The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 021: Greywatch

On the eleventh evening, the sky turned the color of an old bruise.

Ethan stood at the bow of the Patience and watched ash fall on the river. It came down in slow flakes, soft as snow, and settled on the water without making a ring. Far ahead, past the last bend, a dull orange glow lay across the horizon like a wound that wouldn't close.

"That's the Rift," Mags said. She had a pipe clamped in her teeth and a coil of rope over one shoulder. "The Ashen one. It's been open sixty years. You'll stop noticing the smell in about a week."

"What does it smell like?"

"Like burnt hair and wet iron." She grinned around the pipe. "Welcome to Greywatch."

He couldn't smell anything but smoke. He didn't tell her that.

The days on the river had been long and strange. In the mornings Rhea took him up on the foredeck and put a pole in his hands and made him learn his feet. Left, step, turn. Weight low. Elbows in. By the sixth day he could block her slow strokes. By the ninth he could occasionally dodge one. Tomas sat in the stern with the old book in his lap, murmuring to himself, sometimes shouting ha! at a page. In the evenings Ethan sat with his back against the cabin wall and practiced the one thing nobody could teach him: listening. Every pulse on the barge, every fish in the water, every bird on the bank. He learned to hold fifteen meters of living breath in his head at once.

He hadn't slept well. Every time he closed his eyes he heard Voss's voice. Ask your uncle what he was paid.

"Names," Rhea said, from the rail.

He turned.

"We need them before we land." She had cut her hair short with a knife two nights ago, and it stuck out at odd angles. "The poster has your face. The Wardens know my face. We can't be who we were."

"Eli," Tomas said, without looking up from the book. "Eli Gray. A boy with a very ordinary name."

"Why Gray?"

"It's the color of everything here."

"I'm Rae," Rhea said. "Your aunt. Rae Gray. I mend harnesses."

"You do not mend harnesses."

"I'll learn." She raised an eyebrow at Tomas. "And you're Grandfather Tom."

"Seventy-three years old and promoted to patriarch." Tomas closed the book with a thump. "I accept."

Greywatch squatted against the black cliffs like something that had crawled there to die and changed its mind.

It was a wall first. A tall palisade of sharpened logs, hung with iron spikes and old banners, stained dark by years of smoke. Beyond the wall rose a jumble of timber roofs and chimneys, and above everything, on a rise of rock, the squat tower of the Hunters' Guild with a red flag snapping in the ash-laden wind. A road of packed cinders ran from the river docks to the main gate. It was crowded. Carts, mules, wagons loaded with crates that rattled and hissed. Men and women in scarred leather, with axes at their hips and bows on their backs, moved through the throng in loose clusters, each cluster keeping its distance from the next.

The gate guard was a heavy man with a red nose and breath that Ethan could smell from three meters away. He was young and hungover and bored.

[Gate Warden Orrin Pike. Level 11. True attitude: Hungover. Bored. Wishes he were elsewhere.]

Warden, Ethan thought, and tightened. But the window said gate warden, a town official, not the Ironkeep's charcoal coat. He let out a breath.

"Names," Pike said, without looking up from a stained ledger.

"Rae Gray," Rhea said. "My father, Tom. My nephew, Eli."

"Business in Greywatch?"

"Work. The boy needs it. He's a good carrier."

Pike's eyes flicked up. They went from Rhea to Tomas to Ethan, slowly, and on Ethan they stopped. He was wearing a wool cap pulled low and a scarf wound up to his nose. He'd shaved. Mags's wife had rubbed ash into his jaw to disguise the cleft. His nose had been broken once, and it was the one thing nobody could hide.

Pike leaned sideways and looked at the notice board by the gate.

There was a poster on it. Black ink. A narrow face. A broken nose.

"Huh," Pike said.

The breath in Ethan's chest turned to stone.

"What's your trade, boy?" Pike said.

"I carry."

"Hm." He squinted. "Take off that scarf."

Ethan took it off.

Pike looked from the poster to his face and back, slowly, one long time. His expression was perfectly blank. Then he sighed, rubbed his nose, and picked up a stamp.

"My nephew's got a nose like that," he muttered. "Fell off a roof at six. You'd think I'd stop seeing it everywhere." He thumped the stamp onto a sheet and tore it free. "Three-day permit. Register at the Guild hall within three days or you're out. Next."

Rhea took the paper with two fingers. "Thank you, Warden."

"Don't thank me. Just don't be trouble."

They went through.

The streets of Greywatch were narrow and sooty and packed with noise. Timber houses leaned over the lanes, their upper stories almost touching. Smoke poured from tin chimneys. In every doorway hung painted signs, a boot, a bow, a skull with a crown, and from every tavern spilled shouting and the clatter of cups. Everywhere Ethan looked, hunters. Hard faces, bright eyes, a sort of tired swagger. Each had a badge on the shoulder, bronze or silver or, rarely, a gold so dull it looked like brass.

He watched them with Appraise.

[Hunter Corvin Marsh. Level 17. True attitude: Contemptuous. Proud.]

[Hunter Dessa Marrow. Level 22. True attitude: Calculating. Exhausted.]

[Hunter Brann. Level 15. True attitude: Afraid. Hiding it badly.]

Afraid. Half of them were afraid. He could see it in the text, a small pulse of fear under every swagger, and he understood that none of them were safe here. Not even the strong.

Porters moved among them like shadows, bent under enormous packs. Men and women in frayed grey tunics with rope-calloused hands. Nobody looked at them. Nobody spoke to them. When a porter stumbled on the cinders, a hunter stepped over him without breaking stride.

"There," Rhea said quietly. She nodded at a squat inn on the corner, a crooked sign swinging above its door. A rusted ladle painted on the wood. "Cheap. Clean enough. I asked at the dock."

They paid for one room with two beds and a pallet. The innkeeper, a stout woman with flour on her arms, did not ask their names and did not look at their faces. She took the copper and handed over a key. "Bowl of stew each, if you want it. Pays by the day. Don't bring blood upstairs."

"We don't have any blood," Tomas said, with great dignity.

"You will," said the innkeeper, and went back to her pot.

Ethan stood in the doorway of the common room, a bowl in his hands, watching the square outside through the grimy window. Dusk was falling. The Rift glowed on the horizon. A hundred lanterns were being lit up and down the main street, and across it, in the lamplight, the doors of the Guild hall swung open.

A man stepped out. Tall. Grey coat. A silver chain at the collar.

He paused at the top of the steps, pulling on a pair of gloves, and looked out across the square with an expression of mild boredom.

[Warden Liaison Hesk. Level 24. True attitude: Bored. Unhurried.]

Ethan set the bowl down on the sill.

He slowly pulled his scarf back up over his mouth.