Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

The depot clerk had his slips counted before Aiden reached the window.

That had never happened. Four years, the clerk made him stand while the count got done. A lamplighter off Sewer Row was a man you could make stand.

The clerk slid the oil across first.

He did the count after, against the rule, in the wrong order. He looked at the oil. Not at Aiden.

"Heard the yard went a way," the clerk said. To the slips. Not to him.

"It went the way the slate says."

"That’s the way I heard." The clerk stamped the last slip. He did not push it back across the counter like he pushed things at men he made stand. He set it down and took his hand off it.

"Sixth bell’s yours, then. Same as always."

Same as always. He said it like it was a small thing.

He’s been making me stand four years and tonight he counted the oil first.

Aiden took the slip.

He did not say what a man might say. The clerk had not done it to be thanked. Being thanked would have made it a thing it was not yet.

He took the oil and went to the route.

The bell did not move.

That was the part Marsh had been right about. A man passed an Academy assessment and the route was still the route. Grate nine still ran slow. Three copper was still three copper.

He had thought a day like the yard would change the shape of the work. It changed nothing about the work. It changed how the work was walked.

He walked it like a man who had passed.

He hadn’t known what it would feel like until his body did. The breath came back in short pulls. The pulls were not the wall they had been.

He climbed the herb-lane lamp and did not take the wall at the top of it.

He worked the collar twice, as it wanted. His vision stayed clear.

It was a collar on a lamp. Working it was what he knew how to do better than anything.

The herbalist’s father was in the doorway when he came down.

The old man did not come out of doorways. The herbalist’s daughter had told Aiden that, months ago, in the flat way she told him things. Her father had not stood in a doorway after dark since the year the records went wrong.

The records going wrong was as far as she had ever taken the story, and he had never pulled on it. People kept one room where the lamp did not reach. He had his own. He let her keep hers.

He was in it now.

He had a cloth bundle in his hands the size of two fists.

"She said you walk it at the sixth bell." The old man’s voice caught, like old voices do when they have not been used on a stranger in a long time. "I waited for the sixth bell."

"You didn’t have to stand out for it."

"I know what I have to do."

He held the bundle out. He did not come down off the step. He held it at the length of his arm and made Aiden come the step.

Inside the cloth was a wax-stoppered jar, dark glass, the kind the herbalist sold for more than Aiden made in a week.

"Sage and the other thing. The one for the lung. She made it strong. She said you would say it was too much. I am to tell you that it is not a question she is taking from you."

Too much. It’s two weeks’ coin in a jar.

She didn’t send it down to be argued with.

He took the jar. He held it as he had held the token. The small real weight of a thing that had been given and not traded.

"Tell her received."

The old man’s mouth went as Marsh’s had over the tea. The small movement of a face that had been held a long time.

The old man went back inside out of the doorway. He did it without the care a body used when the dark in a doorway was a thing it could not do.

Aiden stood in the lane a moment with the jar in the cloth.

He let it be a thing he had seen. He let it be there.

The lane was quiet as it got between the bells.

He stood in the lane with the jar in his hands. He did not move through it on the way to the next broken thing. For once he stood in it.

The men on this lane had started looking out for him. Quietly. Without saying it.

Then Nyx came off his shoulder.

It did not go down. It went to the edge of the lamp’s throw. It put itself on the cobble facing the dark mouth of the lane where the herb stalls shut at dusk.

It stood there as it had on the stone in the yard. Level. Fixed. The pale eyes not moving off a thing Aiden could not see.

Miasma came off the other shoulder. She stood beside it, facing the same way.

There it is. Both of them. The way they did it in the yard.

He looked where they looked.

The lane mouth had a man in it.

Nothing was wrong with the man. He stood at the closed stalls. He had the stillness of a man working out a small problem.

Aiden had read bodies for four years.

The body did the thing a body did. It shifted its weight. It looked like a man choosing a direction.

It shifted its weight the wrong way.

That was the whole of it. A body coming off a decision moved the foot it had put the weight on.

This one moved the other foot first. The unweighted one. The way a body moved when the moving was the point. The decision was performance. Something the front of the body was doing so the rest of it had a reason to stand there.

It was the size of a flaw in a weld you would not see unless you had spent your life looking at welds.

Aiden saw it. He saw it like he saw the dropped corner of a pane.

A body that moves its weight wrong.

Renn said it. Marsh said it from a window. The proctor said it walked out of the yard in some body nobody will pick out of a crowd.

He looked again to be sure.

The man had taken the lane the ordinary way. The stillness was gone. He was a man who had found the stalls shut and gone to look for open ones, which was what a man did. There was nothing in the lane mouth but the dark the stalls shut into.

He gave the lane the long count anyway. Thirty, by the breath. The stalls’ shut faces. A cat on a sill, a real one, street-built, watching the dark like street cats watch everything: ready to be elsewhere.

Nothing moved that the hour did not own. The week he was allowed was one day old, and he was standing in a lane mouth counting shadows for free.

He noted that. A man could leave a route and the route would still walk him.

Nyx did not come back to the shoulder.

It stayed on the cobble. Level. Fixed. The eyes on the place the man had been.

Miasma stayed beside it.

Neither of them looked at anything else in the lane.

Three meters to the lane mouth. I could be where he was a half-breath ago. And find nothing the lane will let me catch. The clock works on things that stand still. This one does not.

He did not go to the lane mouth.

He stood with the jar in the cloth and did what four years had built him to do. He read what was in front of him and not what he wanted to be in front of him.

There was nothing in front of him.

The lane was a lane. A man had come down it and found the stalls shut. He could walk the rest of the route and log the lamps and go up to a room where a thing had gone right.

He logged the lamp.

He put the jar inside his coat where the token was.

He did not go to the lane mouth to look at the dark the man had walked into.

A week ago he might have, on the chance the looking would tell him something. He knew now what the looking would tell him.

It would tell him what the gate had told him. The only one in the lane that could find the creature could not say so with anything but where it pointed.

It was still pointing.

It had not stopped since the stalls.

He went on with the route.

Behind him the two beasts came off the stone and rode the shoulders again. The green low and easy on the one side. On the other the pale eyes level and back the way they had come.

On the lane mouth where a thing wearing a man had walked into the dark. They held it as they had held an empty seat in a yard of a thousand people.

He had a week he was allowed.

He had a jar that was not a question.

He had a route that did not move.

He had a clock the system gave him for rooms he was not standing in.

He walked into the rest of the week and let the thing on his shoulder keep the watch.