By morning, the square's carts had turned into pieces on a board. Ryn felt it in his hands as much as he saw it: rope lines strung low between wheel and post, the bell tuned wrong and set on a rafter, a new falter rope coiled and ready to be thrown across a gap the instant a boot lifted. Wind came off the east in a thin slice that took smoke and conversation away; it brought in paper and sweat and the dry grit-bitter smell of bone-dust.
They had held twice here. A third would break something. Better to move.
He gathered the rope's end with the quiet authority men obey when their bodies want the same thing. "We go at first light," he told Hana, who was already picking up the empty pans and making noise on purpose to make sleepy people resent her. She grunted and flicked flour off her hands in a gesture that was a benediction coming from her. Dorran, propped on a bench, watched with narrowed eyes that missed none of it and said nothing until Ryn met his look. Then: "Don't be clever," he rasped, which meant, be clever; don't be fancy.
Tamsin checked the jar that sat on the mantle, sniffed, and made a face. "This is a bad idea," she said, not to anyone in particular, and tied it into her inner pocket anyway. Ilyon hovered with his pouches and a hand bundled in a stained linen. He had slept, badly; his eyes had the small shiver of a man who had not stopped thinking when his body did. Kerrin with the yellow sash was learning to tie a flat knot without making the rope resent him; he scowled at his own hands and they obeyed.
Sereth had seen first. He always did. He stood on the roof of the cart nearest the lane spoiler with his bow low and his eyes half-closed against the slant of weak sun, and said, without raising his voice: "They're early. Sponsor's lot. No rider." He spit neatly into the dirt to the right and added, dry, "No surgeon."
Ryn felt his throat unclench a notch. "Then it's the ledger woman," he said. "Or the polite hat with nothing under it."
"Or boredom," Tamsin said. "Men do strange things at breakfast when they are bored."
The enforcer did not come down the lane. The negotiator from the day before in his neat coat and clean hands did, with ten men and a pole-carrying crew. He carried papers that looked like armor in a place that despised metal. He smiled, not kindly, not cruelly, like a man ready to sell you your own bread with a laugh you might confuse for a friend's.
"Rent," he called, as if announcing a festival. He raised a paper with a seal. "By this writ, under the Sponsor's protection and at the Guild's sufferance, we collect levy on those who pass. Don't make me speak again like a fool. It insults us both."
Trella wasn't here. Her voice lived in Ryn's throat anyway. "Paid," he said, holding up the factor's writ like a dirty dish and not letting the muscle in his jaw twitch when he did it. He set the paper on the bar face-up and turned away from it like it might bite him and he wanted to show disdain.
The negotiator's smile tightened at the corners. He had seen a lot of papers that didn't hold up in the slant light of morning; this was one. He gestured and men with poles set to prying at the carts. Not rough; persistent. Their method was to turn your door into their leverage. They would pry the cart forward a foot, then two, then make the gap bigger than a rope could cover fast. Ryn had counted their poles and the prying rings they carried; he had set a quick-release on his own hitch and a wedge in the cart wheel that would squeal without moving. He loosed the hitch with a tug at the wrong moment and the prying men lifted nothing. Their arms jerked and they blinked at their own wrists like they had betrayed them.
The negotiator's expression sharpened. He was not soft. He had learned in towns where walls had no roofs and roofs had no walls and every door had at least three men who called it their own. He shifted to attack from the well side. Sereth had expected that; his arrow rang against one of the pole hooks and the man dropped it and yelped and would tell that story as if he had been in a war later.
It all felt like rehearsal for a thing no one had yet named. It was. Ryn had intended to slip away when the sponsor's lot pushed and the Guild tried to make paper look like wood. Something else cut the rehearsal short.
A horn sounded from left and behind—Guild-sour, three short one long, a call not to attack or retreat but to look, look. The negotiator's face lost its banter. He glanced behind him, saw something, then glanced up at the ridge beyond the square. "Well," he said. "That is an unfortunate timing."
Ryn did not let himself ask. He listened. The sound came in the bodies around him before it came to his ears; a ripple of small flinches and collective breath held, then released too late. The bone-lattice's hum had changed in the night. It had not got louder. It had turned into motion.
"Lattice," Sereth said. "Moving."
The enforcer's patience had broken somewhere else, or someone's curiosity had tripped a wrong syllable into the wrong stone. The ossuary's ring of bone reached down the slope like roots tumbling from a dirt bank. Not fast. Not clean. It did not wave like a flag. It slid, testing and replacing and testing again, all the while holding its own weight with the indecent assumption that it would not fall. At the lip of the ridge, it hesitated, then poured in two places at once in a way no vine could: one toward the Sponsor's crew and one toward the road.
"No," Ilyon whispered, not to the lattice; to the part of him that had leaned forward.
The negotiator took two steps, as if unconsciously, to put himself behind his men. He was too experienced to look for a higher authority; he was his own. "Back," he said to his crew, mild, as if telling a child to put down a knife. They stepped back. One man slipped on Ryn's falter rope and sat down hard. He hissed; no one helped him up. The negotiator crouched, hooked him by the collar with a practiced grip, and heaved him behind the second line. He was soft; he was not a fool.
The lattice reached the z-shape of the ditch where children had played earlier and strands tested the lip. Where they touched, they hissed—salt, thin though it was. The lattice recoiled with that odd embarrassment, then tried the next place. It put down a pane like a stepping stone, then another. Some cracked under their own arrogance and fell in pieces; others held. The hum was neither joy nor anger; it had the austere patience of a man counting money he expected to be paid.
"Under the carts," Sereth said, voice thin as string. "Now."
Ryn had built for men. He cut his own lines and pulled them under, turned them into anchors for people who had to be low. The donkey balked once—sane animal—but he coaxed her with hand and breath and the rope at his waist and she dropped to her knees and crawled in an undignified way that made his eyes sting with love and shame.
The lattice's first pane came through the gap where the cart's wheel had a play. Ryn's bell sang the wrong note. He hauled on a line, and a deadfall he had set in the rafters thunked down onto the pane. The pane cracked. The next one came anyway. The lattice had learned not to care about insult. It was doing what stone does to water: take up space.
The negotiator's men tried to pry with poles at the panes like removing a floor board; the panes flexed, then split, then knit around the places where splinters had sat. It was obscene in the way healing can be when the wrong thing is doing it. The negotiator held up his hands and called "Back." The men did. He was measuring now—merit, not price—calculating whether this square would collapse after he paid rent to a bone-house he had not written a contract with. He did not look at Ryn again. Ryn liked him better for that; he disliked him more.
Ryn moved in small ways. He cut the hitch on a line that would trip a pane. He pulled a rope taut so it would present itself to a pane like a friendly thing; when the pane tried to take it, he yanked and the pane tore wrong. He threw a jar that wasn't a bomb—just water heavy with ash—at the seam where a pane had to slide into another. The ash made friction and the panes hesitated. It was ugly and cheap and effective for one breath. Tamsin's knife slid in and out at ankles that weren't; she cut the narrow ligatures the lattice was pretending to have. She grinned without joy. Sereth did not shoot; his arrows would stick and give the wrong thing ideas. He went on the roof of the cart and counted men and looked for the moment when the panicked will widen and make a bad law.
Hana moved the children and the old through the gap in a hand-coached dance, a slap at the back of the boy with the scar, a tug at Pell's rope. She called bread lies with no apology. Dorran sat where he had been put and held his shield awkwardly, not because he didn't know how; because he remembered what holding the weight meant and wanted to do it and could not. He grunted, low. "Nails, lad," he said, almost conversational. Ryn knew those choices. Nails or men.
The negotiator turned, saw the lattice making a decision to go past the carts and into the square proper, and did something Ryn did not expect: he barked, "Drop it," mild no more. He meant the long box—the harvest cage. A man hesitated; another didn't and tipped it. The box hit the ground and the slats burst. Tendrils, pale as the lattice where they had been fed poorly, slithered out. They weren't strong. They smelled clean and wrong and greedy.
The lattice paused. It tasted that smell and made an arithmetic. It turned toward the tendrils. The tendrils made the worst mistake in the world: they reached. Bone met bone's lesser and did what water does to thirsty earth: entered. The tendrils stopped wanting to do anything but be under a larger plan.
Ilyon exhaled a small sound like a man being punched in the stomach. "Animals," he whispered to the part of himself that had wanted to make sense; he put his hand on his satchel and held it there as if he could keep it from climbing out and offering advice.
"Back," Sereth said. "They will settle after they like the taste. We do not want to be the thing they taste next."
Ryn hauled on the quick-release hitch on the well-side cart and let it swing a little. It opened a gap just enough for a body to slide through. He pushed the rope through and the children went like beads, Hana pushing and yanking and swearing and blessing under her breath like a priestess with vinegar.
The negotiator had his men set a line of poles between the lattice and the open road—not to fight it, to suggest politely a direction. Some of it complied; much did not. He did not stand and watch his men become a story for someone else's paper. He called for a retreat with the same voice he had used to call for rent. His men went. He took one last look at Ryn and then made his tally: he would not get paid here. He would get paid elsewhere by someone else this line would touch with a longer song. He left.
The rope went taut and then slack. The enforcer's patience did not appear. The surgeon's curiosity came down the lane like a smell and did not appear, which made Ryn more angry than fearful in that stupid masculine way. He set stones on the gap as he passed and hated everything and everyone and himself most.
They bled out of the square and found two hedges that made a V and slid along it, rope just above ankle, keeping the donkey low. The lattice lost interest a dozen paces in and gave itself to the feast of tendrils, shivering with the patient rude joy of consumption. Ryn did not look back.
Sereth made a face like a man eating old fat. "We have bought ourselves a little time with their bad idea," he said.
"We always buy time with someone else's bad idea," Tamsin said. "And then we have to pay for it when it comes round the other side."
"Then we run east," Ryn said, breath steady from anger, "and pay a different way."
They ran.
The next half-mile held a run of low stone walls and elm. The ground fell and rose like something breathing in its sleep. The sponsor's horn called from back along the road—sharp, irritated. The Guild's answered with a huff that was tired. The Warden's did not answer at all. That was nothing like permission and exactly like it.
They cut across two fields where sheep had been too sparse to make a difference, then hit the wet shoulder of a run where water had stood long enough to breed mosquitoes invisible and hungry. Past it, the hawthorn fell away and the old quarry road climbed, narrow and mean. The ossuary's hum diminished with every step; it never left entirely.
At the top of the rise, at a bend where men had set a small shrine with nothing left in it but char and a tiny broken clay hand, Ryn stopped. He listened.
"Men," Sereth breathed. "Guild. Not ours. Another factor."
A small column crested the hill, pikes upright, a man with a baton and a face made of paper and stubbornness. He had ink on his fingers and the bruises of a man who had been hauled off a horse by someone who thought less of him yesterday. he looked like someone trying to see a map with his hands.
Ryn stepped into the road. He had the salvage writ. He did not hold it up. "Hold," he said to the man, not a request. The man stopped, partly because Ryn had used the tone of a clerk who had learned to speak to men with knives; partly because a donkey had stepped into the road and looked at him with disinterest. He flicked his eyes over the rope and the hands and the children and the woman with hair braided back into murder and the old man who refused to die and filed it.
"Rent," he said, almost apologetically to his own mouth.
"No," Ryn said, bored. "You hold that place behind us where the square fell apart and explain why you have to write today and the sponsor can write tomorrow and how this is a service. We'll hold the next one. Then we'll argue later and you'll lose and we'll both call it a bargain."
Something in the man's face—that part that hadn't yet learned to lie to himself—wanted to laugh and wanted to cry. He nodded instead. "If you die," he said, "I will write you unkindly." It was a joke from someone who did not make jokes well.
"Good," Ryn said. "Make me ugly so no one wants to be me."
The man looked at the donkey. She flicked an ear. He stepped aside and let the rope pass. He had learned how to hold a door. Ryn liked him and hated him for it. He didn't look back.
The path cut into a beech stand, dappled, cool. The hum under the slab in the tollhouse he carried in his head like an old headache softened a hair. The Warden's voice ran up his bones as if the trees were speaking for them: "Boring."
"Later," Ryn told the pointless god in his head and made himself smile because little boys had rope in their hands and he had learned they needed to see it.
They came out on the ridge line that curved down to the moors east of the ossuary. Beyond, in the middle distance, bluecoats moved like ants along an unfriendly log. Farther, over a low line of spindled trees, banners with nothing on them flapped like sarcasm. The Warden wasn't visible. Garron was somewhere doing math with men you could count only by blood.
"Yard," Sereth said, nodding to a curl in the land where carts could stop without being visible. "One hour. Reset. Move."
Ryn nodded. "Ilyon, water. Salt if you can steal it without being seen by a saint. Hana, bread. Tamsin, set two teeth in that ditch that look like they're made of weather. Sereth, if you see a tree that looks like it wants to fall on a man with a spear, ask it nicely."
They moved. He reset the ropes on his waist with stupid precision—because stupid precision makes so much of life possible. He took stock of the inventory he hated that he kept: two jars of vinegar, one jar of oil, eight nails, twenty-two yards of rope and another five of rotten washing line, one peripheral wedge wrapped under stones two bends back, one in his satchel, one promised to a thing he had not trained himself not to call a person. He used it.
He began choosing the next gate they would hold. It needed to be ugly and boring and right.
The System slid in when his hands were full, which he resented less now that the lines in his head were required for this to work. It had a tone like a well-dressed clerk clearing his throat before telling you something you already knew.
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Class: Trapper II
Level: 7 (pending)
Strength: 7
Agility: 11
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 11
Tenacity: 11
Corruption: 4% (Shard Sync: 8%)
[Skills:]
Makeshift Trap II (efficiency 25%+)
Improvised Bomb II
Linework III
Quickstep I (100%) -> Quickstep II unlocked (requires practice)
Hook-and-Break (Intermediate)
[Techniques:]
Snapline Step (70% stabilized)
Anchor Whip I (Seed)
[Title:]
Ropehand (local), Fixer (local)
[Notes:]
Sponsor attention: high. Enforcer adapting. Surgeon: curiosity heightened.
Warden directive: Shard delivered (east) — Completed. Map access (Nodes) expanded.
He let it sit. Letting things sit was a skill he had not had when he started. He breathed. The donkey nosed his ribs and he swore and laughed again, because he couldn't help himself, because humor is a rope too, because he had yet to learn how to pray but had learned how to find breath under a weight.
He anchored the next field with nails and ugly cleverness. He laid a line across a hedge where a man would go because his eyes told him to, and taught it to sing wrong if touched. He practiced Snapline Step between two hedges with stupid seriousness until he could feel the moment before the rope tried to pull him onto his face and corrected it—the small mastery that will save your teeth at dawn.
"Again," Tamsin said, amused and something else that had no name. He went again. His ankle didn't turn this time. He smiled with all his teeth and this time it was joy, not speed.
Then they moved. Rent was coming again in shapes with bones and shapes with papers. He raised his hand without any drama. "Anchor," he told himself because it was the only word he had worth saying in this world. He felt the lines take it, and that was enough for a dawn.
They went east. The ossuary fell behind them, humming like a wheel under a cart that was now too careful to break. The sponsor's men shifted their net three fields down. The enforcer watched and started wanting to be bored and Tamsin would make sure he got no such gift. The Warden took their shard and made a map in the back of Ryn's skull whether he wanted it there or not. The donkey asked for an apple with her eyes and, God help him, he promised one again and believed it a little.
He had made himself into a tool men could use for rope and work and he was fine with that. He would try to pick when to use himself and when to be used. He would fail, and he knew it, and he would do it anyway. He would set his board and choose Rook when he had to, not because a box told him in a polite font.
The day spread before them like a ledger he had a pencil for. He sharpened it. He did not put his name at the top.
Horns called. The world answered. He pulled.