“They weregoodboots.” He jabs a finger at me. “And I took it back. Loudly. For two and a half years. That’s the part that counts.”
“Whatever helps.”
His ears go red, which is the tell he’s never been able to train out of himself, and I let it sit there glowing because I can. And because under the boots and the bluster what actually happened is that Gunnar tried to bury a man he loved before the grief could get its hands on him. He failed, and has been quietly ashamed of the attempt ever since. I’m not going to say that. I’d never say that. But I want him to know I sawit, so I hold his eyes just a little past comfortable. He looks away first, and that’s the whole conversation without anything spoken.
The long case clicks shut.
Leif still hasn’t said a word — he doesn’t, much — but something in him eases when Gunnar saysalivethe second time. Three years he carried this by himself and never once put it down where the rest of us would have to help hold it. He won’t start now. He doesn’t have to. We’re loud enough that he never has to be, and that’s the arrangement, and it’s held for four hundred years because none of us has ever made him say so.
“What I want to know,” Gunnar says, swinging the pack onto his back, “is how it takes them three years to find one dragon one crossing away.One.We’ve found worse in less.”
“Because nobody looked,” I say.
It comes out flatter than I mean it to. Three years that fucker’s been within reach the whole time, disturbance or no disturbance. And the thing I keep trying to figure out isn’t that it took so long. It’s that nobody with the power to find him seemed to want to. I keep that thought to myself. It doesn’t help anyone to say it.
Nobody would argue with it anyway.
We’re moving inside the hour, on foot, because the crossing doesn’t care how badly you want to reach it. A day’s walk if we don’t stop, and we won’t, which sets us at the threshold near midnight on the far side. Leif said the timing out loud twice. He doesn’t repeat himself unless he’s making a point, and he’s making one. He wants dark on the other side. If the disturbance is the kind of thing that comes at you, we come at it first, out of the night, before it knows the door opened.
I’d have made the same call. I usually would. The difference between me and Leif is that he makes it and I agree a half-second behind. It’s how it’s always been.
It matters. Especially on Earth. Where our dragons can’t play.
We shoulder packs, check straps out of habit more than necessity, and file out one behind the other. Four men who have done this often enough that the work starts before anyone calls for it. By the time the city gates are behind us, the room’s already fallen away.
Then it’s just walking. The land out here goes empty fast — within an hour there’s nothing around us but cold and dark and the sound of four men on the move. A few miles of that and the talk loosens, the way it always does once the walking takes over.
A few hours in, it finds the disturbance. Took them long enough — I’ve been walking next to it in my head since the Embers.
“It’s a creature,” Gunnar decides. “Something crossed over and got its hooks in him. Big. Territorial. Probably been feeding off of him this whole time.”
“Could be the door,” Rayner says. “Something wrong with the crossing, not with him.”
“Could be something he caught over there. Humans have all sorts now. Last time I crossed they’d built a box that watched you back—”
“That was a hundred years ago.”
“Mypointis they’re inventive. No telling what they’ve cooked up since.”
The guesses just keep coming, and every one worse than the last. Inside twenty minutes Gunnar is somewhere in the territory of tentacles and committing to it hard.
I understand why.
It’s still funny.
“It doesn’t matter what it is,” I say.
And it doesn’t. I’ve turned it every way there is on this walk and they all come out the same place. We find him. We take down whatever’s standing between us and him. We bring him home. The shape of the job doesn’t change with the shape of the thing.
“He’s right.” Gunnar sounds almost let down about it. “Whatever it is, we handle it. Even if it does have tentacles.”
Leif almost cracks a smile. I catch the almost. He doesn’t hand many out, and I don’t think I’ve ever missed one.
Nobody’s scared. That’s the part an outsider wouldn’t read right. Four of us walking into the dark toward a thing the oldest powers in the world looked straight at and couldn’t name, and the live debate is tentacles. It isn’t bravado. The four of us have walked into impossible before and walked back out of it, enough times that the word stopped meaning much.
Rayner’s been quiet. Quiet even for him, and I’ve known him long enough to know the difference.
“Might see it before we get there.”
