Chapter 10. Dorn

Something crashed beyond the rear door. A low, rough voice offered a colorful curse, and a man ducked through the narrow doorway.

I had already seen plenty of locals—the guards at the gate, the men in the tavern, the two Seekers with copper badges. They were all hardened people accustomed to dangerous lives. Only now, looking at the man who emerged from the back room, did I truly understand what the word Seeker meant.

He was large. Not especially tall, but immensely broad. Once, he must have been larger still, though the years had pared some of the weight from him. He reminded me of an old ox that remained powerful but had learned to count its winters. An uneven gray beard spread in every direction. Part of his left ear was missing, and two fingers were gone from his right hand. He made no attempt to hide either. Fine white scars crossed his face, and he favored his left leg, dipping slightly with every step. The injury was old and permanent.

He smelled of leather, iron, and cheap brew.

I directed Analysis at him with the quiet touch that had become familiar.

Dorn · Level 34

My gaze lingered on the number longer than it should have.

Thirty-four.

Hald had been eleven. Kess was sixteen, and until that moment I had considered him the strongest person in the guildhall. This limping old man's level was more than twice as high as either of theirs.

I still did not fully understand what the numbers meant, but I knew how they rose: slowly, one step at a time, through every dangerous encounter and every return from a dungeon. To reach thirty-four, Dorn must have entered those sicknesses in the earth many, many times.

And returned many, many times.

Then I noticed something I had never seen above anyone else. Beside the number, fainter than a reflection, hovered the shadow of another number—a higher one. It was as though the System remembered what he had once been and showed what remained now.

I could not be certain I had understood correctly, but the idea settled badly in my stomach. The man before me had once been stronger. Something had taken part of that strength from him, just as surely as it had taken part of his ear and hand.

Dorn stopped in the middle of the guildhall, planted his intact hand on his hip, and looked me over slowly and without affection, the way a buyer might inspect an unwanted horse bundled into a larger purchase.

“This?” he asked Kess rather than me. “This is your great mystery from the Verge?”

“That's him,” Kess said calmly without lifting his eyes from the papers.

Dorn walked a circle around me. I remained still and allowed him to look. The scent of cheap brew clung to him, but his eyes were sober and sharp.

“Thin,” he said, listing faults as if I were livestock. “Clean. Only people who haven't worked stay clean on the frontier. Hands intact. Every finger still there.” He raised his own three-fingered hand. “That means you're no one yet, lad. You haven't paid this land a piece of yourself. But it always collects. From everyone.”

I said nothing. He seemed to have expected excuses or swagger. My silence irritated him.

“Strange clothes too.” He jerked his chin at my shirt. “Not from here. Where did you come from?”

“The forest.”

“The forest,” he repeated with disgust. “All of you come from the forest.” He turned to Kess, and real anger entered his voice, old and deeply accumulated. “Magister, we've done this before. How many have there been? Boys, fools, fugitives without a coin or a scrap of sense, all asking to become Seekers because they heard the Guild pays. How many of them did I have to carry home after their third descent? I'm not a nursemaid. I didn't spend twenty years in dungeons just to hold the hand of every stray who walks out of the woods in a ridiculous shirt.”

Kess set down his pen.

He did it slowly, and something in that deliberate movement silenced Dorn.

“Dorn,” the Magister said mildly. “Shall I remind you who pays for your drink?”

Silence.

“The Guild supports you,” Kess continued in the same level voice. “The Guild pays a pension sufficient for your brew because you can no longer enter the Verge, and you know no other trade. In return, the Guild occasionally—occasionally, Dorn—asks you for a service. Look at a newcomer. Decide whether he is fit. That is all I am asking.”

He picked up his pen again.

“Judge him. If you say he's worthless, I'll strike his name from the page and forget him. Your word carries weight here. But look properly, not from the doorway.”

I watched Dorn's face while Kess spoke. For an instant, quickly hidden, something very much like shame crossed it.

You can no longer enter the Verge.

There was the second number. That was what had taken the measure of him: an old wolf robbed of the only thing he knew and loved, left to spend his remaining years guarding someone else's pups.

I did not pity him. I had found no pity inside myself since the forest. But I understood him.

And to understand a person was to know which thread might move him.

“I'm not asking you to be my nursemaid,” I told Dorn directly. “I need one thing: to learn how to come back alive. From what I can see, you know more about that than anyone else in this town. So look at me properly. Not from the doorway.”

I deliberately repeated Kess's words. Dorn's eyes narrowed slightly. He would have recognized flattery and spat on it.

This was not flattery.

It was the truth, and he heard it.

He remained silent for a long moment. Then he spat aside anyway and grunted.

“You speak neatly for a man from the woods.” He tipped his head toward the door. “Come on. Nothing to see in here.”

He led me to the Guild's rear yard, a fenced patch of hard-packed earth. Chipped wooden blocks lay near one wall. A straw-stuffed training dummy stood nearby, marked by years of use, and several blunted wooden swords rested in a rack. Newcomers were trained here.

They had been trained here for a very long time.

Dorn limped to the rack, pulled out two practice swords, and tossed one to me. I caught it.

“At least you managed that,” he muttered. “Some can't.” He faced me with his sword held low and almost carelessly. His three-fingered hand rested on the grip as naturally as if the weapon were part of it. “No rules. Show me what your hands and your head can do. Well?”

This was where matters became difficult.

I knew I was stronger. Whatever my own numbers truly meant, I doubted his thirty-four could match the raw force I carried. I had seen what this body could do in the forest. If I struck without restraint, even a wooden sword could seriously hurt the old man.

But I remembered Rule Four.

Hide my strength.

A stranger who casually defeated the best fighter in town would no longer be treated as a mystery. He would be treated as a threat, and threats were not invited to learn. I needed to show exactly enough for Dorn to call me fit and not a drop more.

The problem was that I had no idea how much exactly enough might be. I had never fought seriously in my life. As I had already said, the closest thing to danger in my former existence had been my neighbor with the lawn mower.

I stepped forward and swung the way I imagined an ordinary, strong man would swing.

Controlled.

Careful.

It was a mistake.

Dorn barely seemed to move. My sword cut through empty air as his blade guided mine aside, and the flat wooden edge struck beneath my ribs. The impact emptied my lungs and sent me stumbling back.

“Slow,” he said calmly. “And timid. You didn't strike. You pretended to strike.” He spat. “I've seen your kind. A man who protects himself in training is the first to fail in a real fight. Again.”

I straightened. My side burned. Along with the pain rose the cold thing that had settled inside me in the forest: steady, heavy rage.

Not at Dorn.

At myself—for possessing all this foreign strength and still allowing an old, limping man to treat me like a boy with a stick.

I attacked again. A little faster. A little more honestly.

He slipped away once more, but with less room this time. I saw him move his injured leg a fraction later than he intended. I caught his answering strike on my sword and remained standing.

Something shifted in his expression.

“Mm,” was all he said.

We met again and again. I released my strength gradually, one drop at a time, feeling for the point beyond which questions would begin. In skill, I was slower. Twenty years had hammered a thousand techniques into Dorn's body. He read me, deceived me, and found openings I did not know I had.

In pure speed, I was faster. In raw strength, stronger. With every exchange, the difference showed a little more. He could no longer reach me easily. He had to work. His breathing roughened, sweat appeared on his forehead, and the injured leg failed him more often.

Then he surprised me with a sudden attempt to knock me off balance.

An old, dirty trick.

A good one.

It would have thrown the man I used to be.

I did not move. Dorn's momentum failed against me as easily as if he had thrown himself against a closed door. He went still and looked up into my eyes from less than a foot away.

Now he had seen it.

Not everything.

Enough.

I could have pushed him across the yard without effort. Instead, I relaxed my stance, stepped back, and released him gently enough that he kept his balance. Then I lowered the practice sword.

For several seconds, we watched one another while breathing hard—him in truth, me mostly for appearance.

“You're a liar,” Dorn said at last, quietly and almost without anger. “An ordinary man, you said. You're nothing like ordinary.” He slowly lowered his own sword, never taking his eyes from me. “What are you, lad?”

“I'm trying to understand that myself.”

It was the third time I had given that answer in a day.

It was still true.

Dorn did not take me back inside. He returned both wooden swords to the rack, then limped toward a narrow stairway leading to the top of the palisade. He nodded over his shoulder for me to follow.

I followed.

Wind moved across the fighting platform behind the sharpened logs. From there, I could see far across the cultivated fields to the unbroken wall of forest stretching toward the horizon.

The Wild Verge.

In daylight, it did not appear frightening. It simply looked immense and very old.

Dorn rested his elbows on the timber and stared at the forest in silence. The exertion had cleared some of the brew from his scent.

“Twenty-two years,” he said at last without turning. “I went into that forest for twenty-two years. Do you know how many people walked beside me?”

I remained silent, understanding that he did not need an answer.

“Many,” he said. “And now there are none.” He raised his three-fingered hand, looked at it, and lowered it again. “I lost the fingers on the fourth tier trying to bring Crooked Sam home. Failed to bring Sam back too. The ear was another year and another companion.” He gave a humorless smile beneath his beard. “That's how it goes, lad. The land takes its payment piece by piece. Then it takes friends. Then a leg—in my case, it broke badly and healed wrong. That ended my days in the Verge. In time, it takes everything else as well.”

He turned toward me. His eyes were tired and completely clear.

“I'm not telling you this to frighten you. I can already see that frightening you won't be easy, and that's the problem. Men like you are the ones I lost most often. Strong men. Fast men. Men who believed being stronger than everyone else meant nothing could reach them.”

He pointed his shortened hand at me.

“Strength isn't what saves you. Strength is what tempts you to go where you shouldn't. In the Verge, the strongest man isn't the one who survives. The most cautious is. The one who knows when not to advance. The one who turns around even when he might have won. I've known plenty of heroes who didn't return. The cowards are still alive.”

As he spoke, I placed every word into the imaginary table beside the rules I had learned in the forest. This was not a rule I had guessed for myself. It had been purchased with twenty-two years, lasting injuries, and every person he had failed to bring home.

It belonged near the top.

“When you can't read something, run,” I said aloud, remembering the shadow in the hollow and the three question marks. “If you can't understand what's in front of you, don't approach it.”

Dorn gave me a strange look.

“Neatly put,” he said slowly. “Like something copied from a book. Who taught you?”

“No one. I worked it out several days ago.”

For a long time he studied me like an object that belonged on none of his shelves. Then he turned back toward the forest.

“Kess wants me to say whether you're fit. In strength, you're fit—too fit, and that worries me more than it pleases me. As for your head...” He paused. “Perhaps you're fit there too. You listen. Most people don't listen. Most already believe they know everything.”

He spat over the wall.

“All right. I'll tell Kess I'll guide you. Your first descent will be with me. An easy, shallow dungeon near the bridge. I know every stone there. We'll see how you manage against living creatures instead of wooden swords. Remember one thing, forest man.”

He turned and pressed three fingers against my chest, not painfully but with weight.

“While you're with me, you obey me. If I say we're leaving, we leave—even if you believe you could defeat everything inside with your bare hands. I didn't survive long enough to grow this gray beard just to lose another powerful fool. Clear?”

“Clear.”

For once, I did not calculate or weigh the exchange. I simply agreed. For the first time since the silent white light, someone beside me knew something I did not and was willing to pass that knowledge on.

I intended to take everything this world could give me.

Old Dorn's knowledge was the first thing within reach.

“At the gate tomorrow, at dawn,” he grunted, starting down the stairs. “If you're late, I leave without you. And lad...” He stopped without turning. “Change that shirt. Everyone stares at you like a dancing bear at a fair. Ask Brenna. She'll find you something people actually wear.”

He descended and limped across the square, clearly headed toward the inn. I remained on the wall in the wind, gazing at the dark band of the Verge into which I would make my first descent the next day.

Somewhere beneath that ancient forest lay a road. Not merely to the bridge or to a shallow Copper-rank dungeon. Farther. Deeper. Longer. A road to the strength that would one day break through the wall between me and home.

I would begin it with a wooden sword, a borrowed shirt, and a limping old man as my teacher.

So be it.

You begin with what you have.