The Mountain
The trail died two miles below the compound. The packed dirt gave way to loose scree and then the scree gave way to a rock face that went straight up for about four hundred vertical feet, and there was no path and no rope and no sign that anyone had ever considered putting either there.
He climbed it. Took about ninety minutes. His fingers were bleeding by the top and the pack straps had dug grooves into his shoulders and the altitude was thinning his air that he was choosing to ignore. He pulled himself over the lip and stood up and the compound was right there, like he was the last person to know about it.
Nanda Parbat sat on a shelf of mountain that shouldn't have supported the weight. Stone buildings, old, the color of sand that had been rained on for centuries. Low walls. Courtyards that opened into other courtyards. A fountain in the central yard that had water running through it but made no sound. The water moved and the stone was wet and the air around it was still.
The floors were warm.
Not from the sun. The stone was warm from underneath, a low steady heat that came up through the soles of his boots, and it didn't change between sun and shade. The whole compound sat on a heat source below, and the heat had a chemical taste to it, faint, like copper pennies left in water too long. He knew what was under this mountain. Everybody who knew anything about Ra's al Ghul knew what was under this mountain.
He wiped the blood off his hands on his pants and walked through the gate.
The hinges didn't make a sound. Nothing here did. The doors were wood, old and dark, swinging on oiled pivots that somebody maintained. The floors were worn smooth in the centers of the hallways and less worn near the walls. Decades of foot traffic, all of it following the same paths. Disciplined traffic. People who walked where they were told to walk.
A man in dark clothes appeared at the end of a corridor and stood there until he approached. Just turned and walked, and the expectation that he'd follow was so complete that not following would have been the stranger choice.
Three corridors. A staircase that went down and then up. A courtyard he'd already seen from the other side. Then a room.
Ra's al Ghul looked like a man someone had stripped down to the parts that worked.
Tall. Lean past the point of fitness. The face was strong-boned and clean-shaven and could have been forty or four hundred, which was closer to accurate. His eyes were green. The color of the Lazarus compound, the exact shade, and whether that was coincidence or absorption or just the lighting in this room, you looked at his eyes and you thought about what was under the mountain.
He stood behind a desk that had nothing on it. No papers, no books, no ornament. The desk existed to put a desk between him and whoever entered the room.
"Thomas Wayne's son."
The voice filled the room without volume. Low, resonant.
"Your father's philanthropy is..." A pause. "Quaint. He builds clinics. I reshape civilizations."
"I came here to learn what you can teach."
Not what you'll teach me. Ra's caught it. His chin moved.
"Most students enter this room submissive or defiant. You're neither." He came around the desk. Closer, the warmth from the stone was stronger, and the man smelled like sandalwood and something older, mineral. "I haven't decided if that's wisdom or arrogance."
"Both, probably."
Then Ra's almost smiled. The mouth barely moved. The eyes did the work.
"Kirigi spoke of you. He speaks of very few."
"He didn't speak much of anything."
"No. That's how you know it mattered." Ra's walked to the window. The valley was a long way down. "You will train with my students. You will eat what they eat and sleep where they sleep and you will not receive special treatment because your father's name is on buildings. If you survive the first week, we'll discuss what comes after."
The first day, they gave him three of them.
Training yard, morning, sun not yet over the eastern wall. Stone under his feet, still warm. Three League students in a semicircle. All older, all lean from training every day and ate exactly enough and never more. One had a scar across his nose that changed the shape of his face when he breathed. One was a woman with her hair shaved close and hands that hung loose at her sides. The third was big. Tall and rangy and long-armed, built to control distance.
They came at him together. No signal, no announcement. Just three people moving at once.
He lasted about four minutes, which was longer than they expected and shorter than he wanted. The woman was fast and she went for joint locks. The scarred one was a striker who aimed for the body. The big one waited and picked him apart when the other two had him moving. He landed hits on all three of them. Caught the woman with an elbow that split her lip, put the striker on his back foot with a knee feint that Kirigi had taught him, clipped the big one's ribs with a hook that connected cleaner than it should have.
Then the big one got behind him and put him on the ground, and the other two were on him before he finished falling, and it was over.
Four minutes. On the stone with a knee on his spine and his right arm bent to a place arms didn't want to go. The woman's lip was bleeding. She wiped it with the back of her hand and looked at the blood and looked at him and her mouth was flat but her eyebrows were up. A little impressed. More annoyed about the lip.
He got up. Nobody offered a hand.
On the balcony above the yard, someone was watching.
Dark hair in a braid that hung over one shoulder. She stood with her hands on the stone railing, straight-backed, the sword at her hip worn the way other people wore wristwatches. No jewelry, no excess.
She was looking at him.
Eye contact from forty feet away that held through the full count of his getting off the ground and rolling his shoulder and wiping dust off his training clothes. She was reading what had just happened, measuring the gap between his technique and the three students who'd just put him down.
But underneath that, a look he'd seen before. In Kirigi's eyes when the forms came too fast. In the woman from Osaka when the bow happened.
She didn't look away. He didn't either. Long enough for the woman with the split lip to notice and glance up at the balcony and then back at him, eyes narrowing.
Then Talia al Ghul turned and walked along the balcony and the braid swung once against her back and she was gone around the corner.
His shoulder ached where the big one had wrenched it. He rolled it again. The warm stone pulsed under his feet.
Someone had left a clay cup of water on the low wall at the yard's edge. He didn't know who. The water was cold and tasted like the mountain.
Second day. Sword work.
The training yard again, but this time the racks were open and the steel was out. Straight blades, no ornament, sharp enough that the edges caught light in a way that said they'd been maintained that morning. He picked one that felt close to the weight Ducard had drilled with. Heavier in the pommel, but the balance point was near enough.
She was already on the floor when he arrived. Down on the floor, in training clothes, the sword in her hand like she'd been born holding it. The braid was tighter today.
They were drilling cuts. Basic forms, diagonal and horizontal, with a precision requirement that meant the blade had to pass through a specific point in space every time. League students did this silently. Repeatedly. The sweat was the only part that looked like effort.
His fourth repetition. The cut was clean but the grip was wrong and he knew it was wrong because the blade torqued slightly off-line at the bottom of the arc and slightly was nothing in a practice drill and would get you killed against someone who could read it.
She was beside him between one repetition and the next. He didn't hear her move.
Her hand closed over his on the hilt. Functional. Her thumb found the knuckle of his index finger and pressed down, rotating his wrist inward about fifteen degrees. The grip shifted, the pommel seated differently in his palm, and the angle changed everything downstream. Elbow, shoulder, the plane the blade moved through.
Steel and jasmine.
The steel was the sword and the compound. The jasmine was her. Close enough that the scent was specific, not ambient. Close enough that her breath hit the back of his hand.
"Your Ducard training shows. He favors the wrist. Compensate at the knuckle."
Her hand stayed on his. One second past instruction. The thumb was still on his knuckle. Her fingers overlapped his around the wrapped grip and her skin was warmer than the steel and cooler than the stone and she was close enough that if he turned his head he'd be looking at her mouth.
He didn't turn his head.
She pulled her hand away and stepped back and the fifteen degrees held because his wrist had already memorized it.
"Don't thank me. Do it correctly."
She walked back to her position and picked up her own blade and resumed her forms without looking at him again.
He ran the drill twice more. The blade didn't torque.
After training, she fell into step beside him.
He was heading back toward the sleeping quarters along the covered walkway that ran the length of the east wing, and she was just there, walking at his pace, close enough that her sleeve was an inch from his. A pigeon sat on the wall at the far end of the corridor and watched them approach with the flat stare of a bird that had never once been chased.
"You fight like someone who already knows the answer."
He looked at her. Strong nose, jawline that would look good on a coin, mouth set in a line that was neutral but not unfriendly. The braid had loosened slightly during practice and a strand of dark hair was stuck to the side of her neck with sweat.
"That's not a compliment," she said. "If you already know the answer, you stop looking for better ones."
"What if the answer's right?"
"No answer is permanent." The strand of hair on her neck shifted when she turned her head toward him. "My father has been right for six hundred years. He is still refining."
They walked. The pigeon didn't move when they passed. Gutsy bird.
Her arm brushed his.
The fabric of her sleeve against the fabric of his, brief, and she didn't widen the gap afterward. She kept walking at the distance she'd chosen, and the inch between their arms was deliberate.
The warmth went through his sleeve and sat on his skin and didn't leave.
They reached the junction where the walkway split. Sleeping quarters left, main hall right. She stopped.
"Tomorrow. Dawn. The south yard."
"I'll be there."
She looked at him for a count of two. Then she turned right and he turned left and the warmth on his arm stayed for the entire walk back and through the doorway and while he sat on the cot and unlaced his boots and it was still there when he lay back on the thin mattress and looked at the ceiling.
The stone was warm underneath him. The Lazarus warmth soaked up through the cot and through his back and into the muscles that were sore from four minutes of getting beaten by three people who'd trained here their whole lives, and his bones settled into it like they recognized the temperature.
He stared at the ceiling. Stone, uncracked, nothing to count. The light from the window was going orange.
He closed his eyes and the warmth kept coming from below.