Chương 52: Chapter 47 - I Meant to Move Six Tunnels. I Moved the Whole Thing

I Moved the Whole Thing Calder Tannerson · Age about ten years"Flank," Cal said, and Mateo swung wide to the high side of the run without a word. The rats came up where the water drove them. Flooded out of the low runs, dog-sized and dark and frantic, Hill-Rats boiled up out of tunnels the saturation had filled. They did not fight. They fled into ground that had never held them, a whole colony breaking for the storage sheds and the settlement trails, and Cal read the scatter for what he had done to it.

Toward the people's ground.

A bank softened under him. Blue surged into the strap and towed him clear of it, mud spraying, his feet scrambling for higher ground, the padded strap holding where the old loops would have torn his palms. The swamp had shifted. His survey-sense ran the ground and the ground answered wrong, a quarter mile of it, terrain let go where the three of them had never set foot.

"I meant to move six tunnels." He said it to Mateo, to the swamp, to whoever was listening.

"I moved the whole thing." Mateo looked from him to the churned quarter-mile of it.

"That's not what a drainage cut does. That's not what any of this was supposed to..." He stopped.

"You did that."

"The water did that. I opened one door." The dam had been a finger laid on one nerve of a body that ran the length of the swamp, and that nerve ran clear to the village. ✦ Blue went rigid, and a beat later the water gave up what it had been hiding. She turned in a breath, weight forward, the rumble starting low and hard in her chest. No bark yet. Cal followed her line and his survey-sense found the mass before his eyes did, a long heavy shape driving up through the churned water the release had stirred.

Then it resolved. Flat armored skull, the ridge of a back longer than the dam was tall, the banded hide of a cypress gator the flood had pried out of some deep hold and shoved into the open. Mana-touched. Fifteen feet, maybe more. Not the biggest thing down there, his read told him, in the half-second he had for reads. Something further down had not moved at all, and had not needed to.

But this one had, and this one was coming, driving up the broken-dam current toward the only dry ground in reach, and the water he had loosed was the one thing slowing it. It was not enough. The gator took the current and gained.

"Off the water. Both of you." Cal swung the crossbow off his back and seated it to his shoulder, hands moving through a motion older than the body holding them. The first bolt went into the flat of the skull and skated off bone. He cranked the next. The crank was the problem. He felt it like every slow seam in a thing built for dry work, the long dead beat where the string came back and the gator did not wait. Second bolt into the shoulder hide, buried, did nothing.

Third, while it closed, into the soft seam behind the foreleg, and that one it felt. A forefoot came down on dry land. Then the other. He was out of crank. No bolt seated, no time to seat one, a thing the length of a barge hauling itself up the bank at him with two bolts in it and a temper. He went to rocks. Threw one, threw another, caught it on the snout and the eye-ridge and changed nothing.

She broke into a fury of barking, lunging the length of her own restraint and no further, the noise filling the whole bank. She wanted in. Cal spent his one free hand keeping her out of it, fist locked in her harness, because the one thing worse than a gator on the bank was Blue inside its mouth. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Mateo made no sound at all.

Cal clocked the silence for what it was, the narrating boy gone quiet, the quiet he kept only at the worst of it. Then the boy moved inside his own silence. He had both arms around a stone the size of his own chest, hauling it up off the bank, and he said not a word about it. He brought it up over his head and dropped it on the gator's skull, all his weight behind the stone, and the eye went out under it with a sound Cal felt in his own teeth.

The gator convulsed, half-blind, head shaking, one foreleg buckling under it on the slick bank. And the falling came up in Cal the way it came the last time something too big to stop had leaned in over him, certain, with nothing in his hands and no way to make it not happen. It rose from under the floor of him, whole and wordless, and it took him. Terror threw both his hands forward. Something went off.

The arm-doors he kept ready for the cat's skull went wide on their own, every one of them, and the Earth mana behind them dumped through his palms all at once. The water in front of him stood up in a sheet, mud blasting out in a hard ring, the whole churned surface shoving away from him in a shock he had not aimed. The blast hit a half-blind thing already buckling on a slick bank, and the bank was all the current had been waiting for. The gator's foothold slid out from under it.

It went sideways into the broken-dam water, rolled once, and the current took it under and down the channel he had opened, gone with everything else the water had taken that day. The bank was quiet except for Blue, and then Blue stopped too. ✦ They stood in the wrecked mud, soaked, breathing like they had run a mile. That worked. He made himself say the true part of it flat. I didn't aim it. I can't do it again.

The water killed the gator, not me, and the water only had the opening because the fear knocked it loose. He had no idea how to make it fire again, and was not sure he wanted to learn. A marker stood in the air over the broken water where the gator had gone under, the dull silver of a fair haul. ～～～～～ THE ADMINISTRATOR ～～～～～ A mana-touched gator, flood-driven and bad-tempered, and the two of you still standing. I will not sort out who did what in that.

The water did the last of it, and the water was your doing, after a fashion. Experience Points Awarded (gross): +200 Vocational Modifier (+15%): +30 Experience Points Awarded (net): +230 Loot: cypress gator, a fair haul ～～ THIS IS HOW HEROES ARE CREATED. ～～ He pressed the marker to keep it and left the rest unread. There would be a quieter hour for that. He let the silver fold down small and stay. His hands were still working at the crossbow's slack wet string without being told to.

The crank too slow, the string soaked through, the bolts skating where dry ones would have bitten. Bench work for a day his hands were free. He filed it and let his hands quit. The kept ones had drawn into a single mass that took each new one as he pressed it in, a ball the size of a walnut now and heavier every week. Grey-brown, the color of nothing he wanted to name. Not one thing, though.

Worked in the hand it gave uneven, dense in some streaks and slack in others, set in bad layers that never took to one another. Something in there sorted itself. He could not say into what. He set that aside too, beside the crossbow.

"It's yours," Cal said.

"You dropped the rock."

"It is absolutely not mine, you shot it three times, three, I watched you, that's most of a gator's worth of shooting, and the rock was a contribution, contributions don't make a thing yours or my father would own half the duchy." Mateo had his voice back. All of it. He stood looking at the thing they had killed and the words came faster the longer he looked.

"Have you seen the size of it. Somebody has to open that. Up the whole belly. By hand. In the mud."

"You're closer."

"I am not skinning a gator the size of a boat because I am six inches nearer to it than you are." Cal said nothing. He had learned over the season that saying nothing won most arguments with Mateo by attrition, and he was tired enough to let it work. ✦ Far downslope, half the swamp from anything they had built, a hillside the boys had never touched came down. Cal heard it before he placed it, the long grinding drop of a slope giving way, and turned in time to see the far ground go.

A wet section the width of a barn slid into a hollow, and the failure ran outward from there into bank no one had cut, each new collapse pulling the next down after it. Half a mile of swamp, unspooling off a single log he had pulled with his own hands. The slope had come down the wrong direction, half a swamp from where he had set his charge, and it had not asked him which way.

"It's turning." Mateo watched the low grey light come up in the east, careful, half of a bigger question folded into a small one.

"That's rain."

"Rain by tomorrow." Cal put his hand flat to the ground and felt it still moving under him, slow and wide.

"And the water's not done." He would not get the swamp back into its old shape. He needed the water pointed anywhere but the storage sheds the rats had already run for, and one day to point it there. He started counting the ground he would have to move, and climbed.