Chapter 910: A Problem in Dreamland (Part II)
“Beef stew noodles for two!” The owner set the bowls down with the flourish of a man who believed the occasion warranted it, then polished the table with one more unnecessary pass of his cloth. Garcia was, after all, the building’s resident celebrity — the arrival of a martialist apparently elevated even a soup stall.
“Thank you.” Roland drew out two pairs of chopsticks. “Can we also get a fried egg? One each.”
“No problem!”
“If I were you,” Garcia said, already splitting her chopsticks, “I would not choose this place for breakfast with a lady.” She rolled her eyes with practiced precision. “No wonder you’re still single.”
This is slander. Roland kept his expression pleasant. If he weren’t so honorable — if he had any inclination at all toward the God’s Punishment Witches who had been waiting with such ungainly patience — the outcome would have been rather different.
“Zero needs breakfast before school,” he said. “Somewhere close.”
“I understand.” Garcia cut him off cleanly. “That’s why this doesn’t count as setting a precedent.” She mixed the green onions through the broth and watched the soup turn a deep brownish-red. Then she bent and slurped the noodles up in long, fluid pulls — the sound of someone who ate exactly as much as she wanted, without apology.
Roland’s stomach answered for him.
“You seem to manage street food well,” he said. “I assumed you’d want somewhere more formal.”
“Your assumption.” She shrugged. “I’ve been here ten years. I’ve tried every restaurant within walking distance. A decent host picks a decent restaurant — or at least one where no one will stare.” She said it without heat, but her eyes had already moved to the room.
Roland followed her gaze. Half the customers had found something fascinating to study in this direction; two passersby outside had slowed on the pavement. Garcia’s silver hair caught the morning light with the same indifference as a blade.
“I forgot about that.”
“So.” She set down her chopsticks and gave him the kind of look that stripped courtesy from a question entirely. “Why did you need to see me? The Association doesn’t assist with anything illegal.”
Why does she assume illegal? He had only just returned from headquarters yesterday. He had done nothing that fell outside the terms of a hunting license, which was already the outer edge of legality by any reasonable interpretation.
He let the hesitation run long enough to feel authentic. “I want to meet your master. Can you arrange it?”
Garcia blinked. For a moment, nothing registered.
“Ms. Lan,” he clarified. “I bailed on the first appointment and didn’t properly apologize. I’d like to do that in person.”
She studied him the way one studies a street map that has started showing unfamiliar streets. Then she waved her hand. “Really. Now you understand the value of having my master as a reference.” A small, cold smile. “Too late. She won’t see you.”
“Perhaps she dislikes me less than you imagine.”
“Get over yourself.” Garcia stabbed a piece of beef. “You missed the chance I gave you. My master does not waste her time on someone who can’t manage basic punctuality, let alone grant them a meeting.”
“Make the call anyway.”
She paused. Something crossed her face — not quite suspicion yet, more the early edge of it. “You don’t actually want to apologize, do you.”
“If I happen to learn something about martialist training methods while I’m there, that would be a welcome bonus.” Roland held her gaze without difficulty.
Garcia’s lips thinned. She looked as though she had several things to say, considered and discarded each of them, and picked up her phone.
“What’s her number—”
“You couldn’t reach her anyway.” Garcia gestured him to silence. “You need a SIM from the Association to connect to headquarters.” She pressed a key and raised the phone to her ear. “Hello, it’s me…”
She hung up inside three minutes.
“I knew it.”
“You knew what?”
“That she’d refuse.” Garcia set the phone down with more care than the moment deserved, as if she was mastering something in herself. “She reproached me for calling. Her voice dropped an entire octave when I said your name.”
Roland absorbed this without expression, though it surprised him. At the orientation, Lan’s manner toward him had not been cold — pointed, yes, measured, but not cold. He had felt her use of the hidden language as a demonstration of something deliberate, a test of perception rather than a snub. He had not imagined that. He was almost certain he had not imagined that.
Almost.
Until now, he had not been urgently motivated to resolve the mystery. He had entered the Dream World still hesitating. This small, clean defeat changed the calculation. Whatever Lan was — whatever her presence here meant — he wanted to know.
“Fair enough.” He took a careful sip of the broth. Salt, beef fat, the faint sweetness of stewed onion. “When’s the next visit to headquarters?”
“When you can handle the erosion yourself and formally become a martialist. You’re still green.”
The requirement was, in point of fact, straightforward — he could have said so — but he let it pass. “I’m looking forward to it.” He set the bowl down. “Do you remember the opening speech Ms. Lan gave us in the underground hall? She mentioned the Battle of Divine Will was approaching. What does that mean?”
Garcia exhaled slowly, the sound of someone who has had this conversation before and found it unrewarding. “My master has a fondness for a book written fifty years ago. Raison d’être. She recommended it to me as well. It develops theories about how civilization emerges and evolves — the author calls it the deity’s choice. Not a personified deity; more a principle, a logic underlying the continuity of everything. The theories are too abstract for most people here, and they don’t touch ordinary life. The book circulates only within the Association. Almost no one outside has read it.”
Roland stilled.
No question of whether he had encountered it: he hadn’t. He knew the Dream World’s contents the way a man knows his own pockets, and this book was not there. Which meant it had been made here — grown from this place’s own peculiar soil, its own particular dream of itself.
“Can I read it?”
“The copy’s at headquarters. I can borrow it from the library when I file my monthly report.” Garcia tilted her head slightly, reading him in that way she had — not unfriendly, but thorough. “If I remember.”
He had stayed too long at the edge of the question. She was already noticing the shape of his interest, the way it kept returning to the same coordinates. Roland ate the remainder of the noodles without hurry, offered a vague pleasantry about the egg, and made his exit.
He exhaled long and slow on waking, the tent’s familiar smell of canvas and cold earth settling around him.
Everything in the Dream World functioned normally when you kept away from the Martialist Association. It was only when you pulled at that particular thread that the fabric showed its strangeness. The investigation had not gone as intended — but it had not been worthless either. The God’s Punishment Witches, who had waited with the quiet forbearance of those accustomed to waiting, had managed once more to inhabit their bodies fully: to taste, to feel the warmth of soup on the tongue, to exist for a few hours as something other than memory. Watching them he had felt, despite everything, that the journey had earned its cost.
He had been calculating how many more trips he could reasonably manage before the army’s needs reasserted themselves when Lightning came through the tent’s entrance with a swallow-tailed eagle tucked under one arm — the great bird hanging limp and exhausted, its yellow eye half-closed.
“Your Majesty, express mail.” She held out the letter with both hands, her voice subdued. “Encrypted. From Neverwinter.”
Directly from the Western Region. That was not a short journey. The swallow-tailed eagle was the largest of the animal messengers, and it demanded three times the witch’s power that a gray eagle required. Honey could manage one, but barely. To send one at all meant someone had judged the news worth the cost.
Roland stroked the spent bird — the feathers damp, the body radiating the particular boneless exhaustion of something that has been pushed past its design — and freed the sealing ring from its claws. He unfolded the letter.
He stood without moving.
The Demons’ army has appeared in the Barbarian Land.
Earlier than he had anticipated. Earlier by a margin that meant his plans needed rewriting before nightfall.