A problem sat in his core he struggled to answer.
Weapons.
He turned it over the way he'd turned over bad terrain before a raid — mapping the shape of the thing until the answer came out the other side. His Varangur were seven feet of oath-bound muscle who'd held ten creatures with their hands and come out bleeding but standing, and the next thing through his tunnels wasn't going to be caged specimens released by a commander making a point. It was going to be a coordinated team with gear chosen for exactly this kind of work, and his people were going to meet them empty-handed.
He'd sent men into worse situations. He'd also buried those men.
Caden had been clear enough — the Arbiters' rules governed what the dungeon developed directly, not what it acquired on its own. The rules had a gap, which was how Caden got around releasing monsters in his tunnels, and gaps were for people who knew how to use them.
The garrison sat at its entrance, and they had surplus equipment. Caden had said as much without meaning to say it at all.
Gunnar had dealt with men like Aldric his whole life. Men who gave orders without earning the right to give them, who treated allies like assets, and called it strategy. There was a word for that in the old tongue — níðingr — a man without honor, and it didn't matter that Aldric probably had no idea the word existed. He'd earned it anyway. Deception had its place, but against enemies, not the men fighting beside you. A jarl who had to trick his own people into following him was already lost.
So Gunnar felt no particular guilt about what he was planning. Aldric had taken first, in his own way, the moment he'd opened those cages. This was just Gunnar taking back.
Better send two, he thought. I need the right two.
He pushed his awareness through the rooms, feeling the weight of each warrior against the stone.
Sket was the obvious answer — the quietest of them, still as rock, the one who'd stood watch on a ruined leg after the trial without complaint or announcement. He noticed things before other people noticed him noticing.
Orvald was the second, and it took Gunnar longer to arrive at it. Orvald thought ahead, planned his retreats before he needed them, and had taken one look at the tenth room's column and understood Gunnar's intent without being told. A man who read ground that fast read every other kind of ground the same way. He wouldn't rush. He wouldn't improvise when he could plan. He reminded Gunnar enough of Kjartan that the instinct ran deeper than logic, and Gunnar had learned to trust that particular instinct.
He pushed his voice through the stone to both rooms.
"Sket. Orvald. Come to the core."
They stood in the tenth room and listened without interrupting.
When he finished, Orvald said, "The weapons won't fit our hands properly."
"Those puny blades will be better used as daggers."
"Better than nothing." He replied.
"What else besides blades?"
"Anything you can carry back without slowing yourselves down. Anything useful and not nailed down." Gunnar paused. "Armor if you can. Maybe if I absorb it I can recreate it for you all."
Sket, who had been standing against the far wall in the stillness, said, "The garrison camp. The layout?"
"At my entrance. They face outward, away from the dungeon. You'll come out behind them."
"They know the dungeon is here."
"They're stationed to guard it. From outside threats, not from what comes out."
Sket absorbed this and filed it the way he filed everything — quietly, in whatever internal arrangement he kept his assessments. Then: "Night."
"Tonight," Gunnar said. "Before they rotate again."
Orvald looked at Sket. Sket looked back, and neither of them spoke, and Gunnar had been leading men long enough to recognize agreement.
"One more thing," Gunnar said. "When you cross my threshold, you'll feel a drain. Slow, but it gets worse the further you go. Don't push past what you can manage on the way back — I can't feel you once you're outside, and I can't reach you if something goes wrong."
"Understood," Orvald said.
"Go when the moon is at its tallest."
Gunnar felt them at the threshold the moment they stopped.
He hadn't asked them to stop. They'd reached the point where his awareness frayed — the last feet of his entrance tunnel where stone gave way to open air and the earth stopped being his — and they'd paused on their own, and he could feel the hesitation through the soles of their feet pressing into his stone.
"The mana," Sket said.
"I feel it." Orvald's voice was low, the deliberate quiet of a man who'd already set the noise level this job required. "Like wading out."
Gunnar felt it too — a thin drain, steady, the way a hull leaked in cold water. Not dangerous on its own, but present, ticking upward with each step they took toward open air, and the regeneration that usually kept pace with small expenditures had already fallen slightly behind.
"How far does it reach?" Sket said, not quite a question.
"Don't know," Gunnar said, and then they crossed, and the stone ended, and he said nothing more because there was nothing to say it through.
He felt them go as a reduction — the drain notching up, then settling into a new baseline, and the weight of two warriors dropping out of his awareness like oars shipped before a landing. He had the last edge of his domain pressing against open mountain air. Beyond that, he had nothing, but he prayed to his gods that they would come back. Even if they couldn’t hear him in this forsaken realm.
The night was clear enough for their purposes.
Sket came out low and moved left, putting rock at his back, and Orvald came out right and did the same, and they held there for a count of twenty while their eyes found the dark.
The shimmer caught Sket's attention before anything else did — a band ringing the camp perimeter at roughly chest height, faint enough that a man not looking for it would walk through without seeing it. But it caught moonlight at an angle plain air didn't, and it ran from the far left edge of the camp around and back to the right, and where it met the rock face, it met cleanly.
Orvald touched two fingers to his sternum and tilted his chin toward it.
Sket nodded. Ward, or something close enough to warrant the same caution.
He turned his attention to the camp itself and took his time with it.
It was well-made. That registered first, before the numbers, before the positions — the quality of a camp set by people who'd done it enough times that competence had become habit. Tents angled against the prevailing wind, lines at the right tension, firewood under oilskin, equipment arranged along a line running between the main cluster and the rock face. Organized by function, by type, by frequency of use. Someone had set this, someone else had maintained it, and both knew what they were doing.
The night was clear enough for their purposes.
Sket came out low and moved left, putting rock at his back, and Orvald came out right and did the same, and they held there for a count of twenty while their eyes found the dark.
The shimmer caught Sket's attention before anything else — a band ringing the camp at roughly chest height, faint enough that a man not looking for it would walk through without noticing. It caught moonlight at an angle plain air didn't, running from the left edge of the camp around and back to the right, and where it met the rock face, it met cleanly.
Orvald touched two fingers to his sternum and tilted his chin toward it.
Sket nodded once. Ward, or close enough to treat it the same way.
He turned his attention to the camp and took his time with it.
Well-made. That registered before anything else — the quality of a camp set by people who'd done it enough times that competence had stopped being effort. Tents angled against the prevailing wind, lines at the right tension, firewood under oilskin, equipment arranged along a rope line running parallel to the rock face. Organized by type, by function, and at the far end of the line, a tent larger than the others, set back from the rest with the kind of footprint that meant it held more than one category of thing.
Then Sket looked at the treeline and the rock outcroppings ringing the camp's edge, and his skin pulled tight across his shoulders.
Nothing moved. Nothing caught the eye. But the shadows sat wrong in four, five, six places — the specific wrongness of a shadow that had a man inside it, a man who'd learned how to be still and stay that way, facing out into the dark with the patience of someone who wasn't watching the camp at all. He counted the wrong shadows across the whole perimeter and stopped at nine visible and kept going in his head, running the math around the curve of the rock face and the ground he couldn't see from here.
Fifty, maybe. Probably fifty.
Beside him Orvald had gone very still, and his breathing had dropped to the controlled slowness he used when he was doing the same count and arriving at the same number. Sket glanced at him and found his jaw set, eyes moving across the concealed positions with a sharpness that had nothing to do with caution.
Sket's blood had gone warm, and his pulse sped up, which was the wrong combination for a stealth job, and he knew it. Fifty soldiers in the dark who knew how to disappear into their own perimeter — the kind of men worth fighting, the kind a warrior spent years becoming worthy of, and his body had already decided it wanted that fight and was preparing for it with complete indifference to whether this was the moment. Orvald's fist had gone tight in the same way, the slow clench of a man holding himself back from something his hands had already decided to reach for.
He counted his own tattoos by feel the way he did when he needed to remember what he was. Seven marks. Seven victories, and each one a story, and not enough of them, not nearly enough to walk into whatever those shadows were and come out the other side with anything except a quick end.
Orvald's voice came out as mostly breath. "Not tonight."
"No," Sket said. "Not tonight."
The Thane needed weapons. The weapons were in that camp. Sket pushed the hunger down into the place he kept things he wasn't using yet and looked at the camp with different eyes.
The equipment line ran the full length of the rock face — blades, hafts, bundled strapping, shapes readable by outline even at this distance. At the far end, the supply tent sat with its larger footprint, flap closed, lamplight leaking under the bottom edge in a thin yellow line.
Sket looked at the camp proper. Three soldiers sat at a low fire near the center, not talking much, one of them turning a blade over in his hands and running a whetstone along it with the rhythm of a man who'd done it ten thousand times and stopped needing to think about it. Two more stood at the far end of the camp in a loose spar, slow and controlled, the kind of movement that was more about keeping the body warm than anything else. Another sat cross-legged away from the fire with his eyes closed and his hands on his knees, and Sket watched him for a long moment and decided he was either meditating or asleep sitting up, and either way his back was turned.
The shimmer ran its perimeter and the concealed sentries faced their darkness and the camp between them was lit and quiet and full of men who would very much like to know two Varangur were standing twenty feet from their supply tent.
Orvald touched Sket's arm once — move — and they went.
Low and slow, using the shadow of the rock face, staying wide of the firelight's reach. The man with the whetstone kept his rhythm. The sparring pair kept their distance. The meditating soldier breathed in and breathed out. Sket counted his own footfalls and put each one down like he was placing it, and Orvald moved beside him with the same deliberate patience, and they reached the supply tent's side wall without anyone's head turning.
Orvald took the flap. Sket went through first.
The lamp was a single low-burn on a hook, casting everything in amber and deep shadow, and the man inside had his back to the entrance with a ledger open across a crate and a quill working down the page. Short, maybe five-ten, broad through the shoulders in the way of a man who'd done physical work his whole life, and he had the focused stillness of someone deep in a count.
He heard them. Some displacement of air or weight on the ground, and he started to turn with the quill still in his hand and his mouth already opening.
Orvald covered the distance in two steps and got an arm across the man's chest from behind, and Sket came around the front and got his hands on the man's shoulders, and the man's mouth finished opening and produced half a shout before Orvald's forearm locked across his throat and swallowed it.
The knife appeared from somewhere at the man's belt — fast, trained, the reflex of someone who'd been in bad situations before — and it went into Sket's side before he'd fully registered the draw. Then again, lower, a short punch of a stroke angled up under the ribs.
Sket grunted, felt the heat spreading, and tightened his grip on the man's shoulders instead of loosening it.
Orvald's arm pressed harder across the throat, and the knife came back for a third pass and caught him across the forearm, opening a line from wrist to elbow that started bleeding immediately and freely, and Orvald made a sound through his teeth that was mostly just air forced out hard, and bore down.
The man was fighting with everything he had — feet scrabbling for purchase, free hand clawing at Orvald's arm, head trying to find an angle to bite — and he was strong, genuinely strong for his size, and five-ten of determined soldier was not nothing even when the thing holding him was nearly half again his height. He got one foot planted and drove his weight backward into Orvald and moved him half a step before Orvald walked him into the crate stack and the ledger went sideways off the top.
The knife dropped, his fingers had stopped working, the blood leaving his head doing what Orvald's forearm had been promising it would, and the struggling went loose and slow and then stopped, and Orvald held the pressure for another count of five before he eased off, and the man slumped, breathing, alive, deeply asleep.
They stood over him for a moment. Sket pressed his hand against his side and felt the warmth soak through his fingers, and Orvald was already wrapping his forearm in a strip torn from the hem of his own wrappings, jaw tight, working fast.
"He's alive," Sket said, low.
"Yes." Orvald glanced at the tent flap — no sound from outside, no change in the fire conversation drifting through the canvas — and went back to his forearm. "Felt some kind of warning against killing him."
Sket looked at the unconscious man, at the knife on the ground, and agreed without saying so. Killing a garrison soldier in his own supply tent would produce a different category of consequence than two missing crates of equipment, and the Thane hadn't sent them here to start a war with their own side.
He turned to the tent's contents and started reading the room.
Food dominated — sacks and barrels stacked three high along the left wall, dried goods, salt, the sharp smell of something pickled under a sealed lid. Medical supplies on a low shelf, bandaging, salves, and small dark bottles. Rope, stakes, tool handles.
Then the right wall.
Crossbows, three of them, hung on pegs above a crate of bolts with the lid half off. Military-grade, heavier than the hunting kind, the kind of draw weight that punched through mail at range. Sket took them down and set them by the entrance.
Below the crossbows a rack of swords, eight of them, short by Varangur standards and gripped for one hand — but steel was steel.
Three spears leaned against the corner, and beside them, two boar spears, longer and stouter, with the crossguard behind the head designed to keep a charging animal from driving itself all the way up the shaft. Sket picked one up, turned it in his hands, and found it well-balanced; the crossguard gave him an idea for stopping a charging person that he filed for later.
Then Orvald said, quietly, "Sket."
He was standing at the back of the tent, at a long, low box set apart from the other crates, and the lamp caught the lettering on the side — stenciled, military-neat, two words Sket's eyes found and held.
MONSTER WEAPONS.
Orvald already had the lid off.
Inside, packed in oiled cloth, lay blades and hafts built for a different scale entirely — longer grips, heavier heads, the geometry of weapons made to kill larger monsters. A two-handed sword with a grip long enough for Sket to close both fists around it properly. A war axe with a haft that reached his hip. A maul, heavy and graceless and built entirely to ruin things that were too large for regular equipment to ruin efficiently.
Sket picked up the sword and held it at full extension, and felt something settle in him.
Orvald had the axe in both hands, turning it, and the lamplight caught his face doing something it rarely did. "How many can we carry?" Sket said.
"Everything in this box," Orvald said. "And the crossbows. And the spears."
"That's a lot of weight moving through a quiet camp."
Orvald looked at him, then at the unconscious soldier on the ground, then at the tent flap with the firelight and low voices bleeding through it. "Then we move fast."
They wrapped the monster weapons box in its own oiled cloth and Sket got it across his shoulders while Orvald stacked the crossbows and bolt crate together and got the spears bundled under one arm, and for a moment they both stood in the tent looking at the swords and the remaining equipment and doing the same math.
Too much for one trip. Sket looked at the unconscious soldier, still breathing slowly and evenly on the ground, and they left him there and went to the tent flap and Orvald checked the gap and nodded, and they went out low and moving.
The fire conversation was still going. The whetstone was still going. The sparring pair had stopped but they were sitting now, passing something between them, backs mostly turned. The meditating soldier hadn't moved.
They went wide of the firelight the same way they'd come in, using the rock face shadow, and the weight across Sket's shoulders was significant — the box was built heavy, packed heavy. He kept his steps steady, his breathing controlled, and his eyes on the perimeter's concealed positions, watching for any shift in the wrong shadows that meant someone had heard something.
Orvald moved beside him with the crossbows and the spear bundle, and the spears were the problem — long enough that keeping them from catching on rock outcroppings required attention. He watched Orvald manage it, making small adjustments to his awkward burden, and noted that Orvald moved well under load.
They reached the dungeon entrance and went in and kept going until the stone closed around them and Gunnar's awareness pressed back against Sket's feet like solid ground after a long time at sea.
Aldrek and Bram were waiting ten feet inside the passage.
Sket didn't ask how they'd known — Gunnar had arranged it, presumably, the same way Gunnar arranged most things, by thinking three steps ahead and placing the right pieces before they were needed. Aldrek was one of the newer five, broad and quiet, and Bram beside him had the particular readiness of someone who'd been standing in a passage for an hour telling himself it would be worth it.
Sket got the box off his shoulders and Aldrek took it without comment. Orvald handed off the crossbows and the bolt crate and the spear bundle and Bram distributed the weight between them and they turned and headed deeper into the dungeon without a word exchanged, footsteps already fading down the passage toward the core.
Orvald looked at Sket. His forearm wrapping had soaked through dark in a stripe down the outside.
Sket pressed his hand against his side again, felt the stiffness already setting in around the knife wounds, and took stock of the damage. The binding would do what it did, but he needed time to heal.
"Let’s get the rest," Orvald said.
"The swords," Sket agreed.
They turned back toward the entrance, the night air, and the quiet camp with its fires burning low and its soldiers who didn't yet know that anything was missing.
The soldier was still on the ground where they'd left him, breathing the same slow rhythm, the ledger pages scattered around him where the crate had knocked it. Sket stepped over his legs and went to the sword rack and started pulling them down while Orvald moved to the back of the tent.
Six swords, bundled together with the strapping from the rack itself — not elegant, but it held. Sket got them under one arm and turned to find Orvald crouched over a crate he hadn't noticed on the first pass, set back in the far corner behind where the monster weapons box had been. Smaller than the others, sealed with a proper latch rather than a lid, and stenciled on the side in the same military-neat lettering.
CONTINGENCIES.
Orvald looked at it for a moment, then picked it up.
"We don't know what's in it," Sket said.
"No," Orvald agreed, and tucked it under his free arm.
Sket opened his mouth and closed it again, because Orvald's expression had the particular quality of a man who had already decided and was simply waiting for the objection to finish so they could leave, and there wasn't time for the objection anyway.
Then Orvald stopped.
He was looking at the far corner, past the medical shelf, at a keg sitting on the ground by itself with a wooden cup hung on a nail above it. He looked at it for a long moment with the lamp's amber light catching his face, and something moved across it that Sket had never seen on him before — pure happiness.
Sket stared at him.
Orvald set the contingencies box down, freed his arm, picked up the keg, set it on top of the box, picked both back up, and looked at Sket with the grin still running.
"Beer," he said, as if this explained everything, and it did.
Sket looked at the keg, at the grin, at the sword rack, at the unconscious soldier, and decided there was nothing useful to say about any of it and headed for the tent flap.
They came out the same way — wide of the firelight, rock face shadow, weight distributed and feet placed — and the camp was the same quiet it had been, fire burning lower now, the whetstone man gone to his tent, the sparring pair stretched out on their bedrolls. The meditating soldier had finally moved, lying on his side with his cloak pulled up.
Halfway back, with the dungeon entrance visible ahead and the rock face shadow still covering them, the sound came from behind.
The first sound was more of a sharp intake, the noise a man made coming back to consciousness somewhere unexpected and finding the floor wrong under him. Then a thump, probably the ledger being kicked, and then the shout, loud and immediate
"CONTACT — SUPPLY TENT — "
The camp came up like a kicked anthill. Canvas snapping back, boots hitting ground, voices cutting across each other with the speed of men who'd drilled for exactly this, and Sket stopped placing his feet and ran.
Orvald was already running, the contingencies box and the keg bouncing against his chest, and behind them, the camp was fully awake. A large burst of light appeared above the camp, and Orvald knew they had been seen — a single sharp voice cutting through the noise with two words that silenced everything else for half a second.
"There — "
The dungeon entrance was thirty feet ahead and the shouting was twenty feet behind and Sket hit the threshold at a dead run and felt Gunnar's awareness slam back into him like a door thrown open, and Orvald came through two steps behind him, and the stone welcomed them home.
Aldrek and Bram were there again, waiting, and they took the swords and the contingencies box without being asked. Bram looked at the keg, a smile just as large appearing on his face.
Outside, boots on rock, voices, the shimmer of a ward probably being checked for breach points, and the supply soldier somewhere in it all, explaining to whoever would listen what had been in his tent and what was no longer in it.
Orvald set the keg down against the passage wall and straightened and pressed his wrapped forearm against his ribs, and looked at Sket, and the grin was still there, smaller now, but still there.