Chapter 173: The Room With No Door

The job was barely started when the customer threatened Dane Rook. Istra stood over him on six charged plates, and she had promised to salt him where he stood if his next shape shut with people in it. This morning he was only a chest, blind as ever, with the dawn rain coming down on his lid. Behind him the House was lowering rooms into the Rookfall cut to pave itself a road to the town across it. The six people with him had not been dry since yesterday, and he was the reason none had slept. They needed a roof and a way across, Dane thought. As a mimic he had been a box and a wagon, and he wanted to be the roof.

Istra's threat was a term of the job now. Then he reached for his SSS Mimic Skill. The System had marked it Sealed on his first day, and it worked anyway, on one condition: it built for somebody else's need and never for his asking.

Six people needed a roof, so it came. His bottom boards ran out flat over the wet stone, away from the House's rooms at his back, and everybody gave them room. His sides climbed into walls with gaps the wind came through. The crack climbed with them, as his wounds always did. Last, his lid swung up and spread into a roof on two hinges, propped open. He checked every edge for teeth and left the front off, so there was nothing to shut.

Senn Parr tried it first. She struck his new wall with her bar before her dragging boot came over his front edge. Nate's sister stood in the mouth her brother had died in and brought her bar down once on his floor. Yes, in his own code.

Vera went in next without a word to him, smelling of chalk. She sat down against his cracked side, from the inside.

The rest followed the dry. "Seven foot under the eave," said Harl Fen, limping in with a shin that no longer bled. "Room for six, and no front on it. I've paid for worse." Tess came in on a smell of pepper, and Kril set each blade down as if the floor might bite. Istra came last and did not sit. One hand went flat on his wall by the open front and stayed.

The rain came down on him and on nobody else.

A roof was half the job, and the House was proof that a roof could walk. For the way across he asked the room for wheels, and when none came, for one step of any kind. The floor strained forward and went nowhere.

Then they sat down, as anybody would under the first roof in a day and a night. Harl was snoring before his splinted leg stopped rocking. Each time one of them quit holding themselves up, the roof dipped and his crack spread, until the room took up the load by drawing a gap shut. The drafts stopped, it grew warm, somebody sighed, and Dane was slow to hear anything wrong in it. He had not told one gap to close.

The front went last, and fast. A wall stood up from his front edge, the roof came down to meet it, and his lock turned over by itself. That was how the lid had gone down on Nate Parr, with no order from him, and he had spent what was left of the man's life ordering it up. The rain was outside him now and six heartbeats were inside.

Every board in him stopped shaking at once. The roof sat flat on square walls, and the crack in his side went quiet. It was what the wheelwright's shed behind him had promised all night, the job done properly. He had never been so steady, and what had done it was six people shut in the dark.

The hunger counted six hearts, and it counted them as stock. It had always measured how far a heart lay from his teeth. He had left the teeth out and it did not miss them, because there was no distance left to measure. They were in. The warmth in his boards was the warmth of his first day, with Nate Parr's pulse against his tongue. And the hunger, which had been in a hurry every hour since, was in no hurry at all.

Then the System's writing opened in his dark. Convert, it used to ask, over a dead man's knife. This time it asked whether he would keep this shape.

Kept, Dane thought. He knew a shape that had been kept. It stood behind him on twelve legs, and he would have bet it started on some wet night as somebody's kindness.

Istra's hand had not left his wall. Under it her charge came up, and the crack was not quiet any more.

"Dane." Vera was awake against his cracked side, and hoarse. "Dane, there's no door in this. Open it."

He ordered the roof up, and the roof heard him as well as the lid once had. One of Kril's blades went along the front wall and found no seam.

"Nate," Senn said.

Dane had heard that name from the man it belonged to, in this same mouth, with the lid down on his arm and nobody listening but the thing that was eating him.

He had been there for all of that, and he would not be there for it six times over. He knew from hanging drywall that a stiff patch on a soft wall cracks at its edge. This room was the stiffest thing he had ever been, laid straight over his old crack, so he knew where he would break.

He leaned on it. Everything the sealed room had given him, and six people's weight on top of it, he put on his own cracked side, at Vera's back. The boards held for one long breath. Then the crack ran, and he felt all of it. It went past both its old ends, down into his floor and up the wall to the roof.

The wall fell outward into the rain and took Vera with it on her back, and four more came out over it. The roof heeled over and slid off his hinges. Robbed, the hunger counted six hearts in the open and none shut in.

/==[ System: Shape Refused ]==\\

| Shape: a room, six people inside

| Source: none found. Built from a chest

| Stable only with every door shut

| Cost: the crack in your side is longer

\\==[ Stable When Sealed. Noted. ]==/

The System had gone looking in him for a room to copy and found none. He had hung ceilings in a thousand rooms, and evidently other people's did not count. So it had built from what it had, and nobody puts a door in a chest. The crack ran the whole height of his side now, for good.

For a little while he had been a roof, and it had felt better than anything this body had done. He meant to remember that it had.

One wall still stood by itself, with Istra's hand flat on it. She took the hand away.

"I hadn't decided," Istra said, to the wall. "My hand was on him and the charge was up, and I hadn't decided. He broke first."

Tess had sold him once, and her notes had said that what it shut on, it kept. "That's not in my notes," she said.

Senn stood well off with her bar, and Kril went farther.

Harl was the one who came back, hopping along the wreck on a boot and a splint, knuckling the boards.

"He tried to walk it," Harl said. "I felt the floor pull, and it never took a step, because there's nobody at the front. A thing this size walks only when somebody drives it. Then we sat down like sacks, and I had seven foot under that eave coming in and six and a half when I shut my eyes. It carries six, all awake and all working. And it only went solid when it shut its last gap. One door has to stay open. The board where the last one shuts is where it turns into the thing over there."

"That's a wayhouse he's describing, cupboard, and badly," Saint Rust said. It was the knife's old word for a living shelter that let its guests out again. The knife had told him that much at Rainhouse, Dane thought, and had waited until he was in pieces to bring it up again.

Vera stood where his wall had been, her voice almost gone. "The House never stopped while we sat in there," she said. "Its rooms are halfway to the pier. There's the spur and nothing else."

The spur was the last strip of the fallen causeway, a boot wide, running out to the pier in mid-cut, and a chest could not walk.

"Fold him small," Istra said. "I'll carry the chest."

She walked on six plates, and three of them landed late. Dane drew his broken walls in board by board, down to a plain chest with a crack the whole height of one side, and knocked his lid once on its rim. Yes.