Chapter 59: A Useful Reputation
Chapter 59: A Useful Reputation
The morning after the Panther hunt, a man held a door open for me.
That doesn’t sound like much. It was the door of the wash-house, and I’d been using it for eleven days, and for eleven days the general policy on Adrian Vale had been to let the door swing.
He held it, and then he said "morning" in a voice slightly too careful, and then he went somewhere else fairly quickly.
It kept happening all day. The queue at the water tap opened up when I joined it. A woman who had spent a week trying to find out where I stored my meat asked me nothing at all, twice. Two hunters at the fire were arguing about a rifle and both of them stopped, not because they’d finished, but because I’d walked within four metres of the conversation.
Nobody was rude. That was the strange part. They were considerate, in the specific way people are considerate about things they don’t understand.
They didn’t trust me, I thought, filling a bottle in a silence that hadn’t been there yesterday. They trusted that treating me badly would be a remarkably stupid idea.
I turned that over for most of the morning waiting to be insulted by it, and I never quite got there.
Because the practical consequences were excellent. Nobody asked where I’d been. Nobody asked where a horned woman in imperial plate had come from or where she’d gone. The trader who’d spent four days circling the question of my cache didn’t circle it once, and when I laid Panther materials on his counter he offered me a fair price before I’d said a word about it.
Privacy, supplies, and fewer questions. If fear buys me those, I’ll take fear.
Halloran found me at the trade shed in the afternoon and did the single most useful thing anyone in that settlement did for me.
He treated it like business.
"You’ll be going," he said. Not a question. He sat down on a crate across from me with the deliberateness of a man whose knees have opinions. "Not today. But you’ll be going."
"Probably."
"Then let’s do it properly rather than have you slope off at dawn and everyone spend a fortnight inventing reasons." He took out a pencil stub. "Keep the room while you sort yourself out. Nobody’s going to charge you for it after last night and I’d rather you didn’t argue, because the argument would be tedious for both of us."
I let that one go.
What followed was twenty minutes of the most boring and valuable conversation I’d had since the Merge. He wrote down what I wanted and told me what he could actually get, and the two lists were different, and he was honest about the difference. Rifle ammunition — a hundred and twenty rounds, which was more than I’d hoped and less than I’d asked. Preserved food for nine days. Two proper water bladders and purification tablets, which I had never once owned. A repair kit. A decent coat that fit, which turned out to matter more than most of the rest.
And a map.
That was the thing I’d have paid the Panther’s whole hide for. Regional, hand-drawn on the back of a laminated road atlas page, with the settlement marks and the dead zones and four separate territories outlined in different colours by four different people over eighteen months.
"Don’t trust the green," Halloran said. "Green’s Marek’s work and Marek was an optimist."
I traded him plates, sinew, both intact fangs, and the pelt — everything from the Panther except the core, which was already inside me, and which I did not mention.
"You’ll want somewhere bigger," he said, when the trading was done. He said it without looking up.
"Will I."
"You’re not staying here. You’re not a farmer and you’re not a soldier and there’s nothing in Fenwick that wants figuring out." He shrugged. "Greyhaven, then. Five days north-east if you’re careful, three if you’re stupid. It’s fortified properly, they’ve got a real market, medical people who trained before, mercenary contracts, and — " a pause, and I have never been sure whether it was calculated " — an archive."
"An archive of what?"
"Classes. Skills. What’s been seen, what’s known, who had what and what it did to them." He tapped the map twice, over a marked square. "Bigger settlements collect that sort of thing because it’s worth money. If you’ve got questions about your own situation, that’s where the answers live. Or the closest thing anybody’s managed."
I kept my face doing nothing at all and my heart went sideways.
A record. Somewhere with a record of what classes exist and what they can become.
"I’m looking for a bigger base," I said. "Somewhere with walls and a market. That’s all."
"Course you are," Halloran said, and folded the map, and handed it over without another word about it.
The cooldown had two days and a bit left, so I spent them working.
Mostly on the Veil.
It is a much stranger thing to own than I expected. There’s no sensation to switching it on — no cold, no hum, nothing at all except a faint change in how the world responds to me. What I had to do was construct the whole understanding of it from the outside, by experiment, like a man learning what a mirror is by walking past one.
So I tested it on people, which felt indecent and which I did anyway.
I walked slowly through the yard at dusk within two metres of four men playing cards. Not one of them looked up. I stood at the end of the wash-house for six full minutes while two women talked, and they never once glanced over, and when I finally moved out into the lamplight one of them jumped so badly she dropped a bucket.
So it works on people. Right.
But: a boy came round the corner of the print shop at a run and saw me instantly, and stopped, and said hello. Because he was looking, and there I was.
That’s the whole of it. It is not invisibility and I stopped hoping it was by the second afternoon. What the Veil takes is the reason to look — the scuff, the breath, the shift in the air, whatever it is that makes a head come round when nothing has actually happened. Remove that, and I am a coat on a chair until somebody’s eyes land on me directly.
And speed breaks it. Every time. Walk and I’m furniture. Jog and I’m a man. I broke it four separate ways in one evening: a sprint, a swing of the knife at a post, a jump down off a wall, and getting shoved by a hunter who genuinely hadn’t seen me and who apologised for about a minute afterwards.
Feline Grace turned out to be half the skill. The Veil suppresses what I emit; Feline Grace stops me emitting it. My feet land where I put them and my weight comes off bad ground before I’ve decided anything, and on the last night I crossed the whole scrap yard end to end, over sheet steel and loose gravel, and nothing in it made a sound.
I packed in the evenings and thought about who was coming.
That’s the part I couldn’t be practical about. I’d catch myself doing it while I was oiling the rifle — running through them. Vaelora, who’d be furious and magnificent and completely useless in a settlement. Eira, who’d arrive braced for a blow and spend an hour deciding whether the room was a trap. The one in white, whose name I still didn’t have.
And Liora.
Twenty-five percent. That’s what her Resonance says, and I know exactly what it buys, because I read the terms the night she left. One chance in four, but only if the grade roll lands on D first. Nothing in the world was going to give me her twice on purpose.
It rolls a grade. Then it picks a person. It doesn’t know I want anything.
At ten past nine on the third evening, sitting on the floor of a private room with my back against the door, the window opened.
[Blind Call Charges: 1/1]
I looked at it for a long time without moving.
Could be anyone. Could be a fisherman. Could be somebody who spends eight hours screaming at me, which has already happened once and which I entirely deserved.
I put my hand flat on the boards, and breathed out, and activated it.