Loop Eight

  The Moral Line

  He came back with the usual things: Level 7, Night Awareness, a brain full of information about runes and warding wells and the specific liturgical structure of the Cult of the Wild as explained by a drunk ex-scholar named Pereth who had, indeed, wanted something for it. What he'd wanted was for Josh to lose a game of cards to him in front of witnesses, which was so specifically strange a request that Josh had simply agreed and lost the game and spent the following hour receiving a very detailed education in things no one should know delivered in a voice kept low enough that the surrounding camp couldn't hear.

  He had the rune. He knew what it meant. He knew what fed it and what weakened it. He knew that the mushroom Pereth had called by its church name — the Bleeding Brake, a rust-coloured fungus that grew in the grove three miles northeast of camp — neutralised the cult's mark of corruption when ingested, metabolised fast, lasted four hours. He knew it grew on the north-facing root systems of mature oaks and that the grove in question was technically within the camp's patrol boundary and that getting a formal party sent to retrieve it required either the Baron's direct order or the camp healer's written requisition.

  He knew the healer's name was Maret. He knew she was sleeping with Captain Aldous, who was not her husband, because he was not her husband, because she had no husband, but because in this camp the optics of a woman in a professional role taking a lover were the kind of thing that got managed carefully and quietly and would not survive being managed loudly and publicly.

  He had been turning this information over in his mind since Loop 7 with the detached interest of a man examining a tool he hasn't decided to pick up yet.

  He stood on the platform, chain loose at his wrist, the sky its usual pewter, and made the decision.

  He picked it up.

  — ? —

  He had not seen Maret clearly until he looked for her.

  She was older than he'd expected — mid-forties, maybe, with the economical posture of someone who spent their days in small spaces doing precise work. She ran her operation out of a tent adjacent to the Baron's and kept it organised with a rigour that made the rest of the camp look like it had been set up by people who'd never seen a camp before. Her supplies were catalogued. Her instruments were clean. When she moved through the camp people stepped slightly out of her way without looking like they'd decided to.

  He watched her for the better part of a morning before he approached.

  He'd intended to study her manner, her schedule, the specifics of how she operated so that when he made his move he was doing it from knowledge rather than assumption. What he found himself doing instead was noticing that she was good at her job. Genuinely good — he watched her treat a soldier's infected hand with a focus and steadiness that cost nothing except complete attention, watched her explain something to her assistant without condescension, watched her make a decision about a supply shortage and be right about it. She was a competent person doing necessary work inside a structure that constrained her in ways she'd negotiated with quiet pragmatism.

  He thought about this on the way to the tent.

  He thought about it while he was composing what he was about to say.

  He stopped thinking about it when he lifted the tent flap.

  — ? —

  "I need the Bleeding Brake," Josh said.

  Maret looked up from her catalogue. She assessed him in the way of a person who processes strangers quickly and efficiently, sorting by category. He watched himself get sorted.

  "The fungus," she said. Not a question — confirming she'd heard correctly.

  "Yes. The rust-coloured one. North-facing oak roots, three miles northeast."

  A pause. She set her quill down.

  "I know what it is and where it grows," she said. "What I'm interested in is why a squire whose previous occupation was stable work is asking me for a field mushroom by its ecclesiastical name."

  Josh had prepared for this. "I used to work adjacent to a monastery infirmary. I picked up some things."

  Maret looked at him.

  He looked back.

  "The Bleeding Brake," she said, slowly, "is used in the treatment of certain demonic corruptions. Specifically, the kind produced by cult activity." She held his gaze. "We are not currently treating anyone for demonic corruption in this camp."

  "Not yet," Josh said.

  The tent was quiet. Outside, the camp went about its business — the farrier, the cookfire, someone's brief laughter.

  "I'm going to need a reason," Maret said. "A real one. If you have a real one."

  Josh took a breath.

  He had two options and he'd been clear-eyed about both of them since this morning. The first was this: tell her enough of the truth that she understood the village mission's actual danger, trust her professional judgment to recognise it was real, and hope she acted on it. The second was the other thing.

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  He looked at her — at the organised tent, the clean instruments, the quiet competence — and thought about how many loops it had taken to get this close to a real solution, and how many more it would take if this conversation failed, and what the village would do to the squad if they went in without the fungus.

  He opened his mouth.

  He chose the second option.

  — ? —

  He did not dress it up.

  That, at least, he owed her — the bare transaction of it, without flattery or softening. He told her he knew about Captain Aldous. He told her he had no interest in sharing that information with anyone, provided she submitted the requisition for the Bleeding Brake and had a small party sent to retrieve it within the next two days. He told her the reason the fungus was needed was real and he could explain it, if she wanted, after the requisition was submitted.

  He watched her face during this.

  The sequence was: still, then a very small flinch that she suppressed before it fully formed, then still again. A controlled person applying control to something that cost more than the control suggested.

  She looked at him for a long time when he finished.

  "You're very young to be doing this," she said. Quietly. Without heat.

  "I know," Josh said.

  "And you think it's necessary."

  He held her gaze. "I think people are going to die in that village if it isn't done. Yes."

  She looked down at her catalogue. Her hands were flat on the table, still.

  "Get out of my tent," she said.

  He got out.

  — ? —

  He told himself the conversation had gone as well as it could.

  He told himself this repeatedly over the following day and a half, with the specific quality of repetition that means a person is trying to replace a feeling with a conclusion.

  The feeling was this: Maret had looked at him when he finished speaking with an expression that was not anger and was not fear and was not the calculation of a person processing a threat. It was something quieter. The expression of someone who has just seen something disappointing happen and is deciding how to carry it.

  He had produced that expression. In a person who had done nothing to him.

  He went to the training ground and worked with the sword until Vorse told him to stop and rest, which Vorse had never said before and which Josh registered as a sign that he'd been hitting the practice dummy for longer than he'd thought.

  He went to the forest. Killed things. Filed the kills. Came back.

  On the second morning a runner came to the training ground and told him Maret had submitted a requisition for medicinal fungi and that the Baron had approved a retrieval party. Josh was included in it, along with four soldiers and, because the grove was at the edge of patrol range, Captain Aldous.

  He had not known Aldous would be included.

  He reassessed. Decided it didn't change anything. Went to prepare.

  — ? —

  Aldous was a man who looked like he'd been built to a specification.

  Medium height, medium build, hair the particular colourless brown that photographs badly — nothing about him that would stop you in the street, nothing that would make you move out of his way. He was a captain by competence rather than presence, the kind of officer who was effective precisely because people underestimated him until they'd worked with him long enough to stop. He moved through the camp with the minimal footprint of a man who had learned that visibility was a resource to be spent carefully.

  He said nothing to Josh on the march out. Josh said nothing to him.

  The grove was where Pereth had said it was — three miles northeast, a stand of mature oaks in a clearing where the pine forest gave way to something older and broader, the light different in there, softer, the ground between the roots thick with moss. They found the fungus on the north-facing roots exactly as described: rust-coloured, shelf-shaped, growing in clusters. The soldiers harvested it with the focused efficiency of men who have been given a task they understand and want to complete.

  Josh was crouching by a root cluster, pulling the fungus and packing it, when Aldous's voice came from directly behind him.

  "Walk with me."

  Not a request.

  — ? —

  The grove was not large. Aldous led him perhaps forty yards from the harvesting party before he stopped, and by that point the soldiers were visible through the trees but not audible, and the gap between those two things was the whole point.

  Josh stood and looked at him.

  Aldous had the expression of a man conducting a necessary maintenance task. No anger in it — no heat of any kind. Just a person who has identified a problem and come to address it.

  "She told you," Josh said. Less a question than an audit of his own miscalculation.

  "She told me," Aldous confirmed.

  Josh recalibrated. Rapidly. He'd assumed Maret would protect herself first — that the threat of exposure would be sufficient to produce compliance without the complication of Aldous knowing. He'd been wrong about who she was. She'd chosen differently than he'd predicted, which meant he'd modelled her incorrectly, which meant the entire approach had rested on a wrong assumption.

  He thought: I should have told her the truth first.

  He thought: I should have treated her like a person who could be trusted instead of a lever.

  He thought: I still would have needed the fungus.

  He thought: none of that is relevant right now.

  "The requisition was submitted," Josh said. Carefully. "The fungus is being harvested. Whatever you're thinking of doing — the outcome you wanted is already achieved. There's no—"

  "There's the matter of what you said to her," Aldous said.

  "I know."

  "And the matter of what you know."

  "I know."

  Aldous looked at him for a moment. Then he reached for his sword with the same unhurried quality that Gilmour had reached for everything — not quickly, not dramatically, just a man doing a thing he has decided to do.

  Josh took a step back. Thought about running. Thought about the forty yards to the soldiers and how fast Aldous would cover them compared to how fast he would. Thought about the fact that he was Level 7 and Aldous was not Level 7.

  He thought: I put myself here.

  He thought: I—

  — ? —

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  ◆ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◆

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  Level 7

  Death count: 10

  Way of death: Killed by Captain Aldous.

  [Iron Skin: Level 1 → Level 2]

  Would you like to learn the skill [Read Intent]?

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  Skill acquired: [Read Intent — Level 0]

  [???] — Locked.

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