ABSOLVE: The Dark Horse Chapter 4: Chapter Two — Two Seconds, Part 2

Read chapter 4 of ABSOLVE: The Dark Horse by Joker on NovelPedia.

The hands were professional. That was the first datum: not cruel, not cautious, practiced — a grip on each arm at the tricep, thumbs finding the nerve line without hunting for it, the economical handling of men who moved bodies for a wage and had moved many, and were profoundly uninterested in whether the bodies assisted. He assisted. A man learns more carried than fighting. They walked him through the fog across the flooded floor, and he spent the walk the way a miser spends a windfall, itemizing everything. The water deepened toward the middle of the floor and shallowed again — a dished profile, drainage architecture, and once his boot rang on metal under the water, a grate, and he banked that too. The walls when they came were sheer dressed stone to four meters, and above the sheer face the galleries began, and he revised arena to something older and worse, because arenas were built for spectacle and this had been built for something else and become spectacle; the seating was an afterthought bolted into a structure whose original purpose ran deeper than entertainment and had needed, for reasons unstated, walls this thick. They brought him to a cage. Iron, wet, set into the stone at floor level with the black water sheeting through it ankle-deep, and inside the cage, men. He counted eleven. The smell arrived before the details did — old fear, is what it was; fear has a smell when it soaks and dries in wool enough times — and then the details came and he took them in one sweep, left to right, the way he had walked a new site the first morning while the students were still fighting the tent poles. Eleven men. Underfed on a timescale of years, not weeks — that was in the wrists, the teeth, two rickets cases, one healed fracture set badly a decade ago. Laborers' hands on nine of them. All of them wore the same gray-brown sodden shapelessness, and all of them had made the same discovery, which was that the cage's iron did not warm where their bodies touched it, and had stopped touching it. They stood in the ankle water hugging themselves, spaced apart with the careful mutual distance of men who did not know each other and did not expect to live long enough for that to change. Not soldiers. Not criminals — criminals watched the guards; these men watched the gate at the cage's far end, the way cattle in a chute watch the one direction that matters. Stock. And then the twelfth thing, the important thing, the thing his mind had been circling since the galleries: the guards. There were four on the cage. They were fed. That alone would have sorted the room, but it was the least of it. The nearest guard was bored, and he was passing the time by rolling something between his palms the way a man rolls a cigarette — except that what he was rolling was water . A rope of it, drawn up out of the flood unsupported, braiding itself between his hands, lazy as a cat's tail, while he complained to the second guard in a language Shen Huang did not know, about — from tone and cadence — either a debt or a woman. Shen Huang watched the water braid, and his heart rate, that diligent clerk, reported no change, and he made the finding official because no one else was going to: Magic. Native, casual, and administered. Casual was the load-bearing word. The guard wasn't performing. Nobody in the galleries was pointing. A man was doing with standing water what other men did with a coin across the knuckles, which meant the ability was common enough to be boring — and it was on that side of the iron, and it was not on this side. Eleven men in the cage and not one of them had troubled the water at their ankles. That was the sorting principle. Not wealth, not crime. The room divided into people who could do that, and people who could not, and the people who could not were stock. He examined his own hands with brief, honest interest. Nothing. No sensation, no pull, no whisper from the flood at his feet. Whatever ran in the guard's palms did not run in his. He had