Chapter 134: Worse on Purpose
Alistair spent the day teaching himself to be worse than he was, and that turned out harder than learning anything new.
Tobian Marrow came from the Halversen branch of the Marrow house, and the Halversen Marrows were not Edgeform people.
They were Veilform, the defensive school, generations of cautious eastern nobles who had always valued a son who came home over a son who won.
Due had built the cover all the way down. The training history was real on paper, lodged in the eastern registries, paid for and aged like something no one would ever drink.
Tobian fenced Veilform at Class C. Respectable for a third son, and nothing more than that.
The trouble was that Alistair had Class C in him already. He had earned it honestly, in his years with the Upholders of Law and Justice, before the rest of what he was had arrived to live on top of it.
Everything that came after sat over the old Class C like new growth over a buried wall, and a Combat Master would feel the wall through the soil, no matter how green the grass had grown above.
So the day’s work was subtraction.
He cleared the small room of furniture, set the practice blade in his hand, and went through the Veilform sequences alone.
Every time his body tried to be good, he stopped it, and made it ordinary again.
A Class B parry rotated the wrist half a beat early to steal the other man’s tempo.
He made himself parry on the beat, late, the way a careful man parries when he has trained for twenty years and has no gift to show for it.
His footwork wanted to flow. Seeing this, he made it hesitate, the way a frightened man’s feet hesitate between steps.
He kept his weight where a cautious man keeps it, a finger too far back, always half ready to give ground and never quite ready to take any.
It felt like wearing his own coat turned inside out, the seams scratching against him in a way he could not stop noticing.
He ran the sequence again and made it worse, then a third time and made it worse still, until being bad at it cost him more concentration than being good ever had.
The door opened without a knock.
"You’re doing it wrong," said Due, leaning in the frame. "On purpose, I’ll assume, since that’s the only thing stopping me from saying it louder."
Alistair did not stop the form. "You built the cover, so you tell me how wrong it needs to be."
Due adjusted his collar and stepped inside, his boots loud on the bare floor. "Wrong enough that a man watching you starts thinking about his lunch. You parried like you meant it a moment ago, and Tobian Marrow has never meant anything in his life. That’s the whole charm of him."
"He means to go home alive. That counts for something," said Alistair.
"That’s survival, not skill, and survival doesn’t show in the wrist." Due crossed his arms, and his usual grin thinned. "Which brings me to the part you’ll enjoy a great deal less."
Alistair lowered the blade and waited.
"The audit isn’t only papers anymore. Crane added a verification to it, and tomorrow they’re sending a Combat Master to test the assessment in the flesh." Due let that settle before he finished it. "He puts a blade in your hand and watches what the hands do when they run out of time to think. Paper can’t lie for you in a room like that."
Alistair clicked his tongue. "Crane doesn’t trust his own registries."
"Crane doesn’t trust his own reflection, and that’s precisely why he’s good at the work." Due tilted his head toward Alistair’s wrist. "The man he’s sending fenced for the Upholders before you ever wore their coat. Old, slow, and he’s read more liars than you’ve ever met. A Combat Master like that reads the body under the manners. You can dress Tobian however you please above the collar, but below it, the truth lives in the hands."
"Then I’ll make sure the truth in my hands is his," said Alistair.
Due paused at the door on his way out. "I built a man on paper. You’re the one who has to go and be him in a room full of people paid to doubt it." He left without pulling the door fully shut, the way he always did.
Alistair stood alone a while longer, then he ran the Equalizer scan over himself the way he had a hundred times, the cold sweep of his own Characteristic reading the man it lived inside.
The reading came back, and for a moment he stopped breathing.
Veilform. Class C. The Halversen carriage of the wrist, the late parry, the weight a finger too far back.
His Equalizer had read the lie, and it agreed with the lie.
He sat down on the edge of the stripped bed, the practice blade still warm in his grip, and stared at nothing for a moment.
The Equalizer did not lie. It measured.
It tells him, always, exactly what stands across from him and exactly what stands inside his own skin, and in a full year it had never once flattered him or spared him a single thing he did not want to know.
He had spent that year resenting it for being honest, the way a man resents a friend who refuses to tell him a kindness.
Now he had spent one day teaching his body a smaller man’s form, and the one part of him that could not lie had measured him and handed back the smaller man, because for one whole day that was what he had made himself into.
’Even it believes him now,’ Alistair thought. ’A man can fool a city with his clothes and his manners, but to fool the thing inside your own chest, you have to actually become the lie.’
Alistair was honestly unsettled.
He cleaned the blade and set it by the door for the morning, and ate a little, and could not have said afterward what.
He had built Tobian to be perfect, and the price of a perfect lie, he was beginning to understand, was that from the inside it stopped feeling like a lie at all.
He did not know how many days of Tobian Marrow a man could carry before the carrying simply became being.
He suspected the number was lower than he wanted, and that no one ever learned their own number until they had already walked past it.
He lay in the dark a long time without sleeping.
He had spent every day since the Black Mountains afraid that someone would finally see what he truly was. Eventually, the thought turned over on him, and it would not let go.
Tomorrow, for the first time in his entire life, he was going to spend the whole day afraid of being seen as good, while a Combat Master stood across from him with a blade and waited patiently for his hands to forget the lie they had only just learned.
