SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Trafalgar watched the old knight bend, and something in the depth of the bow told him more than any report would. ”You have done well enough so far, Gerhardt. Lead on. I will follow you.”

Gerhardt gave a short nod and turned for a building set back from the wall, one of the few that had come through in good condition. They went inside together, Trafalgar and Moses, the old knight, and four others who had been waiting on him. None of the four wore armor. From the ink on their hands and the weariness in their faces, they were the men who kept the city running rather than the men who bled for it.

The room was large, and a great map covered most of one wall, pinned and scrawled over with marks for everything worth marking. One mine among them had been ringed in red, and beside the ring somebody had written a single word in letters large enough to read across the room.

”That is the one, I take it.” Trafalgar nodded at it. ”The one with DANGER painted over it in a hand you could see from the mountaintop.”

”That is correct, young master.” Gerhardt moved to the map. ”The others are all sound. That one is the wound. There is tunnel access from it through to the rest, so we sealed every other mouth we could reach. Nothing slips out through the back that way.”

”Good work, closing them.”

”I will start at the beginning, if it please you, and give it to you in order.” The knight drew a breath. ”A month ago, monsters came up out of that mine. That, on its own, is nothing new to us. We live off these mines, and in Morgain land monsters come as regular as the snow. There is no end of them.” He paused. ”We know how to handle that.”

”That much is obvious,” Trafalgar said. ”So tell me how a routine came out of the mine turned into a fallen post and better than two thousand dead.”

”That is the part we cannot fully account for even now, young master.” Gerhardt’s jaw tightened. ”We form up, we deal with them, and it goes the way it always goes. Not this time. These were stronger than any that mountain has ever thrown at us, and they came up wrong somehow, agitated, as though something down there had set them off. The mining town at the mouth of the shaft, our high post, was overrun before we understood what we were looking at. There is no one left up there now. Everyone who lived pulled back down here, to the city, to wait for the house to send help.”

He drank from a cup at the table’s edge and went on, and his voice had gone rough at the bottom.

”The people here are strong, young master. Quick. We are hard folk, all of us. We put up a fight.” He set the cup down. ”We had nothing to answer it with.”

”Hm.” Trafalgar took that in without softening it or dwelling on it. ”Give me the count, then. People living here now. Soldiers, workers, all of it.”

One of the unarmored men answered, bald, with a brown beard, the sort who carried a city’s arithmetic behind his eyes. ”Two thousand dead, young master. Four hundred of them trained soldiers, good ones. Twelve hundred miners. Four hundred more in other roles.” He recited it flat, the way a man recites numbers he has counted too many times to feel anymore. ”What we hold now is six hundred soldiers, thirteen hundred miners, six hundred in roles that keep the place standing, and several thousand ordinary residents on top of that, living their lives behind these walls as best they can.”

”And the defenses?”

”You saw them coming in.” The bald man, Bram, did not dress it up. ”Whatever we could nail to the old stone. A handful of chokes where a street narrows enough to hold. Stores that will last us a while yet, though not forever. And morale you could scrape off the floor with a knife.” He let that stand. ”We are drawing breath for one reason and one reason only. The monsters have not come down on us in force. They keep to the mine, up the mountain, and they stay there.”

That caught on something in Trafalgar’s head and would not come loose.

”Now that I do not follow.” He looked from Bram to the map and back. ”They do not come down here at all? We are food, the whole city of us. A month with prey sitting a mountain away and they have not touched it. What holds them up there?”

Nobody had an answer for him, and the quiet that opened up said as much.

Into it, one of the other officers spoke, younger, with a grievance he had clearly been carrying since the first body went cold. ”With respect, young master. We sent for the house a month ago. We sent again. We buried two thousand of our own waiting on a road that stayed empty.” His voice climbed. ”A month.”

”Enough.” Gerhardt did not raise his own voice, and it carried further for it. He turned to Trafalgar, and he did not flinch from the shame of it. ”He is not wrong, and I will not pretend he is. I sent word to your sister Rivena myself, more than once. No one came. The fault for that is not yours to carry, young master, but it is owed saying aloud, and I will say it.”

Trafalgar did not reach for an apology. He had none worth giving, and a hollow one would have insulted every man in the room who had dug a grave that month.

”I am not going to stand here and mourn your dead for you,” he said, even and cold. ”You knew them. I did not. Nothing I say over them puts a single one back on his feet, and I would rather not waste your time or mine pretending otherwise. What I can do is see to it you bury no one else. That is why I came up this mountain, and that is the only thing I intend to be useful for. So let us stop talking about the month behind us and start on the one ahead.”

He had braced, without quite knowing it, for the grievance to boil over. It did the opposite. Something in the younger officer’s shoulders came down, and the room breathed a little easier, because these were men who had drowned in a month of apologies from people who then did nothing, and here at last was one who offered none and looked ready to move.

Gerhardt regarded the young man in front of him, and Trafalgar watched the old knight quietly put away one picture of him and take up another. He had ridden up here braced for the useless ninth son the whole territory whispered about. He was looking now at someone who gave orders like a man who expected the ground to obey.

”Then we will speak of the month ahead.” Gerhardt inclined his head. ”Where would you have me start?”

”With the mine.” Trafalgar’s eyes went back to that red ring. ”I want the men who walked out of it alive in a room tonight. But before that, from you, plainly. Tell me exactly what they saw down there.”