What the Needle Missed

The port was crowded when they left, four times as crowded as usual, according to his notes. He did not write down why. He wrote down that the crowd was there for the ship, and then he wrote down the needle.

It went into Qwitch. The notes call the poison a Stoneshaper paralytic, and they say it missed anything vital. If it had not, he would be dead. Nobody in the records saw who sent it. In a crowd that size, nobody would have.

What the notes do record is that Qwitch knew the poison. He knew how much it took to slow a person, how much more to drop them, and how little more after that to kill. He knew because he had used it himself. Taeon wrote this down plainly, in the same hand as everything else, and did not comment on it.

— I have always liked that he did not comment. It would have been easy to. He noted what a companion was capable of, the way he would note it of any animal he shared ground with, and went on trusting him.

Qwitch would need two days to recover. Before they left, the party sent their report in with Chiskisk, and then they left the station behind.

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The crossing to Castrovel took six days through the Drift. The notes give the crossing one line, and the line is that Qwitch healed. A body that has been poisoned is a system working its way back to balance, and six days is about what it takes. By the time Castrovel came up under them, he was whole.

The party came down at Ship's End, the spaceport district of Qabarat, a lashunta city on the western coast of Asana. The notes keep the rules first, as arrival notes always do. Each of them was issued travel papers good for one week. Carrying personal weapons was frowned upon. A guard gave Qwitch a hard time, and the notes do not say about what.

One week. Taeon wrote it twice, once as good a week and once in full. I think he had already started counting.

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Castrovel was his world. The records do not say what he felt coming down onto it, and I will not say it for him. I will only tell you what the Fragments keep of the arrival, because novitiates always ask.

And after six days in the Drift the ship came down at the end of ships,
and the world below was green, and it was Kopalo's own.
And the one who had been struck was healed, for the body keeps its own counsel.
And at the gate they were given papers, one week and no more,
and they were told the blade is not welcome in that city, and the gun is not welcome.
And the guard was hard with the one who knew poisons,
and the telling does not know why, and does not guess.
And a man of the damaya came toward them quickly across the port,
and his clothes were fine, and they had been fine for a long time.
And he spoke of his city as a man speaks of a garden he has kept,
and he would not stop speaking of it, and Kopalo let him speak.
And they rode into the city in a carriage that drove itself,
and the house of learning stood ten buildings toward the rising and the north.

— Fragments of the Keepers, the Kopalo cycle, as it is usually told

The Fragments make the guide a gardener, which the records do not. The notes say only that he was gushing about the city. But I have read the gardener line to novitiates who have never left the order's grounds, and they understand him at once. I let it stand.

---

His notes end the day with a question mark: Whaloss as contact? Another record, kept the day after, answers it. The man in the worn formal clothes was Whaloss: tall and thin even for a damaya, a student of the old things in the ground, and glad, the record says, to meet them.

The university was about ten buildings to the northeast. The papers had a week left on them. The needle in Qwitch had missed, but someone in that crowd had sent it.

The Field Canon has a line for this, in its section on travel.

Note who knew you were leaving. That is the list of who might stop you.

— the Field Canon, on Passage

He did not write that list down. I would like to think he kept it anyway.