Chapter 28: Know Thy Enemy
"I’m not Loof," Milo said, and found, once the sentence was finally out in open air instead of locked behind his teeth, that it was considerably easier to keep talking than it had been to start. "Not entirely. Not in the way you’re picturing it. I’m someone else, wearing this body, dropped into this story by a dungeon I didn’t fully choose to enter — and that fact is the actual reason I broke the King’s order tonight, and the reason I lied to him afterward without meaning to, and the reason I already knew half of what you told me before you finished telling it."
Osmund didn’t flinch. He didn’t reach for a weapon, or call for Bhaltair, or do any of the dozen things a reasonable man might do upon learning the person he’d just poured out twenty years of grief to wasn’t fully the person he thought he was pouring it out to. He simply leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and said, "Go on."
So Milo did.
He explained it the way he explained everything — plainly, without dressing it up prettier than it actually was. A Talent called Power of Knowledge. A passive half that let him absorb a book’s contents the instant he touched it, and an active half that could summon the phantom of whoever had written a manuscript to teach him, instantly, completely, whatever skill that manuscript held. He explained the cooldown — thirty days, once, now cut down to sixteen through a their world. He explained the one rule that mattered most, the rule that made all of it actually useful instead of just strange.
"Class doesn’t matter," Milo said. "Not to me. A Wizard’s spell, a Rogue’s technique, a Warrior’s discipline — I don’t need to belong to any of those categories to learn from them. I only need the attributes the skill actually requires. Strength enough, wisdom enough, whatever the book asks for. If I meet the requirement, I can learn it, and once I’ve learned it, it’s mine the same as if I’d trained for it my whole life."
Osmund sat with that for a long moment, and Milo watched something shift behind his eyes — grief and shrewd, practiced calculation trading places the way weather trades places on a coastline, familiar with both and entirely at home in either.
"You’re telling me," Osmund said slowly, "that the only thing standing between you and considerably more power than either of us currently has any right to expect is access to the right books."
"That’s exactly what I’m telling you."
"And I," Osmund said, and something in his voice had started, unmistakably, to brighten, "happen to be the one man in this entire kingdom with a smuggling route the Crown itself trusts."
The warmth that followed felt strange after the night they’d both survived to reach it — genuine, unguarded, the specific relief of two people who had each spent hours certain the evening would end considerably worse than a conversation. Osmund poured them both something that was, this time, actually meant for drinking rather than just holding, and for a little while the two of them simply sat with the shape of the plan taking form between them, warm firelight instead of cold dread for the first time since Milo had walked through a portal into any of this.
"Combat first," Osmund said, thinking out loud, the specific energy of a man doing what he’d apparently done best his whole life — building something profitable out of raw material other people hadn’t yet learned to value properly. "Something devastating. A spell that levels a room, a technique that ends a fight before it starts. If we’re arming a man to kill a King, surely that’s the obvious first purchase."
"That was my first thought too," Milo admitted. "I’ve been thinking in exactly that shape since the moment I understood what my talent could actually buy me."
"But it’s not the right first purchase," Osmund said, slowly, working it out loud the way he clearly worked out every good trade before he committed to it. "Is it."
"No," Milo said. "I don’t think it is."
Osmund set his glass down, and when he spoke again, his voice had the specific clarity of a man who had spent two decades learning to spot the difference between a good deal and a deal that only looked good in the moment. "You don’t know what he actually is, Loof. Not really. We’ve seen the Claim. We’ve heard him mention ’other skills related to royalty’ the way a man mentions a second sword he’s never bothered drawing because the first one’s always been enough. You could spend everything I can smuggle you on the single most devastating spell in this kingdom, and still walk into that throne room with absolutely no idea whether it’s actually enough to matter against whatever he’s actually capable of."
"Know the enemy," Milo said, quiet, feeling the whole shape of the idea click into place the way every good idea eventually did for him — not arriving all at once, but arriving in exactly the order it needed to. "Before the weapon. The map."
"Before the weapon," Osmund agreed. "The map."
"There’s a skill," Osmund said, after a moment spent turning the idea over properly, "that traders in the deepest markets speak about the way sailors speak about sea monsters — mostly rumor, occasionally real, always expensive when it actually surfaces for sale. Appraisal. Not combat. Not offense of any kind. It lets the caster look at a person, or a monster, or a threat of any shape at all, and see the true numbers sitting underneath the surface of them — stats, class, hidden abilities, the whole architecture of what they’re actually capable of instead of what they merely appear capable of."
Milo felt something settle into place in his chest, solid, correct, the specific certainty he’d learned to trust every time it arrived.
"That’s the one," he said.
"It’s also brutally difficult to learn, and brutally expensive to acquire even the manuscript for," Osmund said. "The kind of skill that asks a punishing amount of a caster’s mind before it agrees to work at all — I’d guess a WIS requirement steep enough to have turned away better scholars than either of us have ever met. And the book itself, if one exists anywhere within three kingdoms of here, will not come cheap, and will not come quickly, and will absolutely not come without me calling in favors I’ve been saving for something considerably more dire than this." He was smiling now, though, despite every word of the warning, the specific smile of a man who had just found, for the first time in twenty years, a problem worth the effort of solving properly. "Which is, I should mention, exactly the kind of problem I have spent my entire life becoming extraordinarily good at solving."
"You make it sound almost enjoyable."
"It is enjoyable," Osmund said, delighted, and for one full moment looked ten years younger than he had all evening. "Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I got to build something instead of simply enduring what’s already built? Elenna always said I did my best thinking when I had a genuinely difficult trade to close. I’d nearly forgotten what that felt like."
They spent the better part of an hour after that simply planning, the way people plan when a plan has finally started feeling possible instead of merely necessary — Osmund sketching out which contacts might have heard of an Appraisal manuscript surfacing anywhere in the last decade, which routes could move it fastest without drawing the wrong attention, which favors were worth spending now against which favors needed to stay banked for later. Milo found himself, more than once, simply watching the man work, and understanding, with a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire, that this was the first time since a market square had taught him what this kingdom thought of readers that he’d felt like part of a team again instead of a man surviving alone inside someone else’s borrowed skin.
"Once you can see him properly," Osmund said, "truly see him — his class, his real ceiling, whatever he’s actually hiding behind that Claim of his — everything after that becomes a considerably more honest kind of difficult. I can work with honest difficulty. I’ve built an empire out of nothing but honest difficulty. What I can’t work with is guessing."
"Neither can I," Milo said. "I’ve done enough guessing tonight to last me the rest of whatever years this story tries to charge me for staying in it."
Osmund laughed at that, real and unguarded, and it was, Milo thought, a genuinely good sound to have finally earned out of him.
"There’s one more thing," Osmund said, once the laughter had settled, his tone shifting into something more careful, more considering, the specific tone of a man deciding whether a piece of information was worth the risk of sharing. "You’ve told me what your Talent can do. You haven’t told me much about the class riding alongside it — and I don’t need the details, understand, that’s yours to keep exactly as private as you’d like. But it occurs to me that a class as rare as whatever you’re carrying almost certainly comes with more to it than either of us currently understands. Most classes do, the deeper you go."
"What are you thinking," Milo asked, and felt something in his chest lean forward before he’d consciously decided to lean it.
"There’s a place," Osmund said. "A dungeon, if the merchants who whisper about it are to be believed — not the kind that hands out gold or monster fangs, but the kind built specifically to teach a class-holder something true about the class they’re carrying. Hidden functions. Depths the Temple stone never bothers explaining because it’s never once been asked properly. I’ve heard it called the Vault of Knowing, in the three or four conversations I’ve ever heard mention it at all, and I’ve never once had a reason to care about it until tonight, sitting across from a man whose class is apparently rare enough to summon terrified ghosts and cut a King’s own leash halfway through." He watched Milo’s face carefully, gauging something. "I don’t know exactly where it sits. I know which trade route brushes closest to the region it’s rumored to be in. That might be enough of a beginning, if you wanted one."
Milo sat with that for a long moment, feeling something bright and unfamiliar move through him — not the grim, necessary hope of a man plotting a King’s death, but something closer to the specific, uncomplicated excitement of a scholar who has just been handed the exact edge of a question he’s been circling his whole life without ever finding the door to ask it properly.
"I want one," he said. "I want that beginning very badly."
"Then that," Osmund said, raising his glass, something warm and genuine settling across his whole face for the first time since the story of a wine glass had cracked it open, "is exactly what I intend to give you."