With the unexpected bandit subjugation done, Oz was now negotiating delivery terms.
Sael stood a few paces away with his hands in his pockets and watched. The bandits, all two hundred and some of them, were lined up along the slope below the cavern in varying states of being put together; some standing, more sitting, and a fair number lying flat on the rock because they were too wounded to do anything else. Their chief was at the front of the line, unconscious, his face slack and his nose bleeding gently into his collar while one of his lieutenants kept looking at him with an expression Sael did not feel like interpreting right now.
Mizan was talking to Oz. Well, trying to talk to Oz, more accurately. He had been trying for about ten minutes.
"My true weight," Oz was saying, "is thirteen tons, as a dragon. So you owe me thirteen tons of gold."
"...It was twelve tons of gold, sir."
"Thirteen. It was thirteen."
"I... I distinctly recall the figure being twelve."
"Caelen," Oz said, without turning his head. "What was the figure?"
The young merchant with the mana core, who had been standing just behind Mizan and trying to look as small as possible, swallowed. "I... believe it was twelve tons, sir."
There was a pause, then...
"That is acceptable," Oz said.
The arrangement they were eventually settling on, after several more reversals of position and a brief discussion about whether the gold could be paid in mixed forms or had to be raw bullion, was that the payment would be delivered to the nearest city under Oz's name personally rather than Pointbreak's.
This had been Mizan's suggestion, and Sael privately approved of it, since he had no particular desire to take money from them. So he let them work it out, and instead, he turned his attention to the hostages, which was the harder part of the situation.
They were down the slope a little way, gathered near the wagons in the wider section of the pass. The reunions had been happening for the past quarter hour. A woman, who Sael had counted as one of the seven taken from the caravan, was sitting on a broken crate holding Davan's hand and not saying anything; Davan had stopped talking some time ago as well and was simply holding her hand back. His wife, most like. Sael was glad to see them reunited.
Three of the women had been embracing the same older merchant for the better part of ten minutes while four boys were sitting together near the edge of the wagon train, not speaking, but close to each other, and one of the merchants was crying without making any sound, kneeling beside a body that had been laid out on a canvas at the edge of the wreckage.
That was the harder part.
There were eleven dead. Sael had counted them on the way in and counted them again on the way out. Twenty soldiers, the merchants had said. Nine of them had been recovered alive among the wounded at the bandit position, beaten badly but alive; the other eleven were here, where they had fallen. Sael had brought them down himself, one at a time, after the cavern was clear. He had not asked anyone to help him with it.
It would have been better to arrive a day earlier. Or two. Or sometime before any of this had happened. Sael noted that quietly and let it go, just as he had learned to a long time ago.
Pulling at this kind of thread did nothing for the people on the canvas and a great deal of damage to whoever was doing the pulling, and he had stopped doing it to himself somewhere around the second century of his life. He could be sorry without being torn open by it. Most of his work came down to arriving in time for some people and too late for others, and the arithmetic of it was a thing he had made peace with the only way a person could, which was to keep moving toward the next one.
So he turned back to Mizan, who had finished with Oz and was now standing nearby with his hands clasped, waiting to be acknowledged.
"Lord Archmage."
Hmm, that was the other thing.
The merchants had, at some point during the past hour, worked out who he was. Sael wasn't sure exactly when, but the exact moment didn't matter, because the result was the same: every merchant who addressed him now did so with both hands clasped, head slightly inclined, and a voice pitched several notches lower than the one they had been using earlier in the day.
They had been calling him Lord Archmage for the past hour without showing any sign of stopping. Sael had thought, several times, about asking them to please not, and had decided against it each time, because every time he opened his mouth to do so they got more reverent, not less, and he could not work out what mechanism was responsible for this and did not want to test it further.
"Mister Mizan."
"My lord, we have settled the matter of the payment to your companion. As discussed. Twelve tons, in the city, under his name."
"...Yes. Thank you."
"Is there anything further we can do for you, Lord Archmage?"
Sael thought about it. "The bandits."
"My lord?"
"They need to be turned over to the local authorities for judgment. Two hundred-some men, with documented crimes, including the taking of hostages and the murder of caravan soldiers. That's a matter for a magistrate, not for me. Where is the nearest competent jurisdiction?"
Mizan brightened slightly, as if relieved to be asked a question he could actually answer. "The town of Kessenmark, my lord. Half a day's ride west, at the foot of the valley. They have a garrison, a magistrate, and a court of records. The Eredori crown maintains a small post there for exactly this purpose, given the pass."
"That'll do."
He looked at the bandits, who were now mostly compliant. The cloud, in its current size, could not carry that many. Not even close.
So Sael made it larger.
The cloud, which had been sitting at the base of the pass at the size of a generous room, began to expand. It rose to twice its previous size, then four times, then more, the white of it spreading across the valley floor below them until it was the rough size of a small marketplace, flat, steady and unhurried. The merchants made a sound, several of them at once, mostly gasps.
"...It's just a cloud. It needs to fit the prisoners." Said Sael, feeling the need to justify his action and not appear as a show off.
Luckily, the merchants said nothing more.
Sael looked up the slope and found the others coming back down it.
Orion was in front, walking a little stiffly, the tip of Eirwyn still faintly charged. Ilsa was behind him with her sword sheathed and a small scorch mark on the side of her armor that hadn't been there before.
Robin had his crossbow over his shoulder and was steering a man with his arm twisted up his back; the man was protesting weakly and not in any meaningful way while Lance brought up the rear with both hands at his sides and an expression of mild satisfaction, the gauntlets clean somehow, which Sael did not have the time to ask about.
They had the rest of the bandits with them. Roughly forty more men, herded into a loose group.
"Good work," Sael said when they reached him.
"Thank you, sir," Lance said.
"Master." Orion was a little out of breath. "There were two more groups in the back tunnels. We caught up to the second one trying to leave through a side pass. The vice chief is the one Robin has."
"Haran?"
"That's what he was called, yes."
"Hmm." Sael looked at the man Robin was holding, who avoided eye contact with admirable thoroughness. "Good." He turned back to the merchants. "We're going to town. Please get on the cloud."
***
It took them less than two hours to reach the town.
Sael kept the cloud high until they cleared the pass entirely, then dropped down only after Kessenmark came into view; a small walled town at the base of the valley, stone-built, with a garrison post visible against its western wall and a market square in the middle that even from altitude looked busy. He brought the cloud down in a wide clearing about a quarter mile outside the gates, far enough to keep the entire arrival from becoming the day's primary event.
He did not enter the town, but sent Mizan instead and one of the older merchants ahead on foot to fetch the relevant authorities, and stayed with the prisoners on the cloud while they were gone.
The guard captain who came back with them arrived at a fast walk that broke into something closer to a jog when he saw what Sael had brought him.
He was a man in his late forties, dark-haired and grey at the temples, in the practical leather and steel of a frontier garrison rather than a parade uniform. He stopped about ten paces from the edge of the cloud and looked at the rows of bandits, who had been arranged in a long sitting line under Robin's supervision, and his face did several things in quick succession.
"That's the Hollow Wolves?"
"Yes," Sael said.
"All of the Hollow Wolves?"
"As many as we could account for. Two hundred and forty-three, including the chief. There may be a few who slipped through the back tunnels and made it into the rocks; we didn't pursue them past the secondary positions."
"Two hundred and forty-three..."
"That is what I said, yes."
...Was he perhaps hard of hearing?
The captain was now looking at the bandits without saying anything for a long moment, and his hand rose to the bridge of his nose and stayed there. "We've been chasing them for nine years," he said. "Three magistrates ago. They burned a garrison patrol, sacked a royal expedition, took two of our scouts last summer and we never got them back. The current commission on their chief alone is one thousand crowns."
"That's not necessary."
"My lord, I have to log this. There's a process."
"Then log it, and put the money somewhere useful. I have no use for it."
Oz seemed to not agree as he made a sharp bok, how greedy.
The captain looked at Sael for a long moment. Then at the rest of the group one by one. "May I ask who you are, my kind sir?"
"My name's not really—"
"This is Sael the Great," Mizan said, stepping forward before Sael could finish. "Archmage of the Age of Ash, in the flesh!"
The captain stood very still.
"We've had word," he said slowly, "from the eastern messengers. Of the Archmage's return. They came through Kessenmark twelve days ago."
One of the guards behind him drew in a breath. "Captain. Sir. You don't mean—"
"Quiet, Toran."
"But sir—"
"Quiet."
Toran went quiet, though only barely. He was staring at Sael with his mouth slightly open, and didn't seem aware of it. The second guard had taken half a step backward without seeming to notice, while the third had a hand on the pommel of his sword.
Sael, for his part, was trying to find a way into the conversation.
It seemed like the right moment, on balance, to clarify a few things himself. Confirm his identity, indicate that he meant no trouble, perhaps explain why he was here, get ahead of some of the visible alarm. But every time he opened his mouth, someone else was already mid-sentence, and Sael had a longstanding and, he would admit, occasionally inconvenient preference against cutting people off.
Mizan stepped forward before he found a gap.
"Captain, if I may." Mizan's voice had a small forward-leaning quality, the merchant in him reasserting itself now that there was an audience. "He came down on us out of the sky on that cloud. Put more spells on his companions in a minute than I have seen any one mage do in my life, and I have engaged the services of mages from three different schools. My clerk Caelen has a mana core; he could feel the casting from where he was standing. Caelen."
Caelen, who clearly would have preferred to stay where he was standing in this exchange too, swallowed. "Yes. Sir. I counted... fifty-two layered enchantments. On four people, under a minute."
Toran said, "Fifty-two—"
"I might have lost count once," Caelen added quickly.
"My God," the second guard said.
The captain, for his part, didn't say anything.
So Sael, attempting again, started with, "I should perhaps—"
"And the Hollow Wolves, Captain," Mizan went on, and Sael let his hand drop. "Most of them taken by the four companions, and he went up the north face alone for the cavern. The chief is the one at your feet."
The captain looked down at the unconscious Kalrik.
"Sir," Toran said suddenly, his voice climbing, "sir, the flag. Look at the flag."
"I have been looking at the flag, Toran."
"That's the flag, sir."
"Yes."
"That's the Pointbreak flag!"
"My lord." The captain had opened his eyes again, and he was bowing now. The three guards followed half a beat later, in an arrangement of bows that started ragged and steadied itself. "Forgive me. I should have—I'm sorry, my lord."
Sael looked at the four of them, confused as to what they were sorry for. So he raised one hand.
"Hello," he said.
It worked rather well, he thought. Hello was a good opener.
The captain straightened and saluted, and the guards behind him did the same, in something close to unison this time.
"I did not mean to cause a stir," Sael said. "I'll stay outside the town, if it's all the same. I'd rather not be the cause of one." He glanced at the prisoners. "These are yours. The relic and the goods that were on the third wagon are with them as well; House Mizan can identify what's theirs."
"The Lord of Kessenmark will want to receive you, my lord. He's a young man, but he keeps a good house, and he would consider it an honour."
"Erm... another time, perhaps. Thank him for me."
The captain inclined his head and did not press it, which Sael appreciated. He was about to suggest they begin the prisoner transfer when the compass moved.
He felt it before he registered it, the small tug against the inside pocket of his coat where it had been sitting quiet for the past two hours. He drew it out, opened it, and the needle, which had been drifting since midday, settled with the same certainty it had shown the first night at Orlys. He turned it slowly, and the direction it indicated was no longer northeast in any general sense; it was specific now, pointing at something within his immediate line of sight, and he followed the line with his eyes until he found what it was pointing at.
A hill at the edge of the town. Inside the walls, but at the far end. There was a small house on top of it where white smoke rose in a thin steady line from the chimney. And around the house, even at this distance Sael could make out a small flock of perhaps fifteen lambs grazing on the slope.
"Is there someone living there?" Sael asked, without taking his eyes off the hill.
The captain followed his gaze. "Up on the hill, my lord?"
"Yes."
"Ah." The captain's tone shifted slightly. "Yes, there's a young shepherd up there. He's the only one. His parents died some years back, and he stayed on; he keeps the family flock. The town leaves him to it."
Sael was quiet for a moment.
"I'd like to visit him."
At that, the captain hesitated, so Sael looked at him.
"What is it?"
The captain shifted his weight. "It's only that..." He paused, choosing his words. "The boy is not, my lord, what one would call the easiest company. He keeps to himself by preference. He doesn't come down often, and when he does he's, ah, irreverent. Not in a way that troubles anyone in particular, but he has a mouth on him. I'd hate for you to come all the way up the hill to meet him and have him say something that offended you. It would be a shame for our town to have hosted that."
"I see."
Sael was about to tell him that he had a higher tolerance for irreverence than the captain was crediting him for, and that the matter of being offended by a shepherd boy was not high on his list of present concerns, when one of the women from the hostage group stepped forward.
He recognized her. She had introduced herself earlier as Yena, and she had been the one to speak to him in the cavern when no one else would, which Sael had been quietly grateful for at the time and was still quietly grateful for now.
"I can take you up there," Yena said.
Everyone turned to look at her, but she didn't seem to mind. That was a great quality Sael immediately envied her.
"I know the boy," she said, addressing Sael directly. "I live in Kessenmark and was using the caravan to travel to my sister's in Tessavar; that's how I ended up among the hostages. I keep a bakery here on the main square, and the boy comes down often enough to buy bread. We get along well, considering. I can introduce you, if you'd like."
Sael smiled.
"I'd like that," he said.