The Baria Rift Belt was the kind of place mapmakers gave up on.
It cut across the south-east of the Empire like a wound that had never closed: a hundred miles of red canyons, dry riverbeds, and cliffs that changed color with the hour. On paper, it belonged to Barazia. In practice, Barazia's patrols had never bothered to come this deep, and neither had its tax collectors.
Which was exactly why the Bedalshiies liked it.
"Shields up! Up, I said! Is that a shield, Tobben, or a dinner plate?"
Captain Oliver's voice bounced off the canyon walls like a thrown stone. He was a broad man in his late fifties, with half of his left ear missing and a beard that had gone the color of iron. Thirty-one years of soldiering had left him with a limp, a permanent squint, and an opinion about everything.
Below him, on the flat sandy floor of the canyon, the Bedalshiies were drilling. All thirty of them: smugglers, deserters, failed knights and runaway apprentices, standing in two uneven lines with their shields locked, sweating under the morning sun.
Oliver walked the line with a stick, tapping a shield here, a knee there. "Wider stance. You fight like a man waiting for a carriage." Tap. "Elbow in, or a raider's spear will take that arm off."
From a ledge twenty feet above the canyon floor, Kai watched them with his spear across his knees.
He's going to make them run the canyon again, a voice remarked in his head. Ten coins says he does it before the sun clears that ridge.
I'm not betting with you.
You never bet with me. You're no fun at all.
Kai didn't answer. He'd learned that answering only encouraged it.
For the first few months after Helverton, the voice had been silent. Kai had woken in the back of a Bedalshiie wagon, three weeks after the crows landed, wrapped in bandages that smelled of sulfur and bitter herbs. Every bone that could break had broken. His body should have been a corpse.
Instead, it healed. Too fast, and in ways that made Veyra Lancet stare at him over her cauldrons like he was a puzzle she intended to cut open. And somewhere in his chest, the cold thing that had taken his body that night grew quiet, and patient, and busy.
It had spoken again on the day Kai broke into the 3rd Star.
It hadn't stopped speaking since.
You know, the voice went on, I did all the work. Rebuilding your bones. Thickening your channels. Pushing you from the middle of the 2nd Star to the peak of the 3rd in a single year. And not one word of thanks.
You also got twenty-eight thousand people killed.
Kabrikaze killed them. I merely failed to save them. There's a difference.
Kai's jaw tightened. He looked down at the rock beside him, bright and bare in the sunlight.
No shadow. There never was anymore.
The new recruits still glanced at it when they thought he wasn't looking. The older ones had stopped. To them, he was simply Ghost: the man they had pulled out of a crater full of the dead, who cast nothing on the ground behind him and fought like something that had already died once.
They weren't wrong.
"Ghost!"
Kai looked down. Oliver was squinting up at him, stick on his shoulder.
"If you're going to sit up there like a vulture, at least make yourself useful. Show these sacks of wet flour what a proper thrust looks like."
Here we go, the voice said brightly.
Kai sighed, stood, and dropped the twenty feet to the canyon floor. He landed without a sound. A few of the recruits flinched.
He walked to the front of the line, set his feet, and drove his spear forward into the empty air. Once, slowly, so they could see the hips turn and the weight travel up through the back and shoulder. Then again, faster. The third time, the spearhead cracked the air like a whip, and the dust on the canyon floor jumped away from it in a ring.
Silence. Then someone at the back whispered, "Gods."
"That," Oliver said, "is what I want. Not the noise. The feet. Now all of you, do it until your arms fall off."
Thirty groans rose into the morning air.
"And when they've fallen off," Oliver added, "we run the canyon."
Told you, the voice said. You owe me ten coins.
I didn't bet.
I'll put it on your tab.
Kai ran the canyon with them, because Oliver made no exceptions for ghosts.
I was a prince, he thought on the third lap, lungs burning. I had a bath. I had a bed with four pillows.
You had a brother who wanted you dead, the voice pointed out. The pillows weren't worth it.
* * *
By midday, the camp smelled of woodsmoke and something that was supposed to be lamb stew.
Old Richard sat on an upturned crate beside the cookfire, a wooden bowl balanced on one knee, glaring into it like it had personally insulted his family.
"Boot," he announced to no one. "This is a boiled boot. Possibly two boots. With a little sand for seasoning."
"It's lamb," said Gully, the camp cook, without looking up from the pot.
"It was lamb. Once. Before you murdered it a second time." Richard took another spoonful anyway, chewed for a long while, and swallowed with the expression of a man accepting a terrible fate. "Forty-odd years I've walked this world, and I've never been punished like this."
He was a grey, rumpled man with a nose that had been broken more than once and hands like knotted rope. He wore a stained apron over his travelling clothes, complained about his knees whenever he stood up, and fell asleep in the afternoons with his mouth open. Half the new recruits thought he was the camp's retired cook.
Kai wasn't so sure.
The first time Richard had put a hand on his shoulder, Kai had felt nothing at all. No pressure, no Taqa, not even the faint leak of power every fighter gave off. That was what bothered him. It was as if the old man had folded himself away somewhere no one could reach.
Beyond the 5th Star, the voice said quietly. At least. I can't see the bottom of him, and I don't like what I can't see.
As far as anyone in camp knew, the strongest among them was Veyra Lancet.
Last spring, forty raiders had cornered the caravan in a dry gorge. Veyra had walked out alone, uncorked a single vial, and spoken three words. The gorge went silent. Nobody in camp talked about what the raiders looked like afterward, and nobody had argued with her since.
Captain Oliver limped over and lowered himself onto a log across the fire with a grunt. "You're still complaining."
"Someone has to." Richard pointed his spoon at him. "Six weeks, Oliver. Six weeks with no contract. Thirty mouths, thirty swords, and nothing to point them at. Do you know what mercenaries without work are called?"
"I suspect you're going to tell me."
"Beggars with sharp objects." Richard set the bowl aside with a sigh. "The Rift's gone quiet. Barazia's raising watchtowers along its western edge, and their patrols turned back the last two caravans. The raiders have moved on, and the only people with money are the ones in the north who don't hire the likes of us."
"Something will turn up."
"Something always turns up. That's what worries me."
A few paces away, Edrik Vael lay stretched out in the shade of a wagon with his hat over his face, one boot crossed over the other. He hadn't moved since the drill ended.
"If it's a job," he said from under the hat, "I'll take it. If it's another lecture, wake me when it's over."
That one, the voice said quietly, and for once it didn't sound amused. A 4th Star doesn't sleep that soundly in a place like this. Not unless he knows nothing in this canyon can hurt him.
Kai glanced at the hat. Edrik's sword lay across his chest, his hand resting loosely on the hilt.
You've said that before.
And I'll keep saying it until you listen. He's holding something back.
From the far end of the camp came a soft whump, and a puff of green smoke rose above Veyra's tent. A moment later her voice followed it, sharp enough to cut.
"Wren! I said the blue vial!"
"S-sorry! Sorry, they're, um, they're both kind of blue—"
The alchemist looks at you the way a butcher looks at a pig, the voice observed. Curious about where to start cutting.
She kept me alive.
So does a farmer, until market day.
Wren came scurrying out of the smoke a moment later, coughing, her pale hair dusted green, carrying a tray of cracked vials that rattled with every step. She tripped over a tent rope, caught herself, apologized to the rope, and then noticed Kai watching her and turned a deep shade of red.
"G-good afternoon, Ghost." She bobbed something halfway between a bow and a stumble, and hurried away.
Kai almost smiled.
Charming girl, the voice said. She was standing behind you for four full minutes this morning, while you watched the drill. You never noticed.
The almost-smile disappeared.
* * *
Oliver came back to the fire after dark, with a folded letter in his hand and a strange look on his face.
The whole camp noticed. Conversations trailed off. Edrik pushed his hat back. Even Richard straightened on his crate.
"A rider from the north road," Oliver said. "He didn't give a name. He gave this, and a purse heavy enough to make a smuggler weep."
He unfolded the letter. The seal on it was black wax, pressed with a mark Kai didn't recognize: a closed eye inside a circle of thorns.
"An escort job. One cargo, sealed. We're to carry it north through the Rift, and deliver it to the border city of Kharvos, where the Rift opens onto the northern plains. No questions about what's inside." Oliver looked up. "Payment on delivery is ten times what's in this purse."
Nobody spoke.
Then Old Richard picked up his bowl of cold stew, looked into it for a long moment, and set it down again.
"Well," he said quietly. "There's our something."
In Kai's chest, the cold thing stirred. It didn't make a joke. It didn't comment on anyone.
It only said one word, and it said it in a voice Kai hadn't heard since a crater full of the dead.
Finally.