They gave themselves two hours in Hancock.
The town was compromised. Heaven had already been here, already made its statement, and wherever heaven had been once, it tended to return to check its work.
Two hours to move through what was left of the market district, acquired what they needed, and get back on the road before the afternoon light started failing.
They split without discussing it, as some things didn’t need organising.
*****
The black market contact was three streets back from the main square, in the part of town where the damage was lighter and the doors were still on their hinges.
Cophey’s journal had given him a name, a street, and a descriptor: reliable, high cost, doesn’t ask questions if you don’t make him.
The man was exactly what the descriptor suggested.
He operated out of a cellar beneath what presented itself as a dry goods store, accessible through a door behind the main shelving that responded to a specific knock Cophey had noted in her margin shorthand. Lucius had worked it out during the walkover.
The door opened on the first attempt. The cellar was cool and well organised and smelled of dried herbs and something mineral underneath. The contact was a thin man of middle age with careful eyes and the particular stillness of someone who had survived a dangerous trade by learning very early to read a room before speaking in it.
He read Lucius in about four seconds and arrived at a price before the negotiations began. It was high, as Cophey said.
Lucius paid it without negotiating, which made the man’s careful eyes moved briefly before settling back to something neutral.
He didn’t ask what the components were for, and Lucius didn’t explain what it was either. The transaction was completed under ten minutes. Ritual incense, focusing crystals, three grades of binding powder, a set of unmarked silver dishes for the circle work, and two vials of something that man described only as ’concentrated divine residue, origin unspecified.’
He packed it carefully into the secondary bag and climbed back out into the streets.
The looted silver and gold from the bandits, and the remainder of what he had taken from heaven’s field units felt abstract until now, a weight in a bag with no specific purpose but now, he had given it a purpose, a useful one at that.
He moved on to the next item on his list.
****
Seraphine found the temple two streets north of the market.
Abandoned was a generous word. It had been a minor church outpost, the kind that served small communities without the population to justify a full installation, and whatever clergy had staffed it had left quickly enough that they hadn’t taken everything with them. The door was left unlocked, and the interior was dim and dusty, the furniture still in place, the altar cloth still on the altar.
The library was a single shelf in the back room.
Texts that a minor outpost would have been issued as standard liturgical references, divine law compilations, one copy of a church survey of known divine entities in the northern territories that made her hands still for a moment when she found it.
She didn’t steal anything carelessly. She worked through the shelf with deliberate attention, selecting what was useful and leaving what wasn’t, choosing copies over originals where both existed so the absence would be less immediately obvious to anyone who came back to check.
The divine entity survey. A ritual theory text that cross referenced with Cophey’s methodology in ways that would fill specific gaps. Two volumes of pre church theological writing that the institution had officially deprecated and practically speaking no longer acknowledged existed.
She wrapped them in clith from her pack and tucked them against her back.
She paused at the door on the way out, her hand on the frame, looking back at the dim interior of a church outpost that had been abandoned mi operation, the altar cloth still laid and the dust settling on everything evenly.
She left without whatever she had been about to think.
***
Valeria came back to the meeting point at the edge of town before either of them, which surprised neither of them. She had a rolled map case under one arm and a package wrapped in oils kind under the other. She set both down without explanation and stood waiting with her usual quality of unhurried patience.
The map case held four sheets when Lucius unrolled the top one. Northern territories, detailed and up to date, with hand marked additions in a different ink that suggested the original cartography had been updated by someone with direct knowledge of the terrain. The Stormbreak foothills were there, the road networks annotated, elevation marked in practical terms.
The oilskin package he didn’t examine. What it weighed and how it shifted when she set it down told him enough.
He rolled the map back up and stared at them. "Ready," he said.
They left Hancock through the north gate as the afternoon light began its slow decline toward evening, the smoke from the town’s ruined center still threading upward into the grey sky behind them.
The road ahead ran through open country before the terrain started climbing toward the foothills, wide and exposed and empty in both directions as far as the eye could follow it.
Three hundred kilometers. Give or take.
Through open wilderness, with no guarantee of shelter and Heaven’s pursuit team somewhere behind them adapting to Valeria’s interference at a pace she’d described as progressive.
The Stormbreak foothills at the end of it, and inside them a frontier village where Cophey had believed something was about to awaken.
Lucius set a pace and they settled into it.
***
He had learned over the past days to watch Seraphine with a specific kind of attention, and even that had been returning limited information because she was genuinely skilled at managing her presentation. She had been trained by the Church in self-possession before everything else and it showed.
But the body has its own accounting and eventually it presents the bill regardless.
She was tired in a way that the day’s activity didn’t fully explain. Not stumbling, not falling behind the pace, nothing that would register to a casual observer. Just a slight heaviness in her step that hadn’t been there this morning.
A pause she took at the crest of a small rise that was fractionally longer than necessary, her hand resting on her knee for just a moment before she straightened.
The way she didn’t look at the road ahead when she was normally the one reading the terrain.
Small things, each one deniable individually. Together they assembled into a picture he kept looking at and not liking.
He didn’t say anything. She hadn’t given him an opening and manufacturing one would only make her close up further. So he watched without speaking and kept the pace moderate and kept everything away.
Valeria came up on his right as the road curved northwest and the last visible edge of Hancock disappeared behind the hill they had come over.
She didn’t announce what she was going to say. She rarely did.
"Your technique is garbage."
Lucius looked at her.
"Your body is strong," she continued, in the same tone she might use to describe weather.
"The absorbed core gives you output that doesn’t match your level. You hit harder than you should, you’re faster than you should be." A pause. "And you fight like someone who taught himself, which means every habit you have is self-reinforcing and approximately half of them are wrong."
"I’ve been managing."
"You’ve been winning despite your technique, not because of it." She looked at him with those amber eyes that didn’t soften the accuracy of anything they were reading.
"Against blessed warriors at your level, managing is sufficient. Against what’s waiting in the mountains—" She didn’t finish the sentence, because she didn’t need to.
He thought about the ambush on the valley road. Ten warriors. The thirty minutes it had cost him to handle five while she handled her five in the time it had taken him to reach his third.
He thought about her, leaning against the tree, watching him work through it with that expression moving across her face in sequence.
"What are you proposing," he said.
"We have three hundred kilometers of road ahead of us." She looked forward, the flat northern terrain stretching out before them. "That’s enough time." She let it sit for a moment.
"Your body is strong but you don’t know how to use it. I’ll fix that."
He looked at her and she looked back, neither offering the statement as a kindness nor withdrawing it as a burden. Just a fact presented at the pace she chose to present things.
Behind them, Seraphine’s footsteps were slightly heavier than they should have been.
Ahead, three hundred kilometers of wilderness waited.
"Fine," Lucius said.
Valeria nodded once. "We start tomorrow then."
She dropped back to her three-pace distance and said nothing further.
The road ran north and the light kept failing and all three of them kept walking forward.