Hatchling of the Pit

Carnrix is a city built on holes. A beast-city, a wager-city, a rendering-city: one mountain of rock riddled with fighting pits, where every trade boils down to a question a bookkeeper can hold in one hand. What is the beast worth?

Vetch knows the answer from the inside. He was a man once, an egg-poacher, the finest den-reader of his guild, a thief who could read a dragon's lair from claw-scores and shed-membrane smell and dust lines alone. He took a contract to strip a shadowmark nest above the oldest stone in the city, and he died at the den-mouth with the dam's curse going through him like shed membrane peeling off stone. In kind, egg-thief. You emptied a nest. Be emptied. You took the strongest of my brood. Be the weakest, in every den you enter, until the debt is named.

He woke as the weakest of seven hatchlings, from the very egg he had come to steal. Semi-transparent. A crooked wing-bone. Flightless. Priced at three copper snails, the lowest number ever punched into a valuation tag in that yard.

But the curse made a mistake, because curses are law, and law has floors. Be the weakest, in every den you enter. Vetch intends to enter every den in Carnrix.

What follows is a climb through the city's five hells: the Troughs, where stock is fattened; the Muster Pit, where it is graded; the Red Sand, where it bleeds; Champion Row, where survivors are displayed like money; and the Brood Tower, where the city keeps its breeding stock and its secrets. Vetch climbs as something the pits have never learned to price: a dragon that reads dens like a thief and thinks like an auditor. His gift is nest-read, the poacher's craft in a dragon's senses, paid for in heartbeats: every deep read freezes his body solid while the count runs. Twenty heartbeats. Thirty. Forty. The freeze comes sooner each season, and one night it will come at the wrong second, and that is the whole price of being the only reader in a city that reads nothing.

His clutch of six is scattered to the winds of the trade. Nissa the counter to the brood rows, Osla the listener to the tower's young pens. Varlo the brawler to the sand. Fenno the hoarder to the boarding pens. Skeld the coward to a gambling house window. Brue the mimic to the wardens' yard. Seven heads, wherever the heads are put. Nissa taught them the count, and the count is the whole law they have left.

And under everything, the knocking. Three and two. Three and two. A hole dug beneath the oldest stone in the world, paid by the yard and the ton, in feed, in bone, in blood, by a buyer who burns his name off the ledgers every season and buys without looking. The gray office calls him the deep trade. The dam's nest was emptied to open his door. The thief they paid with was the cheapest line on the schedule.

This is the story of that cheapest line climbing five tiers of a beast-city to read the whole arena aloud, one den at a time, one freeze at a time, one name at a time, to a man who never once looked at the things he bought.