She did not lower the hatchet. "Put the knife down." He crouched, slowly, and laid the rusted blade on the stones. He did not put it far away. She noticed that. Her eyes went to it and came back to his face and something in her jaw got harder. "Now the belt." "No." The word came out flat, and he heard himself say it with a kind of distant interest. Old Gaara had spent fifteen years saying yes in rooms like this. "The belt has my food money in it," he said. "You can kill me for it if you want. I'd rather you didn't, and I'd rather not spend the next hour pretending I have nothing to lose. The knife's on the ground. That's what you actually asked for." Seven metres of silence. "You talk like a clerk," she said. "I've been called worse in better circumstances." "Where are you from?" And there it was. He had turned the question over for the last two hours of walking, out of habit, the way he used to prepare for a board meeting on the drive in. There were three good lies available. Amnesia was clean and closed off follow-up questions. A traveller from far away was flexible. Saying nothing at all was the safest of the three. He had discarded all of them for the same reason. A lie needs a world behind it. Say you come from the east, and she asks which road, and there is a road, and it has a name he does not know, and it passes a river he cannot name either. Every lie he told would need a hundred facts he did not have, and he would be building it live, in front of a woman holding an axe, in a language he had owned for four minutes. The truth had exactly one advantage. He would never have to remember it. "You won't believe me," he said. "Try." "I'm not from here. Not from the east, not over the mountains. Not from this world." He kept his hands open and visible. "Yesterday I went to sleep in a room in a city with a million people in it, in a building made of glass, and I woke up under a slab in there." He tipped his head at the ruin behind him. "That is the whole thing. I have no better version." She looked at him for a long moment. "You're right," she said. "I don't believe you." "That's fair." "Say it again." He blinked. "What?" "Say it again. The part about the glass." He said it again. Her eyes narrowed. Not the way people look at a liar. The way people look at a sum that will not come out. "You say it the same both times," she said, half to herself. "Liars decorate." "Give me a while and I'll decorate. I'm tired and I haven't eaten since I got here." "When was that?" "This morning. I think." He looked up at the sun, which was well past the top of the sky, and felt his stomach fold over. "Definitely today." The hatchet came down. Not away, just down, resting against her thigh. "What's in the ruin?" "Two Gloom Crawlers," he said. "Were. There's a nest at the back of the second chamber, past the fallen corridor. They drag what they kill into it." That landed somewhere. He watched it land, and watched her decide not to show him where. "Describe them." "Body about the size of a pig, six legs, two whip arms with barbs. Red eyes, six of them on the big one. They smell like a butcher's bin in August." He shrugged. "The big one favours wide sweeps and lifts its head at the end of them. That is where the plate stops. There is a seam behind the skull, about two fingers wide." Her face changed at that. Properly, this time. "How do you know where the seam is?" "Because I put a rock in it." "With what?" "A piece of obsidian, about so long." He held his hands apart. "It broke." "And the second one?" "I dropped a ceiling on it and then finished it with the same rock." She stared at him. "Alone," she said. "There was nobody else available." Something moved behind her eyes, fast, and he caught all of it. That part still worked. It worked better here, if anything. Directors train the tells out. They sit through media coaching and learn to hold a face like a held breath, and reading one is close work, a quarter second of the wrong blink at the end of a sentence. Marit was not trained. She was tired and frightened and her face did what her face wanted. What he did not have was the dictionary. He could see that her eyes had flicked to the ruin and back, but not whether that was fear or duty or something this place did instead of crossing itself. The pause before her next question was either suspicion or ordinary manners. The instrument was fine. He simply had no idea yet what the readings meant, and until he did he would be guessing with confidence, which he knew from long experience is the most expensive way to be wrong. Then her gaze dropped. Down his torn shirt, past the belt. To his feet. She went very still. "Where did you get those boots?" Ah. "From the nest," he said. He did not soften it. "There were remains in it. Three people, maybe four, it was hard to tell. The boots were the only thing worth taking and I had no shoes. I took the belt and the pouch as well." He paused. "I said thank you. For whatever that's worth to you, which I understand is nothing." "Lift your foot." He lifted it. She crossed the seven metres faster than he liked and went down on one knee in front of him, close enough that he could have driven a heel into her jaw, and he understood that she knew that and had come anyway. Her hand closed around his ankle and turned it. She was looking at the outside of the heel, where the leather had been cut open and stitched shut again in a coarse cross pattern by somebody who had been in a hurry. She looked at that stitching for a long time. When she stood up her eyes were wet and her voice was completely level. "His name was Teodor," she said. "He went in at the start of harvest. He had a bad ankle, so he had the heel built out, twice, because he wore through it." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, briskly, the way you deal with rain. "His mother has been leaving a lamp out. Every night. Since harvest." Gaara said nothing. He had a dozen things available. Condolences. A qualifier about not having known. In his old life he had been very good at the noise you make in a room when something bad has happened to somebody else, the professional murmur, and he could feel the whole practised sequence waiting at the back of his teeth. He did not use it, and he was not sure he was right not to. He had no idea what these people did with grief. In some places you say the name. In some places you never say it again. In some places a stranger who offers sympathy is claiming a share of something that is not his. He did not know which of those he was standing in, and he had learned exactly one useful thing about unfamiliar rooms in fifteen years of walking into them: when you cannot read the code, the cheapest mistake is usually the quiet one. So he stood in a dead man's boots and kept his mouth shut, and let her have the silence, and privately noted that he might be getting this wrong too. "Sit down," she said finally. "What?" "Sit down before you fall down. You've gone the colour of a fish." She was already unslinging a satchel from under the wood bundle. "I have bread and I have cheese and both of them are old. You get half." He sat on a block of fallen masonry and ate half a loaf of dense grey bread and a wedge of hard cheese, and it was the best meal of either of his lives. His hands shook halfway through. She watched him without comment. "Marit," she said, when he had finished. "Gaara." "That's not a name." "It is now." She snorted, and it surprised her more than it surprised him. "Oldstep is an hour that way." She nodded south, toward the smoke. "Forty houses. It sits on the old road, which is why it's called that. You can come." "Generous." "It isn't. You're carrying the wood." She kicked the bundle toward him. "And when we get there you'll say the part about Teodor to his mother, in front of the elder, in those exact words. Not the part about the glass city. Nobody needs that today." He looked at the bundle. It was substantial. "You understand I killed two of those things this morning." "And I've cut wood since I was six." She picked up his rusted knife, considered it, and handed it back to him hilt first, which he registered as the single most significant thing that had happened in the conversation. "Carry the wood." He carried the wood. It was heavier than it looked and the strap cut into his shoulder and about twenty minutes in he discovered that a body with CON 8 still complains, it just complains from further away. He kept up. That fact alone kept him quiet and privately delighted for most of the walk. She talked, when he asked. Not much, and never about herself. Three people gone since spring, Teodor the fourth. The crawlers had never come out of the ruin before, not in her lifetime, not in her grandmother's. Then in spring something had changed. People started finding tracks in the outer fields. Two dogs went. Then a boy who had been fishing, then a man with a cart, then Teodor, who had gone in after them because somebody had to and because he was the sort who went. "Why hasn't anyone dealt with it?" he asked. "The lord's men came in summer." "And?" "And they rode around the outside of the ruin for two days, and they ate a great deal, and then they were called east because there's a war on somewhere that isn't here." She adjusted the strap on her shoulder. "The elder sends a letter every month. Someone in a warm room reads them, I expect." He laughed. It came out short and ugly. "What," she said. "Nothing. It's just familiar." He shifted the bundle. "The work exists. The people who could authorise it are busy having a more important argument in another building." She gave him a sideways look. "You talk like a clerk," she said again. "But not like a coward." "Those aren't opposites where I come from. Some of the worst cowards I ever met had extremely good posture." The road came out of the trees onto a shallow rise, and there was Oldstep below them, forty houses of stone and thatch strung along a paved road far too grand for it, a road that came out of the forest, went through the village, and disappeared into the forest again, going somewhere that no longer existed. Smoke. Goats. A woman beating a rug. Two children who saw them coming and ran, and he could not tell whether they ran toward the village to tell or away because of him. His stomach was full and his shoulder hurt and he was walking into the first settlement of a world he had been in for less than a day. He looked sideways at Marit, and he was thinking about what he was going to say to a woman who had been leaving a lamp out since harvest. And a panel opened beside her head. Marit Halden Level 6 Human He stopped walking. She got three steps further before she noticed and turned around, one eyebrow up, entirely ordinary, a woodcutter's daughter with a bundle on her back and a dead friend in a ruin behind her. There was no panel in front of her face. Nothing hung in her air at all. She was not looking at anything. Level 6. Which meant the numbers were not his. They were not a gift, they were not a reward, they were not a private miracle handed to a man who had suffered enough. They were simply how this place worked, and everyone in that village down there had a number over them, and something had been counting all of them for a very long time. Including him. Especially him. "What," said Marit. "Nothing," he said, and started walking again. "Thought I saw something."

Chapter 4: Liars decorate