The bakery looked worse from the outside than he had remembered. The door still hung off its upper hinge. Someone had kicked it further in while they were gone, which meant people had been through. He checked the street both ways before letting the group go in.
Inside, nothing had been touched beyond what had already been damaged. Mira went straight to checking the shelf behind the counter. Theo checked the canvas divider at the back. Sable, still half asleep from being carried, sat down on the bench and looked at the door, blinking slowly, not quite tracking where she was yet.
Colette stood in the middle of the room and looked at the space that was Pip's, the corner near the far wall where he had kept his things, a folded cloth, a tin cup with a chip on the rim, a smooth stone he had been saving for some reason he had never explained.
She looked at it for a moment, then looked away.
Levi looked at the group.
"We can't stay here," he said. "The Guild knows where you live. Once they work out what happened underground they'll come here first." He kept his voice even. "I have a room at an inn two streets from the market. We go there tonight."
Mira looked at Colette. Colette nodded once.
They took what they could carry. It wasn't much.
.
.
.
The room was not made for six people but it had a bed and a wide bench along one wall and a floor that was clean and dry. Levi put Sable down on the bed and she tucked her knees up and went back to sleep immediately. Colette sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at the wall.
Mira stood near the door, watching him.
"Her eye," she said quietly. Meaning Colette's. "The color. Is it permanent."
"Yes," Levi said.
Mira absorbed this without visible reaction. She went and sat next to Colette on the bed and didn't say anything, just sat there. After a moment Colette leaned sideways until her shoulder was against Mira's, and that was enough.
Theo took the bench. He was asleep in under ten minutes.
Levi took the chair by the window and watched the street. The city was quiet.
Colette had not slept. She was upright against the headboard with Sable curled against her side, watching him across the room.
He looked at her wrists. The rope marks were worse under the candlelight.
"I can't take you to a doctor here," he said quietly. "The guard will find out about the eye. The Count's people have eyes in every clinic in this city."
"I don't need a doctor," she said.
"You need something." He reached into his coat and produced a small jar from the inventory. "Healing salve. It won't fix your eye tonight but it'll keep the wrists from getting infected."
She took it, opened it, applied it herself without asking for help, and handed it back. He put it back in his coat.
"Get some sleep," he said.
She looked at him. "What happens tomorrow."
He was quiet for a moment. He looked at the room. Theo on the bench, Sable and Mira on the bed, the city outside the window still quiet but not in a way that would hold.
"I want to ask you all something," he said. "But it can wait until morning."
"Ask now," she said.
He looked at her. "Do you want to leave Salvene. All of you. Come with me to the capital." He paused. "I have a Library there. It's large, it has room, and you'd be safe. I won't pretend it's a small thing to ask. You'd be leaving the only city you know."
Colette didn't hesitate. "Yes."
Mira, who had been listening with her eyes half-closed, said: "Yes."
Levi looked at Theo, asleep on the bench.
"He'll say yes," Colette said.
"And Sable."
"She'll be annoyed we didn't wake her up to ask."
He almost smiled. "Okay," he said. "We leave in the morning. I'll arrange transport."
She looked at him for one more moment, then lay down beside Sable and closed her eyes.
He turned back to the window.
The Library is going to have opinions about four children arriving unannounced, he thought.
Good, he thought back. Let it.
.
.
.
He heard the boots before he saw them. Organized, a column, coming up the street toward the inn, moving with purpose, not hurrying. He stood from the chair.
Twelve guards in the city lord's livery, heavy plate over chain, hand-and-a-half swords. Behind them, one man in a gray robe with the mage's seal on the collar.
Thirteen total.
He looked at the children. Mira was awake. Sable had woken at the sound of his movement and was sitting up, looking at the window. Theo was on his feet.
Colette was already standing.
"COME OUT." The shout came from below. "BY ORDER OF COUNT ALDRIC, SURRENDER THE AWAKENED COMMONERS. ANY WHO RESIST WILL BE DETAINED."
Sable grabbed Mira's sleeve. Theo stepped back against the wall.
Colette's red eye was very still.
Levi looked at all of them.
"Wait here," he said.
He reached into his coat and took out the hammer. He went downstairs, through the inn's front room past the terrified innkeeper, and out through the door.
.
.
.
The twelve guards had spread into a loose formation across the width of the street. The mage stood slightly back from the rest, which was the sensible position. The guard captain, the one who had shouted, was in the center. He looked at Levi come through the door with the hammer at his side, looked at the hammer, and looked back at Levi's face.
"You're harboring awakened commoners," the captain said. "Surrender them and you'll be detained only for questioning. Resist and the Count's law authorizes lethal force."
Levi looked at the twelve of them. He looked at the mage. He looked at the captain.
"They're children," he said.
"They are property of the Count under the Awakening Ordinance of—"
"They're children," Levi said again, in the same tone.
The captain's expression didn't move. "Last warning. Surrender them."
Levi was quiet for a moment.
He looked down at the hammer in his hand. Short, compact, dull gray metal, the runes along the head warm under his fingers. He had used it since the vault, here and there, enough to know what it did at half effort and three-quarter effort. Every time there had been a ceiling in the way, or a body already close. He had never opened it all the way.
This is the first time I'm going to use full strength on this thing, he thought.
He adjusted his grip. He looked at the formation.
He swung.
The hammer came down on the cobblestones between himself and the guards.
The impact was the opposite of loud. A compression, a thud so deep and total it arrived in the chest before the ears, the way a struck bell is felt before it is heard. The stone under the hammer's head didn't crack. It ceased. The shockwave went outward through the ground in a ring and every guard in the formation left their feet at the same moment, lifted, the earth pushing them up and away.
They came back down and didn't get up.
The houses on either side of the street groaned. The windows on the nearest building blew inward. The facade on the building to the left sheared off in a sheet and fell into the street in pieces. Across the way, the upper story of a warehouse shifted on its foundation and sagged, slow and final, into itself.
The street was dust and settling debris and silence.
The mage was still in the air.
He had reacted faster than the warriors, a levitation reflex, thrown himself upward the moment the shockwave hit and gotten above it. His left leg was wrong below the knee, shredded by flying stone, and he was losing altitude in a spiral toward the next street over, already pulling a channel for a portal.
Levi looked at him.
"Do you think I'll let you go easily," he said.
He threw the hammer.
The throw was not elegant. He had never thrown a hammer before and it showed. It didn't matter. The hammer left his hand on a flat line and covered the distance in under a second and hit the mage center mass.
The shockwave from the impact blew outward in a perfect sphere. Every window within a hundred meters of the point of contact shattered simultaneously. The sound arrived a moment later, a crack that rolled down the street and came back off the far buildings. In the next block, a wall collapsed. In the block after that, people came out of their doors and looked at the sky. The echo took a long time to die.
There was no mage.
Levi stood in the street with his right hand extended, palm out.
"Divine Hammer," he said. "Return."
The street gave him no response whatsoever.
He waited a full five seconds.
He kept his hand out and looked down the street where the hammer had gone, past the fresh impact crater, past the collapsed section of wall, down the long dark avenue where the hammer had continued after impact, following the law of physics without any apparent intention of stopping.
His eyebrow moved.
SYSTEM.
Host.
Where is the hammer.
Approximately four kilometers northeast, based on trajectory and deceleration estimate. It went through two more walls after the mage. It is currently in someone's grain storage.
Levi kept his hand out for another moment. Then he lowered it.
Host. May I ask what you were attempting to do just now.
I was calling it back.
Like Thor.
...
To be clear. The hammer's spirit recognizes you at approximately one percent compatibility. It does not speak to you. It has not acknowledged you as its wielder in any meaningful sense. It tolerates your grip. That is the full extent of your current relationship with it.
Thor is at something like ninety-six percent compatibility with Mjolnir, which, for the record, is a completely different hammer made by completely different gods for a completely different purpose.
You threw a semi-sentient divine artifact four kilometers into a grain silo and then held your hand out like it was going to fly back and land in your palm.
What. An idiot.
Levi's face had gone a very specific shade of red.
Shut the fuck up.
I'm adding this to the highlight reel. I'm going to think about it on difficult days.
I said shut up.
"Divine Hammer, return." Outstanding. Truly.
He turned around and walked back into the inn without looking at the street behind him. The innkeeper was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a ladle, looking at the section of sky where the warehouse upper story used to be.
Levi walked past him and up the stairs.
He opened the door to the room.
Four faces looked at him.
"We're leaving now," he said. "Before I have to go get my hammer."