Nine to Twelve

They rebuilt, and the rebuilding was unglamorous.

That was the first thing about it. He had expected, without articulating the expectation, that a defeat of that size would be followed by something. A speech, or a decision, or a period of visible resolve.

What followed was three weeks of small contracts.

They took the boars again. They took a granary. They took an escort to the crossroads and back, twice, on consecutive weeks, for a man who was not pleasant to work for and who paid on time.

Maren replaced the shield. Itta replaced the string and then, a fortnight later, the bow, which she had evidently been intending to do for months and which she did without comment.

Poppy paid her dues early, once, and made sure everybody knew.

Nobody said the word again. Nobody proposed going back. It sat in the room over the stable for the whole of that time like a piece of furniture that everybody walked round.

* * * *

He drilled it in his head for a week.

He did it on roads, mostly, walking behind the other three. He would put himself back in the chamber and run it, from the entrance, in real time, and stop at the point where it had gone wrong and go back and run it again.

He got quite good at the first minute. He could reproduce the whole of it: the opening, the way it turned for Maren, the flinch that had told all four of them it was safe to commit.

It was the second minute that would not resolve.

He knew what had happened. It had stopped attending to whoever hit it hardest. He knew when it had happened, to within a few seconds. What he could not establish, running it forty or fifty times on every road they walked, was whether there had been a sign.

He was fairly sure there had been.

He could not find it.

* * * *

Then he started doing it out loud at the table.

That was the second week and it was, he accepted afterward, insufferable.

He would begin in the middle of a meal. He would say something like the flinch at forty seconds and then talk for some minutes, and the other three would let him, and then Poppy would say something and the conversation would go somewhere else and he would come back to it an hour later.

Maren engaged with it. That was the thing that kept him going. She would answer, briefly, and her answers were useful, and twice she said something that moved his understanding forward considerably.

Itta engaged with it in her fashion, which was to say four words about spacing that took him a day to unpack.

Poppy did not engage with it at all.

* * * *

Then he started doing it on the floor of the stable with a broom.

He had not intended it to escalate. It had escalated because talking about the shape of a room had turned out to be an extremely poor way of describing the shape of a room.

So he laid it out. A boot for the entrance. Two cups for the ledge Itta had used. The broom, laid flat, for the line where it had come through.

And then he walked it.

He walked it three times the first evening and about a dozen the second, and on the third evening Poppy came up the outside stair, stopped in the doorway, and looked at a grown man standing in the middle of a floor holding a broom at arm's length and saying "and here it stops turning" to nobody.

"Right," she said. "I am leaving the guild."

"You cannot," said Maren, from the table. "You are two dues behind."

"I am leaving the guild spiritually."

She sat down and watched the whole of it anyway, and asked one question near the end which was better than any of the questions he had asked himself.

She asked what it had been doing with its feet.

* * * *

They took it again three weeks later.

There was no discussion about going. Maren simply said, one morning, "We are going back to the pit on Thursday," and that was the extent of the decision-making process, and everybody nodded and nobody asked anything, and Alaric understood afterward that the three weeks had been the discussion.

They went in at the middle of the morning.

Nobody talked on the way down.

* * * *

They won.

It took nine minutes, which was two minutes less than losing had taken.

The sign, when it came, was the feet.

Poppy had been right. It set them differently about four seconds before it changed, a small squaring-off that meant nothing at all unless you had spent every evening since looking for it, and Itta saw it first and said one word.

And they were already moving when it stopped attending to Maren.

That was the whole of it. Everything else in the fight was the same fight. They had one four-second warning that they had bought with a run of small contracts and a broom on a stable floor, and four seconds turned out to be the entire difference between the two afternoons.

It went down at nine minutes.

Nobody was seriously hurt. Poppy took something across the hip that Maren looked at and pronounced unimportant.

* * * *

The winning was smaller than he expected.

That was the finding he kept, and he had it before they had left the chamber.

He stood in a quiet room with the thing on the floor and three people breathing hard around him, and waited for the thing that had happened at the woodpile in Ashfield, or at the end of the first dungeon, and it did not come.

There was relief. There was a good deal of relief, and it was substantial, and it took about a minute to arrive and then went.

Poppy said something obscene. Itta sat down on a rock and started checking her arrows for damage, which was what she did instead of celebrating. Maren went to look at the drop.

That was it. That was the whole of it.

He walked out of a chamber he had died in, having beaten the thing that killed him, and it was a Thursday and they were home by dark.

* * * *

He turned the asymmetry over for days.

It genuinely bothered him and he could not leave it alone.

The losing had been enormous. It had been the largest thing that had ever happened to him. It had ended with him on his back understanding that everything he was would stop, and the understanding had been complete and correct and had contained no doubt at all.

The winning was four people breathing hard in a quiet room and being home by dark.

Those two things were supposed to balance. He had assumed, without ever examining it, that they were opposite ends of a scale, and that beating a thing that had beaten you would be an event of the same size in the other direction.

They were not the same size. They were not even the same kind of thing.

He worked at it on a road in the fourth week and got as far as this: the losing had been about him, and the winning had not.

The losing had happened to him personally, on a floor, alone at the end.

The winning had been a piece of work performed by four people who had prepared correctly, and it had gone the way prepared work goes, which is unremarkably.

He was not certain that was the whole answer. It was the best one he ever got.

* * * *

He reached ten, then eleven.

Ten came in the pit, off the boss itself, and was the biggest single amount he had ever received.

Eleven came some days later off a contract so ordinary he could not afterward remember which one it had been, and arrived at a moment when he was thinking about something else entirely.

He noticed something about both of them.

The chime still worked. The light still came up around him and went through him warm and entire, and he still felt it, and he was not immune to it and never would be.

But he had stopped waiting for it.

There had been a period, in the second month, when he had known roughly where the bar was at any given hour. He had checked it. He had done arithmetic about it on roads.

He could not now have said where it was without opening the card.

* * * *

He reached twelve on an ordinary Tuesday, killing something unremarkable.

It was a contract in the scrub east of Grennet. Boars, of all things, which he had been killing since his second week and which had long ago stopped being worth the walk except that they always paid.

The last one was not the biggest or the most difficult. It came at him at the end of the afternoon and he dealt with it the way he dealt with boars now, which was efficiently and without much interest, and it went down.

The chime went off.

The light came up in a scrub field in the last of the sun with nobody near him except Poppy forty feet away doing something to a snare.

[LEVEL 12]

He stood there and let it go through him.

Then he got on with dragging the thing to the pile, because that was the next part of the afternoon.

* * * *

The climbing had stopped feeling like climbing.

He worked that out on the walk home and it was the last thing he worked out on his own for some time.

There had been a period, early, when every level had been an event with a shape. Two had been a woodpile. Five had been a bad week and a good day at the end of it. He could have listed them.

Somewhere after nine, they had become weather.

The work was the same work. The days were the same days. The number went up occasionally and he put the points where Maren told him and the putting took a few seconds and then the day continued.

He was not disappointed by that. He examined for disappointment and did not find any.

It simply meant that whatever he had been climbing toward, he was no longer climbing toward it. He was just doing the work, and the work was good, and the number was a thing that happened to him while he did it.

* * * *

Maren told him about twelve that evening, sharpening.

He had mentioned it in passing, because there was no reason not to, and she had said "Mm," and then, a few minutes later, into a silence:

"Twelve is where it asks you."

He looked up.

"Asks me what?"

"What you are going to be."

She said it in the flat way she said everything, with the stone going, and did not stop or look up or add anything to it, and he waited for about eight seconds and she did not continue.

"I do not understand," he said.

"No."

"Is it a choice?"

Maren thought about that one. He watched her think about it, which took longer than it took her to think about most things.

"Sometimes," she said.

* * * *

He asked her to explain and she declined.

Not rudely. She said, "You will know when it happens," and went back to the strap, and that was the end of it.

He had learned, by then, what that meant.

It did not mean she was being mysterious. Maren was not capable of being mysterious and would have found the accusation baffling. It did not mean she thought he could not understand.

It meant she could not explain it kindly.

He had seen her do it twice before. Once about a guild she had been in, and once about a person she did not name, and both times she had stopped in the same place, in the same way, and had put the whetstone back to the blade and let the silence do it.

He did not press.

He sat at the long table in a room over a stable with the kettle rattling on its hook, and a woman sharpening something that did not need sharpening, and let it be a thing that was coming.

Three days later, on a wet morning, over breakfast, the panel did it for her.