Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 19, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
The face started before first light, and the sound of it arrived thin and out of order, hammering at an hour when there had been no hammering for four days.
Aeryn lay and listened to it and worked out what it was.
Props going up in the dark, which meant the shift had come on early, which meant somebody wanted the trench roofed and shimmed for its whole length before the light was up, so that the men putting the first cut in would have nothing over their heads but timber they had watched go in themselves.
That was Torrin, and it was a good decision, and she had not thought of it.
Aeryn got the cup down off the lip and counted it in the dark by the weight and then again by eye when the seam under the door turned gray.
A hundred and thirty-seven.
Seventeen more than she needed.
The first surplus she had held on this world, and it had arrived on the one morning she could not touch it.
A drop took the day off her and handed it back at dark.
The soul steered the bath, and a soul flattened since breakfast would steer nothing.
Nettik arrived with the first pail while she was still holding the cup.
“They’re cutting,” he said, through the door frame.
“Torrin says the turn of the morning.
He’s got Hask and two others on the face, and the rest on shims, and Belloch’s gone down as well, which Ma says means it counts for something.” He put the pail down.
“He asked where you’d be.”
Say I will not.
Nettik read it and did not ask why, which no adult in this village had managed yet.
“Right,” he said.
Then, on his way to the second pail, without any change of voice at all: “Ma says you shouldn’t have gone down there.
Torrin’s wife says you should.
They said it at each other over the fire for a while, and then they both said it wasn’t for them to say, and then they went on saying it.”
Which of them is right.
“Ma,” Nettik said, and took the pails and went.
The cup returned to the lip, and she sat with it.
The reason was not complicated, and she had known it since the middle of yesterday.
A cut face with a fresh trench under it has to be stood at and not described, and standing was the one thing she had proved she could not do.
Nineteen paces down and nothing left at the end of them.
The men had worked around her body for half a shift, and a boy had counted fifty-eight of them standing still.
So: buy a body.
There were eight sealed boxes left in the chest, and the order was the order.
Box one had gone in halves out of a pail and had taken the poison out of her marrow and given her eight paces.
Box two had run at full specification and had given her a cheekbone.
Neither of them had been asked what they wanted to give.
There was no way of knowing what was in the third and no way of choosing it, and the honest version of the decision was that she was paying a hundred and twenty drops and a day for something she could not name in advance.
She wrote the columns out in her head anyway, because not writing them would not have made the decision better, and this time there were three of them.
The third one was new, and it was yesterday’s.
What it cost other people.
A man off his work for a day and sitting on a step.
A village told a story at noon that somebody would have to keep telling.
The first cut going in with nobody standing at the edge of it who had read that ground.
A figure stood against each of them, honestly, and the total was smaller than a half shift and very much smaller than fifty-eight, and it came out affordable.
What she did not put a column against was the box, because the box had no number in it and she had nothing to fill the column with.
Aeryn knew that while she was doing it, and did it anyway, and the way she did it was by finishing the other three carefully, and looking at how carefully they were finished, and letting that stand in for the one she had not been able to start.
The order is the order.
I am buying a lottery ticket and calling it procurement.
The third box came out of the chest.
Then she crossed to the door and opened it, which she had done perhaps four times since she came to this pod, and Vaelith was already on his feet off the step.
I am doing nothing today.
The whole of it, as ordered.
Nobody comes up, and that includes you.
He read it.
His face did the thing it did, which was almost nothing.
“The tank is full,” he said.
“The boy came early.”
He always does.
“Then I will be on the step.” He did not come any nearer the door than he already was.
“Will you be on the floor or the cot?”
Why do you want that.
“Because twice now I have come in here and found you on the floor.”
I do not know.
“That is a better answer than the one you gave me last time,” Vaelith said, and sat down with his back to the doorway.
Last time she had given him no answer at all, because last time she had not told him.
***
The tank went into the tub hot off the stone, and the sachet went in after it, and she took it at full heat, which meant the water had to hurt going in and then stop hurting, and the stopping was the wrong part, because it meant the water had cooled and not that she had stopped feeling it.
Whole sachet.
Nothing halved and nothing guessed.
Then the cup, and a hundred and twenty drops out of a hundred and thirty-seven, poured into water that took them without changing color for a count of nine and then changed all at once.
She got in.
The heat drove through her, and past her and out the other side of her, and after that it was not heat.
It was work, being done on her, by something with no interest in her opinion of the pace.
Box two had done it everywhere, every limb at once, building to nothing and stopping for nothing.
This one did not go everywhere.
It went up.
Everything below her collarbone was warm water and nothing else.
Above it, she was being taken apart at a level she had no instrument for, and she could feel the boundary of it, an exact line across her chest where the work stopped, and the exactness of that line was the worst of the whole hour.
Aeryn steered it, and steering was the part nobody had told her how to do, and it was not steering in any sense a pilot would recognize.
It was more like holding a door open with her shoulder while other people carried things through.
The reserve drained out of her at a rate she could not slow, and she counted what she had as it went, because she had one drop more of it today than she had held for the second box, and one drop was a figure, and a figure was the only handhold available.
The reserve fell as a tank falls when the outlet is bigger than the inlet, and she could do nothing about the rate except keep the door open.
Twice she felt it snag on something and clear.
Both times she had no idea what it had snagged on, and both times the snag had been in her head and not her chest.
The beads came up on her forearms and were not sweat, and those she had expected.
What she had not expected was that the work in her scalp would have a sound to it.
Not in the room.
Inside the bone, faint and continuous, like a very fine sieve being shaken a long way off, and it went on for what her broken count put somewhere past two hundred.
Then her throat.
Something in it that had been there the whole time, that she had never once identified, because it had been there before she woke and had therefore been part of the baseline, let go and stopped being there.
There was no pain in it and no relief in it.
A piece of her turned from present to absent and left a space the exact size of itself, and she lay in the water with her eyes open and did not know what had been removed.
She went looking for the top of it while she still had something to look with, because if it was ever going to move, it would move now.
It was where it had been.
Not a finger’s width higher.
Twice she went along it with what she had left, as a person checks a seam in the dark, and it gave her nothing.
Since the second box she had been assuming it rose as the body did.
The body had just been worked on for six hours.
Then either the body did not improve, or the top of it does not answer to the body.
There was no third option and no way to test either one, and the water had gone the color she had no name for, and the reserve was down to a place she did not like.
Aeryn got her heel onto the drain and pulled it before she moved anything else, and lay in the tub while the water went out from under her.
Getting out was worse than getting in.
The sequence could not start until the bath had finished taking, and the bath finished when it chose.
For some part of an hour she sat in the empty tub with her arms on the sides of it and her head back, and was released, and began.
The first two movements did nothing, as they had done nothing since the night of the purge.
The third took hold.
She got through it, and did not get through it well.
Half a pail of clean tank water through the tub and out after it, which was not enough and was what there was.
Two steps to the crate, and the crate jammed into the door, and it jammed in crooked, and she left it crooked.
Four steps to the cot, and she made it without the blanket, which stayed where it was on the floor.
That figure was the last one she took.
***
The room smelled of wet metal and of nothing else, which was what the half pail had been for.
The light through the seam was orange and low and on the wrong side.
Aeryn lay still and ran the inventory before she moved anything, because moving first and counting afterward is how people lose fingers.
Mouth: dry past the point where dry is a description.
Head: clear, which was new; box two had left her with a skull full of wool for a day.
Arms: hers.
Legs: hers, and no worse than yesterday, and no better.
No better.
She put her hand up into her hair and closed it and pulled.
Nothing came away.
The second pull was harder than a person should pull, at the temple where it had been worst, and her scalp complained, and her hand came down empty.
Every morning since she woke on this world had produced hair in her fingers and hair on the blanket, and she had counted it, because she counted everything, and the count had never once been zero.
It was zero.
She held that for a while, and then put her hand on her throat and tried.
Nothing happened.
Twice on the first day she had tried and got nothing, and what she got now was the same nothing, exactly and without any difference in it that she could find.
No sound.
No failure of a sound.
No result at all, the way there is no result when a switch is not connected to anything.
Whatever had gone out of her throat in that water had taken nothing with it that she could stand on, and she had no instrument for the inside of her own neck and no way to ask anybody for one.
The step took Vaelith’s weight while she was still working out how to file it.
“I heard the crate.”
How long.
“Six hours and a little over.
The sun is on the shoulder.” A pause.
“I did not come in.”
I know.
“You told me this morning, so there was nothing to find out.” He said it flatly, as a fact about the arrangement and not as a kindness she had done him.
“Vekka asked at noon.
I said you were working and that it would take the day.
She took that and went away, and nobody came up here, and nobody said anything at the fire.”
Aeryn lay and did that arithmetic and did not like how cheap it had been.
A sentence on a band, given away before the fact, for nothing, and it had bought a village a whole day of not wondering.
The cut.
“It went in at the turn of the morning.”
Where.
“Four paces in from the mouth, on the left side, under the second set of props.” Vaelith paused again, and when he went on, he was choosing.
“Torrin moved it.
He had it marked at six, and he put it at four, because the sides were cut back yesterday and the new face of the spoil showed him something he did not like at six.”
What did he see.
“I was not there, and he did not say it to me.
He said it to Vekka, and Vekka said it to me in four words.”
What four words.
“Wet at six paces.” Vaelith let that sit where it fell.
“He would say no more than that where I could hear it.
I am not a miner, and he knows exactly what I am, and a man does not explain his hole to a man who cannot help him dig it.”
So the cut was in.
Set, shimmed, timbered and behind her, in ground that had been opened and read and judged while she lay on a cot with her mouth open and her hands empty, by a man who had looked at a wall and moved a mark two paces on what he found there.
He had been right to move it.
Aeryn knew that without knowing what he had seen, because a man who has been standing in a hole for a day and a half and changes his mind about it is not guessing.
And she could not check it.
Not tonight, not tomorrow, not until a body she had just spent a day and the whole of that cup on delivered something she could stand on, and it had delivered hair.
Is there a thing in a throat that can stop being there.
There was a long pause outside, and it was the pause of a man reading a line twice.
“I do not know,” he said.
“I want to be clear about the size of that.”
You are being careful with me.
“No.” The step was quiet for a moment.
“Two years on a survey crew putting men back together well enough to be carried, and everything since, learned by being the only one there.
A throat is not a thing I have ever been asked about by somebody who could tell me what it was doing.”
Understood.
“If it changes, tell me what changed and not what you think it means.” The step creaked.
“I will be no use to you, but I will write it down, and two of them are better than one of them.”
Thank you.
“Aye,” Vaelith said, which was not his word, and she could hear in it that he had taken it off somebody else this week and had not decided yet whether to keep it.
The step creaked as he settled onto it.
When the step had gone quiet, she put her legs over the side of the cot and stood up, because there was no sense in owning a figure she had not taken.
Across the room and back.
Then again.
Then again.
She stopped at twenty-two, which was where she had stopped the night before with no bath in her and nothing spent, and she stood in the middle of the floor with the crooked crate against the door and understood that she could have gone further and that going further would have told her nothing.
The number she needed was not the one at the top.
It was nineteen paces and then standing, and standing was not a distance, and there was no way to test standing in a room eight paces long.
A hundred and twenty drops.
Six hours.
The same twenty-two, and hair.
Sitting down on the cot, she looked at the cup.
Seventeen in it, and twenty a day going in from midnight, and one out of it every morning from here.
Aeryn ran it both ways, because she did not believe the first answer.
Take the drop every morning and the cup came to a hundred and thirty-one on the twenty-fifth.
Take none at all, and it came to a hundred and thirty-seven on the twenty-fifth.
Both of them a bath.
The same day.
Six mornings of legs, for nothing.
It was the first thing that cup had ever handed her free, and it had waited until the day she had nothing else, and the day it landed on was the day three men came down off that mountain.
After that box there would be eleven drops in the cup and no cushion under any of them, and every morning she spent would come off the next one.
She lay in the dark with the blanket still on the floor where she had left it, and put her hand back on her throat, and tried once more, and got what she had got the first time.