Chương 97: What a Fifteen Does

The sea was quiet. That was the first thing, before the cold and before the dark. The wall and the screaming and Dobbs's roaring were gone all at once, shut off, and the only sounds left anywhere were the claw grinding on his leg and his own half breath trying to get out of him. He fought the claw. Prying at a thing like that was half a breath spent on nothing, and he knew it, and he did it anyway. He let go of the bar with one hand and got his fingers under the claw and pulled.

He had bent iron bars with these hands, and the claw did not even notice. He kicked at the leg with his free foot and got nothing. He bent himself double in the black water trying to reach the joint and could not reach it. The bar nearly went out of his other hand. He caught it against his chest and held it there like it was the last thing he owned. He was more frightened than he had ever been in his life. The pull went on. Down, and back, easy, like he weighed nothing.

Then the bottom came up, and it dragged him along it. Mud, then stone, and then something worse than stone: the morning's dead, the small ones, bumping past him in the dark and turning as he was pulled through them. It was grinding him against the harbor floor to scrape him off its own claw. The stone tore his shirt and then his back, and his body held. His chest joined in against him. It wanted the half breath out and a new one in, and there was no new one anywhere. So there were two fights now.

One was the claw on his leg. The other was his own chest, which wanted his mouth open, and was going to get it open soon whether he let it or not. It wrenched him sideways through the dark to shake him loose, and his body rolled with the wrench before he had decided anything. His arms tucked. His head came around. He came out of the roll facing it instead of away from it, with the bar still against his chest, and no part of that had been his idea.

His legs had learned it on a hotel carpet in Leeds, off the girl who was not there. SECOND MEETING would put her in the room with him on any night he could get quiet, thirty falls a night, on every night that was his own, and his nights ran long. By now his body did the falls without asking him. And the dark and the cold were old news too. He had worked in this water all month, under these same streets, in this same black. The water had never been the thing that could kill him down here. The air was.

So he stopped spending what was left of himself on the claw, and thought. The leg that held him was the one he had been hitting since the shallows. At the top of it, where the limb met the body, was the first joint, the big one, and the split he had put in it was still there. He could not break that joint. He had hit it with everything his arms had, over and over, and cracked it and nothing more.

But the strength in that limb was past anything his arms would ever be, and it spent itself wildly, wrenching at whatever touched it. Iron does not give. If he wedged the bar deep in the crack, the next big wrench would break the joint against it, like a log splitting on a wedge. All he had to do was climb the leg that was holding him, and set the bar, and hang on. It swung him again. This time he went with the swing on purpose, further than it threw him, and came out of the roll with both hands on the limb.

He climbed it. He went hand over hand along the folded length of it, from the claw toward the body, taking whatever the movement gave him. Folded, the limb kept its big joint close, hardly a body's length from where the claw held his leg. It knew he was on it, and scraped the limb along its own side to crush him off, and he flattened himself against it and let the scrape go over him. It tried the next leg over, too, and the folded joints would not bend back to reach him.

Then his hands were on the big joint, with the split under them. He got the end of the bar into the split and set it deep, both hands, his knees clamped on the limb like a boy on a fence rail. Setting it took the last of the half breath. His chest won while his hands were still working. His mouth came open on its own, all the way down there in the dark, and he breathed the sea. Both lungs. All of it. A blow was something his body knew what to do with by now. This had nothing to do with blows.

The sea was inside the place that was meant for air, cold in a spot where cold had never been. His chest seized around it and wanted it out and could not get it out. His body took it, and did not die, and he kept his hands on the bar. He knew he was drowning, just slowly. Slow meant there was still time. Then he did nothing at all, and let it break its own joint for him. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

It wrenched its own leg back to shake him off, all of that strength pulling against the wedged iron, and the big joint came apart around the bar. He felt the joint go, right through his knees. The claw on his leg opened all at once, and all of it thrashed at once. It surged for the surface with its ruined leg folded wrong under it, and he held on and went where it went. Up through the black. Up through the gray. They came out of the sea together. Sound crashed back. The wall. The world.

The scream that met them was the wrong kind, low and awful, the sound a city makes watching a boy drown, but while he was still coming up it broke in the middle and turned into another kind entirely. He was on its back in the daylight, up by the root of the ruined leg, and the torn joint was right there in front of him, open. He put the bar into it. Then again. Then he kept doing it, with the sea coming out of him between blows, in coughs that brought up more sea.

His blows were getting weaker, and it did not matter, because what he was hitting was already torn open. There was nothing clean about it and nothing clever. It rolled once, all the way over, to drown him off its back. The roll took him under again. Under did not matter anymore. He was already full of sea. His legs rode the dark half of the turn without being asked, and when it came up again he was still on it, and the bar went back into the torn place.

At some point, between one blow and the next, it stopped being a fight. The long body came up under him as it went still, all of it, lifting him out of the sea like new ground, and lay there rocking in its own wake. Abe got to his knees on it and threw up the sea. More water than a body should hold, coughed and heaved out of him onto the carcass, in front of the whole city. His arms shook. His leg, where the claw had held it, did not feel like his. Then he stood up.

The screen had come up somewhere in the middle of it all, and it was still waiting. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 18 Foundation: 60 / 28, 900 (Body 19) He read it on his feet, standing on the dead thing, with the sea still running out of his nose, in front of everyone there was. Nobody on the wall could see what he was reading. They cheered it anyway, whatever it was. All across the harbor, the morning's dead rocked in the wake of the big one's dying.

The boats were pulling for the piers, every rower looking back over a shoulder at him. An oar knocked one of the small dead aside like driftwood, and nobody in that boat even looked down at it. At the first pier, Nell Mott took the bow of the lead boat before it touched the stone and lifted it half out of the water with the rowers still aboard, and the rowers grabbed the pier and held on. The sound coming off the wall had stopped being separate voices.

It was one voice now, the size of the city, and it rolled down over the harbor and came back off the water.

"AN HOUR IN THE YARD!" Croft, from somewhere in the middle of it, hoarse down to nothing, both fists over his head.

"YOU OWE ME AN HOUR IN THE YARD!" Ottley had a chant going at the near end of the wall, DOL-AN, DOL-AN, clapped out on two beats, and the young end took it up. One of the three guards sat down on the edge of the pier with his bent pole across his knees and watched the dead thing rock, and did not seem to hear any of it. Mrs. Garside was shouting it with a grandchild on each hip: prodigy, prodigy, and the women around her were shouting it back.

The word went along the wall and down the piers and out over the water to him. This time nobody was murmuring it. He stood on the carcass and let the word come. In the Bell House, when the word first landed, he had gotten out of the light. There was nowhere out of the light here. Every person on that wall would tell this story for the rest of their lives. He was the middle of it, and the word they would tell it with was the wrong one.

"HA!" Purnell, on the pier, laughing and wiping her face with the heel of one hand, both at once.

"Crew nine! That boy is crew NINE!" Her own boat was still floating upside down somewhere behind the carcass, and she had not looked at it once. Beside her, two men off the hauling line were having a flat-out argument about what they had just watched.

"He was working that same leg the whole fight," one of them was saying.

"Same leg, same spot, every time. I watched it off the steps. He knew what he was doing."

"No bar in the world opens a thing that size." The other one had his arms folded.

"It drowned. It took him down and it drowned itself doing it. Things that size drown."

"Cottle," said Mullen.

"Tell them." Cottle looked at the dead thing. The length of it. The torn leg. The boy standing on it with the bar still in his hand. Then he looked past all of it, at the mouth of the cut, where the swells had stopped coming. Then he turned back to the water and said it to that.

"That's what a fifteen does," said Cottle. Fifteen was the layer where the break came, and the boy standing on the carcass was a long way past it. The argument was over. The cheering came down in pieces, because the day came back in pieces. The sound behind the wall first: the streets, the other fight, the one that had never stopped for any of this. Heads turned along the wall, one after another, away from the harbor.

The word was still going around, and it had something else in it now, because half the people shouting it had somebody unaccounted for in the low city, and the day was not done with anyone yet. He found them while the cheering died. Up the rise, in the crowd, Peg had both hands over her mouth, and June stood dead still with a little kid on each arm, watching him breathe. Dobbs stood at the end of the pier with the rope still coiled in his hand, and looked at him, and hung the rope back on its hook.

Then his voice went along the piers, flat as ever, before the cheering had finished dying.

"Crew nine, crew six, with me. Guards stay on the mouth." He looked at the sky over the drowned streets.

"It's not dark for five hours yet. We use every one of them." The piers emptied into the boats. Abe slid down off the carcass into the shallows, up to his thighs in his own harbor, with the bar in his hand and the sea still coming up out of him when he coughed. The water he waded through had dead ones in it, bumping at his knees, and he pushed them aside like furniture. At the bottom of the steps, Tench reached down with his good hand and hauled him up onto the stone. Mrs.

Amery was coming down toward him with her bag. The wall was still saying the word, but behind the wall, off in the drowned streets, the other fight was still going. He started along the stone toward the crews, and his leg held, and he did not look back at what he had killed.