The Spire’s
Shadow

Kasimir knelt in the dirt beside his skimmer.

It lay on its side with the belly plates up, which was no way for a machine to be. The horn had gone in at the seam of the left plate and snapped off below the surface, and he had been two days getting at it. He worked the pry bar down into the gap beside it, turned the bar until it bit, and leaned.

It came up out of the socket and into his hand. Six inches of yellow-black, twisted and dry all the way through, snapped off ragged. Took nine seconds, in the end, once he got the angle right.

The plate was scored to hell around the socket, a bright gouge worked in deep where the horn had sat and turned. And running off from it, down along the housing and out of sight, the crack he had put there himself at the waystation with a pry bar. Cost him half a day.

He put his shoulder under the frame and heaved the skimmer up onto its struts, and something ground in his left knee halfway through, and he stood there a moment with a hand on the saddle and breathed until it passed.

Then he got a leg over and thumbed the lift. Nothing came up through the frame. No hum, no shudder in the plates, none of that lean the thing did when it took his weight and came off the ground.

“Son of a bitch.”

The skimmer sat in the dirt with a man on it.

He stayed there longer than there was any use in staying. Two hundred miles to his own door. Ten coins in his coat. And the sword in its scabbard along the skimmer’s frame, which had been a good deal more than a piece of steel before Coll and had not been much since.

“—can’t go out with no boots. That’s how you lose your feet—”

Kasimir looked up the road.

A man was coming up out of the east, talking to nobody. Nightshirt torn open and hanging off one shoulder, and no boots on him at all, and the ground out here would have the skin off a foot inside an hour.

“—under the bench. They’re under the bench, I put them under the bench.”

Kasimir sat with his hands on the frame and watched him go by.

He had one arm held across his front like it was splinted, and nothing broken about it that Kasimir could see. Blood on him to the elbow, dried brown, and more of it down his chest, and none of it looked to be coming from anywhere. The nightshirt hung off the shoulder and the shoulder had been burned, and the burn went in bands, and between every band was skin that hadn’t taken any heat at all.

Kasimir had never seen that before.

The man went past close enough to touch and did not look at him, or at the skimmer, and a skimmer sat dead on an empty road is the most interesting thing for a mile in either direction.

Kasimir got down off it. The knee took the landing badly and he stood there a moment with his weight on the other leg, watching him go, thinking about the pattern those burns had made.

Then he went after him.

“Hey.”

He got a hand on the arm and came round in front of him, and the man stopped without any argument. There wasn’t enough left in him to do otherwise.

The man was a head shorter than Kasimir and old enough to be somebody’s grandfather. And the beard was gone off the left side of his face, singed away uneven, close in at the jaw and ragged where it stopped.

Kasimir looked at that.

The man’s eyes were open too wide and had been for hours by the look of them, and they did not settle. Not on Kasimir’s face, not on the road behind him, not on anything at all.

“Mera has the lamp cus it’s dark.” He said it helpfully. He was trying.

Kasimir looked past him, east. The road ran back that way and climbed and went over a ridge, and beyond the ridge there was smoke. One line of it, standing straight up in the still air, thick and black at the root of it. Nothing a man lights on purpose makes that much.

“You come from Greenrun.”

Kasimir got his other hand on the man’s other arm, so he had both of them. “What happened.”

“It stood in the road.” The man was perfectly calm about it, and he had found a way to look through Kasimir rather than at him. “It stood in the road and it looked at the well and it didn’t do anything for a while, it just stood there. Nine, and then eleven. That’s twenty. But there’s only nineteen. Somebody’s counted wrong, somebody’s counted somebody twice.”

“Twenty of what.”

The man’s mouth kept going but the numbers were all that came out of it. Nine and then eleven. Nine and then eleven.

Kasimir turned the man’s arm over and got a proper look at the burn. The bands were clean-edged and about two fingers wide, every one of them the same, laid across the shoulder and down over the ribs with good pale skin between.

He pulled the shirt down off the shoulder to see the rest of it and the whole thing came away in his hand, and the man stood there in the road with nothing on him above the waist and did not appear to notice.

“Who burned you.”

“He said stand still.” And then, brightening, as though he had finally got hold of the useful part. “He said if you stand still. That’s what he said, he said stand still and it goes past you, and I stood still, and Mera didn't stand still, but I’m still standing still. Like he said.”

“Who said.”

The man nodded. He kept nodding, and then he was talking about the bench again, and the boots under it, and his free hand had come up and he was counting on his fingers, absently, not looking at them.

He pulled against Kasimir’s grip while he did it, weakly, in no particular direction.

The wind turned while Kasimir was still holding him. It came up the road out of the east with smoke in it, and for half a second he was glad of it, because he hadn’t had anything hot since before Dryrun.

Then it had hair in it, and fat, and flesh. And under all of that something sweet that had no business being sweet. He knew it. A coilspark run hot. The air off a lift plate that’s been going too long. Machine smell. Spire smell. Not anything that ought to be coming off a village. He went to breathing through his mouth without deciding to, and then he could taste it, which was worse.

He looked at the man he had hold of.

The feet were the worst of him, cut through and going black at the edges, and he did not appear to know it. The burns wanted washing and binding. And whatever had been holding his head together had let go somewhere before dawn and was not coming back.

West was two days of red ground and a waystation that might have a man in it and might not. He would not make either.

East was half a day back to whatever Kasimir could smell on that wind.

He had him in his hand, in fact, and could have turned him around with about four pounds of pressure. Kasimir knew all of that standing there.

He let go.

The man walked on. He was still going when Kasimir lost him round the bend, still talking, and the thing about the bench was the last of it that carried.

Kasimir stood in the road a while with his back to the smoke.

The skimmer wasn’t going anywhere either. He unbuckled the sword off the frame and laid it in the road. Then he got his hands on the handle column and put his back into it, and got the machine over to where the ground fell away off the side of the road, and gave it the last of the push, and it went over nose first and took itself down through the pine and fetched up hard against a trunk.

The sound it made going in was not a good one.

He climbed down after it and dragged branches across it, which would fool nobody. Then he climbed back up and picked the sword up out of the road. Five feet of it and most of that steel. On the skimmer it had been the machine’s problem.

He got it up onto his shoulder and started walking.

The junkrats would have the coilsparks out inside a week and the plates after that, and that was the better part of what he owned going into the trees. Somebody up by the Spire had thrown it away once. Out here in the Fringe it was worth a house and the ground under it.

So Kasimir came down the west road toward Greenrun on foot, with the sword on his shoulder where every soul in that valley would see it coming.