SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”Monsters do not take a mine and hold it,” Moses said. ”That is the part of this I like least.”

Trafalgar turned his head a fraction. ”Go on.”

”An outbreak is a migration. That is all it has ever been.” The captain spoke the way a man speaks about weather he has lived through more times than he cares to count. ”Beasts come up out of wherever they were bred, they flood a valley, they gorge themselves on whatever is soft enough to swallow, and within a season they scatter or starve or move along to the next valley. That is the pattern. Every man who has ever pushed one back will tell you the same.”

”And these have held their ground for over a month.”

”Over a month, in a mine, with the whole mountain open behind them and a city full of food sitting downhill.” Moses let that stand where Trafalgar could look at it from every angle. ”They have not spread, they have not moved on, and they have not gone back down into the deep. So something in that mine is worth more to them than everything else on that mountain, or something in there is keeping them, and I could not tell you which.”

”Two thousand dead, and a garrison with them,” Trafalgar noted. ”Those men were not farmers.”

”No.” A grim rumble came out of the half-demon’s chest. ”Highland miners fight. They have to. A man who cannot put down what crawls out of his own tunnel does not live long enough to draw a second wage. Whatever came up this time went through two thousand of them and their soldiers besides, and it did it fast. Nothing that walks out of an ordinary outbreak does that.”

Trafalgar looked out at the cloud running past the hull and let the arithmetic assemble itself. A month of ground held. A month of breeding, if they bred. A month of digging themselves deeper into a mine that no one alive had been brave or stupid enough to walk back into.

’And my dear sister was somewhere else entirely, doing something so important she could not spare a runner,’ he thought.

”So.” He straightened off the rail. ”What would you do?”

”You had the first part right, and I will tell you plainly that it pleased me to hear it. The city comes first.” Moses raised one thick finger. ”But do it properly. When you get there, do not put your faith in whatever report they hand you at the gate. Reports are written by men protecting their own necks. Find whoever is actually holding those walls, and find the miners who ran out of that mine alive. They saw the thing that put them to flight, and they know the tunnels better than any map ever drawn of them.”

”And they will be the ones who hate us most,” Trafalgar said. ”Since we took a month to come.”

”That as well.” Another finger. ”Second. Count what you have. Soldiers left standing, able men who can hold a sword without falling over, walls, gates, choke points, how long their stores will last if the mountain comes down on them. You cannot leave a city at your back without knowing whether it will keep breathing while you are gone.”

”And third?”

”Third, and this is the one your father will be watching for.” Moses’s purple eyes had gone flat. ”Retaking the post means nothing. You could clear every tunnel of every crawling thing in it, put your banner over the shaft, and the whole business would grow back inside a season, because the post was never the problem. Whatever is holding them there is the problem. So we go in, we find what is keeping them, and we kill it. Everything else is sweeping up.”

Trafalgar allowed himself a very small smile. ”And you would rather I go in and you hold the mouth.”

”That is what I would offer. My place is the front where the bleeding happens, and I can hold one for as long as you need.” Moses shrugged his massive shoulders. ”But it is your mission, young master. Give the order, and I will follow it whether I like the sound of it or not.”

They kept at it while the vessel ate the miles.

The first day passed under a hard grey sky, the mountains rolling by below like a jaw full of broken teeth. Trafalgar pulled the details out of him piece by piece: how many soldiers had been posted, what the garrison had been worth, whether anyone had tried to go back into the mine after the post fell, whether anything had come down the mountain since. Moses answered all of it without decorating a single word, and where he did not know, he said he did not know, which Trafalgar valued more than any of the answers.

By the second night the cold had teeth in it. They stood on the deck under a sky scattered with stars, the two of them, and for a while nobody bothered to fill the space.

”You were in the Dead Meridian,” Trafalgar said at last. ”Years of it, from what I hear.”

”I was.”

”What is it like?”

Moses considered the horizon for a long breath. ”Like being a small thing in a place that was never built with you in mind,” he said. ”The ground you crossed yesterday will be somewhere else by next month. You learn to stop asking why. You learn to eat when you can and sleep in pieces, and after enough of it you stop noticing that you have not spoken aloud in a week.” He rolled one shoulder. ”I would go back tomorrow if I were told to.”

”That says something unpleasant about you.”

Boots came ringing across the deck behind them. Alfred emerged from the helm with frost in his eyebrows and his coat pulled tight to his throat.

”Right.” He nodded ahead, past the prow. ”We will be landing soon.”

Below them, through a slow curtain of falling snow, a city had come into view against the black roots of the mountain, walled and buttressed and bristling with everything its people had been able to nail to it.