Free Last First Snow by Max Gladstone Page B

all, he told himself: that was why goose bumps rose on her arms and on the skin of her belly beneath his fingertips.
    â€œThey need protection,” he said.
    â€œThe Wars are over, Temoc.”
    â€œI was the gods’ sword, once,” he said. “At least I can be these people’s shield.”
    â€œI’d rather you be yourself,” she said. “My husband. Father to our son.” The mattress creaked. She rolled against him, her arm across his chest, her legs clasping his. “No one can ask you to be anything but that.”
    â€œNo.” Their house, their son, her arms, were fortress walls against the desert night. Their bed was a sacred and secret space guarded by dark arts from history.
    She pulled the covers over them and slept. He pretended to sleep too, memorizing instead her imprint, the smell of her hair, the weight of her head and leg and arm.
    It was enough.
    Why shouldn’t it be enough?

 
    10
    Elayne’s predawn world was the color of an Iskari corpse: gray hotel room, gray curtains, gray skyline broken by the Sansilva pyramids. From dragonback the city fit a single grand design, but her fourth-floor window was not high enough to make that order clear.
    She stretched, and took inventory of her body. Were her fingers less sensitive to pressure, her joints more stiff, than the day before? The Craft eroded flesh. Forty years ago, at the height of the Wars, her body and soul had been one instrument carrying out the demands of a single will. Even ten years back she hadn’t felt so clear a split between mind and form. Some mornings recently she woke and moved her limbs like a puppeteer, triggering muscles one by one to rise mechanical from her sheets. Those days, these days, she waited for the twinge of betrayal in the chest or the small vessels of the brain that would signal the start of her next phase of life. Or if not life, then at least existence.
    The betrayal hadn’t come yet.
    But no matter how carefully she kept herself, someday she would take that final stepwise jump, shed muscle and organ, and survive as—what, exactly? A skeleton, on the most prosaic level, but more. None of her friends who’d gone before her could explain the change to her satisfaction. They offered comparisons, many and myriad and no more consonant than those of blind men feeling up an elephant. How was it to see in cold heartless relief, to abandon the soft colors filtered through—created by?—jelly globe eyes for pure harsh wavelengths, to throw wide and close perception’s doors at once? She could imagine such an experience, her imagination was strong, but she had no way of knowing whether her imaginings were correct.
    She suspected not.
    Still, the face reflected in the hotel window hid her skull well enough. Except for her teeth, which pierced white through the illusion.
    The Monicola Hotel had a pool on the top floor, and a gym. Laps sounded pleasant, but Elayne had long since stopped swimming for exercise. Bone density mattered more for a Craftswoman than for other humans, since bones would stay even once she shed her meat. Not that she could afford to neglect her muscles—the chirurgeons were clear on that point. Elayne knew one scholar who still complained of heart trouble and shortness of breath fifteen years after going full skeleton.
    â€œBut you don’t need to breathe,” Elayne had said, “and you have no heart.”
    â€œJust because one does not need to breathe,” the woman replied, “does not mean one cannot feel short of breath. And the lack of a heart does not save us from heart trouble.”
    So: bodyweight exercises. A little work on the bench. No cardio. Air filters be damned: in Dresediel Lex, to run was to invite the city into your lungs, and the city was a drunken guest who liked to trash the place. Elayne did medicine ball slams, lifting the heavy sphere overhead and throwing it as hard as she could into the