Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 3, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Somebody scraped the pot out, and somebody else complained about the scraping.
“It wants doing.
Hush.”
Four words.
The woman who said them didn’t turn around to say them, and the scraping went on, and the complaining stopped.
Aeryn lay behind a blanket on a wire at the back of the communal box, under three covers, and counted the room by sound, the way she’d counted the first room she woke in.
The woman had come in before the light.
Three men behind her, at an interval, and none of them had touched the hearth until she’d spoken.
One was limping on the left.
She’d sent him to sit down for it, and he’d gone.
Three men, one woman, one fire.
Not one moment when the order of it was in question.
On her first morning she’d been told that ten men were tied to her life and would die when she did.
She’d filed it as a thing done to her.
Listening to a stranger’s household get breakfast, she moved it into the other column.
Nobody here thought it unusual.
She was the only person in Thinblood who’d needed it explained.
Bare feet slapped the boards.
A child, running the length of the box.
“Stop that.”
He didn’t.
He went back the other way, fast, and the blanket lifted in the wind of him.
“I said stop.”
Bare feet, a bad shirt, and a tail.
Not an ornament and not a costume.
It came out of the base of the spine through a seam cut for it, and it counterweighted his turn at the end of the room, and the boy had no more idea it was there than she had of her own arms.
Nobody looked.
Two people had told him to stop running.
Neither had told him to put it away.
So putting it away was something he’d learn later.
The blanket dropped.
It moved when the door opened.
It moved when anyone crossed the floor.
It hung four fingers clear of the boards, so she could see feet, and feet could see her.
A room with no door is a room somebody else owns.
Somebody had put the covers over her while she slept.
Had come that close, and she hadn’t woken.
That was the most alarming thing she’d collected since arriving.
The village had been kind.
She made herself hold that, because it was true, and because she was going to act against it within the hour.
She couldn’t run, couldn’t stand, couldn’t make a sound.
And on her hand, in a plain gray ring, she carried enough medicine to buy this village outright, and a box of ten that had to be opened where nobody could see it.
The blanket moved again.
+++
The headwoman came through at the turn of the morning, and she came alone, which Aeryn logged, because nobody else in Thinblood had come to her without somebody standing behind them.
She’d left the tally board on its rack by the door.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t counting.
The iron-gray hair was roped back with its cord, the same as at the fire.
She stood at the foot of the pallet and looked at the ceiling of her own building for a while, and appeared to be doing something behind that.
“Well, you’re up.
You’ve had out of the pot twice now.
I’ll not make anything of it, only it goes in the book, and the book’s read by people who never come down here.”
She let that sit, and then went at the rest of it sideways, which seemed to be how she got at anything.
“There’s a crate of yours in the store, since we’re on it.
Came down on the same drop as the box you’ve been living in.
Bregg’s had it six weeks, and I’ve carried it six weeks, and in all that time not one soul has asked me for it.” A pause with something dry at the bottom of it.
“I’d sooner it was out of my store than in it, whatever’s in there.”
Aeryn raised the arm with the band on it.
The headwoman watched the hand work without any expression at all, which was itself a kind of manners.
Vaelith had watched her write the first time as though a stone had done it.
Put me back in the pod.
It has a door.
“Floor’s dead in there.”
I know.
“Then what’s in there you want that’s not out here?”
Nothing else went onto the band.
Aeryn let the arm down and left it lying where the woman could see it.
The headwoman looked at the arm.
Then at the blanket, which chose that moment to lift, because somebody had come in for the pot.
“Aye,” she said.
“There’s that.”
She stood with it longer than she’d stood with anything else in the room, and as far as Aeryn could read it, she was deciding whether a line item had given her a reason.
“Forty paces from the fire.
Thirty-nine more than you can walk.
That’s mine to carry, not yours.”
She was at the door before she said the rest.
“Vekka.
Long Count if anybody’s rude about it, and you’ll hear both.
The Snake will want to argue first.”
+++
Vaelith arrived faster than the message should’ve traveled, which meant he’d been within sight of the box.
Which meant he’d been within sight of the box since the previous evening.
Vaelith Draveth filled the doorway as he filled every doorway, tall and unhurried, the long tail of black hair pulled up and back.
The scale-shaped lines ran fine along his jaw and beneath his eyes and back toward his ear, separate, each one outlined, going down under the collar and not stopping.
Under his left eye the black mark sat high on the cheekbone, the one thing on his face that read from the pallet.
Sothran Ashkar had taken the outside corner, his back to the doorframe, where he could see the gravel and the room at once.
Pale gold going russet at the roots, and too much of it to have ever been arranged.
He looked at the doorway before he looked at her.
He always did.
“You will not go back to the pod,” Vaelith said. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“I condemned it yesterday.”
She waited.
Vekka had said he’d argue, and a man who’s going to argue should be allowed to get his reasons out first.
You learn more that way.
“The floor is dead.
The energy crystal under it is spent.”
She’d given that one to Vekka already.
She didn’t write it twice.
“Forty paces is too far to be heard.
If something goes wrong in the night, you cannot call anybody.”
Nobody here can hear me either.
He read it.
He didn’t answer it.
“Cold settles in the chest.
In a body like yours, it does not leave again.”
That was the last of them.
She could tell from the way he stopped, the way a man stops at the end of a list he’s put in order.
The answer was ready.
She’d built it in the dark while a child ran the length of the box.
You ordered me to bathe nightly.
Water hot enough to hurt.
“I did.”
There is one hearth in Thinblood and it is in a room with no door.
Vaelith stopped.
It wasn’t a long stop, and a person who hadn’t spent a career reading officers would’ve missed it.
She had spent that career.
She watched a man arrive at the far end of his own instruction and find her standing at it already.
He conceded nothing, because there was nothing in the room to concede it to.
He came in, took the covers off her and folded them over his arm, and when he spoke again it was in the flat voice he kept for findings.
As he bent, the purple stone in his ear caught the light.
She’d noticed it in her first hour and hadn’t, until this morning, had anything to set it against.
The three men at the fire had the holes.
Both ears, some of them four to a side, healed years ago and carrying nothing at all.
“The heat crystal stays away from where you sleep.
If a cough starts, you send for me before it is a cough.”
He crouched, put a hand up, and held it there, palm out, until she gave him her chin.
His hand, when it came, was cold.
Not cool from outside.
She had a wrecked body running a fever it couldn’t afford, and she still made him lower than she was, by enough that a physician taking that reading off a patient would’ve started asking questions.
Cool through a dress, yesterday, when he lifted her off the floor.
She’d put it down to the morning.
Then he’d carried her across a village, and she’d been too busy reading the village to read the man holding her.
A lapse, and she filed it as one.
Two men had come into her room on the morning she woke.
One of them had put out heat like a stove, and she’d thought it was temper.
Three readings.
She’d begun a column for him, and it was the only column in the book with anything in it.
From the corner, without turning around, Sothran said, “She asked Vekka.”
Nobody answered him.
The Snake got an arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and Sothran kept his eyes on the treeline while the two of them went past him and out.
+++
The pod was as cold as she’d known it would be, and colder than she’d allowed for.
A ship that lost its heat lost its hull inward, on a curve a person could plan against.
Stone that had been warm for weeks and then stopped did something else.
It pulled.
Somewhere in the walls the metal ticked, giving up a heat it didn’t have to spare, and she revised her estimate of the night by a third.
He didn’t stay long enough to set her down twice.
He put her on the cot, checked the heat crystal, and was gone before she’d finished arranging the blankets.
She watched his hands on the doorframe, watched him already moving before the last sentence was out of him.
The room was doing something to him that the village outside it wasn’t.
So the room was hers, and neither of them had given it to her.
The only man on this world with the training to work out what she was wouldn’t willingly spend a night in the temperature she needed.
Everything they have done to this body has handed me something.
By the time she moved, the light through the high window had gone flat.
Then she opened the ring.
The chest came out onto the blanket, and she took the lid off the first box, and for a moment she did nothing at all but look at it.
There were ten of them.
There’d never be an eleventh.
Inside: one sachet of herbs, sealed.
Five vials of beast blood, sealed, laid in a row with cloth between them so they wouldn’t knock.
And on the underside of the lid, in the small, neat hand of a technician who’d been paid to be exact, the dosing.
Volume of water.
Temperature at entry.
Order of introduction.
Duration of immersion.
Aeryn read the volume and put the box down.
The figure on the lid assumed a tank.
Every medical facility she’d ever walked into had one, and the man who wrote that lid had never once considered that the woman using it would be lying on a floor forty paces from a pump she couldn’t reach.
What she had was a pail, most of it still full, brought by a man who’d put her into a wall.
One pot.
A filtered canteen.
Measured out, all of it together, less than a fifth of what the lid wanted.
Aeryn sat with that.
The obvious answer was to wait, arrange the water, and run the box at the dose it was written for.
It took her under a minute to throw it out.
Every day at this weight was a day the body didn’t build.
Every day was a day closer to three men walking out of the Raw toward a woman who couldn’t stand to meet them.
Twenty-two of those left.
And the third thing, which she made herself write out in full rather than feel: there was no certainty she could arrange the water at all.
Nine dresses, and a village that owed her nothing.
So the box would run tonight, in a fifth of the water, and she’d carry the ratio herself.
Working it on the band took a long time, and the work wasn’t hard.
The trouble was the two variables on that lid she couldn’t model.
Herbs meant to steep across a volume steeped hotter and faster in a fifth of it, and the blood was meant to disperse.
Half the sachet, she decided.
Two vials opened, three left sealed.
The dose was a guess, and the guess was hers.
The heat crystal went into the pot at her hand, and the water came up to a boil faster than any fire in the village could’ve brought it.
She thought, briefly and without gratitude, that the man had given her the one object in Thinblood that made this possible, and had told her nobody was to be asked about it.
+++
Getting the pot to the floor recess took dragging.
She went in after it on her elbows and one hip, and the heat went through the wasted muscle of her thighs like a blade going in.
Then the herbs.
Then the blood, one vial, then the second.
The water changed color under her hands.
It went from something that hurt to something that didn’t feel like water at all.
For a count of thirty, nothing happened.
She was already revising downward, already building the sentence the dose was too thin, when the marrow of her left femur lit.
There’s no describing a thing coming out of the inside of a bone.
She’d been burned, decompressed, and once had a bulkhead plate come through the skin of her own back, and all of it had been done to the outside of her, where the body knew how to send the signal from.
This came from underneath the place signals came from.
The thing went up the left femur, crossed the pelvis, found the right, and then it was in both arms and in the flat bones of her skull, traveling with an intention that was almost legible.
Something driven out of a place it had been comfortable in for six years, objecting the whole way.
Her back came off the floor of the recess.
Her jaw locked.
Both hands closed on the rim hard enough that something gave in the third finger of the left, and she didn’t let go, because letting go meant the extraction finishing in open air with nothing to rebuild behind it.
And she made no sound.
Not one.
Not a rasp, not a breath with anything in it.
Her throat worked and produced exactly what it had produced every time since she woke on the warm floor, which was nothing at all.
Somewhere in the middle of it, with her spine arched and her eyes open on a ceiling she couldn’t see, part of her stood off to the side and filed the fact, because that part never stopped working.
The village is forty paces away.
If I could scream, they would all be in this room.
The thing she’d been carrying for six years came out through the skin, and the water took it, and the water went dark.
+++
Coming out of the water wasn’t a decision.
She couldn’t stay in it, and that was the whole of the reasoning left to her.
Over the rim she went, onto the boards, and the cold floor of a dead room was the best thing that had happened to her since the bridge.
Steam came off her forearms.
There was something on her skin that wasn’t sweat and didn’t smell like anything a body should make.
The lid had said what came next.
Immersion, then the forms, and the forms are not optional, and a body that takes the bath without the work will pass what it has been given straight through and hold none of it.
She’d read that line the night before and taken it for something written for cadets.
The first form was a floor posture.
Knees under, weight forward, spine set on a line from the crown down, hands flat and elbows locked out.
Recruits did a version of it on the first morning of basic, on a world that no longer existed, and complained that it was too easy to be a test.
She got her knees under her.
She got the weight forward.
She got her elbows locked and the line set, and it was correct, and she held it for three seconds and went down flat on her face on the boards.
She lay there, breathed, and got the numbers.
Three.
From a body carried into this room, against a form a fourteen-year-old holds for a minute and complains about.
Up she came again.
Knees, weight, elbows, line.
The shaking started at the second second and not in the arms, which was information.
It started in the deep muscle along the spine, which hadn’t held anything against gravity in six years and had forgotten the job.
Three again.
Down.
Four times more, and it went three, three, two, three, and after the last one she couldn’t get her knees back under her at all.
She lay with her cheek on the boards and the taste of the thing that had come out of her bones on the back of her tongue.
No breakthrough.
Nothing had turned over.
Half the box was gone.
One of ten.
+++
At some point after that, she dragged herself onto the cot and did the accounting in the dark, because the accounting was the only thing left she was still good at.
Ten boxes.
Nine boxes.
One sachet halved, two vials of five opened, at a ratio she’d invented on a band, in a fifth of the water the lid asked for.
The extraction had worked.
She’d felt it leave, and she could feel where it no longer was.
The rest she couldn’t read.
Too thin a dose, or too far gone a body.
Nothing would ever tell those two apart, because there was no second box one.
She put it in the column of costs already paid and moved to the column that could still be changed.
Water.
Everything that happened in this room for the next nine boxes came down to whether a person who couldn’t walk forty paces could put a hundred and sixty units of water on this floor, hot, on a night of her choosing, without one soul in Thinblood asking what it was for.
Hauling it was beyond her.
She wouldn’t ask the two men, and the reason was only partly pride.
They were the only people on this world who’d ever watched her do anything, and a physician who fetched her water would eventually want to know what the water was doing.
Which left the village.
Which left nine dresses at her throat, pale and low-cut and useless, woven by a clan somewhere for a woman nobody expected ever to be in danger.
In the dark, she began to work out what a dress was worth.
Then what a crate of them was worth.
Then what it’d take to walk into a village store and ask for something she’d never once asked anybody for.
And before she slept, she rolled off the cot onto the floor and got her knees under her one more time.
Knees.
Weight.
Elbows.
Line.
The shaking came at the second second, the same as before, and she knew now that it would, and she knew now where it came from.
She moved the weight a finger’s width forward, off the heels of her hands and onto the bones of the wrist, where the deep muscle didn’t have to carry it alone.
Four.
Not better.
Just known.
Down she went, and stayed down, and was asleep before the shaking stopped.