Chapter 47: The Core in the Corpse
Chapter 47: The Core in the Corpse
I stayed on my knees in that road for a long time.
Long enough that the wrecked frontage across from me stopped being a building and became a grey shape, and then became two grey shapes that wouldn’t hold still, and then became nothing at all.
I don’t remember deciding to lie down.
When I came back the light had moved a long way. Late afternoon, at a guess, with that flat orange coming in sideways under the cloud — which meant hours, four or five of them, spent unconscious in the open in the middle of a street with a bisected field boss cooling half a kilometre away.
Anything could have walked past. Anything at all. I’d never have known.
That thought got me sitting up faster than my head wanted.
The head was the immediate problem. Something behind my eyes had been dragged sideways and left there, and the whole back of my skull ached in a slow rhythm that matched my pulse. My nose had bled at some point and dried; my upper lip was crusted with it and my hand came away brown. My mouth was so dry my tongue felt like something borrowed.
But I made myself do the check properly, the way Liora had drilled into me — start at the top and work down, touch it, move it, load it.
Ribs: fine. I pressed along them and got nothing, and then breathed in as deep as I could and got nothing again, and that in itself was strange enough to sit with. Earlier that day, those ribs had made a sound like a bag of sticks when I hit a wall. Now my chest wall was solid. My left arm did what I asked. My shoulder blade was smooth under the filthy dressing, and when I peeled the corner back there was skin there, pink and new.
She’d put me back together and then gone hunting with me under her arm, and I hadn’t given it a second’s proper attention at the time because I’d been busy being airborne.
So I’m not injured. I’m just dying of thirst in a road.
Manageable. Barely, and only for a few more hours.
Twelve unspent attribute points blinked at the edge of my vision.
I had seen them while hanging beneath the cultivator like laundry and dismissed them on the reasonable grounds that I was busy trying not to vomit from three hundred metres up. Ignoring them now would be less reasonable.
I divided them evenly across the three attributes that had kept me alive.
[Attribute allocation confirmed.]
[Strength: 9 → 13]
[Vitality: 10 → 14]
[Agility: 11 → 15]
Warmth moved through muscle and bone. My limbs tightened around the change, steadier and more responsive than they had been a moment earlier, but the familiar ceiling settled over the improvement almost at once.
[Frail Body remains active.]
[Weak Constitution remains active.]
[Poor Coordination remains active.]
Four points in each attribute did not make me a healthy Level 13. They made me a less hopeless version of the same badly built one. My thirst remained. The pressure behind my eyes remained. Whatever the cultivator had done to my mind was not impressed by arithmetic.
The other thing was in my head, and it had not gone anywhere.
The art sat there with an awful clarity — sharper than memory, sharper than anything I’ve ever learned. I could feel the shape of the sequence the way you can feel the shape of your own hand in the dark: where the breath goes, where attention has to sit and for how long, the order the pathways have to open in, the specific unbearable thing you do at the turn.
I knew all of it. I had done none of it. There is an enormous difference between those two sentences and I understood that immediately, because knowing the sequence did not make me feel one gram stronger.
And I’m not attempting it here. Not thirsty, not empty, not in the open, not four hundred metres from something’s dinner.
So: water and pack first. Which meant retracing a route I’d travelled at three hundred metres in the air while trying not to be sick.
That took me most of two hours and it was humiliating work. I had no memory of direction, only of moments — a plaza with a fountain in it, a long roof of green corrugated sheet, the moment she’d dropped and something with too many legs had come apart. What made it possible was that she’d left a trail nobody else in the world could have left. Every few hundred metres there was a corpse cut in half with a single flat edge, already drawing flies, and the cuts all faced the same way.
I followed her leavings the way you’d follow milestones, and by early evening I was standing on a mound of collapsed roof sheet listening to the wind, and forty minutes of digging after that I had my pack.
The strap was torn and one water bottle had split, but the other two hadn’t, and I drank one entirely in about ninety seconds and immediately felt like a person again.
Right, I thought, sitting on a girder with my head between my knees. Now the ridiculous part.
Because the Ash Ogre was still lying out there in two pieces, and inside it was a Level 15 core.
I had never seen one above Level 6. I had no idea what a fifteen was worth, in any market that might still exist, to anybody — and that uncertainty was exactly why I wanted it. Uncertainty in my favour is the only kind I’ve ever been offered.
The scavengers had found it first, of course.
I lay behind a low wall two hundred metres out and watched them for the better part of forty minutes. Eleven, maybe twelve, working the exposed cross-section of the rear half — grey diggers and two of the long low things and one bigger creature that everything else gave room to. They weren’t cooperating. They were tolerating each other because there was more meat there than any of them could finish in a week, and the tolerance had a shape: the big one ate where it wanted, the middle ones circled, and the small ones darted in at the edges and got driven off every few minutes.
I was Level 13. I could probably have killed two of them. Possibly three, if the ground and the light were kind.
And there are twelve, and I have barely been conscious for four hours, and a number on my status is not permission to be stupid.
Liora’s voice, more or less word for word.
So I went and got a bucket instead.
Not literally. What I did was walk half a kilometre back to one of the cultivator’s earlier kills — a mid-sized thing with its belly opened by a cut that hadn’t even slowed down — and spend twenty deeply unpleasant minutes filling a torn shopping bag with the parts of it nothing had eaten yet. Then I carried that dripping bag along the line of a side street parallel to the ogre, laying a wet trail every ten or fifteen metres, all the way to a courtyard eighty metres east with one narrow entrance.
I put the bulk of it in the courtyard. Then I got up onto a first-floor windowsill on the far side, out of the wind, and threw a length of copper pipe onto a metal roof.
The noise was flat and loud and completely uninteresting as a threat.
It took the smaller ones about ninety seconds. The middle ones followed once the small ones stopped coming back, which is what small animals stopping tells you. The big one held out longest and then went too, because it had smelled the trail and because something else was eating something it hadn’t approved.
I did not watch the courtyard. Whatever happened in there was going to be loud, and loud things attract attention. I wanted to be somewhere else with my hands full by the time it finished.
Getting the core out was the worst physical work I have ever done.
She had killed that thing beautifully and she had not packaged the reward. Her sword intent had divided it cleanly through the middle, leaving the core deep in the front half. I had to climb through the severed body, up over the ribs, in the dark, with a knife and a torch in my teeth, into something the size of a small warehouse that had been cooling since that afternoon. The smell had layers. I threw up twice and kept going both times, mostly because stopping meant doing it all again later.
I found it seated in a mass of tissue under the breastbone, and cutting it free took nearly an hour with the military knife, and when it finally came away in both hands I sat down in the wreck of that chest cavity and just held it.
It was the size of a grapefruit and far too heavy for its size. Dull red, almost black at the centre, and there was a slow pressure coming off it that I could feel in my teeth.
This is worth something enormous, I thought. And I have absolutely no idea what, or to whom, or what happens to a man carrying it when the wrong person finds out.
On the way back I stopped at one of her small kills and cut out a second core. Level 4, maybe. The size of a walnut, dull, warm, unremarkable.
That one was for the art. Whatever the first circulation did to me, it was going to do it to a walnut.
I was not going to gamble a grapefruit on my own competence.