Sael was still looking at Pebble, well, Urus.
"Get out," he said quietly. "Out of the goat. Now."
The thing inside Pebble paused for a long second.
"I... cannot. Archmage."
"Try harder."
"I am not refusing. I am unable. The mechanism is not what you think it is."
"Out of the goat, Urus." Sael's voice did not rise. "I am going to purge you. That has been decided. I will purge you with or without the body, the goat does not need to be part of it. I would prefer the goat not to be part of it. I know its name now."
There was a small pause, and then Sael added, almost as an afterthought,
"Please."
The shell hung in the air as the corrupted residue inside it folded against the hide.
Sael, internally, regretted the please. He had not meant to be polite to this thing. The word had come out on its own, as it did sometimes, and there was no taking it back.
...Oh well.
"Archmage." Urus's voice came back. "I cannot. If I leave this body, the Primordial locates me. Immediately. As soon as I am no longer anchored in something living, the connection becomes visible to the master, and the others come for me."
"Convenient."
"It is the opposite of convenient, Archmage. It is the reason I have been a goat for years."
Oz made a small mocking bok on the wall as Urus went on.
"...The first time I came up out of the rubble, my anchor was an insect. I had a choice of small living things and I took the first one that would hold the connection without burning out, and that was a beetle. I spent six weeks as a beetle while I worked out what had happened to me and where I was. Then I moved into a rat. Then a feral cat in the borderlands. Then a magpie. Then a man, when I was confident enough in the discipline to hold one without him noticing."
"Fitting," Sael said. "Starting as a beetle."
"Agreed," Oz said.
Urus did not respond to this. He continued instead.
"As long as I am inside a body, any body, even a beetle, the master does not see me. The body grounds me. The line that should run between me and the hive is, for whatever reason, broken by occupying a vessel of flesh. I do not know why. I have theorized for a century and arrived at no satisfying answer. But I know that it works, because I am still here, and they have not come for me."
He paused.
"So when you tell me to step out of the goat, Archmage, you are not asking me to step out of a costume, but to make myself visible to the thing that owns me, and to do so in front of you. Within seconds, the hive would have my exact location, and the others would already be moving."
Urus's voice came back smaller.
"I do not think you want them to know where you are, Archmage. Not yet."
Sael did not respond to Urus straight away.
He kept the shell where it was and let the words settle, working through them, and arrived at the conclusion that he was, for one of the few times in the past century, genuinely uncertain about what he was looking at. Not the goat, but the situation. The shape of it kept rearranging itself every time he tried to fix it in his mind.
"What the fuck, Pebble?"
Dan had come down the slope, slowly, and was now standing a few paces behind Sael, staring at his goat. He had not, Sael noted, been hit again by the captain for the language.
"You could talk?"
"He cannot," Sael said, without turning. "Pebble cannot. The thing speaking is not the goat."
"It's coming out of Pebble's mouth, though. Don't you see, old man?"
"Oi!" Said Orion, though he was ignored by Dan.
"Yes." Sael replied. "It is using the mouth."
Dan did not seem to know what to do with the information and stayed where he was as Orion had come closer. He had Eirwyn in his hand and was holding her loosely, the tip down, watching the shell with attention.
"Master?"
"Hmm?"
"...Could this be a sort of magical evolution? A — a deviation, perhaps? A path the Corruption took that nobody else has documented because the conditions for it have never aligned again, I mean."
Sael looked at him.
The boy was earnest. He always was, and the question was a good one in the abstract; if Sael had been hearing it about somebody else's problem, he would have thought about it carefully and given the boy a thorough answer.
"Corrupted entities lie, Orion."
Orion stilled.
"In everything they do. Every word, every gesture, every pause where they could have said something and chose to say something slightly different instead. If there is anything true in what he just said, then that truth is small and is buried in a great deal that is not. The problem is never whether they are lying, but rather identifying which of the things they are saying is the one they are letting you have."
Orion nodded once and did not say anything else, but inside the shell, Pebble jerked.
"I AM NOT LYING!" Urus's voice came back high, the goat thrashing inside the containment. "ARCHMAGE, I AM NOT LYING! VERIFY IT! YOU CAN VERIFY IT! YOU CAN LOOK! MY MEMORIES — ALL OF THEM — I OPEN THEM TO YOU, EVERY ONE OF THEM, GO IN AND TAKE WHAT YOU WANT, NONE OF IT HIDDEN, NONE OF IT WALLED OFF, JUST LOOK!"
The goat's voice cracked as the body slumped slightly inside the shell, exhausted.
"Please," Urus said again, smaller. "Verify."
"I say we kill him," Oz said.
"I agree with Oz, grandpa." Ilsa's voice came from just behind Orion. She had her sword out, low, in a relaxed grip. "We probably should."
"Could you, like, not kill my goat, old man?"
"He's done it again... Dan..."
"What? I just have one request."
"That goat is not your goat anymore, boy, that goat is a vessel for a Corrupted being, that is a very different situation."
"I'd still like Pebble's body back, ideally."
"My lord, I beg your pardon for the boy impudence."
"Hmm." Sael did not find him impudent, to be honest.
Robin had drifted forward, crossbow across his shoulder, ears flat. "Sir, with respect, I'd second the dragon and the lady. Whatever it has to say, the longer we listen, the more time it has to think of new things."
"Sir." Lance, behind Robin, hands clasped. "I would also recommend ending this. The conditions for mercy do not, in my reading of the doctrine, extend to confirmed servants of the Corrupted One, even retired ones."
Sael said nothing. He was, on balance, prepared to do it. The hand was raised, and the arithmetic was clean.
"...Master."
Orion, this time.
Everyone looked at him.
"I am not — I would not normally argue against everyone else, Master. I would not. But..." Orion's voice was steady, although Sael could hear the small effort it was taking him to stay steady. "Perhaps you should verify. If he is lying, you will know. If he is truly trying to deceive you, you of all people will see through it, and we lose nothing by checking. And if he is not lying, even partially, then we may learn something we did not know yesterday, and that we cannot learn elsewhere."
Sael turned his head and looked at him properly.
Orion did not look away.
"Hmm."
It was a hmm of contemplation, this time.
"Yes," Urus said. "Yes — listen to the boy, Archmage, listen to him, he's a clever boy, an intelligent boy, you can—"
Sael closed three fingers and the goat's mouth sealed cutting off Urus's voice mid-syllable.
Sael then stepped forward to the edge of the shell. He thinned the inner layer just enough to let his hand through without breaking the outer containment, reached out, and placed his palm against the side of Pebble's head, just above the eye, where the bone curved.
[Read.]
And then he was somewhere else.
He was on what had once been a mountain, and what was now a flat ruin of stone that stretched from horizon to horizon. Yrsult, the tallest peak the world had ever produced, had just stopped being a peak. The summit was gone, and so were the shoulders. What remained was a vast tilted plain of broken stone, blackened in places and white-hot in others, and across the plain were bodies.
Sael could not, in the half-second he was given to see it, count them. They were everywhere, stacked in the cracks and the craters and along the long jagged seams where the mountain had been hammered open by spell-work on a scale that no one alive would ever cast again.
Through Urus's eyes the plain read differently. The dead were warmer to him than the living, and the dark patches in the smoke moved with intention.
Urus was on his knees. Sael felt the wound before he understood what it was; a long clean cut across the chest, going deep, the blade with the white light along its edge still in him. Caliburn. Bran's sword.
Then Urus looked up at the sky.
The clouds above the plain had been torn open in a wide spiral, and at the centre of the spiral, very high, two figures were facing each other.
One was the Corrupted One, and the other was Sael.
Sael, himself, four hundred years younger, suspended in air above a broken mountain with his arms raised and his coat opened by the wind and the entire weight of what was left of his mana funneling into the working of his the stave he was using: Eirlys and Eld. He could see his own face from below, through Urus, as the exchange went off.
The mana between the two figures collapsed inward and then outward at the same instant, and the spiral of clouds was gone, the light was gone, and for one full second there was nothing in the sky above the plain but white silence, and then the world came back, and one of the figures was still in the air, while the other—
Sael immediately pulled his hand off the goat's head, a bit shaken by the memory of Yrsult.
The shell was still steady, and less than a second had passed for the others.
"...Forgive me, Archmage." Urus's voice came back. "I should have known better. You... you did not give me time to prepare, and I went to the first memory available. I will focus. Tell me what you want and I will bring it forward."
"...Grandpa Sael?"
Ilsa.
He turned, finding her a few paces behind him now, sword still in hand but lowered.
"Are you alright?"
"...I think so. Yes."
She held his eyes for a second longer, then nodded, and let it go, while Sael turned back to the shell.
"Show me everything," he said. "From the moment you woke. A hundred years. All of it."
He placed his hand against the goat's head again.
[Read.]
There was a beetle on a flat stone, beneath an overhang in some forest he did not know, six legs and two antennae and a body the size of a fingernail, and it took days, then weeks, of working out where and then what before he could begin to act.
Then a rat in the rafters of a barn, watching a red-haired girl feed the cats below, until the cats came up looking for him and he had to run.
A cat, after that. Eight years of one. He stayed in it while the girl became a woman and married a baker she had known since childhood, and he left the cat only on its deathbed, moving on with what appeared to be... grief.
He was a magpie for a while, then; skies and carrion and the occasional sight of a man dying in a ditch with nobody to find him, which Urus sat on the fence and watched until it was over.
The first body he took was a farmer who had fallen ill and would not recover, and he stepped into it the day before the dying finished and lived out the rest of the man's life for him; married the wife, helped raise a child not his own, buried the wife twenty years later, and died of old age in a chair by a fire the next body would not remember. Then there was another man, and then another. A merchant who travelled the southern coast. A traveller with no fixed business who walked east for several years and learned a number of dialects along the way. A scholar in a small town who let him read uninterrupted for forty years.
Through all of it, the silence where the hive should have been; the line still attached and the will at the far end of it absent, and a century of Urus checking, testing and finding the absence still there.
And somewhere in the middle of it, the small shift, of him noticing he no longer wanted to look for the others, that he had begun to want things Urus would not have wanted; to know how a particular child two villages over had turned out, to finish a book before sleeping, to see what the south of the world looked like in summer.
Sael felt, briefly, what sat at the far end of the line that still ran through Urus.
It was a pressure, distant but constant, pulling at the edges of who Urus was and trying to dissolve him into the rest of the hive. Every Corrupted being he had ever purged across four hundred years had been at the end of this same line, with the same pressure pulling on them, and the people they had once been had been thinned out and folded into the collective until nothing of them remained. Sael had said for four centuries that the Corrupted were not themselves. He had not, until now, felt the mechanism of it from inside one of them.
It was worse than he had thought.
Sael took his hand off Pebble's head. The day was still afternoon, the grass was still warm, and less than a second had passed.
"So?" Oz said from the wall.
Sael was quiet for a moment.
Then, in a voice that surprised him on the way out, he said:
"He's telling the truth."