SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”A whole life poured into the man, and the best you will claim is that he sees a blade.”

”He sees what stands here. A kinder answer would only be a lie the two of us could name on sight.”

Moses had nothing to set against that, and the lack of it chafed, because Caelum had handed him nothing to break. The man had always been built this way — a blade locked in its sheath, taking insult and threat and flattery alike as so much weather sliding off cold stone. Moses had cracked open monsters that gave him more to work with.

The door stayed dead in its frame.

Moses rolled his shoulders and pulled a low grind from his armor. ”How long do you reckon he means to leave us standing out here?”

”As long as it suits him, and not a breath less. The door has never once opened faster for a man’s impatience.”

”That answer earns a fist somewhere soft.”

”Most accurate answers do, in your company. You have a habit of swinging at the messenger the instant the message bores you.”

”You are enjoying this.”

”I am waiting. They are not the same thing, whatever my face tells you.”

”With a face like yours, I have never once managed to tell them apart.”

Caelum’s eyes never left the carved script. ”Our lord does not summon the captain of the First Squadron and his household shadow beneath a sealed mountain to admire old stonework. Whatever waits past that door has a use for both of us — and I doubt either of us will thank him once we learn its name.”

Moses canted his head. ”So you will own the word after all. His shadow.”

”I own any description that holds true, and that one has held since before you left. A shadow goes where the body goes, does the work the light cannot, and is thanked for neither. The fit is honest. I see no reason to limp around it.”

”You make ’shadow’ sound like a rank.”

”In this house, under this master, it is nearer one than you might care for.”

Moses’s mouth bent toward a grin. ”Keep talking like that and I will start to think you missed having me around.”

”I endured the absence admirably. The halls ran quieter, and rather less of what I mended came back to me broken a second time.”

”Cold bastard.”

”Impatient brute. We have called each other worse, and meant it more.”

For once, something close to true pleasure crossed Moses’s face. ”Better. That is the man I left.”

The old tension did not lift so much as change its weather — less a blade laid to the throat now, more steel eased halfway from the sheath and left to hang there. Both of them knew where the true line ran. They had each stepped over far worse in Valttair’s name and walked home breathing.

Moses’s gaze drifted across the chamber, gauging the stretch of bare floor that opened behind them, well clear of the door. Room enough, and then some. Whoever had hollowed this place out of the mountain had reckoned on things far larger than men standing inside it.

A thought surfaced in his face before it reached his mouth.

Caelum caught it. He always did.

”No,” he said, before the thought had finished arriving.

Moses’s grin widened. ”I have not even asked.”

”You did not need to. I have watched that exact notion cross that exact face more times than I could count, always at the precise moment your boredom outgrows your patience. You are a great many difficult things, Moses, but in this you are entirely readable.”

”I would call it honest.”

”I would call it destructive and spare us both the gentler word. You have wanted to throw a punch since the door first turned you away. I merely happen to be the nearest thing worth hitting.”

Caelum met him with a flatness that would have walked a lesser man a step backward.

Moses pressed on, his voice rough but reined in. ”We have stood here long enough to grow roots. The door stays shut, our lord has not seen fit to call us in, you will not give me Aurevane, and I will not give you my three years. The talking has marched itself into a wall. So let us find out instead whether the shadow of House Morgain has gone to rust standing in all those silk corridors.”

”I do not pick up challenges dressed in cheap provocation,” Caelum said. ”We have known one another across more years than either of us would care to total, and you know better than to bait me like a green recruit with something to prove. If you want a duel from me, Moses, then ask for it as the captain you are. Properly.”

Moses stared at him.

For a breath it looked as though he might laugh, or spit on the stone, or wave the whole demand off as beneath him. Instead the giant drew himself upright. The play drained out of his features, and what surfaced beneath the temper was older, more ceremonial. His right fist rose and set against the Morgain crest, knuckles to the crossed swords and the wolf’s eye.

”Very well,” Moses said, and his voice took on the weight of rank, filling the chamber. ”Caelum — attendant to Lord Valttair du Morgain, shadow of this house — I, Moses, captain of the First Morgain Squadron, call on you for a formal spar while we wait upon our lord’s summons. No killing stroke, no crippling a man past mending, and no steel drawn unless the both of us agree to it. Force enough to take the measure of each other, and not one ounce beyond.”

Caelum’s gaze held on him, cold and impossible to read.

Moses’s purple eyes did not waver. ”Do you accept?”

Caelum drew his hands out from behind his back. Slowly, finger by finger, he began to work the left glove loose — and Moses went very still, because in all their decades under the same banner, he had never once watched Caelum bare his hands before a fight.

”Accepted,” Caelum said. The glove slid free. ”Though I would ask you to hold one thing in mind, when it is finished — that you were the one who requested this. I dislike repeating myself, and I suspect you will want me to.”

Behind them, for the first time since the two had descended into the cold, something deep within the markings of the sealed door began to glow.