Blood on the Watchtower

The eastern bell doesn't ring the way bells are supposed to ring. It rings like someone is beating it with a dying arm, three strokes and a stumble and three more, and I'm out of the guardhouse cot before the fourth one lands.

Fog has swallowed the wall-walk whole. I can see maybe eight paces in any direction, gray going to white going to nothing, and somewhere past that nothing a man is screaming in a dialect that isn't ours.

"Tower's breached." Toru is already buckling his second vambrace, hopping on one boot. "That's not a drill bell. That's Juda's dying bell."

"Then Juda's dying." I'm already moving, sash cinched, blade loose in the sheath. "How many men on the tower tonight?"

"Three. Juda and two greenwood boys who've never swung steel at anything that swings back."

Seven days since I walked into this citadel wearing someone else's authority like a borrowed coat, and somewhere in those seven days the coat stopped feeling borrowed. My ribs still ache from the iron-weighted drills. The cuts on my forearm and bicep from last night have scabbed but not closed, and the fog finds them like it's looking for a way in. None of that matters more than the fact that I'm the warden of this wall and the wall is being tested.

We run the inner path, the one that hugs the base of the curtain wall instead of the exposed parapet, because a man on the open wall-walk in this fog is a silhouette waiting to be a corpse. Toru knows the geography better than I do—seven years garrisoned here against my seven days—so I let him set pace and I watch the gaps between torches, counting them the way Kenshi taught me to count a man's weight shifting before a strike.

"Eastern tower's four hundred paces," Toru says, breath fogging harder than the air around it. "Fog like this, they didn't climb the gorge face. They came up the scree on the blind side."

"How many?"

"Scouting party doesn't bring the whole column. Figure six, eight men. Test the seam, see how fast we answer."

Then we're answering it: shapes ahead, wrong-shaped against the mist, men in leather lacquer with the southern mourning-gray sash tied at the hip. Two of them are dragging something between them—Juda, I realize, by the shape of the boots—and there isn't time to decide whether he's alive.

Toru goes left without a word, the way we've drilled it twenty times on the practice yard, and I go right into the one still standing over the fallen shape, a tall man with a spear held low and competent, no panic in the grip at all.

He sees me come out of the fog and he doesn't hesitate. The spear comes at my hip in a thrust meant to open me from flank to spine, fast and committed, his whole weight already past the point where he could pull it back.

That's the hinge. Kenshi's voice in my skull, a night old and still raw: the moment the weight commits past the point of return, the weapon stops being his. I don't block it. I turn my hip a hand's width, let the shaft run past skin by the width of a folded letter, and close my grip over the haft an arm's length ahead of his own hands.

For one heartbeat the spear belongs to both of us, and that heartbeat is the whole lesson.

I don't fight his momentum. I ride it, add my own weight to the turn, and send the butt of his own shaft into his shoulder joint with everything his thrust already gave me for free. Bone gives under wood with a sound like a green branch snapping wet. He goes down soundless, the breath knocked clean out of him before the pain can arrive to fill the gap, and the spear is mine before he hits the ground.

No blood on my blade. No blade used at all.

It worked outside the lamplight. It worked when it mattered, against a man trying to kill me and not a mentor testing whether I'd flinch.

Juda groans behind me—alive, then—and off to the left I hear the particular wet sound of Toru finishing someone, followed by his voice saying something crude about the man's mother that the man is in no position to resent. Three more shapes retreat into the fog at a dead run, boots skidding on wet scree, and I let them go. Chasing blind men into blind fog on a blind slope is how a warden becomes a corpse with a title.

The one I dropped is still breathing, hitched and wet, clutching a shoulder that won't work right for a season even if it heals clean.

Up on the tower, one of the greenwood boys shouts down that they're both whole, voice cracked thin with fright, and Toru arrives out of the mist a moment later, wiping his blade on his sleeve, glancing once at the gash along Juda's ribs before he looks down at the raider I didn't kill, then at me.

"You're slowing down. Used to be you just put them down proper the first swing."

"He's down proper. He's just not dead."

"That what Kenshi taught you up in that practice hall? Catch the pretty ones?" Toru crouches, none too gently, and checks the scout's eyes, his pulse, the blood soaking dark through his sleeve. "You smell like fog-wet sheep and you fight like you're trying to save coin on funerals."

"Funerals are free. Information isn't."

Toru's grin fades a degree. "You want to keep him."

"I want to know why a scouting cell hit a watchtower the main column's going to be standing under by morning. That's not testing a seam. That's a specific errand." I crouch across from him, press two fingers to the scout's throat myself, feel the pulse thread fast and thin but holding. "Dead men don't answer specific errands."

"Dead men don't escape either. Dead men don't have friends who come looking when he doesn't report back." Toru stands, wipes his blade again though it's already clean, a habit more than a need. "Juda's got a gash down his ribs he'll live with and a story he'll tell for a year. Two greenwood boys up top, scared white, otherwise whole. That's our cost tonight. You want to add a southern blade bleeding on our floor to that account, on the chance he talks pretty for you."

"He'll talk."

"Kenshi's not going to thank you for a loose tongue with a knife still strapped to it."

"Kenshi's not standing here deciding." It comes out flatter than I mean it to, and Toru's eyebrows go up a fraction, the first real crack of surprise I've gotten out of him in a week. Fair. Seven days ago I was a bodyguard with a contract. Tonight I'm telling Kenshi's own enforcer how a warden's business gets done, and neither of us says that part aloud, and by the set of his mouth he hears it too.

The fog hasn't lifted. Somewhere in it, three southern scouts are running back toward a column that is now two days closer than it was at council, due at the gorge mouth by morning, carrying word that the eastern tower isn't soft.

I get my hands under the prisoner's good arm and haul him up, letting his ruined shoulder scream so he knows exactly whose mercy he's standing on.

"Bind him. Carry him down to the interrogation cell below the armory, not the guardhouse—I want walls nobody walks past by accident." I look at Toru until he looks back. "And get Juda to the surgeon before that rib wound finds a reason to kill him slower than any blade did."

Toru doesn't argue again. He hefts the scout's good side over his shoulder with the rough economy of a man moving cordwood.

"Hope he's worth it." He's already walking, swallowed a step at a time by the fog. "Hope you're worth explaining to Kenshi."

"I don't explain. I report." I pick up the fallen spear and fall in behind him. "Tell him after the scout talks. Not before."

Toru's laugh comes back short and humorless through the mist, already half gone before it finishes.