This one took a few days to write and be happy with. Hope I did it justice though. __________________________________________________________________________
Lord Sovann had both hands on the rail of his box and could not make them let go.
Below him, the auction had gone back to its ordinary business, a rack of imbued spears turning in the light and a number climbing. Valuable equipment they couldn’t afford. He was still shivering after what had happened earlier. After a man he had never met had stood at his own rail across and torn the roof off his soul in front of a few thousand people.
He had felt weighed. That was the word his mind kept setting down and picking back up. Something had reached out over the whole of the hall at once and measured him, set him on a scale and read him off it, and then it had moved on. And it wasn’t even malicious. Then it had found him ordinary and disregarded him.
"My lord." Chey was at his shoulder, and the young man's voice was steadier than his hands. "The southernmost box is offering to buy back into the potion lots. Do you—"
"Later." Sovann didn't turn his head. "Sit down before you fall, Chey. You've done enough tonight."
The boy went. Behind him, along the back bench of the box, two of his fighters still hadn't gotten off the floor. One of them, Dara, who three weeks ago had gone up a dry riverbed alone and managed to solo kill a kobold commander. Had wept openly when that wave had exploded from the apex box. Wept the way a child weeps, without shame and without knowing she was doing it, and she was only now wiping her face with the heel of her hand.
She had gotten a perk that allowed her access to her own aura after that kill. Sovann had watched Dara come home changed and had not understood. She was extremely skilled with a spear, having multiple perks that helped her with it, and she had killed a captain of the enemy, and the System had given her something for it. But hers was a thin, sour pressure that made a room want to leave, that lifted the hair on your arms, and made you nauseous. His people had been unnerved by it for a day. He had been quietly and privately awed. He had thought: so this is the thing the great lords carry. He had thought his girl had touched the edge of that realm.
He looked across the hall now at the apex gallery, where the man they called the Potion Lord had come back to his rail with a cup in his hands, and he understood that he had not known what he was looking at then either.
Dara's aura was a candle a man shields against the wind.
What had come off that box was a storm.
---
Sovann made himself let go of the rail and walk it off, once around the box, past his people, and the walking helped settle his thoughts. He was not a man who did his thinking sitting down.
No one had done more for his coast than the man in that box. He understood that plainly. When the kobolds first came up out of the hills and took the fishing villages one tide at a time, Sovann had posted on the forum repeatedly, and most of them had not written back. And the ones who had, they wanted a price he couldn't pay and a knee he wouldn't bend. And then a trade offer had been written back from where the original warning had come. Carrying an offer so plain couldn’t be real. After all, who could afford to be altruistic in times like these? Healing potions, sold at the cost of making them. Siege engines, at cost. Bolts that punched through a kobold hero's carapace and burst inside it, at cost. Blades, at cost.
Hundreds of potions. He had poured them into his men, and they had held off attacks they would have failed at otherwise. And the coast had fallen anyway.
Sovann stopped pacing and let that sink in.
Towns and villages were ash, thousands killed as their warriors were overrun, and if he was honest, and he was always honest, no amount of another lord's charity was going to change the shape of that war. A gift did not fight your war for you. It only let you lose it more slowly and with better equipment.
The frustration came up in him hot and familiar; he had done everything right and lost anyway. He knew what he had to do. He'd known it before he left his own harbor. He just didn’t know if he could stand it. But what other option was there?
The auction was winding down to its last lots, and the apex gallery took most of them. It bid on them without hurry and without heat, one after another, the auctioneer's flat voice saying the County of the Landing until the words became familiar. The last lot of the night — a sealed case the auctioneer would not name the contents of — went up the tiers in a hush, and the number climbed past anything sane, and the man in the apex box lifted one finger and ended it.
That man had bought half the hall. He had also, tonight, given away the price of the other half — bankrolling strangers, buying human beings off the block at a hundred gold a head and freeing them where four thousand people could watch, cutting a slaving alliance out of the whole auction out of what looked like pure fury. He had sold Sovann his own survival at cost for a season.
Where did a man get so far ahead of everyone that he could be that generous and still that rich? How did he have the information he had — the auction itself, the date, the shutdown, all of it named months out on the forum for free? And with all of that, all of it, he was still spending his night finding people to help.
Sovann had run a harbor and its flotilla for twenty years in Cambodia, and then they had been brought to this blasted place. He knew a man who was simply better at this than he was. He was looking at one across a hall the size of a city.
"Chey," he said. "Where's my good coat?"
"On you, my lord."
Sovann looked down at himself — at the salt-stained wreck he'd worn on his latest outing.
"Then it'll have to do."
---
He felt it the moment he crossed out of his own box, and it was worse than he'd braced for.
He had just learned the word for from a strange frenchman who had come to his box with an offer. But the body only needed the one truth: the moment he stepped outside the ground that was his, the ground began to take him. Authority, he called it. The toll a lord paid for standing where another lord's weight already sat, and the auction house sat under no one's weight but its own.
Ten steps along the great curving gallery walk and his legs had the heaviness of the third hour of a night watch. Twenty, and it was the sixth hour. He reached for his mana out of old habit, to pour a little into his stride and burn off the drag — and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t reach it. Mana was his to spend, but authority was the System's to take, a slow tide going out through the soles of his boots, and all he could do was walk into it and keep his back straight.
By the time the apex gallery's arch came into view, he was breathing like a man at the top of a climb, and there was a fine tremor in his hands he could not command out of them. The last forty feet of polished stone looked as long as the crossing had been. He came up on the arch, and he stopped, because two men were already there, and neither of them moved to let him past.
The first was lean and wiry and older than Sovann, weathered down to rope and gristle, with a narrow face that put Sovann in mind of a fox working the tree line, a man who lived by slipping into ground that didn't suit anyone else and coming out of it having done something quiet. His hands, folded loosely in front of him, were a laborer's hands, a fighter's hands, callused across every knuckle. He looked at Sovann as if assessing him.
The second man smiled. It was an easy smile, a warm one, but it stopped at his cheeks and got nowhere near his eyes. Sovann had met enough killers in twenty years of harbor work to know the kind of man who smiled like that. He stood with the loose, weight-forward ease of a man who had fought for a living most of his life, one scarred hand resting easy on his hip.
Neither said anything. Sovann panted and tried to stand straight. He understood he was to wait, and he understood why.
The lean man's gaze went past Sovann's shoulder into the box. Then he leaned back through the arch without turning fully from Sovann and said something low to a woman inside.
She came to the arch, and Sovann straightened out of pure reflex.
She was older, gray, and put together like a blade left in a drawer. She had a small book in one hand with a finger keeping her place in it, and she looked Sovann over once, top to boots, the way a schoolmistress of the old and terrible kind looks over a boy who has come to her door with a torn shirt and a poor excuse, and Sovann, who commanded three thousand fighting people and had buried more than he could bear to count, felt eleven years old again.
"Lord Sovann," she said. "Of the Kravanh reach."
He had not given his name, and he was certain he had not given his name to anyone in this box.
"That is me," he said. His voice came out rougher than he wanted, and he hated himself for it. "You have me at a disadvantage, madam."
"I usually do." She did not smile. "You'll understand me before I let you across. My lord is a generous man. But generosity and patience are not the same coin. Provoke him — waste his time, insult his people, try him the way the last visitor to this box tried him — and our aide will stop. Every crate. Every potion. Every bolt. You are alive tonight on his charity, but it is not endless, and it is not owed to you." She tilted her head a half-degree. "Do we understand one another?"
The drain continued to pull at him, and his knees threatened to give out. He set his shoulder against the cool stone of the arch instead, and hated its weakness, and hated even more that she watched him do it and did not look away.
"Madam." He got the breath for it. "There is nothing on the whole of Gravesend I want more, at this moment, than to work honestly with Count Harold. I did not cross a hallway in this condition to insult the man who kept my people breathing." A dry noise came out of him that was almost the almost-laugh again. "I hold no ill will."
That, at last, satisfied her. It wasn't warmth; he doubted she had much of that to spare. But it was close enough to serve.
"Good," she said, and stepped back. "Come in, Lord Sovann. Sit before you fall down. You’ll want him to see you strong."
He crossed the threshold, and the tide let go of him all at once.
---
The relief of it nearly took his legs out from under him. Inside the arch, the floor was simply floor again, holding him up instead of pulling him under. The smell of coffee and roasted meat filled the air, and something sweet he couldn't place. But the environment was completely different in here. It was…relaxed.
He had spent the night looking across the hall at boxes like his own: lords at the front, alliances ranked behind by whatever order they ran on, everyone standing, everyone being scrupulously formal with everyone else. This box had put its feet up. Couples sat close together and talked. A heavily pregnant woman held court on a back bench with her head on a refined older man's shoulder, and he had a ledger open on his knee, going over something in it. Two of them, a man and a woman, laughed at something and looked over at Sovann with open curiosity; they took his measure the way you'd glance at a bird that had flown in a window, and then went back to their own conversation as though a strange lord arriving half-dead in their doorway were a Tuesday.
The lean, fox-faced man had come in behind him. He put a plain glass of water into Sovann's hand without being asked, and gave him the smallest nod Sovann had ever received, hopefully, unmistakably, approval. Sovann drank it in one long pull and could have wept for it.
A young man near the rail had his boots up on it and was talking with his hands, fast and delighted, at someone Sovann couldn't yet see. In the far corner, a woman knelt at the base of a carved column with a sheet of pale paper flat against the stone and a charcoal stub going back and forth, taking a rubbing of the carving, and a slender man with the bearing of a lord and a wine glass held to his chest stood over her, saying something in a wounded tone. She said something back without looking up that made the man draw himself up in anguish. Sovann placed the accent even at this distance — the Frenchman. The one who'd brought the message to Sovann's own box hours ago. When they were all still being formal and had named this drain for him. Though he had handled the drain far better than he had. Authority, he'd said, almost kindly.
Sovann looked around the box again and counted the people within it.
This was not an alliance. A lot of speculation was on the forum about Count Harold's strength. He had even taken part in some of those conversations. But there was one thing everyone agreed on. He did not have any alliances. Alliances were a treaty of equals, prickly and provisional. This was not that. The Frenchman was a lord; the woman taking the rubbing's was a lady; the older man with the ledger and the pregnant wife held his own authority. He could feel he was noble but not a Lord, but it didnt matter. They were all, every one of them, sworn to the man with the coffee.
He had come across an ocean thinking he was going to meet a rich and generous lord. He was standing in the front room of a budding kingdom.
He crossed the box and had to step wide around the young man with the boots on the rail, who was in the middle of an animated argument about the color of a helmet, of all the things in this hall to argue about, with the man Sovann had come to see. He came up in front of Count Harold Calder, got his first close look at him, and forgot the lines he had rehearsed on his struggle walk here.
He was young. That was the thing Sovann's mind could not get around. He'd known it from across the hall. The man in front of him was young enough to be Sovann's son, with a plain cup of black coffee in both hands and a tiredness in him that no young man should have earned yet. But behind the tiredness, a pair of eyes that had analyzed Sovann already and finished. The way the customs officer at the arch had, the way the schoolmistress had. Sovann had felt all night that this box had a habit of looking at you and being done. It was enough to make a person think he was walking into King Yama's court.
"Count Harold." He got his feet squared and inclined his head. "I am Sovann. I hold the Kravanh reach, south of the kobold line, across the sea from you. I came to — " and here he forgot what he was going to say. The young man was just looking at him, and Sovann stumbled over his words. "I came to thank you. The siege engines. I did not know weapons like that existed. There are men breathing in my hills tonight who would be in the ground if you hadn’t done that. I know you sold it to me for what it cost you to make. I don't — " He stopped. Started again. "I don't have the words for it that it deserves."
He'd meant to be dignified. He'd meant to be the stern harbor lord who did not stammer. He heard himself stammer, in front of a boy.
"Well, thanks is always a good place to start," Harold cut in, not unkindly, and his voice was another thing that didn't fit the face —it was measured, dry, older than the man wearing it. He tipped his head toward the young one with the boots on the rail. "Josh. Get up, let the man sit. That's not an easy walk."
"I was in this chair," said the young man — Josh — with real grievance, unfolding out of it. "Fine, but I got dibs when he’s done."
A dark-haired woman on the bench reached over without getting up and smacked him across the head, hard.
"Be polite," she said.
"I'm getting up, Beth, look at me getting up—"
Sovann sank into the vacated chair before his legs decided the matter for him. The shame of needing it weighed on him, a man of his years and his command dropping into a boy's warm seat. He kept his back straight as he sat, as it was the one thing left he had full command of and attempted to look the man in the eyes.
"Better," Harold said, and looked at him over the cup. "I'm glad you made the walk. Between us, I hoped you would. I wasn't sure you had it in you tonight, and I'm glad to be wrong."
Sovann drank the last of his water to buy time for him to respond.
"You came a long way to say thank you," Harold went on. "So I'll make it worth the trip and say the hard thing first. Your coast isn't lost, Lord Sovann. Your whole reach is. Not tonight, not this winter, but it's coming, and I think under all that gratitude you already know it. That nest isn't a warband anymore. It's going to consolidate. It'll draw its people in, and it'll dig, and by the end of next year, it'll form a city. Once it's a city, it isn't your problem. It's the problem of every region that shares water with or borders you, which is most of the south. The one window anyone has to break it is before it consolidates — as soon as the winter breaks." He let that sit. "So. Plainly. How confident are you that you can organize a war like that?"
It was the last question Sovann had expected to be asked in this warm box smelling of coffee. He took a slow swallow of water he didn't have, found the glass empty, and set it down.
"Honestly?" he said. "Not confident at all."
Harold didn't move.
"My own alliance, I can move," Sovann said. "The lords who share my coast, who've bled next to my people — them I can bring. But we came together to defend, Count Harold. That was our compact. A wall of us against the tide, each man on his own stretch of it." He turned a hand over, the helplessness of it plain. "The rest of the south won't march. Not away from their own walls, not toward someone else's fire, not on a promise about a city that isn't built yet. Not even with your word and your track record. Most lords in this world guard their own ground and count anyone else's war as a way to get their people killed for free. I've made this argument. I've screamed and argued my voice raw. They nod, and they go home, and they double their own gate guard."
Harold frowned at that, and Sovann watched him, then he sighed, short and tired, and for one unguarded breath the count's face was just a very exhausted man's face. There was a great deal more road behind those eyes than one life could have paved.
"Yeah," Harold said, mostly to the coffee. "I keep running into that one. Guess I can't change everything." The corner of his mouth moved, without any humor in it. "Some things just don't change, no matter how the world burns down and rebuilds itself. People still won't cross the street for a fire that isn't in their own house yet."
Then he lifted his eyes back to Sovann's and held them, and the tiredness folded itself away, and the level thing came back.
"So you make them," he said. "If they won't listen, you stop asking them to listen. Diplomacy, if diplomacy works. Force, if it doesn't. I honestly don't care which one you use, and I need you to understand me. Humanity can not let that nest become a city. It will becomes one by the end of next year, whether you and I like it or not. So make them listen. All of them."
Sovann spread his hands wider, frustration rising beneath the respect.
"I hear you. I agree with you. But I have neither the men nor the coin to make anyone do anything." He heard the edge in his own voice. "My people took losses this autumn I'm still counting. The last engagement broke three of my best fighting companies while they held a ridge for two days. I can barely defend the hills I've been pushed back into. You're describing a man with the standing to conquer his own neighbors into an alliance. I'm describing a man deciding which of his surviving companies gets to survive."
Harold looked at him for a moment. Then he turned his head toward the back of the box.
"Caldwell."
The refined older man on the bench looked up from under his pregnant wife's cheek. He said something soft to her, tucked the ledger under his arm, and approached. But Sovann noted with a small internal shock how he did it. Cause it was not the way a subordinate approaches his boss, but the way a brother-in-law comes to the head of the table. It was unhurried, a coin already turning over his knuckles, entirely without fear of the man he was walking toward. Harold watched Sovann notice it, and Sovann had the distinct impression the young count was enjoying it immensely.
"Caldwell runs my economy," Harold said. "Among other things. Caldwell — put together a package for Lord Sovann of the Kravanh reach. He's going to organize a war in the south, and I'm going to fund it." He looked back at Sovann. "You want the standing to make your neighbors listen? I'll give you the resources to buy it or take it. Talk them into the compact if they'll be talked into it. And the ones who won't, the ones who'd rather watch you burn — you conquer them, and you fold their ground and their men into yours. You will make yourself a power in the south."
Caldwell winced. It was a small, professional wince, a man watching a number he loved get spent.
"My lord," he said, careful. "The reserves are tagged for the summer campaign, and after tonight they're — thin. Thinner than thin. I can't do at cost. Not out of what's left." The coin walked across his knuckles. "But I can do a little above what it costs the Landing itself to make. Above production cost, below anything he'd find anywhere else in the world, especially with shipping cost now. We might be able to do that, but shipping is dangerous now. Crossing the sea is dangerous now."
"Then that's the price," Harold said, without a flicker. "Sell him at whatever you say we can bear. Fair to us, better than fair to you." His eyes came back to Sovann. "With how trade works now, it'll be a couple of months to get a first ship to your reach. That's fine. You won't be fighting until the winter breaks anyway. It gives you the season to make your neighbors an offer they can't sit on, and to be ready to make them one they can't refuse."
What was going on? He was bewildered. He had come to this box to say thank you, beg for more resources, and go home, and lose slowly. And now…he heard a war being built for him in a warm room over a cup of coffee, but he did not entirely succeed at keeping his face still.
"And," Harold said, and here he paused, "I'll write to Alnor on your behalf. I have an understanding with them. I'll ask them to send you trainers — path-holders who can teach your people a Path, one that lets them kill monsters far better. It won't be the true path, but they’ll make a difference and a handful of higher-tier fighters to blunt the worst of it while your people learn."
Sovann sat forward before he could stop himself.
Alnor. The insular kingdom. The one whose gray ships patrolled his own shoreline and did not put in, did not trade, did not answer letters, had never answered a letter, an entire kingdom that had decided the rest of the world was weather to be endured behind a wall of water. Their ships had cut across the mouth of his own harbor on their own business and ignored his signals as though his flag were a gull.
"How—" The word came out of him raw. "Count Harold, Alnor doesn't — their ships sit off my coast and won't so much as dip a flag. They don't speak to anyone. How do you have an understanding with—"
"The south cannot be lost," Harold said over him, flat and final; it was a man closing a door he'd decided not to open tonight. "Make the other lords listen. Make this happen. Do not fail me, Lord Sovann."
And it leaked out of him — Sovann felt it again and he almost panicked. But this time it didn't weigh him. This time it was the side Sovann had felt underneath the dread and fury. A certainty that the work was worth doing, a fury at the wrongness of the world. That wanted you to stand up. Sovann felt his own something rise to meet it, and his spine straightened.
He was a stern man, and a hard one, but would not mistake a good feeling for a good deal. He got his wits back with an effort he hoped didn't show.
"Thank you, Count Harold," he said. "I mean that. But — a man doesn't cross an ocean and learn nothing." He held the young eyes. "What do you want from me in exchange? Nothing in this world is free. Certainly not this."
"No," Harold agreed. "It isn't." He turned his cup a slow half-circle in his hands. "If this room permitted it, Lord Sovann, I'd ask you to swear to me right now, and be done with it. I'll say that plainly so you're not surprised when it comes around again."
Sovann held very still.
"I know your deeds," Harold went on. "Better than you'd guess. I know what you did, and I know what you will do. I know how many people are alive because a stern old harbor master decided he wasn't going to run. You're a hero of humanity, Lord Sovann. You may not know it. I do though." He said as fact, no flourish on it, which was somehow worse. "What I'm asking you is uncomfortable. I know that too. Humanity is a broken thing right now — scattered, hoarding, every lord a little island counting his own coin. All while the dark comes up out of the ground under all of us. I'm trying to fix that, but I need help. You're going to be one. A solid block of power in the south, with you at the head of it, and me behind you. I'll point you at the things to help you — ruins nobody's found, where the dungeons are, the named monsters worth hunting."
Sovann's breath went short.
He couldn't help it and didn't try to hide it. A dungeon, the lords kept the location of a dungeon secret. They would only allow their own sworn adventurers access to it. At least that was how it was in the south. And a named monster? He had never in his life killed a named monster; almost no one in his reach had; the perks that you earned for those kills were the stuff that filled the forums, half of them invented. And this young man was talking about handing him a map to them.
"In exchange," Harold said, and the flatness came back into his voice, business now, "I want two things. First — I keep a list. Items I'm looking for. I'll send it to you. You keep your eyes and your traders' ears open, and if word of one crosses your reach, it crosses to me first. That's cheap. That's mostly attention." He set the cup down. "Second — when you and I next meet, you swear to me, and we make all of this real and formal. That's all." The dry thing touched his mouth again. "Talk to anyone in this box you like before you decide. Any of the lords standing around here. Ask them what kind of man I am to be sworn to. I'm a fair one. They'll tell you so, and they've got no reason left to lie to you."
And there it was, the moment when the generosity took shape, and it was for him to bend the knee. He'd known. Of course he'd known. He was a stern man but not a stupid one. Nothing was free.
And now that it was here, Sovann found he did not know if it was what he wanted. To bend the knee. To stop being the last word. The man other men waited on. He hesitated.
"Oi, don't be an idiot, mate."
The voice came from behind his chair, easy and blunt. Carrying an accent he was familiar with. Sovann turned. A broad grinning man was leaning against the rail with his boots up on it.
"Kobolds are eating your coast," the big man said, cheerfully, as though it were the weather. "A man's offering you an army, a path, a map to a dungeon; he’s offering help, and you're sitting there chewing on your pride like it's the last biscuit. You're being handed an unimaginable opportunity. I'd have sold my own mother for less, and she was lovely woman."
"Caswell," said the schoolmistress-woman, without heat, from across the box.
"I'm helping, Margaret."
A second man drifted up beside the first. He was an older man, a pale scar running the line of his jaw, a lit cigar between two fingers, and the smoke that came off it was the finest thing Sovann had smelled in a year. Sweet and dark and expensive, a smoke a man in the hills would have knifed someone for. He looked at Sovann with something that wasn't quite pity and wasn't quite kindness.
"Every one of us in this box has sat in that exact chair," the older man said, quiet, tapping ash into his own palm rather than the floor of a room this fine. "Every one. Had the same argument with ourselves you're having right now." He glanced, once, at the young count, and back. "Not one of us regrets it. Not on our worst day.”
Sovann looked at the two of them, the grinning fighter and the settled man with his good smoke, and then he looked back at Harold. He was watching Sovann over the rim of a cup gone cold.
"Can I ask you a question?" Sovann said. "Before I answer any of yours."
Harold's mouth twitched. "Well. That was a question. But go ahead."
Sovann almost smiled. He was too tired and too turned-around to fully manage it, but it was there.
"How did you do it?" he said. "All of it. You're younger than my second son. You're further ahead than any other lord, you know things before they happen, you give away fortunes, and you're still rich, and you've got Alnor answering your letters. How? How is one man this far ahead of the rest of us?"
For a moment Harold didn't answer. He looked, in that moment, more tired than any man Sovann had ever stood beside. The young count reached over to a small table, took up a different cup. More coffee? But this one was steaming and even from a seat away he could smell the liquor in it. He saw him take a sip as if it was medicine he'd stopped tasting. Life came back up behind his eyes when he lowered it.
"Because somebody has to," Harold said. "That's the honest answer. If not me, who?" He tipped the cup at the wall, at the world beyond it. "It's the end of everything, Lord Sovann. Millions are dead. You've watched your coast burn. And on a night like this you get all of humanity laid out on one table. The worst of us — men who'll put their own kind on a block and sell them by the head and sleep fine. You saw it. People laughed when they saw those people up on the block." He set the bitter cup down. "And the unnamed best of us. All the selfless, meaningless heroic everyday acts that are happening right now. Like some woman in a farming village nobody bothered to name, standing in a gap with a spear she barely knows how to hold, trying to defend her kids. That's the real war. It’s not the kobolds. The kobolds are just the weather."
His voice dropped and roughened, and Sovann understood he was hearing something the young man did not say to many people.
"The real fight's not to lose that. To do every ugly thing that has to be done — the wars, the conquering, the cold heartless math you felt come off me tonight, don't think I didn't feel you feel it — and come out the far side of it still a man. Not the monster you had to be to win." He shook his head, once. "I can't tell you how I've done it. I've got reasons. Let me ask you one back." He looked at Sovann. "Have you completed your Grail quest?"
Sovann let out a breath that was half a laugh and all bitterness.
"No," he said. "No, I have not."
He knew the quest by heart. Everyone did.
*Grail Quest — The Sunless Chamber*
Descend to the sealed chamber in the Deep Dark and take what has waited there for you.
"I have to go down into the Deep Dark," he said, "and find a chamber, and open it, and take whatever's inside. That's all it says. I've sent teams into every hole and cave and old mine on my reach, and I've buried some of them for it, and I have never so much as found the entrance. I don't know where the entrance is. I've begun to think there isn't one, on my side of the water at all." He turned the empty glass in his hands. "So no, Count Harold. I have not completed my Grail quest"
Harold looked at Garrick, the lean, fox-faced man who'd handed Sovann his water.
Garrick rolled his eyes, a whole conversation in it: not this again, you never carry your own. He reached into his coat and produced a map.
It came out folded small as a fist, and it did not unfold like any map Sovann had ever seen. It opened one way, and then a panel of it opened another way, folds inside folds turning back on themselves, until there was a sheet across the small table bigger than the table. Worked so fine that Sovann leaned in over it despite everything and forgot to keep his back straight. There was the basin, rendered in a detail that made his harbor master's heart ache — every river, every ridge, every fort — and there, across a strip of open sea, was the south. His south. The kobold line, the drowned coast, the hills he'd been pushed back into, all of it thinner and vaguer than the basin, a land drawn by someone who'd never walked it.
Harold set one finger down on the far edge of it, below Sovann's hills, on a single mountain that stood off by itself in a stretch of empty ground.
"There," he said. "South face of that mountain. The one standing alone. There's an entrance to the Deep Dark on the south side of it. That's where your door is, though I dont know of any chamber called the Sunless Chamber." His finger stayed on the stone a moment. "Fair warning, you don't just walk in. There's a clan of dwarves living in that mountain. You'll have to bargain your way past them for the right to go down, and they take offense the way other people take breakfast." He chuckled at that last part. “Bringing them beer seems to help.”
Then the young count's eyes came up off the mountain and settled on Sovann's face with new interest.
"Actually," Harold said, and there was the ghost of the dry humor in it. "Dwarves. Huh. Maybe that's something you can help me with."
Sovann looked from the finger on the map to the young count's face.
He felt dread for a moment before the young man's words caught up to him. "Wait," he said. "What? Dwarves?"