Those who walk into the dungeons.
Five people who go down into places that were sealed for a reason. Four of them know exactly what they are doing. The fifth has never been told what he is.
Fifteen, orphaned, raised in a village on the flank of the highest mountain in the Atlas by a grandmother who is not his grandmother. No clan will claim him. No lineage anyone can trace. In a country where a name opens every door worth opening, he has nothing to give at the threshold.
He herds goats. He plays a reed flute badly and constantly. And he catches things in the air that the person standing next to him does not — a fact he has never mentioned to anyone, because it has never occurred to him that it was worth mentioning.
By the end of Volume One he knows what he can do. He still has no idea what he is.
He comes through the villages a few times a season, trades a little, stays a night or two, and moves on. Heavy-set, thick through the chest, a greying beard, and the unhurried calm of a man who long ago stopped needing to be believed.
He answers most questions. Not all of them. When a subject closes, it closes without a sound, and the conversation has simply moved on before you noticed it turning.
She leads, and it is not a title anyone gave her. Cold comes off her the way heat comes off a fire — not summoned, not announced, simply there, and the air changes where she is standing.
She wastes no motion and no words. Down in the dark, that reads as competence. Up in the daylight it reads as something colder, and she has stopped correcting people.
Close range, no elegance, no interest in acquiring any. He fights the way a wall holds — you go through him or you go around, and going around takes longer than you have.
He worked for every hour of what he can do, and he keeps a private ledger of it. Which is exactly why a boy who appears to have been handed something gets under his skin so fast, and stays there.
Ink, paper, and circles drawn faster than they ought to be drawable. Where the rest of the squad solves a problem by removing it, Imis solves it by holding it still — which is harder, less impressive to watch, and considerably more useful.
Also the one who says something funny at the precise moment nobody can afford it. This has been raised. It has changed nothing.
Four more are already waiting.
They arrive with the second volume, and they are not introduced gently.
Volume One — The Dawn of Tizi n’Ifri
Fourteen chapters. Everyone above, and the night that puts them in the same room.