32 | Six Hours

Ottilie Vann came into the wash house on the Monday afternoon and stood in the doorway with a basket.

Soren was doing linens, which was Nessa's job, which he had taken because Nessa had a burn on her forearm from the kitchen that she had told nobody about and would have worked on for another week out of pure spite.

"You do her work," Ottilie said.

Soren stopped.

Ottilie Vann had been in this house five years. In three years of inherited memory she had said perhaps forty words, and most of them had been the names of objects. Her voice was not cold. It was unused, the way a hinge is stiff.

"She's got a burn."

"I know. I saw it Thursday."

She came in, set the basket down, and began sorting it, which was not her job either. Neither of them said anything for a while, and Soren found that he did not mind, and then found that this was itself unusual, because he had spent six weeks filling every silence he came across.

"You go out at night," she said.

His hands did not stop. That was Battle Sense, or six weeks of practice, or both.

"Some nights."

"Twice a week for four weeks. Fridays and one other." She folded a sheet. "You come back with your sleeve wrong. You wash it in the far trough because the near one squeaks."

<<Loraine: She has been watching for five weeks. Nobody in this house has looked at her once in five years. Consider what that does to the quality of a person's attention.>>

"Are you going to tell anyone?"

Ottilie thought about it.

She actually thought about it, taking her time, and that was worse than a flat no would have been, because it meant there was a reason underneath the answer.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because on the Wednesday with the brother, you pulled the ladder up." She squared a corner. "Everyone went up it. You pulled it up after. You were last."

She picked up her basket.

"Nobody's ever been last," she said, and left.

Soren stood in the wash house with his hands in the cold water for about a minute and a half.

<<Lilith: Soren.>>

Don't.

<<Lilith: I was not going to say anything filthy.>>

Then say the other thing.

<<Lilith: She is coming back.>> A pause. <<That is all. She has been gone five years and she is coming back, and it will not be because anybody was kind to her, because people have been kind to her and it did nothing at all. It is because she saw something and decided to be interested in it.>>

---

He took the Gale-Draught on the Tuesday night, in the loft, with the ladder up.

Loraine had been right about the visibility. It came out of the vial as almost nothing, one mouthful of something that tasted of cold metal and river stones, and for about four seconds nothing happened at all.

Then the air in the loft began to move.

Not wind. The mana came in, all of it, out of the stone and the straw and the yard and the fields past the wall, and it came fast and it kept coming, and within four minutes he was sitting inside a density that made his teeth ache and his eyes water. The grain in the sacks shifted very slightly. In the dark it looked like something breathing.

<<Loraine: Cultivate. Do not stop. Do not admire it.>>

He cultivated.

Deepwell took it the way Deepwell took everything, and for one hour Soren sat cross-legged in a grain loft with more refined mana going through him than most cultivators in the Marrow Vale would see in a decade.

It hurt the entire time. It was the single most productive hour of his life.

<<RANK: APPRENTICE MAGE, 8TH STAGE.>>

<<AWARD: 1 RARE TICKET, 400 FP.>>

<<9TH STAGE: 71% PROGRESS.>>

<<Loraine: 8th, and most of the way to 9th, in one hour. That was six days of work.>>

And the tenth?

<<Loraine: Is Peak. Peak is a wall, and there is no draught for a wall. That one you do with your teeth.>>

Then the hour closed.

It did not taper. It stopped the way a door stops, and everything running through him stopped with it and had to go somewhere, and where it went was outward, into muscle and marrow and joint, all at once and everywhere.

Soren went over sideways onto the boards.

He could not move.

He could see. He could hear the mice in the sacks and the wind coming round the corner of the stable block and a horse shifting its weight below him. He could feel the boards against his cheek, and a splinter going into it, slowly, over about a minute.

He could think perfectly clearly.

He could not move any part of himself, including his eyelids, and after roughly twenty minutes his eyes began to dry and there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it.

<<Lilith: I'm here.>>

I know.

<<Lilith: I am going to talk for a while and you are going to have to listen, because that is all either of us can do, and if I stop I am going to start thinking about how much I hate this.>>

So Lilith talked.

She talked for four hours and eleven minutes about nothing whatsoever. She went through every item in the Covenant catalogue he could not afford, in order, with commentary.

She described a world she had been deployed to once where the dominant species had been enormous and shy and had spoken by changing colour, and where her host had been a very small woman who had found the entire arrangement hilarious.

She rated, at length and with reasons, every person Soren had met since arriving on Ariyas, the name of this world.

Marda scored higher than he expected despite her age. Iyla Sarn scored a great deal higher.

Vesper Callowmere received a number that Loraine objected to on the grounds that it was not a number.

At some point in the fourth hour, the ladder moved.

Soren heard it. He could not turn his head and he could not close his eyes, and he lay on the boards listening to somebody set a ladder against the sill very quietly, and Loraine said nothing at all, because there was nothing at all to say.

Feet on the rungs. Slow ones.

A shape came up over the sill in the dark, stopped, and looked at him lying on the floor with his eyes open.

Ottilie Vann.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she came the rest of the way up, crossed the loft, knelt beside him, and put two fingers under his jaw the way you check a body.

"You're breathing," she said.

He could not answer.

"Marda's been calling for you since ten. I told her you'd gone to the far barn for the mending and that I'd send you along when you got back." She sat back on her heels.

"She believed me. Nobody checks what I say. That's the one thing I've got."

The loft was quiet.

"You can't move," Ottilie said. It was not a question and rather more like an observation from the fact that he let her get this close without flinching.

"I've seen this. Not this exactly. Something like it. There was a man at the estate before this one who took something for his back and went down like that, and they thought he was dead for most of a day, and he wasn't."

She was quiet for a while.

"They buried him anyway," she said. "In the end. Not because they didn't know. Because it was easier."

Soren lay on the boards and looked at the wall.

Ottilie stood. She went to the sill, and for one very long second he thought she was leaving.

Then she pulled the ladder up after herself, laid it along the wall, came back, and sat down against a grain sack about six feet from him with her arms around her knees.

"I'll wait," she said. "I'm not doing anything else."