After Peak and Key had returned home, which had become populated by a number of supplicants in their absence, they resumed their labor. The morning ended and the sun pierced the veil of clouds that had seemed permanent a moment before, and it marched inside their table alongside a man. Old Wall was gaunt, white-haired, and missing a number of fingers; Key knew he had fought in the last Response, but that had been many seasons ago, and he had never heard a word from him except in passing. When the Wall looked at Key, his eyes became tinted with a kind of bewildered revulsion; he didn’t know why.
“Aie, eldbrother,” Peak greeted their visitor. “How’s your heart?”
Old Wall didn’t bother to greet him in kind or answer his question. He gestured to the blood spatter left by Key’s earlier mistakes. “Lastfarmer’s?” he said.
“It is.”
“I think it wise to put a man with you,” he said. “How else can I ensure your study keeps his edge from my flock?”
“What do you know of my study?” Peak returned. “I am not a perfect servant, eldbrother. And if this place were always clean, you would see no need for it.”
“It is the Fire Table,” Old Wall sniffed. “There has always been a Fire Table. So it will remain, until the last fireworker is gone.”
“That day is far afield.”
Old Wall ignored him. “There is a work in the fields,” he said. “Too much for the ones given to it. I am obligated to gather more hands. Am I wrong in seeing you’ve none to offer ?”
“Perhaps not, but if I did, the offering would belong to them,” Peak said. “Key?”
“Yes, I’ll go,” he said.
Peak looked at him curiously. “Are you sure?” he asked, squeezing his shoulder.
“I'll go.”
Peak pulled him aside and spoke into his ear. “You know what we’ve discussed,” he murmured.
“I know.”
“Do not trust the Wall. Do not ever be too close to him. If you think he will lead you away from the other ones, you return to me straightaway. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
He ruffled his hair and pushed him. “Go on, then. Remember what I’ve said.”
The journey to the workground was silent. Old Wall did little to address Key’s presence as they went about the shell, collecting other hands for the day’s labor.
After they had gathered a pack of Sixbraids satisfactorily large to Old Wall, they departed for the Houses’ outskirts, where the vacant fields of the shell-dwellers stretched out toward the river’s empty banks. A light drizzle began as they passed through the fields of weeds, brambles, and wilting shellplants that had taken root in the Fall. When they reached the stockseat, where the Sixbraids hid away seed and supplies from the weather beneath a thatched roof, Key caught a glimpse of Young Wall.
Young Wall and his brother Darkhaired Wall were the two eldest sons of Old Wall, and stood among a few younger Sixbraids who milled about the stockseat, chattering among themselves. The Darkhaired Wall was his brother’s senior by at least five years. He was tall and strong, and wore a necklace with a bright yellow stone. Young Wall, who stood below his brother, but above the rest, was less fortunate; half of his face was swelling and discolored. He followed his brother most places, and Key had only rarely seen him outside his presence.
When they arrived, Old Wall took Darkhaired Wall aside to speak with privately. Young Wall watched the two of them step out of earshot and frowned. When he saw Key arrive, however, a smile lit up his injured face. He left the other youth to go and speak with him.
As Young Wall stepped closer, Key felt the hiding rise inside him. It was a royal object, Key’s hiding. One bowed before it as they did a ruler. When it said to sit, Key sat. When it said to cow, he cowed. When it said to speak, it spoke; one did not speak without the hiding’s word. Submission to his hiding was pleasant, Key knew. It was an ancient grail, and in all the world, Key was its only selector. So there must have been need between them. There was no other way to be.
“Aie, Fragile Thing,” Young Wall said to Key. Key blanched when he saw what had become of him, but tried not to betray his horror. “Aie, eldbrother,” he replied.
“How you minding?
“Minding good, eldbrother.”
Young Wall smiled. “I went looking for you yesterday.”
“Yes, my birthman told me.”
“Why weren’t you around?” he asked. “The cold only comes once a year. We had a good time.”
“I was walking.”
“Walking where?”
“The rounds.”
“The mouth on you!”
“No, I’ve no mouth, eldbrother.”
“You went alone?”
Key nodded. Young Wall shook his head.
“What if a heart catches you, huh? A dryhoof? A nightholder? It’s hard out there. It’s a hungry place.”
Key gave a sheepish smile.
“Don’t walk too far, you know?” Young Wall said, clapping him on the shoulder. “A man lives with his own kind. You get happy that way.”
The two of them were called away from each other when Darkhaired Wall addressed his peers.
“All of you listen now.” Darkhaired Wall raised up his hands to quiet the group, which gradually turned toward him. “Today we’re preparing the stemplanters. I’m responsible for you, this time. You have my name. So be virtuous with it.”
They set themselves to the task at hand. The stemplanters, the aim of their labor, were long, disposable farm implements whose components were brought by the cartload from the West every season, to be worked together by the Sixbraids for a shipment East. Their ingredients, bits and bobs of wallrock, were dumped out onto the ground of the stockseat in piles that sat higher than any Sixbraid present. Each man took a spot on a mat, cushioning them from its hard wooden floor, plucked from the pile and began their assembly.
Key could only vaguely recall what the appropriate method was for this task, which they had been taught a season prior. He took out three pieces that looked like they belonged together and tried to fit them inside one another. He pressed and pressed as he would the stem into a base piece, until it snapped in half. Seeing this, Darkhaired Wall shooed him from the workplace.
“Stay away from this, yonbrother,” he said, collecting the materials that had survived Key’s onslaught. “You have funny hands. They do funny things. Go over there for now; do as you like.”
Key felt the way of hiding on him, and consented to the Wall’s command. As he began to move away, he felt somebody grab his shoulder.
“You’re going to stay here and do what I tell you,” Young Wall said. He grabbed another group of pieces from the pile and they sat down together. He showed Key the base of the device he had broken.
“See here,” he said. “Show me what you were doing.”
Key mimicked the movements that had snapped the stem apart. Young Wall blew a raspberry through his lips. “Whew - you’re one empty head, Fragile.”
“I am, eldbrother,” Key affirmed. His smile fell below his eyes.
Young Wall tasted his discomfort and softened his tone. “Come on, it’s not so hard,” Young Wall replied. “Push here,” he said, pointing to a long stone rod.
Key quickly seized the top of the rod and tried to push it in. Young Wall halted him with a firm hand.
“Eh ye,” Young Wall exclaimed. “That hairy thing is right. Funny hands you’ve got. Funny. What made you grab it like that?”
Key shrugged. Young Wall grasped it in the proper way, “Like this,” he said. “You see?”
Key nodded, although he was never sure if he did, in fact, see.
“Most things,” Young Wall said, leaning on the stem. “They never broke because someone pushed them hard. They broke because somebody pushed them wrong. There’s a right way and a wrong way to press on everything that lives. To give it a strength and meaning.”
The stem bent under Young Wall’s weight and snapped. He held it the broken halves in his hands. “Some things, their way – it’s too difficult. There’s a little speck somewhere inside them that only a ruler could push well. But we really must try. The riversland is full of hard, and we come into it as soft things; what choice have we but to toughen ourselves? That’s what my birthman has taught me.” He gestured to his face. “And perhaps that’s what firework has taught you, hasn’t it? Sometimes, to heal, a cut must be made.”
“A cut…”
Young Wall walked over to the pile of parts, retrieved a new stem, and handed it to Key. “Now you try.”
Key imitated him. “Now push,” he said. “Push hard.”
He did, and the rod popped into place.
“There,” Young Wall said, gesturing at the repaired stem. “It’s not so hard, is it?” He clapped Key on the back.
“Thank you, eldbrother.”
“Fragile, you call me like some creator,” he moaned. “You need to speak like others. If you don’t, they’ll see you wrong. They’ll see a gapman. You won’t ever get to have anybody. Okay?”
“Right,” Key said. “Okay.”
Young Wall grinned.
-
A train of wagons appeared on the horizon, many drawn by stonehoofs.
A grey host followed it, in and among them – many figures shifting in the mist, hauling weapons, saddlebags, and assorted equipment. The herald at their head flew the banner of their master. Its sigil depicted a long white bone placed over an arrow.
After he had finished depositing the laborers on Darkhaired Wall, Old Wall arrived at one of the watchwalls’ perches, where an unlucky few were posted each morning to keep a wary eye on the horizon out of a cramped, stilted box.
He climbed up the ladder that lead up to the tower. His aged muscles ached and burned by the time he was done; Sun Wall, a lanky and perpetually stiff fighter from outside his family, offered him his hand. He slapped it away. When Old Wall finally clambered to his feet in the post, Sun Wall again moved forward, gripping his leather upover to help steady him. Old Wall shoved him back.
“What is it?” he asked.
Sun Wall pointed out the ranks of armed men massing across the river. One of the watchwalls squinted at the accumulating mass, shielded his eyes from the dawn, and then spoke the words of counting and seeing: “One man two weapons. Two weapons-men, wallrock drycanes, ten weapons men, string-slings. Fifteen stonehoof, weapons and coverings. Fifteen stonehoof, grassface; seven carriers, grassface. Fifteen weapons-men, fifteen weapons-men, fifteen weapons-men, bendrock drycanes. Men all five canes high, one unseen. Eighteen men weaponless.” He turned to Old Wall. “These are Laruns, eldman. Heartless ones.”
There was a collective groan. “Rulers, hold it from us,” Sun-Wall called out in despair. “They’re beyond measure. What could they have come to take?”
“When last did they bring so many?” one of the Walls asked.
“No fewer than ten seasons,” another answered. “Those did not stop for us.”
When Old Wall gazed out at the host, his lip became joined by a light quiver, and his hands affixed the perch’s railing as though he meant to crush it. After a moment the exertion tired him and he sank; his temper deflated, color drained from his face, and he seemed weak on his feet. He used his grip on the rail to steady himself.
Old Wall flicked his hand at Sun Wall. “Go and tell the Lodge,” he said. “Tell him that the dark has arrived.”
-
The Laruns spread out around the land across the first bend in the river, setting up tents, tables, and fires. In the wake of the stemplanters’ completion, Darkhaired Wall shifted his group back into the shell, toward the hearthouse, where many of the Sixbraids’ stronghoofs and lowers would be kenned after spending the day in pasture. There, Key and the laborers cut wool from the shell’s woolbearers, who lowed contentedly as their caretakers shaved away their lucrative covering with knives of stone. In the midst of overseeing this work and intermittently peering out at the heavily-armed occupiers, Darkhaired Wall had begun to tell his charges a tale. Key paused his work to listen in.
“Yes, I visited Herdetopp with him,” he said.
The jaws of Key’s colleagues had gone slack with awe. “Is it true what they say?” one asked. “You and your birthman passed through?"
"Through the Wild?”
"The new Wild?"
“Of course,” Darkhaired Wall said, his mouth curving at their gaze and whispers. “It’s far too big to go around. There’s no other way.”
“What was it like?” another exclaimed.
Darkhaired Wall sat atop one of the pasture’s fenceposts and laid one leg over another. “It was not only a pleasant journey. There were many concerns. We met those who had been accosted by gift-hungry bites and meat-hungry hearts. Most terrible among these are nightholders, the light-quieting lives, which keep hands over dark and sleep, and do not often frequent our own country; we were fortunate not to meet one ourselves. You can watch the grasses and trees grow, think and wander; in the morning, the path may be open. In the evening, it may already have been covered up again. The wind whispers an awful crying sound, and to lay so much as a finger on the soil there will drench your mind in a curious weight.”
“But what was its face? What was its feeling?”
He smiled. A mist crept into his eyes. “It was… good. The Wild embraces all; it bows to no one.”
They kept working.
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The shell’s visitors marched as the sun began to fall down from the sky. They assembled into columns and filed over the bridge, across the vacant river. “What do you think they’re here for?” Young Wall asked Darkhaired Wall.
“Heartgifts, maybe.” Darkhaired Wall spit. “Bite off another few of our hands, Walls, women.”
“Why do they need so many hoofs?” a worker near Key asked. “And so many weapons?”
Nobody could answer him.
They walked into town. Key heard unsettled whispers point out the uncanny, greycoatted fighters as “heartless men,” and “Freemen.” This type made up the bulk of them, and they came in columns, bearing their arms and goods. Each moved with excellent discipline and carefully maneuvered muscle; they had presumably been marching for days on end, and still they appeared high of spirit and untouched by want, though Key did spot a few clutch their bellies in hunger, smiling all the while.
The Freemen came in strains; there were men built like cattle, heaving huge packs of entrenching materials, weaponry and what supplies they had; men dressed in badged armor, each at the head of a column of armsmen, and the armsmen themselves - high, mighty enforcers of the will that flowed from the Otiser, their realm Larunkat’s seer-sovereign. Key had no personal experience with these, the weird footsoldiers of that sickly and decrepit power. Each was sculpted to appear the most pleasant conceivable image of this dryborn kind, the Laruns, that those they were wrought to serve might enjoy the sight of them as they carried their baggage and fought in their wars: a face mirrored from left to right, blemishless, and sharply cut. Their eyes shined shades of gold, silver, and amethyst.
At the very head of their train was a team of two: a tense, ferrety Sixbraid with sunken eyes, and to his right a massive armsman – Key guessed, the element’s officeholder. The Head Man was massive, a trunk of a body, clad in leather. Like his kin, his skin was thick enough to deflect a dull blade, his arms strong enough to fold metal, or flesh and bone. Unlike the other Freemen, the Head Man’s body was covered in his armor; his head concealed by a polished bendrock helmet. Only his eyes could be seen, and only his appeared indistinct; Key could not name their particular hue in the sunlight. Perhaps it had something to do with the shadow cast by his visor.
“Manor has returned!” The Sixbraids were chattering among themselves, gesturing in awe at the Head Man’s shiverring consort. “It’s Manor! He’s come and changed! He has clothes like a dryman!”
Manor was a man long since departed the Empty Houses, taken by the Laruns some years ago. He stood alongside the Head Man. Key remembered little from that time beside the grief, but he did remember the departing: those who came in force to manacle and guide heartgifts from the Sixbraids into the Laruns’ country, for whatever purpose they thought fit. Returned he had, and dressed like a dryman he was; pinned to his chest was a sigil of pen and sword, the symbol of the Pointers. Manor had been made a holder of secrets, a speaker of codes, a man who hung men. The totem of Manor’s office weighed down his side, a leatherbound copy of the Otiser’s will – shielded from the dust and rain by a thick sleeve.
Freemen broke off from the train in groups of two and three and dispersed through the crowd, dragging away Sixbraids. Clamor and outrage rose from the shell-dwellers as they were beaten and bystanders threatened with langnivs, the Laruns’ short, square blades. Key saw a child covered with blood and dirt screaming at nothing, as though she sought only to blow out her voice and feel no more.
“Gather!” spoke Manor over the commotion. “All you riverborn, gather in the Speaking Place! Gather with speed, please!”
Key and the other laborers looked to Darkhaired Wall. He hopped off his post and waved them forward.
The laborers followed the other shell-dwellers and the Larun train to the monolith. Once the train had arrived in front of the house of the River Lodge, the Freemen began to work, unloading their wood, rope and nails from the wagons. Key had never seen any Sixbraid work with such speed. Theirs was a torrent of devotion, losing very little in their movement, striking nails into wood in synchronous harmony, passing equipment to one another in a tightly-woven orchestra of hammers. In only a few minutes, they had erected a grand device: a strong wooden beam suspended between two poles, host to five lengths of Larun rope, and set above a series of precarious stools that awaited occupants.
Key began to hear a name echoed throughout the mass of shell-dwellers.
“What sort are they building?
“A punisher!”
“It’s a punisher!”
“It’s their choking-thing. Their twisting-thing. It cuts with knots, and does not spill heartswater.”
“But why have they brought it here? Rulers hold it from us!”
“Ih, rulers! Rulers hold it from us.”
“What have we done? How have we displeased them?”
Beside the punisher, the Freemen had brought up an elevated platform, which they set in front of the gathering crowd. Manor and the Head Man ascended it after departing the space on their carriage.
Key couldn’t find Peak. The industry and unclear aim of these visitors frightened him, and he wanted for his birthman’s strength and certainty.
The Lodge, seated in his Entrance Chair, looked on the violation with melancholy and impotent anger. He stood up and grasped Yawn’s arm. “Help me closer,” he rasped. “Let me look with them.”
With a sinking feeling, Key saw his sire’s pillaric silhouette among those being lead to the punisher. Peak passed him on the way up.
He cried out and broke from the crowd, running up to his birthman and clinging tight. The stony hand of a Freeman kept Key at arm’s length.
“I’ll be back, gentle,” Peak said. “Stay with the Walls.”
“No,” Key screamed. “I want to stay with you. Don’t go there, bata. Don’t go away.”
“Stay with the Walls, gentle,” Peak shouted back. Key could observe the facets of his cheeks, his dimples and birthmarks, the strands of hair on his head and face. “I adore-” Then the Freeman fit a sack over his face, and nobody could see him anymore.
The men that the Freemen had dragged up to the stand were stood atop the rickety stools that had been prepared, upon which each struggled to remain in place. Then their necks were bound by rope. A Larun was appointed to stand behind each Sixbraid and given one of the hammers that had just been used to bring up the whole device. Key could not see what they meant to strike next.
“Hear me now!” Manor called out from his platform, doing his best to shout over the crowd. Sweat was running down the side of his face. “All of you, listen to me now! Make it quiet, and listen. No man need go today. I promise that no man need go today!”
The crowd assented for a while. Manor popped open a wooden tube on his back and took out a scroll, bound by pale thread. He untied and unfurled it, and began to read. “Under the order of your lord,” declared the Pointer, “River Strekson, Moved Speaker of the New Process, Commander of the Peace in Holy Josmee: the three feurkun regions of the Empty Houses, their lessers, and all their fields have been deemed Results of The Considered Problem.” Confused whispers took the crowd, primarily aimed at the unusual, half-translated terminology. “In reparation for the cutting and fear-spreading activities of its inhabitants, it is the celestial will that they be slashed and burnt to the ground. Their laboring kinds will be cut into pieces with canes of nightrock. Their bodies will be remitted to open vessels, suspended aboveground with a rope of wallrock. No service of their name can be permitted.” Disgusted, mortified gasps came up from the crowd. These promptly evolved into protest.
“There is only- please, eldbrothers, please be quiet,” Manor said. “I am not finished.”
The Sixbraids would not consent. Somebody threw a rock at Manor’s face. The Head Man caught it, inspected it closely, and slipped into a pocket, before exploding at his men in a guttural harangue. Whatever was said made them draw their swords. On seeing this, the passions of the shell-dwellers suddenly coolled.
“There is only one means of cancelling this reparation,” Manor continued. “A gift of every other fighting man may be delivered to our camp beyond this place’s limit by the second night of our company. These offerings will be passed peaceably, and without pain. A healer of your choosing may perform any revered ways you see proper to their safe passage. Their remains will be imparted you with haste, and in as fine a condition as you might imagine. You will be allowed to bury and celebrate them as you please. Let fall the virtue of our lord, if it is not-”
“Your lord wears no virtue!” A voice emerged from the mass of attendants.
The Head Man stepped forward with a start, carefully maneuvering Manor to the side. He pointed his finger out to where the voice had come. Eight of his underlings pressed into the crowd, roughly tossing about those who wouldn’t clear the way fast enough. They dragged a figure to the front: it was Darkhaired Wall.
The Freemen threw him down in front of the platform. He stood and spit on one of them. The spat-upon wiped his face clean, reached into his pocket, and offered Darkhaired Wall a small towel for his own. He slapped it away, even though his face was cut and covered in muck. He turned his attention back to Manor.
“Where is your manhood, eldbrother?” the Wall roared. “This is your birthplace! We’ve done no wrong to you or this kind you’ve chose.” Grunts of assent rippled through the masses. “Was the cut they gave so complete, eldbrother? Do you feel no shame at all?”
Darkhaired Wall continued to hurl hatred and invective at Manor as the Head Man descended the platform. He stepped up to the Sixbraid, blotting out the sun with his height. His hands shot out, gripping his skull and throat, catching a final vulgarity on his lips; his palm was able to reach around and grasp the whole of his victim’s head. With a wrenching twist, he separated Darkhaired Wall’s head from his shoulders, crushing it in the process. A surprised, outraged lament went up from the crowd before all was again silent.
The Head Man murmured something in Larun words. He laid a gentle hand on Manor’s shoulder when he returned to his side. “O-our lord adores you all,” Manor translated.
“This thing will be carried out with speed,” he continued, wiping sweat from his brow. “If it is not true, let fall the virtue of my lord. No lies have been spoken here today.”
The Head Man waved his hand. Four of the Freemen manning the punisher dropped their hammers and swept their swords upward. In a moment, the captive Sixbraids had fallen to the ground, along with the bonds that had clung to their necks. There had the Laruns cut so precisely as to leave nothing more than a slight, identical red nip that marked each man’s skin.
Each man, except for one. Those who had been cut free removed the bags from their heads, and looked to the victim on their left.
The Head Man whispered into Manor’s ear.
“Take this first chosen as a kindness,” Manor said. “Serve him with your works.”
The Head Man pointed upward. The Freeman hefted his hammer and swung. The rope pulled taut. The bag Peak was under shifted slightly, and as the drop came, he began to struggle.
In the moment that arrived next, Key felt the stirrings of need. He knew a requirement for the world to be a certain way, one with which it would not comply. His body was screaming through his mouth, but he couldn’t feel it or hear it. The barest hint of this escaped his lips as a firm, leathery grip came over his mouth.
“Quiet!” he heard the Lodge’s withered voice rasp into his ear. “Quiet, and be still! Cry if you must. A third one will not go today.”
Key’s body was wracked with intense sobs as he watched Peak choke and shiver on the rope. Then, all at once, he became still. His father’s body rocked gently in the wind.
The Laruns marched out of the town, the springtime breeze blowing their cloaks away and beyond the Empty Houses’ perimeter. A new mass of clouds had swept over the sky, casting a shadow on the shell and the wagons that creaked away. The boots of the Freemen dashed apart the mud, filling it with marks that would freeze over in the night. Then they were back across the river, and the Sixbraids were parted from their company.
-
After the Freemen had settled into their tents on the outskirts of the Empty Houses, Peak’s body was cut down and Darkhaired Wall’s collected, and they were brought down to the river. A small pyre was prepared: wooden logs, cut from the pines to the South, intended to be preserved for the cold, were stacked into a pile that stood higher than Key. Peak, Darkhaired Wall, and Vigor’s mother Lastfarmer were put atop it; there had not been enough time to give any their own event. The Lodge said his words on them before they were given to the fire.
Key was made to light a torch and carry it up to the bodies. He felt eyes on him as he set fire to his father.
Yawn danced an invocation around the pyre, and around the ashes that they scattered into the trickling riverbed. Many of the men present shouted or raged in grief, offering up prayers, curses, and assorted oaths to various objects of worship.
Key didn’t curse, or worship. He did cry, because the world felt like it had stopped making sense, or perhaps that it never had made sense. He was entering the final stages of a progressive delirium, occasionally giggling to himself. Otherwise, the ones watching him saw nothing, and it was the nothing that he preferred.
During the ceremony, a young woman who Key did not recognize emerged from the crowd. She wore a necklace with a bright yellow stone. She took her place alongside Young Wall. He took a sharp stone and cut his hand on it, and laid his hand in the riverbed, leaving his mark on it. He handed her the stone and she cut her own hand. Old Wall watched the two of them do it, with some mixture of emotions that Key couldn’t fathom.
After it was done, and the rest of the audience had returned home, the Lodge came up to Key to speak.
“Go to the Table. Gather your things,” the Lodge said. “You’ll stay with us, until we decide what happens next. No man needs an empty house.”
Key’s face was streaked with tears. The Lodge rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Crying is not a man's work. You were young this morning. Now, you are an old boy. Nobody else can take what you’ve been given. That’s why a man becomes a man’s way. He must be a giver. The only things he takes are the ones no-one else can; you hold them inside yourself. Otherwise, we’ll all fall apart, you see? Do you see now?”
Key couldn’t meet his gaze. He gritted his teeth and felt a round hole in his chest. The Lodge patted Key’s hands, slipped Peak’s necklace inside them, and went on his way.
After the ceremony, Key returned home alone. He walked back through the shell and arrived at their roundseat. He tried sitting in each of its empty rooms, but they were all freezing, so he sat in his father’s chair, put heat on the stove, and heard the forever-gone laughter and the warm touch of his birthman.
The sheet that Peak had laid over their Statement loomed next to the fire. He studied it for some time. He did not want to draw it back. But there was no more choice about it.
So he removed from his seat, threw aside the covering, and traced a finger over the lines of the last invocation Peak had written.
“Night ruler: how much is your own adored by us!” it read. “Creator of hardship; creator of the unseeing; protector of Walls and the unsafe. May you enter into this house, bring into ours your sense, your safety, and your
His words ended and gave way to solid wood.
Key spotted Peak’s three-string by the doorway, abandoned and untouched since the night before. He walked over to it, grabbed it, cradled it in his arms, and plucked the chords of his father’s lullaby. Places, smells and visions swirled together in his mind and created a knowing of something that wasn’t, which had escaped him and which, his body told him, he would find no longer.
He cried again.
-
That night, the shell’s men of consequence met at the Lodge’s estate. Behind the Thought Table, around which the Sixbraids had gathered, sat the Lodge and his sons. He used a thin flame, observed by the Empty Houses’ newest fireworker, to burn prophecy into strips of bark cut from an unblemished sapling. While they divined, the Sixbraid men shouted, and Wellborn, the observing voicewoman, fumed on its edges in her obligate silence.
“We must fight against this thing,” a young man said. “Resist to our last breath. Even if it should mean our destruction.”
There were a few faint murmurs of agreement.
“We have no drycanes,” somebody replied. “What fight is there if we have no drycanes?”
“‘What fight?’” the young man mocked. “Do we not have wood, eldbrother? And then, do we not have sticks to sharpen? Kindling to burn? Do we not have fists to smash with and legs to crush with? Do we not-”
“If you don’t cover your mouth, Hunter, your head will fall out!” barked Old Wall. “How is it you see it fit to speak of fights and failure, with no little ones to fail or fight for? And who of your kind did you lose to these heartless things?! The Laruns have made their qualities known to us. Known to me! Known to Goldhill, the Baking Place, to Shadow-Over-Water! My family has lost enough." He struck his chest. "If it must lose me, it will lose no others!”
“There must be someone willing to help us,” another replied. “The country is yet flush with companies of fighters. Why do we not entreat them?”
There was an uproar of dissent. “Hand our trial to men without rules? Men who have never adored the river, fight the Sixbraids’ fights?” Old Wall lamented. “Against drymen of a thousand thousands, heartless things all? These, and the disaster that commands them. Our cityrock would be wasted, our virtue refute, and we would endanger the innocent besides.”
Sun Wall spoke up. “We should go. Take the little ones and go. There’s no sense in keeping here.”
“Where would we go?” The question came from a leatherworker, Horn. “The Blockwood is overrun with bites, who have no virtue whatever. Nothing but pain lies away from the sun.”
“We can only run toward it,” Sun Wall said. “The Longfur is dense, and full of holy spots. We are hardly rich enough to be chased all the way through there. Once we have passed it, into Leaning-”
“You would have us seek refuge in a land as spoilt as this one,” Horn spit. “Even if we were so empty-headed, we have nothing to offer that land’s bite of a Lodge. Where would we go if they turned us away?”
“Further then – all the way to the far banks, if we must. I’d rather go to the rulers than sell our own to these things.”
It was this particular impiety that proved the last straw for Wellborn. She stepped forward and slammed her palm down on the table. “And I’d rather be cut than cow to them! You half-men would leave thankless the water, let fly the work of a hundred generations? Let them use their nightrock. Let them spill a bowl of it down my throat. They will not have my retreat.”
There were some murmurs of agreement, but more anguished shouts and groans at her illicit outburst. “It would be well spoken, voicewoman, if you were at all a party to our plight!” cried Sun Wall.
So Wellborn went up to Sun Wall and wrestled the weapon from his belt, sawed through the core of her long, tangled brown hair, and threw down both to the table. “I’ll let you bow to heartless Manor, and to his dryman keepers too. But when you draw your straws, set one aside for me. I will be the first to fall!” And Wellborn left the room, which was speechless.
They looked to the Lodge, who was limping back over to the table, carrying three wooden plaques.
“Are you little ones still attacking yourselves?” the Lodge asked. “I can prepare more invocations yet, if you have not tired of it.”
“Tell us what lies ahead,” the men cried. “Give us the signs, eldman. Give us the signs!”
The Lodge stepped up to the table and spread out the tablets for all to see. He pointed to the first, outlining a pair of thick, rectangular shapes.
“The tusks. These speak of our current predicament. Two head drythings, come to swallow us where they couldn’t before.”
He pointed to the second, an ovoid burn with rippling edges. “The storm. It speaks of great trials passing our way, that much is clear – but perhaps also, the possibility of water.”
At last, he pointed to the third, raising his fist in jubilation. A jagged shape had been burned into the wood. “The lightning! A virtuous power is passing by. Will it strike where it must?” The Lodge gestured to a number of five dark spots scattered across the bark. “The sign of the five. This matter has been handed to the Thought Ruler, him and his wisest friends. He, and no other, will decide the course of this destruction.”
“May we yet be saved?” Sun Wall asked.
“The sign of lightning has always made itself known when the storm has met its peak,” the Lodge said. “Only tomorrow will we know for certain. All we can tell the Walls to do is keep an open eye - for travellers, and any drycanes carried with them.”
As the attendees left – some relieved, some still anxious – the Lodge again laid his hand on Key’s shoulder. “Set aside two straws,” he said. Then he himself left, returning to his chambers, and leaving Key in the doorway to look out into the cold and empty night, alone. He could see nothing out there.
So he set aside three, and that was that.