The Slime

It came at him on the road.

He had left Grennet at first light with the gold mark on his map and a loaf he had bought by holding out his whole purse and being handed most of it back, which was a transaction he intended to think about later.

The morning had been uneventful. The road ran southeast out of the bowl and then flattened, and he had been walking for two hours in country that was mostly hedge and stubble field, and he had begun to relax in a way he had not managed since the scrub moved.

Then something came out of the ditch on his left.

A label rose over it.

[SLIME]

Green. Same green as the goblin's had been, which he noted immediately, and which was the first useful thing he had ever done with the colours.

It was about the size of a large dog and shaped like nothing. It moved the way water moves when it has decided to go uphill, which is to say slowly, and with a great deal of internal wobbling, and with an air of total commitment.

It was coming at him.

He got the sword out.

He noted, as it cleared the scabbard, that the arm did it again, and that he did not have time to be interested about it.

* * * *

He swung and missed.

That was the first surprise, and it was not the missing.

It was how much the missing cost him.

He had assumed, without ever formulating it, that a swing that connected with nothing simply went past and you were where you started. This was not the case. The sword went through the space where the slime had been, and it kept going, and it took his shoulder with it, and then his hip, and then he was standing at a considerable angle to where he had intended to be standing, with his weight on the wrong foot and his sword pointing at the ground behind him.

It took him about a second and a half to be a man with a sword again.

The slime, meanwhile, had covered four feet.

* * * *

He swung a second time and connected, and the connection did less than he expected.

Considerably less.

The blade went into it, which was satisfying, and then it went through it, which was not, because going through it did not appear to have any consequence for the slime whatsoever. The material closed behind the cut. There was a noise, wet and unimpressed. Something orange near the middle of the thing, which he had not previously noticed, brightened slightly.

He looked at his sword.

He looked at the slime.

He hit it again, harder, on the theory that harder was the available adjustment, and the same thing happened with more noise.

* * * *

It got him on the shin.

He did not see how. There was no arm and no strike, and one moment it was in front of him and the next a portion of it had arrived against his leg with a slapping sound, and the sting went up through his knee and into his hip and stayed there.

It was completely out of proportion to the dignity of the thing that had dealt it.

He made a noise he was not proud of.

He got the leg back and put weight on it and the leg worked, which was information, and the sting did not stop, which was more information, and he took two paces backward and reassessed.

It came after him.

Of course it came after him. It had one behaviour and it was doing it.

* * * *

The next part took considerably longer than it should have and involved, at one point, both of them going into the ditch.

He was not entirely clear afterward how the ditch happened.

There had been a moment where he went round it, trying to get behind the thing, on the reasoning that a creature with no front might still have a back. There had been the discovery that it did not have a back. Then there had been the further discovery that the road's edge was softer than it looked, and that a man moving sideways at speed on soft ground goes down the slope whether he has agreed to or not.

He went down the slope.

The slime came in after him, without hurrying, because it did not have to.

The ditch was full of last year's leaves and this year's water. He got up in it, and slipped, and got up again with one boot full, and the slime arrived and he hit it four times in the space of about six seconds, from below, at an angle nobody would have chosen.

The fourth one did something.

The orange thing in the middle went out.

* * * *

It stopped moving.

Not dramatically. It simply stopped being a thing that was coming at him and became a mass of material on the floor of a ditch, and then, in a way he could not follow, less of a mass, and then a residue, and then nothing at all.

And a number rose off it.

Small, gold, floating upward at a walking pace, fading as it went.

He stood in a ditch with one boot full of water and watched it go up past his own head and disappear somewhere above the hedge line.

A pane opened.

[XP]

That was all it said. One line, and beneath it a figure he could not evaluate because he had nothing to evaluate it against.

* * * *

A bar he had never noticed moved by a fraction he could barely see.

That was the actual event.

It was at the bottom of his card, underneath LEVEL, and it had presumably been there since the forest, sitting at zero, entirely empty, doing nothing to draw attention to itself. He had looked at that card a dozen times. He had read every line on it. He had never once registered the bar, because the bar had had nothing in it and a thing with nothing in it looks like part of the frame.

Now there was something in it.

Not much. A sliver at the left-hand end, the width of a hair, that he had to tilt his head to be certain of.

But it had been at nothing, and now it was not at nothing, and the difference between those two states was, he understood standing in a ditch, the largest difference available.

* * * *

He climbed out of the ditch and sat down in the road and looked at the bar for a long time.

He emptied his boot first, which took a while and involved sitting down anyway.

Then he sat with his back against the bank and his legs out in front of him, wet to the knee, with his shin throbbing and a stripe of slime residue drying on his forearm, and looked at a hair's width of light at the bottom of a card.

The reasoning assembled itself slowly, because it was the first reasoning of its kind he had ever done.

The bar had moved because the slime had stopped.

The slime had stopped because of what he had done to it.

Therefore something in the world was watching what he did and keeping account of it.

He turned that over.

It was not the same as the arrow, which pointed but did not care. It was not the same as the map, which recorded but only recorded where he had been. This was something else. This was a thing that had looked at six seconds of extremely undignified work in a ditch and had decided it was worth a quantity.

* * * *

He got up and went and found another slime on purpose.

That was the decisive act of the day and he made it in about a second. He needed to establish whether it happened twice. A thing that happens once is an event. A thing that happens twice is a rule, and he had learned by now that rules were the only currency he had.

The second slime was in the hedge line a quarter mile on.

It came at him the same way, slowly, with total commitment.

He fought it better.

He did not swing at where it was. He swung at where it would be in the second and a half his swing was going to take, which he had worked out in the ditch without noticing that he was working it out. He kept his feet on the hard part of the road. He hit it in the same place four times rather than in four places once each, because the orange thing had gone out when he did that, and doing the thing that had worked seemed likely to work again.

It took about ten seconds.

The number came off it and went up.

The bar moved.

* * * *

It happened twice.

He stood in the road with his sword in his hand and something going through him that he had no name for and would not have a name for until much later, when Poppy would describe it, badly and at length, and he would recognise it.

It was not the reward. The reward was a hair's width and he could not spend it.

It was that he had done a thing, and then predicted that doing it again would produce the same result, and then done it again, and been right.

He had been in the world for two and a half days and this was the first time it had confirmed anything he had guessed.

He was entirely, unreasonably delighted.

* * * *

He did several more before the light went.

He went looking for them, which meant he arrived at Ashfield a full day later than he needed to, and he did not consider that a cost at any point during the process.

The third one he killed in nine seconds. The fourth in seven. The fifth was in a wet place off the road and he went into the wet place after it, which was a decision, and got the boot situation back to where it had been that morning.

The sixth he mishandled badly, because he had got confident and had stopped putting his feet where they belonged, and it hit him twice and he came out of it with his forearm stinging and a small and useful lesson about the relationship between confidence and shins.

The bar moved every time.

Never much. Always something.

He noticed, around the fourth, that it moved slightly less than it had for the first, which he filed and did not understand and would understand within the week at a woodpile.

* * * *

He made camp that night off the road in the lee of a hedge, and lay down with a bar a finger's width along.

He looked at it before he slept, which required opening the card, which required a deliberate act, which he performed anyway.

A finger's width.

He had started the day with nothing in it.

He did the sum he could do, which was not much of one. Six slimes, one finger. If the bar was a road, then he had walked a finger of it in an afternoon, and he did not know how long the road was or where it went, but he knew now that it could be walked, and that he was apparently the kind of thing that wanted to.

And something in him was satisfied in a way that felt older than the day. That was the part he could not account for, lying in a hedge with wet boots and a stinging shin.

It did not feel like a new pleasure. It felt like a familiar one, returning, the way a room smells familiar before you remember being in it.

He reached for the reason and found no place in him where the reason was kept.

He was becoming used to that.

He let it go, and lay listening to the hedge, and somewhere under his breath, without any instruction from him at all, the counting had started up again.

One count. Two count.

He slept before he got to ten.