Chapter 29: The Gate Was Opened

They came through the north gate at the fourth watch, and the gate was not forced.

It was opened.

Doha was roped to four posts in the yard behind the ossuary, in the middle of the six-hour cycle, which meant he was standing in a stance he had not chosen with his shoulders rotating at a rate he could not adjust, and it meant he saw the whole of the first minute and could do nothing about any of it.

Beat one.

Girin was on the gate.

He was on the gate because Girin was always on the gate at the fourth watch, and he had been for nine years, and it was not a guard post because the Hall of the Ninth Rite had never in four hundred years needed one; it was a place where an enormous man sat on a stool with a lamp so that anybody arriving in the dark with a body in a handcart would see a friendly face.

The gate came open from the inside and four men came through it and Girin stood up.

Beat two.

"HALL!" Girin bellowed. "HALL! GATE! GATE, GATE—"

He got the third gate out before the first of them reached him, and Doha, from a hundred and ten paces away, at the top of the second beat, with his hips locked into a seat he could not release, watched Girin the ox-driver — who had refused for twenty-five years to learn a single rite, who had said I'm not carrying anybody else's regrets, I've got my own and mine are excellent — pick up a cart axle in both hands and hold nine feet of gateway against four trained men for six seconds.

He put two of them down.

Nobody ever established which two, because it was dark, and because by the time it mattered the Hall had other things to count.

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Beat three. The hole. The skip.

The third man went under the axle and put a short blade into Girin's thigh, high, at the joint, and dragged.

Beat four.

The bell in the tower started, three-three-three, wrong and flat and fast, and the Hall of the Ninth Rite came awake in eight seconds, because a hundred and six people who bury things for a living do not need to be told twice.

Beat five. The pull.

There was nothing within reach. The technique came up empty and finished and let him go, and Doha hit the end of the ropes at a dead run and stayed there.

"CUT ME LOOSE!"

"No," said Su Han.

He was standing four feet away with a knife in his hand and the schedule in his other, and he had not moved since the gate.

"Su Han—"

"You've got four hours till the next one and if I cut you loose now you'll be in the middle of the yard when it starts." Su Han's voice was completely level. "Doha, I've been doing the arithmetic for four days. You are the single most dangerous thing on these grounds and you don't have a vote."

"Girin's at the gate!"

"Yes."

"CUT ME LOOSE."

Su Han looked at him for a long moment.

Then he cut the ropes.

He did it fast and badly, sawing through the first two turns and letting Doha rip the rest, and he said, while he was doing it, in the same level voice:

"Four hours. Whatever happens, at the sixth hour you get away from every body on these grounds, do you understand me, you get out to the Low Field and you take the long way and you don't go near the ossuary—"

"Why are you helping me?"

"Because I'm the one who cast the bell," said Su Han.

Doha did not stop moving. That was the only thing about the next four seconds he was ever proud of.

"How many?"

"Four years ago. One. He asked for one, and he paid me in—" Su Han's face did not change at all. "He paid me in a promise, which was worth exactly what promises are worth, and I have known that for about three days and eleven hours."

"How many seams have you got?"

"A hundred and ninety-one," said Su Han.

"Su Han—"

"I'm forty," he said. "Do the math, you're good at it. I'll be four hundred at sixty-three if I keep the pace, and I've always kept the pace, and I'd like you to notice that I never once asked to slow down." He turned toward the gate. "Go and get Girin. I'll take the west range. And Doha — when this is finished, I'd be obliged if you'd be the one to tell the Hallmistress, and I'd be obliged if you'd tell it straight."