Tsaba cast about once more with her Auristic sight before shutting it off and taking the dagger. Once she started levering the padlock, knowing that they were alone was fairly pointless -- there's no non-guilty way to actually break into a warehouse. And she'd need her magical strength once they got inside, unless they wanted to be opening crates full of bodies all night.
"Thank you," she said, slipping the knife into the lock and applying her full strength. Nuits, as a whole, were not as strong as humans. They lacked the ability to heal and their nerves didn't work right. But they did have one major advantage. Humans almost never used their full strength, because doing so resulted in extreme damage to their body. In theory, a muscle could contract with enough force to break its bone; the human body had ways of preventing that from actually happening unless the situation was incredibly dire. A mother might be able to lift a large boulder off her child, a warrior might be able to cleave right through steel armour with a dagger, when there were lives on the line, but using that sort of strength in everyday tasks just got people killed.
Nuits, of course, could take a new body if their old one was damaged enough. That was the point of the whole exercise. So it didn't matter one bit to Tsaba whether she damaged her current body by applying too much strength to the lock. So long as it held up long enough to make the transfer, it didn't make one bit of difference. What would make a difference was getting caught, so she busted the lock as quickly as she could, handed the knife back, flexed her arms experimentally to determine how much motion she had left, and crept into the warehouse.
The room was fairly dark, so she took Castor's hand so that they wouldn't lose each other and headed for the crates. Once her free hand hit wood, she once again closed her eyes, chanted, and brought djed forth. Using so much magic directly before a transfer was probably unwise, but Tsaba had never heard of magical fatigue, or even overgiving, preventing a transfer.
Of course, that might be because people who tried such a thing didn't survive to talk about it.
She pressed her hand against the nearest crate -- well, coffin -- and concentrated. Dead human, taller than her, pudgy, no major wounds on skin. Could be difficult to carry about. Next crate; dead human, pox sores. She dismissed it out of hand. No use oozing ichor everywhere and looking like she was about to infect everyone with a plague.
She moved her way down the row of crated corpses, moving as quickly as she could and only pausing long enough to pick up surface details so as to limit her energy expenditure. Too old and frail. Not-quite-healed childhood spine injury. Dead too long.
Finally, she paused. Fresh corpse, spine and skin intact. She knew it was the right one. It was small enough to carry back to the university, provided they could remove it from the crate. It was already thin, so the adaptation to being a Nuit shouldn't affect it overmuch. It was also already clothed; humans had a thing about being naked, even when they were dead. It was perfect.
It was the body of a little girl.
Tsaba shut off her Auristic sight and tapped the crate. "This one," she said, her breath catching in her throat. "It'll be the easiest to get out of here quickly, if we can get it out of the crate. Can I borrow that knife again?" |
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