Chapter 613: Inside the Curb

Location: Seven Peaks — the north gate paving

Date/Time: TC1858.03.16

“Edge,” the watch said.

The watch said it the way Tilda had told him to, not loud, the one word. Taron heard it from the gate passage, where he was standing with his back to the wall eating bread nobody had buttered, and he put the bread on the wall ledge and walked out onto the paving.

The light was going. The field beyond the curb was blue with it, and the struck squares lay dark in the snow in their rows, and out past the row of standing coping stones Tilda’s peg stood up out of the snow a finger taller than it had at noon.

Tilda was on the curb. She had been on the curb since the afternoon watch changed, standing on the tops of the coping stones where their tops cleared the snow by a finger, with her bruised arm tucked in her coat and a spear in her good hand. She had her boots on the last stone. Taron had watched her decide that the tops of the curb were the last stone now, the day they set it, and he had not said anything, because she was right.

“Edge,” Tilda called back, not turning. “Finger. Rising.”

“How long?”

“Since the watch said it.”

Hanne came up the paving behind him with her slate. Taron heard her stop two slabs back. He did not look back for her. He looked at the peg, and the curb, and the end slab of the paving inside the curb, the one that sat a thumb low on its half bed with the hole under it and Lisle Thorley’s bread under that.

The peg went down.

It sank slowly, as the others had, until it stood where it had stood before. Then nothing.

Taron put his hand on Stormheart’s hilt and left it there.

+++

The sound came from under his feet.

It was a grinding, low and long, stone on stone, and it did not come from the field. It came from the paving. From the last slab.

Taron took one step back off the second slab onto the third, because the second slab had sunk a coin’s width four days ago and he did not trust it, and he watched the last slab go.

It did not tip. It went down. The whole slab, level, the inner edge first, grinding against the edge of the second slab as it dropped, and then the outer edge after it, until it lay tilted in a pit a forearm deep, with dark earth showing around its edges on three sides. The paving ended at the second slab now. Between the second slab and the curb there was a hole the size of a door laid on its back, with a gray stone lying crooked at the bottom of it.

On the far side of the hole, Tilda stood on the curb, alone.

“Tilda,” Taron said. “Stay there.”

“I’m staying.”

The slab at the bottom of the pit moved. It lifted at one corner, and something put it aside, and the head came up out of the earth under it.

It came up facing him.

Taron had read every sheet, and none of them had said which way one would face coming up. He saw it now: the head-plate wide and flat and gray, crusted, filling the width of the pit, the fine hairs at its rim moving, the whole front of it turned toward the gate and the paving and him. Then the forelimbs came up either side of the head and laid themselves flat on the edge of the second slab, and the body came up after them, crust flaking off its shoulders where the earth had scraped it.

It was half out of the pit, its back to the curb and Tilda, its front to Taron.

He fed Stormheart.

It went the way it went on the drill floor, without hurry. He drew his breath down to the bottom of his belly and held it there, and let the spiritual energy go down his right arm into the hilt the way you draw a whetstone down an edge, once, long, and again. The hum came up through the grip into the heel of his hand. Then into his teeth. He drew the blade with his right hand and took the grip in both, and set his left foot forward on the third slab and his right foot back on the fourth, and brought the blade back and up over his right shoulder, and let the breath go.

Light crawled down the edge of the blade, blue-white, from the hilt to the point, hissing.

The right forelimb came at him across the second slab, low, sweeping for his front foot.

Taron didn’t step back. He stepped in, over it, left foot planted on the second slab, the slab rocking under him a hair and holding, and brought Stormheart down off his shoulder in one stroke at the place where the forelimb met the body.

The edge hit crust. The light went off the end of the blade with a crack he felt in his elbows, and the crust under it went black and spat and came away in a sheet the size of his palm, and under it the plate was gray and smooth, and the edge went across it like a skate across ice and off into air. The force of the swing carried him around. His right foot came off the fourth slab, and he let it come, turned the whole of his body with the blade, all the way around, and came back to face it with his feet set again on the third slab and the blade up.

The forelimb had gone back past him and come around again. It took him across the ribs on his left side, where a shield arm would have been, and he went sideways off the third slab onto the fourth on his hip, and rolled, and was up on one knee with Stormheart in front of him before he’d thought to be.

His ribs told him about it a breath later.

“Back’s plated,” Tilda called from the curb. “Under the crust. Same as the front.”

Taron looked past the head.

Tilda had come along the curb tops to the place behind the animal, and she had driven her spear down into its back, two-handed, her bad arm out of her coat for it. The point had gone through the crust and stopped. Taron could see the shaft standing up out of the gray flakes, not in, a hand’s width of crust burned off around it where it had skated and come back.

The left forelimb went up and back over the animal’s own shoulder.

It didn’t fold its neck. It didn’t turn its head. The head stayed where it was, facing Taron, and the limb alone reached back over its own shoulder for the curb, the way a man reaches back over his shoulder for an itch, and swept the curb tops.

Tilda jumped.

She had nowhere to go but across. She came off the curb with her good arm out, over the corner of the pit, beside the animal’s flank, for the second slab, and she was nearly there. Taron saw her land. Her knees hit the edge of the second slab and her chest after them, and her good hand slapped down on the join between the second and the third, the fingers spread, finding it.

The second slab dipped under her the coin’s width it had dipped before, and a coin’s width more, outer edge down, toward the pit.

She slid.

Taron was up and moving, two steps, three, and he was not going to get there, and he knew it on the second step and kept moving. The limb that had swept the curb came back down off the animal’s shoulder and closed on her ankle. She came off the second slab backward on her chest, her fingers dragging the length of the join and leaving nothing on it, and went over the edge into the pit, past the animal’s flank, down beside it, into the dark earth where the last slab had been.

Stormheart came down at the limb with everything that was left in the blade.

The light took the crust off the limb from the joint to the elbow in one gray sheet. The limb jerked. It did not let go. It went down into the earth beside the body, and the earth closed around it, and there was nothing on the second slab but the marks of her fingers in the frost.

+++

“Raven,” Hanne said behind him.

Taron did not turn. He knew what it meant that Hanne had said it in that voice. It meant Raven’s hands were up.

Hanne said, “Taron’s on the field.”

Level. Not loud. The standing order said who, and Hanne had looked at the paving and seen who, and said it.

“Taron,” Raven said. “Down.”

He went down.

Not back. Back was four slabs of open paving between the animal and the woman whose hands were up, and he’d have been in the line every step of the way. Sideways. He threw himself left off the third slab, flat onto the stone, and rolled once more so he was face down along the west edge of the paving with Stormheart under him and his cheek on the frost, out of the line from the gate to the pit, and he lay there with his side on fire and watched it go over him.

Taron had never seen it from the ground.

Raven stood in the gate passage with her bound hand up first and the other behind it. He saw her draw breath and not let it go. He saw her shoulders turn, the small turn she made before a line. Then the air between the gate and the pit went tight, and the line went.

The first line took the crust off the animal’s head-plate and shoulders in gray sheets, all at once, and the animal reared up out of the pit to its full height, bare, steaming in the cold.

Her hand stayed up.

The second went into the bare front of it, low, under the head-plate, and Taron heard the sound it made, and the animal sagged.

Raven’s hand was still up. Taron could see the wool on it. It had gone dark across the palm.

The third went in where the head-plate joined the neck. The plate over the joint went dull red, and went, and the head came down onto the edge of the second slab with a sound like a sack of grain dropped from a cart, and stayed there, the limbs slack beside it. It did not move again.

Raven went down on the gate paving.

“One,” Hanne said.

+++

Taron was up on the second count, on the third slab, with Stormheart up and humming, standing between the pit and the gate with his feet set and his left side burning.

The nine was when they took somebody.

“Three,” Hanne said.

Beside the dead one, in the dark earth of the pit, the earth moved.

The forelimbs came first, both of them, up out of the ground between the dead animal and the curb, reaching for the edge of the second slab. No head. Just the limbs, feeling for the stone, the way the ones at Halbrook had done on the sheet, the way it had come for Lisle Thorley under this slab four days ago.

“Four.”

He went forward onto the second slab, which was sinking, and he didn’t care. He put his left foot on its inner edge, where the bedding still held, and the right on the third slab behind him, so he straddled the join, and swung Stormheart low across the edge of the stone at the limbs as they came up over it.

There was no time to feed it again. He hit with what was left in the blade from before, which was a little, and with his arms, which was a lot.

The edge took the first limb at the joint where it came over the stone. It didn’t go in. It did what he wanted, which was to knock the limb back off the edge of the slab. The second limb came over. He reversed the blade and struck it backhanded, and the shock of it went up his arms and into his ribs, and he heard himself make a noise he had not made since the Guard.

“Six,” Hanne said.

The limbs came again, both together, low, over the edge of the second slab for his front foot.

He lifted the foot. He brought it down again on top of the nearer limb, on the stone, with all his weight and all of Stormheart’s in a blow behind it, the pommel driven down onto the joint.

“Seven.”

The limb pulled back under his boot. He felt it go. Both limbs went back down into the earth of the pit together, and the earth closed over them, and the second slab rocked once under him and was still.

“Eight. Nine.”

Behind him, on the gate paving, he heard Raven get up.

He didn’t look around. He stood where he was, astride the join, with Stormheart up and his breath going in and out of him in pieces, and watched the pit, and the dead animal lying across the edge of it with its head on the stone, and the dark earth beside it where the other had gone down, and Tilda’s spear still standing up out of the dead one’s back through the burned crust.

Nothing else came up.

Out past the curb, on the slope above the field, something pale stood broadside in the last of the light and looked at the gate. Then it wasn’t there.

+++

Mira was already on the paving with a lamp. She went to Raven first. Taron heard the wool come off Raven’s hand, heard Mira say nothing, and then say, “To the meat,” in the voice she used for telling people the price of a thing.

Then she came to him, and put her palm to his left side under the robe, and he stood still for it.

“Two,” Mira said. “Cracked, not through. You’ll know about it for a month.”

“Fine.”

“It isn’t fine. It’s two.”

Then Mira went back to Raven.

Raven came along the paving afterward, with her right hand bound in clean wool and held against her chest, and stood beside him on the third slab, and looked at the pit.

She didn’t speak. Neither did Taron.

“It was inside,” Raven said at last.

He waited.

“The hole. Under the last slab.” She was looking at the row of coping stones beyond the pit, standing in their line, every one of them where Taron had stamped it down. “We set the curb a hand out from the slab. Outside it. And we left the hole under the slab where it was, and the slab on top of it, because it was easier than lifting it again. The curb was on the wrong side of the hole.”

“Yes.”

“You saw it.”

“After.”

She nodded. She didn’t say she should have seen it before. She didn’t need to. He had watched her set those stones, every one, and he had stamped them, and he had not seen it either.

“It held,” Raven said, looking at the curb. “Nothing came through it.”

“Nothing tried.”

“No.”

He looked at the curb too. Every stone stood. Not one had been touched. Beyond them, the peg Tilda had driven stood where she had left it, upright, a finger clear, as if nothing had happened at all.

+++

Hanne wrote it on the gate-passage table after full dark, with Taron standing over her because he had nowhere else to stand that didn’t hurt.

The name went first. Tilda Rudd.

She wrote what happened in the order it happened, and Taron watched her write it and did not correct anything, because there was nothing to correct. The last slab went down into the hole under it. One came up inside the curb, facing the gate. Back plated under the crust. Reached back over its own shoulder with a limb. Did not turn its head. Tilda Rudd jumped from the curb for the second slab. Taken from the slab by the ankle. The line. Three. Dead. Counted nine. A second came up beside it inside the nine. Limbs only. Taron held the slab. It went down.

Then she stopped, and wrote one more line under the rest, smaller, and Taron read it upside down.

Said Taron.

“That’s for the order,” Hanne said, without looking up. “She said say who. I said who. I want it written that I did.”

“Good,” Taron said.

Taron went out to the paving one more time before he slept. The watch was at the gate, the same young one, with his eyes on the field. The dead animal still lay across the edge of the pit with Tilda’s spear in its back. Past it, the curb stood whole, and past the curb the peg.

Taron stood on the third slab and looked at the peg.

“If it comes up,” he said to the watch, “say Edge.”

“I know,” the watch said. “She told me.”