Dawn came yellow and thin, the way blood looks when water's been added to keep a man alive one more hour.
The north light had a shape in it no sky should wear. It wasn't a stormhead. Storms come in argument. This came in arithmetic: clean angles under the haze, lines of movement so straight you felt them in your molars. Dren stood on the fifth-ring terrace and let the wind run its iron teeth over his skin. The emberfalls hissed down their slotted throats; baffles took the morning and cut it into obedient pieces. Behind him the fortress worked like a body that knows which ache means death and which means another day.
Keffa came to the parapet with her helm already on. Her burn-scored cheek caught the light like a map edge. Neral's fingers were inked to the knuckles, wind-scripts scattered across the table beside her in panes of smoked steel. Brann had mortar ground into the seams of his hands and a brick he hadn't had time to set. Sorev leaned on the good leg, bow resting, bright eye tracking a horizon that refused to be honest. Marik wore the iron circle because stupid things sometimes have work.
"Report," Keffa said.
"Bell-train still stuck at the cleft," Raya answered from the stair with her dust-gray cloak knotted tight. "Two rails crooked. They've thrown fifty men at the problem and a prayer at the rest. The chain train's behind it and angry."
"Good," Keffa said. "Let them be angry in a place that isn't my wall."
Mitan chewed his sliver of bark to wood-paste and tilted his head. "But they're not waiting."
He was right. The shelves far north shivered with motion that wasn't a march in rows and wasn't a tide, either. Columns had become streams—files of servitors and mirror-bearers and rod-men moving around the stuck bell, over the slag ridges, through cuts Dren had thought too steep to carry anything heavy. Behind them moved engines that made the air forget how to feel familiar.
Dren pressed his palm to fused glass and listened. Crown: angry and impatient, trying to decide whether to be a teacher or a fist. Spine: poised along faults like a back that will arch if you breathe wrong. Heart: thin and resentful under the middle rings, water forced into pipes that were beginning to remember river.
He felt the other noise before he saw it: a kind of under that made the glass complain. Burrowers again—but not the little ox-sized rust-drinkers from the brace. Deepers—their cousins that live under mountains, plates hammered from old ship hull, jaws of magnet wire thick as wrists, the patience of stone turned mean.
He didn't look at Keffa. "They're coming under."
"Let them try," Brann growled. "We've been tuning the floor for a decade."
"They tuned back," Dren said.
Keffa's mouth tightened. "Sorev."
"I'll put three boys with gongs on the fourth-ring drains," the old archer said. "They'll bang when the stone huffs." He paused, the faintest smile on the good side. "I'll tell them to pretend it's music."
"Do it," Keffa said. To Neral: "When the wind tries to teach me a lesson, argue politely. If it yells, yell back."
"I have a louder voice than the wind," Neral said without boasting, and set her palms to the panes.
They got an hour of quiet. Quiet is a rich person's luxury and a city's drug. Emberfall used it like a tool.
The first contact wasn't a roar or a trumpet. It was the sound of a thousand feet feeding hate to the ground and the ground chewing before it swallowed. Skinners came at a crawl, low and serrated. Groaners followed in ranks like bad dreams that had learned to share a schedule. The Towerbacks had fashioned their scaffolds tighter after yesterday's humiliation; their bells were strapped with new leather; the choir-men wore fresh ash on their masks the way weak men put on perfume.
Behind them, the Spirebreaker arrived.
It didn't look like a ram. It looked like a Warden whose skull had been turned into an idea: a long, blunt head layered with plates embossed in spirals, a crest like a helical drill, shoulders braced with rib-arches bound by chain. Its mouth wasn't for eating. It was for pushing. When it stepped, the ridges of the shelves under its feet slumped a little, as if stone agreed to move for anything that decided it was already there.
"Guns," Keffa said, tone even. "Not proud. Low. Then lower."
Stone-spitters barked from the fourth ring. Slugs pocked the Spirebreaker's flank and skipped. The drill-crest turned a degree without the head moving and the slugs curved away like birds who'd remembered an appointment.
Neral hissed between her teeth. "It's changing the pressure field. Tell Brann to—"
"Already on it," Brann muttered, and slammed his palm into a binder until it agreed to sing a less cowardly note.
The slender Choir, the learned thing from yesterday's fight, had not wasted its death. Its cousins spread through the ranks—long, jointed, narrow-vented, crests slender and spiked with mirrors—pointing, retuning, telling the march where Dren's lattice sat and how to step around it. He closed the field, opened another, closed the second; Mitan's fingers danced in the air like a man knitting a web around a bear.
"Left baffle," Neral said, and the fabric snapped taut with a sound like water thinking better of drowning.
"Valve three open, four shut—no, other way," Keffa snapped, and the steam learned its manners accordingly.
The first skinners hit the shallow and the lattice did its old work. The second rank tripped where there was no lattice at all, because Mitan had begun to promise triggers that weren't there and the march trusted numbers more than sight. Groaners keened and choked on their own echo when Neral batted their breath back at them like someone bored with a child's tantrum. The Towerbacks pushed; Dren loosened a knee here and a spine clamp there; a choir fell and choked on bells. It held. Ugly. Tidy. Too tidy.
Then the floor exhaled.
It wasn't a crack. Cracks are dramatic and honest. This was deflation: a long soft letting-go that made sand slide in the grooves between glass, made the drains sigh, made the gongs on the fourth ring thrum in confused harmony.
"Under!" Sorev barked.
"Hold," Keffa said, because fear makes men run and running makes holes.
Dren didn't hold. He ran along the terrace, dropped down two ladders, took a ribbed stair at a leap, and landed in a service corridor where the world sounded like a chest that had forgotten how to breathe evenly. He put both palms to the floor and pushed a thread of charge through the basalt, through the old slag, into the packed rubble below.
There they were—Deepers in a grid—chewing the fill under the third ring's outer wall. They weren't coming up yet. They were removing. The stone would hold until someone shouted loud enough overhead and then it would choose to burp the ring and call it a day.
He set a lattice down there where no eye will ever see it—hair-thin threads across tunnels that didn't yet exist, each anchored to a stone tooth. He didn't plan to kill the burrowers. He planned to make their timing wrong. He snapped the first line alive at the exact moment the Deepers moved from appetite to joy. The tunnel sneezed the wrong direction; rubble slid into new hollows; a foreplate jammed; magnet teeth chewed air. He closed the second and the wrong stone fell sideways; the third and a pocket shut like a mouth disgusted with a bite.
The exhale under his feet sharpened to a cough, then steadied. The corridor gained itself by degrees. He stood and ran back up into the light because the light had decided to become a problem.
Above, the Spirebreaker had reached the terrace face. It did not roar. It pushed. The spiral crest spun without spinning—pressure twisted in front of it until stone forgot to be rigid and remembered hot glass. The basalt lip caved in a graceful, nauseous way, and a piece the size of a house sloughed off and fell into the shallow. Men cursed. Guns fell silent where barrels skittered off mounts. One of the baffles tore loose and thrashed itself to ribbons, the wind laughing because it never cared about men's fabric.
Keffa's voice cracked once getting over the roar. "Re-string! Anchor! Don't curse—tie!"
Dren moved without thought—under the remaining baffle, over a chain that remembered him and tried to be a snake, into the spill of glass that had been a floor. The Spirebreaker's crest leaned toward him like a man putting a shoulder into a door he legally owns. He laid his hands on the stone in front of it and turned the Spine left—one degree, then two, then a liar's hair. The curve under the crest changed the kind of slope it was. Momentum became habit became misstep. The crest's spiral met glass at the wrong angle and tried to unscrew itself into solid.
It did not stop. It needed, for the first time, to choose.
"Now," Keffa breathed, and the remaining guns chose at exactly the same breath—low, mean, no glory—and slugs hammered the hinges at the crest's base. A seam split. Neral's wind grabbed the crest's exhale and shoved it back through its own throat. The Spirebreaker's legs stuttered. Dren jammed the shortblade into a plate seam and wrote remember into a clamp that had only ever been told obey.
The crest slowed. Not much. Enough for the fourth-ring valve to open and flog the side of its skull with scald until ceramic blistered and the choir men riding harness there learned something new about humility.
Dren didn't finish it. He couldn't. The Towerbacks had learned too, and one had trundled up under the breach the Spirebreaker made and set its choir to a steady, useful do-do-do that told servitors to go where the hole was and ignore pain on the way. The hole filled with bodies. Bodies became ladder. A Skullback—a Warden whose head had been re-faced into a wall-mallet—pounded the edge of the new gap with dopey insistence. The glass fell in sheets. The fourth ring forgot that it had been asked to last.
"Fall back," Keffa said, and it was the voice of a woman who knows that sometimes living looks like cowardice to men uninterested in tomorrow. "Fifth to fourth. Fourth to third. Don't run. Don't lie. Carry children. Carry barrels. If a gun won't move, break it and bring the breach-load."
The terrace erupted in movement that wasn't panic because Keffa had spent years beating panic out of Emberfall with work. Guns rolled. Ropes tightened. Men who liked shouting discovered they had no breath left to waste. Women with knives tucked into waistbands put them between teeth and tied knots. Children went under arms and over shoulders, quiet because someone had taught them that noise makes aim easier.
A runner found Dren with eyes too wide and a mouth obedient enough to do only its one job. "East drain's gone," he gasped. "Water's running wrong. Fourth-ring cistern's coughing mud."
Neral swore, short and vicious. "They cored us," she said. "They put a mirror down into our throat and told the river to choke."
Brann's face did the thing of a man who's been asked to fix an argument his parents started and left him in their will. "I can't be in three places."
Dren grabbed his shoulder—quick, mean, the only intimacy men like them understood. "You fix the wall," he said. "I'll fix your throat."
He ran through Emberfall like a blade through a rope, taking stairs without counting, vaulting rails not because it looked good but because the floor had decided not to be where feet expect it. The fourth-ring cistern court smelled wrong—earth and old river, not the scrupulous stone-musk of water taught to behave. He dropped to one knee at the nearest lid and put his fingers to rusted hoops. The pitch inside was a coil of instructions fighting for a same breath.
The mirror—inverted, smoky, lowered down a shaft—cast back the shape of the cistern at exactly the right moiré to disrupt flow. Mouths in a side conduit chanted numbers at water. The water wanted to be a river again because it is that kind of creature and the mirror had made that want into sabotage.
Dren did the unthinkable. He called the sky.
Not here. Not on the wall. Out past the northern shelves where the March had come in tidy lines. A seam ripper of pale-yellow arcs whispered through high air and stitched itself into the suggestion of a storm. He caught it with a hand flung like a man throwing a rope across a ravine, drew a thin ribbon off the main, and slid it down the shaft into the mirror's rim so delicately the iron hoops shook with contained laughter.
Nudge. The pitch went left. Nudge. The glass remembered being sand and then remembered that this wasn't the place to enjoy it. The mirror collapsed into a sleepy puddle at the bottom of the shaft. The chant on the side conduit mangled itself into syllables that didn't have a home. Water remembered duty. It ran.
The ground liked that. The third ring stood up a breath straighter. Dren fell back on his heels and laughed once—ugly, grateful, brief.
A drum he hadn't heard since Khar-Tor's salvage yards went off in his bones—impact—and the fort shuddered through the soles of his feet. He got to the fifth ring in time to see the Skullback finish its stupid, genius work: the malformed head had punched the same two square yards of the fourth ring's face for twenty minutes with the patience of men who hate you. The stone finally caved. The ring opened a mouth where a window had been. Servitors poured in, mirror-angles flaring, rods stabbing. Guns there had been spiked; the last gunner swung his barrel into the breach like he was setting a door again and then went down with a quiet dignity men mistake for sadness.
Keffa's voice rode the sound. "Third ring! Close!"
The shutters slammed. Slotted curtains dropped. A fall of fresh ember hissed into the opening and set mirror-bearers on fire in tidy robes. The robed men didn't scream; the servitors did, because pain is democratic.
"South stair," a runner panted. "Break—brace groans—"
Dren didn't wait to be sent. He ran into the fortress's ribcage and felt the brace's song cracking into twos and threes. His earlier corrections held; the ends were failing. He jammed fingers into a binder's etched lines and threw a hair-thin thread across two chords in a key no priest would have admitted existed. The brace remembered how to be a back and stopped posing as a chest. The groan settled into a complaint it could sustain without killing people.
He came up out of the full-throat stair into a courtyard painted with ash. The world had narrowed to useful choices. The emberfalls ran thick, vents hissed obediently, baffles fought wind and mostly won. Still the March came, because arithmetic is zealotry wearing a tie.
The Choir-Lord that had died yesterday had a brother. Taller. Bells caged in a trellis of black bone. The mask-men on its ribs wore plates cut to look like faces and the faces were smiling the way men do who were taught as children that smiling is an act of war. It did not rush. It walked to the exact distance at which men begin to lie to each other and then held its ground while the things around it did the business of being fast.
Dren and the Choir-Lord saw each other. Recognition opened between them like a trap that has the decency to warn you it is a trap.
"Don't," Keffa said behind him, not a command, a favor.
"I'm not going to climb it," he said.
"You're going to cut what you find," Neral said, savage approval in it.
He did. He went low and mean, thread by thread. He made the lattice mis-tune on the shallow even as it tried to learn. He bricked the narrow vent-channels with half-second pulses so the groaners panted uselessly until a gun took them. He wrote remember into ankle clamps and made big things aware of their knees. He did not call the sky onto Emberfall. He unspooled lightning sideways where the shelves were empty and skimmed it along the ground until it became a knife that cut chain like rope without throwing sparks through the curtain.
It might have been enough if the world confined itself to ground and wall.
The sky chose then to be helpful.
Not the storm Dren teased across the far shelves. A vertical knife—a single, terrible stroke from north to south—walked the air and put its heel on the highest baffle. The fabric flashed white, then red along the seams, then tore from pawl to pawl with the sound of a laugh a man hears when he has made a personal mistake and pretended it was theology. The wind came in raw. Embers leapt sideways. A square on the fifth ring caught and tried not to. Men put it out and did not have enough hands for the next one and the next.
"Hold," Keffa said, voice torn thin and still good. "Burn isn't a breach unless you let it be."
Marik stood at the rotor table with his hand on the stupid iron crown. His face was not a king's face. It was a man in a waterline's face. He met Dren's eyes across the court and smiled once, the old way, like men do when they've carried too many chairs and the room is finally arranged.
"Go," he said.
"Where," Dren asked, already moving because questions are lies men tell when they want to be forgiven for doing what they intended.
"North," Marik said simply. "You have a mouth to close before it learns to speak our names as jokes."
Dren ran. He found Raya in the tangle below the third ring, blood at her ear, javelins gone, a rod stolen from a dead servitor in her hand. She moved like a woman who had used up three lives and was borrowing a fourth. Mitan ghosted out of a stair shadow with eyes wild, bark in his teeth ground to strands. They did not speak. There are times when words are shrapnel.
They cut a line through the market—stalls unstrapped, canvas dropped, bread smashed into the dust because someone needed the crate more than the crust. They came to the East Hold and the spiral cut in glass that had captured men's breath years ago and saved it for a day like this. Dren took the steps two at a time, lungs on fire, ribs prosecuting, blade a weight the mind had begun to resent and the hands defend. He came out under the north face.
The March had created a road where the slope had been. Not with machines. With bodies. Skinners and groaners and servitors and men in robes had been layered into a ramp and the ramp shone with frozen glass where the emberfall had run and set; up it came the next wave, slow and inevitable as a bad story coming back to hurt a child who thought she was grown.
"Left," Raya said. "The Choir-Lord prefers his right knee."
"Your ears are better than mine," Mitan said.
"It's because I like music," she said, and stabbed a mirror-man through the bicep with the rod she hated.
They hit the ramp where it met the wall—narrow enough to be a bottleneck, wide enough to feel like a plan. Dren laid a lattice into the set glass so mean it offended him. He told the ramp to slump with one thread and to hold with the next and to choose wrong with the third. The front files stumbled. The second files did what files do—press—and the ramp thought about being a river. He snapped the slumping thread and the press turned into a pile exactly where he needed it.
"Guns!" Raya shouted, and the fourth-ring spitter on Keffa's left answered despite having no right to be alive after the last ten minutes. The slug chewed through masks and into faces.
A Deep-Choir rose on the shelves then, far back—a mouth, a bell, a bowl, all at once—its voice not carried by wind so much as by habit—it had been burying this note under Emberfall for years. The world listened not because it wanted to but because it had always meant to.
The brace groaned the wrong way. The third ring's outer edge sank half a foot in an instant and then came back up in shame. A parapet stone slid into air and became a rock that learned about falling before it remembered being part of a wall. Below, the ramp surged. Above, the baffle tore the rest of the way and wind punched Dren in the side so hard he bit his lip and tasted childhood and Khar-Tor and rust.
Keffa's daughter appeared at his elbow like a dog does when it senses the exact moment it isn't wanted and understands that is the only moment it should be there.
"Get back," he snapped.
"I'm helping," she snapped back.
"You're breathing," Raya said without looking. "Keep doing that. Run when it tells you to."
"When who tells me to?" the girl demanded.
"The wall," Dren said, and she believed him because Emberfall had taught its children to believe walls.
The Spirebreaker put its face to the gap it had made and pushed again. The spiral didn't turn. Stone turned. Glass crawled out of its way. It ate air and exhaled pressure. Dren threw a spear of lightning as thin as a needle into the base of its crest and wrote shame across the clamp that kept it from nodding. The universes in which machines feel that word are small and private; this was one. The crest faltered a degree. That was enough for the valve three stories up to belch steam into the fresh seam. Ceramic blistered; a choir-man on a perch learned to fall.
It should have been heroic. It was work.
The Choir-Lord stepped up under the breach at last. Bells rang the quiet pattern of men who carry ladders. Mirrors slid past Dren's cheek with beams of instruction that told air how to behave. He dropped a veil and those orders died on principle. He shot three threads into the lattice of the Choir-Lord's spine and turned truth into leverage. He did not call the sky to finish the sentence he wanted ended. He looked down the ramp and saw men dying who had sworn no oaths, who wore no crowns, who were only alive because city is a word for people holding each other up in the wind and had now learned how to let go in a fury.
"Break!" Keffa shouted at the right moment. "Not in panic—on the chart!"
The chart: routes etched into heads and feet by a thousand drills. Third to second by the under stairs. Second through cistern court to the east drain if the drain isn't choked. Low city out the old vent-crawl if the vent isn't singing poison. Fifth ring down into the belly, then up again, then out. Dogs drop last. Children run with whoever can lift them and if no one can lift them they run anyway and we pick them up in the next court and if there isn't a next court we make one.
Marik didn't run. He set the iron circle on the rotor housing and it looked like a joke someone had forgotten to tell before the punchline grew teeth. He turned to the men at the council door and said, "Close," and they said, "Yes," because some words have no temperature and still burn. Dren didn't see him again except in the bone of a shadow when the fifth ring's face slid and a hundred years of work learned how to be a river in seven seconds.
Brann stayed at a binder and wouldn't stop hitting it until it sang a bar lower and held the arch over twenty women who were carrying children that didn't belong to them. Sorev put three arrows into a mirror at sixty paces and sneered at the miss he made because he was a man who had run out of pride and still maintained his standards. Neral bent over her panes and swore at the wind like a divorced woman tells a man he is not coming home again.
Dren cut. There is no sentence more honest in a bad day.
He cut chain at shoulders and knees. He cut clamps until big things walked with humility for three steps and died on the fourth. He cut the ramp's will to hold and then cut the slumping before it took the fourth ring toward sympathy. He cut the choir's idea of sequence and made bells ring out of order so the arithmetic had to count like a child again.
He could not cut enough.
He felt it the way a man feels a knife slip on a bone and knows there will be blood and that some part of that blood will be his for reasons that have nothing to do with justice. Pride stood up in him—huge, clean, savage—and said call it. Storm. Crown. Fire. Solve it how gods do and count the cost as literature.
He looked at the fifth ring where Keffa's daughter had vanished into a stair full of people. He looked at the cistern court where a woman had set down a barrel and then picked up a boy and then picked up a stranger's girl with the other hand and then put down her knife so she could keep both. He looked at Emberfall's mouth still set in refusal. He closed his own.
He called the sky where no one lived.
Lightning walked the far shelves in long, patient, pale-yellow stitches. He caught three and skipped them sideways across the shallow like stones. The first shaved a Towerback's bells into ash without starting a fire. The second kissed the slender choirs' crests where arrogance lived. The third drew a blade across the tongue of the Deep-Choir and made it bite itself mid-note.
"Go," Keffa said softly at his shoulder.
"I haven't finished," he said.
"You did yesterday," she said. "We're cashing it now."
"What about you," he said, because sometimes men put a question in their mouth as a way to hold the world one heartbeat longer.
"I hold," she said in the tone of a wall. "Then I leave or I don't."
She pushed him in the chest with two fingers. The touch had the force of a hammer. He staggered back a step because he allowed it and because there are rites between people who will never have time for rituals.
He ran.
He found Raya at the under stairs, holding the mouth of the city open with a blade and a snarl, Mitan on the landing behind her listening to the bell that hadn't rung yet and saying "Not that way" whenever a runner tried to be brave. They moved people into tunnels and out of halls and into a low place where old vents had become doors. Dren turned convulsions left with his fingers. He kept burrowers from following with three threads laid where teeth wanted to go and now found there was nothing to chew.
When the fall came—no poetry, no choices—it came with a soft sigh and a sound like crockery stacked too high failing with dignity. The third ring's outer face sunk six feet. The upper terraces tilted. The emberfalls guttered where their feeders ran dry. The Spirebreaker put its shoulder in again and the wound became a mouth.
"Out!" Keffa's voice cracked through stone. "Out in order!"
They went. They went the way people go when they've rehearsed it knowing they hoped never to. Dogs last. Children first. Bread thrown away when it was too heavy, picked up by men who believed in tomorrow as a profession. Keffa came last to the stair with a boy on one hip and a girl on the other, her burn-scar white as a threat. Neral had the token squares in a pouch and ink on her teeth where she'd chewed a pen through. Brann's brick had been used and his hands were bleeding and he didn't know when that had happened. Sorev had no arrows but a knife and a look like he was going to count tomorrow's quiver whether there was one or not.
They came out into the night as a column, not a mob. Behind them Emberfall turned its face away from the cliff and learned to be fire one courtyard at a time.
They did not look back. You don't look back when a city you can't save is teaching itself to end with a little pride. Dren looked back because he is not a citizen and because pride. He saw the emberfalls blacken and the baffles hang torn and the curtain of glass that would have been their last trick set too late and too hot, hardening in a slab that locked in screams and locked out the next ones. He put the sight in his pocket with Ila's coin and Neral's steel square and the way Keffa had said hold.
They stopped when the ground stopped trembling under their feet. A low shelf of slag gave them a vantage no one wanted. The March didn't cheer. It never does. The men in robes adjusted their masks. The servitors picked their gear out of bodies. The engines found a wall to lean on while their keepers hammered wedges back in where Dren had loosened them. The Choir-Lord stood still until the latest instruction arrived from far north and then lifted one foot and put it down and lifted the next and the world moved with it because it had to.
Keffa set the children down. They didn't cry because Emberfall does not waste water that way. She looked at Dren and said nothing. There was nothing to say. He looked back and had nothing either; his pride was a blade he had carried all his life and it had cut nothing of value in the last hour except numbers and then not enough.
Marik didn't come over the ridge. No one said his name. The iron circle lay somewhere in the wreck of the fifth ring and a hundred years from now a scavenger would hold it up and say "what a stupid thing" and be right.
"Who's missing," Sorev said, penitent and harsh.
"We count when we stop moving," Neral said without inflection. "We count when numbers are not a knife."
Brann sat down and looked at his hands like a man considering buying new ones. Mitan spat out the last of the bark and shivered because bells were still ringing in his head that hadn't rung yet and he was tired of being told the future by instruments. Raya leaned her head back and whispered something to a star as if the star might find time in a schedule like this to answer.
Keffa came to Dren and stood too close. He didn't step back. He had his blade; she had her helm under her arm; they were almost the same height and the wind didn't dare get between them.
"You kept your oath," she said. No praise. A line entered into a ledger that had already burned.
"I wasn't enough," he said, and flinched at saying it—the pride in him bit the inside of his mouth hard enough to taste rust.
"Neither was Emberfall," she said. "And we have been working at it longer than you've been alive."
He breathed once, slow, heavy. The seed's pitch in his chest hummed in clean mourning. "I will cut what I find," he said.
"You will," she said. "You'll cut it north of here where it starts counting."
"If I had called the sky," he said, hating the small voice in him that kept lists of what-ifs the way children keep shells.
"You'd have kept your oath and broken my city," Keffa said. "You chose the only road that isn't a story men tell themselves to sleep. Don't start lying now."
He closed his eyes for the length of one breath. Opened them. Looked at the column of survivors—a line of silhouettes against a sky that had decided to be honest about how little it cares. He saw Raya watching him and not asking anything. He saw Mitan already walking to the head of the line because men who hear bells are always being sent to check on the door. He saw Neral with steel in her fist. He saw Sorev counting with one hand and cursing in his head with the other. He saw Brann stand up because the wall had left and he hadn't. He saw Keffa's daughter scowl at him because being alive is a grievance at her age.
He nodded once. "Black Meridian," he said.
"Everything ugly starts there," Keffa said. "Everything beautiful tries to end there."
He turned and took the road that no longer existed in stone but did in the line between his teeth. The fortress burned behind them, and its heat found their backs and tried to teach them about regret. Dren let it and refused to be impressed.
They walked until the glow was a bruise and then a rumor and then a memory that had somehow become the law of the day. They didn't stop because stopping is how men find out what their bodies have to say about tomorrow. Emberfall's column moved like a river that had been told to pipe and was now running all over the floor out of spite and grace.
On the shelf where the Spine dips before it shoulders up toward the Meridian, Dren looked back a last time. The cliff was a dark line. The emberfalls were gone. The sky above it had wiped its mouth.
He touched the steel square in his pocket. He touched Ila's coin. He did not touch his mark because he knows it will be there when he dies. He set his jaw.