SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Trafalgar woke slowly, and the first thing he registered was that he had nothing on.

’Seems I undressed myself at some point in the night,’ he thought, staring up at unfamiliar rafters.

Which was ordinary enough for him. He’d slept bare for years, half out of habit and half because mana clung to skin better than it clung to cloth, and the habit had outlived the reason a long while ago. Even here, in a plain room over a common hall in a half-ruined mining town, the mana ran rich. The whole valley rested on top of that vein, and the air carried it the way sea air carries salt.

His new core drank all of it while he lay there, quiet and effortless. He could feel it working without being asked, pulling the loose mana out of the room in a slow steady draw, and the sensation ran deeper and heavier than anything the fifth had given him. Where Prime had felt like a full cup, this felt like standing at the top of a well and hearing how far down the water went.

That was the strange part to get used to. Ascend pulled in far more than Prime ever had, and it filled far slower for it, because there was so much more of it to fill. He could feel the road ahead of him now that the sixth was his, and it ran a long way. Apex was the next step. The seventh. He had no notion how long that climb would take him, only that the last one had cost him a couple of years, and that had been slower than he’d counted on even by his own reckoning.

’Longer than I’d like,’ he decided, sitting up.

He got himself out of bed and went to wash, which he needed more urgently than he needed anything else in the world. It wasn’t only the sweat. There was a stink coming off his own body that he’d been carrying since the mountain, blood and beast and two days of frozen dark, and he’d have paid gold for hot water long before anyone offered it.

He got under the shower and let it run over him, and in his head there was room for exactly one thought.

They have people inside the Morgains.

The thing he’d killed down there hadn’t wandered into that mine. A brood of that grade didn’t migrate in by chance, didn’t settle on the richest vein in the family’s holdings by luck, and didn’t get fed on a schedule by nobody at all. Someone had put it there and kept it there, and the someone had known the ground well enough to work it for weeks without a soul above ever asking a question.

So he turned it over while the water beat on the back of his neck, and it kept coming back to the same place. Whoever did this hadn’t crept in over a border. They’d walked in through a door someone opened for them, with maps and time and the confidence of a man who knew when the patrols went by.

Rivena.

Her territory. Her post. Her people. And she’d walked away from all of it half a year ago without a word to anyone, and in exactly that gap this had happened. He couldn’t make the timing into a coincidence no matter how he held it. Whatever her part in it was, she had one.

’Valttair knows,’ he thought, scrubbing the last of the mountain off his arms. ’He’s known longer than I have. He’s already moving pieces, or holding still and weighing which ones to move. Either way, he’ll have read the whole board before I ever put it in front of him.’

There was the other thing, waiting quietly under all of that. The mission was finished. His first official job, or the first anyone bothered to call official, and by the terms Valttair had set him there was a reward waiting at the end of it.

’He’ll hand it over later, I imagine.’ He shut the water off. ’They’ve always been good. Let’s see what it is this time.’

He dressed, worked the last of the stiffness out of his shoulder, and found himself in one piece and better rested than he had any right to be. The new core had done in one night what a week of sleep would have done before it. He crossed the little room and opened the door.

Gerhardt and Moses stood waiting on the other side of it.

Past them, down the stair and out into the street, he could see people. A good many of them, gathered and waiting on him in the cold morning, held back by nothing but manners and the old foreman’s back.

But this was before the feast anyone had promised.

Gerhardt looked agitated, gripping his cap in both hands, shifting his weight like a man who’d been standing at that door a while working out how to knock.

Moses gave him the news, and gave it flat and early, the way he gave everything.

”Young master. They’ve turned up proof.” He said it without preamble. ”Someone had a hand in this. There’s no arguing with what came out of that mine, and I’d wager the right people could get more out of it if it’s put in front of them.”

Trafalgar looked at the two of them, and past them at the waiting street, and turned back into his room, holding the door wide as he went.

”Come in. This isn’t a conversation for a doorway, and the whole town doesn’t need to hear it.”

Moses came through without hesitating. Gerhardt lingered on the threshold, plainly torn, an old highland foreman with no business in a Morgain lord’s private business and no idea what he’d be walking into. He came in anyway, and shut the door behind him, and stood with his cap crushed in his fists, waiting to learn what he’d got himself into.