The first hunt back was a disaster, and I have never been happier to survive one.
I could not bend. That was the whole problem. Every dwarf in Gudrun's party fought low and close to the ground, ducking under swings, rolling away from teeth, crouching behind shields. I could do none of that. The ossium in my back held me as straight as a fence post. When a blind gnawer came at my legs, I could not stoop to meet it. I had to step back and swing down, stiff as a hinge, and I missed, and Fenna had to kill it for me.
"You fight like a door," said Bolli afterward, with great sympathy.
"I know."
"A very tall door. That someone has nailed shut."
"I know, Bolli."
Harek did not say anything. But on the walk back up to the Bellows Gate he fell into step beside me, and after a while he said, quietly, "You've got a puppet that sees in the dark, lad. Stop fighting like a dwarf."
I thought about that for a long time.
So I stopped fighting like a dwarf.
I learned to fight like what I was: a stiff-backed human with one good hand, a heavy sword, fifteen points of mana, and a small wooden friend.
I sent Icarus ahead. Always. He went first into every tunnel, every side passage, every dark hall, running on his threads twenty paces in front of the party with my mana in him and the gray world open behind my eyes. He saw the gnawers before they came. He saw the stonelings sitting still among the rubble, pretending to be rocks. He saw the glowback centipedes on the ceiling, coiled and waiting, long before Ottil's lantern ever reached them.
The first time Icarus warned us of a centipede, Gudrun did not believe me. The second time, she did. The third time, she changed the order of the party, so that I walked second, right behind her, with my hand on my threads and my eyes half-closed.
"Keep your doll out front," she told me. "I'll keep the beasts off your face."
"Puppet."
"Keep your puppet out front."
I learned to fight without bending. I let things come to me. I stood my ground with my back straight and my sword held out before me, and when something came at me, I did not dodge. I let the weight of the starsteel fall on it, the way Gudrun had taught me years ago, and I used Icarus to trip, to distract, to tangle. A gnawer charging at my legs would find a small wooden figure under its feet, wrapping a gloomweaver thread around its forelegs, and go sprawling, and then my sword would come down.
It was not graceful. But it worked.
The Registry noticed, the way it notices everything worth noticing.
Party kill: less experience gained.
LEVEL UP. Level 22.
That was in the spring of the first year. Level twenty-three came in the winter.
In between hunts, I worked.
The pain in my back did not stop. Ulfar had said it would not, and it did not. It burned every hour of every day, a low steady line of coals along my spine, worse in the cold, worse when I was tired, worse after every hunt. But I had learned that work quieted it. When my hands were busy, the coals dimmed, a little. Never out. But a little.
So I kept my hands busy.
The orders kept coming. Lady Rosalind's younger sister got her doll, and wrote me a letter in a careful child's hand, misspelling every third word, to say that the doll's name was Petunia and that Petunia was her best friend in the world. Corva Lisse opened a fourth troupe, and then a fifth, and sent me a drawing her cousin had made of a crowd outside a harbor tavern in Kessaria, all of them watching a little wooden dragon pour tea. Master Plumm sent a box of candied figs with a note that said only THIEF, underlined three times, which Torvi said was his way of ordering another doll.
The money came in steadily, now. I could only make three or four of the big dolls a year, the masterwork ones, and every one of them had a noble waiting for it. Each sold for fifteen gold crowns at the least, sometimes twenty or more. Corva Lisse's stages and plays brought in a crown or two apiece, and she ordered something every season. Torvi's music boxes needed little clockwork figures, which she paid me for out of the hall's takings. And every month there was my share from the hunt, which I no longer sold back to the Hold.
After Torvi's tenth, it came to something close to a hundred crowns a year. More than a Halvard spearman would see in forty years.
I spent almost none of it. Torvi's life debt meant I did not pay for my bed or my meals, and she would not hear of it when I tried. I bought tools when I needed them and gloomweaver silk whenever I could find it, at five crowns a spool. Everything else went down to the eighth gallery, behind the three iron doors, into the small numbered vault with my name in the vault-master's book.
I did not know yet exactly what I was saving for. Only that the things I wanted to make next would not be made of linden and goat hair.
And I made puppets. Not for anyone. For myself.
I had a requirement to meet.
The requirement had not changed in all those years. It still floated in the pale panel of my class whenever I looked:
Magic Puppet Maker (Level 25)
Locked. Requirement: craft a puppet from a magical material.
Icarus had come close. So close that I had named him for it. But he had bled too much mana when I carved him, and the Registry had decided that what was left was not enough. A puppet with a magical component, not from one.
I could not afford another block of elderheart. Nobody could, by the slice. But elderheart was not the only magical material in the world.
The hunts gave me shares. Every month, after we came back up through the Bellows Gate and the common pot was split, I came away with something: a lesser core, a glowing centipede plate, a gnawer's tooth, a twist of raw ore picked from a stoneling's belly. I had always sold most of it back to the Hold. Now I kept it. All of it. I filled a whole cupboard in the Ticking Hall.
And then, in the second summer, Harek brought me a hollow owl.
It had come down into the upper galleries from somewhere on the mountain, the first one anyone had seen inside the Hold in a decade, and he had shot it with a single arrow through the eye. He laid it on my bench, wrapped in a sack, and stood back.
"Light bones," he said. "Silent. Never seen anything like the way they fly." He looked at me sideways. "Thought you might want it more than the Hold does."
I did. I paid him four crowns for it, which he tried to refuse, and then, when I would not take no, did not.
It took me four months.
Hollow owl bones are like nothing I have ever worked. They are light as paper and strong as oak, hollow all the way through, and they hold mana the way a reed holds air: quietly, all along their length. I could feel it the moment I picked one up. A faint, cool, soft presence, like holding your breath in a dark room.
I did not carve them the way I had carved Icarus. I had learned too much since then. My puppet craft had grown, year by year, through every doll and puppet and marionette I made, through the clumsy months in bed and the long months after, until working a material was less like cutting it and more like listening to it. I could feel, now, where the mana ran in a bone. I could feel which way it wanted to go. And I could cut along it, instead of across it, so that almost nothing bled away.
I made a small figure, about the length of my forearm. Every part of it came from the owl. Its frame was the hollow bones, cut and fitted and pinned with slivers of the owl's own beak. Its joints were bone sockets, polished smooth. Its body was padded with the owl's down, the silent gray down that Kessarian spies stuff in their boots. I strung it with gloomweaver silk. I gave it the owl's face, simple and round, with two dark eyes of polished glowback plate.
It was the most careful work I had ever done.
When I set the last pin, the Registry spoke.
Deed recorded: Crafted a puppet from a magical material.
I read it twice.
Then I sat back on my stool, very slowly, so as not to wake the coals in my spine, and looked at the little bone owl-figure on my bench, and felt something in my chest that I did not have a word for.
Torvi came and stood beside me. She looked at the panel I could not show her. She looked at my face.
"From," I said. "Not with. From."
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she put her broad, scarred hand on my shoulder, very gently, right where the coals were worst. It hurt. I did not mind.
"About time," she said.
I named the owl-puppet Hush, because it was the quietest thing I had ever made. When I sent my mana down its silk, it moved without a sound. Not a creak. Not a click. I could walk it across the stone floor of the Ticking Hall, past the brass birds and the moon clock, and even the clockwork crow did not hear it coming.
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 33)
Level twenty-four came that autumn, deep in Old Khazrund, in a flooded hall where Hush and Icarus together found a mire-slug hiding under the black water long before it could rise. I took it with a single thrust, my back straight, my wrist straight, the weight of the starsteel doing the work.
And then there was only one level left.
It took the whole of the next year.
The curve was steep now. Every level took more than the one before, and the beasts in the upper galleries no longer gave me much. Gudrun took us deeper, past the gallery of worn faces, past the long steep stair, down to the levels where the air was warm and heavy and the walls sweated. We found things down there that Harek had to think about before he could name them. We fought them carefully, and slowly, with Icarus and Hush running ahead of us in the dark.
I was past fifty by then. I had not thought about it until Bolli asked me one night how old I was, and I counted, and realized I had been in this world for more than eight years. I had been forty-three when the wall opened. My knee popped every morning. My back burned every hour. The hair at my temples had gone gray, and the beard Torvi kept telling me to trim had gone gray with it.
I did not feel old, exactly. I felt worn. Like a tool that had been used hard and sharpened often, and still had a good edge, but less steel left behind it.
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 35)
The last level came at the end of the second year, in the deepest hall Gudrun's party had ever reached. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
It was a round chamber, carved long ago, with a ring of pillars around its edge and a dry, cracked pool in the center. Something lived in the pool. Hush saw it first: a long, pale, slow shape, coiled in the dark at the bottom, with too many joints and no eyes. It did not move when Hush crept close. It did not move when Icarus crept closer.
It moved when Bolli sneezed.
I do not want to describe the fight. It was long and ugly and loud, and Sigrun broke two fingers, and Gudrun's shield took a second dent beside the first. But at the end of it, the pale thing lay still in the bottom of the cracked pool, with my starsteel sword driven through the joint behind its head, exactly where I had felt the gap open through Icarus's gray eyes a moment before.
I stood over it, gasping, my back on fire, my hand shaking on the hilt.
Then the panel opened.
Party kill: less experience gained.
LEVEL UP. Level 25.
And then, before I could even take a breath, a second panel, wider than any I had seen since level ten.
CLASS EVOLUTION
Puppet Maker (Lv. 25). Evolutions available:
Magic Puppet Maker. Requirement met: crafted a puppet from a magical material. Allows the crafting of magic puppets.
Magic Weaver. Deeds: crafted many lifelike dolls and their dresses. Improves the making of dresses, and unlocks the making of dresses with magical effects.
Illusionist. Deeds: performed and sold string-plays. Improves performance and stagecraft, and increases proficiency at learning illusion magic.
I stood in the dark hall with the dead thing at my feet and the party gathering around me, and I did not hear any of them.
Magic Weaver was a good class. An honest one. I had spent two years sewing dresses for dolls that made a hard man weep and became a little girl's best friend, and the thought of dresses that could hold magic of their own pulled at me. Illusionist was tempting too. Corva Lisse had five troupes now because of me, and I had always wondered what my stages would look like with a little real illusion in them.
But I had waited eight years for the first one.
I chose Magic Puppet Maker.
CLASS EVOLVED: Magic Puppet Maker. puppet craft upgraded: magic puppets may now be crafted.
The feeling ran down my arms, warm and settling, the same as the day I first took Puppet Maker beside a dead bear at the edge of a creek. Like putting on a glove that had been made for me. Only this time, the glove went deeper. Past my hands. Past my palms. Down into the warmth where my mana lived.
And with it came knowing.
I do not know how else to say it. One moment I did not know how to make a magic puppet. The next, I did, the way I knew how to sharpen a chisel or set a ball joint. The knowledge simply settled into me, whole, as if it had always been there and I had only now remembered it.
A magic puppet is not moved by strings, or by mana sent down a thread. It is given a piece of its maker. A very small piece. A splinter of whatever it is that makes me me: my essence, my magic, my soul, if that is the word. The maker splits it off, the way you split a sliver from a block, and gifts it to the puppet, and the bond between them is permanent.
And only a puppet made from a magical material can hold it. Anything less, and the splinter has nowhere to live.
And I could see Icarus.
Not with my eyes. With the Registry. A small, pale panel opened above him, where he stood on the rim of the cracked pool, the way a tag opens above a living thing.
Icarus (Puppet)
DUR 3 STR 1 DEX 4
Another above Hush, crouched on a fallen pillar.
Hush (Puppet)
DUR 2 STR 1 DEX 6
Qualifies: made from a magical material.
I stared at them. I had never once in all these years known what they were. I had only felt it, through the silk. And under Hush's numbers, one more line, very small: qualifies. Icarus had no such line. He had bled too much, all those years ago. He would always be a puppet on strings.
Hush could be more.
The class panel was not finished with me.
CLASS SKILL. Choose one new skill, based on your deeds.
Material Sense. Feel and judge the mana in materials by touch.
Mana Carving. Shape magical materials without bleeding their mana.
Mend Construct. Repair puppets and constructs faster and better.
Shared Sight. See and hear through one puppet at a time.
Trap Rigging. Build puppets into traps and decoys.
✦ LEGENDARY SKILL ✦
Vessel. Deeds: possessed a puppet. Give up your own body, and inhabit a puppet you have made.
I read the list once. Then I read the last line again.
And again.
Give up your own body, and inhabit a puppet you have made.
The hall was very quiet. Behind me, I could hear the dwarves talking, Sigrun cursing softly over her broken fingers, Ottil relighting his lantern. Somewhere far above, the Anvil was beating. Along my spine, the coals burned, the way they burned every hour of every day, and would go on burning for, Ulfar said, perhaps another six or seven years, until the ether finished eating me from the inside.
I thought about the three days in the dark. About lying broken under a slab of stone and feeling the moss in Icarus's small hands more clearly than I felt anything in my own body. About the year in bed, living through his gray eyes. About how many mornings, since then, I had woken in the Ticking Hall and reached for the silk before I reached for anything else.
The most alive I had ever felt.
Mana Carving would have been the sensible choice. Any master puppet maker would have told me so. Mend Construct would have kept Icarus and Hush whole through a hundred hunts. Shared Sight, I already half had.
I chose Vessel.
Class skill acquired: Vessel.
The panel closed. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. I was still standing in a dark hall, with my back on fire and a dead monster at my feet.
But I knew, standing there, that something had.
Then I opened my stats.
I had a point to spend. I knew exactly where it was going. I had known for two years, ever since Dain had told me in a quiet voice that vitality was the only thing likely to buy me more time. Every point more, the slower the ether eats you. I had planned it. I had told Ulfar. I had written it in my ledger.
Kenji Mochizuki — Human, Lv. 25, Magic Puppet Maker
VIT 6 END 4 STR 3 DEX 7 INT 9 ATT 3
STAT POINT AVAILABLE (1)
I stared at the panel.
It had been four. It had been four for as long as I had been in this world. Torvi had told me, years ago, that it was a strong back for an untrained human. And somewhere in the year I had spent lying flat in a bed, staring at a ceiling, being fed with a spoon, it had slipped. Five and below can fade, she had said. Only six and above is forever. It had probably fallen to two in that bed, and the last two years of hunting had dragged it back up to three.
I had never checked. Not once, in three years. I had been so busy with the panels for my class and my skill that I had never once looked at my own body's numbers.
I felt very stupid, standing there.
And then, slowly, I realized that it did not matter.
I looked at the point. I looked at vitality, sitting at six. I thought about the plan: one more point, a few more years, a slower death.
Then I thought about Vessel.
If I could leave this body, if I could someday step out of it into something I had made, then it did not matter how strong it was. It did not matter how much ether was in it. It did not matter how many years it had left. It was a tool. A worn one, with a cracked handle. You do not pour your savings into mending a cracked handle, if you know you can make a new one.
I did not know yet what kind of puppet could hold me. I did not know how Vessel worked, or if it would work at all. But it was there, now, on my panel. A door I could open.
I put the point into attunement.
Attunement 3 → 4
MP 15 / 15 → MP 20 / 20
Torvi's advice, after all those years. I almost laughed.
The last thing I noticed, as we climbed the long stair back toward the Bellows Gate, was my knee.
It did not pop.
I stopped on the stair. Gudrun, behind me, nearly walked into my back.
"What?" she said.
I bent the knee, carefully. Straightened it. Bent it again. Nothing. No pop. No grind. No sound like a cart wheel. For eight years it had made that noise every time I stood up, and now it simply bent, smooth and quiet, like a well-oiled joint.
The span of a human life at level twenty-five, they said, is a hundred and fifty years. The Registry tightens you up a little. You feel younger the next morning. Ten years. Maybe twenty.
I did not feel twenty years younger. The coals still burned along my spine, exactly as they always had; whatever the Registry had tightened, it had not touched the ether. But my knee did not pop. My hands, when I flexed them, felt a little steadier. The ache in my shoulders had eased.
I started to laugh. Right there on the stair. I could not help it.
"What?" said Gudrun again.
"Torvi," I said. "She made a promise. On her beard. Years ago." I bent my knee again, just to feel it. "She was right."
Torvi was waiting at the bench when I came in, the way she always was.
I did not say anything. I just walked to my cot, slowly, and stood in front of her, and bent my knee. Up and down. Once, twice. Silently.
Torvi looked at my knee. Then at my face. Her gears clicked, very fast.
"Twenty-five?" she said.
"Twenty-five."
She set down her tools. She stood up. She came around the bench and, for the first time in all the years I had known her, she hugged me. Hard. Her beard scratched my chin and her gears pressed into my chest and her arms around my ribs set every coal along my spine blazing, and I did not care at all.
"Told you," she said into my coat. "Beard-promise. Never broken one yet."
That night, when the Ticking Hall was dark and Torvi had gone to bed, I set Hush on the bench in front of me and did what the skill told me to do.
It was not hard. That was the strange part. I closed my eyes and found the warmth in my palms, and then went past it, deeper, to something underneath that I had never noticed before. Something small and steady and very much mine. I took hold of the smallest edge of it, a sliver thinner than a gloomweaver thread, and I split it away.
It did not hurt. It felt like breathing out.
I held it in my palm, a speck of warmth I could not see, and laid my hand on Hush's small bone chest, and gave it to him.
For a moment, nothing.
Then Hush turned his head.
There were no threads on my fingers. My mana was not running anywhere. I had not asked him to move. He simply turned his round owl face toward me, slowly, the way a bird does when it hears something it is not sure of, and looked at me with his dark eyes.
Hush (Magic Puppet)
DUR 2 STR 1 DEX 6
Bound to: Kenji Mochizuki.
I did not breathe.
"Walk to the edge of the bench," I whispered.
He did. Silently. Without a sound, without a string, without a single thread of mana from me. He walked to the edge of the bench and stopped and looked back at me, waiting.
"Fetch my cup," I said, and nodded at the mug of cold bitter drink on Torvi's bench across the hall. I did not tell him which mug. I did not tell him how. He climbed down, crossed the floor, climbed Torvi's bench leg, wrapped both small arms around the right mug, and brought it back. Not a drop spilled. I understood, without knowing how, that he had known exactly which cup I meant, because he knew what I meant. Because a piece of me was in him.
He had no mind of his own. I could feel that, too. No thoughts, no wishes. Only the splinter of me, and what I wanted.
I sat there for a long time. Then, because it was late, and I was tired, and my back was burning, and I was happier than I had been in years, I said:
"Do a little dance."
Hush danced. A small, silent, solemn little owl-dance on the bench in the lamplight, turning on one foot, lifting his bone arms, bowing.
On the shelf above, Icarus sat with his strings coiled around his knees and watched. I would have sworn, though I knew it was not possible, that he looked a little jealous.
Afterward, I sat on my cot and opened the ledger. Icarus sat on one knee. Hush crouched on the other, silent as always. Clara watched from the shelf.
Day 3,062.
Level: 25. Magic Puppet Maker.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 36. Masterwork Puppet.
Class skill: Vessel.
Stats: Strength down to three. Never checked. Stupid. The point went into attunement. MP 20.
Hush: owl bone, owl down, gloomweaver silk. From, not with. DUR 2, STR 1, DEX 6. Bound tonight. A magic puppet. No strings. He danced.
Icarus: DUR 3, STR 1, DEX 4. Never knew.
Knee: does not pop. Torvi kept her beard-promise.
Back: burns. Same as always. Vault: about three hundred and forty crowns. All of it for materials.
I looked at the page for a long time. Then, at the bottom, very small, I wrote one more line.
Vessel.
I did not write anything beside it. I did not know what to write. I closed the book, and set it on the shelf, and lay down in the dark with the two small puppets beside me.
I did not try it that night.
I lay awake for a long time, thinking about it.