Jinyang City gained a column of refugees. Black Ridge City gained something rather different: guests.

Strange guests.

At the front, a sharp-eyed scout thief rode a long-legged Swiftlizard, picking the path ahead. Behind him, a company of mercenaries escorted a line of prison wagons — inside each one, bound figures who had clearly been subjected to sustained and creative cruelty, their flesh flayed, their teeth removed, their bodies reduced to something closer to skeletons than men. At the rear lumbered a massive sub-dragon specimen: a Bigfoot Ground-Strider, one of those enormous, plodding creatures that moved slowly enough that watching one made you feel time had thickened. On its broad back sat an absurdly opulent golden throne.

The throne’s occupants were two silver-armored warriors dressed in matching gear, a female slave, and a small girl clutching an infant.

The whole procession looked like a slave-hunting outfit — except that slave-hunting outfits did not typically deploy quasi-Sky-rank Ground-Striders, and they certainly didn’t accessorize with golden thrones. Those were reserved for city lords and above.

What made it truly inexplicable was that the throne was not occupied by anyone of obvious status. No noble. No commander. Just two identically-dressed warriors, a low-born slave, and what was obviously a starving refugee girl. Even seated above everyone else on that ridiculous golden perch, with the height advantage and the ostentatious trappings doing everything possible to confer dignity — the fear and uncertainty in the women’s eyes gave them away immediately. Anyone with half a pair of functioning eyes could see they were commoners. Refugees. People who had no business anywhere near a golden throne.

So why were they on one?

The gate-captain responsible for collecting the city’s entry tax found this deeply puzzling.

“The rich feast while the poor freeze in the road…” he half-heard one of the silver-armored warriors say to the other as the procession drew near.

“Don’t start quoting poetry,” the second warrior replied — female, or close enough that the gate-captain would have bet on it, even hearing her through the crowd noise at distance. “This isn’t the time for that. We have a schedule. The swamp won’t cross itself. Focus on the immediate objective.”

“Who are you, and what’s your business?” The gate-captain stepped forward to intercept the scout thief at the front, laying on the authority. It didn’t matter who you were in Black Ridge City — merchant, slaver, pilgrim, or wandering lunatic — you paid your tax. That was the law. And the law came from the lord of Black Ridge himself, who happened to be the national ruler’s younger brother. In the Windstill Nation, the lord of Black Ridge was not someone whose arrangements got ignored.

The scout thief vaulted off his Swiftlizard with the practiced ease of a man who had done this several hundred times, arranged his face into an expression of warm familiarity — the kind that said we’re old friends, surely — and produced a small coin pouch, which he pressed into the gate captain’s hand while simultaneously leaning in to murmur into his ear at some length. He gestured back toward the Ground-Strider, added a few more words in an undertone, and then produced from somewhere inside his coat a second, considerably larger and more satisfyingly heavy coin pouch, which he offered up with a grin as the party’s entry tax.

All standard procedure. Bribing the gate guard was a scout thief’s second most natural activity after breathing, and paying the city tax was legally required everywhere. Nothing about this interaction was unusual.

And yet the gate-captain stood there afterward with a furrow between his brows that he couldn’t entirely account for.

It was the smile. The scout thief’s smile didn’t feel like flattery. It felt like something else — something he couldn’t name. A private amusement. Like a man who knows something funny is about to happen to the person he’s smiling at, and is already enjoying it in advance.

He watched one of his men open the coin pouch and count the contents. The coins were real — no doubt about that, and there were far more of them than you’d expect from any normal slave-hunting crew. More than most merchant caravans, even.

Were these people just… lavishing money on a city entry tax?

He looked again at the prisoners in the wagons. Wrecks, all of them. Whatever they’d done to these people, there wasn’t much left. No resale value whatsoever. Why would anyone pay a thousand gold coins in entry tax for a cargo that wasn’t worth a tenth of that?

Normal slave crews complained loudly about paying a hundred gold. This lot had handed over nearly a thousand and the scout thief was still smiling.

This was profoundly wrong.

The procession filed into the city. The gate-captain stood at his post and tried to work out what was bothering him. He had more money coming to him than usual. He should be pleased. He wasn’t pleased. Something had gone sideways, and he couldn’t identify what.

“Grayhound. What did he tell you?”

His subordinate trotted over. “Captain, it’s a slave-hunting crew — regular run between Windstill and Galeforce Nation. Just passing through. Main business is smuggling, apparently, slavecatching on the side. Sounds like they’ve had a good haul recently. Very loose with the coin — paid eight hundred gold in tax, Captain. Eight hundred. After we hand up the two-hundred-gold maximum, the rest stays here. Brothers are going to eat well tonight. Haven’t seen a windfall like this in — what, half a year? More? This rotten backwater posting finally—”

The captain stopped listening.

Eight hundred gold. In entry tax. For a crew of slavecatchers hauling a load of prisoners who looked like they’d been put through a grinder.

The gate-captain tried very hard to feel the pleasure his subordinate was feeling, and failed completely. What he felt instead, creeping up the back of his neck, was something unpleasantly close to dread.

No smuggling operation paid eight hundred gold at a city gate. That wasn’t a transaction — it was a signal. But what was it signaling, and to whom?

The commoner slave on the golden throne. The refugee girl. The smile that wasn’t flattery.

The two silver-armored warriors who had looked, objectively, like they had the cultivation level of a moderately fit farmer — and yet had made every hair on his body stand up.

He was still trying to work through it when he heard wings.

A gryphon dropped from the sky in front of the gate, its rider barely managing to stay on. The rider was a courier, and he was painted with blood from the collar down. He didn’t make it past the gate before he pitched forward off the saddle and hit the ground.

The gate-captain reached him first. The man was still alive — barely. As the captain knelt over him, the courier surfaced from whatever had been pulling him under, found the captain’s hand, and locked on.

“Quick — quick — report to the lord — Lamb-Hoof City, Sandstone City, Gobi City, Thornwall City, Walnut City — all taken — I just got out of Oxhorn — I’m — I’m the only one who made it out — tell the lord — tell him — ask the national ruler for help — they’re—”

He had more to say. He ran out of time to say it.

His head fell. He was gone.

The gate-captain was on his feet before the body hit the ground, every nerve in him firing at once. The whole outer ring of Black Ridge territory — five cities — gone? In what, a day? Two? And where were the armies that garrisoned those places? Where were the commanders?

The prisoners in the wagons.

The prisoners who had been tortured beyond recognition. Bone and scraped flesh. The remains of people who had, presumably, at some point, been someone of consequence.

The gate-captain went very cold.

He thought about Lamb-Hoof City. Sandstone City. Gobi City. Thornwall City. Walnut City. The commanders of each of those garrisons. He thought about what a person looked like after being systematically reduced to something you could barely recognize as human. He thought about the prison wagons.

He thought about the scout thief’s smile.

He was soaked through with sweat before the thought finished forming.

“Captain? What’s wrong?” His subordinates stared at him.

“I have urgent business with the national ruler,” he said. His voice came out more controlled than he expected. “You lot hold the gate. The tax money — my share is yours. Split it however you like. Have a good night.”

“Understood, Captain — come back soon!”

“Captain, the gryphon’s ready!” Quick-fingered Grayhound had already caught the courier’s fallen mount and was holding the reins out.

The gate-captain looked at his men. “Brothers,” he said, with a particular weight on the word. “Goodbye.”

He swung up into the saddle, drove the gryphon into the air, and ran it at its absolute limit.

Two days later, somewhere over the countryside between Black Ridge and Greenvalley City, the gryphon’s legs gave out beneath it. He abandoned the animal and continued on foot, driving himself with everything he had.

His goal was not to deliver the message — a disaster of that scale would have reached the national ruler through a dozen other channels before he even mounted up. His goal was simple: reach Greenvalley City. The national ruler’s seat. The capital. The one place in the Windstill Nation that had never once seen a battle in living memory, sheltered behind layers of distance and the ruler’s own formidable strength, nestled deep in the nation’s rear where the fighting fronts couldn’t reach.

If anywhere was safe, it was there.

He stripped his gate-captain’s uniform somewhere in a forest, buried it, and pulled on a deer-hide coat stripped from a buck he caught along the way. A hunter, just a hunter, in from the deep woods to sell pelts. He’d held a cultivator’s strength for years — he wouldn’t starve. He just needed a place to disappear into and a new name to disappear under.

The needle-sharp peak of Greenvalley City’s tallest tower appeared on the horizon, and for the first time in two days, he let himself breathe.

There. Safe.

He walked up to Greenvalley City’s gate with his forged identity documents and his tax payment and his hunter’s story, smiled his most harmless smile at the guards — who looked at his worn coat with mild contempt, relieved him of two extra gold coins that weren’t technically required, and waved him through with a grunt of “get lost.“

“Hey — look at that,” one of the gate guards said behind him, voice picking up with sudden interest. “Now that’s a procession. A Ground-Strider with a golden throne on its back — whose operation is that, you think?”

The former gate-captain of Black Ridge City did not run.

He turned around.

The slave-hunting procession from Black Ridge City was entering Greenvalley City.

They had more mercenaries now — a dozen or so additional escorts folded into the group. A few more prison wagons in the train. The one consistent detail was the scout thief out front on his Swiftlizard, eyes bright, smile intact. The golden throne on the Ground-Strider’s back still carried its strange passengers: the slave woman, the girl with the infant, and above them both, the two silver-armored warriors in their identical gear.

The former gate-captain felt the blood leave his face.

He knew exactly how far it was from Black Ridge City to Greenvalley City. By gryphon, flying day and night without rest, it was a ten-day journey. The reason he’d managed it in three was a spatial rift he’d discovered and used secretly — a shortcut that cut seventy percent off the distance, that nobody else was supposed to know about.

And this group had covered the same distance.

On foot.

With a Ground-Strider.

He stopped thinking about it, because continuing to think about it would require looking at one of the prison wagons, and he was fairly sure he recognized the bloodied figure slumped inside the nearest one, and he absolutely did not want to confirm that.

The scout thief landed lightly from the Swiftlizard’s back, produced his coin pouch, pressed it warmly into the gate guard’s hand, and then — without breaking stride or letting his smile shift by a single degree — turned and addressed the former gate-captain of Black Ridge City directly:

“Well, look at that. You’ve got some impressive speed on you. Didn’t expect you to beat us here.”