Chapter 147: The Men Who Want Nothing
Due’s letters were never restful.
This one arrived in the fig three days late, and it was longer than the others. The hollow in the fig behind the scribes’ dormitory was the only line between Alistair and the south, and every letter that reached it cost Due a bribe he could not truly afford.
Alistair retrieved it after dark, returned to his room, and read it under the lamp as Tobian Marrow, a scholar with no brother anywhere.
Six factions are circling us, Due wrote, and I finally have names for all six, which is more comfort than you would think.
The Ashen Chain wants our steel. The Black Furrow wants our fields. The Brindle Crown wants someone, anyone, to call them nobles again to their faces. The Quiet Confluence wants the river we happen to sit beside. The Spurred Hand wants the bounty Verissan has not posted on us yet but certainly will.
The Hollow Banner simply wants to still be breathing next year. Out of the six, I understand them the best, because so do I.
Six factions I can work with. A man who wants a thing can be sat down and talked to, since a thing has a price, and a price can be paid, or raised, or moved across the table onto a different thing. I am good at the table, brother. You always said so, usually as an insult.
Reading this far, Alistair was reluctantly impressed.
However, the seventh came to our border this morning.
Alistair’s eyes narrowed. He turned the paper to catch the lamp.
Two men, Due wrote. They were unarmed, on foot, and without escort. The Greylight. Anti-Echelon, and religious, and the only one of the seven with a true cause underneath it.
They did not probe our line the way the others probe. They walked up to the border in daylight and asked, by name, to speak with me, in the open. Following that, I received them in the open, because hiding from two unarmed men would have told them more about us than any meeting could.
We spoke for an hour. They were courteous. They listened to every word I said with real attention, and that unsettled me more than rudeness would have. Eventually, they refused us, gently, and the gentleness was the worst part of the hour.
The older of the two said one thing I have not been able to put down since. I asked him plainly, "What would it take to have peace between us?" I always ask that first, and most men answer it with a number.
He smiled at me the way you smile at a child asking where the dead go, a little sorry for the asking.
"There is no price," he said. "Peace is made with men who want to live in the same world as you. You want the Echelon reformed, or replaced, or led by cleaner hands. We want the ground it stands on gone. You and I do not want the same world, Edric of Vale, so there is nothing on your table for me."
He said it without heat, the way I would tell you the field needs rain.
Then he thanked me for my time, and he meant the thanks, and the two of them walked back the way they had come without once looking over their shoulders. Men unafraid of dying do not check whether you are following them.
Alistair set the page down. He was honestly unsettled.
Here is the trouble, brother, and I want you holding it the same way I am holding it.
Six factions want a thing from us. The seventh wants nothing from us. The seventh wants us to not exist, because we are Echelon-registered now, and the Echelon is the exact thing they have organised their souls against.
You cannot buy a man out of his soul. You cannot threaten it into staying home. You cannot reason with it, because the reasoning finished years ago, decided by men who never let themselves un-decide.
We will fight the Greylight one day. Not soon, but one day, and when it comes, it will be the only fight in this entire mess that is not about money underneath everything. That should frighten you. It frightens me, and I am the optimist of the two of us, which is a low bar I cleared only because the bar is you.
The letter ran on for a few lines about supply, the western settlement, and a joke about Tavin’s beard that Alistair did not laugh at. Then it stopped without a closing, because Due never closed a letter.
Alistair had decided long ago that the man left them open on purpose, a small superstition, his way of insisting that there would be a next one.
However, the very last line before the open end was not a joke.
Make your work matter, brother. Mine is getting heavier every week, and I would like very much to believe yours is buying us something I cannot see from here.
Alistair lowered the page. His jaw tightened.
He was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, and everything to do with being trusted completely by a man he could not reach with his own hands.
’He is carrying seven factions and a patient army camped two days from his door, and he still found the breath to ask me whether my hiding is worth his bleeding. He would never ask it plainly. So he asked it as a joke about a beard.’
He read the last line once more, then burned the letter over the lamp and lay on the narrow bed without any intention of sleeping.
He thought about two unarmed men walking up to a border in daylight.
He had fought men who wanted gold, men who wanted land, men who wanted to be feared.
Those men could be moved, because the thing they wanted sat outside of them, where a clever hand could reach it.
The Greylight wanted nothing that sat outside them.
They wanted the shape of the world to match the shape of the thing inside their own chests, and there is no table on the continent wide enough to negotiate that across.
’Due is right to fear the men who want nothing more than the six who want everything. The six will fight us for an afternoon and then haggle. The seventh will fight until one of us no longer exists. And Due will be the one standing in front of them when that day arrives, while I am here, learning to lose at fencing.’
Alistair clicked his tongue at his own thought.
Eventually, the bells outside told him the night was half gone.
Hearing this, Alistair exhaled deeply and sat up in the dark, because the bells meant something else as well.
In six hours, Tobian Marrow would stand across a piste from Coren Thrace, a Sworn Hand who had spent his whole life reading men through their blades, and he had to lose that bout convincingly.
Unfortunately, Alistair had never once learned how to lose to a weaker man, and the Equalizer would not let him start now.
