“Good to meet you.” People were still watching them, some covertly, others openly staring.
Naomi merely gave the man a chin-up as a greeting.
Nyrix glanced about then nodded toward the side. “How about we do a quick walk of the perimeter? Get away for a bit?”
“Good idea,” said Scorio, and followed the other man as he led the way through the press, past a few tents, and out to the edge of the dunes.
The air was alive with the sounds of the sprawling war camp. Distant clinks of metal, hoarse shouts, the occasional mysterious boom or muffled explosion. Overhead the Dread Majesty lingered, anchored by hoary ropes, and the air was textured with smells and stench that only the few days aboard the whale ship had prepared them for. Campfire smoke, cooking meat, human stink, the metallic tang of heated metal, the noxious fumes of latrines hidden somewhere close.
Nyrix didn’t stop upon stepping out past the last tents, but instead led them out onto the dunes proper. The consistency of the sands was gritty, and Scorio scooped up a handful, curious if they were condensed mana like the band that surrounded Bastion, but no. He thumbed at the coarse grains and saw that they were tiny fragments of shell, perhaps even the bone they were named for, bleached white and strangely light.
“Where are we going?” demanded Naomi.
“Top of that dune.” Nyrix pointed. “It’ll give us a view over the camp and get us away from everything. It can get pretty overwhelming in there after a while.”
“Is it safe?” Scorio scanned the dunes but saw no sign of fiends.
“Nothing in hell is safe, but we should be fine as long as we stay close. We don’t bother with perimeter patrols or the like. We’ve enough folks with powers suited to monitoring our camp that nothing can approach without being spotted.”
They slogged up a sandy slope which grew steep at the last, and then turned to plop down on the peak and gaze back over the camp. They weren’t so high that they had a true view over all of it, but enough to gain a sense of its sprawl.
“Anyway, let me introduce myself properly. I’m Nyrix, Dread Blaze, class of 871. I joined House Chimera with a release clause that I exercised last year. I spent some time at the Chimera outpost in the shadow of the Green Giant, but decided I couldn’t stay away, so here I am.” Nyrix smiled disarmingly. “I’m still trying to decide how bad an idea that was.”
“Why does everyone here focus on their class so much?” asked Scorio.
Nyrix shrugged. “Great Souls love hierarchy? Back in the Academy everyone was the same class, so the focus was on who was what rank, but the further out into hell you get, the more the classes mix. So identifying your year indicates how quickly you’ve climbed. Some people take it very seriously.”
“Why?” asked Naomi. “Posturing?”
Nyrix grinned. “Mostly. The youngest Dread Blazes are from the class. 873, correct?”
Scorio nodded.
“The very best from my class, 871, have just made Blood Baron. Have you heard of Mitoko?”
“Yes,” snapped Naomi. “Why do people keep saying he doesn’t count?”
“They,” corrected Nyrix. “Because they’re really weird. They’re not a single person, but some kind of collective. Regardless, even someone as broken as Mitoko won’t make Charnel Duke at the very earliest for another four years. It’s just not done, except maybe by someone like Iulius the Golden. Once you get a sense of how quickly people advance, you can figure out how hungry, how talented, and thus how dangerous someone is based on their rank and class.”
“So my being a Dread Blaze and class of 873?” asked Scorio.
“Pretty damned dangerous.” Nyrix grinned, dug out a plate of pale pink chitin from the sand, and set to crumbling its edge. “I’m respectable at 871, but if I don’t make Pyre Lord within a couple of years, I’ll lose that glamorous edge that makes me oh-so popular.”
Naomi snorted.
“Right?” Nyrix broke a chunk of chitin off and tossed it down the slope. “It’s ridiculous, but also a fair way to assess ambition. Take Rharvyn, one of the other Dread Blazes in Company 16. He’s class of 865. That means he’s been alive over a decade, so two or three of his classmates are already down in the Azure Expanse, while he’s still up here in the Telurian Band taking orders from Taron, who’s five years younger than he is. Do his powers allow him to hurl explosive death hundreds of yards away, cratering battlefields and killing tons of fiends? Yes. Do people think he’s got a future, and treat him with the respect he deserves?”
“Of course not,” said Naomi.
“Right or wrong, that’s how our kind works. Or most of them. They try to get a sense of who’s on the road to glory and then butter them up with compliments. Lose momentum, fail to ascend, and you’ll be overlooked and ignored.”
“Fyrona is Taron’s sister?” asked Scorio.
“Sure is. They’re both Class of 872.”
“But she’s just a Dread Blaze?”
“And you can imagine how that makes their relationship complicated.” Nyrix raised both palms. “Not that I blame Fyrona. It must be incredibly frustrating to be compared to Taron. The man’s a prodigy. Pyre Lord in four years? That’s cutting edge.”
Scorio looked out over the camp, mulling this over.
“So, ah.” Nyrix tossed the broken chitin away. “You fought Charnel Duke Plassus?”
Naomi snorted. “Impressive. I didn’t think you’d last this long without asking.”
Scorio sighed and recounted a bare-bones version of the fight. “So it’s a lot less impressive than it sounds.”
“And you’re the guy who helped Imperator Sol fight off Imogen the Woe?”
Naomi elbowed Scorio. “Explain how that’s also a lot less impressive than people have made it out to be.”
“I just distracted her for a second,” protested Scorio. “She recognized me from a past life, and so I had a little influence on her. I don’t know. It was enough for Sol to do the rest.”
“Sol,” mocked Naomi. “He’s on first name terms with Imperators.”
“And you, ah…” Nyrix searched for the right word. “Killed Chancellor Praximar? That was also you?”
“You’re well-informed out here,” said Scorio dryly.
Nyrix smiled. “Army camps thrive on gossip. We’ve been idling with nothing to do for almost a year. People are going mad.”
“Almost a year?” The scruffy, dilapidated nature of the camp suddenly made more sense.
“The Charnel Duke’s been…” Nyrix considered. “We had a big loss just before I joined up. Over a hundred killed by the Blood Ox, and it’s said the True Fiend took Plassus’ eyes and broke most his bones. Took him a month to heal, and that was with Vermina’s help. The Blood Ox did something to his body, saturated it with bad mana. I won’t claim to understand it.”
“That’s when he lost his nerve?” asked Naomi.
Nyrix winced. “Don’t talk like that.”
“Why? Isn’t it true?”
“Look.” Nyrix turned to face her. “For one, you never know who’ll report that kind of language and get you in trouble. But second, it’s bad for the company. Bad for morale.”
Naomi scoffed and looked away.
“I’m serious,” said Nyrix earnestly. “Great Souls are like cats. Do you know how much work it takes to keep almost a thousand of them grouped together like this? Half of them want to fade away and head deeper into hell out of sheer boredom. Sitting in a war camp does nobody’s advancement any favors. Everybody down there is focused almost exclusively on reaching their next rank, which means convincing them to wait for a war that feels stalled out takes every ounce of authority the Blood Barons and Pyre Lords can muster. Talking like that is a literal attack on our forces.”
Naomi met Nyrix’s gaze. “It’s not my fault the leadership has screwed this up so badly.”
“No,” allowed Nyrix, choosing his words carefully. “But either you’re here to help, or you should leave. Because there’s no room for folks who are going to bring other people down.”