way you lean on a door you have found unlocked, patient, and not in a hurry, and Varkos understood that he had mistaken a breach for a silence, and that the breach had a shape now that he had looked at it directly.

He unbucketed the sword and set it on the yard wall, because he wanted both hands, and because a two handed blade was a fifteen year old's weapon and he was carrying it because the world had given him nothing else and he had stopped finding that interesting.

"I would like a ledger," he said, to nobody, in an empty village. "And a rank that opens doors. And somebody to explain to me what a Gate is made of, since your own Order built one and cannot tell me."

He went into the barn.

The barn had a good roof and a raised floor, because somebody had cared about this place and spent money keeping grain dry on the highest ground in the valley, which made it the obvious place to put something you wanted to keep safe.

The door was shut.

Everything else in Hollowmere had been left open. Nine houses, food still in the pot when it went cold, doors standing. Somebody had closed the barn door from the outside and then gone west on foot, and had done it recently. Days. Maybe a week.

Not eleven years.

Varkos stood in the yard and had that in a second, because the thing in that barn had never needed a door shut behind it. It had needed one shut this week, by a hand that knew which door, which meant that hand was still within a week's walk of here and had not come back.

Behind his sternum, the elbow was leaning.

Not speaking. Leaning, toward the barn, with the patient attention of something that had been given a thing to watch nine hundred years ago and had never once been told to stop.

The prescience came without being asked.

It came complete, which was the part that told him not to trust it. Nine hundred years of a seam in his skull had fed him the shape of things in pieces and out of order, in fragments, the way a man sees the edge of a room before he sees the floor.

This came in one piece, held steady, with the clarity of something delivered rather than seen.

The barn. The floor. The ring of settled dust. The shape on the floor that was not a bull and not a man, but a thing that had worn a shape for eleven years the way a stone wears a hollow in a river.

And behind it, or below it, or somewhere the picture refused to resolve, a door in a wall standing open in a field of grey.

He watched it to the end.

The end showed the barn and the floor and the ring of dust and the shape, and nothing after that. No arrival. No eighteen months. No version of the scene in which anything came out of that door and had to be dealt with.

Varkos stood in the yard and let the picture finish and understood that he had been sent a photograph.

Nine hundred years and he had never once been shown a moment that stopped before the decision. That was not foresight. Foresight has an afterwards, because that is the only thing it is for.

Somebody had wanted him to know about a barn.

"No," he said, out loud, in an empty village. "No, that will do."

The elbow said: Contact.

"Not this time."

He went in.

The light inside was bad and the smell was worse, and at the far end, under the good roof, on the raised floor where four generations of Hollowmere grain had been kept dry, something that had been in the habit of going out at night had come back and was waiting.

It was the size of a bull. It was the shape of a man folded into something that could move fast. It had been waiting so long that the waiting had become the thing itself, and the dust around it had settled in a perfect ring at exactly the distance it had reached.

It looked at him.

Varkos let it look, because a predator establishing what you are is a process and interrupting a process is how men get killed. Then he gave it something to file that was wrong.

"Yes," he said. "That is the right size. Eleven years, and you have never met anything like me."

It came off the floor without hurrying. Four strides, with the patience of a thing that had learned patience in a valley where nothing ever ran.

It hit him hard enough to move him four feet, and he took it on the shoulder, and put his other hand flat on its chest.

And instead of looking through the bond, he shut it.

He had looked through it once, in the ford, on a man who had not asked and was owed nothing, and he had come out of that with eleven names he still had not given to anybody. So he did not do it again. He put everything he had into the elbow's doorway and shoved it, the way a man puts his shoulder into a door that is opening the wrong way, and he broke the receive function rather than the bond itself, which was a thing he had been taught to do and had not expected to need for another three or four centuries.

The elbow went quiet.

The shape in front of him staggered.

Varkos hit it four times in the head with a closed fist and killed it in a way that would have embarrassed a boy of fifteen.

He was on his knees in the dirt when he finished, with his nose bleeding and no memory of the last two seconds.

He sat in the dust of a dead thing in a good barn in a valley with no people in it.

"That was expensive," he said, to the roof, in a voice with almost a laugh in it. "I did not know what I was paying for. I would do it again, and I have said that before, and I did not enjoy it then either."

He got up. Picked up the sword. And then did the only thing he was any good at, which was the arithmetic.

Eleven years of a thing walking the valley roads at a walking pace, never faster, so that nothing which saw it move would ever learn what it could do. Eleven years of quiet, laid out on purpose, across three hundred miles of farmland in a world where a Gate stands in a wall to the north and the wall has a hole in it and eleven things are assembled on the far side of that hole waiting to be told.

The valley was not a hunting ground.

The valley was a rehearsal.

Eighteen months was not a distance. It was a date. And a date needed ground prepared, and this ground had been prepared for eleven years by something wearing a boar's shape on a farm road at a walking pace.

Somebody had posted a contract at a Guild board four days ago with a rider premium nobody would take, in a hall full of men who needed the work, and that contract had put a picture in his head before he had read it, and it had been bait, and he had gone to Hollowmere like a fish.

He had known that on the road. He had gone anyway.

That was the part he did not enjoy, because it meant he had been predictable for a moment, and he had been a Legion officer for a very long time, and being predictable had killed people he had been fond of.

He sat down on the yard wall, which was the first time his body had made that suggestion.

The transit had failed from the far side. Something large had pushed and missed, and the hole it left in the warp had a shape, and he had seen that shape before in the last few centuries, more than once, and it had always been the same hand, always reaching further into the machinery than the mathematics would carry, always certain it was nearly right.

"Ahriman," he said.

Nobody heard it. The valley was empty and the barn was dark and the elbow was spent, and there was nothing on the far side to answer with. Just a hole in the world, and a failed sum, and nine hundred years of a librarian's confidence sitting in a place called Hollowmere having missed by three hundred miles.

Then the rest of it arrived.

Something on the far side had missed. Something on the far side was still trying. The elbow was not a wound. It was an open door, and it had been opened from outside, and something had looked through it at him, and had decided.

Eighteen months was what the prophecy had said. Eighteen months was what the Order had budgeted for and built wards for and named feasts for. Eighteen months was how long this world had assumed it had left.

He had been on the wall in the cathedral for four hours with a prescience that had stopped answering, and he had put it down to shock, and then to the transit, and then to nine hundred years of being worn out.

It was not any of those.

The Iterations had not been waiting eighteen months. They had been waiting until the day the elbow woke up, and the elbow had woken up the moment he fell through, and the mathematics of that was very bad, because it meant the date had been set by the failure and not by them, and they had not lost any time at all.

They had gained a mark on a board somewhere and picked up the piece.

Varkos stood in the yard with the blood drying on his face.

So: a Gate in a wall, opened from the wrong side. A levy taken from a valley for three hundred years into a vault that pays for a poorhouse and nothing else. A rehearsal running in the open where anybody might have noticed it. A contract on a board. A door in his own chest that something had learned to use.

He put his hand flat against the barn wall and looked at the road going west, where twelve people had gone with time to pack and had not looked back.

"So," he said.

He was going to need a ledger. He was going to need a seal. He was going to need the Chapter's archives and the Guild's founding rolls and somebody in the Order who had asked where the levy went, and there was one of those, a frightened old man on the steps of his own altar who had admitted to not knowing.

And he was going to have to go on doing this in a building full of people who were frightened of him, in a world that had just lost eighteen months while he slept, and he was not going to be able to tell them, because the only thing he had left that was worth anything was a rank they thought was the lowest in the building.

"Rank," he said, to nobody. "A wage. A seal. A lock on the door."

He picked up the sword and started walking back down the ridge, because the Long Oath did not permit him to stop and was never going to, and because there were eleven names on the far side of a gate and the smallest one of them had a hand on the door.

He thought it likely needed to be shut.