Chapter 101: Too Much Water

Chapter 101: Too Much Water

The first thing Silas noticed in the morning was the smell.

It wasn’t strong. It was the faint sour wetness of a dishcloth left too long in a sink, and it was coming from the corner by the kitchenette. He got out of bed and crouched by the trays before he’d properly woken up.

Something had changed overnight. Across the surface of the nearer tray, threaded between the gray mats, ran a fine white fuzz, pale and soft. For one stupid, hopeful second his heart jumped.

Pale strands. Fine. Catching the light.

He leaned closer.

The fuzz was cottony and dull, spread in a loose web across the substrate. Where it touched the gray mats, they had gone dark and slick at the edges. He touched one with a fingertip. It came apart in a wet smear.

Mold. Ordinary rot, in a tray he had soaked and left in the dark.

The second tray was less far gone, but it smelled the same, and two of its mats had the same dark, slippery edges.

Silas sat back on his heels.

He was more annoyed than the cost deserved. Pell had said wet material rotted. Elyra had called his trays puddles. He’d agreed with both of them and somehow left the water where it was.

"It smells worse," Nim said from the pillow, without lifting his head.

"I know," Silas said.

"Is it alive now?" Nim asked.

"Something’s alive," Silas said. "Just not the right thing."

He took the copied page from the reference off his desk and read it again, slowly this time, all of it, including the parts he’d skimmed. Found in shaded stonework, often around old conduits, cisterns, and drains. That was the line he’d seized on. He looked at the small engraving beside it, the one he’d glanced at and moved past. A stone wall. A channel at its foot, with water drawn in it. And the band of moss along the wall, a hand’s width above the water, not in it.

Beneath the engraving, in tiny type he hadn’t bothered with, was a caption.

Typical habit: on stone above the waterline, where draft and seepage keep the surface damp but never standing wet. Rots readily if waterlogged.

He read it twice. Then he put the page down and let out a breath through his nose.

He remembered the pale threads on the channel wall now, well above the water. He’d supplied the puddle himself. Worse, the correction had been on the page beside his elbow all along.

Fine, he thought. That’s on me. Fix it.

He did it quickly, before his first lecture. He threw out the worst of the rotten tray, wrapping it in newspaper so it wouldn’t smell up the room. From what was left, he picked out the gray mats that were still dry and firm in the middle, five of them, and laid them aside.

For the new test, he turned one seed tray upside down and set a flat piece of slate on top of it, a coaster he’d been using under the kettle, so it sat raised and tilted slightly. He scattered a thin layer of dry, gritty substrate over the slate and pressed three of the firm mats onto it. Then, instead of pouring water, he dampened a cloth, wrung it nearly dry, and touched the mats lightly with it. He set the whole thing in the shade by the window, where a thread of cool air came through the gap in the frame.

He blotted the last two mats dry and set them in a folded paper on the desk. He would leave those without further water, so he could compare them with the damp ones on the slate.

It looked absurd, like a very small, very sad garden. But it looked a great deal more like the engraving than the swamp had.

***

Ferrow’s practical that afternoon was in the east yard again, but the sled was gone.

In its place was a lane of rough ground, uneven and lumpy, with low logs laid across it at odd intervals and a few loose stones scattered between. Along one side stood five short posts. On top of each sat a small cloth pouch about the size of a fist, weighted with sand.

"Walk the lane," Ferrow said. "Don’t stop. Collect each pouch as you pass and put it in the box at the end." He nodded at a wooden crate at the far end of the lane. "You can lift them with your Talent or your hands. If a pouch hits the ground, it’s broken. If your feet stop, the pass doesn’t count."

"Broken?" one of the other Bronze students asked.

"Pretend it’s full of something fragile and expensive," Ferrow said. "That’s what you’ll be trusted with outside this yard."

Silas went first.

It was harder than the sled. With the sled, the ground had been flat and only the target moved. Here the targets stood still and the ground did the work against him, never the same under his boots twice. The first pouch lifted cleanly. He kept it level while stepping over a log, but his trailing boot caught the raised end. He caught his balance without dropping the pouch; his feet still paused long enough to lose the pass.

"Feet," Ferrow said.

Silas lowered the pouch safely before looking back at the log. Caught that bloody end.

He thought about the sled, and the rope, and step and close. On the second pass he did it differently. He didn’t reach for the pouch while he was crossing a log. He crossed the log first, got both feet back under him, and lifted the pouch from the flat ground just beyond it, already walking. It meant looking ahead and choosing where to reach instead of grabbing at the first chance he saw.

The pouch floated into the crate. He didn’t stop.

By the third pass, he could do three pouches out of five without breaking stride. The fourth always gave him trouble, because its post stood right beside the tallest log and there was no flat ground near it. Once he dropped it. Once he stopped.

His reserve sank with the repeated passes. On the next run he stopped hovering each pouch while deciding where to put it and sent it directly to the crate. The fourth post still defeated his timing, but he finished with less mana spent.

"Better," Ferrow said at the end, which from Ferrow was a speech. "You’re choosing your moment now. Keep doing that."

Silas sat on the bench with his forearms on his knees and thought about Harrowglass.

He would need a proper box for anything he collected. Keeping a handful of living moss floating beside him all the way out was a waste of attention and mana. He could carry it normally and save Remote Grasp for the stretches where using his hands would be awkward. That was something worth trying before selection.

***

Back in the studio that evening, the visitor came early and stayed.

He sat on the floor and let his thread out. Nim, bright on the pillow. His own thread. The cool small place, by the window. He kept his eyes closed and followed it as it drifted: along the sill, down past the desk, across toward the bed. He judged it against Nim each time, not by how faint it felt.

"Desk," Silas said, and opened his eyes to check. Right. He closed them and followed it farther. "Near the chair." Another quick look confirmed that one.

The third time, he placed it on the bottom shelf. When he looked, the visitor was on the shelf above.

Two out of three. He’d followed it across half the room without losing it, which he couldn’t have done a week ago. It was still work. His head ached a little when he stopped.

Before bed, he crouched by the window to look at the slate.

He almost missed it. On the largest of the three mats, at one edge, a tuft of gray growth that had lain flat that morning had lifted slightly from the stone. It wasn’t green. It wasn’t shining. It was just a little less dead-looking than the two dry mats on the desk, which hadn’t changed at all.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he took a pencil and a scrap of paper and wrote down the time, the date, and one tuft lifted, largest mat, left edge. Dry control unchanged.

He didn’t touch it, and he didn’t say anything to Nim. He went to bed.