Two men came for the wounded an hour after the raiders fled.
They walked up the eastern road without horses, without weapons, with a flat cart between them and their hats pulled low. Esteban watched them from the gate. They did not look at the house. They did not look at Diego, who sat on the low wall with his sword across his knees. They loaded the eight broken men onto the cart one at a time, the way porters load sacks, and one of the men on the ground said something to them through his teeth. The nearer porter answered with a single word, and that was all.
When the cart was out of sight, Esteban realized he had been holding the plank in both hands the whole time.
It was still there. A slab of grey wood the width of a door, with a crossbow bolt standing out of it like a nail. He set it against the wall and flexed his fingers. His forearms ached the way they used to after a day of felling oak.
[Focus: 11 / 12.]
The number had been climbing back for the last hour, slowly, one point for every few minutes he stood still. He didn't know yet how fast it recovered when he was moving. He suspected that was something he would learn at a bad moment.
Diego bandaged his arm himself.
He refused help twice. Riko stood by with a clean strip of cloth and a small bottle, and Diego took the bottle without a word, poured it over the wound with his teeth set, wrapped the arm in six quick turns, and tied it off using his mouth and his good hand. The cloth was red through before he finished.
"It will hold," he said.
"It will not," said Riko.
"Then it will hold until I'm asleep."
He went inside. A few minutes later Esteban looked through the doorway and saw the old man in the chair by the cold hearth, head tipped back, mouth slightly open, sword still across his knees. It was ten in the morning. Whatever Diego was, he did not sleep at ten in the morning.
Esteban stood there a moment longer than he meant to. Then he closed the door gently and went out to find Riko.
Riko was sitting on the gatepost, cleaning his fingernails with the little bread knife, looking at nothing.
"I need to see the camp," he said.
"What camp?"
"Theirs. Red Mountain. Half a day east, up in the hills. I asked him last night while you were asleep. Where they sleep, how many, where the leader stays." He shrugged. "I want to know what we're dealing with before the thing with the leader."
"Diego won't want that."
"Diego's asleep."
"I'll come with you."
"No." Riko slid down from the post. "You're a very large person, Esteban. You walk like a wall. I can't have a wall in the bushes."
It was an unfair thing to say, and it was also true, and Esteban didn't argue.
"Be back by noon tomorrow."
"Noon," said Riko. "Sooner, if nothing goes wrong."
It took him until sunset to reach the hills.
The Red Mountain camp sat on a shelf of rust-colored rock above a dry streambed, easy to defend and hard to find. Riko lay on his stomach in a crevice two hundred paces above it and counted.
Thirty-four men. Not all of them armed; a handful were boys no older than sixteen carrying water and firewood. A rope corral with eleven horses. Four sentries, rotating every two hours, none of them watching the slope behind the camp, because no one climbs a slope like that for fun.
At the center, a squat stone hut with a flat roof, the only building. Smoke from its chimney. A man outside the door, sitting on a crate, whittling. Every so often he looked up at the hut, then back at the knife, then up again.
He's afraid of whoever's in there. Not terrified. The way a man is afraid of a dog he has seen bite someone.
Riko waited.
The sun went down. The fires were lit. The men ate, and passed a bottle, and told stories he couldn't hear. Around the second hour of darkness, the door of the stone hut opened and a man walked out.
That was the first surprise. Riko had expected a monster, a mountain, something out of a nursery tale. Instead the man who stepped out of the hut was a bit over six feet, broad in the shoulders and thick through the middle, heavy-boned, with a close-cropped skull and a face that could have belonged to a butcher or a carpenter. He wore only trousers and boots. His torso was bare.
His torso was covered in tiny dots.
Hundreds of them, in neat clusters, on his chest and ribs and the backs of his forearms. Small raised points, each no larger than a lentil. Riko had seen skin like it once, on a man who'd been tattooed with a needle by a sailor too drunk to finish the picture.
Not a tattoo. Scars.
The man crossed the camp without looking at anyone and sat down by the biggest fire. The rest of the camp had gone quiet, though no one had stopped eating. Someone handed him a bowl. He ate. When he finished, he reached into the fire and took out a long iron skewer, one end glowing dull red, and held it a hand's breadth from his own forearm.
Riko stopped breathing.
The man drew the glowing tip along his own skin. Slowly. A line, not a dot, perhaps three fingers long.
He didn't flinch.
Riko watched the line blister and blacken. He watched the man's face, which didn't change, and the man's other hand, which closed slowly around the edge of the crate beside him. His knuckles went white. His jaw moved once, a small muscle jumping at the hinge.
And then the burn stopped looking like a burn.
It was the strangest thing Riko had ever seen. The skin around the blister went pale, then grey, then a flat dull colour like river stone. Not just on the line. In a broad band around it, spreading outward from the wound and settling, until a patch of forearm the size of a man's palm looked like it had been carved from granite and painted to resemble flesh.
The man flexed his hand. The grey patch didn't crease.
He put the skewer back into the fire, and began the same thing on his other arm.
He did this for an hour.
Burn after burn, line after line, slowly, deliberately, a man preparing his tools for the day. Riko had thought he'd seen cruel things. This wasn't cruelty. It was maintenance. And every burn left behind a little more stone on the man's body, until by midnight his arms and chest and shoulders were grey to the elbows, and he sat in the firelight like a statue that happened to be sweating.
Around the thirtieth minute, two of the older men stood up.
They didn't speak. They walked to the edge of the clearing and each picked up a long wooden staff, heavy ash, iron-capped at both ends. The man by the fire rose, turned his back to them, and put his hands on his knees.
The first staff came down across his shoulders.
The sound reached Riko across two hundred paces: a flat crack, like a plank split against a wall. The man grunted. His shoulders didn't buckle. The second staff swung at his ribs, and Riko saw the skin there go dark and glossy a fraction of a second after the staff landed, as if the flesh needed to be reminded.
One heartbeat, Riko thought. No more. But there's a gap.
The third swing broke the staff.
It splintered in the older man's hands, the iron cap spinning off into the dirt. The man by the fire straightened, turned, and looked at him without any expression at all. The older man dropped the broken stick and took a step back. The man by the fire said something quiet.
Then a boy of about fifteen walked out of the crowd.
He was holding a thin steel skewer, shorter than a knife, sharp as a needle. His hand shook. He stopped in front of the man, who looked down at him, and gave a nod.
The boy touched the point to the man's chest.
It sank in.
Not far. A thumb's width, maybe, into the thick flesh beneath the ribs. A single drop of blood welled out. The man's face tightened. Then the colour crept out of the skin around the wound, grey, hard, and the skewer stopped, held in place like a nail in a block of ash.
The boy pulled it free. It took both hands.
Riko turned his head away and breathed through his nose for a long time.
He was back at the farmhouse at noon, thin and filthy, with grass in his hair.
Diego was awake. He sat at the table with a bowl in front of him and did not look up. Esteban was standing by the window with his arms folded. Riko dropped onto the bench, took a long drink from the nearest cup, and began to talk.
He talked for twenty minutes. He told them about the thirty-four men. He told them about the hut. He told them about the iron skewer and the lines of dots and the staff that had broken in two. He described the burns in detail, because he couldn't think of a way to make them sound less like what they were.
When he got to the boy and the needle, he stopped and picked up his cup again.
Nobody said anything for a while. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
"It's pain," said Esteban at last.
"What?"
"The skin hardens after pain. Not before. After." He had unfolded his arms. He was looking at nothing, in the way that Riko had learned meant he was looking at one of the blue boxes only he could see. "The harder the hit, the harder the skin. The staff hurts, so he turns to stone. But a needle…"
"A needle hurts less than a staff," said Riko.
"Which means he hardens less. At the point of contact, anyway."
"It still went in."
"It went in because it was fast. The needle is thin enough that it was inside before the pain had arrived." He turned from the window. "That's the gap you saw. One heartbeat. If something is fast enough, he doesn't have time to harden."
"Or sharp enough," said Diego.
They both looked at him.
He hadn't moved. He still sat with his hands around the bowl, and for a moment Esteban thought he'd spoken in his sleep.
"I fought him twice," said Diego. "The first time I never touched him. I broke my knuckles on his ribs and I went home with six teeth fewer than I started with. The second time I came with a razor. A barber's blade, ground down thin as paper. I'd been working on it for weeks."
"Did it work?"
"Once." He lifted his left arm, bandaged, in a slow half gesture. "I opened a line along his jaw. He hardly felt it. I think he was surprised that I'd done it. But by the time he understood what had happened, the cut was already there, and it was bleeding, and he laughed."
"And then?"
"Then he hit me." Diego took a breath. "Which was the last thing I remember. I woke up in the road. He left me alive, for reasons I don't understand."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"So there's a gap," said Esteban, slowly. "A very small one."
"A very, very small one."
"And you can't use it, because you can't make anything thin enough."
"I can't. That's why I came home."
Esteban looked at his hands.
That night he sat on the back step with a rock in his lap.
He'd found it at the edge of the orchard: a flat grey river stone the size of a loaf, smooth, with a faint vein of white running across it. The sun was long gone and the only light came from the kitchen window behind him. He held the stone in both hands and turned it slowly.
Step reading, said the blue list in the corner of his eye, as he'd asked. Weak. Sees how a target carries its weight.
It didn't work on stone, of course. But the habit it was building in him was a strange new one: a way of looking at a thing and asking where does the weight go. He ran his thumb along the white vein. He pressed.
He pressed harder.
The stone cracked along the vein with a sound like a knuckle breaking, and fell open into two even halves. He hadn't felt any pain. His hand was whole. He sat there with a piece of river stone in each palm, staring at the clean fracture.
It broke where it was weakest, he thought. Not where I pushed.
He didn't know yet what that meant. But somewhere in the dark, a thing was turning over, slow as a millstone.
Inside, in the chair by the empty hearth, Diego opened his eyes. He didn't move. He listened to the boy breathe on the back step, and to the thin sound of a stone being turned between two hands, and said nothing.
After a while he closed his eyes again.