Chapter 166 Every Bed Is Bait

The door had shut on a priest and a stretcher, and Dane Rook went on ringing. He was a mimic chest, blind, wagon-shaped and cracked down one side, parked at the lip of the gap in Rainhouse’s ramp with a dead man’s brass charm hooked on his tongue. Three sickrooms lay end to end across that gap, the only way over it. They belonged to the House, a street of swallowed inns, and a convoy of forty worn-out people was walking into them after his two notes. He had rung them in there, and he wanted every heart that went in to come out this end.

The hunger put three hearts behind that shut door and thirty-eight bunched on the far lip, forty-one exactly. It had none for the nurse’s voice in the far room or for the chair rocking beside it, slow and regular. The hunger counted hearts so it could eat them.

Each floor in there gripped a foot and let go only while a door of that room stood open. Three rooms in a row have four doors, and every door on the House wanted to be shut. So Senn Parr had the near one on her bowed bar. Istra took her six plates and the hum of her charge in over the sill to the second, and Kril the scout scraped after her on blades to the third. Vera stayed at his good side, chalk and a wrapped hand on his lid.

That left the far door to whoever came through last. It swung in again and stayed, and a voice trained over stockpots came down all three rooms. “In, in, keep on. Nobody stops and nobody sits. You’ll lie down when I say there’s somewhere fit to lie.”

Dane knew her as the woman with the ladle, since she gave nobody a name. Tess had been her ruin, and these days she kept Tess on a long cord and held the other end.

She was right about sitting, because every bed in there was a chest with its lid up, and Dane could not fault the design, having been it.

Prayer beads came into the middle room backward. That was Holt, hauling the front stretcher, and there the line stopped, because somebody in that room was already using his voice.

“Jaw forward,” it said. “Stretcher level.”

It was Holt after a night’s sleep, and no heart went with it. The Holt who owned one sounded like he had carried wounded since morning. “That’s me,” he said. “That’s our infirmary at Candle Row, the first night. I said exactly that.”

“And those are my jars,” said Tess, quick and light up the line on her cord. “Top shelf. I moved every one down the second morning, because a dropped jar is three coppers.”

“It has me giving my second entry ahead of my first,” said Kett, the dungeon’s skeleton clerk, over a click of bone, “and I do not enter out of order. Somebody heard this from a bed, in a fever. We had a litter man in the bed under that shelf. I have been one litter man short since the second night out. I wrote him down a deserter.”

Nobody answered him except the rested Holt, who said his two lines again, word for word. So the House had kept their litter man, Dane thought, and made a room out of a few minutes of his fever.

Then the beds began to ask for water.

They asked the way the sick ask at night, in voices the carriers knew from sitting up with them. The hunger had hearts peeling off the line in ones and twos, decent people going to do what they did every night.

It tried the nearest of those voices and came up empty, so Dane rapped his good wheel on the stone twice. No.

“No what?” Vera said. An old man’s voice wanted a drop, only a drop, and Dane knocked twice on top of it. “Him? There’s nobody in…” Her hand came up off his lid. “Oh, you ugly, beautiful box. Holt! Nobody’s in the beds! Never mind the blankets, no pulse means it’s the House talking. Dane can tell. Call them out to me!”

Holt shouted a bed, Vera asked, Dane knocked, and Vera bellowed the answer through two doors. The voice by the stove got one knock, yes, and a living man on a convoy cot had his water. Once his torn side cost him a pair of notes, and four hearts drifted for the walls before the next pair landed.

The House had heard its bait called out, and shut the near room. The rain that had drummed on that roof above him now drummed level with his lid, and the door bore down on Senn’s bar until the wood sang. A frame racked that hard gives somewhere, and Dane pushed the question at the steel without meaning to.

Nate’s knife answered from the back of Dane’s mouth. “Hinge side, low,” Saint Rust said. “That’s where they come apart. Don’t ask.”

Dane did not ask, though a belt knife had no business knowing it. Then, low on the hinge side, beside his wheel, boards parted with a long dry rip.

“Dane!” Holt had the front stretcher in the near room. “The door’s coming down on her bar and the wall’s torn open by the hinges. Which?”

“Dane. The door?” Vera said.

A door on the House was made to shut. The tear was only damage, and he had months of proof down his own side that a torn edge stayed dead. He knocked twice. No.

“The wall, Holt, take him through the wall!” Vera said.

The beads stopped, because a mimic was telling a priest, by way of a mage, to drag a wounded man into a hole in something that ate people. Holt gave it one breath. Then the poles scraped out through splinters beside Dane’s wheel, with Holt on his knees behind them, and the door came down on Senn’s bar a hand above the sill, too low for anything on poles.

After that the tear was the door. The hunger had ten out through it and better than thirty still inside when the heart holding the far door moved. It went a little way in, bed ropes took a big weight all at once, and the far door swung to with nobody’s back against it.

“Go on,” said the woman with the ladle, with the stockpots gone out of her voice. “I’ve got the back. I’m only getting off my feet.”

Her heart had been going hard, the heart of a woman shoving forty people through a door. It eased, and it kept on easing, until it fell in with the rocking chair beside her. Creak, and a beat. Creak, and a beat.

“Lie back,” said the far room. “You’re in out of the wet now.”

The only soul tied to her was Tess, a room and a half up the line and walking away.

Tess, pull your cord, Dane thought. He had the four words laid out behind his lock like tools on a tailgate. Tess would turn and haul before she knew why, and with a door of that room still propped, the bed would have to give her up.

The price was the lure, dead in his mouth for sixty breaths, and the notes with it. He had missed one pair and four people had gone for the walls. This would be sixty breaths of that, with thirty people still inside.

The day Nate Parr died, Dane had no say over his own mouth. Tonight he had four words of say, and he kept them.

He rang the charm.

Vera was asking about the bed by the washstand, and he knocked three times, as hard as the wheel would go. Three meant the question had failed and she should ask another.

“Bad question? Sorry,” Vera said. “Is there a heart in the bed by the washstand, yes or no?”

He knocked twice. No. It was a true answer to a question that did not matter.

Then the far room shut on the woman with the ladle. From both walls boards rattled across the middle of it and met, and one room was two. Her heart was on the far side of them, still going, one beat to the creak.

The convoy came out past his wheel smelling of wet wool, its big sleeper carried up the ramp still asleep. Four people had hold of him the whole way.

Forty-one hearts had gone in over the far sill. Forty came out past his wheel, and the hunger did not round. Nobody else on that ramp knew it had been a choice.

Bone clicks stopped at his cracked side, and something square was set down against his wheel. It was Kett’s box, whose sealed page named Nate Parr and the chest that had closed on him. Nate’s sister stood a wagon’s length off, leaning on her bar, and did not know yet.

“Mimic Seventeen,” Kett said, as the dungeon’s books had it, and went on up the ramp with both hands free for his count. Dane had dreaded that box the whole way up the road, and now he was minding it.

The last of the convoy out was Tess, pepper and quick light steps that came through the tear and stopped dead one stride into the rain.

“All of them, Dane,” Vera said. “That’s all of…” He knocked twice. No. “Her cord,” she said. “It runs from her belt all the way back into that wall, and it’s tight as wire. There wasn’t a wall there.”

Kril’s blades scraped up beside Tess, and one of them left the stone and did not come down again. Kril was offering to cut it.

Tess did not put a price on it. The hemp creaked, and creaked again, and she breathed in through her teeth, because her hands were ruined. She had wrapped the cord twice around her fist.