SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 739: The Long Walk

Gerhardt came up the last of the slope with his lantern swinging and his breath tearing white, and he didn't slow until he was near enough to grab Trafalgar's arm and check for himself that it was whole.

"My lord." Relief cracked the cold off his face. "You're all right. Thank the deeps for that, I feared the worst when the hours ran long." His eyes flicked past Trafalgar to the black mouth up the mountain and came back. "But what happened? The trouble, has it been dealt with?"

"We'll deal with it tomorrow." Trafalgar let the man keep his arm a breath before he eased free. "Today I went down to have a proper look. And I'll tell you plainly, it's worse than any of us reckoned." He let a little weight sit on the next part, because the old foreman had earned it. "Lucky I came when I did. You did right to call for help." His voice cooled a notch. "Next time be more stubborn about it, would you? Sooner is cheaper than this."

Gerhardt's throat worked. Whatever he'd braced to hear, that hadn't been it. "I... understand. Thank you, my lord." He gathered himself. "What is it you mean to do tomorrow?"

"Go straight down and cut out the heart of the thing." Trafalgar started them walking, because standing on a frozen road solved nothing and the town's lights burned warm below. "You and yours can come up and wait outside the mouth. Once it's done there'll be work worth doing, hauling the materials off the carcasses to put them to use. The wretched things crawled up out of nowhere and made a proper mess of us this season, so we may as well get some good out of their hides."

That drew a few grim chuckles from the miners drifting up in Gerhardt's wake, men who'd come out to see the lord home with their own eyes.

"Aye, they owe us that much," one of them muttered, a big man with a bandaged hand. "Take it out of their carcasses, I say."

"Careful what you wish for, Ansel," another put in. "Last thing I skinned off one froze my knife to my glove."

"That's because you've the hands of a countinghouse clerk," the big one shot back, and got a rough laugh out of the pack.

"Beats losing them to frostbite," Ansel said, unbothered, and flexed the bandaged one for show.

Moses let the noise run its course before he cut across it, easy and certain, the way a man talks when he knows nobody's going to argue. "Come morning, anyone who wants to lend a hand can wait at the mouth. And when the trouble's finished, we'll throw a feast worth the name."

That landed better than any speech. Gerhardt nodded slow, a spark coming back into the old eyes, and Trafalgar caught the sense of it: the promise of a feast at the end would do more to hold the settlement's nerve together than any number of guards posted on the road. Beasts a man could kill. Despair rotting through a town in the dark was harder to cut out, and Moses had just handed them a light to walk toward.

"A feast," someone breathed down the line, as though the word tasted of better days. "Gods, I'd forgotten what one looked like."

Gerhardt cleared his throat, practical even now. "We've salt enough put by, and the beer that outlasted the wave. If those beasts truly leave hides worth the taking, my lord, we'll have the pits cleared and the meat curing before the week's out." The ghost of a grin touched him. "Give men honest work at the end of a fright, and half the fright walks off with it."

They came down off the mountain and into the settlement proper, and the evening filled with the small business of it.

Word ran ahead that the lord had walked out of the mine on his own two feet, and the fear that had gripped the place since the wave loosened by a degree. Lanterns came to doorways.

Someone got a fire roaring in the common hall, and the smell of it, woodsmoke and thin stew, did as much for the mood as any promise a man could make.

Hot food was pressed on them, a corner cleared for them, and a hundred small questions came at Trafalgar that he turned aside with the same short line: that it was handled, that tomorrow would end it, that they should rest. He gave them hope enough to sleep on and kept the truth of it folded away where frightened men couldn't cut themselves on it.

'Lie kindly tonight,' he thought, watching a young miner's shoulders come down from around his ears at some soft word of Moses's.

It took the better part of the evening to see it all put right, the watch set, the morning arranged, the willing hands told where to stand. Only when the hall had gone quiet and the town had begun to bank its fires did Trafalgar find Gerhardt again at the edge of the room.

"Gerhardt." He pitched his voice low, for the two of them. "I'd like to take a walk with you tonight, if you'll indulge me."

The old man blinked, caught off his footing. Whatever a highland foreman expected of a Morgain lord at the tail of a day like this, a moonlit stroll wasn't on the list. But there was only one answer a man in his place could give, and no part of him reached for another. "Of course, my lord. Whatever you'd like." He lifted his lantern down from the hook by the door. "It'd be my honor."

They stepped out together into the cold, the town going quiet at their backs, the sky scoured clear and hard with stars over the black shoulders of the mountains.

For a stretch Trafalgar let them walk without aim, boots crunching the packed snow of the lane, the foreman keeping pace with the patience of a man who'd learned not to rush his betters. He was in no hurry to arrive. Some errands went down easier for a breath of cold air first, and this was one of them.

Then Trafalgar told him where they were going.

"Take me to the graveyard, would you, Gerhardt."