Subterranean Surface

No sexual content is included.

Content Warning: Corpses, predation, mimicry, grief, injury aftermath, caste prejudice, claustrophobia, and dangerous subterranean environments.

By the next water pulse, Senn had stopped pretending every job on his Board belonged on the Board. The wall still carried the work offered to anybody desperate enough to take it—waste channels, missing animals, caravan loads, feeder repairs, one badly written request for somebody willing to retrieve a wedding necklace from a nest—but a second economy existed beneath his table, folded into slate grooves and tucked behind the cup he kept moving whenever the ceiling leaked. Khern noticed because Senn removed one of those hidden scraps the moment their group entered, then left it on the table while finishing an argument with a Morrowkin who believed recovering half a corpse entitled her to half the promised payment. By the time she finally left with considerably less than half, Senn had already looked over Khern, Veyrun, Brakka and Split-Tooth and apparently decided none of them had died enough overnight to inconvenience him.

“Before you ask, twenty-two Deran,” he said, pushing the folded sheet toward them. “Before you celebrate, six people have already taken versions of this job. Two came back without finishing, three didn't come back, and the sixth returned in enough pieces that everyone agreed to stop counting creatively.” Brakka's remaining hand stopped halfway toward the posting, while Veyrun's expression lost the pleased look he had been wearing since somebody near the entrance complimented his blue wrist cloth. Khern looked from the sheet to Senn and asked the obvious question: “And you're offering it to us because?”

“Because you keep coming back.”

That almost sounded like praise until Senn added that the Board preferred losing new mercenaries before they became expensive.

The posting was short enough that Khern read it twice looking for whatever had been deliberately omitted. OLD NINTH SPAN — RECOVER THREE SURVEY TAGS FROM LOWER CUT — IDENTIFY MISSING CREW IF POSSIBLE — DO NOT FOLLOW VOICES BEYOND MARKED ROUTE. There was no single employer mark beneath it, only several smaller cuts representing feeder houses, route merchants and two settlements whose names Khern had not yet heard. Senn explained that the money came from a shared pool because nobody wanted to own Old Ninth badly enough to maintain it alone, while enough people needed the passage that losing it entirely would cost far more than twenty-two marks.

Brakka tapped the warning. “Voices.”

“Correct.”

“What kind?”

“The speaking kind.”

She stared at him until Senn's smaller hands stopped sorting tokens.

“One survivor said the route repeated his partner after she stopped talking,” he explained. “Another heard himself farther ahead, though he swears the second voice was better-looking. People around Ninth have stories about older voices too, but stories become expensive when I'm required to believe all of them.”

Veyrun had not looked away from the warning. His fingers rested against the blue strip around his wrist, thumb rubbing the same frayed edge once, twice, then stopping before the motion could become something else. Khern recognized what had tightened in his face, because the warm road had already taught them what hearing a dead person's voice could do when grief wanted to believe faster than reason could refuse.

Brakka took the posting from the table and folded it closed. “No.”

Veyrun looked at her immediately.

“You heard him.”

Veyrun nodded.

“That wasn't permission.”

His eyes narrowed, and Brakka's posture hardened in return. Khern stepped in before they could turn concern into ownership, which had become an argument none of them could make innocently anymore. “He gets to decide whether he goes,” he said, keeping his attention on Brakka before turning toward Veyrun, “and we get to decide whether we follow him.”

Veyrun considered that distinction rather than reacting to it. His hand moved toward the scar across his throat, then away, and after several breaths he pointed toward the posting before tapping his own chest once. He wanted to go. Brakka muttered something about surviving the Outer Crust only to become voluntarily stupid, but she did not tell him no again.

Khern looked toward Senn. “Did anyone hear dead people?”

The keeper's hands slowed.

That was answer enough.

“Who?”

“Whoever mattered.”

Senn did not dramatize it, which made the words worse. One worker had heard his mother from a passage she had never entered; another had heard a dead husband arguing with him about which route to take, complete with an old insult nobody else should have known. Senn believed some stories and distrusted others, because people lied even when frightened and grief made good witnesses bad without making them dishonest. What mattered to him was that the phenomenon repeated sound closely enough that three surveyors had gone missing in a route already known to move under pressure.

“Natural?” Brakka asked.

Senn shrugged. “Everything down here is natural until somebody proves otherwise.”

Khern disliked how reasonable that had become.

Before they accepted, Senn sent them toward the far wall of the Board where one of the two returning workers sometimes spent her mornings pretending not to listen to other people's conversations. Sava was a compact Ossiari with pale mineral growth concentrated unevenly along one jaw and both forearms, small enough that Khern initially underestimated her until he noticed how everyone sitting nearby had unconsciously left enough room for the metal spike resting across her knees. Thin milk-colored lines appeared beneath the plates whenever someone struck the Board's walls or dropped something heavy, then vanished almost immediately.

“You're loud,” she said before Khern had introduced anyone.

Nobody was speaking.

Brakka looked at the glowing lines. “Calling?”

“Beginning.”

“What does it do?”

Sava tapped the spike lightly against the floor. The sound was ordinary to Khern, but Split-Tooth's intact resonance prong turned toward her at once while the damaged one twitched a fraction later. “Things tell the structure they're there. Sometimes the structure tells me.”

Brakka looked down at Split-Tooth.

Sava followed her gaze and noticed the broken prong without commenting on it as damage first. “Still answers?”

“Yes.”

“Different?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Brakka's expression tightened. “Everybody says that.”

“Would you rather it be useless?”

“No.”

“Then stop hearing pity where nobody put it.”

Brakka stared at her for several breaths before giving a reluctant nod. Sava shifted the spike across her knees and asked whether they were going to Ninth, and when Khern confirmed it she told them not to use the route as though they were entering a cave with echoes. Echoes copied what had already happened; Old Ninth seemed to wait until movement gave it a reason to release what it carried. Her own partner had stopped walking when she heard her dead mother's voice, yet the voice continued another three steps before stopping too.

“That saved us,” Sava said. “The mother she remembered would've stopped with her.”

Veyrun's attention sharpened.

“At first it's bad at timing. Then it gets better.”

“How?” Khern asked.

Sava looked toward him. “You stay.”

The answer sat badly in his stomach.

Brakka crouched beside Split-Tooth. “Does it copy vibration too?”

“Steps definitely. Impacts. Maybe pressure. It repeated a collapse after the collapse was finished, which nearly sent us toward the part that hadn't fallen.” Sava looked at the Skitter again, then at Brakka. “Don't make him decide which prong is right if they disagree. Mine disagreed with itself down there too.”

Brakka frowned. “Your Calling?”

“My body.”

Sava lifted one forearm and let the faint milk-lines return beneath the plates when somebody slammed a cup on the other side of the room. “One part told me movement was ahead. Another told me pressure was beneath us. I picked ahead because I wanted one answer, and my friend got crushed when beneath became above.”

Brakka's remaining hand rested lightly on Split-Tooth's harness.

“Let him disagree with himself,” Sava repeated. “Might be the only honest thing anyone does down there.”

Old Ninth lay farther from Varak's maintained channels than anything they had yet visited, and the settlement thinned as they approached it. The transitions were gradual: reliable water troughs became repaired basins, repaired basins became communal jars, and eventually people simply carried whatever water they needed because there was no channel close enough to pretend infrastructure existed. Ancient construction occupied more space than current life did, with collapsed residences turned into animal pens, statues supporting newer walkways, and old battle inscriptions preserved only where nobody had found them useful enough to drill through.

Khern slowed beneath one monument whose face had been entirely worn away. A cooking stall had been built against its legs, the owner using one carved hand as a shelf for jars of dried seasoning. The inscription at the base remained partly readable beneath soot: —HELD NINTH UNTIL THE FIFTH BLOOD—, followed by several names obscured by a drainage cut.

“What happened here?” Khern asked.

The stall owner looked at the monument.

“Fight.”

“I can see that.”

“Then you know.”

“What was it about?”

The old Kharuun considered, then shrugged. “Probably water.”

Brakka caught Khern's sleeve before he could continue. “You cannot interview every dead wall.”

“I can try.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

Veyrun silently sided with Brakka, which Khern considered betrayal until he noticed the little packet of seasoning Veyrun had stolen from the stall while everybody was distracted. Khern stared at it, then at him; Veyrun considered the packet, looked back at the vendor, and reluctantly put two small feed cuts beside the jar instead. The transaction remained theft in spirit even after payment.

The entrance to Old Ninth was marked by three broad white lines painted across the walls at different depths. The first belonged to the currently used route, the second marked the old survey limit, and Sava had warned them that the third should be treated as a suggestion made by people with more confidence than information. Black mineral dust covered the floor beyond the entrance, preserving tracks with uncomfortable clarity, while empty hooks overhead showed where lamps had once hung before enough of them disappeared that nobody bothered replacing them.

A metal plate near the first boundary carried newer writing.

DO NOT ANSWER WHAT ANSWERS FIRST.

Veyrun stopped to read it.

Brakka looked over his shoulder. “Specific.”

Khern touched neither the sign nor the wall. “Probably for a reason.”

Veyrun stared at his damaged hand.

“I can learn.”

Veyrun raised one brow.

“Eventually.”

The first stretch was almost disappointingly ordinary. Abandoned storage alcoves opened along both sides, survey cuts appeared at predictable intervals, and old carrying grooves showed where loads had once been dragged through the route before the settlement shifted upward. The strange part was their own noise. Brakka's claws sometimes returned from the floor a fraction too late, Veyrun's clothing rustled from somewhere behind him after he had already stopped moving, and Split-Tooth occasionally heard enough of himself that his intact prong turned toward the step he had just taken.

They adjusted by speaking less.

That did not help as much as Khern wanted.

Near the second boundary, Split-Tooth stopped. His intact prong pointed straight down the marked route, while the broken one angled toward the left wall strongly enough that Brakka crouched beside him rather than pulling the harness. She watched his head, breathing and feet instead of demanding a direction until the Skitter took two steps forward, returned, then pressed one foreclaw against the left wall.

“Hollow behind there,” she said.

Khern examined the surface. “Route?”

“Maybe.”

“Danger?”

“Maybe.”

Veyrun pointed at Brakka and mimed applause.

She ignored him.

A tapping sound came from deeper inside Old Ninth.

Once.

Then twice.

Then three times.

Nobody moved before the fourth.

Veyrun became completely still.

The fifth tap arrived softly through the floor.

Khern felt the sequence in his teeth.

One-two-three-four-five.

Lina.

Except Lina was dead.

The route tapped again.

This time it stopped after four.

Veyrun's face changed so quickly Khern almost preferred anger. His expression emptied instead, the humor leaving without anything replacing it, while his hand hung motionless beside his thigh. Brakka said his name once, quietly enough that the route did not immediately throw it back.

The fifth tap came several breaths later.

Not a sequence anymore.

An answer.

Veyrun's jaw tightened.

Refusal touched the passage.

There was no light, no wave and nothing Khern could have shown another person, yet the distinction arrived with enough force that the copied pattern suddenly felt naked. Four taps belonged to a memory between people; this was merely four impacts followed by another because something had learned that the absence mattered.

Veyrun staggered.

Khern caught his shoulder.

Blood appeared along one side of Veyrun's mouth, thin but immediate.

“Enough.”

Veyrun shoved his hand away without anger and wiped the blood on his wrist, accidentally staining the blue cloth before he noticed. He stared at the mark for a moment, then looked toward the dark route.

Veyrun raised his own hand and tapped four times against the wall.

The route answered five.

His grin came back slowly.

Not happy.

Satisfied.

It had failed.

Brakka exhaled through her nose. “Very mature.”

Veyrun bowed.

The tension loosened enough for them to continue, though Khern remained beside him for the next several turns. Veyrun did not object. Once, his fingers began moving toward his leg again, but he stopped them himself before the first tap.

Beyond the second line, Old Ninth became less like an abandoned route and more like architecture being digested. Ivory growth had swallowed supports from several different eras, turning beams into ribs beneath translucent deposits and closing some passages while opening narrow seams beside them. Khern could see histories physically layered over one another: an old carved wall, a later repair, a battle gouge, mineral growth filling the wound, another support installed through all of it, then abandoned again.

The first missing survey worker lay beneath one of those supports.

He was Ossiari, large enough that only part of his body had been crushed when the wall shifted. The lower torso disappeared beneath a slab that had settled gradually rather than fallen, mineral plates around his shoulders cracked outward from pressure while one hand remained closed around a survey cord. Nothing around the corpse suggested a fight.

Khern crouched far enough away not to touch him.

Brakka looked toward his damaged palm.

“I'm not.”

“Didn't say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“Your face.”

Veyrun quietly nodded.

Khern glared at both of them.

The first missing survey tag hung from the Ossiari's belt. Khern removed only that, careful not to let his skin touch the corpse, and the restraint hurt in a way he had not expected. His Expression could probably tell him how the man died, where he had stood, perhaps what he had done in the moments before the structure took him.

Mara had died while Khern sat beside her without asking death to explain itself.

He wanted to keep remembering how that felt.

This tale has been pilfered from NovelPhoenix. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The second worker was harder.

She was Kharuun, young enough that for one terrible instant Khern's mind tried to make her Lina before details corrected him. Her skin was darker, her shoulder fur shorter, her house token cut cleanly through the center as though she had deliberately severed whatever it once meant. Her neck had broken against a mineral ridge without any collapse nearby, while the dust showed her running directly toward a solid wall.

Brakka crouched beside the tracks.

“She turned here.”

Khern followed the marks. “Why?”

Veyrun pointed toward scratches on the wall.

Four long grooves.

Repeated several times.

The woman had tried to claw through.

A small metal survey tag remained clenched in her hand.

Khern stared at it without moving.

“What did she hear?” Brakka asked.

None of them answered.

A voice came from below.

“Khern.”

His entire body stopped.

It was Mara.

Not approximately.

Not similar enough to hurt.

Mara.

“Khern, slow down.”

The words were ordinary enough that he remembered several different days at once: drinking too quickly after walking in heat, asking three questions before she finished answering the first, reaching for something while she was still telling him where not to put his hands. For half a heartbeat his body accepted the voice before his mind caught what was wrong.

There was no cough.

No drag of damaged lungs.

No breath shortened by dust.

The voice sounded healthy.

Too healthy.

Veyrun watched him.

He did not use Refusal.

That mattered.

Khern closed his eyes long enough to hear the next repetition.

“Slow down.”

“You never sounded that good,” he whispered.

Brakka's head turned toward him.

The route repeated the sentence with exactly the same breath.

Khern stood.

The voice came again behind him as he walked away.

He expected leaving to feel like abandoning her.

Instead it felt like refusing to let something else improve her.

That difference stayed with him.

The third white boundary appeared around a bend where the route opened into an old construction cavity large enough for the ceiling to disappear into mineral shadow. Several supports had been tied together with rope so ancient that ivory growth had fossilized around the knots, while carvings covered a central pillar from at least three different periods. Khern almost ignored them until one surviving line caught enough lamp light to become readable.

MARKS HAVE NO ALLEGIANCE BENEATH THIS ROOF.

Brakka stopped beside him.

Another line remained below.

FIGHT OUTSIDE. HIRE INSIDE.

Veyrun produced a quiet rasp that might have been laughter.

Khern looked around the ruined chamber.

“This was a Board.”

“Or something before Boards,” Brakka said.

The structure was much larger than Senn's miserable room but no more sophisticated. Hooks had been hammered directly into old supports, grooves marked places where tables once stood, and one wall still carried enough nail holes that Khern could imagine scraps layered over scraps in exactly the same way as the current Board. Thousands of years of history, perhaps, and one of Ivory's most successful inventions remained a place where armed lowlifes agreed not to kill one another until after negotiating price.

Something smaller had been scratched beneath the old rule.

TEN HANDS MADE THIS LAW. NINE KEPT IT. ONE BROKE EVERYTHING ELSE.

Khern read it aloud.

A weak voice answered from between two collapsed supports.

“Pahlavan.”

Everyone turned.

The third survey worker was alive.

He was Cairnid, coated in enough black dust that Khern had mistaken his body for rubble, with one primary arm bound tightly against his chest and three smaller limbs bracing an injured leg. The final survey tag hung from his neck. His eyes moved from Brakka's knife to Split-Tooth, then to Veyrun and finally Khern.

“Board?” he asked.

Brakka did not approach. “Name.”

“Demu.”

“What did you eat before coming down?”

The Cairnid blinked. “What?”

“Answer.”

“Saltroot cake.”

Khern looked at her.

Brakka shrugged. “If the wall knows that, we're already fucked.”

Demu laughed weakly enough that pain cut the sound short. “I like you.”

Veyrun gave him a sympathetic shake of the head.

Demu noticed the throat. “You too, probably.”

They approached only after Split-Tooth showed no reaction to Demu beyond ordinary movement. Khern inspected the injured leg while Brakka checked the old supports around him, and Demu explained that he had been sitting there through at least two sleeps by his own estimate. His water had run out during the previous one.

Khern handed him theirs.

Demu drank once.

Then stopped himself.

“You'll need it.”

“So will you.”

“You're walking out.”

“So are you.”

Demu stared at the container for a moment before drinking again.

The simple kindness seemed to make him more uncomfortable than the three armed strangers.

Khern noticed that.

Azad did not exist in his life yet, so Khern did not know how often he would eventually see that same hesitation in someone else.

Demu handed the water back and looked toward the writing on the pillar. “You're upper?”

“Bone Entrance.”

“That's worse.”

“People keep saying that.”

“Because you ask history questions while standing in places trying to kill you.”

Brakka pointed at Khern. “Thank you.”

Khern ignored her. “Pahlavan.”

Demu's expression changed.

Not dramatically.

Enough.

“You know the title?”

“No.”

“Good story, then.”

Brakka checked another support. “Make it short.”

Demu adjusted his leg before speaking. “Great Ten used places like this before anyone called them Boards. Mercenaries got tired of employers starting fights before paying them, so the Ten made hiring ground neutral wherever they could keep it neutral. Most people remember the rule. Fewer remember who started it.”

Khern looked toward the ten carved hand marks barely visible above the inscription.

“And Pahlavan?”

“One of them.”

“Name?”

Demu laughed.

“No.”

“Why?”

“You ask somebody's name after calling them Pahlavan and see how long you keep your teeth.”

Khern frowned. “It's a title?”

Demu looked surprised that this required clarification. “Obviously.”

Brakka glanced toward Khern.

There.

Hard correction preserved.

“What did he do?” Khern asked.

Demu rested his head against the pillar. “Killed the Usurper of the Steppes.”

The phrase carried weight even before Khern knew why.

Veyrun leaned forward slightly.

“Who was the Usurper?”

“Depends who tells it. Conqueror. Reformer. Saint. Bastard. He took enough of the Steppes that everyone eventually agreed to hate him for different reasons.” Demu shifted again. “Mesas was supposed to finish the war. Instead, most commanders died, the armies folded into each other, and some Kharuun mercenary who wasn't supposed to matter reorganized whoever still listened.”

“Pahlavan.”

“Not yet.”

Khern looked at him.

Demu smiled faintly. “Titles come after people survive long enough for strangers to ruin their names.”

That sentence lodged somewhere uncomfortable.

Demu continued. “The Usurper had the Saint. Mercenary had an axe.”

Brakka paused.

“Killed a Saint?”

“So people say.”

“With an axe?”

“People also say he broke a whole battlefield to reach him, cut through a Domain, split a mesa, killed three hundred men by looking annoyed and drank afterward without taking his armor off. That's what forty years does to a story.”

“What actually happened?”

Demu shrugged.

“He lived.”

That was all history reliably needed.

Khern looked again at the final line on the pillar: ONE BROKE EVERYTHING ELSE. He wondered whether it meant Mesas, the Saint, the old order, or something much more literal. Before he could ask, Split-Tooth moved.

Both prongs rose.

Same direction.

Brakka's head snapped toward him.

The wall behind Demu compressed.

Not cracked.

Compressed.

One support sank several finger widths into the floor while another tilted toward the chamber, old rope tightening until fossilized fibers broke inside their mineral casing. Demu's face went pale.

“That's new.”

Brakka was already moving. “Can you stand?”

“No.”

“Veyrun.”

Veyrun crouched without argument.

Demu looked at him, then at the damaged throat. “You drop me, I'm haunting you.”

Veyrun gave him a thumbs-up.

“That somehow made it worse.”

Brakka used the old survey cord to secure Demu across Veyrun's back while Khern supported the injured leg. Carrying a Cairnid through Old Ninth would make the return slower, louder and considerably heavier—the exact combination Sava had warned them against—but leaving him transformed a recovery job into an execution they had merely declined to perform themselves.

The route spoke while they worked.

“Khern.”

Mara again.

Then, from somewhere farther left:

“Veyrun.”

Lina.

Veyrun's shoulders locked beneath Demu.

A third voice came afterward.

“Brakka.”

Nehra.

Brakka's hand stopped against the survey cord.

The imitation was imperfect this time, tiredness placed in the wrong syllable, but it knew enough.

“Seven cots,” Nehra's voice said.

Brakka stared into the dark.

The route repeated it.

Something tightened in her face until Khern recognized anger being used as a brace.

“That's not funny.”

The darkness answered in Nehra's voice.

“That's not funny.”

Veyrun inhaled sharply.

Refusal stirred.

Khern caught his wrist before it opened.

“Save your throat.”

Veyrun looked at him.

The voice changed.

Rath.

“A finished map—”

Khern's body reacted before thought did.

The phrase stopped.

The recorder had no ending.

It waited.

Khern looked down at Rath's unfinished map secured beneath his clothes.

Then back toward the darkness.

“You don't get the rest.”

The words came calmly.

That surprised him.

No Calling answered.

Nothing supernatural changed.

The imitation simply remained incomplete.

Brakka looked between the main passage and Split-Tooth. His intact prong pointed toward their original route while the damaged one trembled toward a maintenance slit opposite the old Board chamber. She watched his whole body this time rather than asking which signal was correct.

“Good says route.”

Khern glanced at the dark passage.

“Broken?”

“Hollow.”

Demu lifted his head from Veyrun's shoulder. “Maintenance gap goes around old Board wall.”

“Safe?”

“No.”

“Better?”

“Different.”

Brakka smiled without humor. “Ivory's favorite word.”

They took the hollow.

The space barely accepted Veyrun even without Demu, forcing him sideways while Khern pushed the injured leg ahead and Brakka pulled from the other end. Split-Tooth squeezed through behind them as the chamber shifted, the old support collapsing where they had been less than a minute earlier. The impact traveled through Old Ninth and returned repeatedly from different directions until it sounded as though the entire structure was falling around them.

Voices followed too.

The farther they traveled, the worse they became.

Nehra became Mara halfway through a sentence. Sair spoke with Nahl's cadence. Khern heard his own voice say something he had never said. Veyrun's voice appeared clear and undamaged somewhere behind them, which finally made him stop.

The false Veyrun laughed.

The real Veyrun looked back.

His hand rose.

For one moment Khern expected Refusal.

Instead Veyrun gave the darkness the same obscene gesture he had given Senn.

Brakka snorted.

Demu began laughing against his back.

The laughter nearly made Veyrun drop him, which made Demu laugh harder.

The recorder tried to imitate that too.

It got the timing wrong.

Somehow that broke the fear enough to keep them moving.

Split-Tooth found two unstable sections before the maintenance hollow returned them to the second boundary. Brakka no longer asked which prong had detected them; she watched his feet, shoulders, breath and hesitation until his damaged senses became part of a larger language neither of them had possessed before. When he refused one section entirely, she trusted him even though the visible route looked stable.

The floor there collapsed after Veyrun passed.

Brakka looked at Split-Tooth.

“Good.”

The Skitter shook dust from his head.

Her expression softened briefly.

Not pride that he was becoming what he had been.

Recognition that he was becoming useful differently.

Khern filed the distinction away.

They emerged from Old Ninth filthy, thirsty and carrying one living worker plus all three survey tags. The first occupied shelf beyond the route fell quiet when people saw Demu on Veyrun's back, though the silence lasted only until a merchant asked whether Ninth was open and somebody else wanted to know whether the missing equipment could still be recovered.

Demu raised his head weakly. “Water.”

Nobody moved immediately.

A young Kharuun carrying feed baskets did.

He pulled the cup from his own belt and held it out.

Demu drank, then tried to return it.

“Keep.”

The Cairnid stared at him.

“I can replace it.”

“Why?”

The boy frowned. “Because you need it.”

Demu looked at the cup again.

For a strange moment he seemed less prepared for that answer than he had been for voices wearing the dead.

“What do I owe?”

“Nothing.”

Demu's mouth opened.

Closed.

He finally tucked the cup against his chest without arguing.

Khern watched.

Not everything given needed to become debt.

Tessel had already tried to teach him that.

Ivory apparently intended to repeat lessons until he stopped being surprised.

Senn looked genuinely irritated when they entered the Board alive.

Khern was beginning to understand that this was his version of relief.

The keeper's smaller hands stopped simultaneously when he saw Demu, while the larger pair cleared the table without being asked. People nearby noticed the survey tags hanging from Brakka's harness, and conversation around the room began dropping in volume as word traveled from one person to the next.

Senn stared at Demu. “You're expensive.”

Demu slid off Veyrun with enough help to keep his injured leg from touching the ground. “Missed you too.”

“Three tags?”

Brakka placed them on the table.

Senn counted.

Once.

Twice.

Then looked at her as though numbers might have changed because the people carrying them were new.

“Twenty-two.”

“Yes.”

“All three.”

“Yes.”

“Living surveyor.”

“Yes.”

“That's not extra.”

Brakka leaned over the table. “Could be.”

“No.”

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-two.”

“He can describe what happened.”

“Demu describes things for free because he enjoys hearing himself.”

Demu nodded. “True.”

Brakka looked betrayed.

Senn counted twenty-two Deran marks into her palm.

The surrounding Board noticed that too.

Not because twenty-two made them rich.

Because Senn had paid without argument.

That mattered here.

Khern waited until Demu had been taken toward a healer before telling Senn what they found: the recorder, the shifting structure, the dead crew and the ancient Board chamber. He did not embellish the voices, though Veyrun's expression changed when Lina's name became necessary. Senn listened without interrupting until Khern mentioned the carved ten hands.

Then he looked up.

“Ten?”

“Yes.”

“Exact?”

Khern nodded.

Senn leaned back.

A mercenary drinking nearby had been pretending not to listen.

He stopped pretending.

“Great Ten board?”

Senn glanced toward him. “Maybe.”

Another voice entered from behind them. “Not maybe.”

An elderly Morrowkin woman sat near the job wall with one side of her mouth scarred badly enough that several teeth remained exposed when her lips closed. She had not looked toward them until then.

“Ninth was theirs.”

Khern turned. “You know?”

“My grandmother's grandmother knew better than you.”

“That doesn't answer—”

Brakka grabbed his coat before he could begin interviewing another stranger.

The old woman laughed.

“Upper?”

“Yes.”

“Figures.”

Khern pointed toward the ancient inscription. “What does ‘one broke everything else’ mean?”

The woman's amusement faded.

Around them, several older mercenaries became noticeably quieter.

“Pahlavan.”

The title again.

“What was his name?”

Nobody answered.

Not because they did not know.

Because the question itself seemed wrong.

The elderly Morrowkin finally said, “What would you need it for?”

Khern thought about Bell-Tally Nine.

About names and useless details.

“To remember him as a person.”

The old woman studied him for longer than he expected.

Then shook her head.

“If he's alive, that's his problem.”

Khern blinked.

“Alive?”

That drew laughter from three different tables.

Not disbelief.

Nervousness.

Someone near the wall muttered, “Probably.”

Another answered, “Don't start that.”

The old Morrowkin lifted her drink. “Pahlavan killed the Usurper of the Steppes forty years ago and refused every sensible thing people expected afterward. People have been arguing whether he's dead ever since.”

“Why wouldn't anyone know?”

“Because finding him sounds unhealthy.”

Veyrun grinned.

Brakka looked interested despite herself.

Khern thought about an ordinary Kharuun mercenary reorganizing a lost army, killing a Saint and then somehow becoming a story people still lowered their voices around four decades later.

A living legend.

Somebody whose personal name no longer belonged in conversations about him.

He understood suddenly how a person could disappear without dying.

Not forgotten.

Buried beneath remembrance.

Senn slapped the table once.

“Enough history.”

Khern looked toward him.

“You're here for work.”

“We just finished.”

“And now half the Board thinks you found a Great Ten room.”

“We did.”

“That sentence is exactly why I said enough.”

Brakka counted the marks again while Senn pulled several postings from beneath the table and reorganized them. Something had changed in the way he handled the scraps around them. Khern recognized it only when another mercenary approached and Senn covered one particular posting with his hand before the man could read it.

Veyrun noticed too.

His eyes went toward Khern.

Khern looked back.

Neither needed to say anything.

A job was being kept for them.

Not formally.

No rank.

No badge.

No promotion.

Just a keeper deciding somebody else should not take something yet.

The realization should have felt satisfying.

It did.

That was the uncomfortable part.

Brakka divided the twenty-two marks after paying enough toward Demu's treatment that he could not object until later. Split-Tooth received another mark despite having no concept of what he was accumulating, Veyrun immediately inspected a stall outside the Board for another piece of useless clothing until Brakka physically redirected him, and Khern bought fresh material to protect Rath's map from Ivory's damp air.

There was money left.

Not much.

Enough.

They ate somewhere that served food on actual plates.

Veyrun ordered something solely because it was called Saint's Regret, then discovered the name referred to how violently hot it was. He tried to pretend nothing was wrong while tears gathered around his eyes, which worked until Brakka took one bite from his plate and immediately started coughing.

Khern laughed.

Hard enough that people looked over.

Veyrun shoved the plate toward him.

“No.”

Veyrun insisted.

“Absolutely not.”

Brakka, still coughing, pointed at Khern with murderous agreement.

For several minutes the three of them argued over a terrible meal while Split-Tooth tried to steal from every plate equally.

Nobody died.

Nobody chose who would be left behind.

Nobody asked Khern to decide whether mercy still counted when it became ownership.

They were just loud enough to annoy the table beside them.

Khern eventually tried Saint's Regret.

It was horrible.

Mara would have loved watching him suffer through it.

The thought hurt.

Then sat beside the laughter instead of replacing it.

Khern decided he could live with that.

Later, when they returned to the common sleeping shelf, Veyrun's fingers tapped four times against his leg.

No fifth came.

Veyrun waited anyway.

Then smiled faintly and tied the blue cloth tighter around his wrist.

Tomorrow there would be another posting.

Tonight, their marks had bought them time enough to be useless.