Chapter 123: The Wrong Side of the Gate

For a moment, everyone in the lane stopped moving.

He was on his knees at the base of the wall with a slab half free. Alden stood two paces up the lane with the empty tray. Dagna was by the carrier at the shed wall, nearer the gate. Down at the gate end, past the crate of broken facing, one of Brede’s workers, a skinny young man in a canvas apron, had been stacking cleared stone against the shed. He turned toward the horn with a slab in his arms.

Out in the yard, drivers were hauling at their teams. Up on the ridge road, five or six gray shapes ran low along the verge, and two guards with long poles were already out to meet them. Most of the hounds broke and scattered along the slope.

One didn’t.

It came through the gap between the second cart and the gatepost, swerved round a rearing horse, and turned straight into the mouth of the lane.

It was lean and gray, the size of a calf, bristles standing stiff along its spine, and its mana rolled ahead of it like heat off a stove. Early Rank Two. Silas was still Late Rank One.

The young worker took a step back, caught his heel on the stone he’d been stacking, and went down against it.

He was on the lane side of the gate, three paces from the bars, with the crate between him and the swing.

A guard sprinted after it, pole in both hands, twenty paces behind. The rearing cart team blocked her way into the lane. The hound was ten paces from them.

The holding bay was empty. If they could get the worker through that gate, the guard could deal with the hound without anyone underfoot.

“Dagna, wall between it and him!” Silas sprang up. “Alden, take its eyes, then back to her! I’m clearing the gate. We put him in the bay and shut it, and the guard gets it in the lane.”

Dagna’s hand went up. A pale pane of mana slid across the lane at an angle, low and wide, between the hound and the fallen worker. The hound hit the edge of it, scrabbled, and swung away along it.

Alden banged the empty tray against the shed wall with a crack like a shot and shouted something wordless. The hound’s head snapped round toward the noise. He didn’t charge it. He made himself large for one step, then backed toward Dagna’s shield the instant it turned his way.

Silas went for the crate.

He took it with Remote Grasp and pulled it back up the lane, away from the gate’s swing, and it moved about a hand’s width before its back corner bit into a gap between the paving stones and stuck. He pulled harder. The crate tipped forward, wedged itself tighter against the gate’s lower bar, and stopped dead.

No. Wrong.

Battle Evolution caught his mistake as he pulled: he’d dragged the crate by its middle, letting the caught corner pivot into the gate. He was wedging it in.

Let the corner go. Tip the near edge up. Then pull along the free line.

He was already running toward the worker as he did it. He released the drag entirely, caught the crate’s near top edge instead, and lifted it a finger’s width so the stuck corner rocked free of its gap. Then he pulled sideways, along the shed wall, where nothing caught. The crate slid clear of the gate’s arc in one smooth scrape.

Silas reached the worker. “Up, come on, up—” The man was half on his feet, slipping on stone dust. Silas got both hands in the back of his apron and hauled him toward the gate, through the gap, into the holding bay.

“Wall moving!” Dagna said. Silas felt more than saw the shield swing with them, re-angling to cover the gap as the worker went through.

The hound came round the end of the shield.

It had given up on Alden. It came low and fast for the nearest movement, and that was Silas, half turned in the gateway with his arms full of apron. He committed to the last heave. A claw caught his right forearm on the way past.

It felt like being hit with a hot iron bar. Then the cold came after it, and then the wet. His right hand opened on its own. The worker sagged.

Silas swore, grabbed the apron with his left hand, and pulled him the rest of the way through.

“Hey!” Alden had come back out from behind the shield. He threw the tray. It skidded across the paving under the hound’s nose, and the beast lunged at it, then at him, turning half away from the gate.

Dagna came through the gap into the bay, shield still angled behind her. Alden came last, backing.

Silas didn’t try to hold the hound; Remote Grasp against a Rank Two animal at full charge would have been a joke. He took the gate instead. It was heavy and well hung, and it wanted to swing. He guided it, pulling its far edge round in a steady arc the instant Alden was through, and as it met the post he caught the low drop latch with a thin thread and set it down into its socket.

The latch fell with a clank.

The hound hit the bars a heartbeat later. The whole gate rang. It held.

Then the guard was in the lane behind it. Her pole came down across the back of its skull with a crackle of discharged mana, and again, and the hound folded onto the paving and lay twitching.

She looked up through the bars, breathing hard.

“Everyone in there all right?” the guard asked.

Silas found he didn’t have an answer ready.

***

His arm was bleeding properly. Three lines across the outside of the forearm, the middle one deep. Blood ran over his wrist and dripped off his fingers onto the clean stone of the bay.

The edges were already drawing in, with the warm, pulling itch he’d learned to recognize. It was unpleasant and very welcome.

The young worker was sitting against the bay wall where Silas had dropped him. He looked up at Silas’s arm, then at Silas’s face.

“You,” he said, and swallowed. “Thank you. I tripped. I’m sorry. Thank you.” He seemed to realize he’d said that already and shut his mouth.

“You’re all right,” Silas said. “That’s what counts.”

Out in the lane, Vessa and one of her men had hustled two other workers into the cart doorway when the shouting started and kept them there. Now Vessa came to the bars and looked through at the four of them and the blood on the stone.

“Anyone need carrying?” Vessa asked.

“No,” Dagna said.

Vessa nodded once and went back to her people.

The guard unlatched the gate and checked them one by one. Silas let her look at his arm. Her frown deepened as the edges drew together.

“That’s closing fast,” she said, then moved on to Alden.

His hands began to shake as soon as she turned away. Silas folded his arms to hide it, winced at the pressure on the cuts, and unfolded them. He wished she’d come back and give him something to do.

Running footsteps came round the corner of the sheds.

Elyra stopped at the gate.

She’d come from the east court at a dead run; he could hear it in her breathing. Her eyes found him and went straight to the blood: on his sleeve, his fingers, the paving. Her face went very still.

Her shadow was lying across the bay’s flagstones behind her, thrown by the afternoon sun. As Silas watched, it went darker. Deep, wet black, darker than any shadow had a right to be. The air above it turned cold. Something under the surface shifted, the way water bulges before something breaks it.

The guard took a step back without seeming to know why.

“Elyra,” Silas said. “Look at me. Look here.”

He held up his arm. The cuts were already half closed, pink and puckered.

“It’s closing. You can see it. He’s safe in here”—Silas tipped his head at the worker—”and the guard stopped the hound. It’s over.”

For a long moment she only looked at his arm.

Then the darkness went out of her shadow like a held breath let go. It was only a shadow again, ordinary gray on the stone.

Elyra walked straight past the guard into the bay, took his wrist in both hands, and turned the arm toward the light.

“Show me,” she said. “Properly. All of it.”

He let her, and was glad she’d come.

He was also aware, in a small cold place under the relief, of how fast that shadow had gone dark.