Chapter 8: Restless No More

Erlich heaved the last body onto the pyre as the sky paled. They had been at it most of the night — the corridors and chambers and the hidden room where Mordwyn had died, every passage the six had fought through, every corner where the undead had fallen, emptied one by one. Torchlight had traveled the worn steps in both directions, and now the pyre was built on the temple's old offering stone, and the dead went onto it the way the dead were meant to go.

Mordwyn went on last. The boy who had emptied a burial ground and nearly killed six men weighed nothing. Brunner and Godwin lifted him together, and he burned the same as the rest.

Baron Volker stood by the fire with his cloak drawn tight, his eyes on the smoke as it climbed into the morning. The arm wound had crusted over. His sword — notched, bloodied, earned — hung at his hip. Brunner stood beside him, shield gone and scalp crusted, the same dour patience on his face that had been there at the docks and in the scrub and under the earth. Tomas was a little apart, the torches finally out of his hands, his eyes never leaving the pyre. Something had set in his jaw that hadn't been there at dusk. The green was gone.

"Lieutenant." The baron held out a purse, heavy with coin. "The crown's bounty in full. Magyar is in your debt. The boats went out this morning — first time in a month."

Erlich took the purse without ceremony and tucked it into his belt. He did not clasp the baron's hand. He did not bow or speak of gratitude or service. The coin was the crown's and the job was the crown's, and the small politics of a fishing baron's thanks were not his concern. He had come because the letter had come. He would leave because the work was done.

He knelt at the pyre's edge instead, where the pendant lay in two halves on the stone, cold now, the bone-core gone to splinters and grit. He gathered the fragments carefully — the pale chips, the dust, the resin that had bound them — and folded them into a square of leather, then into his pack. Ranger to the last. The capitol wizards would pay for what remained, or they would want it, and either way it was the Rangers' coin.

"Taking souvenirs, Lieutenant?" Leofric asked, from somewhere behind him.

"For the wizards." Erlich stood. "What's left of the bone. It's still mana."

Leofric made a show of disappointment. "And here I thought you'd gone sentimental." Then he grinned — quick, crooked — and turned, very casually, slipping something from the edge of Mordwyn's camp into his own pocket — a glint of metal, a trifle, a thing he would not name and no one would ask him to name. Old habits. Godwin noted the theft and said nothing; Erlich did the same.

Godwin had been counting the wounded. He'd been doing it since the chamber — a habit, a liturgy, the steady second tallying hurts while the rest of them caught their breath. "Brunner's scalp will hold. His lordship's arm needs cleaning but it'll mend. Leofric's ankle is swelling, but he's walking. Tomas is sound." He looked at his own hands, the knuckles raw, and shrugged. "We're whole enough, Lieutenant."

"Whole enough," Erlich agreed.

The sun came up red and salt-hazy over the scrub, and lit the ruins for what they were — old stone and filed-teeth gods, a war two centuries cold, with the smoke of the pyre rising clean into a sky that held no more wrongness. The wind came off the water and carried only salt and thyme.

They left the temple at dawn, the six of them, walking back down the trail toward Magyar and the road beyond. The baron turned off at the town gate with a last nod and his men behind him, and the three Rangers went on alone, the way they'd come — Erlich ahead, Godwin and Leofric at his shoulders, the coin and the bone in the packs. Magyar's fishermen were putting out as the sun cleared the harbor mouth. The nets went down and the trade would follow, and the town would mend in the slow way towns mend.

The restless nights were over.

But Erlich carried one thought away from the pyre that he did not speak aloud. Dragon bones were priceless. The wizards hungered for them and the demons traded for them, and there was no law against a fool buying one stolen. Mordwyn had been a frightened boy with a pendant and a month's mana, and he had emptied the graves and nearly killed six men. There would be another apprentice somewhere — hungry for power and too proud to learn the craft — and the next letter would come, and the Rangers would come, the way they always came.

The road ran north. The sun climbed. They walked.

It was only a matter of time.