Chapter 83: Everything He Had

Theo hit it with everything he owned and it took him fourteen minutes to run out.

He went in at the flank first, because the flank was closest, and he put the sword into the grey up to the guard and dragged it eleven feet along the length of the thing. The surface opened around the blade the way wet clay opens, without heat, without resistance, without anything coming out of it.

The wound closed behind the blade while he was still cutting.

He went for the front. He got up onto a roof and came down on the head of it, if the front of it was a head, with the whole of his weight and Heavy Shadow Drop under all of it, and he went in past his own knees and had to fight his way back out of the surface like a man out of a bog. It shut around his shins while he pulled. It was warm, and it was warm the whole way down, and that was worse than the cold would have been.

He used Long Shadow. He put nine cuts into it from four different roofs, at range, out of the dark, and every one of them landed and every one of them closed. He counted them out loud on the fourth roof, because counting was one of the few things he could still do properly.

He used Shadow Movement to get inside it and cut from within, which was the single stupidest thing he did that night, and he came out of it retching with grey matter in his hair and both eyes streaming. He was still bringing it up two roofs later, down on his hands and knees on somebody’s tiles, with his sword lying flat beside him where he had dropped it.

[Genesis Eyes: mastery insufficient] [Analysis refused] [Warning: overanalysis]

’Show me where it keeps itself. There has to be a heart. Everything has a heart—’

[Analysis refused]

’SHOW ME—’

The blood came out of his nose and over his lip and off his chin, and he had to shut them and stand blind on a roof for half a minute with his hands over his face. His palms came away wet. He wiped them down his front and they did not get any cleaner.

And underneath him the thing went on west at the pace of a slow walk, grinding the cobbles flat under itself as it came, and it did not speed up and it did not slow down, and it had not once, in fourteen minutes, acknowledged that he existed.

That was the part that finally broke something in him.

It was not the size and it was not the faces. It was that Theolyne Chadwick, who had killed nine Legatees and a champion in one night, was not worth turning toward.

’I’m not a threat.’

’I’ve done everything I know how to do and I’m not even a nuisance.’

They were still fighting at the wall when he got there.

That was the thing that stayed with him for years, and it was the thing he could never explain properly afterwards to anybody, including himself.

Nine hundred people had come out of the Cutler gate at midnight. There were perhaps two hundred of them left, and they were formed up in the road in front of a gate that was standing open, in two ranks, with the enhanced weapons that had killed four thousand Inheritors and would not scratch this.

Captain Dunn was in the front rank on foot. She had run out of arrows some time ago. She was holding somebody else’s sword in both hands, low, the way a person holds a tool they were never trained on, and nobody in either rank was talking.

"Captain—"

"Sky’s Husband." She did not turn round. "Can you kill it?"

Theo stood in the road behind two hundred people and did not lie to her, because there was nothing left to buy with a lie.

"No."

"Then we are going to hold it here until the west quarter is across the river," Dunn said, "and I would appreciate it if you would go and be useful somewhere else."

The first rank went in and the first rank went into it.

Theo saw a man he had stood beside on Cutler Street go in still swinging. He saw the woman with the burn up her arm put a one-star sword into the thing up to the crossguard and get taken by the wrist and go in after it, and she did not scream, and Theo never learned her name.

He got four of them out. Four. He went into that surface with both hands and got four people out of it and one of them died anyway, on the cobbles, eleven feet from the gate, from what had already been done to his legs. Theo knelt over him with both hands pressed down where the pressing was supposed to go and felt the man stop under his palms, and then he got up, because there were still two ranks in the road and he could not stay there.

Marrick Vell was sitting against the tilted cart with the anvil half buried in the dirt beside him.

He had his hammer across his knees. He was not making anything, because there was nothing left in the crate and nobody left to carry it, and his hands were black and split to the wrist and shaking hard enough that Theo could see it from six feet away.

"Boy."

Theo went down on his knees beside him and did not look at what he knelt in.

"Mr Vell, I can’t stop it. I’ve tried everything I have. I cut it forty times and it closed forty times, and it doesn’t even—"

"Aye."

"I might not be able to save anyone... I might not be able to go home to my wives."

The last of it came out of him shaking.

The fear was real and it sat in his hands, which had started doing exactly what Marrick’s were doing. And he understood the vicious nature of the Tower’s Trial.

Marrick chuckled.

"It’s a rigged game, boy. You were never designed to win. It is why you’re called Climbers."

Theo put both hands over his face.

For about four seconds he was twenty-one years old and a very long way from a porch with a ramp on it.

"Boy."

"...Yes."

Marrick Vell spoke with a kind voice.

"Stop trying to cut it."

Theo lifted his head.

"You are a Climber with a sword and it is a city with a mouth," the old man said. "You will not out-cut a city. Nobody has ever out-cut a city." He turned the hammer over on his knees, once, the way he had turned it over a thousand times at the anvil. "But I have lived in this one for sixty-one years, and I can tell you exactly what is under the Sixth Wall."

What was under the Sixth Wall was Alderkeep’s whole appetite for a siege.

Twelve hundred barrels of lamp oil in the vaults under the gatehouse, laid in nineteen days ago when the Fifth fell and nobody had got round to burning any of it, because there had been nothing to burn.

Four vats of pitch on the wall itself, cold now, gone hard, hard enough to stand on, for pouring on the sort of enemy that brings ladders.

Six tons of milled flour in the granary loft over the north stair, which the quartermaster had been rationing by the cup for a city that would not need it after tonight.

And a forge cart with a fire still in it, tilted over in a road four hundred yards away.

"Flour," said Theo slowly.

"Flour," Marrick agreed.

"My father worked a mill for two years when I was nine. He would not let me carry a candle up the loft stairs. Not a lamp, not a taper, nothing. He hit me for it once, and he never hit me for anything else in his whole life, and I never understood why until I was about fifteen."

Marrick finally looked at Theo.

"Do you already know?"

"Dust... Is it the dust?"

The plan was worth nothing on its own and both of them knew it inside a minute.

The thing was four hundred yards long and it dragged itself, and it filled a street wall to wall. It would come to the gate. It would not go in the gate, because it did not need to. It would come over the wall, and around it, and through the wall, the way it had come through everything else in that city.

"It has to come inside," Marrick said. "All of it. Under the granary and past the vaults and into the gatehouse, and it has to still be coming when you light it."

"And why would it do that?"

The old man looked at him.

Theo looked back.

’...Ah.’

’Because it has spent four nights eating everything in this city that fought it.’

’And there is exactly one thing left in Alderkeep that it has not been able to take.’

"It has to be after something," Theo said. "It has to be following something all the way in."

"Aye."

The Smith allowed a somber smile.

"Me."

"You."