Chapter 594 - 593: In Daylight

Chapter 594: Chapter 593: In Daylight

Location:Wild Confederacy — The Northern Flats, The Abandoned Bore Site; Settlement Windbreak, The North Gate

Date/Time:TC1858.02.28

The spikes came out of the frozen boards with a sound like something small being hurt.

Kestrel had a bar under the end of a deck plank and her whole weight on it, and every time she leaned, the old iron let go another finger’s length with that thin rising squeal, and every time, she grinned. She’d been grinning since the first trip. Three days of hauling the lane in by sledge, board by doubled board, and she’d treated every one of them like a coin found in the road.

"Last of the deck," she said. "Then the spur. Then we’re done, and the Speaker owes me a drink."

"He doesn’t owe you anything," Esker answered. He was stacking. He stacked the way he pulled, at one speed, laying each board square on the last.

"He owes the frost a winter’s mending, and I’ve taken it off the frost. That’s a drink." The spike came free. She held it up to the light, rust-black and bent, and dropped it in the bucket with the others. "Mei. Where’s the next one footed?"

"Under the rig leg. The north one." Mei pointed with her chin. She’d been doing that all afternoon, because she knew where everything on the deck had stood and what it had been fastened down with, and nobody else here did. "There’s a cross-brace under. Two spikes, not one."

Kestrel set the bar. "Two drinks, then."

The sun was out. That was the strange thing about the day, the thing Mei kept noticing. In all her days at the bore she had never once seen the flats in sunlight; it had been gray, or snow, or dark. Now the light came in low and white across the crust and threw every ridge of it into a long blue shadow, and the glare off it made her eyes water, and the deck planks steamed faintly where the sun lay on them. The collar was a gray crusted disc in the middle of the boards with nothing over it. Nobody looked at it much.

The five stood at the deck’s corners, facing out. Daylight only, the Speaker had said, and back inside before the light goes. It was the middle of the afternoon. There were hours yet.

***

The deck plank under Esker’s boots lifted.

Not much. A hand’s width at the far end, the way a board lifts when somebody steps on its other end. Except nobody was standing on its other end. Esker looked down at it. Mei looked down at it.

Then the board next to it lifted, and the one beyond that, a slow ripple running across the deck from the pit side toward the collar, each plank rising a little and settling, as if something long were passing underneath them, close under, just below the crust.

"Off the—" the five’s head began.

The lane went first.

It was twenty paces off, the stretch of doubled board that hadn’t been hauled yet, running from the deck toward where the tents had been, and Kestrel had gone out along it to set her bar under the next spike. Mei saw the boards under her heave upward in the middle and break apart, end over end, and Kestrel go up with them and come down between them onto the crust beside the lane. The crust held her for half a breath.

Then something came up through it, under her.

Mei never saw all of it. She saw the head-plate come up out of the snow like a turned spade, white with crust and wet underneath, and the long body behind it, and Kestrel’s legs going out from under her as the ground she’d landed on simply opened. She saw Kestrel’s bar fly, spinning, and drop on the snow ten paces off. She heard Kestrel say something, a word, quite clearly and not loudly, as if she’d remembered something.

Then the head went back down, the way a diver goes, and took her with it.

The hole stayed open for a breath, dark and ragged, with the edges of the crust breaking in. Then the snow slid in after.

Mei was already running. She didn’t decide to. The lane was broken and tilted and she ran along the boards that were still level and jumped the gap where they weren’t, and came down on the far side on a board that rocked under her and held. The place where Kestrel had been was a dent in the snow. Mei went down on her knees beside it and drove both hands into it, and the snow was loose and wet underneath, not crust, not frozen at all, and she dug, and there was nothing, and nothing, and her hands were in the ground to the wrists.

"Mei—"

It was Esker. He’d come out along the lane behind her, and he had hold of the back of her coat.

"Get up. Mei. It’s soft. Get up."

She couldn’t feel anything with her hands. Somewhere under them, under the snow and the crust and the unfrozen ground beneath, was Kestrel, and Mei’s fingers had nothing at all.

Esker pulled. She came up off the snow onto the board, and her hands were gray to the wrists, and she turned around on her knees, and the deck behind them was coming apart.

***

Two of them. The five had one at the north corner, where it had come up through the planking right beside the rig leg’s old footing, shouldering boards aside like bedding. The five were doing what fives did. Front, side, head called, the fifth facing out. The front had a spear in it already, at the joint behind the skull, the place the sheets all named.

It hadn’t gone in.

Mei saw that from twenty paces, and didn’t understand it. The spear was there. The front was leaning on it with all his weight. And the point had gone a hand’s depth and then lain along the plate instead of under it, skating, as if the plate went on further down the neck than plates did.

The second one came up out of the deck in the middle, between the collar and the stacked planks, and it came for them.

It didn’t come for the five. It came along the lane, low and fast, the limbs coming out of their fold, toward the two people kneeling on a broken board twenty paces from anybody.

"Up," Esker said. He was already up. He was standing between her and it on the tilted board with nothing in his hands. He’d been stacking planks. He had no weapon at all.

Mei had her sword out before she was on her feet.

It came onto the lane. The boards bucked under its weight. The first limb came at Esker and he went sideways off the board onto the crust, deliberately, the way you’d step off a cart, and the crust held him, and the limb went over the top of him and came at her.

She met it with the flat. The shock ran to her shoulder the way it had at the pit branch, and she gave a pace backward, and there was no more board behind her, and she stopped.

"Head," Esker called. He was on the crust to her left, on his feet, up to his shins and not sinking further, not yet. "Over. Your right."

She went under it, low and left, the way every sheet said, and there was the plate at the base of the skull and the joint behind it, and she put the point in.

It didn’t go in.

It met plate. She felt it skate. She felt the point ride down along a second edge of plate she had never seen on any sheet, laid over the joint like one roof tile laid over the next, and slide off it sideways into nothing. The animal didn’t even flinch.

The plate had grown down. That was all she had time to think. It had grown down over the place where the blade went, and there was nowhere for the blade to go.

The head came around.

It swung back on itself past the shoulder, and Mei saw it coming and couldn’t get her sword back in time, and it didn’t come for her.

It came for Esker.

He was on the crust where it had put him, sideways to it, with nothing in his hands, and he’d turned to look at her, because she was the one it had been fighting. He didn’t see the head until it was there. It took him at the shoulder and the side of the neck together and lifted him off his feet.

And as the head folded back to take him, Mei saw the plates part.

The joint opened. The new plate and the old one slid apart on the hinge of the neck the way two tiles slide when the roof beneath them bends, and for as long as the head was folded all the way back, for as long as it was holding him, there was a gap.

She went into it.

She went into it with everything, both hands, over the limb and up under the folded head, and the point went into the gap and on, and on, and she put her shoulder behind the hilt and screamed and drove it through.

The thing jerked the length of its body. The head unfolded. Esker fell out of it onto the crust.

The animal went down across the lane, and the boards gave under it, and it sank half into the ground and lay there with her sword in it and didn’t move again.

***

Esker was on his back on the crust with his eyes open. The side of his neck was gone. Mei got her hands on it anyway, both gray, numb hands, and pressed, and the warmth came through between her fingers and onto the snow, and he looked up at her, and his mouth moved.

"Soft," he said. "Don’t kneel. It’s soft."

She didn’t move.

"You’re kneeling." No hurry in it, as if she’d stacked a board crooked.

She stayed there, kneeling, until he stopped saying anything. The snow around her knees was going pink and then red and then, where it soaked down, almost black, and it smelled of iron and of the wet clay under the crust, and somewhere behind her the five were shouting to each other in short hard words she couldn’t make into sense. She stayed a while after that, with her hands on his neck and the crust under her knees holding, just, and the sun lying long and white and bright on all of it.

***

The five lost theirs.

That was the word the five’s head used afterward, standing over the broken deck with his spear in his hand and his face a color she didn’t have a name for. Not killed. Not drove off. Lost. They had held it at the north corner, all five, while Mei crossed the lane and back, and it had hurt the side man, a long limb-stroke across the thigh that opened his trousers and his leg beneath, and they had put three spears into its neck, and none of them had gone anywhere. And then, while they were setting for a fourth, it had gone back down through the planking the way it had come up. Into the ground. The boards had settled over the place. Then nothing.

"Down," the head said. "It went down. Like a stone into a pond."

Out on the crust, far beyond the pit, where the light was so bright off the snow that Mei had to look at it through her lashes, something stood. Pale on white. Long. It didn’t move while she watched it, and she watched it a long time.

It was afternoon. The sun was out. It was the middle of a clear day, and it had stood there and watched them in it.

Then it swung north over the crust, and the glare took it.

***

They got Esker onto the sledge on top of the planks. There wasn’t anything else to put him on. They left the rest of the deck where it lay, and the spur, and Kestrel’s bar lying ten paces from where she’d gone, because nobody would walk out to it.

Mei pulled. The side man couldn’t; he sat on the planks behind Esker with his leg bound in two scarves and a belt and his teeth set, and once, about halfway, he put his hand on Esker’s boot and left it there for a kilometer or so, and didn’t say why, and nobody asked. The five’s head took the other rope, and they leaned into it together, and the runners hissed and stuck on the steaming crust and hissed again, and her hands came back to her slowly over the eight kilometers, which she wished they hadn’t.

Her sword was still in the animal on the lane. She’d left it there. She hadn’t been able to get it out, and she hadn’t tried very hard, and she would think about that later.

The palisade showed against the snow at last, with the sun going red behind it. There were people on the wall. There were always people on the wall now.

Naida was at the gate. She was standing on the step beside Nye with a sheet in her gloved hand, and she watched them come up the last slope, and Mei saw her look at the sledge and count, and come up short, and count again.

Nye stepped down.

She looked at the sledge, and at what was on it under the tent hide, and she rested her palm on the hide above his head, and spoke a woman’s name, one Mei had never heard, and then, "Esker."

Then she stood with her hand still on the hide, and looked at the five, and at Mei, and at the empty rope where a third person should have been pulling.

"Kestrel," the five’s head said. "It took her down. Into the ground. There’s nothing to bring."

Nye took her hand off the hide. She turned and faced out across the flats, toward the bore site, toward nothing, the red sun on the side of her face. And she said a second woman’s name, clearly, out into the cold, the way she’d have said it over anybody coming in.

Then she said, "Kestrel," to the empty snow, and stood aside to let the sledge go through.

Naida stepped down beside Mei. She didn’t say anything. She held the sheet out, the one she’d had in her hand, and Mei looked at it without taking it. A Seven Peaks copy, Thorne’s upright hand. Two names she didn’t know headed it.

The last line was short.

The floor was earth. Look down.

"It came this morning," Naida said. "After you’d gone."