They found the March by the taste of iron before they saw its teeth.
North of the brace the Spine spread into low shelves that had once been quarry and now remembered only taking. The wind ran along them as if measuring, then brought a smell that didn't belong to weather—hot oil, chain-grease, bone dust. Mitan stopped mid-step, head cocked, chewing his sliver of bark to a pulp.
"Bells," he said. "Not rung. Anticipated."
Raya crouched and touched the grit with two fingers. "Too many boots. Not enough mistakes." She pointed east. "Flank of servitors there. Mouths in the middle. Large tracks—six, eight, spaced like they don't ask permission when they put their feet down."
Dren laid his palm to the stone and let the pitch climb his bones. Crown was a long, slow press from the north, a storm finding its knuckles. Spine jittered along a dozen faults where old cuts in the world had been braced and then forgotten. Heart ran thin beneath all of it, the old river sulking in its pipe. Far ahead, something made of Warden bone and bad arithmetic moved and every note in the land took a step back out of respect or fear.
He stood. "We don't have hours," he said.
"We don't have minutes," Raya said, eyes narrowed against heat-haze.
"Then we buy some," Dren said.
They slid along the shelves until the land offered a dry wash that cut toward the sound. The first thing they saw was not a Titan but its consequence: rails laid with the care of a funeral, bearing the weight of a bell so large it made the air around it forget how to move. Men in ash-gray hauled the frame with ropes across their shoulders; servitors in chitin marched on either side with rods cocked and mirrors hooded. Mouths came three across in robes the color of cold ash. Behind, a chain-train unspooled, link after link swallowing light and wanting throats.
"Cut the bell," Mitan said, the whisper a prayer with teeth.
Dren shook his head. "Too many eyes. Cut the arithmetic instead." He pointed with his chin to the rail—old Warden rib, petrified, laid across sleepers of scavenged beam. "We take the rails. One degree. They'll push, they'll curse, they'll spend their rage here instead of at the wall."
Raya's rope was already out. She flung a loop and hooked the far rib with a grace that had more to do with hunger than practice. Dren set his palms to the stone under the nearest sleeper and whispered a thin charge into the grain. Ease, he told it. Two heartbeats. Tighten, he told the sleeper next. Rails want to sit straight; he made them sulk. The bell rolled a handspan, found a new low point, and settled with a sound like a room remembering a dropped plate.
A mouth raised his head. Ceramic pupils flashed in Dren's direction like the insult of a hand that knows it's clean. "Correction," he said to his men. "Then cord."
"Correction," Dren repeated softly, and retuned the other rail. The frame twisted. Rope-worn men swore and braced; the servitors stepped forward and found their boots sliding like liars on wet tile.
Mitan hissed air between his teeth the way a man does when a note is almost right. "Again," he said.
Again, Dren thought, and again, the rails settled a fraction wrong. The bell's frame stuck. The chain-tenders whipped a link against the ground as if that ever taught metal to obey. The mouths consulted each other without moving and someone who believed in numbers more than men went off looking for more rope.
"That buys Emberfall an hour," Raya said.
"Two if their pride keeps them stupid," Dren said. "Leave it. The more they fight here, the less they can count later."
They slid back along the wash. Dren set a lattice of three hair-fine lines across a shallow ravine where the servitors would march—trip the front rung and the back two dump a harmonics sting into the coil-gauntlets so their magnets pull them together like drunks in an empty doorway. Not a kill. A stall. Not glory. Time.
They could have cut more. Pride wanted to carve the March into meat right here and let someone else write the poem. Intelligence held its scruff. You don't win a siege by winning a fight you can't finish.
Emberfall's brace looked like a jaw from the north, teeth set in black gum. As they ran toward it, bells started ringing in Dren's chest that hadn't been hung yet—a wall's instinct, angry and practical. The north wind had changed—iron, then salt, then ozone—the promise of lightning. He didn't call it. He didn't have to. It would come whether he wanted it or not and find him by the shape of his bones.
They topped the last shelf in time to see the fortress shed its pretense of sleep. Emberfalls thickened to sheets, poured through their slotted curtains in orange-white veils. Baffles snapped taut along the high tiers, telling the wind what manners to use. Men and women took stations on parapets, at vent valves, behind swivel guns. The bells—all the right ones—spoke, not panic, but choreography: Garrison, cistern, gate. Brace. Brace. North.
Keffa met them at the gate with her helm on and none of yesterday's patience. "You bought us minutes," she said without making it a compliment. "Spend them well."
"Bell train stuck," Dren said. "Chain train delayed. Mouths annoyed enough to make mistakes. The big ones didn't slow." He glanced past her shoulder to Neral, ink beneath her nails like bruises. "Crown will go ugly in an hour."
"It's already rude," Neral said, and flicked two fingers to a runner. "Tell Sorev to unstring the eastern half and be ready to string it in a breath."
"Brann?" Keffa asked.
"North brace tolerates arrogance now," Brann said grimly, mortar in the seams of his knuckles. "I don't, but it does."
"Good. We'll talk later about which of you to marry," Keffa said, and turned to Dren. "We hold the first bite or we die on the second. Your Oath."
"I cut what I find," Dren said. "I won't call the sky on your head."
"Then get off my wall," she said. "Kill where killing helps."
He didn't argue. He took the stairs two at a time and came out on the northern killing terrace—a shelf of basalt glassed by old falls, pocked with sockets where binders sat humming off-key to break any surge that tried to live here. The slope down into the approach had been corrected for centuries—undulations where giants once worked lifted now into ridges that made bad footing for anything large. Dren knelt and touched the glass.
Pitch.
Crown impatient and hungry. Spine taut and ready. Heart thin under the middle, a sink—good for traps if he didn't get greedy.
He laid a lattice. Not the delicate three-line snares he used on burrowers. A field—dozens of hair-fine threads set across the shallow, anchored to splinters of slag, each tuned to a slightly different note of stumble. He could close them in sequence as weight crossed the slope, tripping gaits, misaligning jaws and claws, loosening plates so precise strikes mattered.
Mitan came up beside him, eyes too bright, hands steady. "I'll call the triggers," he said. "You'll be busy not dying."
Raya had already cached javelins where the glass shelf kinked. "Mirrors and rods on the right," she said. "Chain lower. If the big one with the humped back starts lowing, don't answer it with anything that carries. It's a call-and-response."
"King?" Dren asked.
"Captain," she said. "A choir-man. The King will smile first. Smiles don't have echoes."
The world darkened without the sun moving. Clouds with iron spines leaned south. The wind decided to bleed. Dren stood and the lightning under his skin lifted in quiet recognition, a dog raising its head at the sound of boots.
The March crested the far lip.
They did not come in a wave. Waves are beautiful and insane and die on rocks. They came in files and knots and engines. Servitors by the hundred, coil-gauntlets in rows, mirror-bearers behind, chain-tenders hauling that light-swallowing rope like they owned throats they had never seen. Mouths walked in threes, masks impassive, ash-colored robes uncollected by weather. Behind, the big ones.
Skinners first—low, fast, plates articulated like mill-saw teeth, built to strip flesh from stone. Groaners followed—long-bodied, vented down the sides, expelling pressure in a keening that shook dust out of cracks and courage out of men. A Towerback lumbered behind them, a Warden's spine levered vertical, ribs welded into a scaffolding of platforms where a choir of mouths had set up bells and made their math sing. Far back, the line of something bigger moved—unconcerned, polite as a man with a very long knife who knows he doesn't have to show it to be obeyed.
Keffa's voice carried along the terraces without trying to be pretty. "On my mark. Not before. Not after. If you shoot early I'll put you on water duty for a season and make you apologize to the barrels."
Neral's hands hovered over a grid of wind-scripts scratched into steel. "Baffles ready. Vents listening."
Brann stood beside a binder and glared at the stone like a foreman glowers a wall into doing what it promised.
Dren rolled his shoulders. "Don't look at me," he told the wall.
"We don't," the wall said, and meant it.
The first skinners hit the shallow and the lattice closed.
Not all at once. Mitan sang under his breath—clicks and taps felt more than heard—and the first two threads snapped. The skins stumbled. The second rank corrected; the third stepped into a trigger; the fourth slowed at exactly the wrong moment and got shouldered aside by the fifth. Momentum, pride, hunger—each won in turn and spoiled the other. Dren let the pattern open and close across the incline like a man beating rugs until the dust of speed came out.
"Now," Keffa said.
Swivel guns spoke from the fourth ring in low, ungenerous barks. Stone slugs the size of fists punched into joints and vent-mouths; ceramic cracked with the sound of cheap holiness breaking. Chain-tenders tried to throw and found their coils sticking to the ground where Dren's field made the links forget which way down was. Mirror-bearers lifted glass and watched it sag when a two-finger nudge broke their smug pitch.
The groaners opened their vents and made the air into a complaint that tried to live in bone. Neral flicked three wind panes in sequence and sent their breath back into their mouths, like forcing a liar to hear his own story. Two choked and fell. The third learned to stagger forward while coughing and became a different problem.
The Towerback came last to the slope and first to seriousness. Its rib scaffold lifted the choir above the killing ground where spark and slug had been honest work. Bells rang a quiet series—do, do, do—and servitors straightened, mirrors steadied, rods angled toward the terrace. Dren felt the arithmetic lock teeth. It was an order telling the world to be tidy.
"Break their tidy," he said.
Mitan snapped four triggers like a seamstress biting thread. Skinners flailed and made a pile at the Towerback's feet. The Towerback planted its foreplates and pushed—weight as argument. Dren set his palm to a binder and pulled its pitch half a tooth toward true. The ground did not hold harder. It yielded in a direction the Towerback didn't like and the whole ribbed machine listed.
"Left vent," Raya said calmly, and Keffa shouted the same words with volume.
Valves along the tier hissed open. Scalding steam belched across the Towerback's left flank. Choir-men screamed without sound—their bodies forgot which way was breath—and half their bell-clappers slipped. The pattern broke; the do, do, do became a do, do, don't that told servitors nothing and enraged a mirror.
Dren moved. Down the steps, across the glass, into the shallow, sparks whispering around him like a rumor. A chain whipped, hungry. He caught its end and wrote No into it with a trickle of current. It went slack, ashamed. A mirror swung toward his face; two fingers, a nudge at the rim, and the glass slobbered itself useless. A groaner bellowed into his chest; he dropped an EMP veil and the sound became a cough and the beast stared at him like insult had weight.
He left it to choke and ran for the Towerback's knee.
Up close the welds were obscene—plate stitched to ancient rib with metal that had never deserved to touch a Warden. He jammed his blade into a seam and drove a hair-thin thread through the joint until he felt the hinge's lie. The clamp there had been overtightened to force a posture; he loosened it a degree and watched the Towerback try to find an honest way to stand with a fake spine.
"Right knee," he said aloud, and Mitan, hearing bells that hadn't moved yet, hit three triggers on the right flank. The ground there shifted like a shrug. The Towerback overcorrected and exposed the underside of the rib scaffold for one breath.
He took it.
He jumped, caught a rib, stuck there with Magnetic Draw, and drove the shortblade in through a slat with his free hand. He didn't blast the choir with lightning—men die very easily and the wall behind him had been clear about what it could survive. He wrote three strokes in the Towerback's Heart harness—Open, Silence, Truth—and let the engine behind the choir understand, for one clear beat, that it was supposed to serve life and not counting.
The rib scaffold shook as if someone had said the wrong name in a room where that name had been forbidden. Bells dropped. One mouth slipped and his mask cracked on an iron rung; human teeth gave up where ceramic had only complained. The Towerback's head swung, clumsy now, and found a baffle with the side of its crest. The fabric tore, then caught at the edge, and the wind decided not to help anymore.
Dren let go before righteous weight could teach him about gravity and hit the glass too hard. His shoulder gave and then allowed itself to remember being attached. Pride got up before thought could tell it not to. He rolled, slid, came up with a skinner already on him, saw plates like sawteeth opening, and drove his blade up into the seam where upward is an insult. Lightning stung the skinner's throat into a pretended sleep; it folded and the teeth missed his neck by the patience of a knuckle.
Above, Keffa's command voice cracked once. "Valve three—shut! Valve four—open! Gun two—low! Low! Make them crawl to you!"
Neral's hands danced across panes. A gust shoved a mirror-bearer into his own glass; the glass took him like a bad idea takes a room. Sorev's arrows stitched a straight line between two vents and a servitor forgot where the world had put its blood. Brann slammed a binder with the heel of his hand and swore the sort of oath stone respects; the hum stabilized and the terrace stiffened under Dren's boots.
The first hour was slaughter and work. The second was just work.
The March did not run away when its arithmetic failed. It did not mourn. It reached for a bigger abacus. The files parted for something cautious—long, tall, jointed like a ladder, crest slender instead of armored, vent-lines tucked. Not a brute. Something that learned while watching the Towerback fail.
"Choir," Raya said, flattening her breath. "Not in the rib. In the head."
The slender one lifted a forelimb, not to strike, to point, and the mirrors adjusted without needing words. Its vent-mouths opened and breathed a note that was not pain and not command—balance—and Dren felt his lattice lose authority where it lay across shallow and slope.
He bared his teeth. "You think I'm the only one who can retune," he said, and laid his palm to glass. The seed's pitch in his chest tuned itself bloody; he pushed a thread under the slender one's note and twisted it one degree left. For a heartbeat, the choir lost its line. That was all Mitan needed to dump a shock into the skinner pile that made three stand and turn before they remembered how many legs they had.
"Left baffle," Neral called.
"Hold your gun," Keffa answered, voice a lash across panic. "It's listening for you. Don't tell it where to bite."
The slender one pointed again, and a chain leapt with the certainty of a lesson learned. It arced past Dren's cheek and missed only because he loved insulting inevitability. He stepped into the throw and caught the link with his palm open. The chain tried to know him; he wrote No and it sulked.
He was tiring. The proof wasn't in breath—he had learned how to let breath be background in rooms where shouting meant dying—it was in the way Volt Dashes dragged blackness across the corners of his sight and EMP Veils came on like pulled teeth. He had promised not to call the sky on Emberfall and the sky wanted to learn how generous a lie could be.
The slender one's crest flashed. A mirror angle caught Dren full across the shoulders with a beam that wasn't light and wasn't heat. It was instruction—Stop—and his knees forgot that standing is a decision. He went down. Pride lunged to its feet. Body followed late. The mirror came again, the angle clean as math.
"Don't you dare," Keffa snapped from the parapet, and Dren didn't know if she was speaking to him or the sky, but it had the right tone and it kept his hands from opening like a priest's.
He dropped a veil and let the beam die on air that had been told to behave. Then he turned his head toward the north, away from the wall, toward the empty shelves where the March had not yet put anything alive.
"Come on then," he told the weather.
The first arcs stitched the horizon in white. Not a stormhead. A seam-ripper. Lightning walked the far shelves, tall, calm, patient; the thunder rolled south and smothered itself on Emberfall's baffles. He lifted both hands—not high, not kinglike, not an invitation, an alignment—and drew a line between the far ground and the slender one's crest.
The night became a false dawn.
Pale-yellow threads unrolled from his fingers and met the high arcs like fishermen catching huge quiet fish. He did not pull them down on the terrace. He did not bless the walls with death. He snapped them sideways, skimming them across the shallow like stones skipped by a child who refuses to count. The first cut a rank of mirrors into ash without setting a hair alight. The second shaved the top off a groaner and made it eat its own vent. The third kissed the slender one's crest where the choir lived and resoldered a note it had been arrogant enough to believe could not be moved.
The choir lost the pitch and the lattice got its teeth back.
"Now," Mitan breathed, and closed ten triggers in a row. The shallow bucked like a rug. Skinners went down like men tripping over old arguments. The Towerback bell-choir tried to stand and found its knee still a liar. Dren ran, not forward—across—a man writing on glass with his feet, tossing hair-thin threads like a tailor throwing chalk lines on a suit he meant to cut to truth.
He killed the slender one up close, because something in him refused to let precision end from a distance. He came in under a plate where a pointer becomes a weapon if you're slow, jammed his blade into the hinge, and wrote a single note, not three—remember—with a current so exact it hurt his teeth. The head shivered. The choir inside opened their mouths to curse and couldn't find any words because the instruction had gone out of the world like a tide leaving rot.
He left his blade there as a conductor and pushed a palm into the chest of the beast and shoved the engine back through time until it had to decide whether to run honest or stop. It stopped.
He pulled his blade free and fell to his knees because all things not made of stone do that sometimes. He looked up and saw the wall still standing, seen through heat shimmer and breath and a lattice that hummed under the weight of bodies.
The March did what arithmetic does when it fails twice. It looked for an exponent. Far back on the shelf, the big shape that had ignored them decided to care.
"This is your bite," Raya said from somewhere he couldn't afford to look. "Don't chew it."
It came down the shelf at a walk, and the walk did not hurry. It was not the King. It wore a crown of plates because men like crowns and put them on things that make them feel less small. A Choir-Lord—lattice along its back, bells tight-voiced, eyes like burned coins. Servitors arranged themselves at its feet as if it were gravity.
Dren stood.
He did not have storm left to make the night pretend morning again without breaking his promise. He did not have a lattice left to lay that would make the big thing trip like a drunk. He had a binder at his hip and a wall at his back and an oath in his mouth he refused to spit.
He set his palm to glass.
One degree, he told himself. Left. Always left.
He felt where the Crown on the Choir-Lord was jammed in—cheap, a vanity added to a skull that had never wanted jewelry. He felt where Spine had been overtightened to make the head sit just so while men in masks clapped quietly. He felt where the Heart wanted to run and had been yoked to calendar and bell. He set his threads accordingly.
"Mitan," he said.
"Already there," Mitan said, and the first part of the field snapped alive under the Choir-Lord's footfall, not enough to break, enough to turn angle into doubt.
"Raya," he said.
"Left flank," she said, and a javelin took a mirror-man in the soft neck that lives under ceramic and tells truth when pushed.
"Keffa," he said.
"Hold," she said, and the guns held.
"Neral."
"On your count," she said, and the baffles trembled in their sockets because even wind knows anticipation.
He ran.
The Choir-Lord lowered its head—not to gore, to instruct—and the bells along its back began to tell men how to be safe and Titans how to be brave. Dren slid into that voice with a long, low spear of current and told one of the bells to remember being a bowl. It sulked and stopped ringing. He knifed left, let a chain taste him and then wrote No on its tongue, and cut three steps worth of command out of the air.
He felt the block of fatigue in his shoulders like a weight he'd been too proud to put down for a decade. He picked it up again and went under the Choir-Lord's arch, where the ribs had been rebuilt to be platforms for mouths to stand and look superior. He did not kill the mouths. He killed the assumption. He drove a thread into the main spine clamp and loosened it a breath; the whole body had to accommodate that honesty and forgot how to aim for one long, perfect moment.
"Now," he said.
Keffa said it louder. "Now!"
Guns spoke in a harsh chord. Steam screamed from a valve Neral had wanted to open all day and had been too careful to do until this breath. The baffles slid like knives and taught the wind to move sideways. The Choir-Lord planted to resist and found the ground under its feet remembering how to be a small hill a little too late. It dropped, not to kneel, to catch itself.
Dren climbed.
He used the ribs like rungs and the juts like insults. He jammed his blade into the back lattice and wrote Open with a tremble of current that made old welds shiver. He wrenched, not because it helped—because he wanted to take something ugly apart with his hands before the storm inside him remembered it could run his life for him. The lattice broke. Mouths scrambled and went under. He didn't see them land because the Choir-Lord reared with braggadocio and would have smashed him against the wall if the wall hadn't known its job.
He dropped as it hit, rolled, felt the percussion run up his spine and set his teeth. He came up with the blade in a reverse grip and went for the heart harness while the beast forgot to hide it. Three strokes: Open, Silence, Truth. The engine lifted a thought and then another and then decided to fail clean.
It fell like a cathedral deciding to learn humility.
Men cheered against the wall's instructions. Keffa didn't stop them once. Neral slumped against her panes and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist like a woman who insists ink does that to her, not feeling.
Dren sat in the shallow with his knees up and his elbows on them and watched the last of the skinners try to circle and find they had no choir and less courage. He could taste the sky wanting to push harder; he could hear the March trying to remember how to be numbers without the left-hand column. He did not stand again until the slope was body, then broken mirror, then body again. When he did, he walked in a straight line toward the terrace steps and let his blade drag a mark across glass because he needed the sound of it to be real.
Keffa met him halfway down. Her helm was under her arm and she looked like a woman who had won three arguments and lost five and would happily go home to do the dishes if it would keep the city breathing.
"You kept your oath," she said.
"I almost broke it," he said.
"Then promise it again," she said, no poetry left for either of them.
"I cut what I find," he said, and the words felt like habit in a mouth that had learned to chew stone.
Neral limped over, flicking ink off her fingers. "The March isn't finished," she said. "We bloodied its hour, not its mouth."
"I know," Dren said.
Raya leaned on the parapet, watching the north where the shelves rolled away into shadow that wasn't purely weather. "Their King smiled," she said, as if it had happened in front of her and she was only now allowed to tell it.
"How far," Keffa asked.
"Far enough to not hurry," Raya said.
Mitan came up, still chewing wood, eyes wide and tired and too awake. "I heard a bell I don't know," he said. "It didn't ring. It promised it would."
Brann looked past them all at the brace. "The wall will hold another bite like that," he said. "It won't like me afterward."
Sorev, who had not said ten words all day, planted his bow and leaned on it. "They'll come at dusk tomorrow," he said. "They like making mothers choose between feeding a fire and braiding a girl's hair."
Keffa nodded once. "We'll braid before dawn," she said. "Then we'll load the guns."
The bodies on the slope steamed in the cooling wind. The emberfalls whispered down their slotted throats. The crowd's hunger for a cheer died in its mouth and became the work of carrying wounded, counting arrows, tying knots. Dren stood under the killing terrace and let his hands stop shaking because he decided they were done—no other reason.
A small shape appeared at his elbow, materializing like dogs do when bread is ready and like children do when stories are drunk by walls. Keffa's daughter scowled up at him with all the sincerity in the world.
"You made a hole," she said, accusing, pointing at the shallow where his blade had dragged glass like a signature.
"I left a mark," he corrected, because pride could be petty if it kept a city from putting a shrine where he'd bled.
She considered that and, reluctantly, allowed it. "Mother says you come back tomorrow if you're not dead."
"I'll be very inconvenient if I am," he said.
She sniffed. "You already are."
He had nothing to say to that that wouldn't be a lie. He looked past her shoulder at the north. The shelves were empty of motion but full of intention. Far out, lightning stitched the horizon in polite vertical strokes. He did not call them. Not yet.
Keffa's hand ghosted his arm and was gone. "Sleep," she said.
He nodded because there are orders even knives obey when the hand is familiar with metal. He climbed into the city and found a stone he liked and leaned on it until it agreed to take some of his weight. He slept for an hour because the world was going to ask for the next one.
At dawn, the smoke lay in ribbons and the wind had a new math.
A runner found him with his back to the wall and mud in his hair. "Storm-scribe says there's a shape in the north light that looks like it can count past ten," the man said, breathless and smiling the way men smile when they know the joke is on someone and hope it isn't them.
Dren wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and stood. His ribs argued. He won. He slid the blade home and touched the steel square in his pocket and the coin beside it because the weight had decided to mean something and he was too tired not to admit it.
He looked at the horizon. The glow there had gotten smarter.
"King," Raya said from the parapet, as if saying the word by daylight made it any more generous.
"No," Dren said, mouth dry. "A man wearing the idea of one."
"Same thing at scale," Sorev muttered, and spat thoughtfully.
Keffa settled her helm on her head like a woman who knew exactly how stupid the crown on the north horizon would be. "Get off my wall, ashwalker," she said, the nickname a place-name again and not a prayer. "Go cut something before it breaks our tables."
He walked because he chose to.
He was not chosen.
He had come anyway.