Respawn

He woke on his knees on cold stone.

That was the first fact and it took him some time to get past it, because it did not follow from anything.

There had been a ceiling. There had been worked stone cut in a pattern by somebody a long time ago, and a great deal of noise going away from him, and then there had been the end of everything he was, which had arrived complete and had not been in any doubt.

Now there was stone under his hands and his knees, and it was cold, and it was outdoors.

He did not move for a while.

* * * *

Nothing hurt.

That was the second fact and it was worse than the first.

He went through himself piece by piece, kneeling, without looking up. The left arm, which had stopped working somewhere around minute nine and had not answered him for the rest of it, answered him. The shoulder was fine. The place where something had opened him across the ribs was not open and had never been open.

He got his hand up and put it flat against his own chest and found unbroken skin under the shirt, and the shirt was not torn.

His kit was intact.

His sword was on his back in the position his shoulders chose. He had watched it go across a floor with a noise, out of a hand that had stopped being able to close, and it was on his back.

He checked his purse and it was lighter. Considerably. That was the only thing that had changed about him and it took him a further minute to find it.

* * * *

He pressed his own forearm.

He did it hard, with two fingers, into the muscle, and it resisted, and it hurt slightly in the ordinary way that pressing yourself hurts.

He did it again.

He did it a third time and then made himself stop, because he had become aware that he was kneeling on stone in a public place doing something visibly strange, and because the third time had produced exactly the same result as the first two and there was nothing further to learn.

He was solid.

He looked up.

* * * *

It was Grennet.

He knew where he was immediately, which was disorienting in its own way. The shrine at the north end of the crossing, the small domed building he had walked past perhaps two hundred times and had never once gone into and had never once wondered about.

It was mid-afternoon. It was the same day.

The town was doing what the town did. Somebody was arguing at the fruit stall. The smith had a queue.

He had been dead for what he would later establish was about four minutes.

* * * *

The others were already there.

They were on the steps, and they were arguing.

Poppy was furious. That was audible from twenty feet and it was the first thing he registered about the group, and the fury had a specific target, which was a positioning call in the fourth minute.

"You had it turned," she was saying. "You had it turned, and then you gave ground, and if you had not given ground it would have stayed turned and I could have come round."

"If I had not given ground," said Maren, "it would have gone through me at seven and you would have had it at nine instead of eleven."

"Then it should not have been on you at seven."

"No," Maren agreed. "It should not."

Itta was sitting on the bottom step restringing her bow. She had the string half on and was working it with her thumb and had not contributed to the argument at any point.

* * * *

They were treating it as a bad afternoon.

Alaric stood at the bottom of the steps and understood that with total clarity and could not do anything with it.

Maren was doing arithmetic out loud. Repair costs on the shield, replacement on two straps, the coin they had all lost, whether the potions used counted against the guild or against the individual. She had the numbers already and had evidently had them before he arrived.

Poppy was angry in the specific way of somebody who intends to do the same thing again next week and wants it to go better.

Itta was restringing a bow.

Nobody had said anything about being dead.

* * * *

He stood among them and could not make himself join in.

They noticed him. Poppy said something at him, some version of there you are, and went straight back to the positioning call without waiting for a reply. Maren looked at him for a moment and then asked whether he had lost anything from his pack.

He said he had not.

That was the entirety of his contribution to the conversation for a long while, and nobody found it strange, because he was not a talkative man on the best of days and this had not been the best of days.

He sat down on the step at the end of the row.

He listened to three people work through an afternoon that had cost them coin and time and a certain amount of pride, and he could not find any way at all into it.

* * * *

For them it had been expensive.

That was the correct description of what he was looking at and he arrived at it on the steps.

They had gone in, and it had gone badly, and they had paid a price which was real and which was measured in coin and repairs and a week of not doing that again. It was the worst outcome available in their world and it was an outcome they had a set of procedures for.

Poppy had a procedure. It was to be furious and to plan.

Maren had a procedure. It was to count the cost.

Itta had a procedure and it was a bow.

For him it had been the end of the world followed by an unexplained continuation.

* * * *

He tried once to say so.

It came up about twenty minutes later, when the argument had run out and they were walking back and the tone had gone light. Poppy said something about the ceiling in that chamber and how ugly it had been.

And Alaric said, "I was looking at it."

She said, "At what?"

"The ceiling. At the end."

And there was a small pause, and he could feel the shape of what came next, which was that he would have to explain what he had been doing looking at a ceiling, and that would require him to describe lying on his back in a chamber understanding that everything he was going to stop, and to say that he had believed it, entirely, and had spent his last seconds arriving at a conclusion about it.

They had been there. All three of them had been on the floor of that room.

They had not thought that.

He stopped.

"Nothing," he said. "It was ugly."

"It was hideous," said Poppy, and was off, and the moment closed over and he let it.

* * * *

There was no sentence.

He worked at it that night, lying in the dark, and he was thorough about it because he did not enjoy leaving problems open.

Every version came out insane.

I thought I was ending. They would say yes, and you were, and then you were not, that is how it works.

I did not know it worked. They would ask what he thought a shrine was for, and he had walked past one two hundred times and had never asked, and there was no explaining that without explaining a great deal else.

It was different for me. And they would ask how, and he would have to say that for them it had been an afternoon and for him it had been the whole of everything, and the difference between those two things was not in the event at all.

The difference was that they had known and he had not.

He turned that over and found the bottom of it, eventually, some time after midnight.

They had not been braver than him. They had simply been reading a different page.

* * * *

He spent three days quietly checking that he was still solid.

He was not proud of it and he did not stop.

It was mostly the forearm. Two fingers, pressed in hard enough to hurt, at intervals, in the way he had checked his potions and then his discs, except that this was a check on himself and there was no fixed place for it.

He also did other things.

He watched his own hands. Deliberately, in the evenings, holding them up and turning them over the way he had on the first morning, looking for something and not knowing what.

He put his palm flat on the table and pressed until his fingers went pale and let go and watched the colour come back.

Twice he woke in the night and got up and went to the window and looked at the yard, for no reason he could articulate beyond wanting to look at something that had not changed.

* * * *

Poppy noticed and teased him.

She caught him at the forearm on the second day and said, "Are you checking you're still there?"

She said it as a joke. It was the correct answer.

"Yes," said Alaric.

She laughed and told him he was extremely strange, and then told a story about a man she had known who had come back from a bad wipe and had refused to walk under doorframes for a fortnight, and the story was funny and he laughed at it, and she went away pleased.

That was the whole exchange. She had put a name on the thing and had made it small and ordinary, and he had let her, and it helped considerably more than she knew.

* * * *

Maren noticed and did not.

He caught her at it on the third day. She was at the table with the strap she was permanently mending, and he was doing the forearm, and he looked up and found that she was already looking at him and had probably been looking for some seconds.

She did not say anything.

She did not look away either, which was the part he found difficult. Somebody who catches you doing something odd looks away to spare you. Maren looked at him for another two seconds, with the whetstone stopped, and then went back to the strap.

She did not ask that day or afterward.

But the following evening she said, apropos of nothing, in the middle of talking about a contract, "First one is the worst. It is not the same after."

She did not explain and he did not ask, and it was the closest anybody came to telling him what had happened to him.

* * * *

From that week he wore the disc where he could reach it without looking down.

He moved it.

That was the whole of the change and he made it on the fourth day, sitting on the fountain edge, in the same place he had sorted out the potions and then the discs.

The discs had been on his right, forward of the hip. That was correct and had been correct and his hand went there in about a third of a second.

A third of a second, he had established, was not a number he was prepared to accept any more.

He moved one of the three. Just one, off the belt entirely, onto a short cord under his collar, sitting flat against his chest inside the shirt, where his hand did not have to travel at all.

He could reach it with his left hand or his right. He could reach it lying down. He could reach it with a shoulder that had stopped answering.

He drilled that one for most of an afternoon, and then again the following morning, and by the second day the motion had stopped being a motion and had become something his hand did on the way to somewhere else.

He did not tell anybody he had moved it.

Poppy would have asked why, and the answer was that on the floor of a chamber eleven minutes into a fight his hand had gone left twice, to the potions, and had never once gone right.

He did not want to say that out loud.

He wanted the hand to have somewhere to go that it could not miss.