Chapter 84: The Sixth Wall Burns

They set it in forty minutes.

Theo broke the heads off two hundred barrels and let the oil go out across the floor of the gatehouse and down the drain channels into the street. He did the pitch, hacking the hardened crust up in slabs and dropping them off the wall into the oil, where they went under and came back up black and slow. By the end of it he could not smell anything but oil. That was fine. He did not need to smell anything tonight.

He carried up eleven sacks of flour from the loft and cut them open and hung them from the rafters of the gate arch on cord, at head height, in a line, so that anything coming through would burst them. The cord was thin and blue and he tied every knot twice.

Marrick did the fire.

He would not be moved on it. He set the forge pan at the far side of the arch behind a stack of grain sacks, and he built the coals up with the last of the charcoal and a great deal of swearing, and he sat down beside it with the bellows across his knees. The pan threw a low red light up the grain at his back and left the rest of the arch dark.

"Mr Vell."

"No."

"You haven’t heard what I—"

"I have heard it four times tonight from four different people and I have said no to all of them," Marrick said. "The coals have to be alive when it comes and somebody has to keep them alive. That is a bellows job. It is not a sword job and it is not a running job, and you cannot do it because you are the bait."

"You’ll be inside the arch."

"Yes."

Theo stood there in a gatehouse in two inches of lamp oil with fifteen sacks of flour swinging over his head. They turned a little on their cords when he moved, all of them together.

"I’ll come back for you."

Marrick Vell looked up at him from the bellows and smiled, and it was the same shameless grin he had given the soldiers off the back of the cart six hours ago, and it did not have one single thing behind it that Theo could argue with.

"We will meet again, boy."

Outside, four hundred yards east, the thing that had eaten Alderkeep came round the last corner and turned toward the Sixth Wall.

And two hundred people of the west quarter, who had been told twice to go back through the gate, formed up in the road in front of it instead, and did not go back through the gate.

Captain Hessa Dunn was in the front rank.

"Hold the width," she said.

They held it for nine minutes.

Two hundred people with one-star weapons against a thing four hundred yards long, in a road about fifty feet wide, and they held it for nine minutes, and Theo watched every second of it from the top of the gate arch because he had a job and the job was to be seen.

They did not hold it by killing it. Nothing killed it.

They held it by being in the way.

It came to them and it took the first rank and while it was taking the first rank it was not moving forward, and the second rank stepped up into the space where the first rank had been standing, and that was the whole of the tactic, and every single person in that road understood it and did it anyway.

Captain Dunn went in the fourth minute.

Theo saw it. He was on the arch with a torch in his hand, and he saw a woman of forty-five who had held the west of a dead city for nineteen days put her sword into the grey up to the hilt, and get taken by the shoulder, and go in without letting go of it.

She did not look back at the wall.

That was the thing Theo kept. She was facing the right way the entire time.

At nine minutes there were about thirty of them left, and they broke.

They came back through the gate under the swinging flour sacks, past a fifty-nine-year-old man working a bellows in the dark behind a stack of grain, and out into the west quarter, and somebody was screaming at them to keep running and not to stop at the river.

Theo came down off the arch into the gatehouse and stood in two inches of lamp oil in the middle of the road under the gate, alone, with a ruined sword in his hand and a torch in the other, and turned around and faced east.

’Right.’

’Look at me.’

He put the sword point down in the oil and let go of it and spread both arms.

"HEY."

[You’re using skill: Directive]

The word went out of that gate arch and down four hundred yards of the tanners’ row and it did not sound like a shout at all. It arrived, in the way his words had been arriving in people’s ears for four nights, except that there were no people left in that street to arrive in.

Something in the grey turned toward the gate.

"You know exactly what I am. You’ve been eating people all night to get things you didn’t have, and there’s one thing in this city you haven’t been able to put a hand on, and it is standing in an open gate with its arms out. Come and get it!"

It came.

The front of it came into the gate arch and it filled the arch, and the flour sacks burst against it one after another in a line, all of them, exactly as they had been hung, and the air under that gate went white. It went into his mouth and his eyes and the wet of his collar, and he kept his arms out.

Theo could not see. He had known he would not be able to see. He had counted the paces out on the flagstones four times in the last twenty minutes with his eyes shut, from the arch to the drain channel to the door of the north stair, and he had made himself do it a fifth time when Marrick was not looking. The count was in his legs by then and not in his head.

Behind the grain sacks, an old man stopped working the bellows.

He had done his job. The coals were alive. They had been alive for forty minutes and they were white at the middle of the pan and he had kept them that way with two split hands and both arms broken in a way he had not mentioned to anybody. He had worked the last of it by leaning, because leaning did not need elbows.

Marrick looked out through the flour haze at a boy standing in an open gate with his arms spread.

’I have waited enough. Finally, someone can free me from my misery.’

He put the whole of his weight into the forge pan and tipped it over.

The dust went first.

There is a moment, between the coals hitting the air and the air deciding what it is going to do, that is about a quarter of a second long, and Theo used it.

He went into the dark of the north stair doorway and Shadow Movement took him, and the fire caught the flour in the air behind him and came after him down the stair passage like something with an opinion.

The oil went second.

Two hundred barrels’ worth, across the whole floor of the gatehouse and down every drain channel in the street outside, and the pitch on top of it, and the noise it made was not a bang. It was a long low tearing sound that went on for eleven or twelve seconds, and the whole of the Sixth Wall lifted about four inches and came down again.

Theo came out of the shadow in the courtyard behind the wall already on fire.

He was on fire from the shoulder to the knee down his left side, and the shadow he had come out of had not been dark enough, and he went into the horse trough by the north stair face first and stayed under it for as long as his lungs would let him. The water took it off him in one long hiss he felt through the sides of the trough rather than heard.

When he came up, the gate arch was gone.

The thing burned for a long time.

It could not go back, because it was four hundred yards long and the front of it was inside the gatehouse, and the back of it was still dragging itself up the tanners’ row, pushing the front further in.

It fed itself into the fire for eleven minutes.

Theo sat in a horse trough with his left side skinned and his eyebrows gone and watched a city’s worth of stolen people burn in the ruin of a gate, and he did not look away from any of it, because there was nobody else left to look. The water around him went warm and then went past warm, and he stayed in it.

Somewhere in there, the faces stopped being at different depths.

Somewhere in there, it finally stopped moving forward.

And at some point around the ninth minute, over the roar of it, Theo heard the last of it come apart, four hundred yards of grey going up at once, and the heat came across the courtyard and took the skin off the back of his hands where they gripped the rim of the trough.

The panels came up gold in the middle of all that smoke, and Theo read them from a horse trough.

[TRIAL RESOLVED]

[Scenario: THE FALL OF ALDERKEEP]

[Hostile: THE INHERITANCE — ELIMINATED]

[Participants: 51]

[Surviving participants: 1]

[Assessment]

[You entered a city that had stopped fighting. It began fighting.]

[You eliminated nine Bearers and the Champion.]

[You could not eliminate the Inheritance by force. You did not continue to try.]

’...Is that a compliment?’

[Reward: Class Selection is available]

[Your Constitution has been tested past its limit and did not fail]

[Limitless Body - Adaptive Evolution: 71% → 78%]

[Adaptation ceiling raised]

[Circulation Art: Limitless Flow]

[Mastery has increased considerably]

[You have entered the Mundane Realm - Middle Stage]

[Shadow Sword]

[Mastery has increased considerably]

[Sub-skills: Heavy Shadow Drop, Shadow Movement, Shadow Step, Long Shadow, Shadow Shield Technique]

[You have received 10,000 Reputation points]

[Reputations points have been assigned to: Title — THE SKY’S HUSBAND]

[While in the Tower, your fame rose amidst mundane soldiers, the captain acknowledged you and the hidden you freed the Tower Warden from his prison of misery]

[You have gained additional 50,000 Reputation points]

[You have earned 10,000 Tower gold]

[Sole survivor of a Tower Trial. Recorded.] [Note: Titles are broadcast on the leaderboard of the floor upon entry.]

Theo lay back in the water with his ruined arm across his chest.

’Of course they are.’