Free Web NovelChapter 3: Eighteen Silver
He woke to the floor grate quiet.
The contacts had run until past second, and then they had stopped, and then he had slept the way he had slept the night of the contract, hard, without the diagnostic dreams the cough had been producing. Miasma was on the workbench. Same position she had been in when he lost track. Same forward attention. He did not ask whether she had moved.
The notification from last night was still in his vision when he sat up.
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[ proximity alert — bonded beast ]
elemental signature detected: unconfirmed
density: pack threshold
[ current lifespan: 0.5 Years ]
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He read it again. Same words.
Unconfirmed. Pack threshold. The system has a name for Rotfang Scavengers and a name for lamp brackets, and it doesn’t have one for what came up through my floor last night.
He filed it under information without immediate use and got dressed.
She came off the bench when he picked up his coat. Sat in his palm with the patience of something resuming a process they had both agreed on.
He put her in his left pocket and went out.
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The first drainage pipe was on the back of the cobbler’s building on Cutter’s Lane.
She had indicated it on the walk back from Renn’s yesterday and he had not had the time.
He had time now.
He crouched beside the foundation while a delivery cart went past with two crates of something that smelled like fish and resignation, and the cart driver did not look at him because crouching maintenance workers were Outer Ring scenery and acknowledging them led to conversations that led to extra work.
Moon Sage in the joint where the pipe pulled from the masonry. Four sprigs. Smaller than the tunnel patch, but the leaves were doing the same quiet business with the same wrong precision.
He harvested three. Left the root system. Wrapped them in a tannery receipt that had been in his coat lining for a week because he kept forgetting to throw it away. Pressed the wrap flat, tied it with thread off his cuff. That pocket was doing better work this month than it had in its whole history.
She pressed forward.
Two streets down. A window box behind a building that backed onto the old drainage channel, where the runoff had been seeping into the soil for long enough that whatever the original tenant had been trying to grow had been replaced entirely.
Three sprigs. Then a gutter joint on the back side of a guild building three streets from the Academy gates, in the shadow of a wall he had walked past a hundred times on his lamp route. Two more.
Eight sprigs by ninth bell. He didn’t bother counting silver yet. Counting silver before he had sold it was the kind of mistake you made once.
He went to the Broken Stem.
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Renn looked at the eight sprigs.
She looked at him.
"You said no yesterday."
"I’m still saying no."
She picked one up. Checked the stem. "Same source."
"Different patches."
A pause. "How many patches are there."
He didn’t answer.
She put the sprig down. Counted out the coin without ceremony: twenty-six silver for the eight, which was three-twenty per sprig with a tenth piece rounded off in his favor, which meant she was buying his silence on the source by overpaying in a way she could later claim was the standard rate.
The coin was counted in the old style, stacks of four, her thumb squaring each stack before it crossed the counter.
Renn’s hands did not hurry. Hands that hurried said the number mattered.
Hers never hurried. He filed the rounding, and what it was for.
He took the coin.
"The thin man wants to talk to you," she said.
"The thin man can talk to you."
"He says there are things he could pay for that he can’t pay through me."
"Tell him I’m not difficult to find."
He left.
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On the step outside he stood for a moment.
Forty-five silver and twenty copper in his right pocket since yesterday morning. He had spent four years making three copper a day.
The figures hadn’t broken yet. He still had a route, still had a room above the tannery, still had a chest that didn’t catch and hands that didn’t shake. But there was a configuration of his life forming itself in his coat pocket that he didn’t recognize. He didn’t know whether that was the contract’s effect or his own...
Probably both.
Both. And neither one’s mine alone, is it.
He reached into the pocket and put his thumb against her back through the lining. She pressed up against the thumb without opening her eyes.
She pressed once. Patient. Forward.
He started walking.
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He took the route past the Academy gates because she pressed that way at the junction, and because he had not walked past the Academy gates since he was twelve and he was curious whether the contract had changed his relationship with the wrought iron at all.
It hadn’t. The gates were the gates.
Two students were coming out of the side entrance when he passed.
A Frostmane Lynx walked between them at heel, coat carrying the faint blue cast that Frostmanes carried when the weather was cold enough to register on their skin.
The lynx looked at him. Looked at his pocket. Looked away.
It did this without any of the three motions seeming to come from a decision. The lynx had been trained out of decisions about whom it noticed, and noticing Aiden’s pocket had not survived the training.
A courier crossed the courtyard with an Ashwing on his shoulder. The bird was in working harness. The harness was Imperial issue.
Two proctors stood at the bulletin board with their own beasts at heel. A Hearthcat sat at the older proctor’s boots. A juvenile Greyspider clung to the younger proctor’s collar.
The Hearthcat looked at Aiden the way Hearthcats looked at strangers, directly and without expression. The Greyspider didn’t look at him. Greyspiders tracked everything in range at once and singled out nothing.
Aiden stood near the gate post with his hands in his coat pockets and Miasma against his ribs and counted, in the way he had stopped letting himself count, the number of beasts visible from where he was standing.
Five.
That number had been three at twelve, when he had stood in the same place at the same gate the morning of his assessment. He had counted then too. He had counted because counting was something to do while his hands shook.
Five. And I have one of you now.
The Frostmane and the students disappeared around the corner.
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He was twenty meters past the gates when the voice came up behind him.
"Is that a rat."
