The Claim

1-28-2015

The riot of battle done, Esker’s wound reasserted itself as he skulked along an alley of the claim. It was not bleeding too freely—it was a small wound, and his blood scabbed fast—but it was bleeding, and not a little, and who knew what might have been on the damned bullet? [[54]] He paused to notch the fabric of his trousers with the swordspear, then rip a long strip from it. He would look ludicrous, but there was no help for it. He packed the wound on both sides, then bound it. 

He dug around in his satchel until he found the list of words that Ruth had given him. The annotations were better than he had remembered, split by places to look for from the streets and places to look for inside. On the streets, the recommendation was to look for a “hospital” or “school of medicine” or “department of life engineering,” probably in that order; inside, the words grew more finely focused, “acoustics” and “throat” and “force” and so on. 

When Esker stood to go looking for them, he nearly fell. [[186]]

That was clear enough, then. He stood still until the black withdrew from the edges of his vision, then turned to make his way toward the nearest building, a four-story stone mansion with a crumbling red roof. Something nagged at the periphery of his vision, though. He turned all the way around to see a trail of drops. “The Nine preserve me,” he muttered, and forced himself farther down the path. 

After what felt like an hour, he reached the end of it. The trail of drops was still visible in the [[dusk]] light, at least to his soldier’s eyes. 

Something else was there too, farther back. He should not have been able to see it, not at that distance, not lurking so still; but it was etched on his eyes nonetheless, the hulking arms with tiny hands at the end, the lipless face with exposed gums and teeth.

He made his legs move faster. The black was returning to the edge of his sight. His limbs felt like lead, grudging things hanging from his torso, listening only at intervals to his mind; his throat tightened with lack of breath. There was no question of distancing himself any farther from the blood trail; he needed to be out of sight now, before he lost consciousness.

By the time he ascended the stair of yet another four-story stone mansion, he needed to lean on the door and drag a few ragged breaths into his lungs before he pushed the hanging door aside. He could smell the [[bloodbinder]], hear it breathing.

The foyer of the mansion was spacious, interrupted about two-thirds of the way back by a desk before the front stairs began. The walls were graven with the ancient script, discolored in rectangular spots where portraits or tapestries might once have hung; there was more recent sign here as well, old squatters’ fires, the scattered broken bones of birds, a cheap knife bent at the middle of the blade. Esker looked at the stairs, thinking to put some distance between himself and the ground, but they loomed like cliffs, his own blood the breakers lashing fruitlessly against them. He remembered the cliffs at Piko, white like these stairs, the water blood-dark except for where it foamed—and his own blood felt as icy as that striving water, though he knew the tides that kept it flowing were far from eternal. My heart is the moon, he said, and envisioned it exsanguinated, bled moon-white. Feeble moon. Weak tide. 

Foyers have coatrooms, he thought, or closets; little spaces, hidden from the main thoroughfare. He stumbled off to the right and found a low wooden door opening on a long, narrow space. There were metal braces in the wall, he saw with satisfaction, though the rods and hangers must have been plundered long ago. He got over the door, then back into the very back of the closet. He thought he might turn around, so he could at least see if someone or something came for him. Then again, he thought after trying it, best to conserve strength. There was no point in seeing his killer, not when he was this weak. Not when he couldn’t see anything at all.