Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 50: SECOND

The first name was not Percival.

It was a Hearthorn boy with a Cinderhound. Good coat. The kind of name the panel knew. The proctor read it off the list and the boy walked out onto the squared stone and the door shut behind him.

Aiden stood in the cold of the doorway with the breath going short and watched through the iron band of the gate.

Second. Watch the first one.

Learn the box before the box has me in it.

Two men wheeled a wooden post out on a frame and set it at the burned line.

The boy commanded his Cinderhound forward. It crossed the stone low, chest to the ground, the red along its spine already climbing. It hit the post at the base.

The wood caught in two seconds. The flame ran up the grain and the post went black from the bottom.

The boy held his hand up. The panel counted eight and marked a slate. Clean.

The tiers clapped for him. A Hearthorn. They knew the name. The post was wheeled off black. The boy walked back to the gate and the door opened to take him in.

The proctor did not look up from the list.

It was a post. A post on a frame. Not a beast.

The yard did not bring a beast against the first one. It brought a post, let the Cinderhound burn it, and called it Live Combat. The slate did not have a column for what it was. Only whether the beast did it on a count.

Post. They give you a post and a count.

Miasma doesn’t burn a post. Miasma empties a room.

You can’t put "the post left" on a slate.

He had a method that worked five times in eight and only because she carried it. He had a half minute he had been given and had used five times on flat stone, never in a yard. He had a lung being taken apart. He had run the method down to this every morning at the dead lamp.

The yard would set a target and wait for his beast to attack it on a count, in front of a panel that saw beasts. His beast’s whole month was being the reason a thing did not happen. There was nothing Miasma did to a post. A post did not come. A post did not make her square up.

The proctor read the second name.

"Vell."

He did not say it the same as the Hearthorn boy’s. He read the boy to the line. He read Vell to Aiden, low, off the list, the same flat he had used at the door. The Hearthcat at his heel came up off its haunches when he said it and did not sit back down.

He read it to me and his cat stood up.

The cat that woke under the table when Nyx walked the room.

He knows. He knows it before the panel does and he stood his cat up for it.

Aiden went through the door.

The yard’s light was flat and fell on him as it had on the Hearthorn boy. It did not change for a lamplighter’s coat. The stone was squared and laid wide. The burned line ran across it. The panel of four sat at the table with slates and did not look up yet.

Three sides of tiers. People in them. More than the depot held any day of the year. The tree at the far edge, growing out of its stone collar, old, the only living thing they had not put there.

He walked to the mark the Hearthorn boy had stood on and did not look at the tiers. A man who looked at three tiers he could not read with a lung being taken apart was a man performing looking.

The mark itself was a worn brass plate set flush in the stone, polished to a shine by four hundred years of nervous boots.

Aiden set his boots on the plate and let his weight come down slow. The chest charged him for it, as it charged him for everything now. The brass threw back a smear of grey sky between his feet.

He had nothing to perform with. He did not perform. He had never had anything else to bring into a room that mattered.

Miasma was on the shoulder, stiller than careful, as low as she went, the stillness she had held on his own dead corner.

That stillness meant home ground.

Nyx was on the other shoulder. The pale eyes up and out across the stone, level, fixed, as at the gate. They had not come off whatever they were on since the gate.

He ran the yard like a street. Forty admits in their lines, each with a beast and a tell.

A Stoneback grinding its jaw. A Mirefowl doing the half-wing shuffle of a thing that wanted a ceiling. Hands on harnesses, hands in pockets, one girl’s thumb working a coin she did not know she was holding.

The yard was a single animal wearing four hundred faces, and every face he could read said the same ordinary thing. Nerves, weather, waiting.

Nothing in the yard explained his shoulder. Whatever Nyx had, it was not on any face he could find.

Still can’t read it. She went all the way down for it. The thing that walks through walls won’t take its eyes off it.

The panel looked up.

The centre one found the lamplighter’s coat and the two beasts and did what they all did. Decided there might be something. This one had a slate and the authority to write down whatever he decided while he waited.

"Field Provision admit," the centre one said. Not to Aiden. To the slate, and the other three. "Provisional. Two contracted."

He looked at Miasma. He looked at Nyx. His eyes stopped on Nyx the half-beat too long that everything stopped on Nyx. He did not write what the half-beat was. The way the dog in the cut had not been able to write it. "Unclassed second beast. Note it provisional pending the demonstration."

He set the slate down. "Standard live assessment. The handler directs. The panel sets the engagement."

They set the engagement. They wheel the post. They wait for the count.

Except they looked at Nyx and stopped. A man who can’t put a heading on a thing doesn’t wheel a post at it.

The centre proctor did not signal for the post frame.

He looked at the nineteen-year proctor at the gate instead. Across the whole yard. A look that went over the tiers and the burned line and landed on the one proctor in the building who had put Aiden’s name on a list with his own hand.

Something passed between them that did not get said. The nineteen-year proctor did not nod. He put his hand down to the Hearthcat’s head, the cat that had stood up and not sat back down, and he held it there.

That was the answer he sent back across the yard. A man putting his hand on his own beast at the edge of a thing.

The centre proctor turned back to Aiden.

"The unclassed beast first," he said. "Not the Venomspine. The other one." He had not raised his voice. The yard had gone quiet enough that he did not need to.

"We don’t assess the known one against a post when there’s an unknown one. We assess the unknown. That’s the engagement." He looked at Nyx. He went still, as the dog had at the column with no heading. Then he pushed past it, a man deciding to find out rather than file. "Send the small one at the line. Walk it across the burn and back. That’s all. We want to see it move."

They don’t want the post. They want Nyx.

They looked at it and couldn’t file it. So they’ll make it move in front of everyone until the thing they can’t write writes itself.

Walk it across a line. That’s the engagement. Three tiers of people don’t know that’s what they’re here for. I do. So does whatever drew them.

Vane has put paper in front of every man who’s read me since the chamber. He’s not on this panel, but his hand’s still in it. The panel had a page on me before the door opened. That page is why they’re not wheeling out the practice post.

He looked at the small dark shape on his shoulder. The pale eyes already out across the stone, level, fixed, on what he could not read, on what Miasma had gone all the way down for.

The panel wanted it walked across the burned line, in the open, with the whole room watching. The proctor’s hand was on his own cat at the gate. There was no other door. He was already through this one.

He bent and put Nyx down onto the squared stone.

It did not look at the line. It did not look at the panel. It did not look at him.

It stood on the open stone. Small. Dark. The light failing to land on it. It put itself square and faced the one thing it had faced since the gate. Past the burn. Past the panel. At the high tier under the open grey.

Heads turned before voices stopped. And the tier it faced went quiet in a band, six rows, like a crowd around a thing moving through it.

Something in that band of quiet stood up.