Chapter 3

Gus had never in his life wanted to hit something as much as he wanted to hit that heron.

He came down the stair from the window passage three steps at a time, into the noise of the hall: water falling from the roof slots into the basins, water running in the channels, the whole huge space full of the sound of it. The thing was sixty metres ahead, walking down the central channel with that slow high-stepping care, the cradle swaying on its back. The woman’s hand had come up over the edge of the basket again. He could see the white band on her wrist.

“Gus!” Nora was behind him on the stair. “Gus, wait, look at it first—”

He looked at it. It was three metres tall and made of stone and bronze and it had a woman in a basket on its back. It was walking towards a hole in the floor. That was all the looking he needed.

The walkway along the near basins ran parallel to the channel. He ran along it with the fire axe in both hands, the axe that had done everything he’d asked of it so far. He was ten metres from the thing when it stopped walking and turned its head.

It had a face, of a kind. A plate of pale stone with a single round lens set in it, like the eye of a lighthouse. Behind the lens was a slow white light that came up as it looked at him.

The light came out of the lens and touched his wrist.

It didn’t hurt. It was warm, almost pleasant, a soft glow that wrapped round his right wrist like a hand, and as he looked down he saw a band forming there: a ring of white light the width of a watch strap, closing.

The same band that was on the woman in the basket.

”No,” he said, and his whole body went cold. He tried to pull his arm away from the light and it didn’t make any difference, the light came with him, the band was nearly closed—

Nora’s Bolt hit the lens.

It didn’t break it. It cracked across the stone face around it with a noise like a dropped plate. The white light in the lens stuttered and went out, and the band on his wrist unravelled like steam off a cup and was gone. He stood staring at his own bare skin.

“It tags them,” Nora said, coming up beside him, her hand still raised and smoking faintly. Her voice was very calm, which was how he knew she was frightened. “That’s what the band is. It tags them. Don’t let it look at you.”

“Right,” he said. “Right. Don’t let it look at me.”

She had Trace up; he could see the faint shine of it in her eyes. “It’s got a name,” she said. “It’s telling me. Gallery Warden. Custodial. Level nine. Armour twelve.”

“We’re level three.”

“I know what we are.”

The Warden made a sound for the first time: a deep, mechanical, grinding note, like a lock gate opening. Then it came for them.

He learned three things about it in the first ten seconds.

The first was that it was fast when it wanted to be. Those long heron legs could go from a stalk to a stride. It covered the distance to the walkway in four steps and swept one of them across the stones at knee height. He went over it more by luck than skill and Nora threw herself flat.

The second was that it had arms. Two bronze arms held the cradle on its back. A third unfolded from under its body like a crane jib, with a three-fingered grip on the end of it. The grip reached for Nora where she lay. He got the axe in the way with Guard flaring white along it, and the bronze fingers closed on the haft instead of on her. The force of it nearly took his shoulder out of its socket. He could feel the Guard holding, a wall of something in his arms, and the hollow under his ribs emptying fast to pay for it.

The third thing was that it didn’t care about him at all. It wanted the woman in the basket safe and it wanted Nora tagged. He was just in the way.

“Its knees,” Nora said behind him, breathless. “I’ve Traced it. There’s working running all through it like wiring, and it all goes through the knee joints. And there’s something in the middle, under the plates. A light.”

“How do I get at the middle?”

“You don’t. I do. You get it down.”

The grip let go of his axe and swung back for another try. He Stepped. Driving Step took him four metres sideways in a single lurch along the walkway, and the grip closed on empty air where he had been. The Warden had to turn to find him again. Turning those long legs took it a moment.

That moment was Nora’s.

He saw her drop to one knee on the walkway, put her hand flat on the stone of the basin rim and hold it there, and he saw the anchor take: a faint mark like a fingerprint of light. She lifted her hand and cast a Bolt into the mark, not at the Warden. The Bolt didn’t fire. It went into the anchor and stayed there, a little crackling knot of blue the size of a fist, sitting on the rim like an egg.

“What’s that?”

“Snare.” She was already running to the next basin rim. “When it steps near, it goes off. Get it to step near.”

“How?”

“Cross in front of it. This side of the basin.” She pointed. “Be annoying.”

That, at least, he could do.

He went straight at it. He came in under the long legs where the grip couldn’t easily reach and hit the nearest knee with the axe, Edge burning. He felt Brinefang go into it. The cold came off the blade in a breath of white. The joint frosted over. The leg stiffened for two seconds, exactly as the notice had promised. The Warden lurched, caught itself with the other leg and swung its whole body round to reach him, which put its front foot down on the rim of the basin, right on top of Nora’s snare.

The snare went off like a firework in a dustbin.

Blue light ran up the Warden’s leg, all the way to the knee. The knee joint flared and went black, and the leg folded. Three metres of stone and bronze came down sideways into the basin with a crash that sent a wave over the walkway and knocked Gus off his feet. The cradle on its back swung wildly. The woman in it cried out.

He was up and in the water before he had decided to be. It came to his chest and was so cold it stopped his breath. The Warden was thrashing on its side in the basin, legs kicking, the grip flailing. He waded round behind it to the cradle, got the axe-head into the woven bronze where it was fixed to the carrying arms, and heaved.

The basket came away. He got the woman under the arms and pulled her out, light as a child for all that she was a grown woman in a carer’s tabard. She was so cold it frightened him, colder than the water. The white band glowed on her wrist. Her eyes were half open and didn’t see him.

“Got her,” he shouted. “Nora, I’ve got her—”

The Warden’s good leg came round in the water and hit him across the chest.

He felt his ribs go. It was a sound as much as a feeling, a dry crunch on the left side. Then the feeling arrived and the world went white at the edges. Somewhere at the corner of his sight a number dropped like a stone: Health 230 → 141. He was under the water. He was holding the woman. He came up with her, coughing, and the grip was coming down at both of them. He knew he couldn’t Guard and hold her at once and he chose to hold her.

The grip stopped a hand’s breadth from his face.

Nora had put a second snare on the rim right beside the grip arm’s elbow, and it had gone off as the arm swept past. Now she was standing on the walkway above the thrashing thing with her hand out and her hair plastered to her face, putting Bolt after Bolt into the gap the falling plates had opened in its side, where a light the colour of a gas flame burned in the dark.

One. Two. Three. He counted them with his teeth clenched against the pain. Four. Under the noise of the water he could hear Nora counting too, under her breath, and it wasn’t the Bolts. “Eighty,” she was saying. “Sixty-five. Fifty. Thirty-five.”

The light in the Warden’s side went out.

Nora lowered her hand and swayed. “Thirty-five,” she said, mostly to herself. “Thirty-five left, out of two seventy.” He had counted three misses. She had held Trace through the whole fight, and he had never seen her that white.

It stopped moving. Water lapped round it and settled. It lay in the basin like a wrecked crane, and the only sound in the great hall was the falling water and his own breath whistling on the left side.

Then the notices came, and they did not stop coming for a while.

He sat down on the walkway with the woman in his lap and his back against the basin rim and laughed. It hurt so much he stopped immediately.

“Don’t,” said Nora, crouching in front of him, her hands going to his side and stopping short of it. “Don’t laugh, you idiot, you’ve broken something, I heard it.”

“Ribs,” he said. “Couple. It’s all right. It’s all right, Nora, look.” He lifted the woman’s cold hand with the white band on it. “Look. She’s alive. They’re alive. They’re alive.”

Nora looked at the band. Then she looked at him. He saw her mouth go unsteady and her eyes fill, and her chin come up anyway, the way it did when she refused to cry in front of builders.

He knew what he was going to ask before he had his breath back. “Where is Danny Hale?”

“Recovered,” Gus said. He looked at the word for a long time. On a lifeboat it meant you’d got someone out of the water. He didn’t think it meant that here.

The woman’s name was on a lanyard round her neck: Lorraine Petch, Harbour Care, with a photograph of her smiling in a cardigan. She was breathing, slowly, six breaths a minute when Nora counted. She would not wake. The band round her wrist did not come off, and when Gus tried to slide a finger under it, there was nothing to slide under. It wasn’t on her skin. It was a little way into it.

Nora used Trace on it and went quiet.

“What?” he said.

“There’s a thread.” She drew a line in the air with her finger, from the band down towards the floor, towards the dark square shaft at the far end of the hall. “Very fine. Like a fishing line made of light. It goes from the band, down. Into the city.”

“Like a lead,” Gus said.

“Like a lead.” She looked at the shaft. “It was taking her down there. And she’s still tied to it.”

“Can you cut it?”

“I don’t know what it does.” She sat back on her heels. “I don’t know what cutting it would do. I’m not touching it until I do.”

He wanted to argue, and his ribs wouldn’t let him, which was probably for the best.

He applied the level sitting against the basin rim, because it was that or pass out. The sheet that came up made him blink.

“Firstfoot,” Nora said, reading hers. “Plus three to everything. And it calls us Senior.” She sounded faintly outraged. “A day and a half and I’ve been promoted.”

“Took you eleven years at the council.”

“Shut up,” she said. After a moment, she turned her sheet so he could see it too.

“One each into Agility, Arcana and Perception,” she said. “Because I missed three times on that thing, and I was too slow getting out of its way, and I’m not doing either again.”

The Warden had a nest.

It was at the head of the shaft: a kind of alcove in the wall where the thing must have rested between its walks. In it, piled with a sort of mechanical neatness, was everything it had taken off the people it carried. Keys. Phones, dead and live. A watch. Two wedding rings, which Nora picked up and looked at and put in her pocket without a word, to take back to whoever was waiting for them. A plastic butterfly hairclip, the kind a mother keeps in her coat pocket for somebody small, which made Gus sit down again for a moment. And under all of it, older and stranger, the things it had collected from the city’s own people, long ago.

A sword.

It was a plain straight blade in a dark scabbard, with a wrapped grip and a guard like two folded hands. When he picked it up the label came.

“What’s above Uncommon?” he asked the air.

”Legendary,” said Gus, with longing.

“Spellsword,” he said. “Now it says sword.”

He drew it. It weighed exactly what it should, and his hand settled on the grip as though it had been waiting for his hand in particular. He swung it once, carefully. His ribs told him what they thought of that, and he didn’t care.

Nora had found something too: a long flat rod of dark wood banded with brass, marked along its length in some unit that wasn’t centimetres or inches. Every mark was hand-cut. One end was worn smooth by a hand.

“It’s a measuring rod,” she said, in a voice he hadn’t heard from her before. “It’s a surveyor’s rule. Somebody here did my job.” She turned it over. Burned into the butt end was a little mark: a bird’s foot inside a ring. “Somebody here did my job, and the Warden took her rule.” She closed her hand round it, and Gus watched her do the sum. “Seventy-two,” she said. “With this. Not sixty-six.”

And then there was the Warden itself, lying in the basin, and the grip arm with its three bronze fingers, still half open.

He limped back to it and knelt in the cold water and looked.

“Nora,” he said. It came out as a croak. “Nora, it’s a Rare.”

He bound it there in the water, because he couldn’t wait and because he didn’t trust himself to get up and get back down again. Five minutes with his hand on the cold bronze and his mind following something slow and enormous, like holding a door against a wind. When it settled into him he felt it beside Brinefang, two things in two slots, completely different.

“Two,” he said. He leaned his forehead on the Warden’s cold flank and grinned like an idiot at nothing. Two kinds of thing in two slots, and there would be more. There were things in this city he hadn’t even seen yet, and every one of them might have something in it he could keep. He wanted all of them. He wanted to be the man in this city with the most things in his pocket that nobody else had.

That was where he was when Voss arrived.

They came in at the far end of the hall, by the high walkways, a column of nearly thirty. Voss led, with the big quiet man with the shotgun at his shoulder. Behind them came the riot shields and the batons and a dozen people from the town Gus half recognised, the volunteers, carrying spears made of kitchen knives taped to broom handles. They came along the walkways with real discipline and stopped when they saw the Warden lying in the basin. They had been hunting together all night, and it showed: they moved like a crew that had already been paid.

Voss looked at it. Then he looked down at Gus in the water with the sword across his knees and the woman lying on the walkway behind him, and at Nora standing over her with the rule in her hand.

“Firstfoot,” he said. It was not a question. Every staff member in Greyhaven had got the notice; the first clear had been recorded to the whole node. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” said Gus, with his hand on the sword. “We’re very proud.”

The big man with the shotgun was looking at Lorraine. “She’s alive, sir,” he said quietly.

“So I see.” Voss came down the walkway steps, unhurried, until he was standing three metres from Nora. He looked at the band on Lorraine’s wrist with professional interest. “Tagged. Like the ones in the channels. We’ve seen two more, at a distance.” He looked at Nora. “She’ll come to the terminal. We have a doctor and a generator.”

“She’ll come to the hall,” Nora said. “We have a doctor too. And we found her.”

“Finders keepers is a poor principle for a town in crisis, Ms Ellis.”

“So is registration,” said Nora. “Her family will be looking at the hall. That’s where we’re taking her.”

Voss considered her. He did not seem offended. He looked at her the way she looked at a crack in a wall, deciding how far it went.

“Mr Hale,” he said, without looking away from her. “My offer stands, and it now includes your partner. You’d be fed. Protected. My people would search for your brother as a priority, with fifteen trained pairs of eyes instead of two. All I ask is that what you find, you find for the town.”

For one long second Gus wanted to say yes.

He was so tired, and his ribs were broken, and fifteen pairs of eyes was a lot of eyes. He could see it on Nora’s face too: the arithmetic of it.

Then he thought of a man who had stood in the middle of a hall full of frightened people and said those are the priorities, about Danny, about twenty-three units. And he thought of the white light closing round his wrist.

“What we find,” he said, “we find for Danny. And for her. And for everybody’s wedding rings in that alcove over there. You can have whatever’s left.”

“Gethin,” said Voss.

“Sir.”

“Let them go. They found her.” Voss looked at the Warden in the basin a moment longer, and then at the dark shaft at the end of the hall. “This section’s cleared. There’ll be others.”

He turned and went back up the walkway steps, and the column went with him. Gethin Lloyd was last. He paused at the top and looked down at Gus in the water with an expression Gus couldn’t read.

“Ribs?” he said.

“Two.”

“Strap them before you carry anyone.” He touched the brim of a cap he wasn’t wearing, an old policeman’s habit, and was gone.

“Third,” Gus said, when he could breathe properly. “I’m third. How is she second? We’re the same level.”

“Last hit,” said Nora, who had looked it up in the time it took him to complain. “Ties go to whoever landed the killing blow.” She did not quite manage not to look pleased. “Four Bolts, Gus. I counted.”

They carried Lorraine home between them. It took three hours, and he would not remember most of it.

He remembered Nora strapping his ribs with the first-aid kit on the ledge by the fish wall, with tape and a folded towel and both of them swearing. He remembered wading the cold water with Lorraine across his shoulders, the wheel by the gate with its three worn hollows, and the long grey mud in the afternoon light. He remembered seeing Voss’s people at the gateway behind them, setting up some kind of camp in the arch, and not caring. He remembered the hall’s doors and Imogen’s face.

And he remembered the doctor.

She was kneeling on the badminton court beside a man with a bandaged leg when they came in, a woman in her forties with reading glasses pushed up into grey-streaked hair and a fleece from Greyhaven General, and her hands were shining. He watched a gash in the man’s forearm close under her palms. Not to nothing: to a pink, angry seam. The light went out of her hands. She straightened and said something short that made the man laugh in spite of himself. When she saw Lorraine she came across the floor at a walk that was very nearly a run.

“Put her down. Flat. There.” She was already kneeling. “What happened to her?”

“Something took her into the city,” Nora said. “Something carried her. We took her back.”

The doctor put two fingers on Lorraine’s neck and was still for a moment. Then she put her palm flat on Lorraine’s forehead and on her chest. She looked at the band on her wrist without touching it.

“Pulse of thirty,” she said. “Breathing six. Core temperature, at a guess, of somebody who’s been dead in a cold room since lunchtime.” She looked up at them. “That’s not hypothermia. Hypothermia shivers, and then it stops shivering and dies. This isn’t dying. This is being kept.” She took her hand from Lorraine’s chest. “Beatrice Prothero. Emergency medicine, at the General, for my sins. Who’s hurt?”

“Him,” said Nora. “Ribs.”

“I’m fine,” said Gus.

Dr Prothero looked at the way he was standing, at the tape showing under his jacket, and at Nora.

“He’s holding that side like it owes him money,” she said. “Sit down. Jacket off. Let me see under that tape.”

He sat. She pressed twice, and he made a noise he wasn’t proud of. Then her hands were shining against his side and something warm went into him. Not the ribs. Around them. The bruising, the tearing, the deep ache he had been carrying for three hours. He felt it ease like a knot loosening. At the edge of his sight the number climbed: Health 141 → 199.

“That’s some of your health back,” she said. “Not your ribs. I can close a cut and I can stop a bleed, and I can’t knit a bone back together.” She checked something in the air beside her. “It says that comes at skill level five. I’m at three. Until then, you have broken ribs, whatever the number says. Six weeks, if I don’t get there. Don’t lift anything heavier than your own ego.”

“I’ve got a brother to find.”

“Then find him carefully.” She looked at Lorraine, at the band, at the two of them, wet to the chest and filthy and wearing a sword and a measuring rod. “You found her. Down there.”

“Yes.”

“Where there’s one,” said Dr Prothero, “there are more.”

Lorraine opened her eyes.

It happened so suddenly that the doctor flinched. Lorraine’s eyes came open wide and clear and terrified. She grabbed the nearest thing to her, which was Nora’s sleeve, and held on with a strength that whitened her knuckles.

“It counts us,” she said. Her voice was a dry thread. “The light. It counts us. And it’s so cold, it’s so cold down there, and the light—”

Her eyes rolled up. Her hand went slack on Nora’s sleeve. She was breathing six times a minute again, and the band on her wrist glowed softly and steadily, and she was gone.

For a while there was only the sound of the urn.

Gus put his hand into his breast pocket and closed it round the orange whistle with DH scratched into the side.

“It counts them,” he said. “Whatever it is. It counts them.”