“You paid for that.”
 
“I know.”

“Take it.”

“Don't want it.”

“Then you bought me a beer.”

“Fine.”

“Very generous.”

“Don't make it weird.”

The owner took the bottle away. The gray yinglet laughed quietly into his empty glass.

Koldin put several dalasi bills on the counter.

Again the dead faces.

Tonight one of them was a Val Salian statesman Koldin could not name. The man's engraved eyes gazed upward with serene confidence in whatever monetary system had survived him.

The owner collected the notes.

Koldin stood. The day's walking returned to his legs all at once.

He adjusted his belt.

The gray yinglet turned slightly on the stool.

“Koldin, right?”

Koldin looked at him. He had not remembered introducing himself, then remembered the stitched name on his fatigues.

“Yeah.”

The worker pointed toward himself.

For a moment Koldin thought he was finally going to give his own name.

He did not.

“See you around.”

Koldin nodded.

“Probably.”

Outside, night had nearly completed itself. The air remained wet.

Somewhere toward the base a generator hummed through the darkness. Beyond the roofs the Heavenly Veil stretched in pale brilliance, too distant to warm anything beneath it.

Koldin began walking back toward the wire.

He had eaten. He had drunk enough. The report was finished.

Nothing remained except sleep.

For the first time all day that seemed like an uncomplicated assignment.

Another day of rot, wet, and routine had finished.

Koldin returned to the base beneath a sky gone black except for the Heavenly Veil and the weak orange light spilling from windows along the barracks row. The guard at the gate knew him and checked his identification anyway. Koldin presented it without complaint. Regulations were often irritating only until the day one wished somebody had followed them.

Inside the wire, the base had contracted into night.

The motor sheds were dark. A lamp burned above the administration building. Somewhere behind the kitchen, a pump started and ran for several seconds, drawing water into a rooftop tank, then stopped with a knock in the pipes. Flying insects orbited every exterior light in frantic little systems. Beyond the fence, Lenkerk continued making its evening noises: televox sets, arguments, engines laboring through mud, dogs barking, and the drone of insects. 

Koldin went to the barracks.

The room was nearly empty.

He took off his hat first and hung it from the post beside his cot. The golok followed. He loosened the belt and drew the scabbard away from his body, setting it in the narrow space between the cot and wall where it always went. The tiplod-shell casing caught the lamplight with a dull brown sheen.

Pistol next.

He removed it from the holster, checked it despite knowing it remained unloaded, worked the action once and set it inside the little metal locker beside the cot. The magazine pouch went next to it.

The haversack contained an empty water bottle and some loose coins. He put the bottle beneath the cot to return tomorrow.

His footwraps were damp. Everything was damp.

The climate entered objects and remained within them. Clothing, wood, paper, bedding. Even metal seemed somehow wet after enough months in Tilmuhl. One ceased expecting things to dry and instead learned the various degrees of not-wet-enough-to-matter.

Koldin stripped down to his undershirt and sat on the cot.

His foot still ached where he had struck the extortionist. He flexed it.

No swelling. No sharp pain.

Good.

He lay backward for perhaps thirty seconds and then sat up again because his body had not yet decided whether the day was over.

Someone entered.

Boisrond.

He came through the doorway carrying a large dented kitchen pot in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He was a thin human from some town near the Val Salian Passage whose name Koldin had heard several times and forgotten every one. Boisrond looked as though inadequate nutrition had pursued him unsuccessfully for most of his life. His arms were narrow, his face long, his collarbones prominent. No amount of food seemed capable of changing this.

He ate constantly. He smoked almost as constantly.

He drank coffee with the sort of determination other men reserved for liquor, although he refused alcohol entirely, being a strict teetotaler. 

Boisrond set the pot on a table.

“You eat?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Zeerover.”

“What?”

“Tiplod stew.”

Boisrond looked personally wounded.

“I made stew.”

Koldin looked at the pot.

“What kind?”

“Tiplod.”

They regarded one another. Boisrond took a long drag from the cigarette.

“Mine's better.”

“Probably.”

“Then why'd you eat there?”

“I was zhere.”

This explanation seemed to offend him even more.

The man crossed the room and put the pot near the small barracks stove.

Koldin had seen Boisrond eat ungodly quantities of food that would have incapacitated larger people. Giva haricot beans. Tiplod. Poultry. Sausage. Chocolate. Bread. Algae compressed, dried and baked into something the quartermaster insisted was bread. He consumed all of it without gaining visible weight and without ever appearing full, and without ever getting winded.