Chương 3: They're Saying a White Wyrm Went Down

Calder Tannerson · Age two weeks"They're saying a white wyrm went down," his mother said, somewhere over the cradle. Cal stopped breathing. He caught it before it showed, let the next one come in wrong and shallow, the sloppy uninterested breath of an infant with nothing happening to him. Above the cradle his mother's voice went on, wandering toward the thing sidelong, the way she went at everything.

"Up north somewhere, the high country, that's what the Halloran girl had off a barge man." Her hand found the man's arm.

"A white one, Bram, love. And nobody can say who did it, which is the part I keep coming back around to." I can. The heavy tread came as far as the doorway and stopped there. The father... Bram... Slower step, more weight through the heel. The second set of footfalls he had been sorting since the first night. It always stopped in a doorway first. Then the tread crossed the floor.

"Maren." His father said the name slow, as he said everything, with the work still going on underneath it.

"A thing like that, you'd hear the name. Somebody would carry it. You'd hear it for years."

"But nobody's saying anything, and that's the thing, that's the whole thing." Her hand pressed.

"A whole white wyrm down in the high country, and the doing of it just belongs to nobody." His hands had gone still. Cal heard it in the shape of the quiet.

"Somebody put it in the ground and walked off." A breath.

"Strange world." Somebody put it in the ground and it put him in the ground back. The somebody is currently soiling himself in a wicker basket eleven feet from your boots. The father's quiet went on too long and the body answered before he could stop it. Both arms flew wide, fingers spread, and clutched back in around nothing at all. Twenty years and I still flinch at a raised voice. The difference is the flinch used to be mine. He held the small unaimed body from inside it. Eyes loose. Face slack.

Two people who would have died for the answer stood over the box it was lying in and went on talking past him. Then work it. They are the only source you have. So he took what the room gave him. Six steps to the door for her, five for him. The name of a house that had a barge man in it. The news had come off a barge and not out of anybody's own mouth. Secondhand, then. Old before it reached this room.

"Somebody knows, Bram." The mother's voice climbed on it, and the word ran too close to the thing he was. The sound came out of him before he ruled on it. Thin, wet, no aim in it at all, the noise the body made when the body wanted something. Both of them turned at once. Convenient. Then the man said the short word again, low, down into the top of his head where nobody else in the room was meant to get it. Calder. He had heard it a hundred times. It snagged going down.

Close enough to the old one that a part of him answered before he chose to. He did not have the old one anymore to check it against. The talk stopped. Not because it was finished. Because the man had stopped listening to it and put his hands into the cradle instead. They were not hers. Bigger. Blunt-fingered, callused across the heels of the palms and along the web of the thumb. They came in under the arms and the head, both at once, slower than the mother did it, and lifted. The room swung.

Cal came up out of the box and against a chest that ran wider than her whole shoulder, and the smell arrived before anything else did. Oiled hide. Tannin-bark under it, sharp and green. The woodsmoke was in his shirt the same as it was in hers. He settled with his cheek on it and the face was there, close enough to hold. Fair where she was dark, and dark for her was a knot of it pinned up off her neck with one silver streak running back from the temple. Pale-eyed.

A thin white line above the left eyebrow that had been a cut once. Then the hand came down on his head. Palm to the crown, once, and off, the same weight in the same place as every time before it. The current moved on its own. It leaned toward the man the same as it leaned toward her at the feedings, wanting out, reaching for the new weight holding him. He let it go and did not know why he wanted to. By the third feeding he had the room.

Milk and woodsmoke coming near, the long wandering voice that never landed where it started. The father behind her, heavier tread, low voice in pieces. At night she read to him out of a soft-cornered book to put him down. She read as she talked, doubling back, translating as she went. Flow. Marks. Words built for a room of children who did not have them yet. He timed the feedings. He sorted footfalls by weight and cadence. Then he checked the tank, and the tank was wrong again. Not the tank.

She had a word for it last night and it was not tank. Dantian. She had said it plain, twice, slow enough for a child who would need it later. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. Fine. Dantian, then. It is her country. Two of twenty-five. Up one from the gate, and he had not asked for it. It had banked out of the feedings while he lay there doing nothing but taking milk. That was rate, not effort.

Something upstream was feeding the tube whether he worked it or not. He left the gate open with everything else he could not close. ✦ On the ninth or tenth day the mother came back to it. The wide warm one bent low over the cradle and stopped there, and she did not do any of the things she did. No hand to his head. No talking. No book. The voice that ran all day over the top of everything had nothing in it at all. Her hand sat on the rail and stayed.

Two fingers went up to the back of her own ear, rested, came down. She had been doing this since the night the seal popped, and she had not once asked the room about it again. She stopped saying it out loud. That is the part where somebody starts writing things down. He shut it off. Her knuckle brushed his cheek on the way past and his whole head whipped after it, mouth open, hunting. Compromised by my own face. He let his eyes go loose and slide off her, land nowhere.

He delayed the next thing his face wanted, half a beat, then let it happen sloppy, all want and no aim. He made himself stupid on purpose, and it cost him more than the milk had. The edges went out of her reading. Her shoulders dropped. Her hand came off the rail and went halfway to his head and stopped there, an inch off, and came back down to her side without landing. He filed the shape of it. A woman who talks does not stop talking for free. Whatever she was holding, she was paying to hold it.

Outstanding tradecraft, Major. Rank, schools, twenty years of holding a face under pressure, and the operational requirement of the fucking afternoon was holding a stupid one for a tired mother. Rain drove hard against the wall, and the house answered, and he could not help listening. A long timber up under the roof took the wind, groaned, gave a half-inch, held. The give told him where the load ran and where it would not run forever. The cradle sat crooked on a floor that was not dead level.

Somewhere water found the grade and took it toward the sill. Differential settlement. Not the load, the uneven load. A house comes down where one footing drinks more water than the one beside it, drops a quarter-inch nobody measures, and the frame racks to follow. The joint that carried square carries crooked now. He knew whose soft footing he was reading for. His own looked plumb too. The house held. He mapped where the next leak would start.

A clumsy four-footed scuff came on the quiet side of the storm, when the rain had gone to a steady tick. He heard it before he placed her. All leg and no plan, not long off the teat. She crossed to the side of the cradle and asked for nothing. No paw, no lick, no whine. The old vetting ran once, out of habit, and found nothing to hold against her. The puppy leaned her weight into the bedding and let it come through the cloth, and stayed. He waited for the part of him that stood watch to flag her and move her off.

Something he had held clenched since he woke into this let go a notch instead. Then the current moved again. It found the press of her along his side and leaned into the warmth, wanting out, the same as it had wanted toward the mother at the feedings. He had held everything all day. He let it go to her. First thing he had chosen to give since the cold took him. The slow tick of the rain. Her breath. The warm shape along his side, and the cold turning over once underneath it. He did not let it up.

Somewhere far back was a name on a list, two people who thought they had time. He did not go to it. He picked a different one. He had one thing left that was his to give and no hands to give anything else with. So he spent it on the warm shape along his side. Quiet, all his, set down where only he would ever know it. Blue. And it was not only the dog. The wide warm weight arrived every few hours and held him, and he waited for her now between feedings, not for the milk.

Twenty years of choosing who came inside the wire, on a clearance and a need-to-know. Two of them had walked under all of it while he lay there unable to lift his head. Already. Both of them. The reading had stopped hours back. Nobody was saying any words at all. The cold found him in the hour the house slept, and it did not come as a memory. It came as water closing over the back of his neck. He went to the numbers first.

Time between feedings, weight and cadence of every tread in the house, the grade the water took toward the sill. He ran them in the order he had once run a route card, and the order came apart on him twice inside four beats. Fine. Load path, then. He put himself up under the roof and walked the long timber joint by joint. Where the weight ran. Where it would stop running. A hundred spans of it walked before he was ever cold.

Nine feet along it, and then the timber was white and plated and coming down through the dark at him with its mouth open. Threat sweep. Now. Cover, exits, avenues. He ran it on what the dark gave him. The draught ran from one wall. The rain hit a different note on another. A door in the first, then, and a window in the second. The father eleven feet off by the breathing, slow and deep and no use to anybody. He ran the sweep and it came back the same answer as every hour since he woke into this. No cover.

No defilade. No feet to set and no order to give, and no way to tell the two people in this room that their son was going under. His breath went short and stacked up on itself. The small body started the sound a frightened infant makes, and he could not stop the sound, and he could not stop knowing what the sound would bring. Then the weight came against his ribs. Blue had shifted in her sleep, or had not been asleep. Her shoulder settled along his side and stayed there, deliberate, not a collapse.

Solid, warm, breathing slow. The pressure of it pushed his own breath back down into his chest where it belonged. She did that on purp The sneeze went off against her shoulder, wet and small. Blue did not move. She took it as she took everything, and her ribs went on rising and falling under his cheek. As I was saying. She did that on purpose. He lay under it and worked the problem. She had not come up startled. She had not licked at him or whined or gone for the door to fetch an adult.

She had put her weight across the ribs, high, where the shaking was worst. Where a pressure holds a chest still. Nobody had taught her that. She was fourteen weeks old. Somebody in this house is competent, and it is the dog. He quit reaching for the numbers and matched her breath instead, the only thing in the dark still keeping time. In. Out. Slow. The cold drew off like a tide off a flat and left him wrung and still on the bank, breathing in time with a dog.

He had cost her sleep and taken a night's work out of a puppy, and he had nothing to pay it back with. He would carry that until the body caught up. The dog breathed against his side. The rain stopped. Later, in the dark, the warmth left him. He tracked it by the going. The weight dropping away, then working back. A scrabble and a clumsy heave, and she was in with him over the low rail. Still a puppy by the softness of the effort, but big with it. Rangy and deep through the chest, panting.

Her coat wiry and cold at the ends where the outside had been in it. Blue dropped something on his chest and left it there. Warm still, and wet, and turned wrong at the middle. His hand closed on it. He had not sent the order and the order would not come back, and the fist stayed shut in the wet fur whether he voted for it or not. Fine. Hold it, then. He worked out the shape of it with what he had. A rat. Fresh-killed, fur slicked and matted where her jaws had closed.

The spine broken clean at the shoulders, the whole body gone slack below the break. One bite, no worrying at it, no second try. The cold ends of her coat said she had gone outside for it. A neat kill, taken a long way off, carried back through the wet, and set down on him like it mattered. Then the tongue came, one wet stripe up the side of his face, and another, thorough and unhurried, cleaning a thing that was hers. He lay under it with a dead rat on his chest and did the only assessment left to do.

Blue had come in over the wire with a body and a gift and a wet tongue. The wire was already down. He had not signed off on any of it. Well. That's a problem. I already love this dog. No clearance run, no need-to-know, no vote taken. The wire is down, and I am the one who dropped it.