Wrenching his hands free of the shaking cleaver handle—and leaving his notched blade wedged fast in Warden Maro’s stele—the masked leader stumbled two paces back toward the broken courtyard gate and blew a sharp, two-note whistle between his teeth.
At the signal, the crossbowman by the wall and the two injured flankers who could still limp hauled their unconscious friend out of the western drainage trench. They fell back into the narrow eight-foot gateway arch. They weren’t fleeing yet. The crossbowman was already reaching into his oilskin coat for a leaded fire-pot to hurl onto the porch where Seyun crouched with the satchel. Meanwhile, the leader snatched a spare broadsword from a wounded man’s belt to lead one final, packed rush through the gap.
Ilyra stepped forward to meet them in the open courtyard, her spear leveled in one hand. Even so, her left arm hung crimson and stiff against her ribs and her breath came in white, ragged plumes. If three Flame fighters rushed her together. Meanwhile, a fire-pot broke at her feet, she could kill one, perhaps two, before they bore her down.
Seyun didn’t look at the men in the gateway. He looked six feet above their heads at the massive, waterlogged cedar tie-beam spanning the outer gatehouse arch. It supported three courses of heavy gray roof tiles and a tumbled cap of river boulders.
That morning, while standing outside the threshold reading the top door beam script, he had noted how sixty winters of freeze-and-thaw had split the eastern stone ledge-stone bracket supporting the right end of that tie-beam, while carpenter-rot had eaten half through the cedar wood slot joint on the western post. Only the wedged friction of the cracked ledge-stone was keeping two tons of water-soaked timber and roof stone from dropping straight into the gateway.
“Ilyra!” Seyun called out, slinging the recovered calfskin satchel over his oilskin bundle and stepping to the base of the western gate-post. “Don’t charge the gap! On my third count, drive your spear point straight into the split stone ledge-stone under the right end of the gate beam—chest height, three inches below the timber!”
In the gateway arch, the crossbowman struck his flint against the fuse of the leaded fire-pot. Ilyra’s eyes flicked for a tenth of a second from the sizzling fuse to the cracked stone bracket above the leader’s shoulder. Once again she didn’t hesitate or ask why a Coal clerk was directing her spear at stonework instead of flesh.
“One!” Seyun counted, planting both boots in the red clay at the base of the western timber post and sinking his hips into the deep, coiled posture of the twelfth and final base form, The Sluice-Post Lifts the Gate.
“Two!” He pressed his right shoulder and stacked spine flat against the rotted western cedar upright. He gathered every drop of internal Coal warmth from his kidneys and calves into the bones of his thighs—keeping the surge just a hair below the collarbones so his inward channels wouldn’t lock.
“Three!”
Ilyra’s seven-foot spear flashed forward across the rain-swept yard like a bolt of white lightning. Instead of piercing the masked leader’s chest, the diamond tip of hardened marsh-iron struck the frost-cracked granite ledge-stone bracket above his ear with the entire packed force of her Late Flame lunge.
Stone exploded in a shower of gray splinters as the eastern bracket snapped clean off the wall. In the exact same heartbeat, Seyun drove upward through his heels and spine against the western post. He lifted the rotted wood slot tongue half an inch out of its socket.
With a sound like a winter pine snapping in a gale, the two-ton cedar tie-beam and the entire upper course of gatehouse roof tiles crashed straight down into the gateway arch.
The falling timber knocked the sizzling fire-pot out of the crossbowman’s hand, burying it harmlessly under four feet of wet rubble and red clay. Then it pinned the hem of the masked leader’s dark oilskin coat beneath a slab of limestone. Choking clouds of dry lime dust and crushed mortar billowed across the threshold, sealing the eight-foot gap in a chest-high breastwork of broken beams and stone.
Outside the barrier, cursing in the dark rain, the masked leader drew a dagger, sliced the pinned tail of his own coat free of the fallen beam. Then it ordered his limping men to haul their wounded down the shale chute before the rest of the wall came down. Within thirty seconds the splash of their retreating boots faded into the roar of the gorge.
Inside the quiet, dust-hung courtyard, Seyun let his back slide an inch down the western post. His thighs shook from the two-ton heave as he drew slow, measured Coal breaths to steady his pulse. Beside the fallen cedar beam. There, the leader had cut his coat tail free in the mud, a small, thumb-sized wooden badge of polished black lacquer lay face-up in the puddle. Inlaid at its center with a pale bone circle shaped like an open, unblinking sky-slit.
Before Seyun could take a step toward the rubble to pick it up, Ilyra crossed the paving in two swift strides. She planted the muddy sole of her right boot squarely over the lacquered badge. Then she went winter-pale.
The choking cloud of crushed lime mortar and hundreds of years-old roof dust settled slowly under the beating sleet. Then, the courtyard fell suddenly silent save for the hiss of rain on the fallen two-ton cedar beam. Across the eight-foot gateway gap, the piled timber and broken roof slabs formed a jagged barricade five feet high, fully blocking any mounted or foot pursuit from the lower shale chute without an hour of heavy digging.
Bracing his shoulder against the intact lower half of the western post for three full twelve-count breaths, Seyun letting the strained muscles across his lower back and thighs uncoil one by one. Lifting a waterlogged cedar wood slot with pure Coal bone-posture had scraped the skin off his right shoulder blade through his wet wool coat. His knees felt hollow from thirty hours without a hot meal. But not a single channel in his chest had locked or frayed during the heave.
Ten paces away, beside the inner edge of the fallen beam, Ilyra stood motionless with the sole of her right boot planted squarely over the thumb-sized lacquered badge in the mud. The rain washed pink threads of diluted blood from her left sleeve down the white ash shaft of her spear. It pooled around the iron butt-cap at her heel.
Seyun didn’t need to push her boot aside to know what she was hiding. During the half-second before her sole covered the puddle, the gray dusk light had caught the clear gleam of black lacquer inlaid with a pale bone circle. The exact open-sky-slit emblem worn on the collar of the Aperture Court circuit recorder who had sat behind the Oran grain merchants in Ash Reed’s check hall yesterday morning.
Seyun looked from her mud-stained boot to her winter-pale face. He felt the fierce, wordless trust of the last ten minutes cool in his chest like iron cooled in ditch-water. They had been fighting for their lives between crumbling walls. Then, she had listened to every load-bearing call he made without pause. The blades were gone and a piece of evidence pointed toward the supreme trial that signed her hall’s charter. Then, her first instinct was to cover it with her heel.
Near the central stele, the dead grave robber’s body lay half-covered in gray tile dust. Meanwhile, the masked leader’s abandoned cleaver still hummed faintly in the granite notch where Seyun’s call had tricked him into striking. Every mark in the courtyard—from the twelve-part land-mapper’s map in the calfskin satchel to the double-pegged trial riding boots of the ambushers and the black-lacquered badge beneath Ilyra’s sole—pointed up the chain of command toward the very court she had promised would give him a fair hearing.
Seyun straightened his back away from the splintered western post, settled the strap of the dead robber’s satchel alongside his Account Book. Then he waited in the darkening rain to see what story the proud student of White Heron Hall would tell. Just then, she lifted her foot.
Down in the gorge below the shale chute, a horse whinnied once as the retreating ambushers reached their hidden picket line in the alders. Above the hollow, night was closing rapidly over the high limestone spur. The wind coming off the ruined abbey carried the first bitter edge of black frost.
Whatever happened between them in the next breath, neither could stay in this exposed hollow once the ambushers regrouped with digging bars, and neither was going to walk down to Oran with wrists tied behind their back.