The second barricade was a single layer of crate-timber lashed to standing rock. Six men were loading document cases and a strongbox in the cut behind it.
Vhar understood that the moment he saw how thin it was: a single layer of crate-timber lashed to standing rock, manned by four men instead of the first wall's dozen, none of them holding the disciplined spacing the earlier line had kept. Discipline took time to teach. This wall had been built in minutes by men who already knew they were buying someone else time rather than winning anything themselves.
Behind him, the pit lay quiet. Bodies covered the quarry floor, and no one still moved toward cover or the trees. The men at the second wall had watched Vhar smash the first barricade and kill its defenders. Four men could not stop him after thirty had failed.
He crossed the distance to it the same way he'd crossed the first one, and this time the crossing didn't surprise him on the way through.
WHOOSH!
The wood exploded under his shoulder before the motion finished, and the nearest defender's spear thrust caught nothing but the space Vhar's ribs had already left. His palm found a second man's sternum before the first man's spear finished its useless arc back around.
THUD!
The two behind them turned to run. Vhar's forearm crossed one throat and his elbow found the other man's temple in the same continuous motion. Both men hit the ground before they reached the broken wall.
CRACK!
Past the collapsed second wall, the ground opened into a narrower cut where the quarry's original workers had once dug deepest. Six men were loading a handcart with sealed document cases and a locked strongbox, while the man in the leather cuirass stood over them with a drawn sword and a voice gone hoarse from shouting.
"Go," the man said. "Now. However far you get is farther than staying gets you."
Two of the six abandoned the cart entirely and ran for a gap in the quarry's far wall Vhar hadn't noticed from the tree line: a goat path barely wide enough for one man, angling down and away from the eastern gap Nyra was covering. The other four kept loading, hands shaking, glancing back at Vhar's approach with the specific terror of men who had already watched thirty become considerably less than thirty.
Vhar let the two runners go.
He could have closed that distance as easily as the first forty meters. The four men still standing between him and the man who'd given the order to run simply mattered more than whatever they'd grabbed off the cart. This one had already made itself clear.
The leather-cuirassed man stepped between Vhar and the cart, sword raised in a stance that had clearly cost someone real training to teach him, and held it there without retreating.
"You're not the first thing I've had to hold a line against," he said, sword steady. "Doesn't mean I get to walk away from you the way I walked away from the others."
"Step away from the cart." Vhar closed the remaining distance without hurrying. "You cannot protect those men."
The sword came up fast and clean for Vhar's throat. Vhar took the cut on his forearm instead of stepping back. The swordsman leaned too far into the strike. Vhar drove his knee into the exposed ribs before the man could recover.
BANG!
The impact caved his ribs in and threw him backward before the sword could complete a second cut. He was dead before he landed, and the fight in the narrow cut ended with him.
The four remaining crew members dropped what they were carrying and put their hands where Vhar could see them, which was the only decision left that could still change what happened to them.
"On the ground," Vhar said. "Now."
They went down without needing to be told twice.
Tavik reached the cut a few minutes later, Ossa a step behind him, both of them picking their way past the wreckage of two walls and however many bodies lay between them. Tavik crouched over the strongbox first, working its ruined lock open with the flat of his knife rather than a key nobody living was going to produce.
Ledgers. Dozens of them, water-stained but legible, tracking shipments by road and weight rather than by any name that would mean something on its own, until Tavik turned to a page near the back and went very still over it.
He laid the pages out on a slab one at a time. A damp sheet stuck to the next. Tavik separated them with the edge of his knife, then weighted their corners with loose stones so the wind could not carry any writing away. Ossa stood on the other side of the slab and read the columns with him. She did not touch a page until he told her which corner was dry enough to hold.
"These dates overlap the complaints," she said. "Not just ours. Look. This load went missing the same week the east rope band lost three carts."
Tavik followed her finger to the weight listed beside it. "And this one was logged two days after the north outpost reported poisoned water skins." He pressed his thumb into the stone beside the page, hard enough to whiten the knuckle. "They took from everybody who could not prove who had taken it."
"This routing mark." He held it out to Vhar without looking away from it. "I've seen it stamped into finished tool casings before. Foundry work. Somebody's been feeding raw material into a supply chain that ends at people who make weapons and armor for a living."
"Feeding it how," Vhar said.
"However this crew's been taking it. Cache thefts, snare lines, whatever they could pull off contracted ground without a name attached." Tavik's jaw tightened over the page. "Somebody on the other end doesn't ask where materials like this actually come from, as long as the price stays low enough not to ask twice."
"And who's on the other end," Vhar said.
Tavik turned two more pages. No buyer name appeared. "Whoever built this chain kept names out of a book that could be stolen." He closed the ledger. "We know these materials reach a foundry. The buyer did not sign the pages."
"That's still more than we had this morning."
Ossa had crouched beside the four surrendered men, scent-slits working, and looked up at Tavik with something unreadable in her face. "They're afraid of him." She nodded toward Vhar without looking away from the prisoners. "Not as afraid as they are of whoever that cart was headed toward."
"Everyone who's still alive after today should be afraid of both," Tavik said.
One of Ossa's people arrived leading the prisoner taken back at camp the night before, still bound at the wrists, brought forward at Tavik's earlier order to see whether a face from the quarry would loosen anything a fire-lit interrogation hadn't. The prisoner's eyes found the ledger in Tavik's hands before they found anything else in the ruined cut, and something in his face gave way at the sight of it.
"That's the real book," he said. "The one they kept saying didn't exist if anyone ever asked."
"You knew about this." Tavik held it up rather than handing it over. "And you told us you didn't know how many total, in the whole operation."
"The count, no." The prisoner's split lip had healed enough overnight to crack open again when he spoke. "A book being real and a book being read are two different things. Nobody let me close enough for the second one."
Tavik studied him a moment longer, then closed the ledger without further argument. Whatever the man had or hadn't known, the book in his hands now said more than the prisoner ever could have.
By the time the light started leaning gold across the quarry's broken rim, the quarry held nothing that still argued with anyone. The captured men sat roped together near the ruined first barricade, watched by two of Ossa's people who hadn't lowered their weapons once. Word would already be moving through Wildblood Desolation channels by tomorrow, the way word always moved when thirty armed men stopped being thirty in a single morning. The details would take longer to travel than the fact itself: numbers had stopped being a plan anyone could trust against this particular man.
Vhar stood over the last of it and let the day's cost register, plainly, the way he'd learned to by now. His arms had gone heavy, his Uvar reserve spent down close to nothing, and the arrow still lodged in his shoulder had started to ache now that nothing urgent was left to keep him from noticing it.
Ossa stayed close to Tavik's side through all of it, quiet in a way that wasn't quite the same quiet she'd carried since the night of the first attack. She'd spent the morning walking through the aftermath of more violence than her whole band had seen in years, and Vhar recognized the particular stillness that came from someone deciding, in real time, what she was going to let that make her.
"You found the cut snare and the boot marks," Vhar said. "You gave us the quarry."
Something in her shoulders came down half an inch, and that was as much as either of them needed to say about it.
The two runners had disappeared into the frontier with whatever they grabbed before leaving the cart. Vhar could not chase them without abandoning the prisoners and the ledgers. Tavik would have to warn the bands east of the quarry.