Chapter 24: The Two Grandmasters and August's Oath
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 15-28, Month IV: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 15th to 28th day of the 4th Month
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Brews for Brus
The village had been celebrating for two days, and it had two more to go.
The return of August and the Maya forces from Kirka had been marked the way the village marked most things worth marking: food, reduced prices, and an excuse for people who rarely saw each other to sit at the same table for a while. A ten percent discount across all goods and services had been announced for the duration, which proved more popular than anyone had officially predicted. The merchants currently staying at the inn had spent the first morning doing rapid calculations and the rest of the day buying as much as their wagon space could absorb. Local production had moved at a pace that would have looked, from the outside, like a minor economic event. From the inside, it felt like a party with commerce attached.
The tavern called Brews for Brus was the loudest building in the village on any normal day, and during a village-wide celebration it became something approaching a natural force.
Brus Bane himself — the owner, the namesake, and by his own account the finest drinking palate this side of the capital's licensed tasting houses — had arrived in Maya Village over two years ago following what he described as a professional awakening. He had been, in his younger years, a specialist. An alcohol taster of some reputation, a man who had built his identity around his ability to detect the difference between a barrel aged for eleven months and one aged for twelve by flavor alone. That career had eventually led him here, to a growing village in the deep forest that was producing its own spirits and had no one with the knowledge to tell them how good they were.
He had approached the Thornwick family first. Magnos Thornwick and his wife Lyanna were the orchard and fermentation specialists, and the fruit wines they had developed from the orchards in the western fields were, Brus had told them with the particular authority of someone who had tasted ten thousand things and was being honest for once, genuinely excellent. He had then found the Barley and Millwright families, who between them controlled the grain processing and brewing side of the operation. He had gone to both families with an argument that was simple and hard to refuse: he would sell their product better than they could, because he understood it better than they did, and all he wanted in return was a building to sell it from and a share of what came through the door.
The building was now two full floors with a mezzanine on the second level, and every usable space in it was occupied from the moment it opened until well past when reasonable people had gone to bed. The ground floor held the main drinking room, long tables running the length of it and a bar cut from mountain timber that Brus maintained with the same care he applied to his cask rotation. The mezzanine above was for those who wanted slightly more distance from the noise, which in practice meant couples, business discussions, and older residents who still wanted to drink but preferred to do it without someone's elbow in their ear.
The tavern's regular offerings had grown considerably since opening. Maya's fruit wines ranged from the sharp and dry to the deeply sweet depending on the orchard variety and the season's sugar content; the Thornwick family had developed distinct styles across five fruit types and was experimenting with blends. The grain ales from the Barley and Millwright operation came in two strengths, the lighter one being the everyday drink of choice and the heavier being what people ordered when they had decided the evening was going to be significant. Brus had held back from selling anything beyond these core offerings at regular stock, applying the principle that scarcity made value, and the rarer batches moved through a waitlist and household allocation system before any surplus reached the bar.
Mead was the one item conspicuously absent from the regular menu, and Brus was candid about why: he didn't have bees. The village had been inquiring through every caravan and trade contact whether anyone could source a colony — specifically a queen or two that could be transported. The species involved, twelve-inch pollinators that built colonies to serve both honey production and agricultural function, were enormously valuable and moderately difficult to transport. The queen needed to be kept stable, the environment controlled, the workers prevented from scattering. It was manageable with the right preparation, but required someone who had done it before. Brus had put word out and was waiting.
On the second day of the celebration, seated in the mezzanine with two cups of something that was not ale and not wine and was technically neither, were two men who looked, in the way that ancient things sometimes look, deceptively ordinary.
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The Milky Question
Master Ben Flameswrath and Grandmaster Miles Daemon had been arguing for the better part of an hour about milk.
Not allegorically. Literally: milk. Specifically, which of Maya's domesticated dairy animals produced the superior product. The cups in front of them contained warm milk from the Stoneback Caprine on the left and the Woolly Aurochs on the right, and both men had strong and detailed opinions that they were not prepared to compromise.
"The caprine milk has a cleaner finish," Miles said, with the conviction of a man who had survived centuries of conflict and was now applying that same energy to a dairy dispute. "There's no aftertaste. It doesn't linger."
"It doesn't linger because there's nothing to linger," Ben replied. "The depth is in the Aurochs. The fat content. You can taste the altitude it was raised in. The caprine tastes like water that has been told about milk."
Miles stared at him. "That is not a meaningful statement."
"It is entirely meaningful."
"The caprine has a better texture."
"You are describing mouthfeel as though it is the whole of the experience."
They had cycled through this argument in various forms since sitting down, interrupted periodically by detours into the question of whether the village's cheese production would ever reach the market at a volume worth discussing (Gwenda Meadowbrook's aged varieties were, by all accounts, exceptional, but household allocation kept most of it from reaching Brus's counter), and whether either man cared what the alcohol situation was. They did not, as it happened, have significant opinions on alcohol. They were both old enough that drinking had become a matter of preference rather than occasion, and neither had found the village's current offerings compelling enough to pursue. The milk was, genuinely, the more interesting conversation.
Eventually, though, the milk reached its natural end as a topic, and the real subject arrived the way real subjects tend to — sideways, through a pause that lasted a beat too long.
Miles set his cup down.
"We should talk about the boy," he said.
"We should," Ben agreed.
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The Question of August
The grandmaster population of Centuury's three super subcontinents alone was not enormous. Working from the rough population figure of ten to eleven billion souls, and the well-documented statistic that grandmasters represented approximately one tenth of a percent of the total, the number landed somewhere around ten and a half million, which sounded substantial until you understood that the world was extremely large and those ten and a half million were distributed across every conceivable profession, discipline, and region. Architects. Farmers. Scholars. Healers. Enchanters. Combat was only a fraction of the categories in which a grandmaster rank could be achieved, and the combat-oriented grandmasters numbered closer to five hundred and twenty-five thousand, or roughly five percent of the whole.
Of those, the Oath Bearers of Arkanus held membership from approximately four hundred and ninety-nine thousand, the ninety-five percent who had chosen to take the Oath of the Strong and accept the limitations that came with it. The remaining twenty-six thousand or so who had not taken the oath were watched. Those among that group who had committed their unrestricted power toward harmful ends were not watched for long before the order's inquisitorial arm did something about it.
Within the combat grandmaster tiers, the numbers shrank rapidly. The lowest tier held around ten thousand five hundred practitioners. The middle tier narrowed to roughly one thousand and fifty. The high tier contained perhaps one hundred and five. And at the pinnacle, the absolute ceiling of what mortal combat capability could achieve in the known world, the number was somewhere between ten and eleven individuals.
Ben was one of them. Miles was another.
The question they were now discussing, with the low hum of the celebration two floors below providing an ironic backdrop, was whether August Finn was about to become a third.
"His power fluctuates," Miles said. "Without the armor, he sits at the highest tier of Master. With it, he crosses the threshold. That's not the same as being stable at grandmaster. Induction requires stability."
"Senior Miles," Ben said, and his tone was patient in the way that people are patient when they have thought about something far more than the person they are speaking to, "you have been with this young man for how long now?"
"Long enough."
"Then you know that framing his situation as 'power that fluctuates' is like saying a river is just water that moves. He is not unstable because he is weak. He is fluctuating because he is still integrating. There is a difference, and it matters." Ben turned his cup slowly between his hands. "His growth is unprecedented. I have been alive for three hundred and seventy-one years. I have met perhaps forty people who could be called truly exceptional by my standards. August's trajectory does not resemble any of them. He is doing in years what took the rest of us centuries."
Miles was quiet for a moment. He was not a man who conceded points quickly, but he was also not a man who ignored good arguments when they were presented clearly.
"You think he will stabilize."
"I think he is stabilizing now, as we sit here. I think that by the time we locate the peers we need for a proper recognition panel, the fluctuation will be a memory." Ben's lava-pool eyes reflected the lamplight. "And I think, though I will not say this outside this room, that the more interesting question is not when he reaches stable grandmaster status, but what happens after. The scholars argue about whether any mortal has ever broken through the mortality ceiling at height of the pinnacle tier. The theoretical ceiling above which progression cannot continue for those without divine origin. I am beginning to think we are watching the person who will answer that question."
The statement settled between them with the particular weight of things said by people who have earned the right to say them.
Miles picked up his cup. Set it down again without drinking. "If you're right," he said slowly, "then getting him in front of the recognition panel before he progresses further would be prudent. The induction process is already complicated for someone who achieved the threshold at his age. The longer we wait, the more questions will be asked about whether he's been operating outside the oath's parameters."
"He hasn't. But questions will be asked regardless." Ben allowed the obvious follow-up to hang in the air until Miles acknowledged it.
"Then we need to find our ten." Miles meant the ten sitting grandmasters required to formally recognize a candidate's status and submit them to the broader peer review. Between the two of them, they could reach that number through existing relationships without making it an event. The formal induction, the testing, the oath-taking itself, those were separate matters. But the first step was recognition, and recognition required witnesses who could not be dismissed.
They both knew what the oath meant in practice. Not merely the technical restriction on power output — the self-imposed limits that prevented grandmasters from deploying their full capabilities in populated areas and thus removing the populated areas from the equation. It meant membership in an order that policed itself, that hunted its own violators, that held the implicit understanding that the people who sat at the top of the world's power hierarchy were also the people most responsible for not breaking it. Some found that constraint suffocating. Most found it, eventually, the thing that made the power bearable to carry.
"He'll take it willingly," Ben said, as though Miles had asked the question aloud.
"You're certain?"
"I have never been more certain of anything about another person." Ben finally drank his milk. Set the cup down. "He already lives by the principle. He just hasn't formalized it yet."
Miles considered this for a long moment. Then, for the first time in the conversation, something shifted in his expression — not quite a smile, but the nearest thing to one a man like him produced. "The first weapon is yourself," he said. It was his own line, one he had given August during their training, and hearing the weight it carried now was a different thing than saying it in a practice yard.
"He remembered it better than most," Ben said.
They agreed to begin identifying their ten, quietly, through letters that would not announce themselves as what they were. The formal process would take time and would require August to be present for the recognition and debate. But the preliminary work could start now, during the celebration, while the village below was occupied with discounted goods and warm evenings and merchants loading wagons by lamplight.
They switched back to the milk argument briefly, neither willing to concede the final word, and then descended from the mezzanine to find something to eat before the kitchens closed.
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The Letter
While the two grandmasters were navigating the question of August's future, the Elder Council was handling something that required addressing August's past or actually something that was tied to the village past.
A merchant caravan had arrived two days before the celebration began, carrying among its cargo a sealed letter that had traveled a long and deliberate route before reaching Maya Village. It had been sent by a woman. A woman named Carys who was attached to one of the three families who had fled the original village on the night of the massacre.
The council had read it. They had read it twice. The language was precise in a way that suggested whoever composed it had done so carefully, choosing which information to include and which to leave implicit for someone who would understand the context. The letter referenced things that no outsider could have fabricated — details about the original village, names, methods, the particular way the old chief had organized certain ceremonies. It was not a forgery. It was, the council agreed after the second reading, this was the real thing that only August would know about.
They were sent specifically for August.
The woman was already waiting in the council chambers when he arrived — seated across the long table, her hands folded, watching the door with the calm of someone who had traveled far and could afford to wait a little longer. The letter sat on the table between two council members.
Red Peerce gestured for August to sit, and he did.
"We'd like you to read this," Red said. "And then tell us what it means."
August looked at the letter. Then at the woman. Then back at the letter.
He picked it up and read.
The room was quiet enough that the celebration sounds from three buildings over could be heard through the walls — voices, laughter, the faint rhythm of someone playing an instrument badly but enthusiastically. August read through the letter once without expression. Then once more, slower.
When he set it down, the silence in the room had a different quality.
"Well?" Red asked.
"It's real," August said. He turned to the woman. "Which family has sent you here?"
She told him.
He looked at the letter again, and then out the window at the summer evening beyond it. The celebration was still going. The village was still there, twelve years of it, built from the ruins of something that had been thought to have been finished. The three families had gone out back into the world that night the vote for a decision has made majority of them stayed and only the three families who wanted to go back to their old ancestral clans have gone back and disappeared, August have thought of the possibilities, that maybe they might have died or even if they did survive then they wouldn't know or he couldn't reach them. And apparently they had found their way back home, and in time they would find their way back here, but for now it may not be in person, not yet, but in ink, and that was a beginning, he was glad they had survived. But would he truly want to see them back here in the village? This was no longer the old Maya village that they had built that had been destroyed. This new Maya village was built by August hands and everyone that is here right now. His reply would have to follow until only the person who named herself as Carys would begin her journey back.
"I'll need some time with this," he said.
Nobody argued with that.