Chương 57: Six a Night

The stall at the end of the night market put out six tins a night. There were six stalls in that market and Abe had only ever taken from one of them, and he had worked out the reason the first time he stood in that lane, in December. The other five weighed their stock out live, to people standing in a line with their last hour's wages in their hands. The stall at the end was the only one with a crate underneath it, and the crate was what had not sold. Dented tins, dying, worth nothing to anybody by morning.

Going to nothing whether he touched it or not. He had said that to himself the first time. There had been a woman in that line with two coins flat on her palm, looking past all the good stalls at the crate. Whatever was left in it at closing was exactly what two coins bought. So it was not true, and he had known it was not true the first time. He said it every night he went back anyway. He had taken sixty-eight things out of Prescot now.

He knew the number because he counted every one of them, and he had never once lost the count. The man's name was Dyer. Abe had not gone looking for it. It was chalked small on the corner of the table in a girl's handwriting, where a customer would never think to look for it. R. DYER. He had read it on his first night in that lane. He had expected knowing it to change something. It changed nothing, and finding that out had been worse than the name. Dyer worked it out on the third night. Abe knew the night exactly.

He let the world in for a minute, four feet back, and watched the man come to the table and find the crate gone. Dyer did not shout. He did not look around, and he did not ask anybody anything. He put both hands flat on the wood and stood there. The next night he put the crate somewhere else. The first place was under the cart, at the back, behind a stack of empty trays. Abe found it in about a minute, because Dyer had looked straight at it before he walked away. The second place was better.

Dyer walked the crate three streets to a lockup with a hasp on the door. He put a padlock through the hasp and pulled on it twice. Abe stood in the alley and watched him pull on it twice. Then he went in through the window at the back. It had no lock on it, because nobody puts a lock on a window that small. There were three tins in the crate. Abe counted them, and then counted them again. Six had been what the man could afford to lose. Three was what he could afford now. He took two and left one.

It was the first time he had left anything anywhere, and leaving one did nothing whatsoever for Dyer. It did something for Abe. He stood in the stopped lockup with two tins against his ribs and knew he had done it for himself. What Dyer did after that was what Abe had been waiting for. Dyer stopped taking the crate anywhere. He put a chair beside it and he sat in the chair. He was still in it at four in the morning, with a coat over his knees and a mug gone cold on the ground.

Abe let the world in for ninety seconds, ten feet back, to find out whether the man was asleep. He was not asleep. So Abe got quiet again and went and stood in front of him and looked at him properly. It seemed like the least he could do. It also cost him nothing, and he was aware of that while he was doing it. Dyer was on the far side of fifty, with a limp he favored on the left. He had a coat that had been a good coat once. He had a face that had been out in weather for thirty years.

There was a folded paper in his breast pocket with a drugstore's name printed across the top of it. Abe wanted to read it. He made himself not read it, and then stood there understanding that he had already taken more off this man than a piece of paper. Then he checked a screen he had not opened in weeks. Stealth · Novice Lv 5 (0 / 1, 250) Sixty-eight thefts, and every one of them easy. A warehouse, eleven shops over and over, and one man's crate. Not one point for any of it.

He had worked out why in an aisle in Prescot a week ago and it had not stopped being true. Nobody in a stopped city can catch anybody, and the Weave does not pay for easy. There was one way left to make it hard. It had a bad left knee and a daughter's handwriting on its table and it was sitting in a chair eight feet away with its eyes open. He set it up like a kill. Six feet of lockup floor, and a crate with a rope handle, and the handle already turned so he would not have to turn it. Where his feet went.

Where they went next. Which board in the lockup floor was the one that had given under him the first time. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. He put his hand on the crate in the stopped dark and got his weight over it. Then he let go of the world. The lockup came on cold and loud, and Dyer moved. He came up out of four hours of sitting still all at once. His head came up. The mug went over.

Abe had the crate off the ground and his back turned before the mug hit, and Dyer said something behind him that was not a word, and Abe was six feet out the door and running. He heard the chair go over, and the man come after him, four strides, five, with the limp in it. A hand went across his shoulder and did not close. Then he heard him stop. Abe got around the corner three streets from it and got quiet on the second try, which was one more try than it had ever taken him.

Stealth · Novice Lv 7 (310 / 2, 450) Two levels, standing in a stopped street with his shoulder still going where the man had touched it. He had worked that theft out down to the board that creaked and the way the handle already faced. He had planned for everything a person can plan for, and a hand got onto him anyway. Sixty-eight thefts had paid him nothing at all. This one paid two levels, and the only thing it had that the other sixty-eight did not was a man's hand on his shoulder.

He went back and looked in at Dyer, frozen four strides from his own chair with his hand still out. Five other stalls in that lane. Eleven shops and a warehouse. In all that time not one person in any of them had so much as turned around. Dyer was the only man in Prescot who had ever looked up. So Dyer was the only thing in Prescot worth stealing from. Abe stood there and worked out how many more nights he could get out of him. He carried the crate out of the city and did not look back.

It was a mile and a half to the edge of Prescot and he changed hands once, for something to do. In November he had put three ballast sacks up in the muster shed and half the shed had stopped what it was doing to watch, and Dobbs had put the tide sheet down and looked at him for a long time and said nothing at all. A hundred and twenty kilos of wet canvas. He had thought at the time that it was the top of what he had. He could have carried the crate, and Dyer's chair, and Dyer.

"Sixty-nine," Abe said, out loud, on the road going out of town. He had said all of them out loud, every one, since December. He had known since the first tin in December that he was not going to stop. Every night since had been him finding out what else he would do. The reeds had gone quiet on him. He used that phrase for it in his own head, and it did not mean the noise. The stilts still fought and the deep part was still deep.

The bar had started giving him the small numbers it gave him for anything he had gotten good at. He had killed eleven stilts. He could tell you what each one was going to do before it did it. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 11 Foundation: 1, 470 / 10, 000 (Body 12) Body 11 had cost him a week of his own time. He stood in the sleet and looked at it and felt almost nothing, and that frightened him more than the number pleased him.

So he went and looked at the thing in the channel, because the board was on Monday and it was the biggest number left inside forty miles. He had walked past that channel forty-odd times since the twenty-ninth of December and had never gone down the bank to it. He had also stopped telling himself that was about the water. It had not moved. The same reeds were bent under it that had been bent under it on the first afternoon. Abe stood at thirty feet, where he had stood on the first afternoon.

Then he made himself go closer, a step at a time, until he ran out of bank. At six feet he could see that what he had taken for weed on its folded leg was not weed. He cased it for four hours. He walked the channel twice in a stopped world. He looked at it from both banks, and from the water, and from above, standing in a dead willow with one hand on the trunk. He worked out where its weight sat.

He worked out that the folded leg was the one that would go down first, because everything puts its weight somewhere before it moves. He found the one place on that bank where a person could get back out of the water in a hurry, and he stood in it. Then he set his feet and picked his spot. He had spent four hours making sure he would not have to be brave about it. Then he let go. The world came on and the thing came up out of the channel like a door opening.

It was faster than anything Abe had ever stood in front of. The opener landed exactly where he had put it, four inches behind the plate of the head, and it went in, and it did not stop it. The whole animal kept coming. It came up the bank and over him and it did not care about the sword at all. He got the willow between them. He had time for exactly one thought, and it worked. The thing came around the trunk and had to slow to do it, and in the half second it took, Abe got both hands back on the grip.

He put the second one into the folded leg. It went down on that side, and it was not a fall, it was a knee buckling, and it got the leg back under itself in about a second. But the second was there and he took it. He was on its back going into the water with it. Under the surface everything was violence with no sound in any of it, which he did not have time to find strange. It rolled.

He went with it because he could not do anything else and because letting go put him in front of it, and being in front of it was how people died out here. His shoulder hit the bottom. He got his knee onto something that gave. Then he worked the blade in with both hands, short and hard, pushing instead of swinging, four times, five, until the rolling stopped being a fight and became weight. It finished in eleven inches of water at the edge of the channel with Abe kneeling on it.

He stayed there a while after it stopped moving. His legs were not going to hold him yet and he knew it, so he did not try. Then he got out of the water and sat down on the bank with his back against the willow and put his fists under his arms until they were still. He had been frightened going in, but somewhere under the water he had come out the far side of it, into something he had no name for. Getting quiet after it took him most of a day of the world. He sat against the willow and counted and got nowhere.

His body had been sure it was about to die, and it was not taking his word for it now that the thing was dead. The light went while he was sitting there. Then it came back. He had a hole in his coat and a cut across the back of one hand, and something wrong with the shoulder that was not going to stop him and was going to be there in the morning. The world locked in the middle of the afternoon on the second. Abe added up what the last two days had cost him out here and did not enjoy the answer.

Three days left before the pad in the school corridor read him. The core came out the size of both fists together, and it was not gray. It was a dull green, and something went on moving under the surface of it after he had stopped turning it over. Abe had no idea what it was or what it was worth. There was nobody he could ask about either, because asking meant saying out loud where a boy from Calder had been standing when he cut it out.

Riddell had gone upstairs once to find twelve hundred and forty marks for four gray ones. Riddell was not going to be the answer to this. He put it in the bag with the others and did not look at it again. It sat against his back the whole way out of the marsh, warmer than it had any business being. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 12 Foundation: 2, 140 / 12, 100 (Body 13) DRILL HAND · Apprentice Lv 9 (4, 410 / 16, 200) Body 12.

Abe was on a bank forty miles from anybody who knew what that meant, with a hole in his coat and somebody else's blood in his boot. He sat there a while longer, and then he got up and started walking. He came back into Prescot at first light on the third and went down the market lane, because that was where the stall was. There was no crate under the table. There was no table either. Dyer had not come out to trade. Abe stood in the empty lane in a stopped city with a bag of cores too full to close.

He thought about the folded paper in the man's breast pocket, the one he had made himself not read. He would have read it now.