Page 17 of Orc’s Moon

Black-cloaked soldiers move through the outer streets in formations too tight to be looters, dozens of them, spreading out from a breach in the district wall like ink finding the grain of old wood. They’re not searching the way treasure hunters search — no shouting, no scattering to grab whatever glitters first. Every pair carries a boxy iron device between them, antennae bristling off the top, and they sweep it across every doorway and archway they pass, methodical as men checking a field for mines.

“Ward-breakers.” My stomach drops somewhere around my boots. “Those devices — they’re built to find and disable Covenant wards. Someone spent real coin building tools for exactly this city, exactly this problem, which means somebody’s known Blackspire was real and reachable for a lot longer than a few days.”

“Or a lot longer than any of us have been alive.”

It answers a question I hadn’t let myself ask yet — how forty men got past a gate that only opens for Blackfang blood. We never doubled back to seal the Black Gates behind us, no reason to, not with a city we thought was ours alone to explore, and whoever’s watched that mountain long enough to know exactly when to move didn’t need to break anything. They only needed to follow us through a door we left standing open.

At the formation’s center, a single figure stands apart from the rest — silver-haired, a dueling scar pulling one eyebrow permanently upward, watching his men work with a patience that only comes from having done this exact thing enough times that urgency stopped being useful to him years ago. He isn’t shouting orders. He barely seems to be giving any. His men already know the dance, moving through each doorway in pairs, marking cleared ground with a chalked symbol before advancing to the next, nothing wasted, nothing left to chance.

That stillness frightens me worse than anything moving in this city so far. Panic I understand. Panic makes mistakes. This is a man who has clearly never once needed to feel anything to be devastating at his job, and the sheer number of men following his silence without question tells me he’s built that kind of authority the same slow way — methodically, on the bodies of everyone who ever doubted it.

Farther up the ridgeline, where the mountain itself climbs above the district in bare, wind-scoured rock, something catches the last of the daylight and holds it a beat too long to be a trick of the eye. A shape, distant and still, watching the same plaza we’re watching — a lone figure with nothing better to do, it seems, than observe a slaughter he isn’t part of. Gone the instant I try to focus on it — a trick of light on stone, maybe, or something worse deciding it doesn’t want to be seen yet.

I don’t have time to chase the thought. Vorren’s already talking.

“You’re going to keep decoding the Moonkeeper records from up here.” Vorren doesn’t look at me when he says it, already unslinging Nightfall, already thinking three moves past this conversation. “I’ll draw them off the main avenue, buy you time to work, fall back to the Barracks once you’ve got what you need.”

“No.”

That gets his eyes on me. “This isn’t a negotiation.”

“Everything’s a negotiation, Captain; you just usually win them by being taller than the other person.” I’m already checking my knives, already furious for reasons that stopped being about tactics long ago. “I have spent seven years watching other people bleed for what I dig up. Master Coridan, who taught me how to read a damaged page before I could properly read at all, dead in an alley two days after he backed my Blackspire theory in front of the Council. Two research assistants I trained myself. An entire Archive full of people who are dead because I asked the wrong question in front of the wrong committee. I am done being the historian who survives because someone else stood between her and the consequences.”

“This is different.”

“It is exactly the same, and you know it, which is why you can’t look at me while you’re arguing it.” I step into the space he’s trying to put between us instead of letting it settle. “You don’t get to decide I’m worth protecting and then decide unilaterally what that protection looks like. That’s not devotion, Vorren. That’s just control wearing a nicer coat.”

His throat works once, then again, fighting to hold the words back, costing him visibly, and for one furious second I think he’s going to order me up here anyway, rank be damned, and we’re going to have this exact fight again in worse circumstances five minutes from now, with soldiers within earshot of us arguing about it.

“And I’m done being the reason you don’t come out of this alive.” His voice drops, unsteady, a man forcing words out that clearly cost him more than the fight below ever will. “It became my choice the moment I decided I’d rather bury this whole city myself than bury you in it.”

I don’t back down. “It was never yours to make alone.”

“Because if they kill you,” his voice cracks on the word, just slightly, just enough that I hear exactly how much that admission costs a man who doesn’t spend words he isn’t certain of, “none of this matters anymore. Not the Hall. Not the Covenant. Not one word on that wall you nearly died reading. I will burn every truth in this city to ash myself before I let that be the price of finding it.”

I don’t have a clever answer for that. I don’t want one.

I put my palm flat against his chest instead, over blackened steel gone warm from his own body heat, and feel his heartbeat slam under my palm, too fast for a man who hasn’t even drawn his blade yet.

“Then don’t let them. Fight beside me instead of dying nobly in front of me. I’d much rather have the version of you that comes home.”

His jaw eases, just slightly — not agreement exactly, closer to a wall deciding it’s tired of holding a position it never believed in. He doesn’t get the chance to answer in words.

The soldiers reach the plaza below us before we finish the conversation, black cloaks pouring through a side street in a formation too disciplined to be anything but drilled, and whatever Vorren was about to say dies under the sound of forty pairs of boots finding stone at once.

“Stay close. Stay dangerous.” He’s moving now, smiling with something I haven’t caught on him before — not comfort, not reassurance, a man finally being allowed to do the thing he’s best at without an audience of superiors telling him to be careful about it. “I mean both.”

He meets the first wave of them like a door slamming shut. Nightfall opens a path through the lead soldiers’ formation that shouldn’t be physically possible against trained men in matched armor — one blow felling two, the third barely getting his blade up before Vorren’s already moved past him toward the fourth, treating a wall of drilled soldiers like an inconvenience between him and the men actually worth his attention.

I don’t wait to be told where to stand.

I go in low, under the guard of the first soldier who turns toward me expecting an easy target, and put my boot into the back of his knee hard enough to drop him gasping to the stone. My knife finds the gap in a second soldier’s gorget faster than he can raise his own, moonsteel sliding home with a precision no drilling ground could have taught me — only years of ruins that never once forgave a mistake. A third comes at my blind side, and I use his own momentum against him, pivoting into the space he’s already committed to and putting him into the man behind him instead of into me.

A fourth is smarter, holds back, waits for an opening instead of rushing one. I give him a fake — a stumble that isn’t real, weight dropping wrong on purpose — and when he lunges for the gap he thinks he’s found, I’m already gone from it, blade opening the inside of his sword arm before he understands the fight already ended. He goes down clutching the wound instead of pressing the attack. Good. I’m not interested in killing every man the Order sends after us tonight. I’m interested in still being alive when the fighting’s done.

This is what nobody in Asterhold ever prepared me to be, and it is, against my own expectations, exactly what I’m for. A career’s worth of committees telling me a historian’s place was behind a desk, and it turns out the desk was never the point. The reading was. Knowing a building well enough to make it fight for you — that’s not so different from knowing a person well enough to trust him with your back, and I’m only now understanding how much those two skills have been the same skill all along.

“The bridge,” I shout, already tracking the district’s shape in my head — where the load-bearing points are, where a small push topples something large, where years of reading dead architecture finally pay off in a city that’s very much still alive. “The one behind them, over the second canal — there’s a control rune at its base, I saw it on the way in!”