Lord-Marshal Threnn Vaskar of the Kharsu Imperium had, over the course of a long and profitable career, put down four rebellions, annexed two client-kingdoms, and personally overseen the construction of the Long Road that let Imperial grain reach the frontier garrisons a full season faster than it had under the old kings. He had done all of this without once, so far as he was aware, asking anyone's permission — not a rival's, not a rival god's, and certainly not the invisible accountant the border peoples were so fond of crediting for every good harvest and every strong arm.
He did not believe in the Unseen. That was, strictly, inaccurate; belief was beside the point. He had seen the border cultivators fight. He had watched, from a hilltop with his glass to his eye, as a single unarmed farmwife had turned back the vanguard of the Third Legion outside a village whose name he'd since had struck from the maps, simply by standing in the road with her arms spread and refusing, with a serenity his best interrogators would have paid handsomely to understand, to be moved — and the ground beneath the legion's boots had changed, softened, betrayed them, roots surfacing to catch ankles, stones shifting to twist knees, until three hundred trained soldiers had been routed by a woman who never raised a hand. He did not need to believe in the mechanism to know, with the flat professional clarity of a man who'd built his career on inventories, that the mechanism was real, that it was measurable, and that it was — this was the part that kept him awake on cold nights in his command tent — apparently available.
He simply refused to accept that it was not for sale.
"Explain it to me again," he said, "and this time, Chirurgeon, spare me the theology. I have had theology from six captured priests and none of it has purchased me so much as a single soldier's worth of the border-farmers' strength. Explain it to me as you would explain a supply chain."
Iven Corass, Chief Chirurgeon of the Crimson Court — a title that meant, depending on the day, physician, interrogator, or something closer to alchemist, and Threnn had long since stopped asking which — set down the instrument he'd been cleaning and composed his face into the careful neutrality of a man who had learned, the hard way, which of his employer's questions were rhetorical.
"The supply chain, Lord-Marshal, is the problem," Corass said. "There isn't one. That's the entire difficulty, stated as plainly as I know how to state it. We have spent four years and — forgive me, I do keep the ledgers, it is my nature — one hundred and eighteen subjects attempting to manufacture what the border peoples produce accidentally, in children, over breakfast. And we have produced nothing. Not a trickle. Not a whisper."
"You forced a hundred and eighteen prisoners to perform charitable acts," Threnn said, "and none of them gained an ounce of strength for it. I know the results, Chirurgeon. I have read your reports. I am asking why."
Corass exhaled through his nose, the particular exhale of a scholar being asked to state the obvious to a man too powerful to be told he was being obvious to. "Because we forced them, Lord-Marshal. That is the why. I have tried it every way the philosophy would suggest — I have had condemned men ordered to give their rations to the starving, on pain of the lash if they refused, and the giving produced nothing, because the man's hand moved for fear of the lash and not for love of the starving. I have had wealthy hostages ransomed by offering to spare their families if they performed some act of great personal cost to a stranger, and it produced nothing either, because the man's sacrifice was purchased by us, not offered by him — the true cost, you understand, wasn't the giving, it was the fear of what we'd do if he didn't, and the border peoples' Unseen, whatever else may be said of Him, does not appear to be a fool about the difference." He picked the instrument back up, turned it over, set it down again, a man's hands needing occupation while his mouth delivered bad news. "I have even — and this is in the appendix you did not ask for, my lord, because I suspected you would not enjoy it — attempted deception. I told a subject her sacrifice would save her own child, when in fact nothing of the sort was at stake, hoping the belief alone, sincere on her part even if false in fact, might satisfy whatever standard the weighing requires. It did not work either. Which tells me something rather important, if I may."
"Tell me."
"It tells me the Unseen is not merely checking whether the giver believed the act was costly and freely chosen," Corass said. "It's checking whether it was. We can fool a person. We appear, on the present evidence, entirely unable to fool whatever is doing the actual weighing."
Threnn Vaskar was quiet for a long moment, looking out the command tent's open flap at the grey smear of the frontier hills, beyond which — invisible from here, but present in his mind the way a debt is present to a man who has never stopped calculating interest — lay the villages where farmwives turned back legions with nothing but their bare, standing refusal.
"Then we are locked out," he said, "by a standard we cannot buy, cannot threaten, and cannot counterfeit. That is what you are telling me."
"That is what four years and one hundred and eighteen subjects are telling us, Lord-Marshal, yes."
It would have ended there, perhaps, for a lesser man — filed as an interesting curiosity of the border cultures, a strange local physics with no relevance to the Imperium's continued expansion, since the Imperium had never needed the Unseen's economy to conquer anything before. Threnn Vaskar had built an empire on the oldest ledger there was: steel, numbers, discipline, fear, and the simple unglamorous fact that a well-fed army with good roads beats a poorly-fed one without them, regardless of who anyone's invisible accountant favored. Swords cut whether the hand holding them is virtuous or not. Grain feeds a garrison whether it was grown by a saint or a slave. He had never asked the Unseen's permission to build the Long Road, and the Long Road stood.
He knew this. He'd said as much, more than once, to the priests he'd had time to interrogate before losing patience with them — your god does not stop my armies. I have watched Him not stop them. Whatever moral objection He is meant to harbor toward me has produced, so far as I can determine, not one collapsed bridge, not one poisoned well, not one legion struck down by lightning on my behalf. And the priests, infuriatingly, had agreed with him — had told him, in fact, that this was entirely expected, that the Unseen did not override any man's free hand, evil or otherwise, and that Threnn's conquests proceeded precisely as freely as anyone else's choices did, for good or ill, and would be weighed, every one of them, in whatever accounting was eventually due him.
Eventually due him. That phrase had stayed with him longer than he cared to admit. Not because he feared it — Threnn Vaskar had made his peace with a great many things a younger, softer version of himself would have flinched from — but because it implied a second ledger running invisibly alongside the one he could see, and Threnn Vaskar did not like unseen ledgers. He liked, on principle, to see every column of every account he was made to settle.
So it was not fear, precisely, that sent him looking for another door into the border peoples' strange economy. It was something closer to professional insult. The farmwife on the road had cost him three hundred men and a season's momentum, and she had not even fought. If there was strength on the table that his enemies could reach and he could not, the Imperium's entire history argued against simply accepting the imbalance.
He found his door, in the end, not through Corass's careful experiments but through a man who came to him uninvited, in the third year of the frontier campaign, calling himself only the Tallyman, robed in a grey so deep it read as black in poor light, with a manner Threnn's instincts — instincts that had kept him alive through four rebellions — flagged immediately as wrong in some fashion he couldn't at first name.
"You've been trying to buy what can only be given," the Tallyman said, without preamble, seated across from Threnn in the command tent as though invited, though no guard had announced him and none, questioned afterward, could say how he'd passed them. "That was never going to work, Lord-Marshal, and I confess I've watched your Chirurgeon's experiments with some amusement. But there is another ledger. Older than the one your farmwives balance so tediously with their little kindnesses. It doesn't ask whether the sacrifice was freely given. It only asks whether it was given at all — and it is considerably less particular about who's doing the taking."
"Go on," Threnn said, because Threnn Vaskar had not built an empire by declining to hear a man out.
"Strength for strength," the Tallyman said. "Not qi drawn down from your enemies' patient, plodding Unseen. Something older, and hungrier, and — I will not lie to you, Lord-Marshal, since a lie serves neither of us here — considerably less stable. It does not require love. It does not check whether the cost was borne willingly. It only requires that something living pay a true cost, and that the payment be directed, by ritual, by blood, by the right words spoken over the right kind of dying, toward the one who would receive the strength. Your enemies' Unseen is diminished on this side of things, Lord-Marshal — I won't pretend to fully understand why, some old arrangement predating both of us, some door He shut against certain interferences that used to be much freer with their hand here than they are now. But diminished is not the same as absent. There is still room to work, for those with the stomach for it."
Threnn Vaskar had lived a long career of recognizing, with cold professional clarity, the exact moment a deal turned into a trap. He recognized it now. He recognized, too, that he was going to take the deal anyway, because a man who has built an empire on steel and discipline does not, in the end, turn down power merely because it is offered by something he does not trust — he simply resolves to be more careful with the wielding of it than the wielding of anything he's held before.
"And the cost to me?" he asked. "Not to whatever poor soul provides your ritual payment. To me. What does it cost the one who receives?"
The Tallyman smiled, and it was in the smile, more than anything said aloud, that Threnn finally placed what had been wrong about him from the start: there was nothing behind it. Not cruelty, not amusement, not even the calculating hunger Threnn would have recognized and respected in a rival general. Just an emptiness wearing an expression, the way a puppet wears a painted face.
"Everything," the Tallyman said, pleasantly. "Eventually. But not first. First it will cost you nothing at all, Lord-Marshal, and that is precisely why every man before you who took this bargain believed himself the exception."
Threnn Vaskar was not, in the end, a man inclined to heed warnings delivered with a smile that empty. He took the bargain anyway — three condemned deserters, a ritual he did not ask to have explained further than necessary, and by the following dawn a strength in his own limbs that no honest ledger of diet or discipline could account for, a speed to his sword-hand that made his own household guard step back half a pace when he next drilled with them, careful not to show how the step had been involuntary.
It worked. That was the maddening, seductive truth of it, the fact Corass's careful reports could never quite capture in the dry language of failed experiments: the dark ledger worked, immediately, tangibly, in a way the border peoples' patient economy of small kindnesses had refused to work for him in four years of honest trying. He did not need to earn this strength through decades of unglamorous service to strangers who might never thank him for it. He needed only to spend what others could be made to lose.
He told himself, in the months that followed — as the campaigns resumed, as three legions became five, as the Long Road pushed deeper into the border hills faster than the old ledger of steel and grain alone could have carried it — that he was simply proving what he'd suspected from the beginning: that strength was strength, regardless of which invisible accountant claimed authority over its issuing, and that a man clever enough and disciplined enough could always find a second door when the first one was locked against him.
He did not examine, closely, why the deserters' ritual payment had needed repeating within a season. He did not examine why the second payment required more than three, and the third more than the second, an appetite in the arrangement that Corass's careful ledgers — kept faithfully, dutifully, with the growing unease of a scholar watching a number climb in a column he'd rather it hadn't — traced with mounting alarm across eighteen months of campaign records. He did not examine, though Corass raised it with him twice and was twice waved off, why his own reflection in still water had begun to seem, in certain lights, subtly wrong around the eyes, the way the Tallyman's smile had been wrong, an emptiness wearing a face that used to be entirely his own.
He examined none of it, because a man who has built an empire on steel and discipline does not like to examine the places where his own ledger has stopped balancing the way he understands ledgers to balance — where the payments keep rising, and the strength, if he was honest with the private, unwaveringly honest part of himself that had once made him an excellent quartermaster before it made him a Lord-Marshal, seemed to plateau even as the cost of maintaining it did not.
Diminished is not the same as absent, the Tallyman had said, of the Unseen's reach on this side of the border. Threnn Vaskar, alone in his tent on the eve of what would become the Imperium's deepest push yet into the frontier hills, found himself turning that phrase over with something that was not quite fear and not quite doubt, but occupied the uneasy territory between the two where a lifelong strategist finally allows himself to notice a variable he has spent a long while declining to weigh.
Diminished is not absent, he thought, watching his own hand where it rested on the map table, faster now than it used to be, stronger, and — he made himself finish the thought, because incomplete thoughts had never once served him in four rebellions — not entirely mine anymore, in some fashion the reports cannot quite put a number to.
He thought of the farmwife on the road, arms spread, ground shifting beneath his soldiers' boots not through any strength she'd spent a lifetime hoarding for herself, but through a strength she'd apparently never once thought to think of as hers at all — lent, the border priests had told him, always only lent, resting on a relationship rather than sitting like a coin in a locked chest. He had scorned the distinction, once, as theological hairsplitting beneath a serious military mind's attention.
He no longer entirely scorned it. He simply had, by now, a great deal invested in not saying so aloud, to Corass, to the Tallyman on his increasingly frequent visits, or to the private, unwaveringly honest quartermaster's ledger he still kept, out of old habit, in the bottom drawer of his own campaign desk — the one column of figures in his entire command that he had, for eighteen months running, found himself unable to bring himself to total.