Chapter 36: "The Unspent Man"
They took the north road at a jog. The migration horn doesn’t wait for a man to finish being pleased with himself.
Mataon had exactly one hundred paces of feeling like a person who’d solved something. Then the god behind his sternum ruined it.
"Mataon,"
Zahr said, in the tone of a man who’s found a coin behind the cushions.
"A question."
"Ask it running."
"What are these?"
Mataon didn’t break stride.
"What are what?"
"The twelve," Zahr said.
"In your status. Sitting there. Little unclaimed things, in a column, going nowhere. I assumed they were decorative." A pause.
"They’re not decorative, are they."
Mataon’s feet kept moving. His mind did not.
In eight days he had counted every copper in the common fund twice. He had rebuilt a poisoner’s plumbing from the temperature of the water. He had audited a healer’s dilutions, a clerk’s blank pages, a mill-master’s conscience. He had not slept, most nights, until the day’s ledger balanced in his head.
He had never once opened his own status past the line that said how close he was to dying.
"Show me,"
he said, and stopped so suddenly that Tovan nearly ran him down.
The window was there. It had always been there. He’d been dismissing it for a week the way a man swats a notification he means to read later. Because later there was always a monster, or a debt, or a bell.
He opened it properly for the first time.
[Unallocated Attribute Points: 12]
[Levels 2–5 · 3 per level · never assigned]
"Oh," Mataon said.
With the hollow calm of a man discovering he’s been carrying his own wallet in his teeth.
Barni sat down in the middle of the road. Folded ears trembling, curled tail wrapped around his paws. He made a sound the husky half of him used for grief and the cat half used for pure, radiant joy.
"The auditor," the old hybrid said.
"The man who made a mill-master weep at a scale. The man who won’t eat until the column sums."
He was going to enjoy this for years.
"Has been walking into monsters at a quarter of his own strength. For a week. Because he never read the one ledger that was his."
"I was busy."
"You were UNDER-BUILT,"
Almina said, and there was almost heat in it, which from her was a shout.
"I told you to rest. I told you your body was failing faster than it should. I thought you were merely careless with yourself." A pause.
"I did not imagine you’d left twelve points of yourself in a drawer, like unopened mail, because a bell rang. This is worse. This is so much worse."
"It’s efficient," Zahr offered.
"He kept them safe. Unspent. Earning no interest, admittedly, but very secure. Do you know how many men squander their points the moment they get them, on strength, like animals? Not our Mataon. Our Mataon files them. Our Mataon means to get to them after the quarterly review."
"I hate you," Mataon said, without force.
It was hard to be angry at a voice that was, technically, also him.
"You hate that I’m right," Zahr said.
"It’s a different flavour. You’ll learn to tell them apart."
"Both of you. Stop."
Mataon crouched at the edge of the road. The migration horn still called, thin and wrong, from the ridge ahead. He did the thing he should have done on the second day: he read himself the way he read everything.
He did not like the number.
STR twelve. AGI eleven. END thirteen. The sheet of a clerk who walked a lot. No wonder the Bloodsap Stalker had opened his arm like a letter. No wonder every fight had felt like holding a door shut with his whole life. He’d been winning on terrain and other people’s teeth, because his own body was a rough draft he’d never revised.
"Assign them,"
Ivara said, crouching beside him, reading his face if not the window.
"Whatever it is. You’ve got the road-face. Fix it, and let’s move."
"Where," Mataon said.
Half to her, half to the two gods. His hand hovered, then drifted the way it always drifted, toward the column marked Intelligence. The one number that had never once let him down.
"I want it in reason. I always want it in reason. Reason is the only thing that’s ever saved me."
"Reason found the sluice," Almina agreed.
"Endurance is what let you stand in the water long enough to draw it, while your own arm bled. You keep thanking the map and starving the legs that walk it."
He almost argued.
Then he thought of the mill hand’s face, and the arm that had reopened twice, and the plain arithmetic of a man who intended to be alive at Chapter eighty. And he did the sensible thing, which for once was also the humble one.
[Allocating 12 points]
[Strength +2 · Agility +2 · Endurance +3 · Intelligence +1 · Perception +2 · Will +2]
[STR 14 · AGI 13 · END 16 · INT 18 · PER 16 · WIL 18]
[Confirmed]
It did not feel like light. Nothing in this world ever felt like light.
It felt like a coat he hadn’t known he was missing, settled over shoulders that had been cold for eight days and had stopped noticing. The ache in his forearm dimmed. The road under his feet felt, suddenly, like ground he could push against instead of ground that was merely there.
He drew a breath, and it went deeper than his breaths had gone since Starfall Clearing.
"Better," Almina said quietly.
"Sixteen endurance," Barni observed, tail twitching.
"You could have had sixteen endurance since the Hollow Choir. You survived the Hollow Choir on thirteen, out of spite and my personal intervention."
He rose, stretched, trotted north.
"I want it noted, for the record you love so much, that I have been carrying this man."
"Noted," said Edrin, who had, in fact, already noted it.
They crested the ridge, and the record stopped mattering, because the forest was coming down the mountain.
Not attacking. Fleeing.
A brown-and-moss tide of grazers poured through the ferns below. Mossbacks and lesser things, hundreds of them, antlers down, eyes white. The whole herd-mind of the high wood, running from something it would not turn to face.
They were not the danger. They were the danger’s shadow, thrown ahead.
And in their panic they poured straight down the throat of the valley. Toward the lower terraces. Toward the seed-shelf Vezra had planned that morning. Toward the town.
"They’ll trample the farms flat," Ivara said.
"Then whatever’s behind them arrives on ground that’s already ruined."
Vezra’s contour ditch. Her three baffles and settling box, drawn that morning in her own furious hand. The first thing this town had let a goblin sign. Two thousand fleeing hooves would erase it before noon, and no one would ever know the plan had been correct.
"Not the shelf,"
Mataon said, and was mildly surprised by how much he meant it.
"Anything but the shelf."
He planted the measured spear. For the first time it did not feel like a stick he was hiding behind. Sixteen endurance. Thirteen agility. A body that would, at last, do roughly what he asked of it.
[Boundary Spear — Rank F: active]
[Objective: turn the herd, do not stop it]
"We don’t fight a migration," he said.
"We steer it. Tovan, Ivara, the ferns on the west shelf. Noise, not blades. Edrin, mark the fall line. Barni—"
"I’ll go and see what a whole forest is afraid of," the hybrid said, already a blur.
"Since apparently I’m the muscle in this operation."
And behind the fleeing herd, up where the ferns met the black rock, something rose to its full height against the morning and looked down the valley at the town.
The System caught the edge of it, and gave Mataon the first cold line of a number he was not going to enjoy.
[Threat approaching — Rank C or higher]
[Recommendation: do not measure this one from the front]