Chapter 397: Leather, Not Wrap

Chapter 397: Leather, Not Wrap

Jin checked his account on Wednesday morning before breakfast, sitting on the feed crate with the drawing from Ottilie’s spread on his knee.

He didn’t have a spreadsheet. He had a note on his phone with three headings, the way he’d done it since Thornwatch.

Living. Between his First-Class provision and regular allowance, the ordinary costs were covered. The beasts’ approved feed came through the academy, with reviews when their needs changed.

Reserve. That was the line he didn’t touch: money for treatment, transport and a spell without academy support if something went wrong. He’d put it aside before he started looking at weapons.

Everything else. Savings from his support and earlier earnings, including what remained after the hunting and survey expenses, and the ten thousand from the scutes. He checked the payments against his purchases rather than adding up rewards he’d already spent.

He did the sum twice.

It wasn’t a fortune. But forty-eight thousand came out of everything else and left the reserve exactly where it was.

He sat there for a moment, looking at the drawing.

In his first life, he’d once spent three evenings deciding whether to buy a game on sale. In this one, he’d learned to count feed costs before thinking about anything he wanted.

He’d never in either life bought something that cost this much just for himself.

It’s not a toy, he told himself. It’s a weapon. I need it.

That was true. It was also true that he wanted it badly, and he let himself want it.

He went on Thursday afternoon, with Glitch, because Ottilie had asked to see them together.

She came out of the forge wiping her hands on her apron and walked round Glitch once in the street. Then she handed Jin a plain shaft with a weighted wooden head, roughly the length she’d drawn.

"Your height and a hand," she said. "Stand next to him. Turn."

He stood beside Glitch’s shoulder and turned left, toward the drake, bringing the shaft round. The butt end cleared Glitch’s horn by a palm. He turned right, away. The wooden head swung out and came back over the clear testing space beside the shop.

"Again. Faster."

He did it faster. The butt end clipped the horn. Glitch looked round at him with deep disapproval.

"That’s your hands, not the length," Ottilie said. "You let the back end swing. Keep it close to your hip." She took a piece of chalk and marked the shaft where his rear hand should sit, a little further back than he’d been holding it.

He tried again. It cleared.

"Good. Now go and run."

"What?"

"Round the block. Twice. Fast." She pointed down the tack street. "Lucian Vale told you about wrap, didn’t he?"

"How do you know that?"

"Because he tells everyone." She held up two shafts. One had a plain cloth wrap at the grip. The other had a band of rough leather, stitched tight. "Run. Then hold both."

He left Glitch beside the shop and ran twice around the block. On the second circuit, the drake lifted his head to watch him pass, apparently wondering why Jin kept coming back without stopping. He came back red-faced and sweating, with his palms damp.

The wrapped shaft slid in his hands the moment he twisted it. The leather one didn’t. The stitched surface gave his fingers something to hold.

"Leather," he said, breathing hard.

"Leather." Ottilie wrote it on the drawing beside Lucian’s note. "He was right, for once."

She took the deposit at the counter.

[Payment: 24,000 Credits — Ottilie’s (deposit: short spear, commissioned)]

[Balance due on collection: 24,000 Credits]

"Two weeks," she said. "Maybe a day or two more. I’ll send a message." She looked at him over the counter. "Keep practising with the borrowed one. When you get this, it’ll feel different. Heavier at the front. Don’t expect it to make you good."

"I don’t."

"Everyone does," Ottilie said. "For about a week."

He walked home with the receipt in his jacket pocket and kept touching it to check it was still there.

That night, after dinner and cultivation with the partly used stone, he returned to the higher chamber in the Engine.

The higher chamber was quiet now. The ledges where the ibex had stood were empty. Six of the eight nodules he’d collected remained in storage, and the dark rock still held more that he couldn’t reach.

He’d been meaning to come back for the fissure.

It ran up the far wall of the chamber, a black crack as wide as a doorway, high up, with cool air pouring out of it. Flicker could reach it. Glitch couldn’t.

But now that the ibex were gone, Jin had time to look properly at the chamber floor.

At its far end, behind the fallen blocks where Glitch had fought, he found a low, broad passage at floor level. The same air came through it, steady and cool.

He sent Flicker ahead to check the bends and clearance, then brought Glitch along the ground passage.

It went fifty meters, curved, and opened into a gallery.

[Quarry Depths — Fissured Gallery]

It was long and narrow, running away north, with a roof somewhere very high above. The floor was broken.

Three deep fissures cut across most of its width, leaving a narrow strip of ground along the eastern wall. The air came up out of them in gusts and moved across the gallery in shifting streams.

He could see it in the grit lifting off the floor and in long strands of grey moss that hung from the walls and swung, first one way and then the other.

Jin studied it for a long time before he moved anything.

At the first two fissures, saddles of rock joined that eastern strip, broad enough for Glitch to cross carefully. Beyond the third, a sloping shelf followed the wall to the far passage. Flicker flew along it; its surface looked continuous, but Jin marked it for a closer check before taking Glitch there.

Near the entrance, there was a deep alcove under an overhang where the wind didn’t reach. Further north, between the first and second fissures, there was another. Jin named them Alcove One and Alcove Two in his notes.

On the west side, there was no ground at all. Just the wall, a spur of rock jutting out over the first fissure, and above it, a narrow lip of stone running along the wall above the second.

Flicker could use those western landing places. Glitch’s shelters and crossings were all on the east.

He tested Glitch first, at the saddle across the first fissure. Flicker checked the edges first. The saddle appeared joined to the wall, with no loose slabs or visible split across it. Glitch eased a forefoot onto it while Jin watched for movement, then brought his weight forward a little at a time. Nothing shifted.

He took Glitch across. The wind came up out of the fissure on both sides of him and pushed at his flank, and he lowered his body until the strongest gust passed. His weight helped; Jin still kept him away from the edge. He walked into Alcove Two and stood there.

Then he sent Flicker across the gallery to the spur, the long way, slowly.

She got there. The crosswind pushed her twice on the way, once from below and once from the side, and both times she corrected herself with a hard wingbeat.

When she landed on the spur, she sat there for a moment with her feathers ruffled, looking back at the air she’d come through with an expression Jin recognised.

It was the same look she gave the target post when it didn’t fall over.

In the corner of Alcove One, near the warm draught from the first fissure, something grew in the cracks that wasn’t the grey moss. It was a dense, low mat of reddish-grey fronds, soft and feathery, that stirred in the air like smoke.

Flicker’s avatar went straight to it on her way back and bent to peck. Jin called her away before she could swallow any. She shook her head at him and returned to the spur.

[Cinderplume Moss]

[Affinity: fire, wind]

Jin had Glitch scrape a single clump of it loose with one claw.

[Cinderplume Moss — 1 portion stored]

He didn’t do anything else with it yet. He’d checked too many things too late to rush this one.

Before he closed the Engine, he sent Flicker up once more, as high as he dared. Beyond the second fissure, up under the roof, four dark shapes were hanging in a cluster. They were folded tight, motionless.

They didn’t move while he watched. He didn’t think they were asleep.