Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 2, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Some time before the light came, the floor died.
It didn’t cool the way a body cools.
It stopped.
One breath there was heat under the stone, and the next only stone, and the cold at the far end came across to meet her and took its time about it.
She’d come down off the cot in the night for the warm part of the floor, and now she lay still and let the cold arrive — hip first, then shoulder, then the long muscles down her back with nothing left on them to hold it off.
She’d spent the whole night building a schedule, and she’d built it in a warm room without once putting the warmth down as a line in it.
Waste.
So she went back through it with the cold in her, looking for what else she’d been getting for free.
The purge, then ten baths, with a drill after each, the old sequence of movements that drove what the bath had put into the body down into the muscle and set it there.
She’d known that shape since she was a cadet.
What she’d never had to think about was that every one wanted water hot enough to take skin off, held for hours, and heat has to be burned out of something, and whoever owns the burning owns the schedule.
In the ring she had a canteen with a filter in it, and nothing to heat water in, or with.
Rot.
Just inside the door, where it had been since yesterday, the bowl.
Gray mash, boiled until it stopped being anything in particular, gone cold hours ago and stiffened since, with a skin across the top of it.
Ashkar had set it down inside the frame at about that distance yesterday and gone straight back out, at the angle a man uses for an animal he hasn’t decided about.
Nobody had come back for it.
She hadn’t been able to reach it.
One bowl and one day, which isn’t enough to conclude anything from, and she declined to conclude anything from it.
The body had a longer opinion.
For some time, by the feel of it, food had been left in this room rather than given to the woman in it.
Aeryn got her hand up above her chest, turned it over, and took a pill out of the ring.
It sat in her palm, thumbnail-sized and pale, one of a hundred that would never be replaced.
Bread, her people called it, long after there had stopped being any bread.
Under the tongue, and the body took it the way sand takes water, without comment.
Then, out on the gravel: boots.
Two sets, unhurried.
The hand closed, and the arm went flat on the stone.
She minded the reach more than the pill.
An arm goes into a space with nothing in it and comes back holding something, and a man who sees that once never stops seeing it.
By the time the light in the doorway changed, she was a thin, sick woman on a cold floor, which happened to be true.
+++
Sothran Ashkar filled the doorway and stayed in it.
The light was behind him and came through the edges of all that hair, pale gold, going russet at the roots where the light couldn’t reach.
He had a pail in one hand and didn’t look at her, exactly, which she’d watched many men do and never mistaken for shyness.
He was looking at the room, the frame, the angle of the light.
They had that in common, and neither was going to enjoy it.
The pail went down inside the door.
Water slapped the sides of it and settled.
“Cold,” he said.
There was nothing to send back.
“Your stone’s out.” He looked at the floor as though it had wronged him personally.
“Not the box.
The box is sound.
It’s the cell that ran.
Nobody here’s got a spare to hand you.”
The knowing filled in what he meant.
The box was this room, a sealed metal shelter some off-world maker had built and somebody had set down here, and it ran its heat off an energy stone in a cell under the floor.
The stone was spent.
Then he straightened off the frame, and Aeryn turned her arm over and went into the band.
Not out to the network.
Into the band’s own memory, to see what the hand that owned it had last done with it.
One line, composed and never sent, left where a woman abandoned it to reach for a sleeve instead.
Please.
One low stone.
I can pay after.
Please.
Six years of a schedule kept by people who had to keep showing up.
A core cut out of her chest.
A minimum held steady until the muscle stopped asking.
And at the end of it a young woman with no voice had worked out the floor was going, written eight words, run out of nerve or time, and put her hand on a man’s sleeve.
He never read it.
He never looked.
He turned round and put her into a wall for touching him, and the wall finished what six years had brought to the edge of finishing, and he walked out believing he’d shoved an irritation off his arm.
He didn’t know.
He was standing four feet away, not knowing, and he never would.
And she wanted him dead.
Not away from her this time.
Down.
On this floor, her hand at the back of his neck and the stone taking his weight, and time afterward to watch it finish.
She held it.
That was all she did for a while.
Heart going, jaw aching, both hands on the lid, and nothing came off her and nothing in the room changed.
It cost more than yesterday had.
Yesterday she spent something she wasn’t getting back.
This morning she paid rent, and would be paying it every day she stayed inside arm’s reach of him.
Ashkar hadn’t moved.
Whatever went through her stayed inside her ribs, and she filed it, because it meant the thing had a floor as well as a ceiling, and she’d just found the floor.
“Draveth’s coming,” he said.
And then he didn’t go.
His shoulder went against the frame and stayed there with the light behind him, in the position he’d held yesterday, and Aeryn understood that she was going to be in a room with him for as long as this took.
The pail sat where he’d left it, a skin of light moving on the water.
He’d hauled it in the dark for a woman he’d said out loud he wouldn’t grieve over, and it came in cold, and nothing in this room and nothing in her arms would ever make it anything else.
Both hands went back on the lid and stayed there.
+++
Vaelith Draveth came in past him without a word between them, didn’t stop in the doorway, didn’t cross straight to her either, and she noticed both because Ashkar had done both.
His hand went flat on the stone by the door, then at the far end, got the same nothing out of both, and stayed down over the second longer than the first.
“How long since it went?”
Aeryn held up two fingers.
Two hours, by the chronometer, near enough.
Then she closed them.
He took that without asking her to expand on it, then knelt where he’d knelt before, and the scanner came out of the air into his hand.
His own hand came up first, flat, where she could see it, and stayed there.
Aeryn looked at the hand, then at him, and moved her chin down once.
“Turn your head to the wall.”
Her head turned.
Two of his fingers went into her hair above the ear and parted it, and the flat gray casing passed over the place twice.
“The scalp has closed.
The pill did that, and that is the whole of what it was ever going to do.” He brought the instrument lower and held it.
“The bleed behind the eye is where it was yesterday.
It has not grown.”
A scalp closes on its own if you leave it alone, and hers had had her own salve on it besides.
She let him have it, because a man who believes his medicine worked asks fewer questions.
“That is all of the good news,” Vaelith said.
“I would rather you had it before the rest.”
Behind him, in the doorway, Ashkar watched a physician work, the gold of his hair gone dull with the light behind it, and didn’t shift his weight once.
Aeryn kept her eyes on the ceiling and her hands where they were.
Holding a thing down isn’t an event.
It is a job, and it goes on being a job for exactly as long as the reason for it stays in the room, and the reason for it had carried her water this morning and was now filling her only door.
The scanner went down, and he did the rest by hand, which told her more about this world’s medicine than the scanner had.
The pulse at her throat, then her wrist, counted against nothing she could see.
Then he took the arm out straight to find the pulse at the elbow, and his thumb crossed the inside of the joint and stopped.
Aeryn had counted those in the dark hours ago — small knots under the skin, more than showed — and worked out what they were and what for, and how long it had taken.
Now she lay still and watched a man find the first half, and the strange part was how badly she wanted to hand him the rest.
Nothing came out of him.
He turned the arm to the light, asked for the other one, found the same in it, and took longer over the second than the first.
Aeryn knew what he was doing, because it was what she’d have done.
He was counting — grouped, scattered, or evenly spaced — because scattered means an illness treated by whoever was nearest, and evenly spaced means a calendar.
She’d run it already.
He was going to get one number out of it.
Aeryn had all of them.
A small black mark sat under his left eye, low on the cheekbone, and moved when his jaw did, and her eyes kept going back to it, because it was the only thing about that face that wasn’t perfect, and she needed somewhere to put them.
“These are old,” he said.
“And there are a great many of them.”
The arm went back on the stone, carefully, the way you put down something belonging to somebody else.
“Now the part I am certain of.
There is a clot behind the left orbit.
Small, and old, and a bleed there takes the speech and the memory together.” Flat, unhurried, no question in it.
“That is your answer.
It resolves, or it does not.
I cannot tell you which, and any man who tells you which is guessing.”
Aeryn held still and let a physician be right.
“It does not explain the rest of you,” Vaelith said.
“You weigh less today than you weighed yesterday.”
When nothing came back, he asked it properly.
“Have you eaten since I was last in this room?”
Aeryn moved two fingers toward the door, which was as far as that arm was going to travel today, and he turned round and looked.
The bowl sat four feet behind his heel, where it had been put.
Down over it a while, and when he straightened he didn’t pick it up, which she noted, because a man who tidies away the evidence has told you what he means to do about it.
“That is one day,” he said.
“One day is not this.
You are going down faster than a fast goes, and I have been over you twice now and found nothing on you that carries the rate.”
A pause with nothing in it.
“Unfortunate.”
It had taken a bowl on the floor to make him turn round, and that wasn’t stupidity, and it wasn’t indifference.
He’d looked at her hands, her scalp and both elbows and the inside of her skull, and not one of those is across a room.
A woman who can’t cross a room gets fed by putting the food inside the door, and the distance between that door and where she lay was a number nobody in Thinblood had thought to take.
She had it, near enough.
She’d crossed most of that floor on her elbows last night to reach the cot, and it had taken her the better part of two minutes.
Then he took a folded square of cloth out of nothing and set it on the stone beside her, and another, and a third, tied at the neck with waxed thread.
Something dry and green and sharp came off them.
Soaking herbs.
The knowing gave her the name of the clan that grew them and a cost, and the information that this was what a physician handed out when he had nothing better, and her own head supplied the rest unasked.
Mild, cheap, honest work, at about a tenth of the strength of the weakest thing in her own boxes.
It would do something for the skin and the sleep and nothing whatever about what sat in her marrow.
“One in the water.
Every night, as hot as you can stand it.
Not warm.
It has to hurt, or it has not worked.”
Aeryn turned one over with a finger and let nothing at all show on her face, and that was the second expensive thing she did before the light was properly up.
Because he’d just told her, out loud and in front of a witness, to scald herself every night until further notice.
She’d spent the whole night working out how a woman with no standing, no voice, and no reason anybody would accept was going to explain sitting in water hot enough to take skin off, ten nights running, where anybody passing could see the steam coming off her door.
Now she wasn’t going to have to explain it.
It was a physician’s order, and he’d given it in front of Ashkar.
Then he stood, looked at the dead floor, and arrived where he’d been walking since he first touched it.
“There is one fire in this village that stays lit, and it is not in this room.
You cannot stay here.”
The band came half up, and it was Ashkar who spoke.
“Don’t write at me.”
He hadn’t been written at.
He’d stood in a doorway for a quarter of an hour watching another man do the only useful thing anybody had done in this room, and the first movement of her arm had been enough to get that out of him.
Aeryn kept the band up and turned it toward the other one.
She hadn’t written anything yet.
Vaelith answered what she’d been going to ask anyway.
“The water is not the difficulty,” Vaelith said.
Vaelith reached, and nothing this world had shown her yet had gotten her ready for what came out of the air.
It sat in his palm, a little smaller than a hen’s egg, cut in facets, and the red inside moved when his hand moved.
She could feel the heat from four feet.
A heat crystal, the knowing said, and it had come out of the same storage ring as the pill he’d set on the table yesterday without a word.
“That goes in the bottom of the water, and it stays in.
It will not stop while you want it hot.” He set it on the stone an arm’s length from her hand.
“It will not run your floor, and nothing I own will.
It is mine.
Nobody in this village has a claim on it, and nobody is to be asked about it.”
Then he went to the door.
A small hot star sat on the floor beside her head, and she priced it, because pricing things was the last profession she’d left.
That had been in his storage every one of the six weeks a mute woman lay here while one man hauled her water and another decided she was furniture.
He had a reason for keeping it in, and this morning it ran out, and it had never been that he didn’t have one.
Wanting to know what it was outranked wanting the water.
Aeryn wrote, and turned her arm so he could read it without leaning in.
Where do I get an energy stone.
“You do not,” he said.
“Not before Winter.”
+++
“We will take you down to it now.”
Said to her, with a look at the doorway, and Ashkar came off the frame.
Aeryn had about four seconds, and she spent one of them, and then she got her elbow under her and started.
Yesterday, in an argument neither of them knew she was awake for, the physician had said it out loud.
She hasn’t stood a week without a hand on the wall.
So the body had done this.
Badly, holding onto something, inside the last handful of days, and a body that has done a thing once still knows the shape of it.
Her elbow held.
Then the hip came, and hurt, and came further.
Aeryn got a knee under herself and her shoulder to the wall, and the room went into a long, slow half-turn to the left and came back with the door in the wrong place, and she waited it out and put her back flat to the upright and pushed.
And she came up.
Not far.
Far enough that her weight left the stone and went onto her own legs for the first time since she’d woken in it, and for one breath she stood on somebody else’s feet with the whole plan in front of her and every part of it possible.
Then her legs put the question to the body, and the body had nothing to answer it with.
There was no fall in it.
A fall is fast.
She went down like a rope with the load off it, knee then hip, and her shoulder hit the wall hard enough to send a noise round the room twice, and she finished with her cheek on the stone and a strand of her own hair across one eye.
Nobody said anything.
So she did the last thing available and measured it.
One breath, perhaps under.
She put the number where she could find it and hated it thoroughly.
Vaelith had stopped a pace short with both hands where she could see them, and hadn’t caught her, and she was fairly certain that was a decision.
“Do that again in a month,” he said.
Then Ashkar came off the frame he’d been holding up all morning and went down on one knee beside her, gold hair falling forward, and Aeryn got the band up before he had hands under her.
Not him.
The arm stayed where both of them could read it.
Ashkar looked at it a long moment.
This close she could feel the heat come up off him, rising under his collar, the way heat comes off a man who’s been told no in front of somebody.
Then he came off his knee, went back to the door, and whatever it took out of him didn’t reach his face.
He’d stood there through all of it.
Through the scalp and the elbows and the bowl and the count of a schedule kept on her for six years, and none of it had told him the one thing about this room he didn’t know, and none of it ever would.
Vaelith crossed and lifted her, one arm under the shoulders and one under the knees, with the flat competence of somebody who moves patients.
His arms were cool through the dress, and his eyes, above the black mark, went past her to the door and stayed there.
He didn’t ask.
She’d told him who, and he wasn’t making her write it twice.
The knowing arrived helpfully with the information that a noble female isn’t expected to walk anywhere, that this was ordinary, and nobody would think anything of it.
Total loss, that civilization.
Top to bottom.
They help other readers find the book, and they help me believe I’m not shouting into the void.
I read every comment.
All of them.
Theories, questions, complaints, and the occasional typo report I was certain I wouldn’t need.
Please keep them coming.
Edited 07/10/2024