Chapter 172: Vacancy

Nobody told Harl Fen he was wrong about the bed. Harl measured things for a living, usually aloud, so Dane Rook took the quiet for agreement. He had no wheels tonight. He was down to a plain box, a blind mimic chest set in the rain on the wrong bank of the cut, the dry storm channel he had dropped Rookfall's causeway into that afternoon. At his back stood the House. It had set a row of rooms down behind the seven of them, doors open, and their lamp heat lay along his back boards. The nearest, a yard behind his hinges, breathed hot iron and fresh shavings where the rest breathed soap and clean sheets.

Six worn-out people had to get through one night without lying down in the wrong bed, Dane thought, and he wanted to stop wanting his.

In the room next to his, a landlady hummed four bars over warm sheets and told the rain, "Boots off, lad. There's a hot brick in the foot of the bed." After her a tub steamed, cedar and soap, with a drip falling into it. At the far end a kettle rattled its lid over a taproom fire while a landlord promised that the first one was on the house. The hunger went down the row for a heart under any of those voices and did not find one.

"So why beds?" said Vera, to anybody but him. She smelled of chalk and the air after lightning, and she had taken the splint and its last wedge off his lid, and her hand with them. "It could walk over us from there."

Six plates shifted on the wet stone, humming into the crack in his side. They were Istra's, and Harl rode them because of a crushed shin.

"It can't step over that cut," Istra said. "It can pave it with rooms, end to end, and walk over on them. Every room it lays is a room it leaves behind, and the Road-Eater hates to lose a room. So first it wants six more to spend. That's us."

That left the room behind his hinges, a wheelwright's shed, where a mallet was working, three even strokes and a short double. He had been a wagon until that afternoon, with one wheel that turned late, and the House had taken note.

"Bring her in out of the wet," the wheelwright said, a big unhurried voice with no heart under it. "We'll have that wheel off by morning."

He had been splinted and wedged at the roadside ever since he died. Nobody had once offered him what he used to offer other people: bring it in and do the job properly. It was a decent quote, and the contractor was a cannibal.

He wanted a second quote, so he pushed the whole shed at the steel behind his teeth, Nate Parr's belt knife, and Saint Rust said out of it, "I've seen that shed done better, cupboard."

The rain came on harder, and for a long while nobody moved. Tess had got as far as the bath steam, going by the pepper, and Kril held on to a blade he had driven into the bank.

Then a bar ground on stone and a boot dragged. Senn Parr had kept beds for travelers all her life. She picked up a stone and threw it through the landlady's door.

Crockery broke. The landlady hummed her four bars to the end and offered the rain the same hot brick in the same words.

"There," Senn said. "I've broken her jug and she's offering me a brick. That's nobody. That's a few minutes of some innkeeper going round, and it'll say the same over your bones. So nobody goes near a door."

"I heard," Harl said. A boot and the butt of a leg splint came down off Istra's plates. "I knew at dusk. Four foot six across, that bed, feather over straw, and I only want to stand where the warm comes out."

"Harl," Istra said. A plate rang down in his path, and his limp went round it.

Dane's voice came four words at a time, and Harl already knew the only four worth saying. What Harl had was a want, and Dane knew of one cure for those.

One summer he had hung drywall in a dentist's office beside a radio that got one station, and the station owned eleven songs. By August the whole crew could come in half a beat ahead of any chorus, and nobody could stand to hear one through.

The mallet came round again behind him. He had the shed's loop by heart, having listened all evening harder than was good for him, so he started there. His lure was a click he could throw anywhere, and he threw it onto the wheelwright's bench half a beat ahead of the mallet.

It made a poor mallet, a toy. But it got there first, and that made the real stroke the copy. It went tick and then knock, tick and then knock, the toy leading the tool through all three strokes and the double. The bath's drip fell every fourth breath, so he dropped a click into the tub ahead of each one. The kettle lid rattled in fives, and he rattled first.

A sentence has a beat with the words taken out, and a click could carry that. The hunger put Harl one limp short of the landlady's sill when Dane tapped her line out on her own doorpost, a quick three and a longer run.

"Boots off, lad," she said, right on his heels. "There's a hot brick in the foot of the bed." Harl's limp stopped.

A living landlady would have come out to ask who was rapping on her doorpost. This one could not change a word. The landlord got the same. Dane left the wheelwright's line for last. By then the whole row sounded like a shelf of music boxes, the cheap kind, each grinding out its one tune a tick behind a chest.

Harl laughed. It came out cracked, a bark and a wheeze, and he had to hop to keep his feet.

"He's heckling it," Harl said. "He's half a beat early on every one, I timed two. Lie down in that? I'd be up all night waiting for the tick." And his limp came back.

/==[ System: Technique Noted ]==\\

| Ahead of the Beat: a room's next sound, played first

\\==[ Heckling. Noted. ]==/

Dane had been making jokes behind his teeth since the day he woke up as furniture, and this was the first one anybody but Vera had heard. The System had no number for that.

He was sorry to say he enjoyed it, and that lasted until he rested the lure. One loop of quiet, and the landlady sounded kind again. So he worked, mallet and drip and lid and every kind word, until dawn.

Nobody slept. He had kept six people out of the wrong beds by making sure there was no rest anywhere on the bank, and they were colder and more tired for it.

In the worst of it Vera sat down against his cracked side and kept the rain out of the crack with her back. That day he had knocked yes to being handed to her patron, Lord Thorne, whose machine still waited across the cut. He had never knocked to take it back, and she knew it. Her question for bad nights was two words long, and tonight she kept it. Every shiver she gave went into the crack and all through him.

He was a box. Keeping weather off whatever was inside him was the whole of the trade. Under his lid was the one dry place on that bank, the only roof there that was not a lie. It had teeth. Senn, whose brother had died under that lid, came to stand over him with her bar.

"You've shown them every bed they can't have, chest," Senn said. "I won't say it wasn't needed. But any fool can tell travelers where not to sleep. A keeper has somewhere to send them, and she's shaking the pegs out of you. Now show her somewhere to lie down."

At first light, with one bird trying a note up the hill, the taproom came up off the far end of the row with its kettle still rattling. A great creaking weight swung out past the rim, and the landlord went down into the cut promising that the first one was on the house.

He turned his lock toward Vera. With her that meant tell me, or it had.

"It's laying them in the cut," Vera said, hoarse. "One after another, Dane. They're heading for the pier."

So the House was done shopping, and past the pier was her town. Behind him the mallet went on. He knew to the tick what it was, and he wanted it as much as he had at dusk. But six people needed a roof this wet morning, and the only thing on the bank that could change shape was a box with teeth in it. A roof was only a lid with room under it, Dane thought. He would have to grow this one with the teeth left out.

He told himself to become the roof.

One corner of him had barely creaked when six plates rang down around him, and the hum in his crack climbed until it sang.

"If that shape shuts with people in it," Istra said, "I'll salt you where you stand."