POV: tensoon
Summary
TenSoon is finally lifted out of the prison pit and given bones. They are human bones, no skull he has worn before — pulled, his guards say, at random from the storeroom — and he sets to work building a body around them, drawing on the centuries he has spent eating and digesting human corpses on Contract. He has never killed a man, of course: the Contract forbids that. But he has fed often enough on those already dead to know how a body goes together, and after months collapsed into pure muscle in the bottom of a hole the work feels less like skill than like remembering. He has eyes again. He has lungs. He has hands he can hold up in front of his own face. The features are not handsome, since he had no living model and worked from internal stores, but they are real, and the realness is enough to make him want to weep.
His captor is VarSell of the Fifth Generation, whom TenSoon knows by sight. VarSell wears a True Body of quartz inside translucent skin, the way the Fifth's favoured pups tend to — bones that sparkle when the fungal glowstone catches them, vain and impractical and exactly the sort of thing the Second Generation would approve of. He has come with three guards, also Fifths, each carrying the Blessing of Potency embedded in his shoulder. The Seconds have decided to take no chances with this prisoner, even though the prisoner walked back in willingly. The precaution is an insult of its own; TenSoon notes it without bothering to say so.
VarSell is mildly thrown that TenSoon has a body already — he had not expected to find his prisoner standing. He covers the surprise by being clever about the bones: a coincidence, that of all the skulls in the storeroom he had grabbed one whose original owner TenSoon must once have eaten, because look how convincing the face is. TenSoon tells him plainly that he has never worn these bones before. He had built the face this convincingly from nothing. VarSell takes a moment with that information and visibly chooses not to follow it where it leads. The Second Generation have always assumed that body-craft is something one acquires slowly, in proportion to years spent practising it inside the Homeland under their tutelage. They are wrong. TenSoon has surpassed them through doing the work the Seconds have always refused to do themselves: spending centuries out among humans, wearing what was available, getting on with it. He is not gracious about saying so. VarSell very nearly slaps him for the impudence, and then visibly remembers that the Third Generation is senior to the Fifth no matter what crime is currently being tried, and stops himself.
They walk. VarSell takes back corridors, evidently not wanting the spectacle of a prisoner under guard to draw a crowd in the Homeland proper. The tunnels are smooth-walled — natural cave shaped over centuries by the digestive juices of kandra in their infancy, which is how the people build for themselves. TenSoon dissolves his genitals and re-forms a smooth crotch as he walks, the way kandra in the Homeland customarily do, since they were given no clothing. The new body is emaciated. He lost mass in the pit, and more to the acid the Seconds had been about to pour over him, and there was not enough internal store to build proper muscle around the bones. He tries to walk with confidence anyway. There is little point in arriving small.
He thinks, as they walk, about how long he has been away. By his rough count there ought to be an Eleventh Generation by now, and he no longer knows most of the Eighth, let alone the Ninth or the Tenth. He doubts very much there will ever be a Twelfth. The Father — the Lord Ruler — is dead, and the First Contract his people made was with him, and that contract is the foundation everything else rests on. He thinks about the older absurdity. Even when a kandra is permitted to design his own bones from scratch — a True Body of any imaginable arrangement — they still come out human-shaped: two arms, two legs, a face after the fashion of mankind. They built themselves in the image of the people they were given to serve, and then went on cursing those people for the having of them. The feral mistwraiths above ground, in their honest way, are more imaginative than that. They put bones together however they please.
He realises eventually where VarSell is taking him. The corridors are familiar in the way deep memory is familiar. He is being walked to the Trustwarren — the most sacred room of his people — to argue his defence before the First Generation themselves. He should have guessed. A year of torturous imprisonment has earned him a trial in the proper place. If it goes badly he will have an eternity in a pit to think over everything he should have said.
He is not, despite that, walking to the Trustwarren for himself. He is walking there for his people. Whatever they think of him at the end of it, he believes — he still believes — that what he did was right for the kandra, and he means to make them hear that. Even if the only kandra who can hear it are the younger Generations behind him, and the verdict goes the other way.
The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer cautions against thinking of Ruin as raw chaos, and presses the opposite: an intelligent, planning decay, one that can build a thing up specifically so that knocking it down will, in turn, knock down two more. The very act of creating something carries the seeds of what its destruction will cost.