Chapter 24: The Crooked Kettle

Chapter 24: Chapter 24: The Crooked Kettle

Someone was poking him with a cane.

"Young man. Young man. Are you dead?"

Elias opened his eyes. The stairwell swam into focus: peeling green paint, a flickering bulb, and Mrs. Albescu from 2B standing over him in her bathrobe and slippers, her cane hovering an inch from his ribs for another poke.

"No," he croaked. "Not dead."

"Good. It would be very inconvenient. The landlord would raise the rent." She peered at him. "You are sleeping on the stairs."

"I sat down for a second."

"It is eleven o’clock." She sniffed. "You sat down for six hours."

Six hours. He’d missed the hospital. He fumbled for his phone and found two texts from Mira, where are you and, an hour later, eli? With clumsy fingers, he typed overslept, sorry, coming tomorrow and hit send before she could reply.

A window was still waiting at the edge of his vision.

[Warning: Fatigue critical. Stat penalty active: -20% AGI, -20% PER. Recommended rest: 12 hours.]

Minus twenty percent perception. He’d been calling targets for a week with his eyes running at four-fifths strength, and he hadn’t even known it.

Mrs. Albescu helped him up the last five steps with a grip much stronger than it looked. At his door, she pressed a tea bag into his hand. "Chamomile," she said. "For people who sit on stairs."

He slept for fourteen hours.

When he finally stepped into the Sanctum, Marcus and Aveline were waiting at the chalkboard, and neither of them looked surprised.

Under rule one, the line Hours slept this week: 23 had been crossed out. Beneath it, in Marcus’s block capitals, a new line read: FATIGUE CRITICAL. CALLED IT.

"I’m sorry," Elias said.

"Don’t be sorry. Be smarter," Marcus said. "You walked into a boss gate with a twenty-percent penalty on your eyes. Your eyes are the whole plan."

"You lied to your sister about sleeping," Aveline said quietly.

He didn’t ask how she knew. He just nodded.

They sat down on the edge of the firing line, and for a while nobody spoke. Then Marcus pulled out the notebook Elias had brought on Night Two and flipped through it: costs, ranges, recovery times.

"Here’s the problem," he said. "It’s not you, exactly. It’s logistics. We fight every night. You burn mana, we burn stamina, and you burn sleep, and nothing comes back fast enough." He tapped a page. "Every army I served in learned the same thing. You can have the best soldiers alive, and they’ll still lose to an empty supply line."

"In Carrow, the knights rode first," Aveline said, "but the cooks rode second. A garrison with a good kitchen held three times as long." She smiled faintly. "We used to say the cook was the most dangerous man in the castle. If he was unhappy, so was everyone."

Elias looked at his status window. Three slots, two filled.

"So the next one shouldn’t be another fighter," he said slowly.

"The next one should keep the fighters fighting," Marcus said.

Elias thought about the offering. A core, first, because whoever came through would still have to survive the gates. He had one: the hellhound alpha’s core from the Ashfall Kennels, red-black and warm, worth a week of filtration at Ozzie’s. He set it aside anyway.

And something else. Something for the part that wasn’t fighting.

He thought about custard buns in a paper bag, still warm on the bus. About the way Mira’s whole face changed when he handed them to her.

"Halden’s opens at six," he said.

In another world, in a town called Bellwick, the Crooked Kettle hadn’t closed its doors in forty years. Tobin Ashgrove saw no reason to start now.

The blight-army had come over the hills three days ago: a slow grey tide of rot, men and beasts and things that had once been men, all furred with pale mold, all hungry. Bellwick’s walls had held for two days. Tonight they were failing. From his kitchen, Tobin could hear the long groan of timber giving way, and the sound people made when they understood they had run out of places to run.

So he did the only thing he’d ever been good at. He fed them.

The common room was packed wall to wall with refugees: farmers from the outlying villages, a schoolteacher with eleven children, an old soldier with one arm. Tobin moved among them with a pot of barley stew as big as a washtub, ladling it into bowls and cups and cupped hands, talking the whole time. "Eat it while it’s hot. Nobody fights well hungry, and nobody runs well hungry either. Here, love, take two. You’re feeding him as well."

Outside, something screamed.

The roof beams shuddered, and dust sifted down onto the tables. A little girl started to cry. Tobin crouched beside her and put a full bowl into her hands. "There now. Barley and onion and a bit of the good ham. My mother’s recipe. Eat."

The front wall bowed inward.

Tobin straightened up and looked at it. Then he looked at the people in his common room, and at the pot in his arms. There was still a little left. There was always a little left.

The roof came down.

He didn’t feel it. There was only light.

He landed on gravel with his boots planted wide and his arms locked around the pot, and not a single drop spilled.

It was night, and cold, and the air smelled of rain and something sharp and strange, like hot metal. There was no rubble. There was no common room. There was a flat roof, a rusted tank on stilts, a city with more lights than he’d seen in his whole life, and three people standing in front of him.

A young man with tired eyes and a cut on his palm. A tall woman in armor with a sword at her hip. A broad, stern man holding a weapon Tobin didn’t recognize. On a crate between them sat a red-black stone and a round loaf of bread, slightly squashed.

A pane of light opened at the edge of Tobin’s vision.

[Class awakened: Monster Cook.]

[Origin Skill awakened: Beast Cuisine.]

Tobin read it. Then he looked at the three of them: the dark shadows under the young man’s eyes, the way the woman stood with her weight on one leg, the way the soldier’s hands never quite stopped moving.

He set the pot down very carefully on the gravel and lifted the lid. Steam curled into the cold night air, smelling of barley and onion and a bit of the good ham.

"Right," Tobin said. "First things first. When did any of you last eat a proper meal?"

Nobody answered.

"That’s what I thought." He pulled a ladle from his apron, then paused, glanced at the glowing window, and frowned thoughtfully. "Monster Cook," he said. "So tell me. Do the monsters here taste any good?"