Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 41: Chapter 40: ONE SHAPE

The day after the review he walked the Inner Trades route and did not think about the corridor. The route did not care what had happened in a corridor. The route cared about wicks.

He went up the forty-one steps to lamp four on Aldgate Alley, and his ribs stayed quiet at thirty.

Thirty was the step where they asked. Four years, every climb, thirty was where his hand went out for the wall. His hand went out now and found a stone it did not need. He took it off the stone and stood there not trusting it.

A body that gets worse on a schedule does not get better for free. Where’s the bill.

He logged lamp four. He went down the forty-one steps and made himself not count them. He counted them anyway.

Ten days to the yard.

The system fired between four and five. No warning. His hand still cold off the housing.

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[ DETOXIFICATION — STATUS CHANGE ]

Source: Trait — Toxin Filter (passive, continuous)

Stage: whole-body contamination reduced to baseline

Now isolating: per-organ purge, ascending mass

Cleared: spleen

Lifespan returned: +0.2 Years

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 0.7 Years ]

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He read it twice. Then a third time, slow, the way he read the ones that mattered, for what the maker had put in and left out.

There’s the bill. Came back the other way for once. Took five weeks.

The maker had put the order in it. Ascending mass. Small ones first, cleared and counted off. The big ones at the bottom of a list he had not known he was standing on.

Spleen. Two-tenths of a year. The system had been clearing the whole body to baseline before it would name a single organ. The spleen was the first thing small enough to fall off the bottom.

The lung was further down. The lung was the one that took the wall, every climb, four years. Nowhere on the cleared line.

So the one that’s killing me is last. Walk the list down to it. If the list gets that far.

He put it where the system kept the ones it kept and went to lamp five.

Ten days. Seven months. One problem the figure did not touch.

He had never made either of them fight.

He had been drilling the Acid Weave since the egg. The deposit spread was down to a collar. Four-count to eat through iron. Two soft pits where she placed it. He put the dented oil tin on the cobble six feet out. He put Miasma down. He gave her forward.

She went to the bar.

She put herself between him and the tin. The bar. Green rising up her spine, the Acid Weave charging. She was guarding him from a dented oil tin on a cobblestone. The tin sat there being a tin.

He stayed where he was and let her hold the line she had drawn. Arguing with a beast about which of them stood closer to a risk was a fight he had lost every time it mattered.

Not the tin. Go at the tin.

He scraped it across the stone so it moved like a thing with intent. She tracked it. She put herself between it and him and held. The green stayed off her foreleg. She was guarding, not striking.

He understood. When he walked her up to a target, she used the acid. When the target came toward them, she put up the wall. Two responses. He was asking for one and triggering the other.

Every time. Thirty days of it. The Gnawer scout had looked at her and gone. The pack had looked at her and gone. The Griffin had stepped back. A hall of proctors’ beasts had kept their distance. None of it a fight. She ended things before they were things. He had built a month on a beast that was a reason to take the other tunnel.

The yard does not let things take the other tunnel.

"Go at it," he said.

The edge came out on his voice before he heard it leave. It was not meant for her.

It landed on her, because she was what was there. The form had no body that read his. She did. She read it and dropped into the careful rhythm. The shell one. The slow one for a wrong no wall answered.

He shut his mouth.

That was for me. Not her.

He crouched on the cold stone with his beast gone careful because he had put a thing in his voice she had nothing to brace. He sat in it. He did not cover it with a sound.

He set two fingers against her side. She held. The green came up off the careful slow, the way it came up when a wrong had run out.

Hours. She buys that back in hours. I’ve got nine days of hours and I just spent some teaching her nothing.

There was a fourth soft pit in the collar by morning.

He had not set it. She had, in the careful, the green going where a body sent it with nowhere clean to send it. It had run past the collar into the housing seam.

The seam had gone soft. The face pane had dropped a corner out of true. His own corner’s lamp. The one he would inherit. Dark now.

Four copper for a pane. A clerk two streets over logs it by the sixth bell. The pane’s not the cost.

The depot clerk slid his three copper across the counter the next morning without the small pause.

The pause had been there eleven years. Lamplighter Vell, three copper, eyes down, next man.

The pause was gone.

The clerk looked at his face. He had never looked at his face. Then at Miasma on his shoulder. Then he put the copper down a beat too careful, the way a man set a thing down near something he had heard about and not decided on.

The basement. The boy’s father. It went where word went in the Outer Ring, low and sideways, and it had gotten to a counter.

Word’s reached the depot. The one place that’s handed me the same three copper for eleven years is handing it different. That’s the kind of quiet I did not need nine days out.

He did not say anything. There was nothing at a depot counter worth a sentence. There never had been. The new thing was that the clerk seemed to think there might be, and was waiting to see.

Aiden took the copper before the waiting turned into a question.

He went to the route. Nine days.

He heard the two men at lamp eleven. The dark side of the lane. The cold held their voices down.

"—east of the burn line. Whole black stand, struck out last spring. My cousin foraged that ground nine years. Walks up this season, Vane men on the cut road turning foragers off at the tree line. Family charter, they said. On burned ground."

"Burned ground’s nobody’s."

"Tell the coat with the crest. Lost the whole season off a forest nobody wanted till somebody decided they did."

He was a lamp away with the wire in his hand and his head down in the housing. He did not turn it.

A man who turns his head buys in. Not my forest. Not my season. Not my nine years.

He logged eleven and moved on. It went on the shelf at the back of his head with the others he never reached for.

Nyx was on the windowsill when he got back.

Wrong side of glass he had not opened. Pale eyes down on the street. The dark not changing them.

The system fired once. Small.

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[ BEAST CAPABILITY — RECORDED ]

Source: Nyx — Shadow Pup (Tier 1)

Phase: mass below threshold

Sound: suppressed at ambient

Light: occluded passive

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 0.7 Years ]

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He read it. Brief. No fanfare. The system writing what it could finally see.

The form has a column now. So do the things the form does.

He put his hand out.

It came off the sill and up his arm and set its head against his neck.

On the other shoulder, Miasma’s green shifted once. Not the working rhythm. The careful one, the slow one she had used over the shell. It held a beat. Then it went back to the working.

Nyx brought nothing back. Left nothing behind.

The loose board was the way he left it. He checked. A man with a relic under his floor checked.

Nine days.

He took the route at the sixth bell with the figure at seven months, Miasma on one shoulder and Nyx on the other.

Twelve was Sewer Row.

He was repacking sixteen’s housing when the sound came up through the grate beside fourteen.

He knew the grate. He had knelt at it thirty-some days ago with a dying thing between the bars. He knew the sound. Organized. Multiple contacts on stone. The kind that knew it was being heard.

That’s not the gutters. That’s the other thing. And it’s at fourteen.

Miasma was off his shoulder before he finished thinking.

She went to the bars. Small, then larger, the green pulling in along her spine and releasing down her body in the one long pulse. The pulse that was thirty days of everything choosing the other way.

The thing in the grate looked at her.

It put its weight forward.

A second set of contacts came up behind it. Unhurried. The green at her skin climbed past anything he had a count for, and his lamp threw its light down through the bars onto a shape that had heard the thing that made everything leave—

and stayed.