Chương 13: His Own Handwriting

"Crossings," said Tench, on the Tuesday, with six days to go.

"Put the mats away. Nobody is doing anything today except sitting down and listening." Two hundred people sat down on a gym floor and didn't pretend to be pleased.

"Sir, we did this in eighth grade."

"You did it when it was a story about somebody else," Tench agreed.

"Some of you are eight weeks off doing it for real." Abe sat on mat four with his left hand up his sleeve. He was the only person in that room who wasn't bored.

"Ranks. Somebody."

"Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert, Master, Grandmaster, Sage, Transcendent," said Nita Sowerby, in the voice of a person reading out a bus timetable.

"Levels inside a rank."

"Ten."

"What does a skill actually do for you. Naylor."

"It's how you get foundation."

"It is the only way anybody gets foundation, ever." Tench walked the room with the ruined hand kept out of the way.

"You can carry boxes for nine hours and the Weave will not give you one point for it. Register it, work at the part you are bad at, and it pays. Everything else is detail."

"Which ladder does it pay into? Ward."

"Depends on the skill."

"On the type of the skill," Tench said.

"Anything you do with your body pays into Body. Crafts, study, meditation, anything you do sitting down with your head, pays into Mind."

"So nobody does the Mind ones," said Ellis Naylor.

"Why not?"

"Because they're no use to you."

"They are no use to you in a fight," said Tench, "which is not the same sentence, and about four hundred years of this city agreeing with you is why Calder is the shape it is." The room didn't care, and it went past two hundred people like weather. Abe sat on mat four and didn't move his face. He had seven hundred and forty-one points in a bar that not one person in this gym would have crossed the road for.

"Crossings," said Tench.

"One of your skills fills up. What happens."

"You get a stat point," Lena Ward said.

"How many?" Nobody had that one. Then Croft did.

"Depends on the art," Croft said.

"A common one gives you a point. A fine one gives you a point and a better set of doors. Rare or named, two."

"Correct. Which is why some of you will finish this year with a Body that does not match your depth, and most of the rest of you will never work out how that happened." Nobody in that gym looked toward the board out in the corridor. Nobody ever did.

"The doors," said Tench.

"Three of them. You pick one. It is permanent, and the other two are gone, and no, before somebody asks, you cannot go back for them later."

"And then the skill is the door," said Nita.

"And then the skill is the door." Tench had said it to sixteen year groups.

"You do not have Conditioning with a trick bolted on. You have the new thing. The old name comes off and never comes back."

"So Croft hasn't got Swordsmanship."

"Croft has not had Swordsmanship since the month he Awakened," said Tench.

"If he wants to tell you what he has got, he can." Croft did not.

"How many do you get in a life?"

"Two. Three if you are serious and lucky." Tench let that sit.

"That is your whole career. Three questions, and you answer each one in about four seconds, and you live in the answer for forty years."

"That's not fair, sir."

"No," Tench agreed. Nell Mott asked what happens if you pick the wrong one, and Tench said you live in that one too, and about forty people made a noise at once. Abe's chest went tight.

"Here is the part they skip at eleven," Tench said.

"The three doors you get are not the three the person next to you gets." The room made a noise. That one was new to about half of them.

"The Weave looks at what you are when it asks. Your realm. Your depth. Your Body and your Mind. How good the art is. And what you actually did to get there, which is the one everybody forgets." He stopped by the racks.

"Two of you could register the same skill on the same day and put in the same hours and get different doors, because one of you learned it taking hits and the other never did."

"So how do you know what's coming?"

"You do not," said Tench, "unless somebody has been there and written it down." And there it was, all of it, in a school gym, for free.

"Croft. Your family has records."

"Three generations," Croft said, and he said it flatly, without the corridor voice.

"Every offer anybody in my family ever got, and what they did about it. Most of it's people getting it wrong. My great-grandfather's got nine pages to himself."

"Nine pages of a man getting it wrong," said Tench.

"That is the useful part. Danforth."

"My coach has walked most of the ones I'm likely to see," Danforth said.

"None of it is written down. I get an hour of it a week."

"And the rest of you have the wiki." Tench went back toward the bench.

"Or a trade route out of a dock shop, honest and real and written for a job that is not yours." Abe looked at the floor.

"Hands up who has crossed a rank." Croft's hand went up. Two others near the front. One of the two was Sefton, who worked the shallow water Saturdays on a weekend permit. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Abe sat on mat four with his hand in his sleeve. He'd crossed one six days ago, in black water, with two fingers broken and something coming at him, and read three doors off a screen in four seconds. He kept his hand down. He was extremely good at that now.

"Right," said Tench, to the three of them.

"Then you already know the only rule that matters. An heir never wastes a crossing. It is the most valuable thing you will ever be handed for nothing, and you get two or three." Danforth put his hand up again and asked the good question, which was what somebody with no records and no coach was supposed to do. He asked it looking straight at Tench. Then, halfway through the answer, he looked over at mat four, and he did it kindly, and that was worse than anything Croft had ever said out loud.

"You read," said Tench.

"You find somebody who did your job before you, and you read what they left." He picked his stopwatch up off the bench.

"And you accept that it was written for them." Abe didn't hear one word of the last twenty minutes. The free period was the one after lunch. He went up to the corridor behind the music rooms with forty minutes in front of him and a hand that still wouldn't close, and Mr. Vane was in it. The cart was parked across the middle. Mr. Vane had the store cupboard open and a clipboard on top of the radiator that was never warm, and he was counting stacking chairs.

"Afternoon," he said.

"Afternoon." Abe stood there for a second too long, and Mr. Vane looked up, and Mr. Vane was a perfectly nice man who had never done Abe any harm in his life.

"You lost?"

"Shortcut."

"There's no shortcut this way, son. It only goes up to the music rooms." Abe said something about the stairs and went back down the corridor, and behind him Mr. Vane went on counting chairs in a corridor that nobody had walked down since September. He tried the west stairwell instead. There was a bucket on the half landing, and a yellow sign, and a wet floor that hadn't been wet before today. Abe stood at the bottom of it and worked out that he had nowhere in this building to stand. Then Mr.

Vane came past with the cart and stopped, because he was a friendly man.

"You are the one who has been going back there," he said. It wasn't an accusation, though, just a man making conversation.

"One of your lot was asking after you. Wanted to know where you get to at dinner."

"Right."

"I said I had no idea." Mr. Vane got the cart moving again.

"Told him I would keep an eye out, though." He went off toward the hall. Abe stood in the corridor with his bag in his good hand and didn't need one second to work out who had asked. There was exactly one person in that building who wanted to know where Abe Dolan went, and he had been standing at the end of this corridor on Friday, and he hadn't said a word. Croft hadn't told a teacher. Croft would rather have died than tell a teacher.

He had asked a caretaker a friendly question instead, and got a friendly answer, and it had taken away every hour Abe had left in this building. Six days. The library had eleven people in it, which for that library was a crowd. Mrs. Ashe was at the desk. She'd been at it longer than any teacher in the building, and she looked up when Abe came in and her whole face changed.

"Well," she said.

"You."

"Hello, Mrs. Ashe."

"You have not been in here since about March." She said it like somebody who had kept count.

"The shelf is where it was." The cultivation section was four full shelves, and Abe had read all of it. That's less impressive than it sounds. Every book on them was the ordinary version: the standard route through Conditioning, the standard routes through the dozen commonest skills in the country, put in a school by people who wanted every Awakened kid in Calder to have something. It's the wiki with a cover on it. It was written for whoever picked it up, which meant it wasn't written for him.

The shelf that mattered was the small one at the back under the window, three feet of donated paperbacks with the covers going soft. A fisher's manual. Two masons. Something about kilns. A guard's route in four editions, because the docks are full of guards' sons and their mothers give the books away when the sons stop needing them. Abe had read that shelf twice in the year before he Awakened, because it was free and because it was the only thing he could do about his life.

He sat at the table by the window and got his father's paperback out. Then he read the screens, because he hadn't looked properly in six days and had come up here to think.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 3 Foundation: 1, 186 / 1600 (Body Layer 4) Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind Layer 2 Foundation: 741 / 900 (Mind Layer 3) Meditation · Novice Lv 2 (31 / 200) Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 4 (900 / 3200) Sharpening · Novice Lv 6 (410 / 1800) Set Stance had gone to four on Sunday night, in Marek's hall, in the middle of a set of holds, and nobody standing in that hall had known it was happening. The Sharpening line had barely moved in a week, because a stone takes two hands and he had one.

Abe looked at that for a while. It was the first time the hand had taken something off him that he could see on a screen. Then he shook the folded page out of the back of it. Cheap paper, gone furry along the crease. His own handwriting, small and careful, the way he wrote when something mattered. He'd made it last October on his bed, a full year before the Weave gave him anything. THE PLAN, he had written across the top, and then underlined it, because he was seventeen.

Abe read his own page and didn't recognize the boy who wrote it. Conditioning first. It is free and you can do it in a yard. Do not register anything you cannot practice without equipment. Take the guard's line. Somebody has walked all of it and written it down and you will never be able to afford anybody to tell you anything. Two hours a night. Assume you get two hours a night forever. Pick the cheap one. You do not get to be wrong. Abe read that last line about four times. You do not get to be wrong.

He had written that when his whole life was two hours a night after a shift, and being wrong once meant a year gone that he couldn't get back, and the only road he could see was a dead man's road because it was the only one anybody had ever let him look at. Every choice on that page was the same choice. Pick cheap. Pick safe. Pick the thing somebody has already proved. Pick what you can finish. It was a good plan. It was a very good plan for a boy with two hours a night. Abe now had about fifty hours in a day.

He could be wrong. He could be wrong forty times before breakfast and go back and do it again, and nobody in Calder would ever see a minute of it. And he had been walking it anyway. All month. Every night, page fourteen and the slow squats and the guard's line, because it was in his father's handwriting and because he had never once stopped and asked whether it was his road. Six days ago he had spent his one crossing on it, in the dark, in four seconds.

Abe put the page down and sat very still with both hands flat on the table. Then he tried to write a new one. He got as far as THE PLAN and the underline. Then he sat with the pen not moving, and found out what was actually wrong. He didn't know enough. He knew the guard's line because a guard wrote it down and gave it away when he died. He knew what the meta said, and the meta was right about the average person and useless about him.

He didn't know what the third door on his screen had been, or what it opened, or what it cost. Nobody had written down what happens to a boy who is absurdly deep and nowhere near his first breakthrough, because nobody had ever been one. Croft had three generations in a book. Danforth had a man who had walked it and would say so out loud for an hour every Sunday. Abe had gone to Fenner Street on Sunday with the hand taped under his sleeve.

Marek saw it the moment he took his coat off and didn't ask one question about it. Then he worked Abe for the whole hour and watched him the entire time, exactly as he had said he would, and at the end of it he said nothing. Abe walked back down the Corn Road and found the silence much worse than the questions. Abe had four shelves of the average answer, three feet of somebody else's trade, and his own handwriting from a year ago telling him to pick cheap. He put the pen down.

"You have not turned that page," said Mrs. Ashe. She had come over with the cart to put the kiln book back, and she was looking at him exactly as she had looked at him for a year.

"Is there anything else?" Abe said.

"Anything that isn't on those shelves."

"There is a locked cupboard in Mr. Tench's department," said Mrs. Ashe.

"I cannot lend you a thing out of it. Neither can he, unless he signs for you first."

"Then I'll go and ask him."

"You can ask him this afternoon, love. He will say yes the minute he is allowed to. He is not allowed to. Advanced work maims people, and a teacher may only sign for a student who is deep enough to take it, and the only number he has to go on is the one on that board in the corridor." Nita had rewritten that board on Monday night. Amrit had gone up on it and half the year had shifted a place, and Abe's was the only row on the whole wall that hadn't moved since the sixth of October. Abe stood very still.

"How deep."

"Four." Abe was on four. He'd been on four for over a week, and there was nothing in the world he could do to prove it before Monday.

"And past the cupboard?" he said.

"Past the cupboard there is nothing in any library anywhere." Mrs. Ashe said it without one scrap of drama.

"The proper trees are in families. That is rather the point of them." She wasn't being unkind, and she had clearly said it to somebody before.

"I've been putting things on that shelf for nineteen years," she said.

"It's the best I can do and it's not very good, and you're the only one in the whole school who ever read all of it." Then she went off with her cart. Abe sat at the table by the window with a page of his own handwriting in front of him. He'd spent a month thinking about Monday the third as the day he made Miles Croft wrong. It had just turned into the day Tench could finally sign for him, and Mrs. Ashe had been the one to tell him so. Six days, and no idea at all what to write on the second line.