Chapter 276: To the North (4)

“Bold of you—to catch it?” The man’s face twisted with fury. “Fine. Then die for real!!”

A clear tone rang as light crawled over his free hand and hardened into holy power.. He drew back with every intention of caving Ketal’s skull.

Ketal’s expression barely changed. He caught that hand, too. Now, he held both wrists. The missionary thrashed, spat, and jerked his shoulders as if he might shake his bones free of their sockets.

“You flea-bitten barbarian!” he snarled. “Let me go!”

Hadn’t they called him gentle?

Ketal wondered. He studied the man’s eyes and found no gentleness there; they were blown wide with mania, the pupils swimming. The Holy Sword hummed in mild fascination.

“Is he truly ordained? He looks more madman than missionary. Perhaps Elia’s mercy is broader than I thought.”

“Let go!” the man shouted again, wrenching from side to side. “I said, let go!”

Reason would not find a purchase on a mind in that state. Ketal weighed the moment, sighed inwardly, and loosened his grip.

“I need you to calm down,” Ketal said.

He did not raise his voice, but he set force behind the word, and the force sank into the room. His presence pressed on wood and plaster and air, turned every grain in the doorframe heavy, and then flowed over the man and down his spine. The missionary’s face froze, caught on the ragged edge between rage and something like panic.

“W-what...?” the missionary stammered.

Reality acknowledged a weight his mind could not ignore; the mania cracked. Sanity washed back in on a low tide, leaving surprise and confusion in its wake.

“What’s going on?”

“Are you steady now?” Ketal asked him in the same calm tone. “I have no intention of harming you. Will you sit and talk?”

***

They sat in a room, and Ketal explained who he was, why he had come, and what the Church of Elia had told him. The man’s face changed as words found their places. The lines around his mouth loosened.

“I... see,” he said at last. “Then I judged too quickly. I’m sorry.”

“I understand,” Ketal said. “It looks as if you’ve had a hard time of it.”

“Hard implies there’s been some part of the day that wasn’t, and there hasn’t. These thick-skulled—” He cut himself off with a visible effort, rubbed at the bluish half-circles etched under his eyes, and tried again. “No. No, that’s not helpful. I’m Darkul. Priest of Elia, and, yes, the fool who volunteered to civilize a village full of barbarians.”

“I am Ketal.”

Darkul squinted. “You look like a barbarian yourself. Do you... speak like a normal person?”

“I am an intelligent and reasonable man.”

Darkul made the face one reserved for a stranger who claims he has taught lions to waltz. “Right. Well. If you say so.”

His mouth said he accepted the answer; his shoulders slid half a handspan away, and his hand closed a little tighter on the chair back. Ketal laughed under his breath. The man had been living raw for too long; every noise in the street had been a threat for weeks.

“In any case, I was introduced in the holy land, correct?” Darkul asked him after a breath.

Ketal set a small bundle on the table. Darkul touched the stamped sigil with something close to tenderness, then broke the wax and read. When he finished, he let the parchment rest against the heel of his palm and exhaled.

“You’ve come to help the North,” he said. “I suppose that makes sense. With Hell’s creatures climbing the walls two villages over, we need every hand we can get.”

Something like that,” Ketal said. He chose not to explain the matter of the Demon Realms.

Darkul studied Ketal the way a veteran looks at a new hire before a dangerous job. He was not weak himself; his presence had the clean edge of an Advanced who had tuned body and grace until they hummed. He was strong enough to travel alone into the cold and keep his life, strong enough to hold his ground in a room full of men who wanted him quiet.

He weighed Ketal, and for a moment his eyes flickered, as if he had stepped into cold water.

He’s a highest-level Advanced,

Darkul thought. He realized Ketal was a man who had a toe on the line below Transcendent, strong enough to make a difference in the North.

Ketal had simply encountered too many beings of Transcendent or Hero. Even so, a highest-level Advanced warrior was still a formidable power. In fact, reaching the Advanced level alone was enough to qualify one to serve as the captain of a kingdom’s knight order.

“The world is a mess,” Darkul said. “I know that much. I’ve been trying to decide whether to leave the village and join a defense line.”

He had come North to preach, yet preaching seemed small beside the news pouring in from every road. A servant of a god had responsibilities, and the first among them was to set their body between the innocent and what would eat them.

The calculation did not take him long. He put the letter down, nodded once, and met Ketal’s eyes.

“All right,” Darkul said. “I’ll go with you. I know the North, and I am not helpless. I will be useful.”

“Thank you,” Ketal said, and smiled.

Darkul cleared his throat. “Then, what is the plan? You have one?”

Ketal rubbed his chin. He needed information, not rumors. The Quest had flagged an Anomaly in the North, something foreign that had slipped through the cracks and rooted. He did not know its shape, its numbers, or how tightly it had wound itself into the land. For that, maps and lists would not be enough; he needed someone who watched from the middle of the web.

“We should go to the center,” he said.

Darkul nodded. “Then we see the king.”

“Hm? Can you really meet the king so easily?” Ketal asked him, his face showing doubt. A king was the highest of all; one could not simply walk up and meet him.

“One doesn’t in the South,” Darkul said, then grimaced. “But this is the North.”

“Ah.” Ketal’s mouth tilted. It was startling how quickly the habits of cities settled into one’s hands. He had been away from the White Snowfield only a short while, and already he had begun to forget how barbarians were. measured worth. The North belonged to barbarians. Here, rank and pedigree meant little, and strength spoke first.

Kings were not exceptions. A king ruled because he could not be pushed aside; the rest was meaningless.

“With your strength,” Darkul said, flicking a glance over Ketal that took in the breadth of his shoulders and the quiet way he filled the room, “you will not have trouble getting an audience. We go to the heart and ask the man who has the best view of the map.”

“That sounds right,” Ketal said.

The King of the North was a Hero, a leader of a people who would never follow softness, and if the North had managed to build and hold a center, then he was a man of sense as well as sinew. Ketal had once worn a chieftain’s title; some part of him still wanted to know what kind of man sat on that throne.

“How long from here?” Ketal asked Darkul.

“If we move quickly,” Darkul said, thinking through the passes and winter roads, “about a month.”

“A month, then,” Ketal said, and held out his hand. Darkul took it.

They would be together for a month or so, long enough to learn each other’s habits, both the good and the bad. For a journey to pass in harmony, it helped to know who sat across the fire. Ketal tilted his head, considering.

“When the holy land wrote about you,” he said, “they called you gentle. Here, you opened a door with a curse, tried to take my head off, and the roof looked as if giants kicked it. What happened?”

“There are reasons. I wasn’t like this to begin with. These barbari—

sigh.

No, listen.”

The wall gave way before he could explain. A plank blew inward and smashed against the table. What was left of the wall followed, and the room inhaled the street. A barbarian with a grin like a crack in rock shouldered through the hole he had made and threw his arms wide.

“Darkul,” he boomed. “I have come. Today I will beat you, and glory will be mine!”

Darkul shrieked. He did not aim; he simply moved. His heel planted, his leg snapped, and the big man pinwheeled across the room and into what remained of the far wall. Darkul chased him, caught him by the hair, and slammed him into the floorboards until the cracks formed a neat grid.

“I told you to use the door!” he yelled on the downswing. “No breaking walls! No tearing roofs! I am freezing to death because you lot can’t be bothered to knock!”

The barbarian made a strangled sound that might have been contrition. It might also have been his ribs.

Darkul stepped on his chest with deliberate care. Something gave way with a brittle crunch. He grabbed a handful of fur at the collar and heaved, dumping the barbarian into the snow outside. Then he stood there quivering, hands open and empty.

“As I was saying,” he began.

The opposite wall exploded.

“Darkul!” another voice roared. “Today I erase my shame and end my defeats!”

Darkul made almost the same sound as before and launched himself like a thrown knife.

***

It did not stop at two.

They came from the wall, from the ceiling, from a panel that had once been a window and had been boarded up after the third time someone had mistaken it for a door. Each declared a challenge with the same joyous certainty. Each found Darkul’s patience a thing with an edge.

Darkul broke arms and legs without ceremony and threw them into the street like firewood. The thud became part of the village’s winter music.

When the fifteenth had limped off, there was silence save for the wind slipping through fresh gaps. Darkul stood in the middle of what had been his home and turned slowly, face hollow with disbelief.

“My house...” he whimpered.

What had been broken when Ketal arrived had been salvageable. Now it was not. Walls leaned new degrees. Light stabbed down through a roof that had lost track of where its beams were meant to meet. The boundary between inside and out had become a polite fiction.

Ketal looked at the damage, then at Darkul. “What’s going on?”

“Barbarians,” Darkul said, pronouncing the word the way one pronounces a diagnosis.

He had come North to preach. Of course, they had pushed back; that was the shape of the task. Men and women who did not care for gods did not start caring because a stranger spoke in a kind voice. They had tried to kill him. He had expected the attempt, met it on his feet, and beaten it down. As an Advanced priest, he was strong enough that no one in this village could break him.

He had then done the reasonable thing and tried to set terms.

He told them he had come to teach. If they wanted him gone, they were welcome to make that argument in the language they understood best. If they could beat him cleanly, he would pack his bag and go; if they could not, they could listen or not as they pleased, but they would stop trying to bury him under the floorboards.

In Darkul’s mind, it was a sound plan. However, it failed miserably.

“I should not have said the word

challenge

,” Darkul said through his teeth.

The moment they had a challenge, the village developed a single idea and acted on it—defeat Darkul.

That was acceptable, and it was even what Darkul wanted. The problem was not the goal but the schedule. They did not take turns. They did not call at ordinary hours. They saw no point in waiting until he had finished his food. They came when he slept, when he washed, when he squatted behind the woodshed and looked up to find a man dropping through the branches.

If he stayed inside, they did not knock. Darkul had tried to reason with them. He had begged them to set a time, to respect a boundary. He had sworn he was not going anywhere. He had promised to hold court in the street at noon and six.

They had nodded solemnly and returned through the roof at midnight, smiling the way children smiled when they had solved a puzzle.

He had borne it as long as a man could. Then something in him had snapped. He broke bones, and it bought him a day or three. Their bodies knitted themselves back together in a way that was not natural, and they came again, winning by persistence the ground they could not take by skill.

Gentleness eroded, and habit set. The next time the wall moved, his foot moved too.

“They are unforgivable,” Darkul said, voice flat with exhaustion. “I am an outsider, and there are lines I will not cross, so I will not kill them. But the only peace I get is the minute between tossing one into the snow and the next one coming through the ceiling.”

“Do they stand down when they lose?” Ketal asked him.

Darkul blinked. “Of course they do.”

Ketal’s mouth closed on a reply. The barbarians he knew had fought until their hands tore off the bone, then used their teeth. When their legs were gone, they crawled. The silence stretched and cooled; he folded the thought away where it would not show.

“You have done well,” Ketal said instead.

Darkul laughed at nothing in particular and then, abruptly, grinned.

“But that’s finished!” he exclaimed. “I have an excuse to leave, and it even has Elia’s seal on it.”

He had wanted to run, but he had not, because running would have made the work meaningless. Leaving with Ketal was not running; it was answering a call. He set his hands on his hips, looked at the ruin that had been his roof, and nodded.

“Let’s drink!” he said. “I saved a bottle for the day I succeeded at converting barbarians, but I think this qualifies.”

“A toast,” Ketal said. “I will share it.”

They drank, because there were days for duty and days to let warmth into the bones. The talk that followed walked with an easy gait. Mostly Darkul told stories, and mostly those stories ended with a curse and a splintered door. Ketal agreed with every condemnation. It was rare and pleasant to be understood so thoroughly by someone he had only just met.

“You are a good man,” Darkul said at last, happily drunk and holding his cup with both hands. “When I saw your shoulders at the door, I prepared for grunts and headbutts.”

“I have had my share of trouble with barbarians,” Ketal said. “I sympathize.”

“Did they do the same to you?” Darkul asked him, leaning forward. “They come with a scrap of fur or a bag of teeth and call it tribute, then demand a duel as if they were standing before a king.”

“No. They promised their hearts,” Ketal said, and drank. “Not metaphorically. One said that if he lost, he would offer me his heart. He lost, and he kept his word. I did not know where to put it. It is still in a box.”

“A-at least they asked properly, right? Mine break the roof and declare war at breakfast!” Darkul said, trying to one-up Ketal.

“One tried to move in,” Ketal said. “He meant to share a house so we could fight all day and all night. I powdered his shinbone and threw him into the snow. He crawled back on the third day.”

Darkul stared at him, the pity plain. “You poor man.”

Ketal smiled into his cup. The pity did not sting; it felt deserved and oddly kind.