They moved through Bakura Town the way people move when they are trying very hard not to look like they are moving carefully — which is to say, slowly, with frequent stops to examine things of no particular interest, and with the general demeanour of two people who had nowhere specific to be and no reason to hurry.
Tama matched his pace without being asked. She'd understood, from the moment they entered the gate, that this required a certain quality of performance. She delivered it with the instinctive fluency of a child who had grown up in a country where the wrong kind of attention had consequences.
The farm sat at the far end of town, behind walls that communicated their purpose clearly. Ornn kept them in the flow of foot traffic, angling gradually closer, reading the approaches as he went.
At two hundred meters, the Heart of Steel rang.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
He stopped walking in the same motion that he bent down, plucked a small wildflower from the gap between two paving stones, and tucked it behind Tama's ear with the unhurried ease of someone doing exactly that and nothing else.
"There," he said. "Now it's complete."
Tama looked up at him. She'd understood in roughly half a second. "Thank you, big brother," she said, in the sweet, carrying tone of a child talking to family, and hugged his arm.
He turned them both around and walked back into the crowd without changing his pace.
It wasn't until the mark faded from his awareness — the Heart of Steel's signal dissolving as the hostile presence passed out of range — that he let himself breathe properly. His back, he noticed, was entirely wet.
He found a quiet alley and stopped.
"Don't move from here."
Tama nodded once. She didn't ask questions. That quality in her, Ornn had decided, was one of her most underrated features.
He leaned out and looked back toward the farm.
It took him a moment to find it — the granary roof was the same straw-yellow as the hat — but once he saw it he couldn't unsee it. A figure lying flat on the roof, bow in hand, watching the open ground in front of the farm gate with the focused patience of someone who had been doing this for a while and expected to keep doing it.
If I'd walked another fifty meters, he thought, without particular drama, that would have been a problem.
The archer was the problem. There was no approach to the farm gate that didn't cross open ground, and open ground with a patient archer covering it was not a puzzle that had a clean solution. Going around meant walls. Going through meant the archer. Going back meant no food supply and starting over.
He was still working through the geometry of it when the ground moved.
A faint vibration through the soles of his feet, building steadily. He raised his head.
The farm gate was opening.
It came out slowly — a cart of extraordinary dimensions, hauled by a beast that had clearly been selected for the job based on size rather than personality, piled with food and water and the general abundance that the rest of Bakura Town very visibly lacked. A tribute shipment. Heading to the Flower Capital.
The town noticed immediately. Foot traffic reorganised itself toward the street without anyone making a conscious decision about it, drawn by the particular gravity of people watching food go somewhere that wasn't toward them. Necks craned. Children pointed.
Ornn watched the cart, and the crowd, and the guards at the gate who had rotated their attention toward the procession.
Then he looked at Tama.
"I need a Kibi Dango," he said. "Now, while nobody's watching."
She checked her surroundings with the practiced efficiency of someone who had grown up understanding what while nobody's watching actually meant, then made one — quick, quiet, tucking the bright little ball into his open palm before anyone's attention could drift their way.
He pocketed it.
Then he sat down on the ground, ran both hands through his hair until it looked like it had opinions about several different directions simultaneously, and rubbed his palms along the alley floor until they carried a convincing layer of dust and general misfortune.
Tama watched this process with the expression of someone trying to determine whether it was intentional.
"Stay here until I signal," he said, and walked toward the checkpoint.
The guards at Bakura Town's main gate had the particular posture of people whose job had been uninteresting for long enough that they'd stopped expecting it to change. There were five of them, swords at their hips, attention nominally on the gate but practically on the tribute cart making its way through the main street behind them.
Ornn approached with the energy of a man who had been rehearsing something difficult and hadn't quite decided to go through with it.
"Excuse me," he said, stopping a careful distance back. "The — the notice. On the board." He gestured toward Yamato's wanted poster without looking at it directly. "Is it true? About the reward?"
One of them looked him over. The dishevelled hair. The dusty hands. The general presentation of someone who had recently been having a worse day than them.
"What about it."
"Five hundred gold." Ornn swallowed visibly. "If the information is real."
The guard's posture shifted slightly. Not toward Ornn, but toward the possibility that this was going to be more interesting than the last several hours. "That's what it says."
"I think I saw her." He kept his eyes at approximately chin height — not quite meeting anyone's gaze, not quite avoiding it. "This morning. Coming into town. A woman, red horns, carrying a mace about this long—" He measured it with his hands. "She killed a tiger in the wilderness. One strike. I didn't — I didn't know who she was until I saw the board."
The silence that followed had a particular quality. He watched five people doing arithmetic simultaneously.
A heavyset guard cleared his throat. "I'll go take a look. The rest of you stay here." He moved to take Ornn's arm with the practiced casualness of someone making a private calculation.
A pockmarked face on the other side of the group made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Convenient. The rest of us stay and you take the informant out alone?"
"I'm senior—"
"You're hungry for five hundred gold is what you are."
The argument that followed had the efficient momentum of one that had happened in various forms many times before. Ornn watched it proceed with the expression of a man who had come to provide information and found himself caught between forces he hadn't anticipated, and waited for the moment when someone would remember he was there.
He turned his head slightly toward the alley. Found Tama's eyes. Gave the smallest possible nod.
"Gentlemen." His timing was exact — cutting into a breath between exchanges. "If she runs while you're deciding, none of us gets anything."
That landed. The arithmetic shifted. All five of them looked at each other, reached a unanimous conclusion about the risks of being left out, and fell into motion with the collective purpose of people who have agreed, without quite saying so, to figure out the details after the fact.
They left the gate together.
Six hundred meters. Far enough.
"Now," he said, to no one in particular — or rather, to his own ability, which didn't require an audience — and let the transformation come.
Not fully. Just enough. The partial shift rising through him, his frame expanding, the particular density of the forge god's body settling over his bones. The golden magma welled to the surface of his skin without being directed anywhere, just present, radiating outward with the unhurried authority of something that wasn't trying to threaten anyone and was considerably more threatening for it.
The guards experienced the sensation of being in the presence of something that existed outside the category of problems they were equipped to handle.
All five of them sat down on the road without making a decision to do so.
He shattered the five marks in sequence. The warmth moved through him with each one — five clean pulses of the Heart of Steel doing exactly what it was built to do, the permanent enhancement accumulating quietly beneath everything else.
Then he let the transformation go, rolled his shoulders, and looked up.
Yamato stepped out from behind a large boulder at the side of the road with Tama at her hip and the mace over her shoulder, wearing the expression of someone who had been watching and had assessments ready.
"Where's the food?" she said.
"Not yet." He crouched beside the nearest unconscious guard and started working on the outer layer of the uniform — a passable disguise, or at least a better one than what he was currently wearing. "Take Tama and these five somewhere out of the road. I'll be back."
Yamato looked at the guards. At him. At the direction of Bakura Town.
"What are you going to do?"
He got the uniform sorted, stood, checked the fit. Acceptable.
"The tribute cart," he said. "That's where the food actually is."
He adjusted the collar, tucked his chin, and walked back toward town.
The big fish was still in the water.