Chapter 19

True to her word, Naomi took his training more seriously in the days that followed. She eschewed night-time visits altogether to greet him at First Clay, to sit cross-legged and guide him through his Coal manipulation techniques, the room filled with dark, bloody light from the still warming up sun-wire.

“You intuitively went with a paddle,” she began on their third day, tone surprisingly non-judgmental. “At the higher rankings, Great Souls don’t require such visualizations, as they can interact with mana directly, but for now, that works. But you don’t need to limit yourself to that image—in fact, if you use it for too long, you’ll find it imprinted upon your spirit, and it will become an obstacle to your long-term growth. So try using different ideas to work the mana around.”

“What do you use?”

“It’s different for me as an Emberling, but now I imagine a vortex, like the kind of funnel that forms in water over a drain. I use that to pull the mana directly into my Heart. But that wouldn’t have worked for me as a Char; it would have been like trying to suck sand up through a straw. When I was at your stage, I used…” She narrowed her eyes, trying to remember. “I would imagine a great wind blowing through the mana like it would through the ash ivy outside my bedroom window.”

“A great wind,” he said softly, gazing through her now and at his Igneous Heart. Which, he noticed, was appearing with greater facility each time. The room was filled with sooty smoke, but instead of trying to stir it, he sought to summon a blast of wind, to surge through the heavy clouds like a gale.

But the image didn’t connect; he sensed soft ripples pass through the clouds, but nothing more.

“Whatever you imagine is just meant to be a metaphor that you connect with,” she said, tone patient. “In the end, we’re all just using our will, but right now, knowing that does nothing for you. You have to give your will shape. I’ve heard of people imagining hands molding clay, or slicing chunks out of the clouds with scythes or shovels. Some Great Souls imagine their Hearts at the bottom of huge pits, so that the mana falls down toward it, while others cast nets over the clouds, using the mana’s own resistance as a means to drag it closer. You have to experiment. See what works best for you.”

He spent the morning attempting different visualization techniques, working at every metaphor he could imagine, but in the end, nothing worked so well for him as the idea of the great paddle, dipping down into the black clouds as if he stood on a skiff above them and was making his way across a lake.

That afternoon Naomi led him to a sunken ballroom that tilted drunkenly toward one corner, the roof haphazardly cracked, the floor turned into an obstacle course by huge fallen blocks.

“We’ll train here instead of out in the open. There’s no longer any sense in trying to break you through a fear of falling, is there?”

He forced a smile in return. “Ha, right. You’re most kind.”

“My father had me train in the martial arts since I was young.” She slipped into a combat stance, resting her weight on her back leg, front leg bent, the ball of her foot lightly touching the ground. “I loved it. But eventually, I had to wonder: what does learning how to hit people and defend yourself have to do with the power of the Igneous Heart?”

Scorio warily moved to stand before her, falling into his own combat stance, presenting a three-quarters profile, arms up, legs slightly bent. His body was a mass of bruises, his muscles stiff, his knuckles swollen, but he forced the pain from his mind.

Only to realize she was waiting for an answer. “You said nothing concentrates the mind like pain and avoiding death. The more real the fight, the greater the benefits.”

“True. But think—when I’m in my nightmare form, do I really need to know how to do this?”

And she sprang forward, light and athletic, only to leap up and spin, leg scything around in a wicked arc. Her foot missed his face by an inch.

Scorio leaned back, a fraction too late to have avoided the blow, and felt the rush of air as her foot swished past him.

“I… I guess not? But surely it helps?”

She’d landed lightly, fallen easily back into her combat stance, backed away. “It does. But then half of all Great Souls who pass their first trial develop ranged attacks that require no melee skills at all. Yet still, they train. Why?”

Scorio resisted the urge to rise out of his stance. “Something about the act of training the body itself?”

“Close,” she said, nodding her head in approval, and despite himself, Scorio felt a rush of gratification.

She illustrated her next words with three carefully controlled roundhouse kicks, executing them slowly and with great precision, one low to the knee, one to the stomach, then one high, to the chest. “Advancement through the ranks requires one thing and one thing only: ambition fueled by an inexhaustible will. Training the body by learning martial arts hones the will by forcing you to learn discipline, self-control, and focus.”

Scorio watched her retract the last kick and then slowly, with great control, lower her foot back down to the ground. “Makes sense.”

“So.” She smiled, and he didn’t like it. “You’ll learn to fight so that you can learn to manipulate mana with the same force of will and determination. Yesterday you showed me you already had good instincts; you move well, remain aware of your surroundings, and know when to press and when to back off.”

“Didn’t seem to help me any.”

“Didn’t help you at all, but then, it wasn’t a fair fight. But your technique was raw, almost sloppy, your movements too loose and predictable, and you have virtually no stamina.”

“Well, that seems a bit harsh. Virtually none?”

“Virtually none,” she said with finality. “From now on, you’re going to start each cycle with a run which won’t end till First Clay becomes First Rust.”

“All of First Clay?” He tried and failed to hide his disappointment.

“Then you’ll meditate till Amber, working on your Coal manipulation. After that, you’ll meet me here, where we’ll work on your forms and technique. And in the evenings, we’ll talk. I don’t know much, but what I do know, I’ll share.”

Scorio inclined his head gravely. “Thank you. I couldn’t ask for more.”

“Just shows your ignorance. You’ll finish the day cycle with a run that’ll last all of Second Clay. But since we’re already here, you can warm up with fifty laps of this chamber. And to keep things interesting, I’m going to follow behind you in my nightmare form. If you slow down, I’ll punch you in the kidneys. Go.”

“Go?” Scorio’s eyes widened in surprise, but when she began to shift into her gaunt, horrific form, he took off, tripping and stumbling as he navigated the room toward the far wall.

He didn’t look back, but he knew she was right behind him. Not because he could hear her footfalls, but because of a low, terrifying chuckle that seemed to whisper directly into his ear.

* * *

On the fifth night, Scorio built an actual fire in his chamber out of desiccated wooden fragments he’d found in a collapsed building during his morning run. He carefully leaned the slats against each other to form a pyramid and stuffed the hollow beneath with dried moss and dead ivy.

When Naomi appeared for their evening review, slender flames licked at the wood and cast dancing shadows across the walls. A soft, cottony smell filled the chamber, a scent which prickled at lost memories, and Scorio found it surprisingly difficult to tear his gaze away from the dancing flames.

“What’s the occasion?” asked Naomi, tone wary as she sat across from him.

“The sun-wire’s been feeling oppressive of late.” He gazed into the heart of the small fire. “And I’ve some questions for you.”

She canted her head to one side. “What questions?”

“There’s so much I don’t know. Don’t understand. But we’ve been focused just on immediate training. You won’t even speak of what happens once I ignite my Heart.”

“There’s a reason for that,” she began, but he cut her off with an upraised hand.

“I know. I understand. But—well. These runs I’ve been doing.”

“Run-walks,” she corrected.

Scorio grimaced. “Mostly runs. I can loop the ruins all the way around three times within the entirety of First Clay.”

“You should be able to do five.”

“Well, I’m at three. But my point is, that’s a lot of time to spend thinking. And now that I’ve mostly worked out a safe path, I’ve realized there are things I need to ask you.”

Naomi settled down, reclining on her side and leaning on one elbow, her expression skeptical. “Such as?”

“Well, the ruins.” He gestured around the room as if taking in the vast, moldering buildings without. “What’s happening? Why is Bastion dying like this?”

She shrugged a shoulder. “Nobody knows.”

“There has to be speculation.”

“Sure. But that’s just what it is. Speculation. Some think that when the portal to our supposed homeworld closed, Bastion stopped receiving some kind of vital energy that kept it alive, and now, like a plant trapped in the dark, it’s withering up. Others think it’s a spiritual judgment of our failings. Some think it’s all part of the plan, and meant to act as a clock counting down to our extinction if we don’t destroy the Pit in time. But nobody really knows.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Centuries, easily. Maybe since Bastion was founded. It’s a slow process. They’ve figured that at the rate it’s going, the city has perhaps ten years left before it’s consumed utterly.”

Scorio sat up. “Ten years? But there’s so much left that’s just fine.”

“The ruins are expanding ever faster.” Naomi stared morosely out the window. “They say that originally it was but inches that were lost each year, then mere feet. But now they’re expanding quickly enough that you can see the change from day to day. So yes. It’s been studied exhaustively by just about everyone. Ten years, they say, then the Archspire in the Academy will be destroyed, and the Great Souls will never return.”

Scorio absorbed this, trying to wrap his mind around that fate. “How do you know when a year’s up?”

“The sun-wire pulses in a unique way. It happens every three hundred and eighty-four cycles. Why three hundred and eighty-four? Nobody knows. But every time we hit that number the sun-wire goes through this light show, and everybody reckons themselves a year older.”

Scorio nodded slowly, tonguing his molars, mulling this over.

Naomi watched him, faintly amused.

“And—the portal home. Does anybody know why it closed?”

“If they do, they’re not sharing. I remember asking my father the same questions. Legend has it that in the beginning, the portal would open frequently, but never stood permanently open. But that in time it opened less frequently, and one day ceased to open at all, breaking the oath that was sworn to the Great Souls and those who came to live here and serve them in hell. That’s when the focus of every Great Soul became the destruction of the Pit. It’s said that the one who accomplishes that will become the Infernarch, with power over life and death and all of hell. They’ll lead every living soul back to Ettera, opening the portal home, and our sojourn in Bastion will come to an end.”

Her smile was steeped in bitterness. “’Course, the Empyreal Prophecy had everyone excited on that front. The whole city was ready to celebrate a few years back. It foretold the day the Imperators would crush the true fiends and collapse the Pit, and the Houses, the Great Souls, everyone made a big push. Then it all went wrong. The Imperators were thrown back, there were big losses, and it’s been revolution in the streets and denial in the halls of power ever since. And with only ten years left, time’s really starting to run out.”

Scorio nodded, taking this in. “Who made the prophecy?”

“Supposedly? Some Great Soul from centuries back. Though I think the council fabricated it for their own ends. Who knows? Regardless. It failed, and now the streets are ready to burn with outrage.”

“And the ruins started when the portal closed?”

“Right. Or shortly thereafter. First, they consumed all the most important buildings that had been built close to the portal, and then they spread outward.”

“Most important buildings? Like what?”

Naomi shrugged. “The old palace, the old basilica, the old academy. The most important buildings were built around the perimeter that met the portal itself. All gone now, all destroyed and consumed.”

Scorio frowned. “Old academy?”

Naomi raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I said.”

“You mean, the one everyone’s training in now is new?”

“If you count a building that’s nearly two-thirds of a millennium old as ‘new,’ sure.”

“And the old one? Have you been?”

Naomi smiled. “Of course not. The deeper you get into the ruins, the more dangerous it becomes. And what do you think we’d find? The ruins have been scavenged and picked over ever since they were abandoned.”

“Huh,” said Scorio, sitting back. “Interesting. What about Black Star petals?”

Naomi blinked at this sudden change of topic. “What about them?”

“I met a couple who made money collecting them, or used to. They said they’d sell them to House Basilisk, who’d turn them into pills for their Great Souls.”

“That so? I used to take Black Star pills when I was young. But from what I remember, it takes some fifty plants or the like to make a single pill. It’s not worth the effort.”

“Why not?”

“Because just like everything else in the safe zone close to Bastion, they’ve been picked to extinction. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Black Star plant around here. Plus they only bloom where Coal mana is strongest, which is where, coincidentally, you’ll often find the most dangerous predators. Just not worth it.”

“But say I collected fifty plants. Would you know how to turn them into a pill?”

Naomi considered, clearly uncomfortable with the question. “I mean, not really. But I know someone in town who would. An alchemist. But forget about it. I’d not waste his time until you survived the process of collecting fifty plants.”

“All right then.” Scorio gave a sharp nod. “Then I’ll start doing my Second Clay run at night to see if I can’t find some.”

Naomi’s tone turned flat. “You’re not listening. That’s not a good idea. It will take you forever, Black Star pills are just condensed Coal mana, and you’ll be a target to every predator out there.”

“Are you willing to give me my sapphire vials back?”

Naomi narrowed her eyes but didn’t answer.

“No? In that case, I don’t have much choice, do I?”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“If it comes to that, I won’t be able to say much at all, will I?”

To which she couldn’t resist smiling. “Fair enough.”

“And one more thing,” he said, taking up another wooden slat and laying it carefully against the fire. “When I was in the Academy, Praximar said something about Great Souls keeping journals, keeping treasures for their future selves. Have you heard about that?”

“Sure,” said Naomi. “Common practice. As was raiding the lockers of famous Great Souls once they died for their loot.”

“Wait, what?”

Naomi shrugged one shoulder. “Was one of the first ways I became disenchanted with the Academy. Technically your locker is meant to be inviolate, but it was sickening how often the trainers or more powerful students would raid a locker when word reached them of a notorious Great Soul’s death. Of course, that also meant that most Great Souls didn’t bother leaving anything of worth in their lockers once they realized the truth. So it’s not nearly as amazing a cache of treasure as you might think.”

“But they’d leave something behind? Journals?”

“Journals, sure. Art, objects of sentimental value. It’s not cut and dry. If a Great Soul had powerful friends, their locker might remain untouched until those friends died, too. And if the Great Soul was reborn in time, they might actually get access to their stuff before it was stolen. But… how long did you say it’d been since you were last reborn?”

Scorio’s heart sank. “Two hundred and thirty-three years.”

Naomi gazed at him sorrowfully. “Add in the fact that you’re a Red Lister, and the odds of there being anything of value in your locker are incredibly small.”

Scorio sighed. “Great. I thought… well. There’s still a chance, right?”

Again with the one-shouldered shrug. “Nothing’s impossible. But it’s not as if you could walk into the Academy and ask to see your old belongings.”

“Not walk in, sure. But what if someone smuggled me in?”

Naomi raised an eyebrow. “And who would do that?”

Scorio smiled pensively. “I’m not sure they would. But there’s no harm in asking, right?”

“Would that that were true.”

* * *

After Naomi disappeared for the night, Scorio wrapped the bands of leather he’d salvaged from a discarded harness about his near defunct sandals and carefully slipped out the window into the darkened ruins.

Second Clay was already fading to twilight darkness, the sun-wire a livid seam of garish orange across the dim sky wrapped in funnel clouds, the maroon and musty brown hues of the last cycle’s light giving way to smoldering umber and deeper shadows.

It wasn’t true darkness; there was enough deep light to illuminate the edges of buildings, to wash the darkest chocolate brown over raised surfaces, to give a sense of the objects around him as he descended to the street.

But shadows seemed impenetrable, windows and exposed interior spaces beyond crumbling walls revealing nothing but ebon night.

Scorio took a moment to stretch, easing his aching muscles and limbering up, then set off at a light jog, giving himself time to warm up, his footfalls echoing softly off the rough walls.

Heavy rain began to fall, the droplets fat and warm, spattering down from the revolving clouds in spiraling curtains that washed across the city. Scorio raised his face to the rain and allowed it to wash the day’s sweat and dust away. This moment had become one of his favorites; the rain didn’t last long, but while it fell it seemed an absolution.

It was his fifth run, but this time he left the trail he’d made for himself that ran radially around the city in a neat path, and instead angled deeper into the ruins, striving to keep to open streets or broad avenues, though even these were often choked by collapsed buildings or washes of shattered masonry.

Nothing but exposed stone and shadow lay around him. The darkness seemed to swarm with movement, but he’d learned to relax and not let his paranoia get the better of him. Instead, he jogged with soft focus, allowing his peripheral vision to pick up on dangers that he might not otherwise have sensed.

Because for all that the ruins seemed a blasted wasteland of gray rock and charred stone, there was a subtle ecosystem existing within it, subsisting, he now understood, off the Coal mana that wafted across the desolate urban landscape like smoke off the charred remains of a fire-stormed city.

The mana wasn’t actually like smoke, however; it had—if not an intelligence—then perhaps a reason to where it gathered and thickened, and where it grew sparse to the point of non-existence. At first, he’d wondered if it didn’t simply settle into hollows and depressions like a heavy fog, but no; he’d come across dense pockets high up in the buildings, or dropped into lower basement levels, wary and with his senses tingling, to find that the cramped, half-collapsed rooms might prove devoid of any Coal.

There seemed to be a system to it, but he couldn’t divine its rules. So instead, he simply jogged through the lessening rain, and challenged himself to envision his Heart as he went, to hold it before him like some talisman, so that he could get a weak sense of the Coal mana about him as he went.

It wasn’t easy.

More often than not he’d realize he’d been running for a spell without any sense of the mana at all, and have to stop to summon his Heart once more. Or he’d get such a tenuous read on the ambient mana that he couldn’t really tell if it was thick or thin, more just if it was there or not.

But the creatures that lived in the ruins were obviously attuned.

More than once he nearly ran into a funnel of delicate strands that were woven across entire rooms or even streets, their filaments beaded with Coal mana that had condensed like dew upon blades of grass. He’d been tempted at first to harvest these droplets until he’d seen movement above, a hint of massive, insectile legs and burning red eyes. He’d backed away and then fled, realizing he’d almost fallen prey to a not-so-subtle trap.

The fire salamanders with their strange gill stalks were quiescent during the night, but occasionally he’d jog through a nest and startle a dozen of them into waking, sending them shooting away in all directions like streaks of crimson fire.

More wondrous and strange were the fist-sized and stone-shelled barnacles he’d come across that clustered across entire streets and encrusted entire buildings with their conical forms; usually they’d be dormant, their mouths hermetically sealed, looking like little more than part of the decay, but sometimes he’d come across stretches of street awash with Coal mana, and there the barnacles would have opened up and waved their filaments in the air.

Random boulders might be covered in gray mussels the size of his palm, and occasionally he’d espy glowing motes of soft green light floating within the Coal mana currents, each of which would resolve itself into small, transparent organisms whose simple internal organs were visible, each of them trailing long and incredibly fine tendrils behind them.

Once he turned a street corner and froze, looking up to see a curved shell the size of a wagon floating down the center of a particularly rich flow of Coal mana, its shell patterned with gray and pink stripes, a great, unblinking eye pinned directly in the center of the spiral, gazing at him with alien intelligence as it jetted its way slowly down the street, trailed by a mass of rubbery tentacles.

But there were more overt predators as well.

He was forced to barricade himself into a small chamber with the help of his chalk when a pack of black-furred beasts that came up to his knee came leaping after him, eyeless and squat, their huge mouths filled with glowing green fangs, their entire bodies seeming to be little more than sleeves in which to fit their maws.

Another time he realized that a massive feline was keeping pace with him along the rooftops, six-limbed and utterly silent. Scorio had frozen, heart hammering, staring up at the beast, which ceased trailing him to stare back down, only for its head to lurch up from its shoulders as its neck elongated and then spread out violently into a hood, revealing glowing patterns scrawled across its interior that immediately dulled Scorio’s wits and drowned him in lethargy.

It took all his will to stumble away and sprint through the streets, garish afterimages of that mesmerizing pattern hanging before his eyes all the while as if seared into his mind.

But all of that he’d experienced while running his perimeter route, staying roughly the same distance from the edge of the civilized city, and never straying more than a dozen blocks into the ruins proper.

This time he sighted upward, getting his bearings from the sun-wire and the fiery gaps that littered the ruins in the sky, and set off at an oblique angle, moving deeper into the ruins, his nerves growing ever tauter with each step.

It was a tricky line to walk; head too quickly into an obvious area of thick mana, and you risked running into a trap or patient predators; remain too circumspect, and you could spend all night running down barren streets, glimpsing nothing but the hollowed-out remains of old mana-mollusks.

So Scorio ran cautiously, and when he saw a street scalloped with dormant stone shells, he eased into it, slowing down and scanning the rooftops as he went.

Nothing moved.

On he ran, footsteps sounding painfully loud in his ears, chalk clasped lightly in his right hand.

The clams that cluttered the walls weren’t overly large or densely grown, so the Coal mana had to only wash through here sporadically. He followed the street down till it reached a chasm over which extended a brutal bridge like a toppled monolith.

A deep red glimmer illuminated chasm walls covered in serried ranks of large barnacles, over whose rough stone bodies milky-white spidercrabs the size of ponies picked their way, the edges of their armored bodies lit a soft pink by the chthonic glow.

He paused, considered. Summoned his Igneous Heart, and with it hovering before him in his mind’s eye, opened his attention to the sweeping clouds of rank mana.

The chasm below him was absolutely saturated with Coal.

Scorio studied the descent. The walls were architectural in nature, a series of ledges, balconies, rough walls, and protruding buttresses. It was an easy matter to drop to the first broad ledge, only five yards below, and from there he could drop to the second. It arced around a promontory, and then there were some four stories’ worth of dark windows, their pocked blackness against the gray stone making it seem like a hive of some sort, before another broad ledge showed the first of the barnacles.

Was it worth descending? Exploring? The climb back would be arduous but possible; the stone was so decayed and cracked that he’d not be at a loss for handholds.

Scorio glanced back down the street, over the bridge, then sighed in resignation and wished he still had his other treasures. He hopped off the street to the sunken curb, moved to the edge, grimaced, then turned over to lower himself down to his stomach and drop to the ledge below.

Carefully, slowly, he descended, always making sure he could see a way back up, and after ten harrowing minutes of climbing down past the hollow windows, he dropped the rest of the way to the final ledge and there peered over at the fiery depths below.

The Coal mana was as thick as tar here.

A river of fire was washing slowly past far below, great plumes unfurling as if in slow motion, a never-ending gout of virulent orange overlaid by a startling yellow. The very rock seemed to glow with heat, the gray gradating to a cherry red like a long bar of metal whose end had been placed in a fire.

No coming back from a drop into that.

In the center, however, rose an island of rock, a towering column whose top was some twenty feet out from him and some thirty below. A couple of Black Star flowers grew far out there, and Scorio crouched down, rubbing at his chin, as he pondered how he might reach it.

Wait—

There.

Scorio stared down at a protruding corner several yards below, nestled between the barnacles whose delicate fronds waved back and forth through the air. A slender flower grew amidst them, its petals a soft, velvety black, the heart a softly glowing blue.

No need to leap out to that isolated column. He’d happily settle for the one below him.

Sucking on his teeth, Scorio considered how he might reach it. He’d have to lower himself off the ledge, catch the toes of his sandals on the uppermost barnacle, then trust that it would hold his weight as he reached for a crack several feet above it.

And if it didn’t?

He’d drop some six yards to the next ledge.

Not letting himself consider the danger, fixating solely on the plant, he once more lowered himself to his belly, eased over, and felt with his toes till he found the rough ridges of the barnacle.

Put weight on it, then some more, then eased all the way off, hands holding tight to the edge, to reach down and shove his fingers into the crack, desperately taking hold.

The barnacle had retracted its frond and snapped up tight. Worse, the closest spidercrab had stilled, its eyestalks orienting on him.

“Hello,” murmured Scorio, forcing a cheery smile. “Just passing through. Don’t mind me.”

The spidercrab shuddered, then turned around completely to face him.

“Okay, got the message.” Scorio worked his way down the barnacles, moving carefully but still cutting his fingers on their razor-sharp edges, till he was able to put the ball of one foot down on the protruding corner.

The spidercrab began to pick its way toward him, each leg as long as he was, their tips looking more like weapons than anything else.

Scorio leaned down, pulled up the flower, and shoved it into his robe.

A dozen barnacles around him retracted their fronts with a snap, and two more spidercrabs froze and twisted around to stare at him.

There was no time to hesitate. Scorio leaped up, clasped the shell of the uppermost barnacle, and heaved himself aloft. Scrambled higher, reached his ledge, and hauled himself atop it.

The spidercrab had closed the distance with unnerving speed, its mouthparts vibrating, its eyes catching the red light from below. It darted toward him, forelegs raised like spears, and Scorio knew they’d come down with punishing force and speed once it was in reach.

Reaching down, he drew an inch-long line of chalk on the side of the ledge, then stashed it in his robe and leaped for the lowest window.

His whole body tensed in anticipation of a blow, a terrible strike that would pierce robes, skin, muscle, and bone, pinning him to the wall.

Instead, he heard a hissing, bubbling sound, then two cracks below him.

Scorio climbed, panic giving him renewed strength, hurling himself from windowsill to windowsill, ascending in moments what it had taken him ten minutes to climb down.

Only once he reached the ledge above did he glance below him to see three of the spidercrabs on the ledge he’d vacated, waving their forelegs about as if cheering him on, their attention focused on the invisible beam of the chalk wall, against which they clacked their legs as if trying to figure out what it was.

Gasping for breath, Scorio climbed higher, till at last, he stood at the foot of the bridge once more. He took out the Black Star plant and held it up to the sun-wire’s dead light, studying its bioluminescent core in the gloom and touching one of the thick, velvety petals.

It felt like soft mud and left a dusty residue on his skin.

“One down,” he said to himself and tucked it back into his robe. “Forty-nine more to go.”