The Blunt Reaper

That five-time limit knowledge changed the way Mara approached every exercise.

Her ability was powerful enough to Cull, but it could not replace ordinary fighting. She needed weapons to create openings, ranged attacks to test a creature’s defenses and enough skill to reach its memory concentration without wasting one of the few activations available to her.

For several days, Rook watched her train without offering anything beyond the occasional insult.

He stood near the edge of the yard while she struck dummies, sparred with other students and practiced moving through the basic forms taught by the Forty-Second. Whenever Mara asked him for help, he claimed the instructors were already being paid to make her less useless.

That changed near the end of the week.

Mara stood before an unfortunate training dummy whose torso had been replaced twice since her arrival. She attacked with a short dagger, driving the point into its chest before tearing the weapon sideways. Her next strike landed beneath the ribs, followed by another toward the throat.

The dummy accepted every wound without complaint.

Rook did not.

"You’re holding it wrong."

Mara stopped with the dagger embedded beneath the dummy’s jaw. She turned slowly. "You’ve been watching me do this for several days."

"Yes."

"I asked you for help on the first day."

"I remember."

"And you chose now to mention it?"

"You weren’t leaving the Bastion on the first day."

"I was always leaving."

"You could have changed your mind."

"Have you met me?"

"That’s why I’m helping now."

Rook approached and pulled the dagger from the dummy. He held it before Mara, loosened his grip and placed his thumb farther from the guard.

"You’re squeezing too hard. Makes the wrist stiff."

"I don’t want it taken from me."

"Then don’t let anyone reach it. Holding it hard won’t stop someone stronger from breaking your fingers."

He returned the dagger and adjusted her hand around the grip. "Keep the point toward the threat. Don’t wave it around unless you plan to cut something. A dagger is faster than a sword because it moves less."

Mara tested the grip. "You could have taught me this earlier."

"Earlier, you were inside the safest Bastion I’ve visited in several decades. Now you’re strong-headed enough to follow me somewhere people enter and apparently forget to leave."

"The Manager disappeared somewhere near the Hollow Road. We don’t know whether that is where we’re going."

"It will be somewhere equally unpleasant."

Rook stepped away and drew a wooden practice blade from the rack. It possessed the approximate length and shape of her dagger.

Mara looked at it. "What are you doing?"

"Making sure you’re reliable enough not to die the first time I look away."

"That almost sounds considerate."

"It’s selfish. If you die, the Brand hurts."

"Whatever helps you sleep."

"Nothing helps me sleep when you’re nearby." Rook raised the practice blade. "Stab me."

Mara did.

His weapon struck the dagger aside so easily that her arm continued past him. Rook tapped the wooden edge against her ribs before she could recover.

"You’re dead," he said.

Mara stepped back. "You told me to stab you."

"I didn’t tell you to miss."

She attacked again, changing the angle and aiming beneath his arm. Rook turned his wrist, caught the dagger against the flat of his practice blade and redirected it toward the ground.

The wooden edge touched her throat.

"Dead again."

"You’ve had three hundred years of practice."

"And the Abomination will care deeply about that excuse."

Mara tightened her grip.

Rook tapped the dagger with his weapon. "You’re doing it again."

She loosened her fingers and attacked a third time.

Rook swatted the blade aside.

"Again."

The fourth attempt ended with Mara’s wrist trapped beneath his arm. The fifth left her facing the wrong direction. During the sixth, she attempted to kick his knee while stabbing toward his stomach.

Rook moved aside, caught her ankle and pushed.

Mara struck the ground upon her back.

He looked down at her. "Better."

"I fell."

"You made me move."

"That is a remarkably low standard."

"You’re remarkably new."

Their sparring continued after every lesson.

Rook never allowed her to rely upon the Death Imprint. She needed to reach him with the physical dagger before he would permit her to manifest the extended blade. According to him, an ability used to compensate for a failed attack merely produced a more expensive failure.

Mara learned to stop chasing his weapon and attack the body behind it. She learned how to change the direction of a thrust without drawing her hand back, how to use her empty palm to obstruct his sight and why stepping away from an attack was often worse than moving close enough to prevent it from gaining force.

Rook remained faster, stronger and insufferably difficult to touch.

He blocked every obvious strike, punished every opening and declared her dead often enough that the word lost most of its effect. Yet by the sixth day, Mara managed to cut the sleeve of his coat with the tip of her practice dagger.

She stared at the narrow tear.

Rook examined it.

"I got you."

"You damaged my coat."

"While you were wearing it."

"It’s an old coat."

"That doesn’t make you less stabbed."

"I’ve been stabbed properly. That wasn’t it."

Mara smiled throughout the rest of the session.

The Remembrancer found them the following evening.

Rook and Mara occupied one of the smaller training yards behind Beacon Hall. Mara had just attempted to pass beneath his guard when the man in dark blue robes appeared at the entrance. Several pairs of spectacles remained secured across his forehead, though none rested before his eyes.

He carried a grey pouch in one hand and a thin ledger in the other.

Mara lowered her dagger.

Rook’s practice blade stopped before her shoulder.

The Remembrancer approached and held out both items. "The separation is complete."

Mara took the pouch first. It weighed almost nothing.

"What happened to the fragment?"

"Everything identified as a death scene, Abomination memory or unrelated recollection was removed and sealed separately. The remainder is inside."

She accepted the ledger. Its dark cover had been tied shut using a length of silver thread.

"And this?"

"My working notes."

Mara looked toward him. "What did you find?"

"I don’t know."

Rook lowered the practice blade. "Useful."

The Remembrancer appeared unoffended. "My Death Imprint removes the memories I handle once the work ends. I recorded my findings during the separation, then sealed the ledger before releasing the final recollection."

"You wrote this?" Mara asked.

"Yes."

"But you don’t remember what you wrote."

"No."

"Can’t you read it?"

"I am prohibited from doing so. The notes concern memories that do not belong to me. Once the work is complete, I retain only the instructions given and the knowledge that I followed them."

Mara untied the pouch.

The fragment that rolled into her palm no longer resembled the dark sphere she had carried from the Eighty-Sixth. It had once been nearly as large as her fist, crowded with faces and scenes pushing against one another beneath its surface.

Now it was smaller than the end of her thumb.

A dark marble rested in the center of her hand, smooth and almost weightless.

White light moved inside it.

Mara lifted the fragment closer.

The surface opened upon a familiar scene. A white room appeared within the marble, its walls too clean and bright to belong anywhere in the Underworld. Dark figures stood around something she could not see. Metal instruments hung above them, and a faint purple reflection moved across the edge of the memory before the scene folded back into darkness.

She looked toward the Remembrancer. "Are these the memories I asked you to preserve?"

"I don’t know."

"You spent several days separating them."

"And now I no longer remember doing so."

Mara held up the ledger. "Does this explain what was removed?"

"It contains a record of every group I isolated and the reason for its exclusion. Read it before entering the remaining fragment. It may help you understand what you are seeing."

"Entering it?"

"Touching the original fragment exposed you to whatever memory reached the surface. This one has been compressed. If you attempt to parse it, the recollections may pull you farther inside than before."

Rook’s expression changed slightly. "How far?"

"I don’t know."

"You say that often."

"It is a professional necessity."

The Remembrancer looked toward Mara. "Do not examine it in a public area. Find somewhere quiet, preferably somewhere secure enough that no one will interrupt you if the memory displaces your surroundings. Sit before making contact, and do not hold a weapon or have anything dangerous nearby."

"Why?"

"By going through these memories, you will feel them..." The Remembrancer said.

"Huh?"

"He means if you end up seeing the memories of a depressed person, you might want to kill yourself."

"Ah, how fun..."

The Remembrancer turned to leave, then stopped beside the entrance.

"One more thing. The fragment is smaller because very little remained after filtration. That does not mean what remains is unimportant. It means the same scenes persisted beneath memories belonging to several different souls."

Mara glanced toward the white room inside the marble. "Several people remembered this?"

"I don’t know."

For the first time, the answer sounded less like a limitation and more like a warning.

The Remembrancer left the training yard.

Mara remained where she was with the marble in one hand and the ledger in the other. The white room appeared again beneath the fragment’s surface. This time she saw the edge of a table, several black restraints and part of a hand pressed against metal.

Rook returned the practice blade to the weapons rack.

"You still want to do this?"

Mara closed her fingers around the marble. "Yes."

"You don’t know what’s inside."

"That’s the reason to look."

"It could belong to someone else. The Fourth Rank was made from several souls, and every one of them blamed me for whatever happened. You might see nothing except people dying while deciding I was responsible."

"Then we’ll know why it recognized you."

"I already know why. It was insane."

"It knew your face."

"So do many people I avoid."

Mara looked down at the small ledger. The silver thread around it had been tied carefully enough that opening the cover would break the seal. Whatever the Remembrancer had discovered waited inside, written by a man who could no longer remember seeing it.

Rook watched her. "You don’t have to prove anything."

"This isn’t about proving something."

"Then what is it about?"

Mara searched for an answer that would satisfy him and found only the same uneasy certainty that had followed her since leaving the Eighty-Sixth.

The Fourth Rank had recognized Rook.

"I have a feeling that if I don’t look," she said, "something about this will never feel right."

"That’s a poor reason to enter the memories of a dead monster."

"It’s the only one I have."

Rook stared at the marble enclosed within her hand. The white room briefly reflected across his eyes before disappearing beneath her fingers.

Finally, he lifted the coffin onto his back.

"Then we find somewhere private."

Mara secured the pouch and followed him from the yard, carrying the last surviving fragment of a life Rook insisted he did not want to remember.

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