The Swordsman Who Did Not Draw

Once, there was a swordsman who never drew his blade until the last possible second.

I say it out loud, because Borrowed Pages seems to want me out loud. The carriage smells of copper and toner and the inside of a stranger's coat. The wet-shadow thing folds itself through the door in pieces, the way a spider gets into a bath, and I keep talking.

I talk about a swordsman in a yellow coat who would stand very still on a bridge, and how the rain would hit his shoulders, and how every fool who rushed him died with a confused little expression because they had never seen a man wait that long.

I describe the bridge. I describe the rain. I describe the colour of the coat, which in the book was the colour of old butter, and I describe the way the swordsman breathed once before he moved.

The system glows.

[Borrowed Pages: pending belief check.]

[Faded Lamplight is listening.]

[Faded Lamplight is listening very hard.]

Up in the dark above the cracked ceiling of the world, I feel something thin and tired lean in close enough to fog the glass. Not power. Attention. The poorest kind of love.

The wet-shadow thing lunges.

My right hand comes up like it belongs to somebody else, and there is no sword in it, there has never been a sword in my hand in my life, but for one moment the air in my fist remembers being a sword in a story I read on a bus in October.

I do not draw. I wait.

The thing arrives. I move.

It comes apart along a clean diagonal, the way a curtain comes off a rail, and falls in two wet halves at my feet. The carriage is very quiet. The businessman with the war-god is staring at me with his mouth open in a small neat circle.

[Borrowed Pages: belief check passed. Faded Lamplight believed you.]

[Cost: minor. Borrowed Pages settling.]

My hand is empty. My hand is shaking. There is a thin sting along the side of my palm that was not there a second ago, a paper cut from a page I never touched.

[Faded Lamplight says: "oh. oh that was lovely. i remembered him. i had forgotten i remembered him."]

Forty-six minutes on the countdown.

.

We get off the train because the train is no longer a train. It is a long metal coffin with the doors stuck open and the lights flickering in a pattern I do not want to learn. I climb down onto track ballast that crunches like cereal.

Above the city, the sky is wrong.

It is daytime. I know it is daytime because my watch says 8:33 and because there is a sun in it somewhere, a pale coin behind clouds. But the stars are out. All of them. Thousands of them, in shapes I half remember from school posters and shapes I have never seen on any chart. They sit in the blue daylight like watching eyes that forgot to close, and some of them are moving very slowly, the way a hand moves when it is reaching.

The big ones have names already. I can feel the names land in my head the way a flag lands on a building. The Drowned King in the east, a long sprawl of greenish points like a body laid out on a slab. The Hound up at the zenith, a fang of bright stars with one red one for an eye. The Unsleeping Flame, the businessman's patron, a tight knot of white fire I do not want to look directly at.

And, somewhere, mine. I have to look for it. I find it because it is easier to find than the others, in the embarrassing way a friend with no money is always easy to find at a wedding. A single dim point above the rooftops, the colour of a streetlamp at the end of its life. It flickers when I look at it. It almost waves.

[Faded Lamplight: "down here. sorry. i know. i'm working on it."]

Forty-one minutes.

I need food. I need water. I need to not be standing on an open track when the next thing comes through.

There is a corner shop across the road with its window broken in a clean star. I cross. The shop is empty in the way a shop is empty when people have left in a hurry and not in the way a shop is empty when people have been taken, which I am already learning to tell apart by the smell. I take two bottles of water, a packet of crisps, and a roll of plasters for the paper-cut hand. I put a twenty pound note on the counter out of sheer habit, and Faded Lamplight makes a small noise in the back of my skull that might be a laugh.

["that was nice. nobody's going to spend it. but that was nice."]

I am opening the second bottle when I hear the crying.

It is coming from the stockroom. Small, hiccupping, the kind of crying you do when you have been at it for a while and have run out of the loud part. I stand very still. The countdown ticks. Faded Lamplight flickers.

["go and look. please. i can't make you. but please."]

I go and look.

She is maybe nine. Brown hair in a half undone plait, school cardigan, one shoe. She is wedged between a stack of crates of fizzy drink and the wall, with both hands over her ears, and when I crouch down she stops crying and looks at me with eyes that are very awake.

She does not look at my face first. She looks above my head.

"Your star is sad," she says.

I do not move. My mouth goes dry the way it goes dry before a sentence you cannot take back.

"You can see it."

"It's right there." She points, through the ceiling, with a finger that is not quite steady. "The little one. It's leaning down."

Nobody can see another person's sponsor. The system glow is private. The businessman saw my text only because the system showed it. The star itself is a thing in the sky that everybody sees and nobody sees as theirs.

[Faded Lamplight has gone very still.]

[Faded Lamplight: "oh."]

"What's your name?" I ask, because I do not know what else to ask.

She is still looking up, not at me. "Mira."

"Mira. I'm going to get you out of here. Okay?"

She nods. Then her eyes track sideways, slowly, up and to the right, the way a cat's eyes track a thing on the ceiling. The colour goes out of her face. The hand she had pointing with curls in on itself.

"The big one," she whispers. "With the teeth. It just looked at you."

The shop goes dark. Not power-cut dark. Eclipse dark. The pale coin of sun behind the clouds has been crossed, very neatly, by something the shape of a jaw.

Up at the zenith, the Hound has turned its red eye down.