Chương 17: The Cupboard

Mr. Tench was in the cultivation office with his coat already on. Abe had the speech ready. He'd said it to a frozen bin forty times on Sunday night and he had it down to about nine sentences, and he got through two of them. Then Tench lifted the ruined hand and stopped him.

"Depth four," Tench said.

"Sir?"

"That is the line. A teacher may sign out certified material for a student on a depth of four." Tench put his bag down on the desk.

"You are on six."

"Yes."

"You were on four last Tuesday as well, I should think. And the Tuesday before that." Abe stood where he was and waited. Tench looked at him for a long moment, and Abe stood in a cultivation office at ten after four on a Monday and waited to be asked. He wasn't asked. Tench took a key off a hook by the window. Then he opened a cupboard that Abe had walked past every school day for five years without once wondering what was in it. He had expected it to be full, but it wasn't.

There were maybe forty books in there and half the shelf was bare. A school in Calder doesn't hold much certified material, and what it holds is old.

"What have you been working off?" Abe had the paperback out of his bag before he'd decided to. Green cover, coffee ring, eight marks printed on the back. Tench took it in his good hand and did not open it at the front, which is what everybody does. He opened it at the back. He read the last eleven pages standing up, and Abe watched a man he had known for five years read his father's handwriting.

"Whose is the blue pen?"

"My dad's."

"Wall guard?"

"Eleven years."

"Mm." Tench turned to the last page, where it says IRON BODY, underlined twice and pressed hard enough to score the paper.

"He never got there."

"No."

"Nobody does. That is not a slight on him." He handed the book back.

"It is a good road, Abe. For a man who has to stand in one place in the dark and still be standing after." Then he took his coat off and put it on the back of the chair, which Abe had never seen him do in five years.

"You are not going to stand on a wall." He took one of the four books off the shelf and opened it flat on the desk.

"This one."

"Sir?"

"You noticed it. I watched you notice it." Tench turned it round so it was the right way up for Abe.

"Forty years old, out of a city that is not this one, and two schools got rid of it before we did. Do you know why?"

"No."

"Because the man who wrote it was wrong twice and put both of them in."

"A family book only writes down the times somebody was right, because the grandchildren read it. This man had nobody to impress." Tench went down the page with one finger and stopped.

"There. He argues with himself for nine pages about a crossing he took in his thirties, and it takes him four more to admit he took the wrong one. That is going to do more for you than every crest in this school." Then he showed him where it went. Somewhere past the middle of it, printed in gray ink on cheap paper, was a man's memory of his own second crossing. His father's paperback had one too, because every trade manual on Earth does. EVOLUTION · Long Watch Choose one. This choice is permanent.

BULL'S BACK · Common · Carries weight all day and the body does not pay for it. SLOW HEART · Fine · The body spends itself slower. Air, blood, and heat go further. SECOND WIND · Rare · Spent strength comes back once, when it is needed most. Abe's whole skin went cold. He had stood in black water eighteen days ago with a screen like that hanging in his head and four seconds to answer it. He had never seen the next one. Neither had anybody he knew.

It had been sitting in a locked cupboard forty feet from his classroom for five years.

"He was a breakwater diver," Tench said.

"Witherby, forty years ago. He registered Conditioning like every child on Earth, took Long Watch out of it at his first crossing, and that is what Long Watch turned into."

"He took Bull's Back."

"Of course he did. His whole living was carrying." Tench turned four pages.

"Nine pages arguing with himself. Then this." The different ink again, smaller, pressed in hard. The weight was never what killed men in my trade. The air was. Take Slow Heart.

"At Expert the screen gave him three more doors." Tench did not slow down.

"He took Stone Shoulders. He passed over Long Haul, and he was probably right to. Then he passed over Quick Mend, and he was wrong, and he spent the rest of the book saying so, because a man who mends overnight is in the water again the next morning, and a man who doesn't is sitting on the bank."

"That is the second one he got wrong."

"That is the second one he got wrong. And he is the only writer I have ever found who will tell you so in ink." Tench turned to the back, where the pages went thin.

"The fourth crossing is Master. He copied it out of other men's accounts, because he never stood in front of it himself. He broke at seven, like a sensible man, and the route stops in the middle of a page with nothing written after it." Abe looked at the last written page for a long time. Four crossings, three doors at each of them, argued over by a man who had walked through three and got two of them wrong. A whole working life, laid flat on a desk in an hour.

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"Now the part that matters," Tench said, "and you sat in my class on Tuesday, so you already know it. The doors this man got are not the doors you will get."

"Because of what I did to get there."

"Because of what you did to get there. He earned his crossings under nine feet of harbor water, so the Weave offered him doors for a man who works drowned." Tench closed the book most of the way.

"What it offers a boy who trains the way you apparently train, I could not begin to guess. Nobody could. That is not a thing that has happened before." Abe thought about a door with a lock on it, in the dark under Salt Row, that was not in any book, and kept his face still.

"So read why he chose things, not what he chose," Tench said.

"What he chose was right for him. Why he chose it is the part you can use." Tench used the good hand to hold the page flat. The other one stayed where it always stayed, out of the way against his side. Abe had sat in this man's classes since he was thirteen and had never wondered what happened to it, and nobody else had either, because it was just a thing about Mr. Tench, like the little black notebook.

Abe worked out, for the first time ever, that something had happened to that hand, and that whatever it was had put a man in this office teaching two hundred children a year. He didn't explain it, and Abe didn't ask, and that made two of them. Abe stood in a cultivation office with his hands at his sides and did not move. Nobody had ever done this. He had a dead man's underlining, a shelf of books that were right about everybody and useless about him, and a page of his own handwriting telling him to pick cheap.

Not one person in his whole life had ever put a book on a desk and drawn him a road.

"Right. Advice, and then I am going home, because my dinner is getting cold." Tench put the key down on the desk and left it there.

"Read them with a pen in your hand and argue back at him in the margins. He is wrong somewhere nobody has caught yet and it might as well be you." He shrugged.

"The Weave pays for reading the same as it pays for anything else, and half this school has never worked that out."

"Sir."

"And when a crossing comes at you, do not answer it standing up." He picked the key back up without appearing to notice.

"Every wrong door in that cupboard got picked in under a minute by a man who was certain. The screen waits. They all wait. So you sit down and read it three times, and you bring it to me before you answer." Abe thought about answering one in eight inches of black water with something coming at him, and said nothing.

"It stops," Tench said.

"Sir?"

"At the end. They all stop." He closed the book with one hand.

"Every route in that cupboard was walked by somebody who broke at seven or eight, because seven or eight is where a person breaks. The man who wrote this one assumed you would be gone by then. He was writing for somebody sensible." He put it into Abe's hands and took three more down after it. They were heavier than they looked, and one of them had another school's stamp in the front with a name crossed out.

"So it will carry you as far as it carries anybody," Tench said, "and then you will be on your own, and there is nothing in this room about that." Abe stood there with four books against his chest and worked out what he was actually holding. Every hour he had ever spent training had paid him points. The books were the first thing anybody had ever handed him that changed what an hour did. Then Tench got a card out of the drawer, signed it, and wrote the date on it.

"Mr. Tench."

"Yes." Abe had a dozen things he could've said and picked the worst one.

"Why aren't you asking me?" Tench put the key back on its hook. Then he got his coat off the chair.

"Because you would tell me," he said, "and then I would have to do something about it." He picked his bag up off the desk. Then he put it down again.

"One more, and then I am actually going. You know about the summer exam."

"Everybody knows about the summer exam."

"Everybody knows about it the way everybody knows about the moon." Tench had his coat half on and did not finish putting it on.

"Every senior in this city sits the same paper on the same day and it licenses you or it does not, and the ones at the top of it get read out in a hall."

"I know, sir."

"Stop knowing about it and start aiming at it. It does not ask what your Talent is. It does not ask what your father did or what your family has in the bank." He got the other arm into the coat.

"It reads what you are off a pad, the same as that screen in my gym, and it has never once cared where any of it came from." It went into Abe like a hook going into a fish.

"That is where this goes for you," Tench said.

"Not a wall, and not a trade. And most years I do not say that sentence to anybody." He picked the bag up again.

"Bring them back if you cannot follow them." Miles Croft was waiting in the corridor between the cultivation department and the stairs. He'd been there a while. He had his bag over one shoulder and a wooden practice blade in each hand. There were about forty people in that corridor who had found a reason to be in it.

"Dolan." The corridor went quiet in patches, which is what happens when forty people notice the same thing one after another.

"I've been following you for eight days," Croft said. He said it flatly, out loud, in front of all of them, which Abe hadn't expected.

"I went to your work. I've watched you eat your lunch, which is a mad thing to admit out loud. I stood at the end of the corridor behind the music rooms like an absolute idiot for three lunchtimes running." Lena Ward laughed. Croft did not.

"I've no idea what you're doing. I've stopped asking, because you won't tell me and I'm done looking stupid about it." He held one of the blades out. Abe didn't take it.

"Saturday," Croft said.

"The hall. Anybody who wants to come can come."

"Croft."

"You're top of that board." He lifted the blade an inch.

"And I'm the best in this school with one of these. So which one of those is actually worth more? I want to find out." He shrugged.

"Whoever wins, the whole school knows by Monday." He was not angry. Abe thought about that for a long time afterward. Croft had simply worked out the one true thing about Abe Dolan that nobody else in that building had noticed all day. Abe had a depth of six, a Body of five, and four books under his arm with a whole career mapped inside them. He also had a left hand that had set crooked, and a Swordsmanship registered four days ago that could not hit a trash can lid.

Behind him, at the end of the corridor, there were still people at that board.

"Saturday," Abe said. Croft nodded once and put the blade back under his arm and went off toward the stairs. The corridor started up again behind him like a machine coming back on. June was sitting on the front step of the block when Abe turned the corner. She had her coat on over her school sweater and her bag still on her shoulder, and it was dark and cold and she'd plainly been there a while. That was four streets and a set of stairs further than she should've gone on a Monday.

Abe stopped on the sidewalk about ten feet away.

"Well?" said June. And Abe found that he'd planned nine hours of this day down to what his hands were going to do, and hadn't planned one second of this.

"Six," he said. June put both hands over her mouth. Then she said a word that Peg would have hit her for. Abe sat down on the cold step next to his sister in the dark and laughed until he couldn't breathe. He hadn't laughed once since the bell that morning, and this step was the only place in Calder he could. They sat out there for about twenty minutes, longer than either of them should've, and June made him go through the whole thing twice. She wanted the faces.

She didn't care about the number at all once she had it. She wanted to know what Naylor's face had done, and whether Nita had cried, and what Croft looked like sitting on that floor with his arms around his knees. Abe told her all of it, and it was the first time in a month that telling somebody something had made it bigger instead of smaller. Then he told her about the books. He got four sentences in before he heard his own voice go, and he had to stop and start again.

"Say it again," said June.

"He took his coat off."

"I heard that bit."

"He took his coat off, June. He was going home. He had his bag in his hand." Abe looked at the step.

"Then he sat down and told me where I'm going." June didn't say anything for a moment.

"Good," she said.

"About time one of them did something."

"He didn't have to."

"I know he didn't have to. That's what makes it good." She pulled her coat round.

"Where does it go?"

"A long way."

"Abe."

"I don't know how to say it so it sounds like anything." He tried anyway.

"It's four turnings and most of a life, and I know what all four of them are, and up until about five o'clock today I didn't know there were four." June sat with that.

"So he's the first one," she said.

"The first what?"

"The first person who was any use to you." June said it perfectly evenly.

"I've been waiting five years for one of them to be any use to you." Then he told her about Saturday. June stopped smiling.

"You can't use a sword," she said.

"No."

"Abe."

"I know."

"You have four days."

"Five," Abe said.

"There's Saturday morning." June looked at him for a while in the dark. Then Abe watched his sister decide not to say the next thing. He'd seen Peg do that about nine times, but he had never seen June do it.

"Right," she said. Then she said the other thing, because she was never going to leave it there.

"You'll tell me how it goes."

"It's on Saturday. You'll be there."

"I won't, actually." June said it perfectly levelly.

"The hall's up two flights and there's no elevator, and I've had a bad week, and I'm not going to sit at the bottom of a staircase while everybody I know goes up it." Abe didn't have anything to say to that.

"So come home and tell me how it went," said June.

"The bad bits too. Don't do the version where you're fine."