F-Rank Mimic Chest: My SSS Mimic Skill Lets Me Become Anything

Pima’s stamp came down on the plank table under the guild board, and the cobbles of Rookfall’s lower square carried it up into Dane’s wheels. Another flooded family had gone onto her list.

He knew that stamp from his first days with Ash Company. Under his good front wheel an iron grate breathed cold off the stairs to Brackenvault, where he had woken blind, a mimic in a chest’s shape, hungry for whoever opened him first. He had rolled up into town in a wagon’s shape once Vera woke, with the splint bound back on his cracked side and her last wedge driven in under it. Down in the cut the House was still laying its stolen rooms into the water and losing them.

The flood in the cut was slowing, though. Its roar had dropped to a hiss, and the last room it laid had held, wedged against the one that had come ashore at noon. By dark the House would be up the bank. The square was full of families Senn’s water had put out of the lowest lanes, and whenever one of them drifted back toward the lower road to see what was left of their house, Dane rolled his late wheel into their way and sat there until they went round him uphill. They had stopped jumping when he did it.

”Name, lane, how many,” Pima said at her table. ”Boots off if you’re going in. I’ll not have the flood on the hall floor.”

The hall door let out wet wool and lamp smoke every time it opened. Over by the stable a man said, ”Who let that water out?”

”Your boy’s shaking,” said Senn Parr. Her bar came down on the cobbles, and her boot dragged after it. ”There’s a loft up the hill with a fire in it. Get him there and get his feet dry.”

The man went. Two more uphill, Dane thought. The hunger followed them up the hill, the man’s heart slow and heavy and the boy’s going quick up on his shoulders.

Over Pima’s table the board’s sheets rustled on their pins, rain-soft. Dane had parked under them with his lock turned up, and so far all they had told him was that they were paper.

Tess came out of the stable yard at her quick light walk, with her cord coiled on her shoulder again, and stopped by his front corner. The five of them had slept the afternoon away out there after two days awake, and under the pepper she still smelled of straw.

”Reading’s a copper,” Tess said. ”I’ll put it with the rest.”

She read fast and flat, without stopping for the hard words. ”Lost, one goat. Wanted, a dry cellar, will pay in eggs. Room to let, three coppers a night.” She went on down the sheets through the names, who had gone up to whose sister’s and who was looking for whom, and Dane listened to every name all the way to its end. None of them was June.

A row of boots stood along the guild wall where Pima made people leave them, and his front wheel had come to rest against somebody’s pair. June used to kick her shoes off by the door the minute she got in, wherever they landed. He would come home late and trip over them in the dark and swear, and that was how he knew she had got in all right.

A woman came for the boots against his wheel. He rolled back off them and let her have them.

If June had come through, she would read this board, right down to the last lost cat.

Pima called for a lamp, because she would not write down a name she could not read, and somebody brought one out of the hall, and Dane smelled the wick catch.

Four words at a time was all his voice would do. Every time it managed them, the click he threw to hear his way by went dead for sixty breaths, and his cracked side shook. Below the square the cut had gone quiet enough that he could hear the House wading. Sixty breaths without a click, then, with that coming up the bank. He could wait until after, Dane thought, except that he had no idea what after would leave of the board, or of him.

So he got his torn tongue up behind his lock, and with Pima’s stamp halfway up, Dane said, ”Dane Rook. Alive. Mostly.” It came out hoarse and torn down one side, louder than he had meant, and it was still his name. Then the click died on his tongue and his cracked side began to shake, and the wedge ticked in the splint at every shudder.

Pima’s stamp stayed where it was.

”The board takes names and needs,” Pima said, in the voice she had used on forty families since noon. ”Dane Rook, alive, that’s a name. ’Mostly’ is a second line.”

Two coppers went down on the plank, then two more. ”Two lines,” Tess said.

He waited for her to ask who it was for. She asked Pima to pin it high, where the lamp would fall on it. Pima’s pen scratched it down, and it was a short name and took her no time at all.

Kril ran up the lower road, blades scraping stone, and went past him into the hall. Behind Kril, at the top of the bank, the slab groaned. Dane felt it through the cobbles before he heard it, a weight climbing out of the water onto stone, leg after leg, and timber dragging up after the legs.

The House came up the lower road toward the square and lay down along it. On both sides fronts went down one after another, boards and shutters crashing as they settled, each one closer. Then the rain changed. All afternoon it had hit the cobbles of the lower road, and now, the whole length of it, it drummed on roofs.

Chalk and the air after lightning came out of the hall behind him, and Dane turned his lock on Vera so she would tell him.

”It’s taken the whole lower road,” Vera whispered. ”Fronts both sides, right down to the slab. Rooms laid across the top, so there’s no sky down there. A lamp in every window.” Under the whisper her pulse kept to its slow three beats. ”I buy my chalk on that road.”

”That’s Candle Row,” Tess said. Her quick feet had stopped.

Up in the roofs, auction slates knocked on their chains whenever the wind moved them. Dane had been sold under that dry clatter.

The smell reached the square next, hot wax and onions frying in fat, and the hunger felt every heart around him turn toward it.

”Onions,” said a boy, high up on somebody’s shoulders, and the hunger knew the pair: a big slow heart with a quick one riding above it, the man Senn had sent up the hill, back down again.

The crowd began to go downhill. Senn swung her bar across the steep lane by the stable and put her whole weight behind it.

”That’s not an inn,” she said. ”It doesn’t let you out in the morning. Up the hill.”

”Our beds are under your water, keeper,” said the boy’s father.

”Then sleep in somebody else’s.”

Senn had the steep lane. The lower road was the other way down, and where the fronts began it was about a wagon wide. If he sat across it, anyone going down there would have to climb him first. Dane rolled for it, still shaking, his late wheel dragging. With no click to tell him where to stop, he went on the warmth coming at him and the wax getting thicker, until Vera’s whisper caught up with his back wheel. ”That’s far enough. The first sill’s a hand past your corner.” He swung his tail round and stopped broadside across the street’s mouth.

The boy’s father reached him first, in wet wool. A hand closed on the edge of Dane’s lid to climb, and the hunger measured the wrist and the boy both. Dane let his lid come up a crack under the man’s fingers, so they found teeth, and held it there while the hunger pulled to go wider.

The hand came off him. It was Vera’s town, Dane thought, and he had just shown it his teeth. The man backed away up the slope with the boy, and the people behind him backed with him.

All but eleven went back up the hill. The hunger followed the ones who didn’t as they slipped round behind the fronts and down the side lanes in twos and threes. Down there doors opened inward, and warm air came out, and kind voices with no heart under them. Dane reached for a click, and his tongue came up with nothing. The eleven went in, and the doors shut behind them. Eleven, and he had spent his click on his own name.

His side quit shaking. He had his click again a while after that, and with the shaking gone he could smell past the wax. The first door, just past his corner, smelled of the West Sump: wet gray silt. Hest, he thought. Her hand had locked shut on her rake and stayed shut, and she had gone after the House at first light yesterday with Marda and that rake. The smell was strongest at the frame.

Dane turned his lock on it and dragged his late wheel over the cobbles in one long scrape. Trouble, where his lock pointed.

Kril’s blades came down the slope behind him and stopped at the frame. A blade touched the wet wood and stayed on it.

”Hest and Marda?” Vera whispered.

Kril’s blade came down on the silted frame once, flat, and the wet took the ring out of it. Yes.