Whisk showed him the water-crack with her missing claw, because there was no time to show him with anything else.
It was a seam in the rock at the end of the ledge, no wider than a Skitter, with the sound of running water in it, going down. “Comes out under the pens. Big-folk don’t look at drains. You’ll fit. The knife-girl will fit. The Varr won’t.”
“Then the Varr,” said Brakka, “goes down the proper way with the tree, and makes a noise when a noise is wanted.” There was a hole in the plan the shape of a Pell, and she made the plan round it, and did not say his name. “Sprat, Quire, rat: pens. Get the Hounds out. We’ll be at the bottom of that scaffold with the stair behind us. When you’re out, you come to us, and we go up together.”
“And then?” said Ilsa.
“Then the Hounds tell us how they were marched down, and we go up it backwards. Fast.” Brakka’s tusks showed. “I’ve never yet found a hole without a way out of it, girl.”
Whisk and Dabble went back along the gallery then, as the Tally had said, two shadows into the dark where a Pell had gone humming.
Wick looked at the crack. He had slept perhaps an hour on the scree; it was not a night. The slack had left him hollow and the hour had not filled it, and there was nothing in the air to fill it with. He went down anyway, because he could fit, and because the fourth name on the board was down there somewhere, and Ilsa went behind him with her knives, and Skritch went ahead of them both without being asked.
The drain came out under the second pen, as Whisk had said, in a stone channel that ran along the back of the stockades with a foot of black water in it. Wick lay in the water with his chin on the lip and looked through the gaps between the posts into the pen, and there were people in it.
Seven, perhaps. They sat or lay on straw in the lantern-light with their backs to the posts, thin in the way the Skitter were thin, and every one had an iron ring at the ankle and a chain running from it to a long bar bolted along the floor. Four wore rags that had been a company’s colours once. Three were Greystep folk; he knew it from the grey in their skin. Lanterns on poles stood at the corners, burning low, and under the lanterns the frost had grown in ferns up the posts.
And at the far end of the pen, pacing, was Vosk.
He was not a big man. He was square and quick, and the leather half-mask covered the left side of his face from brow to jaw, with a dark shine on it where it had been oiled. Under the mask, when he breathed, there was a sound. A wet drag, in and out, like a bellows with a hole in it.
He stopped by a man on the straw who had reached a hand out toward the nearest lantern.
“No,” said Vosk. His voice was hoarse and reasonable. He kicked the lantern-pole over. The lantern went out in the straw and the man’s hand came back. “Listeners don’t need warm. Listeners need quiet. The client wants you fresh.” He walked on. “He’ll be wanting a look at you soon, and I’d rather he saw you awake.”
He went out through the gate. Two guards stood by it. One wore a half-mask like Vosk’s. The other wore a long blue-grey coat and black boots with a double-stitched seam.
Ilsa’s breath in his ear. “Watch coat.”
“Stolen,” he whispered back, and did not believe it, and knew she did not either.
They waited until Vosk’s wheeze had gone away across the dig. Then Skritch went up out of the drain like a shadow, under the bottom rail where the frost had rotted it, and Wick heard the smallest sound in the world, a Skitter whisper, “Big-folk. Grey Hounds. Which one’s Marta Keel?”
A pause. Then a woman’s voice, cracked, so low it was barely there. “Who’s asking?”
“Lantern Company. Aldo Marsh’s brother.”
The pause this time was longer. Then: “Stars. He’s a child.”
“Yes,” said Wick, from the drain. “I know.”
Ilsa did the locks.
She came up out of the water with her picks already in her hand and went under the rail, and Wick followed, and lay flat in the straw beside a woman of thirty with a hard, bony face and hair hacked short with a knife, and the woman looked at him and reached out, and touched his hair, once, as if to check it was real.
“Marta.”
“Wick.” Her voice was a rasp. “He talked about you. All the time. Till they—” She stopped. “You read the mark. On the pole.”
“Three notches and a bar.”
“He said you would. He said if anyone comes it’ll be Wicky and he’ll be furious.” One side of her mouth went crooked; the other side had forgotten how. “Are you furious?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Ilsa’s pick went into the lock at her ankle and the ring opened with a click that sounded, to Wick, like a dropped plate. Nobody at the gate moved. Marta drew her foot out of the iron and flexed it. “Three more. Jory, Sal, Ennis. The three Greystep can’t walk, their legs are gone grey, and there’s two more of theirs in the first pen. Don’t—” she caught Wick’s sleeve as he turned ”—don’t. They’d slow you and you’d all die and so would they. Get us out. Come back with more. That’s the only way. That’s soldiering.”
He looked along the pen at the Greystep people on the straw, and he hated her, and she was right.
“Where’s Aldo?”
Marta’s face changed.
“Not here. Down. They took him down, months back, to a cell by the door. He’s the only one they keep by the gate.” She was pulling herself up on the post. “He’s alive. Last I saw. They need him alive, boy, that’s the whole of it, they’d lose the whole dig before they’d lose him.”
“Then I’ll—”
“No.” Ilsa, not Marta. Flat, at his ear, with her pick in the second lock. “You’ve got nothing. Nothing in your hands, nothing in the air. You go down there tonight, you’re a bucket in a dry well with Vosk standing over it. We get these four out. We come back. Say it.”
He could not say it.
“Wick.”
“We come back,” he said. It came out of him like a tooth, and he meant it.
They got four out of the pen and ten yards along the drain before the alarm went.
It was a lantern. The one Vosk had kicked over had been lying in the straw, out, and the half-masked guard came in to set it right, and saw a chain lying open on the floor with nobody in it, and shouted.
Everything happened at once after that.
A bell started out on the dig, an iron clang, clang, clang. The guard in the Watch coat came through the gate with a crossbow and Ilsa put a knife through his sleeve and into the post behind him, so that he stood there pinned and roaring and could not aim. Marta had the other guard’s own cudgel out of his belt before he had finished turning round and hit him with it, twice, with fifteen months in every blow. Skritch was shrieking “Drain, drain, drain,” and the four Grey Hounds went into the black water on legs that had not run in a year and ran anyway, and Wick came last with Ilsa’s hand in his collar, and behind them, over the bell and the shouting, came the wheeze, and a hoarse voice saying, perfectly calmly:
“The small one. The small one goes to the client. The rest you can kill.”
The drain ran under the scaffold. They came up out of it at the foot of the timber with the dig in uproar round them, and there was Brakka.
She was standing at the bottom of a stair cut into the rock with Auntie across her chest and Seven at her back, and a Vosk man lying at her feet, and her face as they came up out of the drain was the face Wick had not looked at twice in the gallery. “There you are. Up. Hounds, which way did they bring you down?”
“The Throat,” said Marta. “Bridge. Then the long stair to the pit. It’s the only way up they use—”
“Then that’s our way. Seven, light, when I say, and then we—”
“Smoke,” said a voice from behind the scaffold-foot, small and hoarse and shaking. “Captain. I’ve got smoke.”
Oswin came round the timber on his short legs, black with soot from his bald head to his boots, with a clay pot in each hand and Pip’s dark shape stuck through his belt, and his frill, unbelievably, was up.
Brakka looked at him. Then she threw back her head and laughed, one great bark of it that rang off the cavern roof over the bell and the shouting. Wick had heard her laugh in a brawl and on a river and it had never sounded like that.
“Tallowby, you absolute—”
“I’ve been saving them,” said Oswin, and threw the first one, and a wall of thick grey smoke went up like a curtain, and they ran into it.
The Throat was a crack in the floor of the world.
The stair went up out of the dig and along a gallery and out onto a lip of rock, and there the rock stopped: a gap thirty feet across, black, going down farther than any lantern would show. Across it ran a bridge. Two ropes, hand-thick, and planks lashed between them, swaying in a draught that came up out of the black and smelled of nothing at all.
Marta went over first. Then Jory, Sal, Ennis, on their ruined legs, with Skritch running the rope beside them. Then Oswin, with his eyes shut and Seven’s good hand on his shoulder. Then Ilsa, shoving Wick ahead of her, and the planks jumped under his feet and the ropes burned his white hands and he looked down once and never did again.
Brakka did not come.
He turned on the far ledge and saw her. She was standing on the near lip at the end of the bridge with Auntie in both hands, and behind her, up the gallery, the lanterns were coming, dozens of them, and the shapes of men under them.
“Captain—”
“Go on, Sprat.” She did not look round. “There’s forty of them. The bridge takes one at a time. I’m the one.”
“Brakka, you can’t—”
“I can, actually. I’ve done it before. Six out of thirty, remember?” She set her feet. “This time it’ll be seven.”
The first of Vosk’s men came out of the gallery onto the lip and she hit him, once, and he went back into the three behind him and they all went down. The next came with a spear and she broke the spear and then him. The next got a bolt into her shoulder before Auntie reached him, and she did not seem to notice. But they kept coming, three at a time, and she was one, and the lantern-light showed Wick her face, and it was not grinning any more.
Then Vosk came.
He did not come at her. He stood back in the gallery mouth, square and quick and wheezing, and said in his hoarse reasonable voice, “Cut the ropes.”
Two men ran for the bridge-posts with hatchets.
Brakka saw it: the bridge, the company on the far side, the hatchets, the lip where she stood that would be an island in a moment with forty men on it. And she did the thing he had known since the first waystation that she would do one day.
She drew breath. All of it. Her chest went out like a sail.
And she sang.
It was not “Forty Tusks”. It was not a song at all; it was the Varr war-cry, the one meant to carry through hull-wood across a mile of ice, and she snapped it. She put everything she had into one note, and the note hit the rock.
The Throat shook.
Stone came off the ceiling in sheets. The two men with hatchets went flat. The gallery mouth cracked from floor to roof and Vosk went back into it with his arm over his face. And the wake that came off her was a thing Wick had never felt: a grit-hum so deep it was not in his teeth, it was in his bones, in the rock under him, in the ropes of the bridge, a grey thread as thick as a cable running from the roaring Varr across the gap to his empty white-tipped hands.
He had not slept. The cold was not yet out of him from the warden. He was a bucket in a dry well.
But the well was not dry. Something had just been poured into it.
He took it.
He could not have held a tenth of it. He took one thread of the grey, one, and it bit, cold, up his arms into his chest, and he looked at the near end of the bridge where the ropes were lashed round two iron posts driven into the lip, and he pushed.
The lip cracked.
A line went across it, under the posts, sharp as a chisel-cut, and the whole lump of rock the posts stood in sheared off the edge of the Throat and dropped, with the two men who had been reaching for them, into the black. The lashings held a heartbeat longer than the rock. The falling weight yanked the bridge after it like a whip, and then the lashings tore, and the bridge, hanging now from its two far posts only, swung out across the Throat like a pendulum, planks clattering off it, and came back and slapped the far wall under Wick’s feet so hard the ledge jumped, and swung out again, less. The rock fell for a long time. Nobody heard it land.
Brakka stood on the edge of nothing with Auntie hanging from one hand and a bolt in her shoulder and her chest heaving, and looked across thirty feet of air at Wick on the far side.
“Sprat,” she said. “That was my bridge.”
“You were going to cut it anyway—”
“I was going to cut it after I crossed.” She looked down at the drop. She looked at the forty men picking themselves up in the gallery behind her. Then she looked at the ropes, which Seven had lit white with a lift of its good hand: two of them, hanging from the far posts, still swinging, out over the black toward her lip and back against the far wall and out again, a little shorter each time, like a clock running down.
“Right,” said Brakka Ironsong. “Never. Again.”
She waited one swing. She watched it go out and come back and go out. And on the third, as the loose ends came swinging toward her lip, she jumped.
She did not clear it. Nobody could have. But seven feet of Varr with Auntie flung out ahead of her reached a long way, and the swing brought the rope the rest of it, and the maul’s head caught it and wrapped it, and the rope took her weight with a crack that Wick felt through the ledge, and she swung back in against the far wall and hung there over the black, swearing by her grandmother’s tusks, while Marta and Ilsa and Seven and Wick hauled hand over hand until her tusks came over the edge.
Dawn found them on the hillside above the pit, in the mist, and the mist was gold.
They had come up the long stair with Brakka’s weight on Seven and Oswin both, and the smoke-pots behind them, and the Vosk men had not followed; they had their own dead to count, and no bridge, and a windlass that took four at a time with Marta’s crossbow waiting at the top of it. Then they were out, under the oaks, with the sky going grey above the towers of Kell, and nobody could walk another step.
Brakka lay flat with Oswin cutting the bolt out of her shoulder.
“I walked backwards,” Oswin was saying, to the bolt, in the voice of a man who had been asked nothing and needed to say it anyway. “Very slowly. It stopped listening when Pip stopped ticking, and I stood still till I couldn’t feel my feet, and then I went and found him, and came back along the gallery on my hands and knees, and the ledge was empty, so I went down toward the noise.” The bolt came out. Brakka said a Varr word. “I’d like it noted that I am never, ever doing that again.”
“Noted,” said Brakka, through her teeth, and put her good hand on the top of his bald head as if checking he was solid, and took it away. “That’s Ledger, Tallowby. That’s deep in the Ledger.”
Seven sat with its grey arm across its knee and its face turned up to the first light. The four Grey Hounds sat together in a knot and did not talk, and ate Petrie’s bread as if it were the only food in the world.
Marta sat by Wick.
“The client comes in a hood,” she said. She had not been asked. “Always. Twice I saw him. A carriage, on a track nobody knew, and a hood up, and a voice. Never a face. I’d know the voice again. That’s all I’d know him by.” She looked at her hands. “He asked Roux about weavers, and that was the last time she argued with him. Vosk is his dog. Vosk doesn’t know what the door is for. The client does.”
“Aldo.”
“Aldo’s by the gate.” Her jaw worked. “A cell cut in the rock. Chained. Every few days they take him to the door and make him do the thing he does, and every time he does it less.” She looked at Wick, straight, and her bony face was not hard at all. “He saved me with it. In the second shaft. That’s how they found out. He knew they would. He knew, and he held the roof up anyway, because I was under it.”
Wick could not say anything.
“So you don’t owe me for the pen,” said Marta Keel. “You owe me nothing. I’m paying.” She put her hand on the back of his neck, roughly. “We go back for him. Soon. With more than a Varr and a girl and a rat. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then eat something. You look like a wet week.”
He laughed, and it hurt, and he ate.
Skritch saw them first. He came down his branch and said, “Lights. On the mule-track. Lots. Big-folk, in a line, with sticks—”
Torches. Through the trees, down the hillside toward the pit, bobbing in the gold mist: twenty, thirty, in a long line, and under them the glint of helmets and the long swing of blue-grey coats.
Ilsa was on her feet with a knife in each hand. Marta had the crossbow up. Brakka got one elbow under her and said, “Tallowby, if you’ve a seventh pot—”
“Hold,” said a voice from the column.
It was thin, and tired. The torches stopped. And out of the line, on a grey mule, with a hooded cloak thrown back from his thin white hair and his spectacles catching the first sun, rode a stooped old man, who saw them sitting in the leaf-litter with their chain-raw ankles, and put one ink-stained hand to his mouth, and then lifted it, and waved.
“Oh, thank the stars,” said Archivist Quill. His face was grey as paper. He was crying. “Thank the stars. You’re alive.”