The scout saw them first.
Flavie had been stationed at the eastern ridge for three hours, crouched behind a collapsed section of palisade with her longbow across her knees and her eyes fixed on the road that wound down from the Tamoe Highland. The road had been quiet for two days. Quiet in the way that felt less like peace and more like a held breath, the kind of quiet that preceded the sound of bones clicking together in the dark. She had learned to distrust quiet roads.
So when movement appeared at the far bend, she had an arrow nocked before she consciously decided to do it.
There were six of them. That was what she counted first. Six shapes moving down the road at a pace that was neither hurrying nor wandering, and for one horrible, stomach-dropping moment she thought they were undead. Another patrol of Andariel's walking dead come to test the camp's eastern flank. Her fingers tightened on the fletching. She drew to her cheek.
Then she understood what she was seeing, and her breath left her in a slow, careful exhale.
Five of the shapes were indeed skeletons. She could see the pale gleam of bone even at this distance and could see the dark hollow sockets where eyes had once been. But they were not shambling. They were not lurching or spreading out in that disorganized, mindless way that the undead always moved, that maddening lack of purpose that somehow made them more frightening rather than less. These five walked in a file, two and two and one at the rear, and they kept their spacing with a precision that her senior sister back in the order would have found acceptable. Each one wore what appeared to be salvaged armor, mismatched in origin but fitted and secured, pauldrons on bony shoulders, bracers on forearms stripped of flesh, and each carried a weapon held in the proper carry position. Not dragging. Not raised in mindless aggression. Carried.
The sixth figure was a man.
He walked ahead of the formation, not in front of them like someone being followed by wolves, but in the position a sergeant takes when he walks his squad, connected to them without being consumed by them. He was not tall, perhaps slightly above average, and he wore the dark robes of a Necromancer, though even those seemed somehow less theatrical than the ones she'd encountered in illuminated texts and traveler's tales. No excessive draping. No trailing ornaments. Practical, even if the color was the color of a moonless sky.
His hair was black and fell to just above his collar, and in the grey morning light of the Tamoe Pass it caught no particular sheen. It simply was. Dark hair. A young face, though she couldn't make out the features clearly at this range. He carried a staff in his left hand and used it neither as a crutch nor as a cane but simply held it, the way a soldier holds a spear when the spear is not needed quite yet.
Flavie did not lower her bow.
She sent the whistle signal back toward camp. Two short, one long.
Unidentified. Approach.
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Kashya heard the signal from within the camp perimeter and felt the familiar tightening in her chest that had become so habitual over these past weeks it barely registered anymore. She was already moving before the echo of Flavie's signal died, pulling her cloak around her shoulders against the morning chill and gesturing for two of her better fighters to follow without breaking stride.
She met the approaching party at the camp's eastern gate, if a reinforced gap in the palisade with two archers positioned above it could be called a gate, and she took in the scene with the rapid assessment of someone who had spent the last several months keeping people alive through sheer force of disciplined observation.
The man had stopped perhaps twenty feet from the entrance. He had not been asked to stop. He had simply read the situation and stopped. The five skeletons had stopped with him, and this was the thing that struck her first and most forcefully, the thing her mind kept returning to even as she was cataloguing everything else. They had stopped exactly when he stopped. No stumbling continuation, no gradual drift to a halt. They stopped as though a single switch had been thrown for all five of them simultaneously. Two on the left. Two on the right. One behind, centered. They stood without fidgeting, without the subtle restless movement of the undead she'd learned to dread. They simply stood and looked forward and waited.
The man looked at Kashya with dark eyes that were not unfriendly but were not particularly warm either, and he waited for her to speak first. She appreciated that, in a distant, professional way.
"Necromancer," she said. It was an identification, not a welcome.
"Yes." His voice was even and unhurried, each syllable placed with the care of someone who had decided that excess words were a form of waste. He had a slight accent she couldn't immediately place, a precision to his consonants that suggested a language with harder edges than the common tongue.
"You've come from the Highland?"
"The pass. Three days from the eastern road."
Kashya's eyes moved to the skeletons. One of her fighters behind her made a sound that was not quite a word. She ignored it.
"You have company."
"Yes."
She waited for elaboration. None came. She changed approach.
"Most Necromancers who come to us arrive with rather less organized accompaniment."
Something shifted in his expression, not quite amusement, but perhaps the ghost of an acknowledgment that the observation was accurate.
"Disorder is inefficiency," he said. "Inefficiency gets people killed."
"You're aware that what I'm looking at is already dead."
"I'm aware." He didn't seem bothered by the observation. "The principle holds."
Kashya studied him for another long moment. He was young, she realized. Younger than she would have expected from someone projecting this particular quality of settled composure. His features were unmistakably Xiansai in origin, the structure of his cheekbones, the shape of his eyes, and there was something about the combination of that young face and those steady, measuring eyes that was dissonant in a way she couldn't immediately name. He looked back at her without impatience, without the anxiety that most travelers showed when stopped at the perimeter, without the aggressive performance of confidence that people adopted when they were trying to hide its absence. He was simply waiting. He had assessed the situation, determined that waiting was the correct response, and was now executing that response with complete commitment.
"Your name," she said.
"Wei-Ran."
"Wei-Ran," she repeated the strange syllables.
"Some choose to pronounce it as Weiran," the man said without breaking stride, "on account for easy remembrance. I do not stop them."
"Just Weiran?"
A brief pause. "Weiran of the Priests of Rathma. If the full title is necessary."
"It's not." Kashya glanced at the skeletons again. The one at the rear had not moved a fraction of an inch. "Where did you learn to manage them like that?"
Weiran's gaze tracked briefly to his escort and back.
"The same place I learned anything else. Study, then application."
"Most Necromancers who study the summoning arts don't produce…" she gestured, searching for the word.
"Soldiers," he supplied.
"I was going to say something considerably less flattering."
"I know." He adjusted his grip on the staff slightly. "Most Necromancers who practice summoning are interested in quantity. Shock value. The psychological effect of many. I find that five who respond to instruction are worth considerably more than fifty who do not."
Kashya was quiet for a moment. Behind her she could hear her fighters exchanging low words, and she chose not to hear them.
"You know what we're dealing with here. You've heard about Andariel."
"Yes."
"And you've come anyway."
He looked at her with an expression that suggested the question was perhaps self-evident.
"I didn't come for the scenery."
"No." For the first time since approaching the gate, the edge in Kashya's voice softened by the smallest degree. Not warmth. She had very little warmth left in stock. But a kind of professional recognition, one soldier reading the posture of another and finding something there that didn't need to be named aloud. "You'd better come inside."
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They gave him a tent at the edge of the camp, near the quartermaster's stores and away from the main fire where most of the Rogues gathered in the evening. This arrangement suited Weiran without him needing to say so. He established himself with minimal ceremony, set his pack down in the corner, and spent the first hour simply sitting cross-legged on the bedroll and reading from a leather-bound text that appeared to be written in a script none of the Rogues who passed by could identify.
His skeletons stood outside the tent.
This created, predictably, a significant amount of discomfort among the camp's inhabitants. Weiran had anticipated this. He'd learned long before this journey that the living had a complex and largely irrational relationship with the managed dead, and that managing their discomfort was simply another variable to account for. It was not a moral failing on their part, nor an imposition on his patience, simply a factor. He noted the wide berths people gave the tent's entrance. He noted the conversations that stopped when he emerged to eat, which he did efficiently and without apparent concern for what was served. He noted the way the younger Rogues watched his skeletons with a fascination they were trying to disguise as wariness.
He said nothing about any of this. It would resolve itself or it would not.
Kashya came to him that evening, as he'd assessed she would. She was a woman who moved on her own schedule but did not waste time, and he'd clocked her for the type who would want information gathered and organized quickly. She crouched at the tent entrance rather than stood, which he found interesting, a gesture of approximate equality from someone who was clearly habituated to authority.
"Akara wants to speak with you," she said.
"When."
"Tomorrow morning, if it suits you."
He considered this.
"It suits."
Kashya was quiet for a moment. Her eyes went to the skeletons again, as they kept doing, and he recognized in her gaze not quite the disgust that some people showed, not the performative tolerance that others managed, but something more genuine and more complicated. She was trying to reconcile something. He waited for her to finish the reconciliation.
"The one on the far left," she said. "It's standing differently from the others."
Weiran glanced.
"The pauldron on its right side is loose. It's compensating. I'll adjust it tonight."
Kashya stared at him.
"It affects the shoulder's range of motion," he said, in the same tone he might have used to explain why a wheel needed re-greasing. "If we're going into those monastery passages, compromised range of motion is a liability I'd rather not carry."
"You're telling me your skeleton," Kashya said slowly, "is adjusting its posture because it has a loose piece of armor."
"Yes."
"And you noticed this."
"I noticed it two hours ago. Tonight is the appropriate time to address it."
She looked at him for a long moment. The firelight from the camp's center didn't reach this far, and in the dimness her expression was difficult to read. But something in it had shifted in a way he couldn't precisely categorize. Not comfort, exactly. Something adjacent to it. Something that might have been, in its most cautious form, the early stage of a professional respect being carefully assembled piece by piece, the way a good archer assembles confidence in a new bow. She wasn't willing to trust it yet. That was fine. He didn't require it.
"Goodnight, Weiran," she said.
"Goodnight."
He listened to her footsteps move back toward the main fire, then set down his book, picked up the small tool he used for armor adjustments, and went to see to his soldier's shoulder.