Chapter 109: An Inconvenient Place to Be Useful

The academy coach had been built for comfort by someone who had never sat in it.

The bench was padded in theory and wooden in practice. Silas’s field bag sat between his boots, the dart’s case strapped across his chest, Pell’s shallow collection box on his knees, and every time the coach lurched over a rut, something he’d packed dug into something he hadn’t.

It was worse for Nim.

“You’re sitting on my ceiling,” said a very small, very aggrieved voice from somewhere near his left hip.

Silas shifted his weight without looking down. While he’d been standing, the pocket had been a perfectly reasonable place for a spirit to curl up. Now the coat pocket had folded in on itself, leaving Nim wedged against the lining.

“Better?” he murmured, barely moving his lips.

“No,” Nim whispered.

Silas leaned slightly to the right. The coach hit another rut.

“Worse,” Nim hissed.

Across from him, Dagna had her gauntlets in her lap and her eyes half closed, but she hadn’t missed him leaning back and forth for ten minutes like a man trying to get comfortable on a nail.

“What’s in the pocket?” she asked. 𝖋𝙧ⅇ

“Something fragile,” Silas said.

Dagna glanced at the collection box on his knees and closed her eyes again. Apparently the explanation was good enough. Silas kept his coat away from the bench.

Alden, beside her, had been staring out the window since they left the academy gate. He turned now, bright-eyed and entirely awake.

“Have you ever been this far east?”

“No,” Silas said.

“Me neither,” Alden said. “We went north to the mill towns and south to the coast, never east.” He pointed. “Look.”

The farmland they’d been rolling through all morning was giving way to rougher ground. The fields became pasture, the pasture became scrub, and on a low rise ahead, catching the morning light, stood a long line of glass: ribs of iron and pale panes, broken in places, a great curved roof in the middle like the back of something asleep. Ivy and climbing trees had grown up its flanks. The whole thing glittered and sagged at once.

“Harrowglass,” Alden said, with satisfaction.

Silas looked at it and felt the distance properly for the first time. His room was half a day behind him now. No doubled strength, no doubled recovery, no corner of the world that told him the instant anything moved. Out here he had his own body, his five old Talents and one new one, and whatever reserve he arrived with.

He’d spent two weeks preparing for exactly that. He still wished the coach ride had taken longer.

Good, he thought. Pay attention, then.

***

Ferrow was waiting at the outer gate with a slate and a map pinned to a board. Silas went to him before the teams had finished climbing down.

“The eastern service-path gate,” he said. “Does it connect to the open half of the court?”

Ferrow didn’t seem surprised to be asked. He tapped the map. “It does. Path runs in through the gate, then along the outer wall into the court. You can walk the white half.” His finger moved inward. “The old channel runs through both halves. It crosses the boundary here. Anything past that line stays closed, channel included. During an approved collection window, you can inspect the open section. Not before.”

“Understood,” Silas said.

“Galleries first,” Ferrow said.

Silas copied the boundary onto his own map in pencil, a short hard line through the middle of the court, and went to join his team.

***

The north galleries had once been a place where people grew things for money. Now they were a place where things grew by themselves and nobody had told them to stop.

The first gallery ran long and narrow beneath a ribbed glass roof, a third of the panes missing and another third cracked. Raised cultivation beds lined both sides, stone-edged, knee high, so overgrown that it was hard to tell where a bed ended and the walkway began. Silas found the edge of the first one with his shin. In places the remaining glass trapped the sun, and the air beneath it was warm and close and smelled of wet leaves. Everywhere, half swallowed by roots, there was old equipment: watering frames, rusted pipe brackets, trays, pumps, something with a dial. ⅇℓ.

“Glassbacks,” Ferrow said, at the gallery entrance, to Team Nine and Team Three together. “Glassback skitters. Small, low Rank One, territorial. They nest under the old beds, especially the warm ones. On their own, they’re a nuisance. Disturb a nest and they go everywhere at once, and they like climbing frames.” He jerked his chin at the roof. “Which shakes loose glass. If you see one, call it. If you’re not sure your route’s safe, hold where you are and call me. I’ll be checking the adjoining bays. Call through the door.”

They started on the near end.

The first real job was a tray. It sat half buried at the back of the third bed, a long shallow metal tray of brass flow regulators, a dozen fat brass fittings with little valves on top, the kind of thing a conservatory would once have used to control water to each bed. Mundane salvage, worth something to the academy’s workshops.

Alden reached for the near end and Silas said, “Hold.”

Alden held.

“Look at the far corner.” Silas pointed. A root as thick as his wrist had grown over the tray’s far edge and down through an old fastening, a rusted metal clip that had once held the tray to the bed frame. “It’s still clipped. If you pull from this end, the near side comes up and the far side doesn’t. The whole tray tips and the regulators go into the bed.”

Alden looked, saw it, and grimaced. “I’d have pulled.”

“I’d have pulled too, if I hadn’t been looking at the corner.” Silas crouched. The clip was out of reach behind the root, and getting a hand in there meant shoving through leaves above a bed edge he couldn’t see. Remote Grasp didn’t care about leaves. He found the clip, felt the rust in it, and turned it carefully, a little at a time, until it gave with a dull click.

“Clip’s free,” Silas said.

The open stretch of walkway beside the bed had no glass above it at all, only empty frames and a few loose panes hanging at the edges like loose teeth.

“Dagna,” Silas said. “Wall. Over the walkway while we bring it out.”

Dagna lifted a hand. A pale pane of mana slid into place over the open stretch, slanted to shed anything that fell.

“Through,” Silas said, and steadied the far end of the tray with Remote Grasp as Alden lifted the near end, slow and even. The tray came out of the bed level. Not one regulator rolled. Alden walked it under Dagna’s shield to the cleared path, set it down, and let out a breath.

“That,” Alden said, “was much better than me pulling.”

Dagna lowered her shield. “That’s the first plan that’s worked exactly how somebody said it would.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Silas said, and was much more pleased than he let his face show.

***

They had cleared two more beds when Leander came down from the far end of the gallery, picking his way along the edge of the walkway.

“Skitter sign at our end,” he said. “Scratch marks on the frames and droppings under the third bed from the end. Nothing moving yet. I’d assume your warm beds are worse.” He looked at the tray of regulators sitting neatly on the path, then at Silas. “You got that out in one piece.”

“The clip was still on,” Silas said.

“I saw you looking at it before anyone touched it.” Leander studied the next bed along, the one under the largest stretch of intact glass, where the air shimmered faintly with warmth. “What’s your read on that one?”

Leander waited for an answer. Silas resisted the urge to look behind him for someone better qualified.

“Warm,” he said. “Lots of cover under the frame. If they’re anywhere, they’re there.”

“Agreed.” Leander nodded once and went back to his team.

Alden crouched beside the warm bed and inspected the exposed edge. Nothing stirred. He set both hands on a rusted watering frame tangled in the vines, ready to ease it up.

Silas glanced down.

Under the edge of the bed, in the dust along the stone, there were fresh scratches, fine and many, running in and out of the dark. As he looked, something under the frame moved: a quick shift, a glint like broken glass where the light caught a curved back.

“Hold!” he shouted.

Alden froze with the frame half an inch off the bed.

Something clicked beneath the frame. Alden looked at Silas, waiting, with the weight still in his hands. He needed an answer now.