Chapter 81: The Unbreakable Wall Cracks
The marquess’s army did not look like an army when it entered Blackthorn. It looked, in the pale morning light, like a migration.
A hundred magisteel carriages. A dozen war golems folded down to their dormant configuration, carried on flatbeds like sleeping giants. Supply wagons, forge carts, a mobile infirmary that smelled aggressively of camphor and old blood. And the soldiers themselves — around three hundred in total, professional and unhurried, moving through Blackthorn’s mud-slicked streets with the practiced ease of people who had done this in worse places.
Blackthorn’s residents watched from the walkways overhead. Nobody ran. That alone was progress.
Jack watched from the mayor’s third-floor window with his arms folded and his expression carefully neutral. He had been awake since before dawn. Not because of nerves, he told himself, but because his body’s relationship with sleep had become increasingly transactional — he gave it a few hours, it gave him a reduced desire to feed, and they parted on civil terms.
’Three hundred soldiers,’ he thought. ’Fed, equipped, and professionally loyal to a man who could turn the ground beneath my feet to concrete.’
He had spent the walk back from the fortress the previous night constructing and discarding various framings of this fact. The most honest one was that Marquess Cunningdal was, in absolute terms, a far more dangerous entity than anything Jack had encountered since arriving in this world. His B-grade Earth Magic was battle-hardened. His instincts were calibrated to warfare. And unlike Duke Henson’s blundering spy or Prince August’s poisoned knights, the marquess would not make the mistake of underestimating Jack twice.
He had, however, already made the mistake of shaking Jack’s hand.
’That’s worth something.’
A knock at the office door. Leon entered, looking considerably less corpse-like than he had a week ago, which Jack attributed partly to adequate sleep and partly to the small vial of Angel Tears he’d permitted the man to keep as incentive. Leon had stopped looking at Jack with open murder in his eyes and graduated to a more sustainable medium-term resentment. Also progress.
"The marquess requests a meeting," Leon said. "He’s set up his command tent in the northern clearing. His words were, and I am quoting directly, ’at his earliest convenience, which I suggest is immediately.’"
"Send word that I’ll be there within the hour."
"He said immediately."
"And I said within the hour." Jack picked up his cane. "Hierarchy, Leon. Pay attention to who has more fangs."
He gave it forty minutes, which was a compromise between demonstrating that he was not at the marquess’s beck and call and demonstrating that he was not stupid enough to antagonise someone who could compress the soil beneath Blackthorn into bedrock.
The command tent was large, military-precise, and warm in a way that suggested the marquess had extremely good heating stones. Evelyn sat in the corner with a book she wasn’t reading. Nicholas stood at the back like a piece of furniture that disapproved of everything. The marquess himself stood over a map table with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, which on a man of his build looked less like casualness and more like a structural choice.
"Blackthorn’s water supply," the marquess said by way of greeting, pointing at the map. "Overflow from Lake Tarlington. Seasonal flooding managed by pipes. Adequate for five hundred people. You currently have two thousand plus my three hundred. Do you see the problem?"
Jack looked at the map. He had, in fact, already seen the problem. He had not yet solved it because solving it required a stoneworker of serious ability, and until yesterday morning the only stoneworker of serious ability within reach had been camped outside his walls with an army.
"I see it," he said.
"Good." The marquess placed a finger on the map. "There is an aquifer here, beneath the plateau. Deep, clean, consistent flow regardless of season. If we tap it, Blackthorn could support ten times its current population without rationing." His finger moved. "I can open the channel in three days with Geokinesis. A week if we want it properly lined."
Jack studied the map. Then he looked up at the marquess. "You came to a meeting you requested to offer me a solution to a problem I hadn’t mentioned."
"I came because I noticed it on the way in and it needed addressing." Richard Cunningdal shrugged his vast shoulders. "I am not a man who waits to be asked."
"No," Jack said. "You’re a man who comes to meetings with solutions pre-loaded. Which means you want something in return."
A pause. Nicholas made a sound that might have been approval.
"Training ground," the marquess said. "The wastelands to the north and east. My soldiers need live combat experience against dungeon threats. Whatever’s out there — escapees, creatures warped by mana, whatever your Perception Field can map for us — I want access to it."
Jack considered. The wastelands were his territory by royal decree. Allowing the marquess’s soldiers to operate in them was either a reasonable military arrangement or the first step toward the marquess treating the land as his own. The difference between those two outcomes depended entirely on what Jack built in the next few months.
He made a decision.
"Accepted. But every engagement gets reported to Zero. She compiles the dungeon data. My information, my cartography. Your kills, your experience."
The marquess extended his hand without hesitation. They shook. It was, Jack noticed, a considerably more even exchange than the one the previous night. The man was learning the rhythm.
Good. Partners who understood each other’s rhythms were more useful than partners who were afraid of them.
As Jack turned to leave, Evelyn looked up from her book. Their eyes met for a brief moment. She had her uncle’s brown eyes and something else beneath them — something that hadn’t been there the night of the arena. A particular quality of attention, like a person who has recently learned that the world is both worse and stranger than they thought, and is trying to decide how they feel about that.
Jack gave her a small nod. She returned it.
He would need to do something about Evelyn. Not urgently. But her C-grade Earth Magic and her apparently dormant knack for surprise would be wasted sitting in corners reading books she wasn’t reading.
He filed it under ’later’ and went back to work.