Chương 14: A Normal Salamander Day

Morning arrived at my home, even though I was just a freeloader at this point. I surfaced from sleep slowly. The bed beneath me was not grand, but it was a bed. Not mud, but a real bed. I hugged my pillow and rolled over a few times. I fell with a thud. I lay still on the floor for a moment. I started cataloguing. Ceiling. Wooden beams. A spider in the corner, small, the ordinary kind, doing its usual web maintenance. I approved of the spider. It ignored me, which was also fine.

The human brain had been screaming at me, more or less nonstop, since I'd gotten home the night before. Why are you talking casually with one of the people who killed you?! Technically, it wasn't I they killed, I told it, which seemed to settle the matter as far as I was concerned. The human brain remained unconvinced. It had remained unconvinced through the entire walk home, through dinner, and through most of the night, which was impressive dedication. I sat up. The rock sat on the small table beside the bed.

I'd learned, through several uncomfortable nights, that sleeping with it on my head created complications. Mostly because it rolled off at odd angles and startled me awake. I picked it up. The weight settled into my palm like a greeting, and I set it back where it belonged. There. Better. The slight pressure, the familiar cool of stone, the particular quality of knowing where the edges of myself were. I stood, crossed to the door, and pushed it open.

The main room beyond was simple: a wooden table with four equal sides, which I registered as a stable platform, and which the human brain insisted on calling furniture. Two chairs. A small window looking out onto the street. On the table sat a bowl covered with a cloth, steam still rising faintly through it. Beside it, a folded piece of paper. I picked up the paper and stared at it for a while. My Translation Common skill was doing its best. There's bread in the basket. Eat before you go.

Don't forget to lock the door. — Eris I nodded at the paper. I'd started nodding at things Eris left behind for me, which I understood to be a valid form of communication even when she wasn't present to receive the nod. I sat down and lifted the cloth. Porridge. Thick, pale, with a small pat of butter melting slowly into the surface and a dusting of dried leaves that the human brain corrected to herbs. I registered it as warm, dense, and not a bug, but edible. I ate systematically.

I had learned that eating too fast produced consequences, and eating too slow meant the porridge cooled into something that no longer had good feelings about itself. The bread in the basket was yesterday's. It had gone slightly stiff at the crust, but acceptable once torn into pieces and softened against the porridge. There was no fly. I did not look for one. In the weeks since acquiring this body, I had achieved something adjacent to discipline on the subject of flies.

The human brain had been extremely clear about that particular boundary. I ate the last of the bread slowly, savoring the way it had gone soft and warm from the porridge. I licked a bit of butter off my thumb before I remembered that was probably not something Eris would approve of. Once I was done, I carried the bowl to the sink. I rinsed it the way I'd been shown: swirl, tip, set it in the rack, don't just leave it floating. I dried my hands on the cloth hanging by the window.

I crossed the room, stepped out the door, and made it four full steps down the street. [The door.] I walked back and closed it. [Lock.] I locked it too.

It was already late morning. The market stalls stood open. The blacksmith's clanging drifted down the road at a steady rhythm. Cats already occupied the fence posts and claimed them. I walked through it. I had learned, over the weeks, that moving through Millhaven worked differently than moving through the swamp. Out there, you moved to avoid things that wanted to eat you. Here, you moved and humans acknowledged you, which required an entirely different category of response. I was still calibrating.

"Fresh fish today, lass!" The fisherman at his stall lifted a hand toward me as I passed. His skin was tanned, and his apron was doing its best under difficult and ongoing conditions. He waved. I nodded back.

"I'll buy when I have money." He laughed. He always laughed when I said this. I still hadn't fully worked out why. Two stalls further along, the old woman with the apple cart was already rearranging her display for the day.

"Apple, dear? Three coppers, good and sweet." Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. I nodded.

"I'll buy when I have money." The old woman smiled.

"You always say that."

"It's always true." This was, as far as I'd managed to work it out, the mystery of human existence. Money was how you got things, money was what you earned by doing things, and the gap between earning and spending it was a place where savings could accumulate. In practice, the moment money arrived, food arrived afterward, and the money departed again just as quickly. The human brain insisted this was called "living expenses" and was a normal condition.

I remained unconvinced that normal and sensible were the same thing. I had, at present, nothing in my pocket. By the end of the day, I intended to have some. By the end of the day, I would certainly still have nothing. This, too, was apparently normal.

The Adventurer's Guild smelled the way it always did. The morning crowd was lighter than the afternoon crowd, and quieter with it. I pushed through the door and looked around.

"Good morning, Ms. Archer-mage, or should I say good afternoon?" Xyno raised a hand from a table near the window. She had a vial in her other hand. Its contents were cycling through colors at intervals that suggested whatever was inside had strong opinions about being contained. I nodded once in her direction, then turned and made straight for the counter. Attendance came first. Everything else could wait. A hand closed around my sleeve. I paused and looked back.

"That's cold, you know?" Xyno's tone stayed conversational.

"I need to make attendance. My food depends on it."

"Just let her go." A hand I hadn't seen coming closed around Xyno's, prying it loose from my sleeve. Norman stood there, face arranged into its usual unremarkable configuration.

"Thanks." I nodded at him and turned. Behind me, I heard Xyno.

"Didn't see you coming, Mr. Swordsman. Your ignorable face is genuinely a mystery." Norman said nothing. I continued walking toward the counter where Eris was working through a stack of papers. She looked up when I arrived and set her pen down.

"I closed and locked the house," I said.

"Good." She reached across the counter and patted my head, which ended up patting my rock instead. The rock didn't mind. The rock and I both loved being patted by Eris.

"Did you eat?" she asked.

"The porridge. And the bread."

"Good." She smiled. Then she returned to her papers.

"Doing a quest today?"

"That's the plan." I turned toward the quest board.

"Your plans have mixed results." This was, admittedly, fair. I acknowledged it by not responding and moved toward the board instead. The quest board had its usual population of papers: colored tabs sorted by rank, handwriting that ranged from careful to frantic, requests from monster subjugation to finding someone's lost dog. I scanned it. Left to right. Top to bottom. My eyes moved through the F-rank section, where the rewards were modest but the expectations, proportionally, matched.

A bug-catching quest would do fine. I wasn't picky. Xyno appeared at my left shoulder.

"Anything good?" I kept scanning.

"I'm looking."

"How about this one?" She pointed at one. I looked. A D marker sat in the top corner. The sketch at the center showed a moth, wings drawn out in detail.

"Moths taste good," I said, then remembered, "but we can only take F-rank."

"Mr. Swordsman looks like he has a high rank." Xyno glanced to her left.

"What rank are you?"

"D." The voice came from her right. Xyno turned right.

"Mr. Swordsman, your timing is either very good or deeply annoying. I haven't decided which yet."

"It's also rude to appear like that," I added.

"But I walked over normally," Norman said. Xyno had already pulled the quest paper off the board and was moving toward the counter.

"Anyway, you'll be our party leader, so we can take D-rank quests." I followed. Behind me, Norman followed too, which apparently meant we were now a party. For some reason, my chest felt warm with the thought.

"Wait. That's a Bloody Moth." Norman stopped. I didn't stop walking. Norman had probably made a mistake. The moth in the sketch was the color of old paper. Beige. Slightly yellowed at the edges. Definitely not bloody. We arrived at Eris's counter. Xyno set the paper down. Eris read it. Then read it again. Then a third time, slower.

"No need to glare at the paper," Xyno said brightly.

"It's only D-rank."

"Shut up," Eris said to Xyno, then turned to me.

"Are you aware that this is a Bloody Moth, and one of the Chittering Depths Dungeon's lower monsters?" I looked at the sketch again.

"It's not red." Eris took a long, slow breath.

"It's a sketch. The real thing is red."

"I see." I put a hand under my chin and considered this.

"So it is red."

"I thought you were the bug-catching expert?"

"I am. I simply haven't eaten this particular one yet."

"We don't have to take this quest," Norman said, to no one in particular, though it was clearly aimed at me.

"We also don't have to form a party with her." Eris nodded with every word he said. I stood still for a moment. The rock sat on my head. The guild made its usual sounds around us: chairs scraping, low conversations threading together, the distant clatter of someone dropping something they'd probably regret later. I had learned that the thing humans felt when they were excluded from something was not the same thing a salamander felt when another salamander claimed a log first.

There was no precise word for it in salamander terms. Salamanders had never organized themselves into parties and then deliberately chosen not to include someone. Salamanders simply went where the bugs were, and that was the entire system. But the feeling existed anyway. It was real, and it was happening now. I looked at Xyno, then turned back to Eris. I smiled wryly.

"Being left behind hurts." Norman turned away. He looked at the wall. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at some fixed point in the middle distance.

"Damn it." Eris sighed. She picked up her stamp and brought it down on the paper. She gave a small smile. Xyno wrapped both arms around me from behind.

"That was sweet, Ms. Archer-mage." Eris glared at her. Xyno raised both hands and stepped back immediately.

"Time to go meet the client. Would you mind doing the talking, Ms. Archer-mage? You're the bug-catching expert, after all." She was already at the door by the time she finished talking. I considered this.

"I am the bug-catching expert." I nodded and followed.