"Before They Took It Out"

⭓ ⭓ ⭓

The chained machete was a canyon weapon, and no one at the First Gate used it.

Kadrimani ran the form alone in the blue dark before First Horn, the chain singing through his hands. The blade was a hand-and-a-half of curved iron, dulled for drill, and the chain gave it a reach that did not exist without it. It was built for ledges---for swinging across a gap, for hooking a man's ankle and pulling him off his feet into the drop. Out on the flat salt it was useless, and that was the point. Let it go too long and he would be rusty with it when he went home, and a skein warrior who could not fight Canyon-style was a skein warrior who had forgotten what he was.

The chain wrapped his forearm, unspooled, snapped the blade out in a flat arc that bit the post and held. He pulled it free. Let the chain run back through his palm. Began again. The rhythm was old. He let it run.

"You're the only one here who drills that."

Kadrimani didn't turn. "It's a Canyon weapon. No one here uses it."

"Because it's hard." Jabahazi came up from the Keep side without sound, the way he always came---already there, as if the space had been waiting for him to fill it. He stopped at the edge of the salt with his arms loose at his sides. The dead scar showed through the torn linen, grey and still.

"Because it's hard on flat ground," Kadrimani said. He let the chain run back through his palm, the links cool and familiar. "On a ledge it makes sense. Out here it's useless. That's the point."

Jabahazi watched the chain, not the man. His head tilted a fraction. "And here?"

Kadrimani caught the blade. Let it settle against his palm. The weight was wrong for the flats and he knew it, and he drilled it anyway, because a skein warrior who could not fight Canyon-style was a skein warrior who had forgotten what he was. "Here it keeps me honest. Let it go and I lose it. So I don't let it go."

Jabahazi stepped into the ring the way still water moves when something beneath it shifts. He walked a slow half-circle around Kadrimani, and his eyes went from the chain to the seam to the post and back to the chain, and Kadrimani felt the weight of the looking the way he always felt it---a silence on the scar, a prickle at the base of his skull.

"You held the line at the changeover," Jabahazi said. He stopped his circuit. He was at Kadrimani's shoulder now, close enough that the cold off him was a thing Kadrimani could feel. "You went back into the fissure when the ceiling was falling. You've made a habit of the thing no one else will do."

"Someone had to."

"Someone always has to." Jabahazi reached out and caught the chain where it hung. He didn't pull. He just held it, the links still against his palm. "And it is always you."

He let go. The chain dropped. Kadrimani caught it before it hit the salt.

"The marked girl," Jabahazi said. He was walking again now, slow, his back to Kadrimani, his voice carrying over his shoulder. "In the Keep. You offered to stand at her back."

The beast stirred once, low, and went quiet. Kadrimani coiled the chain around his forearm, link by link, buying himself the time it took to do it. "She's my betrothed."

"Is that all she is."

Kadrimani's hands stilled on the chain. Jabahazi had stopped walking. He stood at the edge of the ring now, facing the north wall, the salt desert pale beyond it, and his silhouette was a dark cut against the white.

"She is a thing they will spend," Jabahazi said. He did not turn. He spoke to the wall, to the salt, to the thing under the salt that Kadrimani's beast had been reaching toward since the road. "You watched the dead speak through her. You know what that room saw. They did not see a Given or a trainee." He turned then, slow, and his flat eyes found Kadrimani's. "They saw an instrument. They will send her to every taken scout and every cold spot on the salt where something might be buried, and they will keep sending her until there is nothing left of her to send, and then they will send what is left."

He walked back toward Kadrimani. Each step was unhurried, deliberate, a man crossing ground he had measured long ago. He stopped an arm's length away---close enough to speak low, close enough that Kadrimani could see the grey of the dead scar, the stillness of the chest beneath it where no breath moved.

"The marked. The skein. The hollow." Jabahazi's voice had not changed. It never went hard and it never went warm. "We are all of us tools to them. The only question anyone here is really answering is how long he lasts before they set him down."

Kadrimani's hands went still on the chain.

He knew the move. He had watched Jabahazi do it to the whole cadre after the changeover---stand over two people the Wall had spent and say a true thing so exactly shaped that the truth came out feeling like a blade. He knew it was being done to him now. That was the trouble with the man. Knowing did not help. The thing he said was true, and Kadrimani had no answer for it that was also true, and Jabahazi knew he had none, and stood in the knowing without pressing, which was worse than pressing.

"Why tell me," Kadrimani said.

Jabahazi looked at him for a long moment. The wind came up off the salt and moved the loose linen at his chest, and the dead scar showed through---grey, still, a door that would never open. He reached up, slow, the way a man reaches for a thing he has touched a thousand times and never grown used to, and laid two fingers flat against the seam.

He did not answer the question. He let his fingers rest there a moment longer than the gesture needed, as if the scar were doing the talking and he were only translating, and then he dropped his hand and turned toward the Keep.

"Ask her," he said, over his shoulder, unhurried, already three strides gone, "what her Obi almost told her not to trust. She stopped herself before the name came out. I was in the room." A pause, not long enough to be for effect, exactly long enough to be worse than effect. "See if the two of you land on the same one."

The chain hung slack in Kadrimani's grip. The beast said nothing at all---and the silence of it was not the quiet of a thing asleep but the quiet of a thing holding still, and Kadrimani, who read most things, did not read that one, because it was the one thing in the world he had never learned to look at straight.

⭓ ⭓ ⭓

Kadrimani stood in the ring with the chain dead in his hand. The beast was still-too still, the stillness of a thing that had heard something it recognized and did not like. He did not examine it. He coiled the chain, link by link, and let the rhythm of the coiling push Jabahazi's words to the back of his mind where he could keep them until he knew what they were worth.

Agan came around the beast-line then, and Kadrimani saw him before Jabahazi turned.

He was moving the way a man moves when something still hurts and he has decided not to show it. And his wrist was out of the splint. That was the first thing---the reed-and-cloth binding Njira had put on it was gone, and the joint under it was still swollen, still the wrong colour, and Agan was carrying it against his chest the way you carry a thing you are pretending you are not carrying.

Kadrimani stopped mid-form. "That's not a week."

"I know."

"You're not healed."

"I know." Agan's eyes went to Jabahazi and came back, and whatever he had caught coming round the corner---and he had caught something, it was in the too-careful set of his face---he folded away where he folded everything. "I need to be stronger."

"You need to be less broken. Put that wrist in a drill now and you're useless a season instead of a week."

"I'm useless anyway if Deka puts me down again." The voice stayed level. Under it ran the same raw refusal he recognized in himself---at least the beating's mine---pressed flat now by daylight and no less there for the pressing. "I can drill footwork. Forms. I can do it one-handed if I have to. I'm not lying on a pallet another day while he decides what to do with me."

Jabahazi had turned fully now, and he was looking at Agan the way a canyon beast turns its head at a scent it did not expect on the wind. Kadrimani watched the interest kindle behind the flat eyes, and something cold set itself down in his own gut, because he had seen that look before. It was the look the man had given him at the gate, the first day, with the beast driving him into the salt on his knees and the whole line watching.

"What happened to your wrist, boy," Jabahazi said.

Agan's face did not move. "I fell. On the east stretch. The ankle gave and I went down on the rocks."

The same lie he had given Kadrimani. It sounded no truer for the second telling. Kadrimani watched Jabahazi read it exactly as he had read it---the too-flat delivery, the detail too specific, the way a lying boy holds your eye because looking away is the tell. Jabahazi did not challenge it. He smiled---small, brief, no warmth anywhere in it.

"Stretch out your hand," Jabahazi said. "The wounded one."

Agan hesitated. Then he uncurled the wrist from his chest and held it out, palm up, and the hand shook with the work of keeping it level. The joint was purple going yellow, the skin still angry over the place the bones had shifted. Kadrimani had set worse. He had also told men with less than that to stay off it a moon.

Jabahazi walked to the rack on the North wall and took down a practice spear---long, dark-hafted, Mountain make, weighted for two hands---and brought it back and laid it across Agan's open palm.

"Hold it."

Agan's arm dropped two inches before he caught it. The spear was not heavy. A child could hold it a breath or two. But the wrist was wrecked and the weight went straight to the wreck, and Kadrimani watched the colour leave Agan's face, watched the jaw lock, watched the whole body go rigid around the point of the pain---and the arm came back up, and held.

Jabahazi watched the arm come up. Something in his flat eyes shifted---the barest flicker, there and gone, the look of a man who has just had a suspicion confirmed.

"You have the one thing the beasts can't give you," he said. "You don't stop."

He stepped back. "Hold it until nightfall. If you can. I'll train you nights, after the day drills, while Kadrimani has you by day. You'll get stronger than you have ever been. Or you'll break." A pause. "Either way you'll have your answer."

Sweat already stood on Agan's forehead. The arm shook in a fine steady tremor from wrist to shoulder, and his eyes streamed at the corners, and his face was set like a door a man has shut from the inside.

"Yes," Agan said.

Jabahazi nodded. He looked at Kadrimani, and the flat eyes held his a half-breath past need. Then he walked toward the Keep, unhurried, and did not look back.

Kadrimani watched him go the length of the ground. Then he looked at Agan.

"He's using you."

"I know."

"You heard what he said to me. Before you came round."

Agan's eyes met his. The spear-point trembled in the air between them, and his voice came tight around the effort of holding it. "I heard enough."

"Then you know what he is."

"I know he's the only one who offered to train me at night." A breath, shallow, careful of the ribs. "I know Deka puts me down again the first chance he gets. I know I can't stop him one-handed with no beast. If Jabahazi wants to use me, let him. I'll use him back. I'll get stronger. And when it comes to it, I'll decide whose I am."

Kadrimani looked at him a long moment. A boy holding a spear on a ruined wrist because the other road was staying small, staying nothing, staying the thing everyone had already decided he was.

The beast stirred, low. It did not understand pride. It understood not going down. Here they were the same thing.

"You're a fool."

"I know."

"That wrist will hurt the rest of your life."

"Then it can match the ankle."

Kadrimani turned away. He crossed to the far corner, took up the machete where he had let it fall, and began the form again. The chain spooled and snapped. The blade found the post. He did not look at Agan.

But every few passes he looked.

Agan stood where the man had left him, spear across his palm, arm shaking. The sun came up off the flats white and hard. Trainees crossed the North ground and glanced at the boy with the wrecked wrist and the shut-door face and did not stop, did not ask, because no one here stopped and no one here asked, and that was the whole architecture of the place.

Kadrimani drilled, and looked, and drilled. And somewhere in the rhythm of the chain---unspool, snap, recover---Jabahazi's words came back to him unbidden. We are all of us tools. He watched the spear tremble in Agan's grip. The only question is how long he lasts before they set him down. Agan's arm was already shaking, and the sun had barely cleared the Wall's shadow, and he was not putting it down. Kadrimani had seen this before. In a dry creek-bed, at nine seasons old, with the beast tearing its way into him and the compound standing on the rim. He had held then, too. Not because anyone would come. Because holding was the only thing left that was his.

He did not say it to Agan. He did not need to. The spear held, and the chain sang, and the morning wore on.

By midday, the tremor had spread to Agan's shoulder. Kadrimani suspected his whole right side was a single wire of pain, and he had stopped feeling the hand at all---a dead weight at the end of a burning arm, the spear resting on a palm that no longer told him it was there. Agan held it by memory, by the shape of the haft he could still see, by the refusal to let the thing drop.

By late afternoon, his knees were shaking. The sun had moved across the sky and the shadows had lengthened until the spear's shadow stretched halfway across the Yard, a long dark line pointing north. The North ground had emptied of its drills. The last trainees had gone to water, and still he stood. The spear had become the only thing in the world. There was nothing but the haft and the weight and the arm that would not put it down. His shadow pooled at his feet, and the pool spread, and still he stood.

At dusk, when the last light was going, Kadrimani stopped his form. He crossed the ground and stood in front of Agan, and Agan looked at him out of eyes that had gone somewhere far off and were only now coming back.

"Nightfall," Kadrimani said.

Agan looked at the sky. Then he lowered the spear. His arm did not bend---it had forgotten how. He used his left hand to take the haft from his right, and the right arm dropped to his side like a thing that no longer belonged to him.

Kadrimani caught him before he went down. He got a shoulder under Agan's good arm and half-carried him to the trough, where he sat him on the stone lip and pushed a waterskin into his left hand.

"Drink."

Agan drank. The water ran down his chin. His right arm hung at his side, useless, and the wrist was swollen worse than it had been that morning, and he was looking at it like a thing he had decided not to care about.

"You held it," Kadrimani said.

"I held it."

"That was stupid."

"I know." Agan lowered the skin. His voice was raw and slow, and his eyes when they met Kadrimani's had something in them that had not been there at dawn. "But I know I can hold it. That's what I needed."

Kadrimani sat down on the trough beside him. They did not speak. The dark came down over the Yard, and the elders began their hum, and somewhere across the salt something ancient and patient was still waiting, and here on the lip of a water-trough two boys sat in the quiet with their matched broken bodies and did not need to fill it.

He saw it, after a while. The thing under the thing. Agan had won his Gambit on foot and been told it did not count. Had been ground under Deka a whole season. Had been put on the Den floor by eight men who did not trouble to learn his name. And he got up. He came back. He held the spear.

Kadrimani had been broken at nine in a dry creek-bed, three hours screaming while the compound stood on the rim and did not come down. Told every day since that the thing in him was a monster. He had learned to hold it. To fight with it and without it. To stand at the back of people who would never once stand at his.

The same fire burned in both of them, at the same heat---the refusal to stay down, to be small, to be the thing the world had already named them. He had not looked for a brother out here. He had stopped looking for anything out here.

Brotherhood, back home, had never begun with affection. It began the first time another man chose to keep standing after every sensible reason to stop had already arrived. One watched. One remembered. One day you realized his survival had become part of the way you measured one's own. No one announced it. No oath was sworn. The mountain simply counted one more rope between two people who would carry each other when the climb turned bad.

And the salt had handed him one anyway, holding a spear he had no business holding, shaking, not putting it down.

⭓ ⭓ ⭓

That night the beast dreamed of salt.

The same dream, always the same. The hum in the teeth. The white flats running past the edge of the world. The face that was not a face turned toward him across a distance with no measure in it. It did not speak. It never spoke. It waited, patient, the way the salt waited, the way everything under the salt had waited longer than there had been a First Gate to wait inside.

He woke with the threads out.

They had come while he slept---leaked from the seam, lain across the pallet, reached into the dark toward nothing he could name. He drew them in. It took longer than it should. It always took longer at night, when the day's holding was spent and the beast came up close under the scar to feel at the world through the seam.

Across the barracks, Jabahazi was awake.

He sat upright against the far wall, still in the way no canyon man is ever still, and his eyes caught what little light there was and returned none of it. He was watching. He had been watching, Kadrimani understood, some while.

Kadrimani drew the last of the dark inside him and lay back down. He put his thumb to the memory-cord at his wrist, the knots he had tied himself, alone, one for each thing he had lived through and never spoken of, and he made himself think of Fatifa instead---of a shoulder a hand's breadth from his in the blue dark of the Den, of the one person in the whole Gate his beast would sleep beside, of a girl can have her secrets and the flicker in it he had still not found the shape of. One person did not look away from him. He held that the way he held the cord, and let it be the thing that took him under.

And something stayed after Kadrimani was gone under, settling into the places already worn soft for it---where Osei had taken his half-step back, where the drywash still threw its echo, where a compound had stood on a rim and listened to a child scream and not come down. Not words this time. A name he did not have and a room he had not been in, and a woman who had almost said something and had not, and a man who knew she almost had. They found the place, at eighteen, in the salt, where he had knelt and named himself the danger, and they lay down in it, and made themselves at home.

But so did the other thing. The spear, still held. The boy, still standing. The brother the salt had handed him, shaking, not putting it down. That stayed too. It had less weight than the old words, but it was newer, and it was his, and it did not go away.

The man from the gate did not close his eyes.