The Tool

The contract paid in an object instead of coin, and Poppy declared it an outrage before anybody had seen what the object was.

It had been a straightforward job. A merchant's warehouse on the south road had something living under the floor, and the something had been eating the stock, and the four of them had spent a day and a night taking the floor up in sections and dealing with what was under it.

[LEVEL 9]

It arrived while they were putting the last of the floor back, and he read it kneeling on the board he had just nailed down.

The merchant had been pleased. The merchant had also been short of coin, which he explained at length and with a degree of feeling that Alaric found excessive.

"In lieu," said the merchant.

"In lieu," said Poppy, in a voice that could have stripped paint.

Then he put the four discs on the counter and she stopped talking.

* * * *

They were flat, about the width of two fingers, and they sat in the palm as though the palm had been the intended destination.

Dark metal, or something that behaved like metal. Warm, which he did not expect. A single word stamped across the face of each one.

RECALL

He picked one up and turned it over, and the back was blank, and the panel that came up over it was the shortest he had ever seen.

[RECALL DISC]
[SINGLE USE]
[COOLDOWN: 6 DAYS]

That was all of it. No description. Nothing about what it did.

He looked at Poppy, who had gone from outrage to something else entirely and was holding hers up to the light.

* * * *

She explained it on the walk home and did it, for once, well.

"It puts you back at the hall," she said. "Wherever you are. Instantly. You press it and you are there."

"Anywhere?"

"Anywhere. Bottom of a dungeon. Middle of a road. Underwater, allegedly, though I have not tried it and would like to state that on the record."

"How far?"

"Doesn't matter," said Poppy. "That's the whole thing. It is not a distance. You press it and you are standing in the stable, and whatever you were standing in is somewhere behind you being surprised."

He turned that over for about a quarter of a mile.

"Once," he said.

"Once. Then it is a lump of metal for six days. Then it works again." She spun hers between her fingers. "Everyone carries one. Nobody ever remembers to."

"Remembers to what?"

"Use it," said Poppy. "You get one shot at the best decision of your life and by the time you would need it you have entirely forgotten it exists. Ask anybody. There is a man in the hall who died with three of these on him. Three."

She found this hilarious.

Alaric did not find it hilarious. He walked the rest of the way turning over the shape of a thing that solved a problem exactly once and could not be remembered at the moment the problem occurred.

* * * *

He tested it immediately and stupidly.

He was aware, at the time, that he was doing something foolish. He had a six-day cooldown in his hand and no reason to spend it and a fairly clear understanding of what he was giving up.

He did it anyway, from two streets away, standing at the fountain, because there was a difference between being told a thing worked and knowing that it worked, and he had never in his life accepted the first as a substitute for the second.

He pressed it.

* * * *

There was no travel.

That was the part nobody had prepared him for, and Poppy's explanation, which had been accurate, had entirely failed to convey it.

He did not go anywhere. There was no motion, no rushing, no interval at all. He pressed a disc at a fountain and then he was standing in the room over the stable with his hand still coming down from where it had been.

The light was different. The smell was different. His body arrived believing it was outdoors and had to be told otherwise.

He put a hand on the table.

His heart was going hard, which surprised him, because nothing had happened to him. Nothing had touched him. He had simply been removed from one place and installed in another and some part of him underneath had objected violently to the entire transaction and was still objecting.

* * * *

Maren was at the table.

She had been sharpening. She looked up.

He would remember the expression afterward, on several occasions, and would never be entirely able to describe it.

It was not surprise. She had not jumped, and she had not put the whetstone down, and there was nothing in her face that suggested a man appearing in the room from nothing was outside her experience.

It was something considerably more careful than surprise.

She looked at him standing in the middle of the floor with his hand half raised and his heart going. She looked at the disc, which was now a dull thing in his palm and had lost its warmth. And she looked at his face for about two seconds.

"You tested it," she said.

"Yes."

"From where?"

"The fountain."

Maren said nothing at all for a moment.

Then she said, "Right," and went back to the whetstone, and it was a full week before he understood that she had been doing arithmetic about him and had arrived somewhere.

* * * *

He bought a second one the same week.

They were not cheap. Not ruinous, either, and he had money by then, and he stood at the trader's stall doing the sum and found that he did not particularly care about the sum.

He bought a third a fortnight after that.

Poppy noticed the second one and said something. She noticed the third one and said considerably more.

"Three," she said. "Alaric. You have three."

"Yes."

"They're on a six-day cooldown. All of them. Together. That is not how it works, they do not stack, you cannot press three and go three times."

"I know."

"Then why."

He thought about it properly, because she deserved a real answer and because he wanted one himself.

"If one is broken," he said.

"They do not break."

"If one is broken," said Alaric, "or lost, or in the pack rather than on me, or if I have used the first and something happens on the fourth day."

Poppy opened her mouth.

Then she closed it, and looked at him for a moment with an expression that was almost the one Maren had used, and said, "That is a horrible way to think," and went to get bread.

* * * *

He carried them the way he carried the potions.

That was not an accident and he did it deliberately, on the second afternoon, sitting on the same fountain edge where he had sorted out the potions two months earlier.

Fixed place. Right side this time, forward of the hip, mirroring the potions on the left, so that neither hand had to cross the body.

He drilled it. He did not count the repetitions, but it was more than eleven, and by the end of the afternoon his right hand went to the discs without being sent and without his eyes leaving whatever they were on.

He checked them the same way he checked the potions.

Without looking. Two fingers, in passing, at the top of a stair or at a doorway or while somebody was talking, so often that it stopped being a check and became something his hand did while he was thinking about other things.

He would do it perhaps forty times a day from then on.

He never once used one after the fountain.

* * * *

Maren said it in the eleventh week, sharpening, not looking up.

They were alone in the room. Poppy was downstairs. There had been no conversation for about ten minutes, which was the ordinary condition of a room containing Maren, and which Alaric had come to find restful rather than awkward.

Then, into the quiet:

"You never spend anything you might need later."

He looked up.

She did not. She went on with the stone, long even strokes, at the rate she did everything.

He examined the sentence. It was not a question and it was not a criticism, and it had the flat assembled quality of a thing she had been holding for some weeks and had decided to put down.

"No," he said. "I do not."

"Three discs. Four potions."

"Five."

"Five potions," said Maren, without any change of tone, "and I have never once seen you drink one."

* * * *

He agreed that this was true.

He did it out loud, because she had earned a real answer and because there was no version of denying it that survived contact with his own belt.

"I have not."

"Why not?"

And there it was, the same question she had asked on a cart in the rain two months ago, arriving from a different direction and finding the same nothing underneath it.

"I do not know," he said.

Maren nodded slowly.

"Do you know where it comes from?"

"No."

"Have you looked?"

He considered lying, briefly, and discarded it, because lying to Maren had never once worked for anybody in his hearing and because he did not want to.

"Twice," he said. "Not for that. For other things."

"And?"

"There is nowhere in me where the answer is kept."

* * * *

She stopped sharpening.

That was rare enough that he noticed it as an event. The whetstone came off the blade and she set it on the table, and she looked at him properly, and the look went on for slightly longer than any of the others.

"I have seen it before," she said. "Not often."

"Seen what?"

"People who carry too much of everything." She turned the blade over and looked at the edge, which did not need looking at. "It comes from having had nothing. Usually. In my experience."

Alaric sat with that.

He had, on the available evidence, come from nothing. He had woken under a tree with a sword and no name. There had been a period of some weeks in which he had owned four items.

But that was not what she meant. He could hear it in the shape of the sentence. She meant a childhood, or a bad year, or a stretch of somebody's life in which they had learned what running out felt like.

He did not have one of those.

He had two months.

"That may be it," he said, which was as honest as he could manage.

"Mm," said Maren, and picked the whetstone back up, and the subject closed the way subjects closed with her, which was completely and without warning.

* * * *

He did not go looking.

He thought about it that night, lying in the dark with his belt over the back of a chair where his hand could reach it, and he made an actual decision, which he registered as a decision.

He had reached for the origins of his own habits three times now. The arm on the forest track. The counting, twice.

Every single time the reaching had gone out and come back holding nothing. Not a locked door. Not resistance. An absence with no edges, the same absence he had found when he reached for a name on a forest track before he had one.

Three attempts. Three of the same result.

He was, by then, a man who could read a curve.

So he did not go looking, and told himself it was because the looking had never returned an answer, which was true.

The other reason was one he did not put into words that night or any other night, and which sat quite comfortably underneath the first one.

The habits were good habits.

They had kept him standing in a flooded quarry and out of trouble in four cellars. Whatever had put them in him had known something.

And if he ever did find the place where the answers were kept, and opened it, there was no guarantee at all that he would like what was in there, or that it would still be his afterward.

He went to sleep with three discs on his belt and did not dream about anything he could remember.