Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 44: THE CUT

He did not move.

The contacts came on. Unhurried. Stone, then stone, the spacing even, a thing walking that had no reason to hurry because nothing down here had ever given it one.

Four feet. Light. Not the scavenger’s weight. Not the dragging thing’s. Smaller than both. It’s small.

The lamp held its six feet. The head sat in the light at the far edge, facing out, facing him. Behind it the dark gave the thing up one part at a time.

A dog.

A small one. The kind that worked a yard and barked at carts and slept under a step. The kind that had a man somewhere who fed it.

It came down the cut into the lamp’s six feet, and the lamp landed on it the way the lamp landed on everything. That was the first wrong thing. The lamp had not landed on Nyx in days, and it landed on this.

It came to the placed head and stopped at it.

It did not sniff it.

A dog smells a dead thing from across a yard. This one walked up to one and didn’t put its nose down. A dog forty feet under a street it had no stair to take.

It stepped around the head the way a man stepped around a chair he already knew was there. It put itself in the middle of the six feet the lamp was allowed. It sat.

Not the way a dog sat. The way a thing sat when it had been sent somewhere to wait and the waiting was nearly done.

Renn said it in the back room. The body behaves wrong for its species and the people who own the body don’t always know. I filed that under theory. It’s not theory. It’s this.

Miasma’s rhythm went lower.

She had been old-still since the cut. The recognizing one, the one she had done over the relic before he knew the relic was a thing. It dropped under that now, lower than he had ever felt it go, the green banking down past almost-nothing to nothing he could read.

She did not come off his shoulder. She did not put herself at the wall. She put her weight forward, toward the sitting thing, in the rhythm that was not the wall and was not the working pulse, the one that meant she knew what she was looking at.

She’s not bracing to fight it. She’s bracing the way you brace at a thing you’ve met before and hoped you wouldn’t again.

The dog’s head came around.

It found Miasma. It held on her. It did not do the thing a dog did to a beast that could end it. It looked at her the way the depot clerk had looked at his face. It looked at her the way a man checked a thing against a thing he was already carrying.

Aiden stood at the mouth of the cut with one tool and watched a borrowed body run his beast against a list.

That’s what it came for. The source. It wanted to see the source with its own borrowed eyes.

He did not move. He did not speak. He gave it nothing to add to whatever it was writing. He had spent four years being a man nobody wrote anything about. He knew how to be that.

He stood in the lamp, a lamplighter who had come down a hole after a scavenger and found a dog. He let it be the only thing he did.

It did not matter.

The dog had what it came for off the looking. He saw that the way he saw a tool mark. It had not needed him to do anything. It had not needed the bond to work where it could watch. It had needed to put borrowed eyes on the source once, in a place with no one else in it, before the place that had everyone in it.

Then it found Nyx.

Nyx had not moved off the threshold. It stood square in the mouth of the cut where it had put itself, small and dark in the lamp, facing in.

The dog’s attention crossed it.

The lamp put his shadow on the wall beside her, and the two darks did not touch. His moved when he breathed. Hers did not move at all, and somewhere in the last days, it had stopped pretending it needed anyone to cast it.

He filed that with the rest of the things he was not going to say out loud in a tunnel.

The wrongness changed.

He could not have said how on a form. He read it the way he read a seam about to go.

The sitting thing had been patient with the head and patient with him and patient with the source it had walked forty feet down to confirm. It was not patient with Nyx.

The borrowed body held too still. The kind of still a thing went when it had found a column on the page that did not have a heading. Could not move past it. Could not write it down.

Fourteen years, Renn said. Fourteen years of confirming bloodlines and it sits down in front of Nyx’s like it’s filling in a form. It gets to the dark on my threshold that the lamp won’t land on, and the form runs out of paper.

Miasma moved.

She came off his shoulder.

Not at the dog.

She put herself down on the stone between the sitting thing and the threshold, between it and Nyx, low, in the old-still rhythm and not the wall.

She held there. She did not strike. The rhythm she was in was not a rhythm that struck. It was the one that recognized.

She had recognized the thing, and she had recognized what its attention did when it crossed the pup. She had put her body in the line between them, in the only register she had that was not a fight.

The dog looked at her do it.

It got up.

It did not back away the way a thing backed from a beast. It got up the way a man got up from a chair when the thing he had come to a room to see had been seen.

It turned in the cut, unhurried, the spacing of it even on the stone. It went back into the dark the way it had come.

The dark took it one part at a time, and the contacts went away down the run until the stone stopped carrying them.

The head stayed where it had been put. Facing out. Facing him.

He stood in the six feet the lamp was allowed for a long time after the sound was gone.

It didn’t come to trap me. The head wasn’t bait. It was a door left open. It wanted me down here with both of them, once, quiet, so it could look before the day everyone looks.

He picked the lamp up off the squared stone. His hand was steady on it. He noticed the steadiness and did not trust it, the way he had not trusted his ribs on the forty-one steps. A body that should be doing one thing and did another was a body sending a bill he had not seen yet.

He did not go further up the cut. There was nothing further up the cut for him now. The thing it held had come to him, looked, and left. Walking deeper would only be him handing it a second look it had not asked for.

He went back down the run the way he had come.

Miasma rode the shoulder again, the old-still rhythm draining off her slow, slower than it drained off a kill.

Nyx came off the threshold last. It did not look up the run after the dog. It looked at him once, the pale eyes the dark did not change. Then it took the other shoulder, faced forward, and did not look at the dark again.

It had never once done that before.

He put it on the shelf at the back of his head with the rest and did not reach for it, because he had nothing to do with it yet.

The shaft was where he had left it. The grey at the top of it was full day now.

He climbed it hand under hand. He had one tool. He had two beasts. He had a half-minute clock he had used twice on flat stone with no one watching.

He had the thing the cut had actually given him, too. Not a scavenger explained. Not a body recovered.

It was that the most watched room in the city was where this finished. The thing that ran it had known that before he walked down the hole. It had spent one of his eight days making sure he knew it too.

He came up through grate fourteen into his own route at full day, hours late, a clerk’s column already marked against him two streets over. He stood on Sewer Row in the light with the lamp in his hand and nowhere to put any of it.

The chest worked.

He noticed that it worked. The climb out of the shaft had taken less out of him than the climb into the route had taken out of him a month ago. The wet had not come up the throat.

The wall was somewhere in his head as a place he used to need, not a place he reached for now.

The system fired once.

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[ DETOXIFICATION — PROGRESS ]

Source: Trait — Toxin Filter (passive, continuous)

Cleared: small intestine

Lifespan returned: +0.05 Years

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 0.75 Years ]

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A hundredth. He logged it where he logged the figure now, the way he logged a tool count, and put it where it went.

Point seven five. The lung’s not on the list yet. The list is moving.

He took the long way home. The sixth-bell route was gone. The clerk had already marked it. Walking the route now would only put his name a second time on a column that did not need a second mark.

He cut through the herb-lane.

The herb-lane ran behind the shopfronts, the delivery side, where the herbalist’s stock came in and the ground waste went out.

Aiden had walked it a handful of times in his month on the route, always off-hours, always because the main lane had something on it he didn’t want to walk past.

The herbalist’s daughter ran the back of the shop. He knew her the way he knew most people on the route, by sight and function.

She took deliveries at the side door, ground stock in the yard behind it, and kept the shop’s book at a table by the window with a lamp Aiden had reported twice for a cracked pane.

She was the one who had watched him log the pane both times, and both times she had brought him water he had not asked for and taken the cup back without a word. Route people. The ones who noticed a man’s habits because his habits crossed their window at the same bell every day.

The herbalist’s father was on the step out of his door, watching the lane the way a man watched when he was waiting for a thing. He saw Aiden come around the bend. He did not call out. He waited.

Aiden came to the step.

The old man looked at his face, at Miasma on his shoulder, at Nyx on the other. He had not seen Nyx close before.

Aiden watched him register the size of it. He watched the old man notice the way the lamp on the lane fell on the cobbles and on Aiden’s coat, and went around the small shape on the shoulder without touching it.

The old man’s hand came up.

It came up slow. It was the hand a man put out when he was confirming a thing he was already sure of. He reached toward Nyx the way a man reached toward a dog he knew the name of, the back of the hand first, the thumb tucked. His fingers crossed the space where Nyx’s shoulder should have been.

The space was empty.

Nyx was there. The pale eyes had not moved off the old man. The body was on the shoulder. The hand went through the air where the shoulder was, and the air did not have the shoulder in it for the half-breath it took the hand to cross.

The hand came back without finding fur.

The old man did not pull it back fast. He set it down on the step beside him. He looked at his own palm once, the way a man looked at a hand that had gone somewhere it had not expected to go. Then he looked at Aiden.

He did not say anything about it.

"My granddaughter keeps the book by the window," he said instead. "She said the sixth bell came and went without you. She said if you came past the back way, you’d be walking long."

"Tell her she counts better than the clerk does."

"I will."

Aiden went up the lane.

The old man stayed on the step. He did not put his hand on the post the way a younger man would have. He sat on the step in the light and watched Aiden go.

He felt the pup not be where the pup was. The herbalist will know inside the hour. The lane will know by night.

Eight days, and the lane is the only thing that has not put a paper on a desk.

Eight days.

It’s not waiting in the dark anymore. It’s waiting in the yard. With everybody.