Chapter Six: What The Soldiers Said

The forge did not get quiet at the end of the day so much as it changed the kind of noise it made.

The hammering stopped and the roar of the fire dropped away to a low breathing sound, but the iron kept hissing whenever Torvan dunked another finished piece into the quenching trough, and the great leather bellows in the corner sighed every few minutes as the banked coals were kept alive for the morning. From the front room, through the open door, came the low rumble of men talking, which had not stopped since the middle of the afternoon and showed no sign of stopping now.

Naruto had spent the last hour sorting scrap.

It was the kind of job that got handed to the newest pair of hands anywhere in the world, and he had done it without complaining, mostly because complaining had never once in his life made a pile of metal smaller. He stacked flat bar with flat bar, rod with rod, offcuts by length, and put the genuinely useless pieces in a barrel by the door. The work had a rhythm to it and the rhythm was restful, and he had needed something restful after a week in which the most restful thing that had happened to him was dying.

He had been at the forge eight days now. In that time he had learned a number of things.

He had learned that Torvan could tell the temperature of a piece of steel by its colour to within a margin that Naruto found genuinely unnerving, and that he would not explain how, because as far as he was concerned it was not a thing that required explaining any more than knowing when a person was angry with you. He had learned that Torvan's wife was named Mira, that she ran the front room and the accounts and effectively the entire business, and that she threw bread at people she liked, which Naruto had discovered on the second morning when a warm roll had hit him in the side of the head from a distance of nine feet.

He had learned that nobody in this city thought there was anything strange about paying a boy in coin at the end of a week, which meant that in four more days he would have money, and money meant clothes that were actually his and a bed that was actually his, and possibly a proper meal that did not involve either bread or somebody's stew.

And he had learned that he did not sleep.

That had been the eighth thing, and it was the one he liked least. He lay on the cot in the corner of the back room every night and he closed his eyes and he stayed exactly as awake as he had been standing up. He could get close, if he breathed slowly and stopped thinking on purpose, into a kind of grey drifting that was restful without ever properly going under. But it was not sleep. His body simply did not want it, the way it did not want food, the way it did not want rest, and after eight nights of it he had begun to suspect that he was going to have a great deal of spare time in this world and nothing to spend it on.

He set the last length of bar on its stack and straightened up, wiping soot off his forearm and onto his trousers, where it joined a considerable quantity of previous soot.

Torvan came back through from the front, wiping his hands on a rag that had given up all ambition of ever being clean.

"Busy today?" he grunted.

"Yeah, I noticed."

"Soldiers can't get enough of new blades, seems like." Torvan tossed the rag onto the bench. "Third order this week from the garrison, and that's not counting private commissions."

Naruto shrugged. "Guess that's what happens when there's a war going on."

Torvan looked at him for a moment. It was a longer look than the conversation deserved, and Naruto felt it and kept his face doing what it had been doing.

Then the smith jerked his head toward the front of the shop.

"Come on. Might as well hear what they're saying for yourself."

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

The front room was warm and low-ceilinged and smelled of oil and cold iron and, faintly, of whatever Mira had cooked at midday.

Four men in armour were standing and sitting around the long counter with tin cups in their hands. Their helmets were on the floor by their feet, which told Naruto something about how long they had been there. Two of them were young, barely older than he was and considerably less marked by it. One was middle-aged and built like a gatepost and had not said a word in the time Naruto had been listening through the door.

The fourth was doing the talking. He had a thick beard going grey at the corners and a scar that came down his cheek from just below the eye to the line of his jaw, the kind of scar that tells you the blade was moving downward and the man was not.

Naruto leaned against the wall at the end of the counter and made himself into furniture, which was a skill he had spent a childhood developing for entirely different reasons.

"I'm telling you," the veteran was saying, and his voice was not raised at all, which made everybody lean toward him, "the Demon King is not a story people tell children so they'll go to bed. He's real. He's been at the kingdoms for centuries. Every few decades somebody hurts his army. Really hurts them, I mean, enough that the fighting stops for a while and everybody gets to have a generation of peace and forget what he looks like."

He turned his cup on the counter.

"And then they come back. And they comes back stronger than the last time."

The younger of the two boys leaned in with his elbows on the wood and his eyes wide open.

"What's he like? I've heard he's a giant. Ten feet tall, they say. And that he can turn a man to ash just by looking at him."

The veteran snorted. It was not an unkind sound, exactly, but it was not kind either.

"I don't know about the size, lad. I've never seen him and I intend to keep that record intact." He took a pull from the cup. "But I've seen what his army leaves behind. Villages gone overnight. Not burned, some of them. Just gone, and everything still standing, and nobody in it. Demons don't spare anybody. Man, woman, child, it makes no difference to them at all. They are heartless killers, every last one of them, and anybody who tells you different has never been north of the plateau."

Naruto felt his face change and caught it and put it back.

Heartless killers.

The words went into his stomach and sat there with a weight out of all proportion to their length. Without any decision on his part his hand came up toward his forehead and his fingers brushed the place where two horns were, under a transformation that had not slipped in eight days and could not be seen by anyone in this room.

"Oi." One of the other soldiers was looking at him. "You listening, kid?"

"Uh, yeah." Naruto snapped back and got a grin onto his face, the wide easy one that had got him out of more trouble than any technique he had ever learned. "Yeah, just thinking."

"Thinking you don't want to run into one of them, I'd wager," another man said, and laughed, and the laugh had a dark thing underneath it that nobody in the room found funny including him.

Naruto let the conversation move on and did not join it again for a while.

Heartless killers. He turned it over. If that was true, if it was even mostly true, then what was the point of it? Wars had reasons. Terrible reasons, stupid reasons, reasons that fell apart the moment anybody examined them, but reasons. Somebody wanted land. Somebody wanted a trade route. Somebody's grandfather had been humiliated at a treaty signing eighty years ago and the grudge had been carefully handed down like a family sword. He had spent his whole life inside a system built out of exactly that kind of thing, and he had hated it, and he had at least understood it.

Here, four men in armour were sitting around a counter stating as a settled fact that there existed an entire species whose reason for being was to kill people, and none of them thought this needed any explanation whatsoever.

And if that was the case, then where did it leave him? A boy with horns who had never killed anybody outside of a fight he had not started, standing in a blacksmith's front room wearing somebody else's face.

"How do you fight one?" he asked, and made it sound idle, the way a boy asks about something he has heard in a story.

The veteran turned his head and considered him for a moment.

"You don't," he said. "Not one on one. Not unless you're a mage of some standing, or a priest with real weight behind him, or one of those adventurers with a name people already know." He set the cup down. "A demon looks at a man in armour the way you'd look at a dog with a stick in its mouth. It isn't that they're stronger, though most of them are. It's that they're old. The one that took the village at Herten Ford had been alive four hundred years. Four hundred. How many mistakes do you suppose a thing makes in the four hundredth year that it made in the first?"

"So what do you do?"

"You fight them in numbers, and you lose most of the numbers." The veteran shrugged one shoulder, and the shrug was the most eloquent part of the whole answer. "Or you get out of the way and let somebody better handle it. There's no shame in the second one, lad. There's a great deal of shame in pretending otherwise and getting your squad killed proving it."

The gatepost of a man, the one who had not spoken all evening, made a low noise of agreement into his cup, and it was the only sound he made the entire time Naruto was in the room.

Naruto filed all of that away.

Old. That was a new piece and it did not fit anywhere he could put it. In his own world, age had been a thing that happened to people and eventually stopped them. Kakashi at thirty could not do what he had done at twenty. The Third had been a legend who had also, by the end, been an old man with bad knees. Here, apparently, the older a thing got the worse it became to fight, which implied that whatever demons were, they did not wear out.

He thought about a body that did not get hungry, and did not get tired, and had not slept in eight days, and put that thought somewhere he could not see it.

"I heard the Hero from the central region is the one who's going to end it this time," the young soldier said, and his voice had hope in it that made him sound about twelve.

"Aye." The veteran nodded slowly. "Name of Himmel. Word is he's already put a party together. A warrior, a mage, and a healer. A proper one, not the sort who turns up in a village and asks for a donation." He set his cup down. "They're going north. All the way north, to the palace in the Northernmost Province."

Torvan, behind the counter, made a sound of flat disapproval in his throat.

"That's suicide, that is! No one's ever reached that palace and walked back out again."

"Maybe not. But if it's anyone, it's him." The young soldier had gone brighter still. "They say he's the chosen one. The only man alive who can pull the sword out of the stone."

Naruto's head came up before he could stop it.

"Sword out of a stone?"

Every face at the counter turned toward him, and the young soldier looked at him the way a man looks at somebody who has just asked which end of a horse goes forward.

"Yeah. The Holy Sword." He said it slowly, as a kindness. "It's been stuck in a stone in a village up in the mountains for a thousands of years. Only the true Hero can draw it. And that sword is the only weapon in the world that can kill the Demon King for good. Properly. So that he doesn't come back."

"Right," Naruto said, nodding as though this were all filing itself away neatly and not in fact bouncing off the inside of his skull.

Privately he thought that it sounded exactly like one of Pervy Sage's books. The bad ones. The ones with the maps in the front.

The veteran drained the last of his cup and set it down on the counter with a small final knock.

"And guess where they'll be coming through, on their way north."

Naruto glanced up. "Here?"

"Exactly here." The man nodded. "Bakur Canyons is the last real town before the Northern Plateau. The only road to the Demon King's palace runs straight through these gates, unless a man fancies taking the mountain passes alone, which nobody sane has ever done twice."

The young soldier grinned all over his face. "So if we're lucky, we'll see the Hero in the flesh."

"Or unlucky." The veteran did not grin. "If he's here, it means the Demon King's forces aren't far awat. They follow the Hero the way gulls follow a fishing boat. Wherever that man goes, the fighting arrives about a week later."

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

Naruto stayed quiet after that, looking down at the scarred wood of the counter and following the grain with his eyes while the conversation moved on to somebody's brother and somebody else's pay.

This Hero Himmel sounded like a very large deal indeed.

Which meant that he was probably the single most useful person in this world for a boy with no memory of arriving in it. A man who travelled with a mage. A man who had walked the length of the continent and had seen things. If anybody knew whether a person could arrive in this world from somewhere else, it was going to be somebody like that, or somebody he knew, or somebody in a library he had access to.

There was a problem with that, and it was a big one.

If Himmel was on a holy mission to end demons, and if Naruto's new body with its horns and its mana and its complete absence of chakra put him in that category as far as anybody here was concerned, then walking up to the man and saying hello was going to be a conversation with exactly one likely ending.

He would be asking for help from the person most likely to kill him on sight.

Later, when the soldiers had finally gone and Torvan was pulling the shutters across the front windows, Naruto stood in the doorway with his arms folded and looked out at the street.

The night air came in cool off the high ground and it was a relief after the heat of the shop. The city had not gone to bed. Down the length of the street, merchants were still calling out over what was left on their tables, cutting prices to shift the last of the day's bread. Two children ran past chasing something that neither of them had, both of them shrieking. Somewhere behind him a tavern door opened and let out a burst of laughter and a smell of spilled beer and then closed again.

It was hard to believe that somewhere out beyond these walls, a king made of something other than a man was emptying villages one at a time.

Then again, Naruto thought, he had stood in a crater that used to be Konoha, and there had been laughter in that village too, right up until the morning of the day it stopped. He, of all people, had no business being surprised at how quickly a place full of noise could become a place full of nothing.

He let out a long breath.

"Guess I gotta work out where I stand in all this," he said, under his breath. "Demon or not."

"Talking to yourself again?"

Naruto jumped about an inch, which was embarrassing, and covered it by smirking over his shoulder.

"Old habit, y'know."

Torvan grunted. He did not ask what Naruto had been talking to himself about, which was the thing Naruto had decided he liked most about the man. He drove the last shutter home, dropped the bar across the front door with a heavy wooden thud, and turned the key.

"Get some rest, kid. Tomorrow's going to be busy."

"Yeah."

Naruto did not rest.

He lay on the cot in the back room with his hands behind his head, staring up at the rough beams of the ceiling, and let his thoughts go where they wanted, which was in circles.

He could keep his head down. That was one option, and it was a real one. He had eight days of proof that it worked. Hold the transformation, do the work, take the coin, learn the language of the place, find out how the world was shaped, and stay quietly alive at the bottom of it where nobody looked. There were worse lives. He had lived a worse one, for about nine years.

Or he could find a way to get near the Hero's party. Not walk up to them. He was reckless, not stupid, whatever Sakura had written on the subject. But near. Close enough to listen. Close enough to work out whether there was anything in that group that could tell him what had happened to him, and whether there was a road out of here, and what exactly a demon was supposed to be in a world that had apparently settled the question long before he arrived in it.

Both roads had a cliff at the end of them, as far as he could tell. One ended with him spending the rest of a very long life pretending to be a face he had made up. The other ended, quite possibly, with the most famous swordsman on the continent putting a blade through his chest because of the shape of his forehead.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, in a place that had not been there two weeks ago, a voice that was very like his mother's laughed out loud.

You were never the type to sit still, dattebane.

Naruto's mouth twitched in the dark.

"Yeah, yeah," he muttered. "I heard you."

And then he lay there for the rest of the night with his eyes open, listening to the city breathe, entirely certain of one thing and one thing only.

When Hero Himmel came through the gates of Bakur Canyons, Naruto Uzumaki was going to end up in the middle of whatever happened next. He always did. The only question left open was whether he would be standing up at the end of it.

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