Bilius' Body

  In the past, Taylor would cram himself into a new body and then force parts of it to move around until, bit by bit, he got the whole thing working. A wiser soul had taught him that a better, kinder way was to slide in slowly, sink into the nerves, muscles, and skin a little at a time, filling it up like water. The memories came in little bits at first, starting with key memories that anchored the host's identity and branched out from there.

  The dead boy's name was Bilius d'Mourne, a son of Otis d'Mourne, and he was eight years old. He suffered from a deadly sickness, the toadstone fever. Not many children caught it, but those who did rarely survived. Maybe the fever killed him, or maybe the boy wasn't willing to suffer through another day of pain. Regardless of the exact reason, he died in his little bed. The nursemaid must have found him, pulled the sheet over his face, and gone to notify the manor's staff. There was no fire in the boy's hearth, and the house was shut up for the winter, so there wasn't any need to move the body right away. The cold would keep him.

  Taylor lay like that for hours, testing his new limbs, letting Bilius' limited knowledge and memories acclimate to their new occupying soul. The chill was too bitter for such a young body. His body was too thin to account for the scant few days of fever that killed him, and his blanket was too thin. His chamber pot wasn't empty.

  Between the cold and his bladder, Taylor couldn't take it anymore. He had to get up, use the chamber pot, then wrap himself thrice over in the sheet and find his way downstairs to the kitchens in bare feet. His newly acquired, previously used Bilius brain knew the way. The iron stove had a bank of coals inside, the tinder box was full, and the pantry was adequately stocked. He got the fire going. After he put some warmth into his aching fingers, Taylor assembled ingredients and started to cook.

  That is where Cook found him, standing on an overturned box, applying himself to making breakfast with an adult's determination and the awkward inexperience of an eight-year-old's hands. She almost scolded the boy, but he was doing nothing dangerous. In fact, he had a rather good quickbread going in one pan. In a second pan, he was cooking an egg, a slice of meat, a few slices of vegetables, and he'd sprinkled herbs over the lot. He split the bread in half and slipped the other ingredients inside.

  The boy ate his oversized sandwich at the stove in big, hungry bites. The lad hadn't eaten since he fell ill, not that the house fed him overmuch to begin with. He was the nursemaid's problem. As she came near, he noticed her with a guilty glance.

  "I'm sorry. Did you want some?" He clutched the sandwich like she might take it from him.

  She turned away from him with a frown. "I think you need all of that for yourself. I'll get the dishes. You sit at the table. Like a human." She clacked a plate down in front of him without looking, and waited for the unruly child put sandwich on the plate, feet on the floor, and butt into a proper chair. She fed him a second breakfast and sent him upstairs to his room. He didn't have much of anything to wear in his room, but he found a threadbare tunic, trousers, and a pair of leather sandals. With that done, he started to explore the chilly house starting with the downstairs.

  The building was rather large, very solid, and very square. The exterior and load-bearing walls were made from dressed stone stacked without mortar and then fused with magic until the seams between them were nearly invisible. It was hard to tell with his currently non-existent magic skills, but the stones themselves might have been created with magic. They looked like granite, but the particle distribution was very fine and much too uniform, showing no trace of messy geological processes. If it was natural rock, then it was rare stuff.

  Floors and interior walls were thick timber, cut smooth, closely fitted, and draped with tapestries. The windows all had glass, perfectly clear sheets of it without bubbles and only minor distortions, but they were only single-paned. Interior shutters included thick pads of batting for insulation, and most of them were shut tight. He ran through the rooms on the ground floor: kitchen, back mud room, staff room, entry hall, parlor, dining room, another parlor, office, and a big event room occupying a dedicated wing of the house.

  Most of the house was closed up and the furniture covered by sheets, but Taylor wandered through the several rooms anyway. That much exploring tired out his Bilius body. When he came to the grand staircase leading to the second floor, and his room, he felt the need to rest and plopped down on his butt on the floor.

  He was in the entrance hall, looking up at the stairs, as the maid (Miss Chambers, if he remembered) opened shutters along the front of the house without greeting the child or telling him off for sitting in the entrance hall. There was a grand portrait opposite the front doors, hidden by the nighttime shadows but now revealed by sudden daylight. Bilius' family.

  Father was in a major's uniform of the Imperial Expedition Corps: a big double-breasted coat of dark blue that matched his hair. He was decorated with a silken sash, brass pips on his epaulets, and a row of medals pinned to his chest. He was in his late thirties, perhaps, with the faintest touch of gray at his temples. Bilius' memories told him Father had the Commander class, and his skills let him make the most of others in a fight. He was also the Legate of Mourne, which was important but he didn't know why.

  Mother also wore a uniform of the same corps, a more flattering female version of the coat with a skirt. Her pink hair and green eyes were a striking trait from her side of the family. She was a Battlemage. Bilius' brain flooded him with pride. Both of his parents had classes. Important, powerful classes.

  Mother and Father's hands rested on their two children: a son and a daughter, ages eight and five. When they deployed, they took the older children with them and left newborn Bilius at home. Taylor racked the dead boy's brain for details, but all he had was a sense of great importance surrounding a place called Grisham's Wall.

  That was why the house had so little staff. They only had to take care of the property and one small boy. There was Cook, Cook's husband Blake, Chambers, and Karla the nursemaid.

  The second floor had bedrooms for the family and the nursemaid, and Father's library. Karla's room was next to his own, so Taylor knocked on her door to meet her, and let her know he wasn't dead. It only occurred to him just then that, if Cook wasn't shocked to see him making breakfast, then the nursemaid hadn't told anybody he died.

  Karla. He couldn't think of her face, but that was her name. She didn't answer when Taylor knocked, so he risked opening the door and peeking inside. Not only was she not there, but there wasn't any trace of her at all. Her room lacked anything personal a nursemaid might own, like clothes, keepsakes, vanity items, or a case to carry them in. She was moved out. Or escaped. She might have feared the consequences of letting her charge die.

  Taylor didn't need a nursemaid, anyway.

  The third floor was all guest rooms, with an attic on top. The other servants (Cook, Cook's husband Blake, and Chambers) lived in cottages on the property. So there was nothing else of interest to see indoors. That meant it was time to view the exciting room: the library.

  Taylor took his time. His new Bilius brain didn't know how to read, but the collection looked promising. It had a few hundred books, most of them arranged in groups with identical bindings, suggesting they were related by topic or author, or had simply been re-bound at the same shop. Billius opened the shutters and took down sample books to page through, just to see what he was dealing with. Most of them were solid text, with little in the way of charts, figures, or illustrations. For all he knew, they were romance novels. Other books were filled with diagrams, probably magical in nature, and he noted the location of these.

  He saw two scripts in wide use. The more popular one had distinct letters made from entirely straight lines, printed mechanically on paper, and was probably the local script. About a fifth of the books featured a loopy, joined script unrelated to the first. Those books used thicker paper, colored inks, and were mostly penned by hand.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  One oversized volume proved to be a folio of maps, which Taylor flagged for later study. Geography was destiny, as they say, and knowing the land came in handy. The large-scale maps seemed to track the growth and shrinkage of an empire over many years, but without reading the dates, he couldn't know if he was looking forward or backward in time.

  The real prize was a set of volumes bound in bright red leather with a fine, scaly texture and gilt edges to the paper. The characters were complex ideograms expressing ideas instead of sounds. The language was Mi'iri, and it popped up in a lot of worlds. Taylor knew how to read and speak it because he served the Mi'iri in one of his past lives. The red books were filled with arcane diagrams, treatises, theories, and spells. The series was The Art and Practice of Magic in nine thick tomes by Gatimu Ndegwa.

  If the spells worked for him, he could start training immediately. He couldn't sense or shape mana at all, but if he could use spells then he could start solving those problems. He set to skimming volume one, and discovered he could read most of it just fine. The language was definitely Mi'iri, even if the thoughts were less convoluted than the strange working of the Great Contemplative Sages. There was some nonsense about 'elements', 'affinity', and 'aspects', but there was a lot of good stuff in there, too. His excitement built, and his hands were shaking by the time he found what he was looking for in the second half: a spell for light.

  He took a brass candlestick from a study desk and tried casting the spell on it. "Flame in the dark, harken to me, come to life. Light!"

  The candlestick glowed, barely. It wasn't much, but it was enough to get started. He could use the spell to learn how to control his mana and take the first step toward mastering magic in this new body. After a certain point, he wouldn't even need spells.

  Assuming he lived. That was always the caveat. And, since Bilius dying was a prerequisite to Taylor's arrival, survival wasn't something he should take for granted.

  Carefully, he put everything back in its place.

  Ignoring the guest rooms on the top floor, Billius went outside to look at the grounds, crunching a thin layer of snow under his sandals. He had memories of the area, but not vivid ones. Perhaps he didn't like the outside much. There was a low stone wall around the property, with maybe fifty yards between it and the house in all directions, partly filled with dormant garden beds. In the space of ten minutes, he learned he had a stable with one horse, and that a single lap around the house was enough to wind him.

  His physical condition was not very encouraging.

  He dragged himself to the warmest place in the house, the kitchen, and moved a chair near the oven where he could dry his clothes and warm his feet. Cook pretended not to see him, probably so she wouldn't have to send him away. That's where he was, steam rising from his body, when Cook's husband and the elderly maid walked in.

  "What is the boy doing here?" Chambers asked Cook.

  "I'm cold and wet, and this is the only fire." He tried pouting while he said it, to make it cute. Nobody could refuse a sufficiently cute child. Her only response was a scowl.

  "Where are your shoes?"

  "These are my shoes. And my tunic, and my pants. I don't have other clothes."

  "Nonsense! Come with me!"

  The maid took young Billius by the arm and pulled him, none too gently, up a flight of stairs and down the hall to his room. She saw the unmade bed, smelled the full chamber pot, measured dust with a judgemental finger, and examined the chest that should have been filled with blankets and clothes. The maid stormed next door, where she found an empty room where Karla and her belongings should have been. She returned in a barely constrained rage.

  "What did you do to her, you little monster?"

  "I didn't do anything, Miss Chambers."

  "You did something. Why else would she leave?"

  "I don't know. I was sick for days and days. She said I had toadstone and was going to die. I woke up and everything was like this." Taylor hated that he was crying. The old bat should listen to him, but she wasn't going to. Children were always in the wrong.

  "She wouldn't just leave. Not my Karla. You did something." For a second, he thought the maid was going to slap him. But, she got control of herself and left to vent her rage elsewhere.

  Later, he overheard Cook's husband say Karla had taken the weekly food budget from Cook's tin, all the Young Master's warm clothes and shoes, some of the Lady's silk dresses, and other odds and ends. Good clothes in usable condition were easy to sell off in any town, it was only a matter of price. Horses, jewelry, and tableware were more valuable but raised more questions.

  The following weeks were carefully choreographed. Miss Chambers worked a strict schedule in the mornings, performing certain duties on certain days in certain rooms, and Billius learned where to be at any given hour to avoid her. She disappeared in the latter half of every day, inconsolable, either drinking or crying. Billius learned to clean and dust his room, make his bed, and use the bathroom down the hall instead of the chamber pot. He was delighted to learn this world had running water, pushed by gravity via aqueducts or pumped into high cisterns by teams of horses. The water was a suspicious brown tint, but nobody commented on it.

  For clothes, Taylor made do with hand-me-downs from his brother, courtesy of old chests in the attic. They were out of style but sturdy and warm. They enabled him to spend more time outside exercising and exploring beyond the confines of his little estate. Basic fitness came first, and he tired himself out every day with calisthenics, long walks, and, later, runs.

  Cook and her husband were named Mr. and Mrs. Blake, but Cook was called Cook to avoid confusion. Blake turned out to be a very useful man to have around. He often saw (from a distance) the boy's efforts during his morning workouts and built little things for him, like a chin-up bar, a roll-up ladder to let him over the back wall easier, a target for his throwing practice, and a variety of wooden training weapons weighted down with bits of metal.

  The afternoons were for lunch, a nap, and magic practice. He drained his mana every day until he felt sick, then drained it again as soon as there was more. The half-dozen low-mana spells he learned in the first several days were the typical semi-useful things. He could create light, start small fires, move small objects without his hands, mend small breaks and tears, purify water, clean things that weren't too dirty or stained, and make a stick point toward his home. He learned that last little spell in case he got lost while wandering the hills behind the house.

  The wonderful thing about being young was how quickly he recovered. He just needed to make sure he could eat enough. Old Bilius stayed in his room and didn't want to bother anyone. New Bilius/Taylor showed up at mealtimes and asked for seconds. Cook, Blake, and Taylor ate in the kitchen's little nook, the two adults with their heads down as if he might bite their heads off on a moment's notice. He figured if he kept being nice to them, maybe they would realize he wasn't a bad person. One day, they might even look him in the eye.

  His magic books were interesting and included some topics he knew little about, like taming animals. But there wasn't much he could do with new ideas until he trained his mana, and that would take a while. His more pressing problem was reading the local language. He approached Blake while the groundsman was working on the horse shed, ensuring it was warm for the impending winter. He was nailing up fresh siding, with grassy mats stuffed inside the wall for insulation.

  "Mister Blake?"

  "Just Blake to you, Young Master." He didn't look away from what he was hammering. "Need something?"

  "Yes. I need to go to school. I should be learning to read about now, shouldn't I?"

  The hammering stopped. "I'll talk to the curator. Perhaps she will arrange something."

  "Who or what is the curator?"

  "She takes care of the town for your father."

  "We have a town? I want to see it."

  "You mustn't." Blake turned to face him, a rare event for any conversation in this house, and his face instantly formed a sneer. "You stay inside the walls, or you go up into the hills right behind the house. Nowhere else is safe for you. You'll be killed." He'd be relieved if that happened. Then the three caretakers could watch over the property in peace, without the added burden of taking care of him.

  Taylor fled from him, ran to his room, slammed the door and braced a chair against it. Poor Bilius. Trapped in a house full of people who couldn't stand him. Maybe he hadn't died of toadstone. Maybe he just gave up.

  Taylor filled his basin with slightly brown water and waited for it to settle. Then, he tried to catch his reflection. His image was difficult to make out, but there wasn't anything hideous about it. His hair was a deep midnight blue, a good color in his opinion, and his face looked symmetrical. There weren't any stains or scars. He looked a lot like the woman in the big portrait but with the man's hair color and slightly hawkish nose. Whatever these people had against him, it wasn't his face.