Chương 54: The Round

He went back out after they had gone to bed, and did it again on the Tuesday morning, and it went better, because now he knew what it did with its legs. He did it once more before noon. DRILL HAND · Apprentice Lv 5 (640 / 5, 000) He got quicker at the getting-quiet part too. Trying was what made it worse, and it took him three goes to work that out. Marek had sat on the mat by the wall bars with his hands turned up on his knees and nothing in them.

Abe sat in the sleet and put it all down, the leg and the noise and the sword. The world locked when he stopped chasing the quiet. Then he made a mistake. It wasn't a brave one and it wasn't a careless one, and it was going to hurt him more than either. He had cased the field again that morning. He walked all of it and picked the fourth reed dog off a shallow bank on the north side. Then he went back for a stilt, because it was on his way.

It was also the one he had kept picking in his head on the bank the day before, when he could not get quiet. It stood in the deep part with its neck folded down along its own back. Up close it was taller than the room he slept in. The legs came out of the water like scaffolding poles, four of them, and the water only came halfway up them. Purnell had not been exaggerating in the punt. He cased it for an hour. He went in from the south side, where the bottom was firm and the water came to his chest. Then he let go.

The opener landed exactly where he had put it, on the front leg above the joint. The head was nine feet over him. There was nothing else on the animal he could reach. The point went in to the bone. The stilt turned its head down and looked at him. After that it was work. He could not get near anything that would kill it. So he went at the same leg, and got out of the way, and came back and went at it again. The water took the speed out of every swing and out of him with it. It tried to stand on him twice.

The second time he went under and came up with his feet on nothing, and had to swim four strokes to find the bottom again. Twenty minutes of the real world. He counted the whole way through it, because counting kept him from thinking about his arms. The leg gave way in the end. The whole animal came down sideways with a noise like a scaffold going over. He finished it in the water with both hands on the grip and his shoulder against its neck.

He stood there afterward and could not make his hands let go of the sword. Getting quiet after that took two hours more. So when he walked up onto the north bank and set his feet and let the world in, his map of that marsh was five hours old. The reed dog wasn't there. The thing that was there was not a reed dog. It had been coming up that bank for a while. It was already inside the four seconds. DRILL HAND did what it always did.

It did not matter, because his opener was aimed at empty air a foot to the left of the head. He got out of it by dropping the sword. The point was aimed at nothing and the animal was already inside his arms, so he let the blade go and got both hands into it instead, and took it backward off the bank with him into the deep water. The animal's legs were all of it. In four feet of water they did nothing for it.

Abe got it under and held it under, with his own head going below and coming up and going below again, and the two of them stayed like that for a long time. He was stronger. He had known that since the first one. It broke off on its own. It went up the bank and away through the reeds without hurrying at any point. He got the sword back off the bank and came out on the far side with it, a long open cut down his left forearm, and one boot.

He sat in the reeds and looked at the arm, and thought about it in a perfectly calm and horrible way. If he had gone under in that water, there had been no still to go into. He had spent seven hours on a hummock the day before finding that out. Nobody on Earth knew he was here. He had eaten shepherd's pie at that table last night and heard about a dog called Trevor, and not one word of it had been about a marsh. If the reeds got him, Peg would spend the rest of her life not knowing where he had gone.

He tied the arm up with his shirt and sat there until his hands worked again. Then he added up what the day had cost him, and that was what stopped him. The stilt had taken twenty minutes and two hours of getting quiet afterward, and out there in the world it was Tuesday evening. He had four cores in a bag. He could have had eight by morning, and Peg put the plates out at six.

So he got quiet, faster than he had managed the day before, and walked back into a stopped Prescot and took bread and two tins of meat out of a shop with nobody in it. He came back over the wall on the night of the thirtieth with four cores in a bag and one boot on. He'd cut them out himself. He knew where they sat, because he'd watched Riddell take one out of a tin in October and call it clean and worth three hundred and ten marks. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Four of them. Abe sat on the floor of the hall in Prescot and laid them out in a row on his coat. Twelve hundred and forty marks, if Riddell paid what he'd paid before. He would. He was Riddell. Peg brought home about ninety marks a week from the school kitchens and stood up for every hour of it. Abe looked at four gray lumps on a coat. He could not think of one single way to carry them into his own kitchen.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 8 Foundation: 2, 410 / 4, 900 (Body 9) Two and a half thousand short of a nine, near enough. He sat on a stranger's floor and looked at that for a while, because there was nobody he could show it to and nothing else in the room to look at. He did not go home that night, and he had meant to. He sat in the doorway of the hall with the bread and worked the walk out properly.

Forty miles of dead four-lane, nine hours of his own legs going down and nine coming back, and not one minute of it would show on a clock anywhere. Eighteen hours was one round of the marsh, and a round was three hundred and ten marks in Riddell's hand. He told himself he would go at New Year. Then he looked at the four cores on his coat instead, and worked out what four cores every two days came to.

"Twelve hundred and forty marks," Abe said, in an empty hall.

"In two days." Then he made himself do the big one slowly. Two million marks was the number on the kitchen wall. June had put it up there in green pen when she was twelve, above the doses and the electric and the shoes, with a face drawn next to it with its tongue out. In November he had worked out what Gault's four hundred a month came to against two million. The answer had been four hundred and sixteen years, and he had not said that one out loud to anybody, then or since.

This was not four hundred and sixteen years. He could not get a figure he trusted out of it, because he did not know how many days like Monday he could put end to end. What he had was that it was years now instead of hundreds of years. He looked at the road south for a while. Then he wrapped the cores up and put them under the radiator, and went back over the wall. So he built a round. Case the field frozen and walk all of it, every time. Pick. Set his feet, get the spot on the head, let go. Fight it in real time.

Sit down in the sleet and put everything down until the world locked. Cut the core out. Eat, sleep on the hall floor, and go again. The casing was the part that mattered, and losing a boot was how he had learned it. He walked the whole field before every pick after that, even when he had walked it that morning. It cost him an hour of his own time and it never cost him anything else. He counted the rounds out loud at the end of each one.

"Twelve." Then, a long way further on, "Twenty." Somewhere past forty he lost the exact number and started counting cores instead, because cores went in a bag and rounds did not. DRILL HAND · Apprentice Lv 7 (1, 904 / 9, 800) The getting quiet came down and down. Seven hours on the first one. Two after the stilt. Then an hour. Then most of an hour. Then one afternoon he sat down on a hummock and the world locked before he had gotten comfortable, and he sat in the stopped sleet feeling insulted about it.

He was not calm. He had stopped minding that he was not calm, and the Weave did not seem to know the difference. Then the near field stopped paying. It happened the same way it had happened in his own yard at home. He killed the ninth reed dog and the bar barely moved. He stood in the water knowing exactly what that meant. He had gotten good at reed dogs, and that was the end of reed dogs. So he went into the deep part, where the stilts stood. The one on the thirtieth had taken him twenty minutes.

The next took eleven. The one after that bent backward at the middle in a way nothing with a spine should be able to do. It opened his shoulder and still went down inside eight minutes. They paid him more in an afternoon than a week of the shallows had. He counted the stilts too. Four, then six, then nine. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 9 Foundation: 1, 180 / 6, 400 (Body 10) The screen came up in the middle of a flat brown field with the sleet hanging in it. Abe stood and looked at it for a long time.

Nobody in his year was on Body 9. Croft was not on Body 9. Danforth's father's money had not bought one. There was nobody within forty miles to say that to.

"Body 9," Abe said, to a field. He said it again with Croft's name in it, and stood there grinning at the sleet. Then he went back out, because the number on the kitchen wall was still two million. He went further into the deep part than he had meant to. There were animals standing out there in water up to their chests that had no business being that far in. Every one of them paid better than anything he had killed yet. He stopped being surprised by that somewhere in the second week. Nine reed dogs. Nine stilts.

Twenty-two things out there he had no name for. He could have told you what every one of the forty had cost him. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 10 Foundation: 4, 710 / 8, 100 (Body 11) He did not laugh at that one. He sat down on the bank and looked at it, and then he looked out at the channel. The food ran out too. The warehouse in Prescot had lasted him nine days the first time. It did not last nine days again, though, because he was eating like three men and sleeping like one.

He worked through the far end of it, then the racks by the door, then two pallets somebody had shoved into a corner and forgotten. Then it was shops. He counted those as well, because he counted everything. Four shops the first week. Then eleven. He took the tins out of the middle of the shelves rather than off the ends, because a gap in the middle looks like somebody bought something. The man in the shop on the corner of the market lane had his glasses pushed up on his head and a pen in his mouth.

Abe took eight tins off a shelf four feet from the man's face, and kept his eyes on him the whole time he was doing it. In the ninth shop the woman behind the counter had a baby on her hip and her mouth open on a word she had been saying to it. Abe stood in front of the two of them for a long while before he took anything, but he took it. He knew what that made him. He kept the number of tins in his head, in order, shop by shop.

After the eleventh shop he checked Stealth, because he had been expecting something after all that. Stealth · Novice Lv 5 (0 / 1, 250) It had not moved one point since the night market. A warehouse, eleven shops, and a man with his glasses pushed up on his head four feet away, and the Weave had paid him nothing for any of it. He worked it out standing in the aisle with the tins inside his coat. The man four feet away was never going to turn around, and Abe had known that before he reached for the shelf.

Nothing he had done in eleven shops had been hard. He had made sure of that every single time, on purpose, because getting caught in Prescot would have finished him. Nobody in Prescot had noticed yet. He thought about that over every meal he ate out of those tins. He came out of the marsh on the thirty first with the sleet coming down the way it had all week, and the first thing he did was look at his arm. The cut down his forearm was a scar.

It was a good clean one, gone pale, the kind of scar he had on both knees from being eleven. He turned his arm over in the gray light and looked at it and could not put his finger on the week it had closed up. He remembered the shirt. He remembered tying it. He could not get at anything in between. Abe stood in a field outside a city that had never heard of him, with a bag of cores at his feet and no idea whatsoever what the date was. Then he worked it out, and it was the thirty first of December.

The board was on the fifth of January, which was five days away for everybody in Calder and as long as he wanted it to be for him. Peg would be doing the landing table tonight. Mrs. Bewley would be cutting the cake with the bread knife, because nobody could ever find the right one. June would be on the stairs with the kids from the fourth floor. Every one of them thought he had gone out after breakfast yesterday.

He went back into Prescot for the four cores under the radiator, and ate sitting on the hall floor, and by the time he came out again it was dark. He got quiet in about forty seconds and started running south. Somewhere down the dead four-lane he started working out what he was going to tell them, because June was going to ask him how long he had been gone. He had counted everything up here. Rounds, cores, shops, tins. He was still working on it when he got there.