Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 47: FIVE

Five days.

He woke on the floor with his back against the bench leg and knew before he opened his eyes that the night had not given the lung back.

The first breath of the day went down into the deeper, wider place, stopped there, and came back short. The second one did the same. There was no morning in it. No clear early-stopping breath that was his and not yet spent.

The spending had started at lamp sixteen and the spending did not care about his schedule.

Day two of the lung. The screen said duration not fixed. Not fixed means it tells me when it’s done by being done.

He lay there one more breath than he needed to. The floor did not ask anything of him. Everything past the floor did.

Then he got up. Between slow decay and getting up he had only ever had one answer. A worse lung did not change the answer. It only changed the cost of it.

He drank two fingers off the apothecary’s jar. It did what it could.

He went to the dead lamp before the route.

He did not skip it. He had thought about skipping it on the way down the stairs with his chest doing the new thing. He had kept walking to the corner.

Four of eleven was a number. A number that he stopped working stopped moving, and a number that stopped moving five days out was the same as the column with his name in it getting its signature.

He crouched at the collar at Miasma’s level. He put the two fingers on her side.

She leaned into the fingers. He held there longer than he had the morning before. The holding cost him nothing. The breath cost him everything. The holding was the one place the breath did not matter.

Then he worked the method.

Step back. Press for forward. Move so the wall had nowhere to stand.

The first try, the green went down into the foreleg and forward into the empty air where he had been. He marked it.

The second went to the wall. He did not say the word he had said the night he put the edge in his voice. A man with a lung being taken apart learned fast which costs he could still afford.

He worked it and counted and the count came up six of twelve.

Six of twelve. It was four of eleven yesterday. It moved. It moved the right way on the morning the lung’s worse, which means the method’s hers and not mine, which means she carries it the day I can’t carry myself.

He marked six of twelve in his head the way he marked a lamp and picked her up. His chest charged him for the bending, the housing-low crouch, the standing back up, each one costing more than it had the day before.

He took the charge without sitting down with it. Sitting down with it on Sewer Row in the grey was the same as not getting up off the floor.

Nyx came down off the sill on its own and took the other shoulder.

Two weights now, balanced. The body between them did the bookkeeping without being asked, shoulders squaring to the load the way a beam squares to a roof.

It had not gone through a wall in three days. It had not looked at a corner in three days. It rode the shoulder and put the pale eyes on him the way it had started doing in the cut.

When his chest stopped him at the top of the corner’s small rise and made him stand a breath he did not choose to stand, the pale eyes were on him for that.

Not on the dark. Not on the route. Not on anything else.

It watches me breathe now. The thing that walks through walls. I don’t have anywhere to put that and I don’t have the air to go looking.

The route was the route. He worked it the way he had worked it the two days before. Every lamp clean. The most ordinary page a clerk could read. Except the page did not show the wall at every fourth lamp now, the hand flat on stone while the breath went down into the thing being cleaned and came back with less than he sent down.

Between lamp twenty and twenty-one his chest stopped him.

He stood at the post and made the breath come back as far as it would come. Miasma came forward on his shoulder in the careful rhythm.

Nyx on the other did the thing on its own. It moved up the shoulder line and put its head against his temple. The small real weight. The cold not coming.

Both beasts held the rhythm together.

Not the wall. Not the working pulse. The one they had held in front of the cut, both of them, the same beat. They held it on him now.

The breath made it to the middle of his chest and stopped there.

Miasma’s weight settled. Nyx’s head stayed where it was for the length of one more pull and then came off. Both of them rode the shoulders again. Neither of them looked at the dark.

That’s a thing they have not done before. Not at the same time. Not on me.

He went on. He did not file it.

He made it to twelve. Sewer Row. Grate fourteen ticked where the iron had settled. The bar he had bent back was still bent back. The run under it quiet.

He did not look at the grate longer. It had already done what it came to do.

The system fired at fourteen.

Right at the grate. His hand not even on a housing. He felt the border draw and his chest was already doing its worst, so there was nothing left to brace. He read it standing over the bar he had bent back, in the cold coming off the run.

Miasma flattened against his collar. Nyx went still on the other shoulder.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[ DETOXIFICATION — STATUS ]

Source: Trait — Toxin Filter (passive, continuous)

Isolating: lung (primary) — load reduction 31%

Throughput still rerouted.

Function degraded.

Estimated completion: not fixed.

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 1.3 Years — HELD ]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He read it twice.

Thirty-one percent. Two days for thirty-one percent. Sixty-nine left at the same rate is four more days. Maybe five if it slows, because heaviest on record does not keep a rate. The yard’s in five.

It’s not going to be done before I walk in. It’s going to be in the middle of doing it.

He took his hand off nothing. The bent bar, the cold, and a beast going careful on his shoulder for a wrong that was inside the man she was riding.

He finished the route. Every lamp. The wall at every fourth one. He logged them clean and went to Marsh’s.

He had told Marsh about the cut the day before. The drag. The head. The dog. Marsh had listened without moving.

Marsh did not have the kettle on.

That was the first thing. The kettle has been hot every day for as long as Aiden has known the man. The kettle was cold.

Marsh was not at the table. He was at the window with the curtain held back two fingers’ width, looking down at the lane. He did not turn around when Aiden came in.

"Don’t stand in the middle of the room."

Aiden did not stand in the middle of the room.

"Two days," Marsh said, still at the curtain. "A man’s been on the lane two days. Not the same man. That’s the part. Day before yesterday it was a coal porter who portered no coal. Yesterday, a woman selling thread who sold no thread and never moved from the corner where thread would never sell. Today there’s a boy minding a barrow with nothing in it across from my door. The boy sits behind it like he’s done it his whole life and he’s never once looked at what’s in it."

The body behaves wrong for its species. Renn’s words. Marsh just described it from a window without knowing he was quoting her.

"They’re not watching you," Aiden said.

"No." Marsh let the curtain fall. "They’re watching the man who comes to see me. They started the day after you told me about the cut."

He turned around. His face had the thing on it Aiden had seen once before, the night he said you’re the fourth name, the flat with nothing kind in it because the kind had been spent.

"It’s not careful anymore, Aiden. I told you it doesn’t show itself. Two days ago it stopped not showing itself to me. It put a body on my lane so I’d see it from my own window, the way it put a head in that cut so you’d see it by lamp. It’s done being a thing you only find after."

He crossed to the cold kettle and gripped it, giving his hand somewhere to stay.

"I worked under Halbern seven years. I have spent the years since being a man nobody had a reason to look at, on a route nobody wanted, in a room with a cold kettle. It has held that long because I gave it nothing to look at. You came up my stairs four years ago with three copper and a dead street and I let you, because a lamplighter learning lamps was nothing to look at either."

He took his hand off the kettle. "It’s looking now. At my lane. At my door. The thing I bought with eleven quiet years just got spent, and it got spent on you. I am not telling you that to put it on you. I’m telling you because this is the kind of thing you hear from beside a door, not in the middle of a room with nowhere to go."

Here it is. He doesn’t stop on the flat voice. He stops when there’s one more.

"What," Aiden said.

"It put bodies on my lane to see who comes to me," Marsh said. "There is one man who comes to me. It already knows who you are, it confirmed that down a hole with your own beasts watching. It is not spending three borrowed bodies on my lane to learn a thing it knows."

He looked at Aiden, and the flat went somewhere under the flat. "It’s spending them to learn who else you go to. Renn. The boy’s father. The herbalist. Anyone you’ve let see your face since the cache. It’s not confirming you anymore, lamplighter. It’s drawing the room. Everyone in it. Five days before the assessment puts that whole room in one place at one time."

The cold kettle did not tick. Nothing in the room did.

It’s not hunting one name. It’s mapping every name I ever touched, and the yard’s the day it has all of them in a box with a door.