Chapter 310: Hold It Down

The first thing the mix took was the taste of water. He drank at the top of the slope and it came into his mouth like wet metal, and Qingluo said that was the binder sitting on his tongue and to stop making the face.

The second thing was his hands. He closed his fist on the way down and the fingers arrived late and shut harder than he’d asked them to, and the grip on Marrow Dragon felt like holding somebody else’s sword through a glove.

The third thing he noticed on the shelf itself, and it was the one that frightened him.

The silver was lying in its usual place, knee deep and drifting, and he walked into it and breathed, and nothing happened. No closing at the back of the throat. No water in the eyes. He stood in the thing that had put him on his hands and knees the day before and his body had no opinion about it at all.

’I don’t like this.’

[ Nor do I. You’ve got a hole in your own alarm bell.] Mira had been flat and close since the first dose. [ Count out loud, exactly like she told you. Your body has stopped keeping score, so the number is the only thing between you and drowning on a rock.]

It came out of the water fast and furious and stayed that way.

Xuan took the head on the outside with Coiling Dragon, rolled it past his hip, and then dropped the sword point down into the crack in the rock behind him and went in with his hands, because what came next was not swordwork.

He got both arms around the hinge behind the jaw, set his boots on the dry stone, and turned the head to the left and held it there.

That was the whole job. Thirty feet of animal wanted its head back and he had to make sure it stayed at the angle that kept the mouth pointed out over the water and the left sac sitting up under Qingluo’s hands. Not a throw, not a cut. An angle, held.

It breathed out across the rock, and he breathed in.

"One," he said.

Qingluo came in under his arms with the case already open on her chest and her forearms braced on the hide.

The first seat failed. She cut a slit over the sac, put the seat in, and the whole muscle rolled under her and spat the needle out with a hiss of fluid that went nowhere useful.

"Nine," Xuan said.

"Keep it at that angle and stop helping."

She cut again, three fingers along from the first, and this time the seat held and she screwed the glass onto it. The animal made a sound he felt through his chest, and the sacs came up hard, and the first of it went into the tube in a spurt the colour of weak tea.

"Twenty."

"That’s a finger. I need four of those." She had her cheek almost against the hide. "Twenty-two. I’m counting as well, so don’t slow down for me."

The animal fought in long shoves that came up through the whole body, and every one of them moved him half a boot and he had to walk it back. His arms burned first, then stopped burning, which he understood was the mix and not an improvement. At forty his shoulder went dead from the inside and he kept the angle with the meat of his forearms and his own weight, exactly as she had told him he would have to.

"Fifty. Arm."

She let go of the glass with her left hand, found the cut inside his elbow without looking for it, and put the second tube against it while her right stayed on the seat.

"Count out loud through it," she said.

He counted. The cold went up his arm again and this time it reached his jaw, and his tongue stopped being his, and the numbers came out thick.

"Fifty-eight."

"Good. Two fingers."

At sixty-four the animal got its shoulders under itself and started to roll, and there was no version of holding that with a dead arm and a set of fingers he couldn’t feel.

So he did what he had done ten thousand times, without deciding to. He put qi into his arms and through the hilt of the sword wedged behind him, all of it at once, hard.

Marrow Dragon gave it straight back to him.

The hilt went hot in the crack of the rock, hot enough that he felt it through a hand that had stopped feeling much, and the blade put out a vibration that had nothing clean in it anywhere. Underneath that came a sound he had never heard a sword make, low and wrong, somewhere between a bell and a beam taking weight it was never cut for.

The shock came back up his arms and into the dead shoulder, and he lost the number.

[ Sixty-five.] Mira, instantly, hard. [ You were on sixty-five. Say it.]

"Sixty-five."

[ The blade can’t take you any more. It holds Foundation qi and you stopped being Foundation months ago, and it has just told you so.] She stayed flat. [ Not now. Hold the angle and don’t push another drop through it.]

He held the angle. He held it with nothing but his own weight and the arms, and the animal rolled him a full pace toward the mud before he got it stopped.

And somewhere in that, with his mouth open and his chest working, he took a whole breath.

He knew it as it happened. It went in deep and it went in wrong and it went past whatever was left in the purse, and the closing came back all at once, from the back of the throat forward, and his eyes ran and his lungs turned to something that did not want to be lungs.

He did not let go. That was all the thought he had room for.

"Eighty," he said, and it came out as a sound rather than a word.

"Eighty-one." Qingluo had not lifted her head. "Three fingers. Keep it there."

The stitches in her left forearm had opened somewhere around the sixties and there was a line of blood running down onto her wrist and off her thumb onto the hide, and she had both hands on the glass and was not doing anything about it.

At eighty-eight she took the seat out, capped the tube, and put her hand flat on his ribs.

"Out," she said.

Getting off that shelf was the hardest part of the entire business.

He could not simply let go. The moment the head came free it would be through the place they were standing, and she was between him and the slope with a glass tube against her chest. So he walked the head three steps further left, wedged the jaw against the lip of rock where it had no purchase, put his boot on the hinge and shoved, and threw himself backwards.

Cloud Step took him up the shelf and it cost him something he felt go. The animal’s mouth came down on the rock behind him, and then again, and he got Qingluo by the back of the collar and hauled her the last of the way up the slope with his legs going and his chest full of broken glass.

The silver stopped following them forty paces up. They went another twenty on top of that, which neither of them discussed.

Xuan went down on the dead ground and coughed until there was blood on his palm, a fair amount of it, bright and thin.

Qingluo was flat on her back eight paces away with her ruined arm across her middle. The first thing she did was hold the tube up against the sky and turn it once to look at it.

Two fingers and a bit of brown fluid, in a tube about the length of his hand.

That was what forty years of a bowl, and six years of the house’s attempts, and three people’s skin came out to. He had looked at the tube before he had looked at his own hand, and he noticed himself doing it, and found he could not entirely decide how he felt about the man that made him.

"Say something," Qingluo said to the sky.

"Four fingers was the number you wanted."

"Four fingers was greed. Three is the antidote and a sample for the bench, and I’d have taken two and walked." She let the arm holding the tube drop onto her chest. "Your man in the north lives. You can have that sentence, and I’ve never handed it to anybody before."

He got his breathing down to something that worked, slowly, with a lot of blood in it, and looked over at his sword lying in the grit where he’d dragged it.

[ Xuan.] Mira, when he picked it up. [ Look at the spine, a hand above the guard.]

There was a line in the metal. Thin, pale, running with the grain for about two fingers, and it had not been there yesterday.

[ That’s the first one. There’ll be more, and they won’t stay small, and there is nothing you can do with a whetstone about a blade that has stopped being big enough for its owner.]