The compass had stopped working sometime around midday.
It wasn't broken — the needle still moved and swung when Sael tilted the casing — but it had lost its certainty. It drifted now, settling in one direction for a few minutes before quietly reconsidering and pointing somewhere else. He'd opened it four times over the past hour and gotten four different answers, none of them northeast.
They were gathered around it on the cloud, all of them looking at the thing in his palm.
"Perhaps it needs to recharge," Orion said. "Like a mana core after heavy use. If it pulled on a specific desire for a full day at speed, maybe it simply ran out of—"
"It doesn't work like a mana core," Lance said.
"You don't know that."
"I know it's not alive."
"Neither is a mana stone, and those deplete."
Ilsa was watching the needle with her arms crossed. "Could there be interference? Some kind of ward or barrier in the area that's disrupting the connection?"
"Possible," Sael said, which was honest. He had a few theories of his own, none of them fully satisfying.
Robin, for his part, had been looking at the compass, then at the ground below, then back at the compass, in a cycle that had been going on for several minutes. "I think," he said carefully, "that it might have led us here on purpose."
Everyone looked at him.
"I mean, it pointed northeast for a full day. That got us here. Now it's stopped." He gestured vaguely downward. "Maybe here is where it wanted us?"
This was either very perceptive or completely wrong, and Sael found he couldn't immediately determine which.
So he looked down.
"Where are we, exactly?" Robin asked.
"Eredor," Sael said.
Among all of the others, Orion seemed to be the only one who knew the history of the place, as he suddenly went still. "Eredor," he repeated. "Isn't that where Pointbreak fought Varek the Ashen?"
"Yes." Sael looked at the pass ahead. "We were ambushed there. Varek had set a trap along the northern ridge, and we walked into it. Half of us went down in the first hour." He paused. "I went down in the first hour."
This seemed to surprise even Oz, as Sael was certain he heard a little bok from the dragon. He drew on his pipe, remembering the past.
"Varek was one of the Corrupted One's better generals," he said. "He was careful, and patient. He'd been tracking us for weeks before that, which none of us had noticed."
He exhaled slowly.
"He hit us at the narrowest point of the pass. Thyria took a blow that put her out for two days. Korath was still standing but had taken enough damage that he was barely useful. Lysara was pinned down on the eastern side with Elden. I'd been hit by something that disrupted my mana core badly enough that casting wasn't an option for a while, which is a profoundly uncomfortable experience I'd recommend avoiding."
He could still feel it, when he thought about it. The silence where his magic should have been, one of the worst experiences for a mage.
"Most of us were down or out of position. Varek's forces were pushing through the center. And then Garrick—" Sael stopped for a moment, smiling at the memory. "Garrick saw an angle. A single approach along the left ridge that would take him straight into Varek's flank. Nobody else had seen it, or if they had, they'd decided it wasn't survivable. Garrick decided that was beside the point."
"What did he do?" Orion asked.
"He went up alone with no signal, nor plan, nor warning to the rest of us. Just went." Sael looked at the ridge line in the distance, the rock pale in the afternoon light. "He hit Varek's flank so hard it broke the entire formation. The general's forces scattered. Varek himself was taken down within the hour." He tapped the pipe against his palm. "It was the decisive moment of the entire engagement. Without it, we lose the pass, we lose Varek's forces at our backs for the rest of the campaign, and everything that came after is considerably harder."
"Ah, is that how sir Garrick lost his arm then? In this battle?" Ilsa asked quietly.
Sael chuckled. "Yes. He lost it getting up the ridge. Varek's rearguard caught him on the way in. He finished the climb anyway."
Sael put the pipe away, still smiling.
"When it was over and we found him, Bran asked him what he'd been thinking. Garrick said he hadn't been thinking, he'd just seen the angle and gone, so Bran stared at him for a long moment and then said: 'That is the most simpleminded thing anyone has ever done in my presence, and it saved all of our lives.' And Garrick said that seemed fair."
Sael's voice had gone warm somewhere in the telling of it.
"That is how he came to be called Garrick the Simpleton. He wore the name like it was a badge from then on, never argued with it once."
The cloud drifted in the quiet that followed. Below them, the valley road lay still and peaceful, farms catching the afternoon light, the pass ahead grey and unhurried.
Oz, who had said nothing through any of this, turned his head toward the north. "There are people on the road," he said. "Running."
Sael looked, and indeed, the road below, maybe two miles ahead, had people on it moving south. Fast, scattered, and away from the pass.
He closed the compass and put it away.
"We're going down," he said.
The cloud dropped low over the road, slow enough that the people below had time to notice it before it reached them. Most of them scattered further south when they saw it coming, which was a reasonable reaction to a cloud descending toward you at speed; Sael couldn't fault the logic.
He leaned over the edge slightly. "Excuse me. Is everything alright?"
A beat of silence from below. Then, from somewhere in the scattered group: "Bandits! Bandits, please, help us!"
"Hmm."
Sael brought the cloud down the rest of the way.
The group converged as soon as it touched the ground, cautiously at first, stopping a few feet back and looking at the cloud, then at the people on it. There were eleven of them; men mostly, a few older, all of them out of breath and missing their composure entirely. One man near the front had a cut above his eyebrow that hadn't been seen to. Another was still clutching a ledger to his chest as though he'd grabbed it on instinct while running and hadn't thought to put it down since.
"Are you, kind sire, a mage?" The man with the ledger said, looking at Sael.
The latter considered the cloud he was standing on, which should have been indication enough, but he decided to not point out the obvious. "...Yes," he said instead. "Yes, I am."
The man closed his eyes briefly and said something under his breath that sounded like a prayer of thanks. Then he straightened, pulled himself together with visible effort, and said, "I am Royen Mizan. House Mizan." He looked at Sael squarely, waiting.
"Sure," Sael said. "And?"
Ilsa stepped forward beside him. "Wait. House Mizan, as in the eastern trading consortium?"
The entire group seemed to exhale at once. Royen Mizan's posture shifted from tightly wound to relief. "Yes! Exactly, yes!"
"Most people in trade know the house," Ilsa said.
Mizan started talking the moment Sael's feet touched the ground, words coming fast and stepping on each other.
"T-the Greyspine of Eredor has been quiet," he said. "Three years, nearly four, without a serious incident. We had reports, w-we checked. The guild posts along the valley even said the route was passable and that the bandit activity had dropped, that—"
"Liar! You wanted to save the toll," shouted one of the other men. He was older, heavyset, with a split lip that had dried badly. "That's what you wanted!"
"Davan—"
"Don't!" The man's voice cracked on the word. "My wife is up there! Don't say the word 'reports' to me right now!"
Mizan's jaw tightened. "We had soldiers. Twenty of them. I made a calculated—"
"Your calculation got men killed!"
"...Gentlemen," Sael said.
Neither of them listened. Davan stepped forward, fist already forming at his side, and Mizan stepped back as the other men around them shifted uncomfortably.
Sael put up two barriers, one between each of them and the space in the middle, quiet and without announcement. Davan's next step went nowhere; he hit the wall and stumbled back, confused. Mizan found himself similarly contained, pushed gently but firmly to the left.
Both men stopped.
"Thank you," Sael said. He looked at Mizan. "Please, tell me what happened. Clearly, and from the beginning."
Mizan took a breath. "The Greyspine has had a reputation for years," he said, more carefully now. "Mountain bandits. But the attacks had been thinning out, season by season. The guild posts confirmed it. We brought twenty soldiers and decided the route was worth the risk; the southern detour costs two weeks and the fees at Davan's point alone—"
"It costs money," Davan said, from behind his barrier. "That's the point. You chose money."
Mizan ignored him with visible effort. "Twenty-three wagons. Silk, spice, dye, and alchemical supplies bound for Tessavar. Halfway up the pass, they came from above and from both sides at the same time. More of them than we'd seen in any of the guild reports. The soldiers went down fast." He stopped. "The men who could run, ran, and the women..." He paused again, shorter this time. "Seven of them were taken. Everything on every wagon went with them."
He looked at Sael, steadier now but only just.
"I will give you your weight in gold," he said. "All of you. If you bring them back."
Sael glanced up toward the pass, then back at Mizan.
"That won't be necessary," he said. "Get these people to the nearest settlement and wait." He looked at the others. "We'll go."
"What do you mean that won't be necessary?"
The merchants looked left, and found Oz sitting at the edge of the cloud, feathers flat, looking at Sael as if he'd been personally wronged. Several of the men took a step back.
"Free labor?" Oz said. "You are proposing free labor for humans we have never met? Do you understand what you are, Archmage?"
"Come now, Oz."
This was embarassing.
"I will tell you what you are. You are the simpleton, not your companion. I am a dragon, and this entire situation is beneath me. I do not clear mountain passes for merchants."
"You don't have to do anything," Sael said, smiling at the chicken's jab. "I'll handle it."
"No."
Sael looked at him.
"I want to handle it," Oz said. "I crave violence. I have been sitting on this cloud for two days. I am going." He turned his head toward Mizan, who was staring at the chicken with a bewildered expression. "You. Human. You said our weight in gold, yes?"
Mizan blinked. "I... yes, I—"
"Speak when you are spoken to and stop stutering, your weakness irritates me."
"Y-yes. Anything. We just need our merchandise back, and the women—"
"My true weight," Oz said, with the precision of someone dictating terms to a scribe, "is 12 tons. That is my weight as a dragon, which is what I am, regardless of present appearances. You will have that amount delivered to me upon completion, do you understand?"
The silence that followed was , for lack of a better word, considerable.
"That's—" Mizan started. "That is an absurd amount, sire. Thirteen tons of gold? Do you understand what you're asking?"
"Of course I do," Oz said. "The question is whether you do."
"We lost twenty soldiers today. Seven women. Twenty-three wagons of goods." Mizan's voice was controlled but tight. "We are not in a position to simply agree to—"
"Then don't," Oz said. "We will leave."
"Wait!" One of the men behind Mizan stepped forward. He was younger than the others, thin, with ink stains on his fingers. He leaned close to Mizan and said, quietly but not quietly enough, "The relic is with them. It's on the third wagon."
Mizan seemed reluctant at first, then closed his eyes for a moment.
The other men had gone still. Davan was looking at Mizan now with a different kind of attention than before, less anger and more something harder to name.
Mizan opened his eyes, looking at Oz, then at Sael. "If you retrieve everything that was taken," he said, "the women, the wagons, all of it, we will give you that amount. You have my word as vice head of House Mizan."
"Your word," Oz said, "is worth nothing to me. But the gold will be."
"...Agreed," the merchant said.
"Good," Oz said, and looked away.
Sael said nothing. He stood with his pipe and looked at the young man with the ink-stained fingers who had mentioned a relic and then gone very quiet, at the speed with which an impossible number had become acceptable the moment that word entered the conversation. Silk and spice, Mizan had said. Alchemical supplies.
He hadn't mentioned a relic.
"Hmm," Sael said quietly.
He looked up at the pass.