Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 45: THE PAPER AT THE DESK

Marsh was on the depot step at first bell, the morning after the cut, sitting where retired men sat. In nobody’s way, and in everybody’s view.

He had a folded sheet in his hand. He did not give it to Aiden. He held it the way he held things he had already decided about.

"There was a paper at the desk this morning," he said. "The desk that stopped being mine the day I walked out of it. Reassignment. Route Seven to Route Twelve, effective the third bell of the day before the assessment."

Aiden waited.

"Route Twelve is two districts off. Different route. Different lamp count. Different ledger. The paper says clerical correction. The paper has no clerical reason to exist."

"Whose hand."

"Not a Vane hand directly. A man who owes the Vanes a favor. The favor went through enough desks to look clean by the time it reached the one that used to be mine."

Marsh turned the sheet so Aiden could read it. He did not let go of it.

The form was clean. The route number was correct. The date was three days out, two before the Preliminary, one before the proctor’s stated review window. The clerk’s stamp was real. The signature above the stamp was a name Aiden did not know.

"He cannot refuse it himself," Marsh said. "He can lose it. A desk cannot lose a paper for long. An old man with no desk can lose one for exactly as long as he likes. The man at my old desk owes me eleven years, and he gave it to me to lose."

He took the sheet back. He folded it once, and then again, and put it in his coat, in the pocket where a man kept the things that were not going to be found.

"It is going to spend the week being lost."

"What happens when it does not move."

"Another comes." Marsh’s mouth did the flat thing. "A different form. Same source, one desk closer to yours. They started five desks out. Tomorrow they will be four. The review is in seven days. They run out of desks before the review runs out of days."

"And after."

"After the review they do not need paper. The review is the paper."

Aiden put his hand on the depot door. He did not push it open yet.

"Why are you telling me."

"Because the lane has been watching. The clerk’s hand was different yesterday at the window. The herbalist’s father came up at fifth bell to ask whether you were still on Seven. The boy ran the bend twice yesterday past your route timing." Marsh paused. "The lane knows someone is trying to move you. It does not know the details. It is doing what a lane does when it decides a man on it is worth keeping."

"Which is."

"Getting in the way of the paper."

Aiden took his hand off the door.

He looked at Marsh.

"How long have you been losing paper for me."

"Three days now." Marsh did not look away from him. "Hold the route. Walk the week. The absence last night goes in the review as a mark against you, not a form that kills you today. That’s what luck looks like at this level. Do not give them another one."

"I am not going to."

"I know."

Marsh went down the corridor.

Aiden pushed open the door.

The depot clerk had his slips counted. He had the oil out on the north counter. He did not say anything about it. He counted Aiden’s slips and pushed the oil across and took his hand off it.

The clerk’s window looked onto the south lane. The south lane was empty. It had been empty all morning. The clerk had been standing at the north counter for an hour before Aiden came.

"Sixth bell’s yours, lamplighter."

"Same as always."

The clerk did the slow look. The look held longer than the look had held two days ago. Then the clerk took his hand off the slip, put it under the counter, and brought it back with a wax-stoppered jar.

He set it on top of the oil.

Aiden looked at the jar the way he looked at any unpriced thing. The counter between them was depot property. What crossed it off the ledger was the clerk’s own, and clerks owned almost nothing. He took it with both hands.

"From the apothecary. He said it was for the lung. He had heard. He said to tell you he was not to charge for it."

Aiden took the jar.

He did not say anything. The clerk had not done it to be thanked, and the apothecary had not sent it to be thanked. He put the jar in his coat. He went up the route.

The route did not move.

He worked grate nine. He worked the lamp at the herb-lane mouth. He took the wall at the top of it for one breath, the wet climb shorter than it had been at lamp seventeen, the lung purge running the way it had been running since the contract.

He came down the lamp.

He went on with the route.

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 chest caught once. The grey came in at the edges and went back out.

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. The chest. The grey. The shoulder ache from the scavenger that would not be gone for a week. None of it new. The body was learning the cost of a thing it could do.

Three times in three days. The hands have not started reaching for it on their own yet. The yard does not let me start reaching for it then.

He logged the lamps he had not logged. He went on.

Lamp twenty-one was the second lamp from the dead-lamp corner.

He worked it. The wet climb came back at the rung, short. He held it through. When he came down off the rung, Miasma was off his shoulder before his boots touched stone.

She was on the cobble. She was not facing the lamp. She was facing the corner.

Nyx was on the cobble beside her. Not riding to her. Already there. He had not seen it leave his shoulder. The dark of it on the stone did not match the dark of the lane around it.

He turned the lamp on his belt down to a coal.

The corner sat thirty feet off. The dead lamp on it held no fire. It should have held the spill of the working lamps on either side. Every unlit post on every route caught near light against its iron.

This one didn’t. The light from twenty-one did not reach it. The light from the herb-lane side did not reach it. The dark on the corner did not have an edge.

A man stood under it.

Aiden saw him the way he saw tool marks. Not by looking for him.

By the shape the dark made around a body that shouldn’t have been standing in it.

He was beside the post, in the place a man stood when he wanted the post between himself and the lane he had come up. He was not large. His coat was the coat of a man on a lane at night. There was nothing else on him for Aiden to read.

He was looking at Aiden.

He had been watching the whole climb. The lamp. The breath at the top. The coming down. The watching was the work. He was being paid for it, and it was almost done.

Miasma did not pulse.

She did not go to the wall. She did not go to the working rhythm. The green banked down past anything Aiden knew. The recognizing one. The one she had done over the cut. She held it on the cobble and did not move and did not come back to his shoulder.

Nyx held the same beat beside her.

He had never seen them in that rhythm at the same time outside a place the dark had taken a body into. They were in it now, on a corner he walked every night, thirty feet from his own door.

Both of them. The one that recognizes. They have not done that together up here.

The man did not move.

He stayed beside the post and let himself be looked at.

He did not lean. He did not shift his weight. He held the stillness of a body that had been hired to hold a stillness for as long as the stillness was paid for.

The stillness was being paid for now. The man knew Aiden was watching him hold it.

He let Aiden see him watch.

Then he stepped back.

Not far. Two paces. Into the part of the dark on the corner the light did not reach and never had. He did it slow. He kept his face turned.

The face went into the dark last, and the dark closed over it the way water closed over a thing it had taken, smooth, without a trace.

The corner was empty.

It was the kind of empty a corner was when a body had just stepped out of it and the lane had not yet caught up to it being empty.

Aiden did not move.

Miasma did not come up off the rhythm. Nyx did not come up off the rhythm. They held the corner the way they had held the cut, both of them, the same beat.

The corner held nothing. They held it anyway. The thing they were holding it against had not gone far enough for the holding to be done.

He counted thirty under his breath.

The corner stayed empty.

Miasma came up off the recognizing slow. The way she had come off it at the cut, slower than off a kill.

She came back to his shoulder. Nyx took the other.

Neither of them looked back at the corner once they had taken the shoulders, and that was the worse thing, because they did not need to.

He walked to the post.

He did not draw the tool. A man with a tool drawn was a man saying he expected to use it. He kept the hand near the belt and went the thirty feet at a route pace. He stopped at the post and put his hand on the iron the way he would put his hand on any post on any lane.

The iron was cold.

It was the cold of iron on a lane at the back end of the third bell. There was nothing on the post. There was nothing under it. The dropped face pane was the dropped face pane.

He stood at the post.

He did not look into the dark the man had stepped back into. The man had not come for the looking-into. He had come for the looking-at. The looking-at was done. Looking into the dark after him would only be Aiden adding a thing to whatever the man had been hired to write down about him tonight.

He took his hand off the iron.

He came down off the corner with Miasma riding the shoulder and Nyx riding the other.

Marsh’s flat shape was at the lane mouth.

He had not gone home. He had stood at the lane mouth across the bend for the back half of the route. Aiden filed that the way he registered everything else.

"The lane saw it too," Marsh said.

"Saw what."

"That you walked past the dead-lamp corner with both beasts standing the watch for you. The baker’s boy is two streets over. He saw it from the lane. He came to me at the depot before I left."

Aiden did not say anything.

"He said your beasts were both on the cobble facing a corner with nothing in it. He said there had been a man." Marsh paused. "The boy is six. He is right about the corner."

That was not the Witness. The Witness borrows beasts. That was a man. A hired man. Paid to stand and watch and report what he saw. Percival’s paper doesn’t need a desk if the man on the corner can tell them what my beasts do at a dead lamp.

"It was not something the boy would recognize."

"No. But the lane has now seen what your beasts do when a body is somewhere they think a body should not be. The lane will tell the lane. By morning the depot clerk will know. By tomorrow night the apothecary will know. The papers do not move through the lane. The lane is moving past the papers."

Marsh put his hand in his coat. He took it out empty.

"Walk the week."

"I am."

Marsh went.

Aiden stood at the lane mouth a moment.

The route was done. The jar in his coat was a jar. The clerk at the depot had stood at the north counter for an hour before he came. The lane was doing what a lane did when it decided to keep a man on it.

He went up to the room.

He put the jar on the workbench. He sat on the floor. Miasma came to his knee. Nyx came against his thigh. The lamp stayed lit because there was oil for it.

Seven days.

Seven days and four desks left.

He did not file that. He held it the way he had held the thing in the chamber, the way he had held the wire before he decided the shape.

It held.

He let the lamp burn through the count.