Dungeon

The order came down at dusk on the fourteenth day of the siege, which was the fourteenth day Corvin had been standing in the same field outside Halvenmark watching the same fires on the same ridge while the Legion’s engineers worked on the same problem they’d been working on since the second day. The problem was the town. The town was full of people who had come there because the Legion had told them to come there, which was a detail that had become inconvenient to the officers managing the siege.

The order was passed by a sergeant whose name Corvin did not know.

Read it. Sign here.

Move on.

He read it. He did not sign. He stood in the field with the paper in his hand for a moment that lasted longer than a moment, and then he folded it and put it in his coat and walked north.

It took the Legion six hours to notice he was gone.

He knew this because he’d covered roughly eighteen miles by the time the first rider came through, which was fast enough that they’d sent the rider before they’d properly decided what to pursue him for. Desertion was the correct charge but it required documentation he doubted they’d had time to file. By morning it would be filed.

By afternoon copies would be moving to every garrison and posting station within two days’ ride.

He had twelve silver pennies, the clothes he stood in, the Legion sword he’d drawn ten years ago and carried since, and the specific problem of a man who has done an irreversible thing and has not yet worked out the implications.

He worked them out over the following weeks.

The first implication was money. Twelve pennies lasted eight days if he was careful, four days if he wasn’t. He was careful.

He found work: two days clearing a field outside a town whose name he didn’t learn, three days helping a carter whose horse had gone lame between towns. The carter had questions about where Corvin was coming from and where he was going. Corvin said east and kept working and the carter let it go.

People who moved carts across difficult roads in difficult seasons had a practical interest in not asking about the men who appeared to help them.

The second implication was the warrant. He saw the first copy in a town called Oriel, tacked to a post outside the garrison, and stood in front of it long enough to read it carefully. Height, build, the scar on his left forearm, the way he carried his shoulders from ten years of pack weight.

No likeness. The reward was modest. Not worth the serious manhunt, only the distributed inconvenience of his description on every post between here and the sea.

He took the notice off the post and walked away and spent the rest of that day rearranging how he held his shoulders.

The third implication, which took longer to arrive, was where he was going.

He’d been going east because east was away from Halvenmark and away from the garrison at Miren where most of the Legion’s administrative functions ran. East meant forest eventually, and forest meant reduced road traffic, and reduced road traffic meant reduced likelihood of meeting anyone with a financial interest in reading warrant notices carefully. This was sound reasoning for two weeks.

After two weeks it was just movement without destination, which he recognized as a different problem.

He spent three days in a town he didn’t learn the name of, working at an inn, and thought about the problem. He was a ten-year infantryman with skills that were useful in contexts he could no longer safely enter. He could survive in the field, which had turned out to be useful, but surviving in the field indefinitely without a destination was a way of postponing a problem, not solving it.

He needed somewhere warrants didn’t reach.

The man in the tavern was drunk enough to be telling the story badly and sober enough to know he teled it badly, which made him the best kind of source. A man who was drunk enough to believe his own story told it smoothly. This man kept losing his thread and backing up and changing details and apologizing for the details he’d changed, — working from something real and trying to fit it into the shape of a story worth telling.

The shape was this: a house at the edge of the eastern forest, abandoned, with a dungeon beneath it, and in the dungeon treasure enough to make a man comfortable for the rest of his life. The man had not been into the dungeon himself. He knew someone who had.

The someone had come back with a coin. Here the man produced it: gold, worn, the face on it belonging to no dynasty Corvin recognized. And a story about a trophy case and twenty categories of treasure and a leaflet that explained the whole thing.

Corvin looked at the coin. He looked at the man. He thought about the qualities of a place that had been written up in a leaflet and apparently maintained a mailbox and a trophy case and a set of structured categories for its contents.

“Where,” he said.

The man told him. The directions were imprecise, heard from someone who’d heard them from someone else, but precise enough. Three days east of Miren, north off the main road, look for the house at the clearing’s edge.

He put two pennies on the table.

“That’s all you’re giving me?” the man said.

“You didn’t go in,” Corvin said. He picked up his pack and went east.