Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 39: THE DOCUMENTING

The summons came to his door on the fifth day.

Not by the sixth bell. By a runner, in the afternoon, while he was off-route. A boy in an Academy under-clerk’s sash, out of breath from three flights, holding a folded square with a wax seal that was not the brass tree of the Maintenance Division.

It was the Academy’s own seal. He had seen it once, twelve years ago, on a rejection letter he had burned in a broken lamp.

He took it. The runner waited, the way runners waited when they had been told to confirm a thing was received and not just delivered.

He broke the seal.

Lamplighter A. Vell, Field Provision 7. Required: attendance, Lower Grounds review chamber, second bell tomorrow. Matter: incident report filed re: unregistered beast, lower training grounds, orientation walk, day three. Filing party: Vane, P. Both contracted beasts to be present.

He read it twice.

There it is. Five days. He couldn’t make a proctor write it at the wall. So he found the pen himself.

He looked at the runner.

"Received," he said.

The runner went.

He added it up on the floor that night with both beasts and the lamp out for the oil.

Before he opened the summons again, he did the other thing.

He stood up off the floor. He moved to the middle of the room, where there was nothing in front of him for three meters because the room was not three meters across in any direction the floor had open.

He picked the angle that had the most floor: the diagonal from the workbench to the door. He stood at the workbench end of it. He looked at the door.

He did the thing the system had told him he could do.

The room was at the door.

He had not crossed the floor. He had not stepped. The workbench had been against his shoulder a half-breath ago. It was three meters behind him now.

His vision greyed for one count and came back. He put his hand on the doorframe to confirm it was the doorframe. It was.

The doorframe, to its credit, held still for it.

Three meters. Once a half-minute.

The clock works.

He stood at the door for the rest of the count. He did not try it again. The system had said once per thirty seconds. The system had been right about every number it had given him so far, and a man with half a year did not spend the second use on a second test in his own room.

He went back to the floor.

Percival had filed an incident report. The report named an unregistered beast on a training ground.

The thing the report could not say, because saying it made the report sound mad, was how the beast had gotten where it got. A report that said a beast appeared behind me with no breach in an unbreachable wall was a report that got its filer looked at. A report that said an unregistered beast was loose on the lower grounds during an orientation walk was a report that got the beast’s tamer looked at.

Percival had filed the second one. The true thing folded inside a survivable one. The kitten-sized impossible thing turned into a procedural one: unregistered, loose, during a walk.

Three clean violations the Academy had columns for, with the part that had no column left out, because the part that had no column was the part that had backed him into the wall in front of forty people. He was not going to put that in writing under his own name.

You took the wall out. Of course you did. The wall’s the part that happened to you. You’re filing the part that hits me.

Miasma was at his knee. Nyx was against his thigh. He sat with the folded summons and the lamp out, running through what the review chamber would be.

The lamp stayed out because the dark was cheaper and the thinking did not bill by the wick.

Both beasts had arranged themselves touching him, which they did not ordinarily do at the same time, and neither was asleep. The pack had read the week. The pack had voted with its weight. He let the vote count and went back to the chamber in his head.

Three violations. Unregistered beast. Loose on a ground. Present during a sanctioned walk without declaration. The Academy had a procedure for each violation.

The procedures, run, ended at a Field Provision admit losing his standing eleven days before the assessment.

That was the shape of it. Percival had not needed the wall. The three violations were enough on paper to take the assessment away from a lamplighter before the lamplighter ever stood in the yard.

He looked at Nyx in the dark.

It looked back, the pale eyes, the only part of it the dark did not change.

The system wrote you down after the wall. The Academy hasn’t.

It has his report and no procedure for what you are. He’s betting the procedure runs before the truth does.

And if the procedure runs the wrong way, I still have a half-minute clock and three meters.

He sat with that.

He did not file it as a plan. The trait was a thing he had once a half-minute in a room where the panel sat across a table and a Vane sat on the same side as him and the floor was small.

Three meters was not a way out of a small room. Three meters was a way to put a Vane between him and a door if the day went somewhere a man with a half-year had decided not to let it go without a move on the floor.

He sat with that too. Then he understood the thing he had, and he sat with that instead.

The system had resolved Nyx. Affinity: Void. Tier 1. Lineage D. Designation accepted. He had read it on the path and read it as a thing about Nyx.

It was also a thing he could put on a table. A Field Provision admit could not argue a wall. A wall had no procedure and arguing it made the arguer the mad one, which was exactly why Percival had cut it out.

But a Field Provision admit could declare a contracted beast. Declaration was a procedure. The Academy had a column for it. He had been told zero on the array twelve years ago. The array had been a procedure and the procedure had been the thing that crushed him.

Percival had filed the report that ran the procedure against him.

Aiden could declare the beast and run the same procedure the other way.

He cut the wall out so the report would live. Now it doesn’t say what Nyx is. Just unregistered.

So I register it. On the record.

He can’t put the wall back without becoming the man who files a wall.

He did not file the thought. He held it, turned it, the way he turned a wire before he decided what shape tomorrow needed it in. It held.

It was the first time in five weeks the procedure had been a thing in his hand instead of a thing on his neck. He sat with it in the dark. He did not make tea and let the thought be the thing it was for as long as the dark let him.

Miasma pressed her weight against his knee.

He let the lamp stay out. The count was done. He had a move, and the man who built the trap had built it out of the one material Aiden had spent his life being broken by and five weeks learning to hold.

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The review chamber was small and had a table and three chairs on the far side of it and one on the near.

He came in at the second bell with Miasma on his shoulder and Nyx on the other. The three on the far side were the older proctor, the nineteen-years one, a clerk with a ledger, and a third man Aiden did not know.

The third man wore a coat that was Academy administration rather than proctor, the kind of man who ran the procedures the proctors only witnessed.

Percival was in the near chair.

Not in the room as the filing party at a distance the way he stood at processing tables.

In the room. In the chair on Aiden’s side of the table, because the review put filer and subject on the same side facing the panel, next to the man he had filed it against, in front of the panel, with the Griffin at his heel and Aiden’s two beasts four feet away.

It had looked at her across the annex hall and not been able to stop. In the small chamber, it kept its head turned to the wall, the deliberate hold of a beast keeping its eyes off a thing on purpose.

Percival’s hand was on its harness the way a man’s hand stayed on a thing he was not sure of in a room he needed to look sure in.

The administration man read the report aloud.

He read it flat, the procedural voice, the three violations in the order the report had them.

Unregistered beast. Present on the lower training grounds. Loose during a sanctioned orientation walk.

He read it the way the examiner had read the array result twelve years ago, the same flat, the structural-fact flat.

Aiden sat in the chair the review put him in and felt the old thing the flat voice did. He did not let the old thing be the thing that ran him, because he had a move, and the move did not need him to be the man the flat voice made.

The administration man finished. He looked at Aiden.

"The filing party alleges an unregistered beast. Do you contest the beast is yours."

"No."

The administration man’s pen moved. A contested-ownership branch of the procedure closed. He had expected the contest. They always expected the contest. The contest was where these went.

"Do you contest it was present on the lower grounds during the walk."

"No."

The pen moved again. Another branch closed. The clerk looked up from the ledger.

The older proctor did not.

The older proctor was watching Aiden the way he had watched Aiden at the desk. He had already read where this was going because he had been doing this for nineteen years.

"Then the beast is unregistered, present, and undeclared," the administration man said. "That is the filing. Do you have anything to enter before the panel rules."

"Yes," Aiden said. "I’m declaring it."

The room did the thing.