Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 28: RUMOR

He did not open the chest again.

He slept four hours. It took him down the way deep water takes a tired swimmer. No dreams, no waking to check the bolt.

He woke past first bell. Mouth dry. He drank from the tin cup.

He looked at the chest.

He left it closed.

He knew what was in it. Opening it again would not change the letters or the bound ledgers or the boy whose father had kept them. The decision he needed was not in the chest.

Looking at the chest again would only be a way of not making it.

He went to work.

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The neighborhood had it by the time he reached Cutter’s Lane.

He felt it before he understood it. A street held itself differently when it was carrying a story it had not finished telling.

The cobbler’s door stood open. Two men stood in it, buying nothing. The Greyspider on the doorframe tracked him the way it always tracked him. The men did not look at him at all.

That was its own kind of noticing. The kind where people agreed not to look at what they had come to see.

He kept his pace.

Four years had taught him the pace was the message. A man who slowed down wanted to know. A man who wanted to know might be connected to the thing. A lamplighter could not afford to be connected to anything.

He walked the gutter side at the speed of a man whose route did not care what the street had heard. He listened the way a man listened when he was not allowed to look like it.

The Faller’s Row office had been entered in the night.

The street gave it up in pieces. Not the event itself. The reactions. The event assembled behind them as people talked. An enforcement basement. A door that had not been forced.

That was the part the street kept returning to.

Forced doors were ordinary. A crowbar, a strong man, a thing the city understood. This door had not been forced. The lock was gone. Not broken. Gone. The men in the cobbler’s doorway kept turning it over, the way people turned over a fact to see if it got more believable from another side.

It did not.

A chest was missing.

The street did not have the owner. It had the missing, the door, the no-force. It was building the rest out of those three. What it built was not the truth. It was not far from it either. Streets were never far when they had the door and the missing and a thing they could not explain.

He lit lamp eleven.

He did not look down the lane at the bakery.

The closed door had become a fact about the route now. Like lamp eleven’s housing. Like the herbalist’s greeting. He had stopped letting himself look at it. Looking meant slowing-down and slowing-down was the message.

He lit lamp twelve.

Thirteen.

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The boy was not on the step at lamp seventeen.

He had not expected the boy.

He had snapped at the boy. The boy’s father’s chest was on the floor of his room. The family’s bakery had been emptied by the city.

There was no morning in any of that where a six-year-old came out with bread for the lamplighter who had been short with him.

He ran the moment back the way he ran a botched repair. The word had been the depot word, the one for couriers who interrupted a count. The right word for a courier. The boy was six. There was no tool in the kit for un-saying a word. He had checked.

He lit lamp seventeen.

The step was empty. The door behind it was closed. He had been turning absences into information for weeks. This one refused.

It was the step, and the door, and a thing he had done to the step’s occupant that he had not undone.

He might not get to undo it. The family was somewhere the city had put them. The city did not tell lamplighters where it put bakers.

He finished the route.

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The man was waiting outside the depot when he came to sign out.

Not an enforcer. No long coat. A working man. Aproned. The apron of someone pulled from a trade.

Aiden knew the apron before he placed the face. He had seen it once, from forty meters, beside a municipal cart, while he lit lamp eleven and did not slow down.

The baker.

The city had put him behind a closed door. He was not behind it now. He stood outside the depot in his apron in the early dark with the stillness of a man released without being told why, who had walked to the one place he could think to walk.

He looked at Aiden.

Aiden’s hand stopped on the sign-out register. The wrong tool against the wrong problem. No plan behind it. The body ahead of him again.

The baker did not speak for a moment. He had the face of a man who had rehearsed a thing on the walk over and was finding the rehearsal would not survive the saying.

Up close he was older than forty meters had made him. He had the boy in his face. The same set around the eyes. The same way the eyes held a thing and decided whether to let it out.

"They let me go this morning," the baker said. "No charge. No reason. The man at the desk could not tell me why. He kept looking at a paper that said the material had not been processed."

He stopped. Started again.

"The material taken from my shop. It was not processed because it is not there. Someone took it out of the building before it could be."

Aiden said nothing.

He had nothing safe to say.

He had a chest on the floor of his room and a forged paper spent to nothing and a beast who had melted the lock of a door he could not open.

The man in front of him had just told him, without knowing it, that the theft had worked. A chest gone before the ninth day was a charge that could not be filed. It was a man released at first bell with no reason the desk could give.

The baker watched his face.

He had the boy’s eyes. The boy’s eyes knew how to hold a thing and decide whether to let it out. The baker held it. He decided.

"My son brings bread to a lamplighter," he said. "On a route the lamplighter was put on two weeks ago. My son is six. He decides who he likes by something I have never been able to follow."

A pause.

"He told me the lamplighter was short with him yesterday. That the lamplighter did not want the bread. He was not upset. He told me the way he tells me weather."

Another pause.

"And then this morning I am released from a thing I should not have been released from. And the only fact anyone can give me is that the material is gone."

He did not make it a question.

He left it as a statement with a hole in it. A question would have needed an answer. The baker had already been the man whose year got carried off. He was not going to hand that weight to someone else just to know.

Then he said, "Thank you."

To the hole. Not to Aiden. The way Aiden had said it to a marker in a clearing. To a girl who could not hear him.

He turned. He walked back toward a bakery the city had emptied and given no reason for emptying. In an apron. In the dark. A man going home to a son who decided who he liked by something nobody could follow.

Aiden stood at the register with his hand stopped on it.

He did not finish the signature for a long count.

The dry close did not come. He did not reach for it. He had a man’s gratitude aimed at a hole where an answer should have been. A chest on his floor the man did not know was there. A boy who told things the way he told weather. The boy’s father walking home in the dark, having decided not to ask the one question that would have let either of them carry the other’s year away.

He finished the signature.

The ink came out uneven.

He looked at it in the register. He had no observation about it. No note about bodies catching up. The signature was uneven, in a register, the way a signature went uneven when the man signing it had a baker’s thank-you sitting in him with nowhere to go.

He left the depot.

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He went home the long way.

Not the route home. The long way. The one that added the quarter hour. He did not tell himself it was the route this time.

He knew it was not.

The street had the story now. The whole Outer Ring had the door that was not forced and the lock that was gone and the chest that was missing. Somewhere in the next days, someone was going to ask the lamplighter how a lock disappeared off a door.

The lamplighter walked every street the story was on. A man who walked every street eventually got asked.

They had not asked yet.

They were going to.

He walked the long way home with that ahead of him. A chest behind a bolted door. A baker’s thank-you with no place to land.

He did not resolve any of it.

It was not the kind of night that resolved. He had stopped pretending they did.