Chapter 4

At ten o’clock, an hour before the notice, Rosamund Achterberg made Nora a cup of tea she hadn’t asked for and sat down beside her on the step by the yard doors to drink her own.

“Gerald’ll be sulking by now,” she said, without preamble. “My cactus. Twenty years on that windowsill, and that man’s people are sleeping in my office, and they’ll have put him on the floor.” She blew on her tea. “Stupid thing to mind. I mind it.”

“You could go up there. He’s offering food.”

“I know what he’s offering.” Rosamund looked down at her own sheet in the air, the way you might glance at a watch. Then, unexpectedly, she turned it so Nora could see.

“Hold,” said Rosamund. “Means if I shout, people stand up straighter. I’ve been doing that for twenty years without a class.” She closed it and looked at Nora sideways. “You’re near the top of that list now. You and your big lad.”

“It’s just a list.”

“It’s his list,” said Rosamund. “He thinks it’s his. Somebody ought to push him down it.” Knees cracking, she stood up and took Nora’s empty mug. “Get some sleep before eleven. That’s what the watch is for.”

Nora did not sleep. She lay on the stage with her head on Gus’s good shoulder and listened to three hundred people breathing in the dark, to Imogen walking the rows with her torch pointed at the floor, saying the same three things in the same calm voice, and to Rosamund at the yard doors humming something under her breath that might have been a hymn or might have been a ferry company jingle.

The notice came at eleven, the same as the night before, polite as a doorbell.

Rosamund was at the doors before it had finished. “Lights,” she said. Somebody killed the strip lights over the badminton court, and the hall went dark apart from the camping lanterns at the doors and the glow of Dr Prothero’s hands over a man’s arm. Three hundred people stopped talking at once. Nora heard a child start to ask something and be hushed.

“They came up the hill last night as far as the chip shop,” Rosamund said, low, to the dozen people round her by the main doors. They were her watch: Dennis the bus driver, two sixth-form teachers, Jarek and Tomasz from the car wash on Mill Lane, Jamal from the lifeboat with his bandaged hand, and others Nora didn’t know. All of them had classes now, and none of them had a weapon worth the name. “Tonight they’ll come further. They’ve learned the way. Main doors, fire door, yard. Nobody goes outside. Nobody opens anything. If you see a light that looks at you, you shut your eyes and you get behind something.”

“What do we do about the light?” asked one of the teachers.

“We kill whatever’s carrying it,” said Rosamund. “Gus, Nora. Where do you want to be?”

It was the first time anyone had asked Nora where she wanted to be in a fight. She knew.

“The yard,” she said. “That’s where they’ll come. It’s dark, there’s bins to hide behind, and the doors only lock with a bar.”

“Then that’s where I’ll be,” said Rosamund.

Gus was looking at the fire axe in his hand. He’d been carrying it all evening out of habit, the new sword on his hip. Now he turned the axe round and held it out to Rosamund, handle first.

“Here,” he said. “It’s done all right by me. Hockey stick’s no good against those plates.”

Rosamund looked at it. Then she took it and weighed it in both hands, and for a moment her hard broad face went soft.

“My daughter would love this,” she said. “She always said I needed a bigger stick.”

She had planned it all evening and laid it the moment the notice came, because an anchor only lasted half an hour and she was not going to waste one on waiting. It was the most useful she had felt since the sea went quiet.

Snare held one Bolt in one anchor, and she could keep two anchors at a time. So she put one snare on the inside of the yard doors, low on the steel kick-plate where anything forcing through would have to brush it. The other went on the push bar of the fire door, beside the emergency light she had lit for the small boy the day before. She had practised on a mop handle all evening, three seconds, three seconds, three seconds, until she could do it without thinking. Twice today three seconds had nearly been the difference, and she did not want to find out about a third.

Gus couldn’t fight properly. That was the other thing. His ribs were strapped and Dr Prothero had told him in front of everyone that if he took a hit on the left side he would puncture a lung. He had grinned and said he’d take them on the right, then, and nobody had laughed. He could Guard. He could hit. He couldn’t twist, or run, or take a blow and keep standing. He stood behind the yard doors with the new sword in his right hand and his left arm pressed to his side, and his face in the lantern light was grey.

“You should be inside,” she said.

“I am inside.”

“Further inside.”

He looked at her, and she let it go. She would not have gone further inside either.

Dr Prothero had set up by the stage, with a trestle table, every first-aid kit in the hall and a teenager from the sixth form who had once done a St John’s Ambulance badge. Imogen went up and down the rows again: stay down, stay quiet, stay together. Margaret Ogden sat by the main doors with her phone in her lap, the way she had sat all day, until the first of the wounded came in.

At twenty past eleven they heard the clicking.

It came up the hill out of the dark like the sound of rain starting, a few dry ticks, then more, then too many to count. Nora stood at the narrow window by the yard doors and looked out through the gap in the blind. She saw the bins in the yard and the wall and the gate beyond. Then the gate went over, all at once, pushed flat by a tide of grey bodies coming over it, and the yard was full of them.

And with them came the lights.

There were two of them at first. They walked on six thin legs like enormous harvestmen, a little taller than a person, each with a body no bigger than a suitcase slung low between the legs and a round lens on the front. The lenses were lit. They swept slowly across the yard, across the hall’s back wall, and where they passed, the brickwork glowed for a moment white and soft.

“Tallymen,” Nora said. She didn’t know where the word came from. It felt right. They were counting.

The first hookjaw hit the yard doors.

The doors were steel-skinned wood with a bar across them in brackets. They held for the first impact, and the second. On the third, the bar jumped in its brackets and the doors opened a hand’s width. A hookjaw got its head into the gap with its jaws working sideways at the air.

Rosamund hit it with the fire axe.

She didn’t have Edge. She had a Watchkeeper class and forty-four years, twenty of them selling tickets to people who didn’t say thank you, and she put all of it into a two-handed overhead blow that split the thing’s head plates. It pulled back screaming. The doors slammed. She threw her shoulder into them, and the bar dropped back into the brackets. She stood there breathing like a bellows.

“Hold,” she said. Something in her voice went out across the hall, a pressure Nora could feel on her own skin, steadying. Every one of the watch at the yard doors seemed to stand a little straighter.

Then the first Tallyman came up to the door, and its lens found the window.

The light came through the gap in the blind and touched the face of Dennis Maguire, the bus driver.

He didn’t make a sound. He just stood there with the band forming round his wrist, closing, his face slack and puzzled. Nora put a Bolt through the window glass and into the lens from three metres away. The window blew out in a spray of glass. The Tallyman’s lens went dark and it reeled back blind into the yard among the bins. The band on the bus driver’s wrist unravelled, and he sat down on the floor and began to shake.

Glass. The window was open now: a hole in the wall a metre wide. The hookjaws in the yard turned towards it at once.

“Window!” Gus shouted.

The first one came through it like a dog through a hedge. Gus was there. He took its lunge on Guard and the Guard held, and for the first time she saw Warden’s Grip work. The pale light on his blade did not just stop the jaws. It closed on them like a hand and held the creature by the face for one long second with its feet scrabbling on the sill. In that second Jamal drove a broom-handle spear into its throat.

“Warden’s Grip!” Gus said, delighted, and then, “Ow. Ow. Ow.” His left hand went to his side.

A second came through the window. A third hit the doors. The doors held. A gutter crab the size of a car tyre came scuttling through the broken window along the wall at ankle height and into the hall, where people screamed. The car-wash brothers stamped on it with commendable teamwork until it stopped.

Then the light came back.

Not the blinded one. The other Tallyman had come round to the broken window from outside, and its lens swept in through the hole across the hall: across the badminton court, across the rows of mats, across three hundred faces turning towards it. Where it passed, people went slack. Nora saw two bands begin at once, a woman’s wrist, an old man’s. She couldn’t reach the lens from the stage without hitting the people in front of it.

Esther Lindqvist stood up.

She was the sixth-form teacher who had taken Lamplighter, the one who had sat by the doors at dusk with a soft white light in her cupped hands while the children sat round her. She walked straight across the hall towards the window with her hands held out in front of her, and the light in them came up white and fierce, a lantern’s worth and then a lighthouse’s. The tag-light met it in the air and bent. It slid away from her light the way water slides off oil. It slewed sideways across the wall and couldn’t find a wrist.

Turn back what hates it, Nora thought. That was what the offer had said.

“Go on,” said Esther, to the Tallyman, in the voice of a woman who had taught Year Ten on Friday afternoons for a decade. “Go on. I dare you.”

It didn’t. The bands on the woman’s wrist and the old man’s unravelled. “Dennis,” Esther said, lower, over her shoulder, “take them behind me. I can’t keep this up.” Behind Esther the bus driver, the Wayfinder who’d spent the day apologising for his class, had the frightened rows on their feet and moving. He was leading them back towards the stage in a long quiet line, and somehow every one of them knew where to put their feet in the dark.

And at the yard doors Tomasz the Mender had both hands flat on the groaning bar, and the cracked iron under his palms was knitting back together a centimetre at a time, while his brother Jarek stood over him with a broom-handle spear.

Nora went up the stage steps to get height. From there she could see everything at once, and could think.

The fire door. The second Tallyman, driven off the window by Esther’s light, had gone round the side of the building; she could see its light moving along the upper windows like a searchlight on a prison wall. She knew where it was going. The fire door’s snare was sitting there on the push bar like a fist-sized egg. She waited until the lens came round the corner of the building, close to the fire door, and the thing’s long front leg reached to try the bar.

The snare went off. Blue light ran up the Tallyman’s leg into its suitcase body. Its lens flared and burst, and it fell in a tangle of thin legs against the fire door and lay twitching there. The light in it died.

Nora stared at the word. Tallyman. Twenty minutes ago, standing at a window, she had made that word up herself and said it aloud to nobody. Now the interface was using it back to her, politely, as if it had always been called that.

“Yes,” she said. She turned back to the yard doors, and saw Rosamund.

The yard doors had started to go.

There were too many of them out there. Nora could hear them, dozens, piling against the steel, the bar groaning in its brackets, the frame beginning to come away from the wall. Rosamund had her back to the doors and her heels braced. She was holding them with her body and her voice. That Hold went out across the hall like a hand on everyone’s shoulder, and the doors were still moving, a centimetre at a time, opening.

“Nora!” Rosamund’s voice had stopped sounding like a bus. “I can’t hold it. Do the thing. Do the egg thing!”

The snare on the kick-plate. It was there; Nora could see it, a faint blue knot at the bottom of the door. But it would only go off when something came within a metre of it. That meant the doors had to open, and when they opened Rosamund would be standing in the gap.

“Step away from the door,” Nora shouted. “When I say, step away. I’ll put another one behind you, on the floor—”

She ran. She went down the stage steps and across the hall and dropped to her knees on the parquet two metres behind Rosamund. She put her hand flat on the floor and began to inscribe.

Three seconds.

One.

The bar in the brackets snapped like a gunshot.

Two.

The doors burst inwards. Rosamund went with them, thrown forward off her feet. The first hookjaw came through the gap over the kick-plate and the first snare went off under it with a bang. It died in the doorway. The second came over its body. The third came round the edge of the door.

Three. The anchor took. Nora paid for the Bolt and fed it into the mark, and the second snare sat there on the floor glowing.

Rosamund was getting up. She was on one knee in the doorway with the fire axe in her hands, swinging it at the second hookjaw. She hit it, and it bit her.

It bit her high on the thigh. Nora saw the dark spray in the lantern light, and saw Rosamund’s face go white and surprised, and saw the hookjaw start to drag her backwards out through the doors into the yard, where a third Tallyman, out by the flattened gate, had turned its lens towards the doors and was already swinging the light round to find her.

”No,” Gus said.

He tried. He came across the floor with his sword up and his left arm clamped to his side and Stepped. Before Nora had seen him move, he was in the doorway beside her. He put the sword into the hookjaw’s neck with Edge and Brinefang together. It let go, and frost spread through it from the wound. But a fourth was coming over the threshold, and Rosamund was lying on the steel kick-plate in the open doorway with blood pumping out of her leg and her hand still locked on the axe. As he stood over her, Nora saw him understand it in the same moment she did: he could Guard himself, or he could swing, and nothing he had could put itself between Rosamund and the next set of jaws.

It came in over her. Nora’s floor snare went off under it, two metres back, too far behind. Too far behind to help Rosamund. Close enough to blow the thing apart in the doorway an instant after its teeth had closed on her shoulder.

Then Jamal and the car-wash brothers and the bus driver, still shaking, were at the doors. They got the doors shut over the dead hookjaws and wedged a trestle table across them. Gus was on his knees with Rosamund’s head in his lap, shouting for the doctor.

Dr Prothero came at a dead run. She dropped beside Rosamund, put both shining hands on the thigh wound and held them there. The light poured out of her and the bleeding slowed, and slowed. Nora saw her face, the face of somebody who already knows the answer.

“Femoral,” Dr Prothero said quietly. “She’s lost too much. I can close it. I can’t put it back.”

Rosamund looked up at Nora, then at Gus, then past them both at the yard doors.

“Are they shut?”

“They’re shut,” said Gus.

“Good,” said Rosamund. “Good. Tell my girl I had a bigger stick.”

She held the axe out to him. He took it, because she wanted him to.

She died a little after midnight, on the kick-plate of the yard doors, with the hall’s three hundred people behind her and the clicking in the yard slowly dying away down the hill. The interface noted it without comment, in a list of names nobody had asked for.

Three. The bus driver’s sister, from the badminton court, who had gone to the window to look for him when the glass broke. A man called Tony Brannigan from the last row, who had run outside to stop her. And a teacher from the watch who nobody had seen go, whose spear they found in the yard in the morning, broken in two.

Sixty-four per cent.

Nora sat on the stage steps at four in the morning with the notebook on her knee and looked at the number for a while. Then she wrote it down.

Margaret Ogden had spent the siege on her knees beside Dr Prothero, pressing towels into other people’s wounds with no class at all, because somebody had to. At a quarter past four she sat down on the step beside Nora and looked at her own hands, which were not clean.

Nora’s hand went to the two rings from the gallery in her coat pocket and stayed there. She had read the inside of both by torchlight. One of them said M & R. She did not yet know whether it was a thing to give a woman or a thing to take away from her, and she kept her hand where it was.

“Maybe I should have chosen,” Margaret said. “Something. I could have done more.”

“You did plenty.”

“Raymond would have told me to choose something sensible.” Margaret smiled a little, at nothing. “He’d have chosen something silly himself. He always did.” She looked at the doors. “I’ll wait.”

The XP had come in while they were still fighting, a long column of it. Nora had not read it. At some point the level had come too, and she had not applied it, because applying it while Rosamund was lying under a fleece on the floor by the yard doors had felt like going through her pockets. At four in the morning she applied it, because they were going down again at first light and she would need it. She was not going to let Rosamund die so that Nora could be too fastidious to be useful.

When she applied it, it did not feel like the other levels. It came in slowly, like warmth into cold hands, and the notice that came with it was worded differently from any she had seen.

In recognition. As if it knew. As if it were sorry, in its own way, the way it was sorry for the inconvenience. The selection came after.

She did the sums anyway, because she always did. Chain: two more targets at half damage, call it forty each, enough to reach three of the things in the doorway. Overcharge: double the mana for a hundred and thirty-eight on one target, which would have killed the yard-door hookjaw outright. Quickscript: three seconds down to one, for five more mana an anchor. On paper Overcharge won, and Chain was the Rare. But she had knelt on the parquet two metres behind Rosamund and counted to three, and it had been one second too long. No amount of damage would have bought that second back. She chose Quickscript, pressing the thumb that still had parquet grit under its nail against the words. She had begun to see what she wanted to be in a fight: not a woman in a doorway throwing lightning, but a room already set before anything came into it.

The other two offers faded. She sat looking at the place where they had been, and something cold went down her back that had nothing to do with Rosamund. Snare, yesterday morning, minutes after she’d been tied to a rail working while Gus lost a shoving match. Quickscript tonight, an hour after three seconds had been one too many. Both times, the thing she had needed had been waiting at the next level.

Gus came and sat down beside her with the fire axe across his knees. He didn’t say anything. Then he showed her his.

“Second Wind,” he said, before anything else. “Look at that. A third of my stamina back, once a fight. With these ribs I’m going to be blowing like a horse every time I swing. That’s the sensible one.” He looked at it for a while. “I was standing right over her,” he said. “Right over her. And I could stop it hitting me. I couldn’t stop it hitting her. I had all this,” he made a small gesture at the air, at the sheets, at the sword, “and I couldn’t put any of it between her and the teeth.”

He chose Interpose, leaving the sensible one where it was. His hand was shaking.

His free points went into Agility, Vitality and Arcana. “Faster, harder to kill, bigger Guard,” he said. “I’m not getting caught flat-footed in a doorway again.”

Three slots. He had a third imprint already, a Common one: Gutterhook, from the crab the car-wash brothers had stamped on. He had bound it at three in the morning, sitting by the yard doors, because he couldn’t sleep and couldn’t sit still. The interface had asked him a question then that it had never asked before.

He had kept Brinefang and the Grip and put the crab away. Now, with a third slot, he put it in. Driving Step could end in a hooking strike now that dragged something small a metre towards him. It was the least of his imprints, and he put it in anyway.

“She was forty-four,” Gus said. “She sold ferry tickets. She had a hockey stick.”

“She had a class,” Nora said. “She held the whole hall up with it. You felt it.”

“I felt it.” He looked at the axe. “I’m going to carry this. I know it’s worse than the sword. I’m going to carry it anyway.”

“I know,” said Nora.

They buried Rosamund at seven in the morning, in the little garden behind the hall where somebody had once planted roses for a jubilee. There was nowhere else. Imogen read something from a book she didn’t name, in her dry, steady voice. Two of the watch wept and the rest stood with their hands in their pockets. Margaret Ogden came out into the garden and laid her own scarf across the turned earth, because there were no flowers. Jamal said he would go to Leeds himself when the roads opened, find Rosamund’s daughter and tell her about the stick. Nora stood with Gus’s good arm round her until the others had gone inside, and found that what she felt under the grief was something simple, hard and very clean.

At a quarter past seven, Imogen stopped in the middle of the hall with the porridge pan in her hands. She read something in the air and stood very still.

“For keeping three hundred people fed and quiet through a siege,” she said to the porridge pan, in a voice like dry paper. “Well.” Then she handed Dennis the pan. “There’s a lad by the windows hasn’t slept. I’ll move him nearer the stage.”

Esther Lindqvist, the Lamplighter, was asleep on the stage with her hands still faintly glowing. Above her, in the air where anyone could see it, a notice had been waiting since three.

The children had found it first. They sat round her in a ring, reading it to one another in whispers, and nobody had the heart to move them.

At half past seven a pickup came up Chapel Hill with PORT SECURITY on its door, and a young man in a black fleece got out and handed Imogen a sheaf of photocopied leaflets. TERMINAL PROTECTION — REGISTRATION — FOOD — SAFETY. Imogen thanked him and took them inside. Nora watched her use them a few minutes later to light the camping stove for the porridge.

Nora went down the list past the top five, looking. Rosamund’s name was gone from all of it.

Voss was six. They had fought a siege and were five, with a first clear and a title behind them, and he had neither. Four to six was nine hundred experience in two days. At twenty a hookjaw, if they still paid him twenty, that was forty-five hookjaws. Nobody climbed that fast on their own. Something was feeding him.

Dr Prothero found Nora in the kitchen at eight, where Lorraine Petch lay on a camping mat under three blankets beside the warm oven, breathing six times a minute.

“Show me,” the doctor said. “The thread. You said there was a thread.”

Nora used Trace. The kitchen went faintly luminous, the old wiring in the walls glowing dull orange, the oven’s element a hot red smear. And from the white band on Lorraine’s wrist, very fine, so fine she had to look away and back again to be sure of it, the thread ran out across the floor, under the back door and away.

She opened the back door. The thread went across the yard, through the place where the gate had been, down Chapel Hill. It went down the hill and along the front and out across the seabed towards the city, pale in the morning light, thin as a hair and taut as a fishing line. When she let Trace go it vanished. When she took it up again, it was there.

“It’s a leash,” Dr Prothero said, standing beside her in the doorway. “It’s a drip line. It’s a monitor lead. I don’t know what it is.” She folded her arms. “She’s being kept. Something’s keeping her alive and cold and tied to something else, and it’s keeping all the others the same way, and I would bet my registration on it being the same thing that came up that hill last night and counted them.” She looked at Nora. “You’re going down again.”

“This morning.”

“Then I’m coming.”

Nora looked at her.

“I’m forty-six. I’m a Field Medic, apparently, which is what I’ve been for twenty years without the hat. I spent last night closing holes in people that came up that hill.” Dr Prothero looked across the kitchen at Lorraine. “And I haven’t done a thing for her. I don’t have a treatment, Nora. I don’t even know what I’d be treating.” She pulled out the chair beside the mat and sat down. “Imogen’s arranging cover. I need to see where you found her. The next one of those nights, I’d rather be standing where they started.”

Gus was in the doorway. Nora hadn’t heard him come.

“Beatrice,” he said. “Can I call you Beatrice?”

“Come here before we leave; I want to check that dressing. And you can call me whatever you like if you keep your left side out of the way of anything heavier than a feather.”

“Then welcome aboard,” said Gus. He held out the hand that wasn’t holding his ribs. “We’ve got sandwiches.”

Beatrice shook it. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she showed them her sheet.

“I levelled in the night,” she said. “For treating thirty-one wounds. It counts them.” She was quiet a moment. “It counted her, too.”

They went down the hill at nine, three of them now. Beatrice carried Rosamund’s hockey stick; Imogen had put it into her hands at the door without a word. They went past the chip shop with its window smashed and its door hanging off, past the bottom of Quay Street where their own flat stood with its door open and something grey and jointed lying dead on the step. Nora did not look at it for long. The thread from Lorraine’s wrist ran down the middle of the road ahead of them, invisible unless she looked, and when she looked, it was the only straight line in the town.

At the bottom of the hill, the notice slid into her eye again. It was not addressed to the town this time. It was addressed to the two of them.

Nora read it aloud for Beatrice, who wasn’t senior and couldn’t see it, standing at the bottom of the hill in the wind.

“Fifteen days until what?” said Beatrice.

Gus didn’t answer. He was looking at the word intake. He had seen it once before where it mattered, after the Warden, beside his brother’s name.

“Fifteen days,” Gus said. “Then that’s what we’ve got.” He started across the mud before either of them could answer, and after a moment they went after him.