Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

He slept four hours and woke at fifth bell.

The relic was on the workbench. The Corpse Lotus blossom was on the workbench. Miasma was on his chest.

She had not slept on him before. She had slept on the pillow, on the workbench, on his knee. She had not slept on his chest. He registered the weight before he opened his eyes. He kept his eyes closed for a beat longer.

Hey.

She did not move.

Hey. Big day.

She pressed her weight once against his sternum. He let her stay there until he had to sit up to make tea.

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The buyer was still on the road. Two days out, maybe three. The thin man’s crew would be at the Ashwood grave tonight.

Aiden signed for his oil ration and walked out of the depot.

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He had eleven hours of daylight and one full night.

The plan, as it had assembled itself on the floor against the workbench last night, was four moves:

One: finish his Inner Trades route as scheduled. Cover.

Two: return home at the eighth bell. Pack the relic and the catalyst into the reservoir-and-bag configuration. Descend.

Three: reach the chamber by tenth bell. Place the reservoir in the depression. Place the Corpse Lotus on the floor at the base of the block. Wait.

Four: survive whatever the chamber did when the four conditions met.

He had no idea what the four conditions meeting looked like. The cultivation manual described Tier 1 to Tier 2 evolution as the body’s elemental signature reorganizing along a new structural axis. The manual did not describe what the reorganization looked like from outside the body. The manual had been written by Academy theorists who had never watched the reorganization in a pre-imperial chamber off of Halbern’s map.

He was going to find out tonight.

He started his route.

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He lit twenty-one lamps in order. He answered the herbalist’s morning greeting the way a tired lamplighter answered a morning greeting. He spoke to no one else.

The route gave him its small ordinary ledger and he kept it. A bracket gone soft at nine. A pane sweating at twelve where a pane should not sweat. A new chalk mark on the cistern wall, low, child-height, a game’s scoring or a code’s, and he logged which corner it sat in without slowing, because the difference between a game and a code was whether it moved, and he would know tomorrow.

Counting was free. Counting was the one trade the street had never been able to price.

The boy with the bread was on the step at lamp seventeen.

This time he had a small wedge of cheese with him as well.

"You came back," the boy said.

"I’m working the route."

"My mum said the cheese is for the rat."

Aiden crouched.

The boy held the cheese out. It was the size of a coin. Pale yellow, sweating slightly in the warmth of his palm. Aiden took it. He set it on the back of his hand.

"Thank her for me."

"You can pet her again if you want."

"Once. Behind the ears."

The boy reached up. He stroked Miasma the way he had stroked her two days ago. Once. Twice.

The boy’s mother was watching from the doorway. She did not come down. She watched her son pet a rat on a lamplighter’s shoulder, and her face did not have the arrangement most adults’ faces had at the boy’s age when they watched their children do something they had not been authorized to do. Her face was something else.

The boy stepped back.

"Thanks for the cheese," Aiden said. "I’ll save some for her."

"All right."

The boy went back to the doorway.

The mother put her hand on the boy’s shoulder when he reached her. She looked at Aiden. She nodded once.

He nodded back.

He kept walking.

All right. That’s something.

He filed the cheese against the bread in the same column.

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He finished the route at eighth bell.

He went home through Cutter’s Lane. He took the gutter side. He did not look at the cobbler’s doorframe. He did not look at the bakery. He did not count the small beasts.

He had been counting them for days. Twenty-seven beasts. Six watching him wrong. He had stopped adding to the count. The Witness was watching. Adding to it did not change the plan.

He climbed the stairs to his room.

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He bolted the door.

He went to the workbench. He set the lamp down. He looked at the configuration he had left there at fifth bell. Relic in the reservoir, Corpse Lotus on the cloth, Miasma between them.

He picked up the reservoir.

The relic’s pulse came up through the metal into the stain on his palm. Warm. Settled. The pulse Miasma had been carrying for four days.

He set the reservoir into the kit bag, padded with the wax-paper packets. He set the Corpse Lotus blossom in the specimen pouch. He closed the bag.

He put on his coat.

He looked at the room one more time.

The lamp on the workbench. The cup in the basin. Half the bread the boy had given him, wrapped in wax paper at the edge of the bench.

He picked up the bread.

He unwrapped it.

He tore it in half.

It was old and the bread was the bread of a working family in the Inner Trades sector. The bread had been baked anyway, by a woman whose son had brought it to his door on a route he did not belong on.

He ate the bread slowly.

He chewed it. He swallowed it.

He put the other half in his coat pocket against the inside lining where the ledger and the map and the inspection authority sat.

The bread was for after.

If there was an after, the bread would be eaten.

If there was not, the bread would be in his coat when they found him.

Either reading was acceptable to him.

He picked up the kit bag.

He picked up Miasma.

He went to the floor grate.

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The descent took ninety minutes.

He went through the grate beneath his workbench, down the maintenance system under his building, through the lateral tunnel that ran to the depot’s basement junction, along the channel Halbern had drawn for him, to the vaulted junction under the Academy.

From the junction he turned south. He found the side channel where Miasma had sent him to escape the pack.

He turned into it. He walked east through the section he had counted at three hundred and forty-two steps. The slope rose. The chamber opened.

He stood at the entrance.

He had been here yesterday. The chamber was the same chamber. The block was the same block. The depression was the same depression. The runes on the sides of the block were the same runes.

The pulse from the relic in the reservoir at his hip had not changed.

He went in.

He set the kit bag on the floor.

He took out the reservoir. He held it up to the lamp light. The pulse from the relic ran steady. He carried it to the block.

He set the reservoir into the depression.

It fit.

The fit was exact. The reservoir went into the cut the way a key went into a lock that had been waiting centuries for the key to arrive.

He stepped back.

He took the Corpse Lotus out of the specimen pouch.

He unwrapped the wax paper.

He set the blossom on the floor at the base of the block.

He picked up Miasma.

He set her on the floor between the blossom and the block.

He stepped back.

He killed the lamp.

The chamber went dark.