Chapter 7. Greyfall

The forest ended all at once, as though someone had cut it away with an axe. One moment, black trunks three arm spans thick surrounded me. The next, I stood at the edge of a plowed field with a small town beyond it.

I stopped at the tree line and stared for a long time.

After days in the wilderness, the place struck me with its plain, unpolished humanity. A palisade of sharpened logs, darkened by rain. Cramped roofs behind it, covered in turf and wooden shingles. Above them rose the same smoke I had followed through the forest. A watchtower stood beside the gate, and a man stood atop it. Several more people bent over the soil in the fields.

That was when the sight caught me from a direction I had not expected.

I had thought I would feel joy. Instead, a dull, pressing ache settled over me.

This was an ordinary life, as ordinary as mine had been less than a week ago. Someone was tending a stove. Someone was weeding a garden. Somewhere behind that palisade, there was surely a woman who had kissed her husband that morning and a child waiting for his father to return for dinner.

An entire town of people who still possessed all of that. It was two steps away and as unreachable as the second moon.

I looked at their smoke and thought of my own home, eight minutes away from where I had died and an entire world away from where I stood.

I forced the thought aside. I needed these people—not their lives, but their knowledge.

The first thread.

I understood how I must look to them: a stranger in torn clothing of an unfamiliar cut, walking alone from a place people did not leave alive. In their position, I would not have been pleased to see me either. So I did not hide or approach in secret. I raised my hands to show my empty palms and walked openly toward the gate at an unhurried pace.

Four people were waiting by the time I arrived. Three men and one woman, all armed: a spear, two axes, and a short bow with an arrow already nocked. They wore rough leather and undyed wool. Their faces were weathered, hard, and scarred.

They were not soldiers. They were simply people accustomed to danger arriving on any ordinary day, and prepared to strike before it did.

The eldest, a thickset man with gray stubble, leveled his spear at my chest and barked something.

Then something happened for which I was not prepared.

I understood him.

Not the language. I had never heard those words, and none contained a single root I recognized. But the meaning entered my mind directly, bypassing my ears, exactly as the lines of light above the creatures had done.

Stop. Take one more step and you fall where you stand.

I stopped. Before I had time to think, I answered.

“I am unarmed. I am not your enemy.”

The words came on their own—and they were not Russian. My mouth shaped foreign sounds smoothly and naturally, as though I had spoken this language all my life.

A colder shiver passed through me than the spear at my chest had caused.

I knew that cold by now. I had felt it when my body knew how to fight before I did. I had felt it when I read the language of light without ever learning it. Now this human language lay ready inside me as well, foreign and mine at once, and I spoke it without choosing the words.

Whoever had thrown me here had not been stingy.

A body. A cheat sheet. A language.

I had been equipped, and with every passing hour I understood that terrible word more clearly. Not equipped like a guest, but like a worker driven to perform a task.

No one had bothered to tell me what the task was.

There was no time to dwell on it. The older man narrowed his eyes without lowering the spear.

“Where did you come from?”

I could have lied. But I knew nothing of the local geography, and these people would hear a clumsy lie before I finished telling it. So I gave him the safe portion of the truth.

“The forest. I woke there several days ago. I don't remember how I arrived.”

They exchanged glances. The woman lowered her arrow slightly—not because she trusted me, but because she wanted a better look.

While they studied me, I studied them in my own way. I directed Analysis at the older man, quietly and with the same light touch I used on animals.

For the first time, I used it on a human being.

Hald · Level 11

Only a name and a number. No warning, no symbol of irregularity, no question marks. An ordinary man whom the System knew perfectly well and placed without difficulty inside its tables.

I let my gaze pass over the others. Fourteen. Nine. Seven.

I understood something else, something more important than most of what I had learned so far.

They were normal.

I was not.

I still did not know what my own numbers meant. Until now, I had possessed nothing against which to measure them. At least I had a beginning. The way the four guards held themselves—wary, maintaining distance, ready to strike but in no hurry—said more clearly than the numbers that they sensed I did not belong among them.

A man who walked out of the Verge alive, without supplies, without a weapon, and without fear in his eyes was either exceptionally fortunate or exceptionally dangerous.

They were leaning toward dangerous.

I kept that knowledge to myself. You did not reveal an unnecessary advantage. The rule had served me in my former life during negotiations where the stakes were money. Here, the stakes were my life, which made laying my cards on the table an even worse idea.

“No weapon, no pack,” Hald said, more to the others than to me. “And he walked out on his own.” He spat into the dirt. “A miracle.”

“Could be bait,” the woman said quietly. “Something might be using him to draw us out.”

“Doesn't look like bait,” muttered one of the men with an axe. “Bait doesn't stare around the way he does.”

I was staring. I could not help it. There was too much at once: the first human faces I had seen in days, the first spoken words, the first rooftops, the smell of hearth smoke. After the empty forest, the town was deafening.

Hald studied me in silence for a long minute. Apparently, he decided that a dead stranger could explain nothing, while a living one under guard might still prove useful.

“Only fools and Seekers enter the Verge around here,” he said. “You don't look like a fool, and I know every Seeker by face. That makes you a mystery. I don't like mysteries.” At last he lowered the spear, though he did not put it away. “You're coming with me. Try anything, and I'll put you down. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Keep your hands where I can see them.”

The gate opened only wide enough for one person at a time.

Inside, Greyfall was even more cramped than it had appeared from the fields. Crooked lanes. Churned mud. Houses leaning against one another for support. A hammer rang from a smithy. Livestock bleated somewhere nearby. The town smelled of smoke, manure, wet leather, and something cooking. The smell of food tightened my stomach; for days I had eaten nothing but tough, overcooked meat with the taste of stagnant water.

People turned to look at me. A woman standing in a doorway pulled a child close, a curious, dirt-smudged boy of about four. I looked away because the sight hurt.

Two people in leather coats watched me pass and began speaking quietly. Copper badges had been sewn onto their shoulders.

The Seekers, I realized. People who entered the Verge by choice.

Hald guided me along the middle of the street, half a step behind. I felt the point of his spear at my back the entire way.

“We're going to the Grey Griffin,” he said. “They'll feed you if you can pay. And the woman there carries more weight in Greyfall than I do. You'll tell her everything. I wouldn't advise lying to her. It tends to cost more than it's worth.”

I had nothing with which to pay. But there was food there, and people who might answer at least one of my thousand questions.

That was where I needed to go.

I followed the smell of stew down a muddy street in a foreign town, escorted by a foreign guard's spear, holding one thought in my mind: somewhere here, with the first human word, the first bowl of food, and the first answer, the long road home began.

I did not yet know its length or its price.

I knew only that I would follow it to the end.