Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 42: GRATE FOURTEEN

The thing came up through the grate before he had the lamp closed.

Not slow, the way the scout had come thirty days ago. Fast. Shoulders first, through the gap where a bar had rusted thin.

It was bigger than a Gnawer. The jaw was wrong. Wide, hinged low, built for holding, not for chewing. The body behind it was long and flat across the shoulders. Coarse fur, wet from the tunnel, slicked against ribs that moved too fast for a thing that had just come up a grate.

Behind it the second set of contacts stopped being slow and became four legs driving off stone.

Miasma was off his shoulder.

She hit the cobbles between him and the grate and went large. The green pulled up her spine and down her body in the long pulse.

The thing came through the bar anyway.

It got its head and one shoulder clear. The pulse broke against it and did not turn it. He saw her body register that. The green stuttered. It redistributed. The rhythm hunted for the rhythm that ended encounters and did not find the one that won them.

The thing got its second shoulder through.

The system gave him nothing. No notice. No axis. The same silence it kept for the chamber and the egg.

It’s not leaving. It’s the first one that’s not leaving.

"Foreleg."

It was the wrong word. She did not need it.

She had already given up the wall. The green came off her spine and ran down her right foreleg, the line he had built at the dead lamp on a count of four. There was no count here. There was no collar standing still to take it.

She put the foreleg across the thing’s muzzle as it cleared the bar.

The grate seam went soft where her foot pushed off it.

The muzzle did not.

It came through.

She was under it before he saw her move. Low.

The thing put its weight down where she had been. She was not there. She was at its flank. She put the green into the soft behind the foreleg, and the thing screamed.

The skin split where the deposit sat. Not a cut. A dissolving, the edges pulling back from the center the way the brass collar had pulled back from the deposit on the dead lamp. Except this was muscle under the skin, and the muscle was wet, and the wet hissed where the green touched it.

The first sound anything had made in thirty days that was not the sound of leaving.

Aiden was moving.

He did not decide to. The body went before the head, the way it had at the breach wall. Fast. Not running. The bent tool was already off his belt and in his hand.

Four years of not closing on things. Close on this one.

He got the tool into the eye on the side Miasma had opened. The angle was wrong.

The socket was deeper than a Gnawer’s and the point skidded off bone before it caught. Not deep enough.

He felt the resistance change when it hit something softer and then the thing moved and the tool came out wet in his hand.

The thing turned on him.

It was faster turning than it had any right to be.

It came around low. The shoulder caught him across the chest and his boots left the cobble.

He hit the stone flat on his back. The air went out of him in a sound he did not choose. The kit left his hand and skidded away. The thing was over him before he had the breath back. The jaw opened wider than a jaw that size should open. He could see the hinge working. He could smell the tunnel on its teeth.

Chest didn’t catch. Hit that stone hard enough to break the old ribs. They held. None of that matters in two seconds.

The weight came off him.

Nyx was on its back.

It had not phased. It had not come through a wall. It had crossed eight feet of open cobble the no-sound way. It was small. House-cat small. The lamp would not land on it.

It had its forefeet between the thing’s shoulders. Not on them. Between them. The way its limb had gone through the box rim. The way its foot had sat inside Aiden’s hand. The forefeet were where the thing’s spine was, and the spine was where the forefeet were.

The thing stopped. Mid-lunge. The jaw held open. The muscles along its back locked in a sequence he could see travel from the shoulders to the hindquarters.

Each one seized in order, the way a cramp took a leg except this was the whole body. The eyes were still moving. The lungs were still going. Everything else had been told to stop and had stopped.

The thing tried to throw it.

Nyx stayed on it the way the dark stays on a corner.

Miasma hit the flank again.

She did not need the opening. She took it.

The green went into the wound she had already made, deeper now, the thing fixed and screaming and not turning. Aiden got his feet under him. He got the tool back. He got it into the eye the right depth this time, both hands, his whole weight behind a thing he had spent four years never doing.

The scavenger went down between his beasts and did not get up.

Sewer Row went quiet.

The ordinary quiet. His ears worked again. The route was the route. The cold. The smell. The grate ticking as the iron settled where her foot had softened it.

He stood over it with the tool in his hand. His shoulder was filling up with what it would charge him for tomorrow. His chest, under all of it, worked.

Then the other thing landed on him. The thing he had not done.

I had the half-minute. I didn’t reach for it.

He stood with it for a beat.

The body had gone for what it had years on. The blink had sat in his head while he was on the cobble with a jaw over him, and his head had not handed it to his hands.

The system gave me a clock. My body has not put a hand on it yet.

Then he stopped being a man who had won a fight.

Now I’m a lamplighter standing over a body on a public route nine days before the assessment. That’s the worse one.

He knew what an unclassed kill on Sewer Row was. It was a notice. A worker found a dead beast he could not name on a grate, he filed it, the filing went up, and the filing had his name and his route and his assessment date on the same page. Four years of complaint forms had taught him how fast a form moved when the thing on it was a problem and not a cracked crystal.

Percival’s whole game is paper. A proctor’s note. A report under his own name. Now there’s a form that writes itself and it has my route on it.

It was the other thing too. The one from Renn’s back room. It was about this. A borrowed body that moved wrong for its species would want a Vesperian source that had just killed something the system refused to name, on a grate, in the open.

She said when the Witness confirms a bond it takes both. I just did the bond in the open with the lamp on it.

He did not file it.

He wiped the tool on the inside of his coat. He got the kit out from under the grate lip. He took the dead thing by a hind leg and put it down the grate it had come up, into the run that fed away from fourteen.

A thing that went down a sewer on Sewer Row was the sewer’s problem. The run carried things off and did not ask what they were.

It went down heavier than it had come up. It caught on the lip. He put a boot on it and pushed and the water took it. The sound it made going was not one he was going to keep.

The seam she had softened had bent a half-finger out of true. He got down on the cobble and bent it back with the tool, by feel, the way he had bent a hundred bars back over four years. A dropped grate bar was a column the form did have.

Nine days. Not handing them a logged failure on top of the rest.

His hands were not steady doing it. He let them not be. There was no one on Sewer Row to perform steady for, and the performing had always been the part that cost the most.

Miasma came off the kill slow. The green banked down out of a register he didn’t know about. Her flanks moved hard. She had spent something the count at the dead lamp had never asked of her. She would buy it back over days he was not sure he had.

He crouched and put two fingers under her jaw. The beat ran fast and even. Spent, not broken. She suffered the reading for exactly as long as it took. Then she turned her head off his fingers, which in her grammar was a full medical report and a request to stop fussing, in that order. He stopped fussing. He kept the worry. The two had different shelves.

She broke the guarding. She broke it because something made her. The yard won’t make her. The yard just stands there with a door and waits.

Nyx came off its back.

It did not go to Aiden. It crossed to Miasma.

He watched it. He did not have anything else to do with what he was seeing.

The pup stopped a body-length from her. Small. Dark in the lamp it shed.

Miasma’s head came around. Her flanks were still going. The green was still draining. She put her eyes on it. On Nyx. She had never once put her body square to it the way she put it square now.

The green did not gather. The wall posture did not come up. Something else sat in her. It did not look like the thing she did to a threat. It did not look like nothing.

It did not lower its head the way a beast lowered its head to the one that opened the kill. It did not circle the spot or scent it.

It stood in the lamp it would not hold and its eyes came off Miasma and went to the dark past the grate, where the contacts had come from, where the light did not reach.

It kept them there.

Miasma watched it look past her.

Then she turned to the route, flanks heaving, and put her weight against his ankle. Hard. The way she did when the answer was that there was no answer.

He got the kit up onto his shoulder.

He took the route home the long way and stopped twice. Once for the breath. Once to do the thing he had not done in the fight.

The lane was empty between fifteen and sixteen. The cobble ran flat for thirty feet. He picked a mark on the stone three feet ahead of his boot.

He blinked.

The mark was behind him. His boots were on cobble he had not stepped to. The shoulder did the thing the shoulder was going to do for a week, and the chest caught once, and the grey came in at the edges and went back out.

Three meters. Half a minute.

He stood on the cobble he had not walked to. He counted thirty under his breath. He picked a second mark.

He blinked again.

The second mark was behind him too. The body did the same thing it had done the first time. The chest. The grey. The shoulder. None of it new. The body was learning the cost of a thing it could do.

Years of the bent tool. Two of these. The hands don’t reach for what the body has not paid for.

He went home with the figure at point seven and a shoulder that would charge him in the morning and two beasts that had not been there thirty days ago.

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

The warmth’s still coming off it. It didn’t send the last.

The system still had not said one word about any of it.