Silberwald.
Konrad saw the capital from fifteen leagues out.
He had been away for months.
The desert still clung to him. Sand had worked into the seams of his boots, the lining of his coat, the leather strap of his satchel. His skin had darkened three shades.
The magi-car's crystal drive hummed beneath the floorboards. Konrad had purchased a replacement crystal at the last relay station. The original had died at the first Imperial relay west of Kumsur, a few days after he crossed the border.
The harbor road widened as he descended the final hill. Traffic thickened. A pair of mounted officers in Magical Army dress gave his filthy magi-car a pitiful look.
Konrad didn't care.
He had eighteen photographs in a leather case beneath the passenger seat, each containing an image no human being had captured before.
The Imperial Chronicle's offices rose from the old district in a narrow four-story building. He parked the magi-car at the curb, locked the drive housing out of habit, and climbed the stairs with the leather case under his arm.
The newsroom occupied the second and third floors. A dozen desks jammed between cabinets and shelves.
Marbach spotted him first.
"Ries." The older correspondent lifted his head from a half-written column. His eyes moved from Konrad's face to his ruined coat. "You look like something the desert spat back."
"It did try to keep me."
"Should have let it."
Konrad dropped his satchel on his desk. The desk had been cleaned in his absence. Someone had organized his materials into a neat stack. Someone else had left a note.
Your mail is in the bottom drawer. There is a lot of it.
He ignored the mail.
He took the leather case upstairs.
Frieda's office occupied the fourth floor's southwest corner. The walls were covered in pinned clippings, source maps, and a calendar marked with publication deadlines.
Frieda von Thalberg sat behind the desk with a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago. Her wire-rimmed spectacles sat low on her nose.
She looked up when Konrad entered.
Her eyes did the same inventory that Marbach's had.
"You're alive," she said.
"Disappointed?"
"Relieved." She set down her pen. "I was three weeks from printing your obituary."
"I'm flattered."
"It was short."
Konrad sat in the visitor's chair. He placed the case on the edge of her desk.
"Before we start," he said. "Tell me about Kaltbach."
Frieda leaned back.
"What about it?"
"I've been riding for five weeks. The last real news I received was from a caravan driver at the border who told me that the Bastard Knight had declared himself Baron of somewhere in the north and the Hexenzeit army had gone home angry." He crossed one ankle over the other. "I'd like the details."
Frieda removed her spectacles and cleaned them on her sleeve.
"Kaspar von Hexenzeit drove magi-cars through a House Hexenzeit military cordon surrounding Kaltbach. He declared himself Baron under Crown authority, invoked Imperial garrison law through a Magical Army Goldkrieger who happened to be present, and ordered nine hundred Hexenzeit soldiers to vacate his territory."
Konrad's eyebrows rose.
"They left?"
"They left. Roderich hasn't said a word, which means he's planning something."
"Who broke the story?"
Frieda's mouth compressed.
"We didn't."
Konrad went still.
"The Silberwald Gazette had someone on the northern trade road. Clara Wendt. She'd been covering disputes in the border settlements for three months." Frieda paused. "She was already in the area when the revolt happened. She followed the Hexenzeit column north and had a dispatch on the road to the capital before Kaspar's magi-cars had cooled."
"She beat us."
"She beat everyone. The Capital Register, the Morning Bell, every freelancer between Hexenzeit and the Wolkenmark border." Frieda replaced her spectacles.
Konrad looked at the ceiling.
Papers lost stories the way armies lost ground. What he enjoyed was that Gregor Hahn had lost this one too.
Hahn wrote for the Silberwald Gazette. They had entered journalism in the same year. They had covered the same stories. They had chased the same leads across the same cities for years, and the professional relationship between them had settled into a pattern of mutual rivalry.
Hahn should have followed the Hexenzeit column. He should have been on that ridge.
Instead Hahn had arrived in the Kaltbach area two days after the standoff ended.
Two days late. The army was gone, Kaspar was inside the walls, and Hahn's piece was a solid follow-up. Second place.
Now, sitting in Frieda's office, he allowed himself to feel the warmth of having his rival fuck up.
"I have something better than Kaltbach," Konrad said.
Frieda looked at the leather case.
"Show me."
Konrad opened the clasps.
Inside, the eighteen treated copper plates lay in padded slots, each one protected by a sheet of waxed paper.
He drew the first plate and placed it face-up on Frieda's desk.
The image showed Qalathar's southern gate. Above it, clouds of dust rose from a breach in the upper rampart.
At the breach's center, a shape pressed against the ward barrier. A feline body the size of a three-story building, its jaws open, its forelimbs braced against the invisible resistance.
Frieda adjusted her spectacles.
Konrad placed the second plate beside the first.
The same wall. A different angle. The feline Titan had been driven back. Sand mages lined the rampart, their arms extended, compressed pillars of golden sand rising from the desert floor to strike the creature's flank.
"These were taken over a period of several weeks," Konrad said. "The attack frequency increased while I was there. Some days, two Titans struck the wall within hours of each other."
Frieda said nothing.
He placed the third plate. The fourth. The fifth.
Desert landscapes. Settlement clusters east of Qalathar. The cairn line where the caravan routes ended. A ridge of barren stone overlooking a valley that should not have existed, green vegetation pushing through what had been sand two years prior.
The sixth plate showed the river.
Mana-saturated water. The banks were thick with growth. Trees that looked decades old but stood on ground that had been empty desert within living memory.
Frieda's hand hovered over the image.
"Where is this?"
"East of Qalathar. Past the last settlement."
The seventh plate. The eighth. Views of the eastern grassland from elevated positions. The contrast between dead desert behind and living terrain ahead was visible in a single frame.
The ninth plate showed the facility.
Concrete walls. Steel framing. A structure that did not belong in this age. Faded paint on one visible surface. Around the perimeter, small figures in uniform moved between guard positions.
"Imperial soldiers," Konrad said. "Operating a facility hundreds of leagues inside the Sultanate."
Her eyes moved faster between the plates.
The tenth through fourteenth plates showed details. Guard rotations. Equipment crates. The river passing beneath the facility's eastern foundation. The mana-glow that rose from the water at dawn.
Konrad placed the fifteenth plate on the desk.
Frieda went still.
The image showed a bowl between mountain walls. A broken landscape of shattered ridgelines and exposed bedrock, as though the earth had been cracked open and left to bleed.
At the bowl's center, shapes moved.
Some stood on four legs. Others on six.
"How many?" Frieda whispered.
"Twenty-three. I counted."
The sixteenth plate.
A quadruped with spined ridges along its back, each spine taller than a man. A winged shape perched on a broken cliff face, its wingspan casting shadow across half the valley. Something low and broad that moved like an armored beetle, its carapace reflecting the mana-glow from the waterfall.
The waterfall was a column of blue-white water falling from a cleft in the mountain wall. The source of the mana current that flowed west and south toward Qalathar.
Frieda's hands had moved to the edge of the desk. Her fingers gripped the wood.
Konrad placed the seventeenth plate.
The turtle Titan.
Its shell spanned the distance from the cliff base to the middle of the bowl.
Konrad placed the eighteenth plate.
The same turtle Titan. Different moment.
Its head had risen. Its mouth was open.
From that mouth, a column of light extended across the bowl.
At its terminus, a mantis-shaped Titan that had been standing moments before was gone.
Beyond the mantis's former position, the beam continued into the mountain wall.
The mountain wall was cracked. A vertical fracture ran from the beam's impact point to the summit. Dust and debris hung frozen in the air around the wound.
Frieda stared at the image.
Konrad waited.
Frieda removed her spectacles.
She set them on the desk beside the eighteenth plate.
Her hands were trembling.
"Twenty-three Titans."
"In one location. Organized into what appeared to be groups."
Frieda picked up the eighteenth plate and held it closer to the lamp.
"This creature destroyed a mountain."
"Part of one."
"And another Titan."
"In a single discharge. The mantis was erased."
Frieda set the plate down with exaggerated care, as though it might detonate.
"Konrad."
"Yes."
"This needs a front page."
Konrad smiled.
"I thought so."
Frieda did not return the smile.
She stood and walked to the window.
"I'm afraid to publish this."
Konrad's smile faded.
"Afraid?"
Frieda turned from the window.
"I'm calculating the consequences and they don't seem good." She pressed her fingertips together. "Twenty-three Titans in a single location. Organized behavior. A creature capable of destroying a mountain. Konrad, until a year ago there were perhaps three people alive who have ever seen more than one Titan at a time. The Sultanate's entire military doctrine is built around the assumption that Titans are solitary, territorial, and incapable of cooperation."
She gestured toward the plates.
"If I publish these tomorrow, that assumption dies in the capital by afternoon and in every court and embassy by evening."
"That's our job."
"Our job is to inform." Frieda returned to her desk but did not sit. "This will cause panic. In the minor kingdoms. In Wolkenmark. In every settlement along every border where people already lie awake at night wondering whether the next Titan will be the one that doesn't stop."
Konrad shifted in his chair.
He didn't like it.
"How long?" he asked.
"Two days."
"Before the story runs."
"Two days to notify the relevant parties. The princes and princesses. The Ministry of War. Iron Cross High Command. The Sultanate's diplomatic attaché in the capital." Frieda's voice was steady now. "They need time to prepare statements, position responses, and brief their own people before the public reads this. If the story breaks without warning, every faction will scramble, and the scrambling will be worse than the news itself."
Konrad leaned back.
The chair creaked beneath him.
He did not enjoy this part. The careful management of truth so that the people who held power could arrange their faces before the people who didn't hold power learned what was coming.
"Two days," she repeated.
"And the story runs complete. Every image. Every detail. No cuts for political comfort."
Frieda met his eyes.
"Every image," she said. "I didn't build this paper by protecting people from what's real."
Konrad nodded.
Frieda sat down. She arranged the eighteen plates in a line across her desk, studying each one again in sequence. Her spectacles were back on.
"Where next?" she asked, without looking up.
Konrad had been thinking about that since the Kumsur border.
The options arranged themselves in his mind.
Qalathar. The obvious choice.
But the Sultanate would not welcome him after these images reached print. Whoever held authority over the wall would want to control the narrative, and a foreign journalist who had already demonstrated a talent for photographing things he wasn't supposed to would become an inconvenience.
The north. Kaltbach. The new barony. Kaspar was building something up there. There was a story in that. Several stories, probably. The political angle alone could be interesting.
But Kaltbach was being covered. Every freelancer was already running north.
Konrad didn't chase headlines. He chased the story that hadn't been written yet.
"South," he said.
Frieda looked up.
"The expedition," Konrad said. "House Hexenzeit's dungeon expedition."
Frieda's expression sharpened.
"The Academy dungeon expedition. House Hexenzeit has been pushing for months. The authorization has been stalled, but every source I have says the Academy is days from signing the final papers."
"Exactly." Konrad uncrossed his ankles and leaned forward. "Everyone is going north because Kaspar has a new title and a town full of barricades. I'm going south because House Hexenzeit is about to spend an absurd amount of money and political capital near Grenzheim."
"You want to cover the expedition."
"I want to cover an expedition," Konrad said. "At worst, I get several weeks of Academy scholars arguing over old inscriptions, officers posing beside artifacts, and Roderich's people claiming they have discovered the key to ending the war. It will be dull, self-important, and full of men who hate being photographed."
Frieda watched him.
"And at best?"
"At best, they find something worth putting on page three."
Frieda's mouth twitched.
"You think the expedition will be uneventful?"
"I just spent months photographing a hidden Imperial facility, a mana river, and twenty-three Titans fighting beneath a mountain." He gestured toward the plates spread across her desk. "The odds that two world-changing stories happen one after the other near the same front line are ridiculous."
Frieda looked down at the image of the turtle Titan splitting stone with light.
"That is not how odds work."