I should probably give you some more in-depth information about the members of our little fellowship. The ones you don’t already know, that is.

  The three former students of mine you’ll already have plenty of surface-level information on, to elaborate there their names were Dubin, Vonti and Chak. They were all shorter men, though maybe just average for peasants, and had done rather well in soaking up my lessons. Which was to say, the three of them were sneaky, slimy cowards who could fend off a fencing champion for at least a handful of seconds.

  Next up was Cedwin, one of the nastier men I’ve ever had the displeasure of being acquainted with. He was covered in guns and looked as if he was perpetually one perceived slight away from using them, foul-tempered, cruel, just all-around not the sort you wanted to turn your back to.

  But all of these people were ranging from competent to capable. So you can imagine that Gruin and the aelf engaging in a death-match right outside Arvharest surprised them quite thoroughly.

  It surprised me, too, for different reasons. The whole melee felt like I was watching two opposing forces clash. On the one side was Gruin, his limbs pistoning out like the metallic drive of a steam mechanism, his hammer a heavy block of death cutting through air and dirt in its efforts to do the same with flesh and bone. The aelf was everything he wasn’t and nothing he was. Not fast, exactly, as much as she was…measured. Like every move was planned out ahead of time. She dodged each blow by so small a margin that I thought, more than once, Gruin had hit her anyway, and her whole body seemed to contort around like she was dancing on puppet strings.

  Gruin didn’t land a blow, not yet, while she refrained from marking him at all. The two just stayed interlocked in their violence for one minute, two. The aelf seemed to be slowing, I thought, while the Grynkori remained tireless as ever, but she still wasn’t fighting back. Another minute and she finally struck him, slashed one shoulder with a dainty little blade that looked more like it was made for shaving than killing.

  It shaved Gruin, alright. Shaved a strip right off his arm and exposed the meat below, let blood drool lazily out of it, then fly off in short flecks as he whirled and churned the air with his hammer in a fury redoubled. Apparently the sight of drawn blood convinced Morlo that things had escalated enough already, because he chose that moment to step in.

  This was Morlo, though, so his method of breaking up a fight was only debatably less dangerous than simply watching it reach its end. He waved both hands and threw out a blast of wind that sent Gruin stumbling away and, hitting the far less dense aelf, launched her fully off her feet. She flipped mid-fall and landed on both heels, entirely unfazed.

  Gruin appeared to be made even angrier at not seeing her eat shit.

  “Butt out, wizard,” he snarled, “I’m killing this one.” The aelf said nothing, just watched as the Grynkori stormed closer.

  “No you’re not,” Morlo told Gruin calmly as he put up a wall of wind and forced him back again. “Stand down.”

  “Or what?!” the Grynkori growled.

  Morlo showed him.

  The Thaumaturge lifted off from the ground and the winds turned sharp and heavy around him, coiling under his feet as robes flapped and billowed, as the ground trembled and shivered. I felt a terrible heat in the air, watched fire blossom beneath him in waves, rolling out just shy of us all. I screamed, covered my face. Didn’t even think to use my own powers to muster a defence. What good would they have done anyway?

  “I think you’re forgetting yourself, Grynkori,” Morlo called out. Somehow his voice cut over the screaming winds, the trembling earth, the chattering teeth. I felt it run right through me and weaken my knees as terror pinched at my nerves. Gruin didn’t seem scared, no more than ever before, but I saw him struggling just to stand as the brunt of Morlo’s winds focused on him. “I am Morlo, the Great. And the Terrible. And though I know you do not fear death, your debt still rests with me. You will obey me in this as you will in all else. Say you understand.”

  The command was like a crumbling mountain. Gruin stared up at Morlo with, I saw for the first time, simmering hatred. I wondered if this was how the Grynkori would die, a final blast of fury that threw him into combat with a force no arms or iron could match. Instead he looked away from Morlo, still quivering with rage.

  “I understand,” he spat.

  All at once, the wind disappeared and Morlo gently levitated back down to the ground.

  “Good,” the Thaumaturge was all smiles again in an instant, “now that we’ve taken care of that, let’s get moving. We have things to do, you know.”

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  We were all travelling by horse for this stretch of the journey, though I’d been warned that later lengths of it would require us to switch to foot due to terrain. All of us were happy for this, save Gruin. He grumbled the whole way about how slow our horses were, about how wide his saddle was, how horrible everything around him appeared to be. I mostly just tuned it out, having gotten used to the Grynkori’s complaining and, recently, been given a new concern.

  Morlo had spoken of a debt owed to him by Gruin. I wanted to know what it was. Part of that was just simple curiosity, I’ll admit, but my motives were mostly pragmatic. Whatever shackles the Thaumaturge had Gruin on might be ones he’d be willing to wrap around me, too. I still didn’t know half as much about the old man as I’d have wanted to, and I was becoming more convinced every day that the absence of my knowledge in that regard was dangerous.

  Unfortunately, Morlo was better than most Thaumaturges at keeping secrets. And your average Thaumaturge has a lot of practice at doing that.

  There were other complications, too, like my receiving unwanted attention from Devyne when he rolled his horse up next to mine and started yapping away without invitation.

  “You didn’t say goodbye to me when you left, back at the fort.” I turned to him and, in my befuddlement, let my less-than-Heroic true expression show.

  “What?” I snapped, more irritable than anything. I was in no mood to be given another source of confusion now of all times.

  “We fought together, bled together. I put my life on the line to fight alongside you, got myself dragged into the army just to save your skin from Wyrickai, and you didn’t even say goodbye to me before running off with Morlo to chase legends elsewhere.” Devyne seemed to have been working himself up into a rage as he spoke, and I now saw that I was at risk of getting yet another noble grudge aimed at me.

  I calmed down fast at that, and focused faster. Spending half a year constantly having deadly weapons swung for your head did, if nothing else, instill a strong mastery over your own emotions and how to wrangle them under control when the need arose.

  “It wasn’t like that,” I told him quickly, “not at all.”

  Pure bullshit of course, it had been exactly like that. With the mitigating factors being that Devyne was a witless lunatic who I figured was jeopardizing my life just by working with me, he’d already walked me into danger without bothering to gather information on it and was altogether too enthusiastic about all the things that went bump in the night.

  But he wouldn’t care about any reasons I might have had, good or otherwise, for slighting him. I knew enough about arrogant, stupid, self-centred arseholes to predict that much. Even if I did not yet know that it was mainly because I was one.

  “Morlo had his plans, and I had no say in them. He can be quite insistant, and I didn’t want to cause any trouble to you and your father by delaying him and risking the creation of some big scene, not after you’d gone out of your way to, as you said, help me out regarding Wyrickai.”

  Devyne clearly wanted to believe me, which was why I knew my bullshit would be accepted long before I saw his face slowly smooth out all the anger. He actually looked a little bit embarrassed as he spoke next, which was fine by me as it meant he’d be less scrutinous about whatever else I said.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he mumbled, “sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I hid my relief and kept my eyes forward. “Either way, we have bigger things to worry about now.” I, in particular, had a great many bigger things, from Morlo’s revelation about Gruin, to his wider plans, to the immediate threat of where we were headed.

  Any one of those seemed like it would be a worthy priority, but in the end I had to default towards the one that was most likely to physically kill me. To that effect I sidled my horse up next to Morlo’s and tried to strike a conversation.

  “What sort of danger are we to expect?” I asked him up-front.

  “Shamblers, obviously,” he replied.

  “Right, but how many?” Morlo hesitated at that. “That I do not know, it’ll depend on how much we need to fuck around with the source of them. There may, admittedly, be other problems too. Keep on guard is all I’ll say.”

  It was actually a pretty candid answer by his standards, which I appreciated. What I did not appreciate was my new company.

  Cedwin liked to practice with his guns a lot. He also made his own black powder. Apparently the way he did this was by processing his own shit, which meant that every night we were treated to the smell of boiling human excrement as he replenished the munitions he’d wasted on practice shots. I could only guess that he was reusing the lead balls.

  When confronted about this smell, he said two words. ‘Fuck off’. Never more, never less, and he never changed his behaviour. So I thought he could fuck off, too.

  The three former trainees of mine mostly kept to themselves, though I found they were quite eager to interact with me, too. We spent a good few nights chatting and laughing over our experiences in the siege, which were all horrible but at least served to make the present time seem less horrible by comparison. When I wasn’t with them, I was usually with Vara. She and I had started to warm up to each other a little bit, for several reasons. Though things were also complicated. I suspected that she was unsure where we stood, and didn’t like that uncertainty. I felt much the same.

  Gruin and myself had about the same interactions we always did, which was comforting in a way. The familiarity kept me feeling normal, kept everything feeling grounded and expected. It did, however, mean that Gruin was still being Gruin, far from the most pleasant thing to be around I had to say.

  He spent most of the time glaring at Il’vanja, as if he were exerting his will at every moment just to resist leaping over and clubbing the aelf to death. Morlo sent him periodic death-stares that I imagined were doing a lot of good to help him keep that urge in check.

  That pretty much set the tone of our journey. There’s a lot of stories about it, these days, but as someone who was heavily involved I can confidently tell you that it was mostly just people being unhappy together.

  But that shouldn’t surprise you, you’ve read a lot of my other stories by now.

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