The tea was, objectively, terrible.
Cormac had boiled it in a billy can over a small fire in the middle of a forest at some ungodly hour of the night, using water he’d collected from a stream that he was fairly confident had not been anywhere near a cow recently, and the leaves had been the cheapest the shop had on offer.
He sipped it anyway, sitting on a fallen log with his coat folded beside him, and found it entirely satisfactory for the purpose it was currently serving, which was mostly to give his hands something to do while his brain did the real work.
He stared into the fire that he made seemingly entranced.
‘Corpse Collector.
What in the world does that actually mean”
The Acting Method was based on the name.
That much he knew, because it was practically the first rule anyone learned about the Acting Method.
But a name was not an instruction manual.
‘So what does it actually mean to be a Corpse Collector?’ he thought, turning the mug slowly between his palms.
‘Collect corpses?
That’s the obvious reading.
That’s probably even part of it, technically speaking.
But that’s the act, not the essence, and the essence is what actually matters.’
He had worked out the essence of his other pathways by now, aided by his prior knowledge and the simplicity of them.
Sleepless, for instance.
The act was simple enough: don’t sleep, stay awake, keep your eyes open through the night.
But the essence underneath it was something else entirely, something closer to a philosophy than a behavior, the idea that there is simply too much left to do, too much left to see and read and understand, and that surrendering eight hours of that to sleep was an insult to the night.
‘Sleep is for people who’ve run out of things worth staying up for,’ he thought, and felt something in his chest agree with him a little too enthusiastically for comfort.
Warrior worked similarly.
The act was to overwhelm an opponent and to be a natural combatant, able to use any fighting style with proficiency, which he had already tested rather thoroughly against a group of those Foundation agents.
But the essence was broader and colder than that, the simple conviction that one ought to be better at violence than ordinary people are, in every form violence takes, with every weapon and every style, and adjust to every unfamiliar fighting circumstance.
Not to simply win a fight.
But to be a weapon designed to fight.
‘So by that logic,’ he thought, frowning into his tea.
‘Corpse Collector isn’t about hauling bodies around like some sort of morbid delivery service.’
He took a sip of his barely passable tea.
‘It’s about…
what?
Custody?
Ownership?
The dead belong somewhere, and I’m the one who takes them there?
That sounds more like a Ferryman and I’m not quite there yet’
He considered that for a moment and found he quite liked it, but thought that it is not quite right.
‘Or it’s about the collecting itself.
The gathering.
Making sure nothing that’s died gets left lying about where it doesn’t belong.’
He stared into his almost finished tea.
‘I’ll just start collecting corpses for now, we’ll see what happens then’
“Art thou finished with thy rest?”
Cormac looked up.
Sir knight stood a few paces off at the edge of the firelight, sword already in hand, the deep blue coat hanging off empty gauntlets with the patient, faintly expectant posture of a man who had been standing there for some time and was too polite to say so.
Cormac drained the last of the terrible tea in one swallow and set the mug down on the log.
“I am,” he said, standing and rolling his shoulders.
“Let’s go again.”
He barely made it three exchanges before he remembered, with fresh and humiliating clarity, exactly how far apart they actually were.
Sir knight opened slow, almost lazily, a diagonal cut that came in at shoulder height with all the urgency of a man reaching for a teacup, and Cormac read it, moved to meet it, brought the rapier up in the parry he’d been trying for almost the whole day now.
The parry landed.
It was even, he thought, a rather good parry.
It simply did not matter, because sir knight had already let the blade slide off the contact, redirecting the force of Cormac’s own parry into a circular motion that carried his pommel underneath Cormac’s guard.
The pommel slammed into Cormac’s ribs before he’d finished being pleased with himself taking him down.
“Thy guard is sound,” sir knight observed pleasantly.
“Thy recovery, less so.”
‘Noted,’ Cormac thought sourly, getting up, stepping back and resetting.
‘Hopefully he can’t do this all day, although the color of his coat might say otherwise.’
He came in faster the second time, using the strength of a Warrior properly now, closing the distance in a single explosive step that would have caught an ordinary swordsman flat-footed and probably put them through a tree.
Sir knight was not an ordinary swordsman.
He gave ground without breaking form, two clean retreating steps that turned Cormac’s charge into wasted distance, and sir knight’s blade came across in a low arc that Cormac only avoided because his reflexes were considerably faster than his technique.
They traded properly then, blade to blade, seven, eight, nine exchanges in quick succession, and Cormac could feel his body doing things it had no business knowing how to do, the Warrior pathway feeding him corrections mid-motion, wrist angle, weight distribution, the precise moment to disengage.
It was, he thought distantly, genuinely remarkable.
It was also not nearly enough.
Sir knight met every single one of those corrections with something of equal skill, a kind of experience that made Cormac’s best efforts look childish by comparison, each parry costing sir knight half the movement Cormac spent.
Each of sir knight’s counters arrived a fraction earlier than it had any right to.
“Thou hast improved remarkably,” sir knight said, conversationally, as he pushed aside Cormac’s thrust with his blade, an attack that Cormac had genuinely believed would land.
“Truly.
When first we crossed blades, thou didst grip the hilt properly, yet thou hast improved even further.”
“Thank you,” Cormac managed to say, breathing harder now, circling.
“Now thou grippest it as a seasoned swordsman,” sir knight continued, countering a feint, reading the real attack behind it, and answering it with a beat that rang Cormac’s blade nearly out of his hand.
“In no more than three nights thou hast become a proper knight.
Someone has trained squires for three years who could not claim as much.”
‘Is he genuinely having a conversation right now?’ Cormac thought, resetting his grip with fingers that had gone slightly numb.
‘He’s giving me a performance review.
Mid-spar.
While winning.’
“Thy talent,” sir knight went on, entirely undisturbed, “is astonishing.
Someone means this sincerely.
The speed at which thou dost absorb instruction is unlike anything Someone has witnessed in life or after it.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Cormac said, barely breathing, and lunged.
Sir knight caught it without apparent effort, rotated the bind, and had the point of his sword resting gently against Cormac’s sternum before Cormac had finished committing his weight.
“Though thy footwork,” sir knight added, “remains a work in progress.”
‘I need more practice,’ Cormac thought bitterly.
‘The fact that he can deliver a monologue while destroying me says considerably more about my skill than any compliment he just said.’
They went another twenty minutes.
Cormac lost every single exchange but one, though he lost them by narrower margins as the night wore on, until he managed to force sir knight into a corner and successfully hit him once, but that simply set his fate in stone as sir knight then beat him relentlessly.
‘My digestion still advanced though, both from the Sleepless and Warrior pathway since although I was getting overwhelmed, I was still able to show my proficiency.
Silver linings I guess.’
By the end of it he was drenched in sweat, his arm felt like it was burning, his lungs working as hard as superhuman lungs can, and he dropped back onto the log with the specific ungraceful thud of a man whose legs had filed a formal complaint.
“Well fought,” sir knight said, and meant it, sheathing his blade.
“Thou art becoming formidable, Sir Nikador.
Give it time.”
“Give it time,” Cormac repeated between breaths.
“I do have plenty of that.”
He sat there a while, letting his heart rate come down, and then reached into his coat and took out the floppy disks.
They looked, in the firelight, exactly as mundane as they had the first time.
Thin and unremarkable squares that had absolutely no business existing in 1929, and which he had thus far declined to experiment with on the reasonable grounds that he was not sure how to use them.
He turned one over.
There, printed in small neat letters across the upper portion, were two words he had somehow entirely failed to notice before.
SIGN HERE.
‘…Bullocks,’ he thought.
‘That’s it?
That’s the mechanism?
Sign here?
They made an interdimensional teleportation device and the activation method is a sign?’
He inspected all the floppy disks which were all the same and stored all but one back into his coat.
‘This world is so stupid.
I love it here.
Why can’t everything be this simple?’
He reached into his waistcoat and took out the fountain pen he’d bought earlier, mostly because it had looked expensive and he’d been feeling flush with the extra cash he stole.
“Sir knight, ready yourself, please.
I’ve a suspicion we’re about to go somewhere,” he said as his accent all of a sudden thickened from the delight he was feeling.
“Someone is always ready,” sir knight said, and held his sword with what could only be described as enthusiasm.
Cormac stood, checked that his suitcase was packed and latched, shrugged his overcoat back on, and settled the fedora onto his head.
Then he reached up and touched the small necklace at his throat, the yellow oil-tipped feather his mother had given him, worn smooth by years of exactly this kind of nervous habit.
‘For luck,’ he thought.
‘Or at least not misfortune, this isn’t really my expertise.’
He pressed the nib of the fountain pen to the disk and signed his name.
The light came instantly, white and total and entirely without ceremony, swallowing him and sir knight.
As the world folded around him, that same patient pull behind his head that had been beckoning him forward since the moment he’d woken in that forest strengthened.
‘Still there.
Still pulling.
Where exactly are you taking me?’
The light faded.
He heard a soft female voice.
“No offense.
Would you please pass me my heel?”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________ nvm i’ll be busy in saturday, dunno if i can get something out tomorrow too