The village had been dead for three days. Maybe four. Ren could tell by the flies.
Not the fat, lazy ones that gathered on refuse heaps and open latrines — the camp had plenty of those, and he'd learned to ignore them the way he'd learned to ignore the perpetual stink of forge smoke and the midnight hymns that rattled through the canvas walls of every tent in the Army of the Immaculate. These were different. Small, black, frantic. They clustered on windowsills and doorframes in tight spirals, drawn to something in the wood that Ren couldn't smell but they could. Ludo's journal had a note about it — page forty-three, cramped handwriting in fading ink — about how certain insects responded to boneglass resonance before humans could detect it. The flies arrived first. Then the rats left. Then the ground got warm.
The ground here was cold.
Ren crouched at the threshold of what had been a bakery. The door hung open on one hinge, pushed inward by wind or haste. Flour still dusted the counter. A bowl of risen dough sat beside the oven, collapsed into itself, grey with mold. The baker had walked out mid-task. No struggle, no blood, no claw marks on the doorframe — just absence. The whole village was like this. Forty, maybe fifty structures arranged along a single road that ran east-west through a shallow valley. Homes, a smithy, a granary, a tiny shrine to Verada with its iron flame still standing upright on the altar. The people were gone. Their things remained.
He moved through the bakery in the pattern Jorel had drilled into him during two weeks of training that had felt more like two months: threshold check, floor scan, ceiling scan, corners. Look for heat shimmer. Look for discoloration in the walls — the grey-green bloom that meant boneglass corruption had reached the structural timber. Sniff for the sweet-rot, the honey-and-meat smell of early gestation that clung to the air like perfume from a corpse. Touch the floor with bare fingertips. If it was warm — warmer than the ambient temperature, warmer than stone or wood or packed earth had any right to be — then something was growing underneath, and you got out. You got out fast, and you didn't come back without branded soldiers and a priest who could channel fire.
The floor was cold. The walls were clean. The air smelled of mold and dust and the faint, papery scent of abandoned places — the smell of time reclaiming what people had built.
Ren marked the bakery clear in his head and moved on.
***
The village was called Thornfield, according to the weathered sign at its eastern approach. A name that suggested agricultural hardship and stubborn persistence — the kind of place that had survived bad harvests, harsh winters, and the slow economic bleeding that came from being three days' walk from the nearest market town. It had not survived the rumors.
The army's forward intelligence — such as it was, a network of scouts and informants and terrified refugees who traded information for food — indicated that a demon eruption had occurred thirty miles south of here, in the mining settlement of Crag's Hollow. The eruption had been small by Harrowfeld's standards. Thirty, forty demons. Enough to consume the settlement and its hundred-odd residents. Enough to send the surrounding villages into panic.
Thornfield's residents had fled north, toward the army's protection. Smart. Faster than most. The kind of decisiveness that suggested someone in the village had seen an eruption before, or had believed the stories enough to act on them before the screaming started.
Ren worked through the village systematically, building after building, the way Tik had taught him to work a new mark's house — except instead of evaluating wealth and security, he was evaluating contamination. Each structure got the same treatment: threshold, floor, ceiling, corners, smell, touch. He checked the well in the village square — the water was clear, no oily sheen, no warmth rising from the shaft. He checked the granary — dry, cold, undisturbed except by mice. He checked the smithy, where a set of horseshoes sat half-finished on the anvil, and the tanner's workshop, where hides hung stiff and untreated on their frames, and the six houses on the south side of the road that faced the direction from which demons would come if they came at all.
Nothing. Thornfield was clean. Empty and clean and already beginning the slow process of returning to the earth — weeds pushing through the garden plots, a shutter hanging loose, a door banging in the wind with the rhythm of something breathing.
It took him four hours. Four hours of silence and methodical work, alone in a dead village with nothing for company but the flies and the wind and the constant, low-grade awareness that he was the first living human to walk these streets since the evacuation, which meant that if anything was here — anything with teeth or claws or the patient, predatory intelligence that the organized demons displayed — he would be the one to find it. And he was alone. No backup. No branded captain at his shoulder. No prayers or wards or channeled fire. Just a seventeen-year-old thief with a set of lockpicks, six alchemy pouches, and a boneglass figurine that pulsed faintly in his breast pocket like a second heartbeat.
The figurine had been quiet all morning. Cold and still against his chest. He took that as a good sign — Ludo's journal suggested that boneglass responded to the presence of other boneglass, and the figurine had been warm, almost feverish, in the days after Harrowfeld. Here, miles from the nearest known deposit, it was inert. A stone. A keepsake. A dead man's gift that Ren carried because it was the only piece of his old life that fit in a pocket.
He finished his sweep at the village's western edge, where the road climbed out of the valley toward the ridge where Jorel waited. The sun was past noon. His shadow stretched behind him, pointing back toward the empty village and the empty road and the empty houses where people had lived three days ago and might never live again.
***
Jorel was where Ren had left him — on the ridge, prone behind a fallen oak, watching the southern approach through a battered spyglass that had been repaired so many times its brass casing was more solder than original metal. Branded scout captain. Twelve years in the Army of the Immaculate. Three brands on his left arm — endurance, perception, and something Ren hadn't been able to identify that made Jorel's left eye slightly brighter than his right, as if a candle burned behind the iris.
He didn't look up when Ren approached. Ren hadn't expected him to. Jorel had the economy of attention that characterized the best scouts Ren had encountered — nothing wasted on what wasn't necessary, everything allocated to what was. He'd accepted Ren into his section without comment, trained him without praise, and assigned him this solo mission with a single sentence: "Clear the village. Report back. Don't die."
Three instructions. Ren had followed all of them.
"Clear," Ren said, dropping to one knee beside the fallen oak. He kept his voice low — habit from the guild, reinforced by two weeks of scout doctrine that treated unnecessary noise the way a jeweler treated unnecessary scratches on a finished piece. Unacceptable. "No contamination. No boneglass activity. No signs of infestation. Evacuated three to four days ago — orderly departure, not panicked. They took livestock and portable goods. Left everything else."
Jorel lowered the spyglass. His branded eye tracked across Ren's face with the flat, evaluative precision of a man reading a report written in a language he spoke fluently. "Warm floors?"
"No."
"Wall bloom?"
"No."
"Sweet-rot?"
"Nothing. The well is clean. Granary is dry. I checked all forty-seven structures, including outbuildings."
Jorel's expression did not change. His expression rarely changed — the three brands had sanded away the micro-movements of facial muscles that communicated the nuanced range of human emotional response, leaving behind a topography of competence and attention that registered approval and disapproval through channels Ren was still learning to read. A curt nod. A longer pause before the next instruction. The absence of correction, which in Jorel's command vocabulary, was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
What Ren got was the curt nod.
"We'll push the advance column through at dawn. You'll guide the vanguard. Mark the safe buildings for billeting."
"Yes, sir."
Jorel returned to his spyglass. Conversation over. The ridge was cold despite the season — autumn had arrived with the deliberate, unannounced precision of a changing of the guard, and the wind that rolled across the valley carried the first hint of winter in its edge. Below them, Thornfield sat in its shallow valley like a stage set after the actors had gone home. The shrine's iron flame caught the afternoon light. The baker's door banged in its rhythm.
Ren sat back against the oak and ate his rations — hard bread, dried meat, a strip of something that the army called fruit leather and that tasted like sugared boot sole. He ate mechanically, without pleasure, the way the army taught everything: efficiently. Fuel for the machine.
***
The walk back to the forward camp took two hours. Ren used the time the way Tik had taught him to use transit — processing the intelligence he'd gathered, filing details, building the mental map that would let him navigate Thornfield in darkness if the situation required it. Forty-seven structures. One main road, two side lanes, the well in the square, the shrine on the north side. The baker's door that banged. The smithy with its unfinished horseshoes. The tanner's stiff hides. Details that meant nothing in isolation and everything in aggregate — the complete picture of a place that existed now primarily as a military asset.
He'd cleared his first village. Nobody had died. Nobody had praised him for it. Nobody had needed to.
This was the transaction the army offered: your skills, your time, your willingness to walk into places that might kill you, exchanged for food, shelter, and the absence of the branding iron. The scouts who earned their keep got to remain unburned. The scouts who didn't were transferred to infantry, where the calculus was simpler — you fought, you bled, you took the brand when the alternative was being the next name read at the evening's prayer for the fallen.
Ren had no intention of being transferred.
The forward camp materialized out of the late afternoon haze — a cluster of tents and wagons arranged in the defensive wheel formation that the army used for its advance elements. Smaller than the main camp, which sprawled across a river valley ten miles north like a canvas city. The forward camp housed the scouts, the advance cavalry, and a rotation of branded soldiers whose presence served the dual purpose of military readiness and theological reassurance — the brands of Verada, glowing faintly in the gathering dusk, a reminder that divine power walked among them and was available to anyone willing to pay its price.
Ren passed the perimeter sentries — a branded woman who checked his scout token without speaking, her eyes sliding across him with the incurious efficiency of a gate mechanism — and made his way to the scouts' section. His tent. His cot. His kit, arranged with the same precision he'd used on his first night, two weeks ago, when the barracks had smelled of sweat and hostility and the screaming from the branding tent had carried through the canvas like weather.
He sat on his cot and pulled Ludo's journal from his pack. Page forty-three. The note about flies and boneglass resonance. He'd confirmed it today — the flies in Thornfield had been the wrong kind, the frantic spiraling ones, but they'd been on surfaces, not in the air. Surface activity without air saturation meant residual resonance, not active contamination. Thornfield was built over old boneglass deposits — most settlements in the region were — but the deposits were deep and dormant. No seeds. No gestation. No warmth in the ground.
He made a note in the margin of Ludo's journal, his handwriting smaller and more precise than Ludo's, adding a data point to a collection of data points that might, someday, constitute a useful body of knowledge. The old alchemist would have approved. Ludo had believed in observation, in the patient accumulation of evidence, in the heretical notion that understanding preceded prayer.
Ludo was dead. The evidence remained. The observations continued.
Ren closed the journal and lay back on his cot. Outside, the camp's evening routine unfolded — the forge stations firing up for the night shift, the prayer tents filling with the faithful, the branded soldiers rotating their watches. The machine operated. It always operated. And somewhere inside it, scattered across its vast, grinding structure like seeds in soil, were the people who had walked the road with him out of Harrowfeld. Nella. Harsk. Fossick. Callum. Moth. His people, dispersed into the army's compartments, absorbed into its functions, separated by the institutional logic that assigned each person to their most useful position and discouraged the bonds that might make them hesitate when the order came to advance into fire.
He hadn't seen any of them in eleven days.
The figurine lay cold against his chest. The camp's hymns began — low, rhythmic, the kind of sound that became architecture after enough repetition, the walls and ceiling of a church made from human voices and the desperate need to believe that someone, somewhere, was listening. Ren did not sing. He lay still and thought about Thornfield's empty bakery, the risen dough collapsed into itself on the counter, the flies spiraling on the windowsill.
His first mission. Clean. Professional. Competent.
Nobody had died, and nobody would remember it, and tomorrow there would be another village, and the day after that another, and the day after that another, stretching forward into a future defined by empty buildings and cold floors and the flat, branded eye of a man who communicated approval through the absence of criticism.
This was his life now.
He pulled the figurine from his pocket and held it in his palm. Cold stone. Dead weight. A thief's keepsake in a holy war.
Tomorrow, the army would advance through Thornfield. Tomorrow, he would guide the vanguard through streets he'd walked alone, pointing out the safe buildings, the clean water, the granary with its undisturbed stores. Tomorrow, the machine would occupy the space that people had abandoned, and the iron flame on the shrine would be replaced by a real one — a branded priest channeling Verada's fire in a consecration ceremony that would cleanse the village of whatever spiritual contamination the faithful imagined lurked in walls and soil and the rising dough of a baker who had run.
And after the consecration, after the vanguard had settled and the advance column had pushed through to the next objective, Ren would walk ahead of them again. Alone. Into another village, another empty town, another dead place that needed someone expendable to verify its emptiness before the valuable soldiers arrived.
The scout who went first. The thief who walked in shadows.
He closed his hand around the figurine and listened to the hymns and did not sleep for a long time.
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