"Chief," Carly said again, because I hadn't answered. "How much for a run?"
The whole counting room waited on me. That was new.
A few weeks ago I'd been the cheapest name on the chalk slate behind Mehix's counter. The slate was the price board of the rental pool, the registrar's office that rented support students by the run at a price set by their rank. My price had been the floor price, which bought a mug of bad ale and half a pie.
Now my line on the slate was a wet grey smear where Mehix had wiped it with his sleeve.
I looked at the smear, then at Carly.
She was leaning back on the counter on both elbows, a toothpick in the corner of her mouth and her stormcaller's coat hooked on one finger over her shoulder. Her bleached hair was growing out dark at the roots. Her grey eyes stayed on me. She had the look of a bartender sizing up the last man at the end of the bar, deciding whether he got one more or a glass of water.
"I'm not for rent," I said.
It came out a size quieter than I meant. Four days without a voice had taught me to spend it carefully.
"Everybody's for rent, chief. It's just the number."
"Not me. Not anymore." I nodded at the smear. "I'm a partner. The squad splits everything four ways, and partners don't get rented out by the run. We don't have a price because we don't have a slate."
Her toothpick stopped.
It had been rolling the whole time, corner to corner, in a slow tick-tock. The second I said partner, it went still between her teeth. I noticed, and I noticed that I'd noticed, which was a different problem.
Beside me on the Bench, Taeth's crutch tapped the floorboards in a happy little rhythm. He was enjoying this enormously.
Down the counter, Semaux's thumb landed on her pommel once, hard enough to click.
She'd come in for the squad's share of the glass money and stayed for the show. Her other hand rested on her mother's parrying dagger at her hip, as if she had to check every few minutes that it was really back.
Carly glanced at her. Semaux looked back. Neither of them blinked, for about as long as it takes to pour a shot.
"Miss Paxton." Mehix didn't look up from his ledger, and its brass corners caught the window light. "Partners don't rent. It's a rule. I wrote it the other day and I'm rather fond of it." He turned a page. "And you, as of this morning, are not free to ask."
"Didn't say I was free," Carly said. "Said I was asking."
"Your contract with Mr. Carver's team is exclusive." Now he looked up over his spectacles. "A term booking. Nobody else may use you until it ends or someone buys it out, and a buyout costs what's left on it plus half again. I have the figure. You won't like it."
"I never like the figure. That's how you know it's real."
Mehix almost smiled. On him it looked like a crease in paper.
"While you're both cluttering my counter." He tapped a fresh notice pinned to the board behind him. "The winners' pass. The trial-winning squad may dive to floor twelve for the rest of the term, rank or no rank."
"Twelve," Semaux said. "Good."
"And the Winners' Descent, on the eightieth day. One sounding of floor fifteen before Riseday, with academy guides, for the winners only."
"Fifteen." Semaux's hand went still on the dagger. "Nobody in third year has seen fifteen."
"Nobody in third year has won the trial with an F-rank support," Mehix said. "This year is full of firsts. I find it exhausting."
Carly pushed off the counter. She dug in her coat pocket, came up with a copper penny, and set it on the wood in front of me, right under where my price used to be chalked.
"For the conversation," she said.
Then she walked out with her coat over her shoulder and didn't look back. The toothpick had started moving again by the door. I watched it go and wondered what I'd said to stop it.
"That's a penny, Ian," Taeth said. "You're looking at it like it's a letter."
"It's a nice penny."
"It's a bribe. A small one. Charge her more next time." The crutch tapped. "Oh, wait. You can't."
Semaux swept the penny off the counter into her palm and put it in her pocket.
"Squad money," she said. "Everything splits four ways."
The next morning the Bench brought me tea.
The Bench was exactly that: a long pale wooden bench along the foot of the great board in the hall, where unbooked supports sat and waited for somebody to need them. I'd sat there for weeks at the floor price, and some mornings nobody needed me at all. I still sat there. Partners don't rent, but it was the best seat in the hall.
The warden with the cracked shield brought the tea himself, in a chipped cup with a blue rim. The chip faced me, which I chose to take as a compliment. The two menders who shared one scarf waved from their end. The rope-maker was splicing a line and nodded without looking up.
Someone had drawn the pool's chalk mark on the wall above my seat, the slash and circle chalked on a rented support's sleeve. Someone else had struck a line through it.
"Somebody's going to scrub that," I said.
"Somebody's going to get hit with a shield," the warden said, and sat.
Behind us the great board rose to the ceiling. We called it the Tally, a grey stone wall cut from older rock. Names rose and fell on its face in pale light, ranked by kills, depth and trial points, and nothing else.
The rock came from the Gauge, a vein of old stone deep under the academy that had read every one of us the day we arrived and kept reading us on every floor.
My name was at the bottom of the first-year column. GRIFFIN, Cheer Mage, 212 of 212, rank F.
Cheer Mage was my class: war-cheers, beaten rhythm, the herald's calls before a charge. It got a laugh in every room I'd said it in. The Tally didn't count cheers, or light, or mending, or the warden standing in front of a thing with teeth so somebody else could stab it. It counted who did the stabbing. I'd made my peace with that, mostly.
Two first-years had set up under the trial panel with a stub of chalk and were taking bets on the stone. RATI, VALISIETH, THOMAR and GRIFFIN, with odds beside each. They'd given me the longest odds, though it was hard to know what they thought I'd lose at.
"Six to one against you," Taeth said, swinging up on his crutch. "On what, though?"
"Existing, probably."
"I put a stag on you to keep existing. It's a long bet." He took a gulp of my tea without asking. "Neidrel's in Mehix's office with bread. He's calling it evidence."
He was. When the squad came down the hall, Neidrel had a whole round loaf on Mehix's counter, still warm, and Mehix was eating a heel of it with great dignity.
"It's for the ledger," he said, chewing. "The kitchen master's. She says the bread proves her shifts. I'm examining the evidence."
"Examine it slower," Neidrel said. "There's more."
Semaux came last, her hair still damp from the yard. Val walked beside her with the look of someone who'd spent the night watching a ceiling.
"Sleep all right?" I asked her.
"Beautifully." She didn't hesitate. "I slept like a felled tree. Several felled trees. A whole forest of them, side by side, unconscious."
The tips of her ears went pink.
I let it go. With Val, you waited for the second sentence, and some days it never came.
We sat on the Bench in a row with our chits out, which in the hall was borderline obscene. A chit was a brass tag on a chain, warm against the chest and linked to the same stone, and only its owner could read the words that rose on its face. Showing one was like taking your shirt off at dinner, so we shielded them with our hands like card players.
Each of the women had points sitting unspent on hers.
That was Unison: what a night with me left between me and a woman. My cheers landed harder on her and cost me less, and each night gave us both one free point to place where we liked. None of us had planned it. The Gauge had simply noticed and chimed.
"Swift," Neidrel said, and pressed her thumb to the brass. "Both of them. I'm sick of being slow."
"You're not slow," I said.
"I'm a door, chief. Doors aren't slow, they're shut. I want to be a door that gets there first."
Semaux placed hers without a word, all three into Swift, fast and done. Val held her chit a long moment before she put hers into Nerve.
"For crowds," she said. "Not that I need it."
I'd worked out how to explain a Threshold, in case anyone from home ever asked. It was the highest level a body would reach on its own. Every fighter had one, and the chit showed it from the day you were measured. When you got there, XP simply stopped. You could kill a hundred things and the number wouldn't move.
The hall had a word for a fighter stuck there: the plateau. It treated a plateaued fighter as finished.
Under my cheers, in a fight with real danger in it, the number moved. Whatever a woman earned past it, she kept, whether she stayed with us or walked.
Semaux had been stuck at twenty-two for two years. She was twenty-seven now.
"Floor ten," she said, standing. "Today. First again. Everything."
"Breakfast first," Neidrel said.
"Floor ten has breakfast."
"Floor ten has bellmaws. That's not breakfast, that's a bad morning."
The winners' pass got us through the Deep's gate silently. The guard on his stool just waved.
The Keimore Deep went down under the academy in floors, like a building turned upside down. We went down them one by one and touched each waystone as we passed, the warm grey pillars where nothing hunted within twenty paces. Floor eight cost us an hour and a weeping knight. Floor nine cost us a nest of shrieker bats and most of Val's patience. By the last stair my chit had been warming steadily all morning.
On the stair down to ten, Neidrel started humming.
It was a kitchen song about a baker's daughter and a runaway cart. She hummed it low, under her breath, the way she did before a fight she didn't love. The tower shield on her back knocked the wall on every narrow turn.
"Bellmaw," Val said from the bottom step. "Long gallery. One. Big."
I came down beside her and looked.
The gallery ran straight for sixty or seventy yards, low and wide, its floor slick with a grey slime that smelled like old pennies. At the far end a bellmaw hung from the ceiling like a swollen iron-grey fruit. Its whole underside was one huge bell-shaped mouth, open and ridged inside.
A bellmaw's toll stunned anything that heard it. It rang through your bones and froze you where you stood. You didn't fight a bellmaw. You got to it before it rang, or you lay there while its friends ate you.
"It'll ring when it sees us," Semaux said. "Seventy yards. We won't reach it."
"I can shoot the mouth," Val said.
"Arrows in the mouth make it ring louder. Everyone knows that."
"I didn't say it would help."
My chit went hot, like a coin left on a stove. It chimed once, a clear note only I could hear, and words rose on the brass.
```status LEVEL 15 Cheer Mage | Ian Griffin Brawn 6 | Swift 28 | Nerve 32 | Aether 5 | Mettle 32 Lungs 80 New cheer slot (4) ```
"What?" Semaux said. She'd seen my face. "What number?"
"Fifteen."
"Read it."
I read it to her, quietly. Brawn was still six, which meant I could carry a sack of flour if it was a small sack and I was motivated. Lungs was my breath, counted: every cheer I held spent it, and when it ran out, the cheers stopped.
The last line was the one that mattered. A slot was how many different cheers I could hold at once. I'd had three. Now I had four.
"Four," Semaux said. She looked at the bellmaw, then at Neidrel. So did I.
My cheers landed on everyone in the squad who could hear me and wanted them, all of us at once and all the same. I couldn't aim them at one person. Somebody still had to be the one running, and that somebody needed speed, strength, a body that wouldn't fold and nerve that wouldn't freeze if the toll came early.
"Neidrel," I said. "How fast are you now?"
She grinned, and the gap in her teeth showed. "Two points faster than yesterday."
"Want to find out how fast with four cheers held?"
"Door's open, chief."
Earshot was how far a cheer carried: about twenty-five yards for me in open air, half that around bends. The gallery was straight, but I'd still have to run behind her.
"When I say," I told the others, "you all hit what's left."
Semaux narrowed her eyes. "I'll hit it first."
"You'll hit it second."
She didn't argue. That worried me more than if she had.
Neidrel set her shield on her arm and her maul in her fist, rolled her shoulders, and went.
I gave the squad Go!, three quick knocks of sound, for Swift. Then Heave, two deep hauls like pulling a rope, for Brawn. Then Hold!, short-short-long, for Mettle. And then, for the first time ever, a fourth on top: Steady, two long pulls under all of it, for Nerve. Four rhythms braided together, and my head felt like a kitchen at the dinner rush.
Neidrel hit the gallery floor like a dropped cart.
Twenty yards, and slime sprayed off her boots. Thirty, and the bellmaw stirred, its mouth swinging toward the sound of her feet. Forty.
My Lungs were pouring out of me like water from a cracked jug. Four cheers didn't cost four times as much. Each new one doubled the drain, and I could feel the count sliding with every breath.
The bellmaw's ridged mouth flexed. It was going to ring before she got there. I could see it already: Neidrel ten yards short, frozen mid-stride with her shield up, and the whole thing coming down on her.
I Reprised Go!
A Reprise was the same cheer again in a new rhythm, stacked on top of itself, which the chit swore it couldn't do. I gave it the old stadium clap. Then a drum loop from a game I hadn't played in three years. Then the waltz beat on the three. Then an improvised beat, and another after it, just noise in a pattern. Past the third Reprise, each one took something out of me, and the back of my throat scraped raw twice.
Neidrel stopped being a woman running and became a thing moving.
The toll began. I felt it before I heard it, a hum in my teeth like a spoon struck on a pot.
She was already there.
Her shield came up and slammed into the bell-mouth from underneath and shut it, iron on iron, with a noise like a tavern door kicked closed. The toll choked off into a sick gong. Her maul came round behind the shield and caved the bloated body in.
"Now!" I croaked.
Val's arrow took it through the side. Semaux was there half a breath later, sword flat and fast, and opened what was left. The bellmaw came down off the ceiling like a sack of wet washing and burst on the floor. Glass skittered across the slime, pale blue and clear.
I dropped all four cheers at once. My Lungs were nearly empty and my throat felt sanded.
Neidrel stood over the wreck with her shield still raised, staring back up the gallery at the stair.
"I was there," she said. She sounded almost angry. "I was back there, and then I was there. Did you see? I've never been anywhere first in my life."
"I saw," I said. It came out a rasp.
"You sound terrible."
"I feel great."
Val crouched over the glass and scooped it into her hood with both hands, because she'd forgotten a bag again. Bellmaw glass sold well.
Semaux wiped her sword on the bellmaw's hide and said nothing. She'd hit it second, and her jaw said so.
At the floor-ten waystone the others went to fill the waterskins at a seep in the wall.
Semaux didn't. She sat down on the warm stone next to me, close, her sweaty shoulder against mine. Her short black hair stuck to her forehead, and she smelled like the yard and steel and bellmaw.
"She got the kill," she said.
"You got the second hit."
"I don't want the second anything." She turned her head, and her amber eyes were very close. "First again. Everything. I'm not waiting another two years for anything."
I looked at her mouth, then back at her eyes. She saw me do it and didn't move away.
"Is that a threat," I said, "or an offer?"
"Yes."
She held my look for one more breath. Then she stood, picked up her sword belt and walked off toward the seep as if she'd said something about the weather. Her thumb tapped the pommel twice on the way.
I sat there with my throat burning and my chit warm on my chest, and I was very happy.
We came up into the hall at dusk, loud the way you come up after a good floor. Neidrel was singing the baker's-daughter song out loud now. Val had glass rattling in her hood, and Semaux had already picked the apothecary who'd underpay us least.
The Bench was quiet.
That was the first wrong thing. Dusk was when teams came up short and needed a mender, or came up lost and needed a lamp, and the Bench haggled.
Nobody was haggling.
The old warden sat with his hands on his knees. The two menders sat together under their one scarf. The rope-maker had stopped splicing. Every support on that long pale bench sat facing the hall, very still, and each of them had a ribbon pinned on the sleeve.
Maroon and grey. House Ardarford's colors, Cameron's sponsor. The ribbons were pinned neatly over the white chalk mark of the pool, so you could still see the slash and circle under the silk.
Taeth was at the end of the row. He saw us and got up on his crutch slowly, the splinted leg swinging. He wore a maroon tabard over his shirt, new, with a sharp grey border, and it hung on him as if somebody else had dressed him.
"Sorry, Ian," he said, before anyone asked.
Above my seat the struck-through chalk mark was still on the wall. Somebody had pinned a maroon ribbon beside it.
