The job was posted on the low board, which was where Joss always looked first, because the low board was where a man without a sweetheart to impress took the work that actually paid.
"Scouting," he read aloud, squinting at the slate. "Unusual beast activity, the woods north of the river fork. Guild wants eyes on it before they send anyone heavier. No engagement — observe, mark the trouble, come home." He tapped the coin-figure at the bottom and grinned over his shoulder. "And they're paying like they mean it."
"They're paying like they expect not everyone to come back," said Mira, who never let a coin-figure go un-suspected. She was leaning on the rail with her short mage's staff slung across her back, the way she always carried it, like a part of her spine. "Guilds don't open the purse for a walk in the woods."
"Frontier's been twitchy," Garrick allowed. He'd come up behind her without a sound, big and unhurried, and put a hand on the small of her back the way he had for the eleven years Joss had known the two of them. "Farmers losing stock. Hunters saying the deer have gone strange — bunching up, running south. Something's stirred the woods." He read the slate over Joss's head. "Observe and report. We can do observe and report."
"We can do anything for that kind of coin," Doln boomed, because Doln did not own a quiet voice and had never wanted one. He dropped a meaty arm around Joss's neck and hauled him in. "Eh? Even babysitting the new fork in the river with our resident bachelor here. Joss, lad, you watch the trees, I'll watch your back, and Sela'll watch to make sure you don't trip on a root and bleed out, since the gods know no woman else is watching you."
"There's a whole frontier of women not watching me," Joss agreed. "I keep it that way out of mercy."
"He keeps it that way," said Sela, gentle, from where she was repacking her satchel of bandages and little stoppered things, "because the last one called him 'sweet,' and he hasn't recovered." She didn't look up, but the corner of her mouth went, and Doln laughed like a rockfall, and Mira snorted, and even Garrick's beard moved, and for a moment the guild hall was just the five of them, warm in the cold morning, the way it had been for years.
That was the thing Joss would come back to, after. Not the slate. Not the coin. Just that — the five of them laughing at him, and him glad to be laughed at, because being the one without a sweetheart meant he got to belong to all of them at once.
"Right," Garrick said, and the word settled it the way his words always did. "We take it. Easy money, eyes only. We're back before the new moon."
They took it.
* * *
The forest had been theirs for years, and the forest was wrong.
It started small, the way wrong things do. The birds were the first to go quiet — not all at once, but by midday Joss realized he hadn't heard a single one since they'd crossed the fork, and a wood with no birds in it is a wood holding its breath. Then the tracks. Mira found them first, of course; she went down on one knee at a muddy seam in the trail and frowned at it for a long time.
"Deer," she said. "Boar. Fox. A wolf, I think, an old one." She traced the air over them without touching. "All of them. Same day, near enough. All going the same way."
"South," Garrick said.
"South. Fast." She stood, and wiped her hand on her thigh, and didn't say the rest, which was that animals only all run the same way when there is one thing behind them they have all agreed is worse than each other.
After that the banter thinned out on its own. Doln still cracked the odd joke, but quieter, and Sela had stopped humming, and Joss found he was reading the trees the way he was paid to — every shadow, every still branch — and finding too many of them looking back. Twice they passed a carcass. Not a kill, exactly; nothing eats a deer and leaves the antlers and the hide in a heap like that, like the meat had simply been taken and the rest discarded. Sela made a small sound at the second one and Doln moved his bulk between her and it without being asked.
"We mark it and we go home," Garrick said, low, when they stopped to water the day down. "Whatever's hunting these woods is big enough that everything else fled it. That's the report. We find where the tracks lead, we look, we don't touch it, we leave." He looked at each of them in turn, and his eyes stayed longest on Mira, the way they did. "Nobody's a hero today. We're eyes. That's all."
"Eyes," Joss agreed, and meant it, and the word felt thin in the quiet wood.
The tracks led them up, out of the river bottom and into broken, stony ground, where the trees grew crooked out of the slope and the earth showed its dark bones. And there, in the side of a wooded hill, behind a curtain of dead bramble that something large had pushed through more than once, was the mouth.
A cave. Just a cave — a dark slot in the stone, taller than a man and twice as wide, breathing the faint cool damp that caves breathe. The converging tracks ran straight into it and did not, Joss noticed, with a slow cold turning in his gut, run back out.
* * *
"That's it, then," Doln said. "That's where everything in the wood's been running to." He hefted his axe, more for comfort than use. "Den of something. Big something."
"We don't go in." Mira had her staff in her hand already. "We mark it. That's the job. We mark it and we run and we let the Guild send forty men and a sword-saint or whatever it takes to clean it out."
"We mark a cave," Garrick said slowly, "and the Guild asks us what's in it, and we say we don't know, and they dock the bounty and send us back to find out." He was staring at the dark mouth with a craftsman's irritation, a man measuring a job he didn't want. "I'm not saying we fight anything. I'm saying we put our heads in far enough to say what we saw. Tracks lead in. We look at where they lead. Ten steps. We keep the light low and our backs to the door."
Joss went to the threshold and looked in, and that was the part he would never be able to explain afterward, in the dark, to himself.
It was empty.
He'd braced for a reek, for bones, for the hot animal stink of a den, for eyes. There was none of it. The cave opened into a wide, rough chamber, gray and lumpish and unremarkable, the kind of dead-end hole he'd sheltered in a dozen times in a dozen woods. The torchlight reached a way in and found nothing — no nest, no kill-pile, no movement. Just stone, cool and quiet and ordinary, and the tracks running across the dust of the floor and stopping, scattering, as if the things that made them had simply walked into the middle of an empty room and ceased.
"There's nothing here," he said, and hated how relieved he sounded.
"There's nothing here," Mira corrected, still on the threshold, still not stepping in. "Joss. Come back to the door."
But Garrick had come up beside him, and Doln behind, filling the entrance with his shoulders, and Sela in the lee of him, and the torch threw their five shadows long and thin across that empty gray floor, and it was so plainly, stupidly empty that the dread of the wood started to feel like children's nerves, like a story they'd talked themselves into. There was a den somewhere, sure. But not here. Here was nothing.
"Ten steps," Garrick murmured. "We say we looked."
They took the ten steps.
Joss never heard the order to take an eleventh, because that was when, very small and very high in the dark over their heads, something squeaked.
It was such a little sound. That was the obscenity of it, after — that the end of everything announced itself like a mouse in a wall. One thin squeak, up and to the left, where the torchlight didn't reach.
Mira's head snapped up. She was the one with the ears; she was always the one. "Light," she said, "Joss, the light, up," and her voice had gone to a register he'd never heard from her, and Joss lifted the torch on pure animal obedience, lifted it high and tipped his head back to follow it —
— and the ceiling moved.
For one heartbeat his mind refused it. The roof of the chamber was high and vaulted and it was furred, it was a living darkness packed wing to wing, layer on layer, hundreds of small bodies hung folded in the black, and where the torchlight touched them it caught, all at once, in a thousand small wet points, a galaxy of little eyes opening and turning down, every one of them turning down, toward the five warm shapes standing in the dust below.
The squeak came again. And then it was not one squeak. It was all of them.
"Out," Garrick roared, "OUT, GO—" and the ceiling fell on them.
It did not feel like animals. That was the thing Joss's mind kept reaching for and failing to hold — it felt like the dark itself had developed teeth and dropped, a screaming avalanche of leather and claw and bared little fangs that hit them not as a swarm but as a weight, a collapse, the whole roof coming down at once. The torch was knocked from his hand and the world went to lurching shadow lit in slivers, and in those slivers he saw it happen, all of it, every piece, in the space of three breaths that lasted the rest of his life.
He saw Doln go down roaring, axe up, the great arc of it scattering bodies that were simply replaced by more, the big man buried to the chest in a heaving black mass and still swinging, still bellowing, and he saw Sela not run — Sela throw herself toward him, toward Doln, both hands flung out, gasping the first desperate words of a healing chant — "Let this divine power be as—" — but the words needed finishing and the dark would not wait; it took her legs and then her waist and then her, the spell dying half-spoken in her throat, and she and Doln went under together in the same place, reaching, and did not come up.
He saw Garrick put Mira behind him. Of course he did. Eleven years and the last thing the man ever did was the thing he'd always done, turn his broad back into a wall between her and the worst of the world, his shield up over them both — and it was not enough, it was so far from enough, because there was no front to face when the death came from above, and they went down not to an enemy but to a tide, Garrick's shield ringing as it was driven down onto him, Mira getting her staff up and three words of a spell out of her mouth before the tide drove her arms down and buried the rest of the chant with her. He heard her say Garrick's name. He heard Garrick try to answer. He heard both sounds stop, close together, and the not-hearing afterward was worse than any scream.
Joss was screaming. He understood that distantly. He had his long-knife out and he was cutting, and every cut buried itself in something that died and was instantly forgotten by the mass, and he was going backward, toward where the door had been, and the door was gone, the whole geometry of the room lost under the churning dark, and there was no out, there had never been an out, the out had been the lie of the empty floor that drew them all the way in.
Something struck the side of his head. A small thing, a single body slamming his temple at the end of its dive — such a little blow, after all of it. But the gray floor swung up at him, and the slivers of light narrowed, and the last thing he saw before the dark took him too was the place where his friends had been, churning, lowering, going still.
Then nothing. Mercifully, finally, nothing.
* * *
He woke, which was its own atrocity, because waking meant it had been real.
He came up out of the black in pieces — pain first, a deep wrong throb in his skull and a worse one in his side; then cold, the deep stone cold of somewhere far underground; then the air, which was thick, thick in a way air should not be, heavy in his chest like he was breathing through wet wool, pressing on him from every side with a weight that had nothing to do with the cold. It made his teeth ache. It made some animal part of him, far below thought, lie very still and whisper leave, leave, leave.
He could not leave. His hands wouldn't answer right and his legs were ruin and when he got his eyes open he understood, dimly, that leaving was a thing that belonged to the world above, and he was no longer in it.
He was in a hall.
It went up and up into dark he couldn't measure, a vaulted gothic immensity of black stone, columns rising like the trunks of dead iron trees, every surface worked and carved and deliberate in a way that no cave was ever deliberate, faces leering down out of the stonework with just enough expression to be obscene. A wrong light came from nowhere he could find, a dim red-edged glow that lay on everything like the light of a sun going down inside the earth. It was beautiful. It was the most terrible thing he had ever seen, because it had been made, and the only hands big enough to have made it were hands he did not want to imagine.
And at the far end of the hall, where a normal hall would have an altar or a throne, there was a throne. And on the throne, there was the thing.
Joss's mind, which had survived the ceiling, very nearly did not survive the throne.
It was a boar. His thoughts kept insisting on that, stupidly, the way you insist on a small true fact when the large true fact is too big to hold — it's a boar, it's only a boar — except it was the size of a cart, and it sat the great black throne the way a king sits, four arms, four clawed hands resting on the carved stone, and its hide was the dull dark gray-black of cold iron, plated at the shoulders, and from its spine and its knuckles and the ridge of its skull there grew, glittering faintly in that sunless light, shards and nubs of raw crystal, a crown nobody had given it and nobody could take away. Tusks like sabers. Eyes that were not an animal's eyes. Eyes that were watching him, and had been watching him, he understood with a fresh plunge of horror, since before he woke.
He made a sound. He couldn't help it. It was not a word.
The boar leaned forward on its throne, and the crystals on it caught the red light, and it opened its great tusked mouth, and it spoke.
"You wake."
The voice came up out of it like stones grinding in a riverbed, slow and broken and deep enough that Joss felt it in the thick air, in his aching teeth, in the floor under his ruined legs. Two words. Just two. And those two words did something to Joss that the ceiling had not quite managed — they cracked something, some last load-bearing beam in the structure of what he understood the world to be. Monsters did not talk. That was known. That was as fixed as the sun. A beast was a beast; it hunted, it died, the Guild graded it by the letter and you fought it or you fled it, but it did not sit a throne and say you wake in a voice like a landslide learning grammar. The thing in front of him was not supposed to exist, and it did, and somewhere under his terror Joss felt his mind simply stop trying to make the two facts agree.
"Please," he heard himself say. It was the only word he had. "Please. Please, I—"
"Maker wants." The boar's head tilted, slow, considering, and the saber tusks scraped a thin line of sound from the air. One enormous hand lifted from the throne and turned, claws open, a gesture almost — almost — like a man inviting a guest to speak. "Maker wants know. Outside. Up." A claw tipped toward the dark above, toward the world, toward the sun Joss would never see again. "You tell. You tell all. For Maker."
"I don't— I don't know what you—" Joss was weeping, he realized, had been for a while. "What's the Maker, I don't, what is the Maker—"
The boar did not answer that. Something passed over its terrible aware face, a kind of stillness, as if it were listening to a voice Joss couldn't hear, a voice that came from somewhere deeper than this hall, somewhere further down, and Joss's skin crawled with the certainty that whatever sat on the throne was not the thing he was truly speaking to. The boar was the mouth. The Maker was the dark behind it. And the dark wanted to know.
"You tell," the boar said again, gentler, which was worse. "Or you go up there." It nodded, once, at the black above — at the ceiling, at the wings, at the way he had come. "With friends."
So Joss told it.
He told it everything, in a flood, in a wreck of a voice, kneeling broken on the cold stone of a hall under the earth — because the alternative was the ceiling, and because a part of him, the part that wanted to live past the next minute even with nothing left to live for, had already surrendered completely.
He told it the kingdom. Shirone — the kingdom was Shirone, the nearest crown, a small old realm on the frontier, and over Shirone sat the Dragon King's lands to the south, the great power they all bent the knee to, dragons in the mountains that the king's house could call on. He told it the town, the river fork, the names of the roads. He told it the Guild, because it kept asking who sends, who comes, and he explained the Guild as best a man can explain a thing while sobbing — that there were ranks, that you started at the bottom letter and climbed, F to S, that his own party was middling, just middling, that the truly dangerous work went to the high letters. Strong, the boar kept grinding, how strong, strongest, and Joss told it what little a guild nobody knows about the great and terrible. That the strongest carried titles — Saint, and above that King — of the sword or of magic; that the highest the Guild itself ever fielded, an S-rank, might be a sword-saint who could break a company alone, or a mage who pulled weather down out of a clear sky. But that was only the top of the Guild, he wept, only the strongest a man like him ever heard a name for — and the world climbed up past that, far past, past anything he could give it. The Dragon King's beasts in the southern mountains. Things the kingdoms themselves knelt to. Powers men spoke of the way they spoke of gods, ranks stacked above the ranks he knew, names he didn't have and was glad not to have, because surely a man did not survive the knowing of them. He was nobody; he scouted woods for coin; the great powers of the world did not introduce themselves to men like Joss, and he had never once been so grateful for it.
He told it about magic, when it ground the word power at him and waited. That it came from inside a person, that mages spoke the words and the mana answered, fire and water and stone and wind, that it took years, that he himself had none. He told it the lay of the land, north to the endless wars in the broken countries, south to the dragons, the forests, the rivers, the towns. He told it everything a small man knows about a large world, which is the shape of the corner of it he was born in and rumors of the rest, and the thing on the throne took all of it, every scrap, its terrible eyes never leaving him and its great head going still, now and then, to listen to the dark.
And when he was empty — when he had poured out every fact and rumor and frightened guess he owned and had nothing left in him but the weeping — the hall was quiet for a long moment, and the boar sat unmoving on its throne, listening to the thing below, and Joss knelt in the red-edged dark a thousand miles under the wood where his whole life had died that morning, and waited to learn what the Maker had decided a used-up man was worth.
The boar's crystal-crowned head turned, slowly, back to him.
It had not yet decided.
That, somehow, was the most frightening thing of all.