The guard behind the armory's outer desk was asleep when Remus arrived, and stayed that way for a solid thirty seconds after the messenger poured a full glass of water directly onto his face, which struck Remus as either a very specific protocol this kingdom trained its palace guards in or a very personal grudge the messenger was finally getting to indulge.
"Who're you," the guard managed, blinking water out of his eyes, "you shouldn't be here."
Remus held up the small gold badge General Tacitus had pressed into his palm that morning, two conjoined birds behind a sword and shield, the same crest carved above the office door, and watched the guard's whole posture snap upright the way a man's does when his own career flashes suddenly and unpleasantly before his eyes.
"The Armoury," Remus said. "I'm told you'll show me the way down."
The guard fumbled beneath his own desk for a set of keys that weren't there, muttering something increasingly panicked under his breath, before his gaze landed on the heavy door to his right and he simply pushed it, expecting resistance and getting none. It swung open on its own weight, already unlocked, and the guard stood there a moment blinking at it, plainly confused, a man discovering a fact about his own evening that he had no memory of causing.
"Must've opened it myself before I dozed off," he said, in the tone of a man trying very hard to believe his own explanation. "Go on, straight down that hall. Five flights of stairs, then two more of my lads guarding the actual vault. Show them the badge same as you showed me."
"You're not coming with me?"
"Restricted to the badge-holder only," the guard said, already looking faintly relieved to be excused from whatever was clearly about to go wrong somewhere below him.
The hallway ran brick and ordinary for the first two flights, and then the walls changed without warning into raw cut stone, the temperature dropping fast enough that Remus felt it first in his fingertips: a mineral, ancient cold, the cold of a place the sun had never once reached in whatever centuries it had existed. The last two guards at the bottom were asleep as well, and this time Remus noticed, before he got close enough to wake them, the faint, ugly swelling along the back of each man's skull, the kind of bruise that came from something a great deal more deliberate than a long shift and a comfortable wall to lean against.
Store. Preserve, he thought, and felt the familiar, settled weight of the command land exactly where he wanted it, six Constructs already folded away in his inventory since the road from Oldtown, intact rather than broken back down into raw iron and steel the way a simpler tool would have been. He called them back out now, Stone Guardian first, then Wind Archer, then four Lesser Constructs he'd built purely for bulk and formation in the weeks since Genesis, each one settling into the corridor around him with the low, patient creak of joints that had never once complained about being asked to do this exact job twice in the same week. He set Stone Guardian at point, Wind Archer covering his back, the other four arrayed in a loose diamond, and, because whoever had left two guards unconscious in a hallway clearly wasn't planning on being found the easy way, he threaded a hair-fine silk tripwire between the diamond's outer edges before he let himself move any further.
"Search," he said, out loud, mostly out of habit.
Skill Blocked.
Two words, and nothing more needed after them, though the older instinct in him almost narrated the obvious conclusion out loud anyway before he caught himself and let the system's own message stand on its own. Whoever was down here had a stealth skill good enough to shut his own detection off entirely, which told him considerably more about the intruder's competence than it told him about their location.
They found her the old-fashioned way instead. The silk thread cut behind him three steps later, and the Lesser Construct nearest the break loosed a bolt on pure reflex, the shaft catching on something invisible in the air and stopping dead, a thin, dark line of blood already threading down toward the stone floor before the shape of a person even resolved out of nothing.
A girl in a long brown cloak folded down onto one knee, teeth gritted hard around whatever she wasn't willing to let herself say out loud, a bolt lodged clean through the meat of her left shoulder.
"I blocked every sensory skill in this hallway," she said, breathing hard through the pain, "how did you find me?"
"I didn't," Remus said, pulling her hood back to reveal dark, loose hair and a pair of brown eyes he'd already seen once today, on a bench beside a stream, looking at him with exactly this same startled fierceness. "Every guard between here and the top was already asleep before I arrived, every door was already unlocked, and the last two had welts on the backs of their skulls consistent with someone circling behind them in the dark. You didn't need to be found. You gave yourself away three separate times before I ever got here."
"Rhaeya," she said, when he asked her name, the word coming out clipped and wary, a woman deciding in real time how much of herself was safe to hand over to a stranger who'd just watched a Construct nearly put a bolt through her shoulder.
"What were you doing down here?"
"Reclaiming something that was stolen from my people," she said, and there was no hedge in it at all, only a flat, wounded certainty. She drew a short, curved blade from beneath her cloak, single-edged, dark along its length in a way that swallowed the corridor's dim light rather than reflecting it.
Remus pressed his palm to the flat of it without fully deciding to, the motion as automatic to him now as reaching for the charcoal behind his ear.
"Identify."
Item: Lion's Claw.
Design cannot be acquired.
He read the second line twice, the same careful, filing-away read he gave every refusal the System had ever handed him, and felt something close to genuine interest stir underneath the immediate disappointment. Every Design he'd ever acquired had come to him because he already possessed some piece of the underlying knowledge it grew from, iron and forge-craft and, later, the Dwarven method his father's line had never once touched. This blade refused him outright, no partial credit, no visible seam he could work at from the side, a closed door with no keyhole anywhere on its surface.
"Interesting," he said. "An item I can't reproduce. There aren't many of those left in my life these days. Give it to me, and I'll let you walk out of here with your legs still under you."
"You said you'd let me go if I told you what I was doing," she said, and there was real fury under the wariness now, sharp and freshly lit, the fury of someone realizing, mid-negotiation, that the terms had quietly moved on her.
"I said I might let you go," Remus corrected, without any real heat in it, just the flat accounting of a man who'd learned, the hard way, exactly how much daylight there was between a promise and a possibility. "Give me the blade, or I wake the guards you so carefully didn't kill, and you can explain the last hour of your evening to them instead of me."
She held his gaze a long moment, weighing something he couldn't fully read behind her eyes, and then, with visible contempt, pressed the blade into his open palm.
"You'll never even manage to swing it," she said, bitter. "It won't answer to a hand that isn't of my blood. So enjoy your trophy."
"I don't need to swing it," Remus said, honestly, since there didn't seem to be much use in pretending the restriction embarrassed him to a woman who'd clearly already worked out, from thirty feet away and one look at his Constructs, that he never drew a weapon of his own for any reason at all. "I collect things I can't build myself, purely so I remember there's still a ceiling somewhere above me. Go on. I gave my word."
"Invisibility," she said, and the word wasn't spoken to him at all, some private trigger-phrase for a skill of her own, and she simply wasn't there anymore, only the fading sound of careful, retreating footsteps to prove she ever had been.
He turned the Lion's Claw over once in his own hands after she'd gone, feeling the cold, patient weight of a thing that would never once do what he wanted it to do, and understood, with the same odd, settled satisfaction he'd felt over Goruk's blade a month ago, that not every problem needed solving to be worth keeping.
"Store. Preserve," he said, and tucked the refusal away where he kept every other rule the System had ever handed him.
The armory itself, once he finally reached it, was less a room than a cathedral built for weapons instead of gods, headless statues lining both walls in poses he'd have called martial if he'd known which martial tradition they came from, four arms on every one of them, four legs, hands built with an extra finger no human sculptor would have added by accident. Whoever these figures had honored, nobody currently breathing seemed to remember, and Remus filed that particular mystery away with the same careful patience he gave everything he couldn't yet solve.
He worked the actual vault methodically, palm to hilt, palm to pommel, palm to the flat of every enchanted blade the collection held, letting Identify pull the design out of each one in turn while his Constructs held the doors, and by the time the two guards began stirring groggily back to consciousness behind him, he'd cleared the room's entire catalogue.
141 Enchantments Acquired.
One hundred and forty-one. He said the number out loud once, quietly, the way he always did with a total that size, mostly to make himself actually believe it rather than simply read it off the air. He had, somewhere in the last hour, gone from a man who understood the theory of a magic sword to a man who could build almost any sword the entire recorded history of this kingdom had ever thought to enchant, and the only price he'd paid for it was a stranger's shoulder and a blade he'd never be able to properly use.
He thought, on his way back up through the cold stone stairwell, that it was probably the cheapest trade he'd made in either of his lives so far, and made a private note not to expect his luck to hold that way twice.
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