The Grief Engine

Chapter 3: A Debt Explained

The graveyard shed smelled like turned earth and lamp oil, and it was, Wren thought distantly, an almost embarrassingly appropriate place to have the worst conversation of his life.

There were six of them crammed inside it once the gate had gone quiet - himself, Sable, and four of the orphans who slept there on good nights, the youngest of them, a girl of maybe seven called Pim, pressed so hard against Sable's side that her small hands had gone white-knuckled in the fabric of Sable's sleeve. Nobody had spoken since the shed door shut. Outside, the sounds of the Cartel patrol withdrawing - boots, a barked order, the particular metallic clatter of men collecting a wounded comrade's gear - had faded into the ordinary afternoon hum of the district slowly, disbelievingly, starting to move again.

Wren sat with his back against a stack of burial-cloth, staring at his own hands like they belonged to someone he'd just met.

"So," Sable said, in the too-calm voice of someone holding a much louder voice in reserve. "You want to explain the part where you crushed a warden's truncheon like it was made of bread."

"I don't," Wren said honestly, "know how to explain that."

"Try."

He didn't have the first idea where to begin, so he began with the thing that was still hanging six inches from his face, patient and unbothered, in a color of light nobody else in the shed could apparently see.

"There's a book," he said. "Floating. Right here." He gestured at empty air, and four faces turned to look at exactly nothing, which told him everything he needed to know about who else could see it.

"A book," Sable repeated.

"It talks. Or - not talks. It's more like it's already inside my head when it says things, so I don't know if 'talks' is-" He stopped himself, because he could hear how this sounded, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes instead. "Old Mercy is dead," he said, which was the only true thing he was fully certain of, "and right after, this - thing - showed up, and now I can apparently punch through solid steel casing with my bare hand, and none of that is supposed to be possible for someone like me, so forgive me if my explanation isn't very good yet."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Pim's hands loosened slightly in Sable's sleeve. Outside, someone was crying, two streets over, in the particular ragged rhythm of a person who'd just found out what everyone else already knew.

The Bearer may address the Ledger directly if he wishes clarity, said the voice behind his sternum, mild as ever, as though it had been waiting politely for a gap in the human conversation. It is generally more efficient than speculation.

Wren went still. "You can hear when I'm talking about you?"

"Talking about who?" Sable said.

"Not you. It." He pointed again at the empty air, felt three of the orphans lean subtly away from him, and made himself stop pointing. "It just said something. It said I can ask it things."

Sable's jaw tightened, but she didn't argue with him, which was, Wren was coming to understand, one of the more valuable things about her - she'd spent enough of her own life being disbelieved that she'd developed an allergy to doing it to other people, even when what they were describing sounded like the ravings of someone in shock. "Then ask it something useful."

Wren closed his eyes, which felt absurd, since the book existed apparently regardless of whether his eyes were open, but it helped him concentrate. What are you, he thought, as clearly as he could manage.

I am the Elegy Ledger, came the answer, precise and unhurried. I record what is owed, and I convert what is owed into strength. This is the whole of my function.

Owed by who? To who?

By the world, to you. Every meaningful loss you carry is logged as an entry. Every entry accrues. The Bearer grows stronger in proportion to what he has lost, and to the closeness of what he lost it to.

The words settled into Wren's chest like stones dropped into still water, each one sending out a slow, cold ring. You mean, he thought, though he already knew the answer, though some ugly certain part of him had known it since the moment the truncheon crumpled under his fingers, Old Mercy. You mean I got this because she died.

Yes.

"Say it out loud," Sable said sharply. "Whatever it just told you. I can see it on your face."

Wren opened his eyes. Pim was watching him now too, along with the two older boys, all four of them silent in the particular attentive way of children who had learned very young that adults' bad news was usually going to be their problem eventually, so it was better to hear it early.

"It grows my power," Wren said slowly, "based on what I lose. The people I-" His voice caught, and he made himself push through it, because Old Mercy had never once let him leave a sentence unfinished out of cowardice, not in nineteen years, and he wasn't going to start the first hour after her death. "The people I care about. When they die, I get stronger. That's - that's the whole design of it."

The shed went very quiet.

"That's obscene," Sable said, flatly, after a moment.

"I know."

"That's - " She stood up so fast that Pim startled, and paced the length of the small space twice, arms crossed hard over her chest, before she rounded on him with the look of someone doing arithmetic she badly didn't want to be doing. "So every person you've ever lost. Every person you will lose. That's a - a payment plan. That's what you're telling me."

"I'm telling you what it told me."

"And you believe it?"

Wren looked down at his hands again - the same hands that had spent the morning digging a grave for an old man named Tam, that had, an hour ago, folded a charged truncheon like wet paper without so much as a bruise to show for it. "I don't know how not to," he said. "I felt it happen. I felt her-" He stopped again. Started over. "I felt it the second she went down. Like something in my chest had been waiting my whole life for exactly that, and I hate that more than I've ever hated anything, and I still can't make it not be true."

Pim, who had been silent through all of it, small and grave-eyed in the lamplight, finally spoke. "Is it going to keep happening?" she asked. "Every time somebody dies?"

It was, Wren realized, the actual question. Not the philosophy of it, not the horror of it - the practical, immediate, child's-eye version of it, the version that mattered to the four people currently sitting in a shed with him instead of out in the street where the soldiers had gone. Am I safer near you, or less safe.

Clarification requested, said the Ledger, before Wren could answer her himself. The entry logs closeness of bond as a multiplier. The Bearer does not require deaths to occur. He requires only that they be possible, and that the bond be real. Many Bearers before him have chosen to maintain distance from all others, believing this the safer path.

Many Bearers, Wren thought, seizing on the phrase even through the noise of everything else. There have been others?

There have been many. There is currently one who holds the title of strongest being in the universe, and reached it by this exact ledger, seeded in a different age, in a different Bearer's chest. You are not the first offered this account. You will not, I suspect, be the last.

Wren said all of this out loud, slowly, watching it land on Sable's face - the specific way her expression closed off, the way it always did when a problem turned out to be bigger and older than the person standing in front of her. "So there's a - a right way to do this," she said. "According to the book. Push everyone away. Stay alone. Get strong on purpose."

"That's what it's telling me is the intended path, yes."

"And what happens if you don't."

Wren looked at Pim's small, waiting face, at the two boys behind her who had gone still and listening, at the empty space beside him where a book made of bruise-purple smoke hung with the patience of something that had all the time in creation and had chosen, of all the graveyards in Lastlight, this one.

"I don't know yet," he said. "But I'm not doing it the way it wants."

Nobody in the shed cheered, or told him it would be alright, or promised him anything at all - which was, he thought, probably the most honest response the moment deserved. Sable just held his gaze for a long, measuring second, the look of someone deciding whether to trust a man who'd just admitted, out loud, that a piece of magic wanted him to let her die.

"Good," she said finally. "Because if I ever catch you waiting for one of us to go down so you can level up, I will end you myself, powers or not."

It was, Wren thought, probably the kindest thing anyone had said to him all day.

End of Chapter Three