Ryo didn't have to think about whether to go. He grabbed the long ash pole he kept by the door for lifting wet bundles, the coil of rope that had dried against the hearth, and the smaller, bad pitch pot Anna had tied with a bright cloth. He slung his bag with the book, the jar, and the nails over his shoulder because he didn't leave it behind if a crowd was forming anywhere. Ren took a roof hook and a short-handled shovel. Toller grabbed two more poles because there were always not enough poles.
"Anna," Ryo said. "Bar. Buckets. Keep the door warm. If we're not back before full dark, go to Mara and sit on her bench, not the floor."
"I'll come if you shout," she said. "Otherwise I keep the room standing."
The horn sounded again—long, short, repeat—closer. Men started to run the way men run when they haven't for months. Women came with poles and hand knives and their sleeves tied tight.
The north bend of the road was a raised strip of stone and packed clay with water on both sides—reeds high and black with wet, ditches full to the lip. The road was narrower there; cart ruts ran deeper. A culvert pipe under the road burbled and hiccuped, forcing water where it didn't want to go. If Ryo were a thing that loved tight places and wet throats, he would come there to take a bite out of a village.
People formed a line because people know how without being told. Guards from the mill road—Brann's white-shirt boys—stood with sticks that were too short to keep teeth away. Soren stood with his box under one arm and a pole in his other hand like he hadn't realized he'd picked it up. The priest had a broom with a broken head and a look that said he knew what was a joke.
Brann was front-left with three men, stick-man among them. The thin man was still in stocks at the shrine, face like sour milk. Brann's face wasn't bored now. It was set. He needed this to go his way more than he needed coin. Ryo saw the source of it land in his posture.
"Guardians to the road," Soren called again because he was supposed to. The words sounded thin over the water.
"Get the carts crossways," Ryo said to Ren without raising his voice. "Two. Axles into the ruts so they don't roll. Rope between. Trip height. Not knee. Shin." He pointed with the end of his pole where he wanted it. "There," he added to Corlan, who had arrived with his boy and a cart because of course he had. "There and there. Close enough a man can step through easy. Far enough a thing with a long step snaps a shin on the rope."
Corlan didn't argue. He flicked reins. Men jumped. The cart came sideways hard.
"Toller," Ryo said. "Box nails. Boards. Lay them point-up just under the water on both sides of the rope. Don't scatter. Clusters. If anything's fast, I want it to get surprised and sit back on its arse."
Toller's grin was brief and mean. He ran and fetched a box from under the bird-post where someone always kept one for fences. He went to his knees in cold water and set boards by feel, nails like teeth.
"Bad pitch on the rope," Ryo said to Ren. "Just a smear. Not the whole pot. If it runs, I don't want it in the ditch."
Ren tugged the cloth from the pot and grimaced at the smell. He set the pot near the rope and dipped with two fingers, clever, quick, laying a skin that water wouldn't wash fast.
Brann turned his head at the smell. "You're smearing shit on my rope," he said flatly.
"Your rope will make the first dog slip," Ryo said. "It'll make the second hesitate. You want hesitation."
Brann looked like he wanted blood more than hesitation. He didn't say so. He didn't step aside to help with the rope either. He held his stick and kept his eyes on the water.
"Salt?" the priest asked Ryo dryly, broom across his shoulder.
"Salt," Ryo said. "Not to scare anything. To give eyes a line to aim at." He had a sack from the alehouse out of habit. He took a handful and walked, spreading a thin white streak just this side of the rope. "Nobody steps past it," he said loud enough for the front rank. "If you go over the salt without me saying so, you'll take a bite meant for the rope. If you step back before I say so, you'll trip your neighbor."
That was all. He didn't make a speech. He set the sack down on a rock and took his place: not on the end, not in the exact middle. He wanted to see both.
The water burped. Then the sound shifted from burp to wet scrape. The reeds moved like hands. A shape slid out—doggish, too long, too low, shoulders high, hip bones up like knobs under slick fur that wasn't fur. Its head was wrong. Too wide across the cheeks, eyes set like buttons someone had pushed in too far, whiskers trailing like rotted roots. It opened its mouth and let a noise out that wasn't a howl and wasn't a growl, a wet, deep call like a man with a throat wound trying to speak.
It saw the line where men stood. It didn't see the rope. It moved toward a gap between poles because there's always a gap. Ryo took one step forward and one step left with his pole and tapped the salt with the pole butt. "No step past," he said. He felt it land somewhere not in his chest—not quite in his head either. The way a door learns a hand.
Hold: line.
He didn't look for that feeling. He let it sit.
The thing loped. It put a front foot over the salt. It found rope with its shin and went down half-hind. It snapped out of instinct at the nearest thing: Brann's stick. Brann didn't back up. He jammed the stick crosswise into the thing's mouth just behind its teeth and shoved. It gagged like a dog that had caught a bone wrong. Ren stepped in from the side and in one motion turned the shovel and slammed the flat of the blade down where neck met shoulder. Bone cracked. The thing spasmed. Toller put his pole in at the hind leg and pushed the body onto the nails he'd set. The thing thrashed and then didn't.
Blood went black in water. The water took most of it fast. The rest stank.
The second was faster. It came at the rope low, belly close to the ground, and tried to slide under. The paste on the rope got in its mouth and nose. It shook its head like a man flinging pepper. It hit the boards. Nails bit into its gums. It howled—worse, high and wrong. Soren flinched. The priest didn't. Ryo went in, pole low, and drove it into the wet ground under the thing's throat. He put weight down and kept it there while someone—he didn't see who, didn't need to—put a pole into the base of its skull hard enough to stop the legs. He stepped back and wiped his hands on his coat because he wasn't going to lick them clean like the old men at the peat pit used to when they were thirteen and stupid.
"Back half a step," Ryo said. "Not three. One. Make them think they wasted a move."
The line obeyed the way men do when someone's voice comes in on the right note at the right time. Even Brann did. His mouth was set weird. He wasn't used to hearing anyone tell him how far to move his feet.
Three more slid into view, one after the other, wet-backed and hungry. The first veered toward the salt and stopped like it had sniffed heat. It went for an angle, found rope, found nails, found bodies. A white-shirt boy screamed when a mouth found his pole and followed it to his shoulder. Blood sprayed. The boy fell and kicked. Ryo stepped in and planted his heel on the base of the thing's skull the way he'd done a hundred times on chickens and twice on drunk men. He put his weight there and shifted. The thing's jaw came loose from what it wanted. Ren's shovel finished it. Toller dragged the boy back by his belt while the priest jammed the broken broom under the next thing's jaw to buy a heartbeat.
"Lye," Ryo said without looking. He wasn't talking to anyone he could see. Anna wasn't there. He knew it. He said it anyway because she would come if she chose and only if she did.
"Here," came her voice behind him—a breathless grunt, not scold or question. She and the goose house woman had a bucket between them, steaming. Not boiling; she wasn't an idiot. Enough to blind without turning the ditch into poison gas. She didn't ask where. She waited for "now."
"Throw low," Ryo said. "Not at their backs. Faces."
Anna and the bread woman walked forward together, not running, because walking keeps water in a bucket. On Ryo's word, they put the bucket's lip just over the rope and tipped. The lye splashed the face of the third thing just as it opened its mouth. It inhaled a scream and got lye all the way into its throat. It threw itself sideways and slammed into the boards Toller had hidden. Nails took its flank. It tried to back up, took the rope in its teeth, and got paste full of dung and ash under its tongue. Soren gagged. Ryo did too, a little. The thing scrabbled and fell into the ditch, leaving a piece of itself on a nail.
"Again," Ryo said, already reaching for the next bucket Anna had left with the priest to hold.
"Fuck you, I only brought two," Anna said out of the side of her mouth, but she went anyway.
Brann moved well. He kept his stick low and used it like a bar, not a spear. He didn't grandstand. He saw Ryo see that and didn't like it.
The fourth came different. It didn't test the rope. It came up out of the culvert like a rat from a drain, crawling with its belly to the stone. It snapped at ankle height. It grabbed a boot and pulled. The boot came off. Corlan wasn't attached to it. He'd felt the bite coming and jammed his toes down hard into the boot heel. Ryo saw the naked, mud-black foot and filed the trick away even as he put his pole down across the things shoulders and pinned it long enough for Ren to drop the shovel point-first into the spine.
Water moved wrong to the right. Ryo's head turned before his eyes did. The reeds over there shivered in a way that wasn't wind. The line was already adjusting. People feel big things begin.
"Bigger one," Toller said, voice thin and excited and scared at once.
"Pole ends together," Ryo said. "Three men. Hook its jaw if you can. Don't let it get its belly on the rope."
Brann heard it. He moved two steps right without waiting for anyone else and set himself where he'd be seen. He wanted to kill a big one where people could remember his name later and put it in a story he liked.
The water bulged and then broke like something large remembering air. The howler was the size of a small cart, hide a slick green-black, whiskers trailing weed and something that looked like strips of cloth that hadn't belonged to it originally. Its eyes were set too far apart and not deep enough, like someone had pushed them forward. It didn't howl. It made a thick, wet sound like a bubble expanding and popping over and over.
It saw the line. It didn't see the rope. It came high, long-striding. "Now," Ryo said. Three pole ends slid under its jaw like men had always done it. It bit down. All three poles flexed. If the rope hadn't been smeared, it might have thrown its weight over. It hit the rope and skidded. Nails took its forelegs. It started to roll.
Brann stepped in and drove his stick like a wedge just behind the jaw hinge. It lodged. The howler's head torqued. Brann's stick cracked. He kept the broken length pressed crosswise. The thing bucked.
"Hold," Ryo said, and his voice wasn't to men or to anything with a mind. It was to the line. The word went out and back like sound pouring under a door and coming back warm.
Hold: recognized.
The front rank didn't run. They stepped back that one half step again without looking at their feet and let the weight go into the rope and into the carts. The carts held because Corlan and two others had leaned their own bodies against the wheels. The rope didn't snap because Ren had picked an old length with fibers that didn't mind wet.
The howler whipped sideways and took the priest down. The broom went flying. The priest hit on his shoulder and rolled like a man who had fallen enough in his life not to break something stupid. Ryo went low, grabbed the priest's collar, and hauled him back under the trip rope while the beast's claws tried to find purchase on stone and found pitch and nails instead.
"Shovel," Ryo said. Ren heard him like they'd practiced, though they never had. He came up on the left hip and put the blade in where spine met skull. It bit. The howler bucked. Ren jumped back so he didn't lose a hand.
Brann snarled—actual sound, a man's—brought the broken stick overhand, and drove it into the soft place in the howler's mouth behind the palate. The stick broke again halfway, and his fist went in after it up to the wrist. He didn't pull fast enough. The howler snapped, and his thumb met teeth. Blood went everywhere. He yanked back and kept the thumb. Ryo saw the blood on his hand and the angle of the bite and the held breath behind Brann's teeth that said it had almost been different. Brann stared back at Ryo, eyes wide for a heartbeat in a way that said he understood something about mortality and hated the person who'd forced the lesson into his mouth.
"Finish," Ryo said.
Toller grabbed a loose pole and rammed. The pole end sank at an angle and hit bone. The thing shuddered hard enough to shake water off its back like rain. Then it went slack and slid half into the ditch, half onto the road.
Silence came hard and raw for one second. Soren's breath whistled in it. Someone puked into the reeds. The priest swore without religion and rolled his shoulder to see if it still moved.
"You hold," Ryo said, not loud. The front rank held like the word had weight.
Two more smaller ones came up because they hadn't gotten the message. They found nails and rope and men with poles who knew the movement now. They died faster because practice counts.
The water still moved wrong to the right. More reed heads swayed. Ryo counted shapes. "Five," he said. "No. Six. One bigger again, back of the pack."
Brann spat red and flexed his bitten hand. He set his feet like he would do it again because now he had an audience and an expectation, and both matter in men like him.
Soren shifted his box under his arm like he was going to use it as a shield. "We can't hold the rope if two big ones hit together," he said very plainly. "We need a different trick or we take a bite and then it's a run and we lose the road."
Ryo went to the salt sack. He took a handful and walked two paces forward, past the rope. He didn't look back to see who hissed at him for it. He made a thin, straight line on the wet stone, a hand-width inside where the rope lay. He put the salt down like he used it to mark thresholds. He put a brick-sized stone at one end like a weight, and another at the other end, and then he turned to Soren.
"Say it," Ryo said.
Soren blinked water out of his lashes. "Say what," he asked, not getting it.
"Your countersign named the levy," Ryo said. "Name this line as the guardians' line. Say men who stand here are guardians. Say nothing that steps here unbidden is permitted. Say it now. Say it loud."
Soren looked terrified of performing. He did it anyway. He squared his shoulders, lifted the paper in his hand though it had no magic, and said, loud and formal because that was the only way he knew how to say things, "By Gareth of Millroads' hand and mine by his leave, I name this the guardians' line. Men who stand here hold the road. Nothing crosses that is not bidden by the village."
The priest, because he wasn't a fool and saw the shape, added in his dry way, "And if something tries, may it choke."
Mara's voice carried from behind them, where she had just arrived, as if the sound had always intended to include her. "Witnessed," she said, and put her ledger on Corlan's cart so a page caught rain and didn't care.
Ryo felt the line under his feet go from "chalk on stone" to "door frame" in his bones. It wasn't a wall. It wasn't magic. It was a rule set where people could see it and had said "yes." He took a step back behind the rope again because he wasn't an idiot either.
The pack hit. Four small, one big. The small ones checked like dogs at a cliff they hadn't been told about when they reached the salt line. They didn't stop. They gave the line a fraction of hesitation. It was enough for poles to find throats. The bigger one put a foot on the line and sank as if the stone under it had gone soft—not really, not in the world, but in the way its legs took weight. It bared those too-wide teeth and pushed. It came through, slower than it had meant to. Ryo made the choice to commit or back away.
"Forward," he said. "Two steps. Hit at the line."
They went. It felt like sacrilege for half a beat, stepping past something you'd just named as a hold. It worked because the timing took the beast right where it had thought balance waited. Brann jammed his stick and didn't get bit because Ren's shovel took the angle; the priest put the broken broom into an eye socket with an accuracy that made Ryo change his opinion of him. Toller got rope around a hind leg and fell backward with it the way you throw a calf, and the thing went down a knee because physics works on monsters too.
"Now," Ryo said. And they killed it in the mud: shovel, pole, stick, rope tight, bone popping, breath stopping, water running red. It was ugly. It was work.
Then nothing came for a long five breaths in which Ryo counted his own pulse and the drops off his ear and the way Brann's wounded hand leaked through his fingers. People started to believe the pause. He didn't. He stepped up to the rope and tapped it with his pole.
"Not done," he said.
The reeds at the far side parted like a curtain this time, not like wind. Something larger pushed them with its chest. It moved less like a dog, more like a crocodile pretending to be a dog—low, heavy, drag ruts behind. Its whiskers were broken in places where something bigger had bitten them. Its skin had scars that had healed wrong. It opened its mouth slow and showed four rows of teeth nested like oyster shelves. It had something like a collar around its neck woven from reed and bone. That meant hands had been near it once. Ryo didn't like what that implied.
The alpha came straight down the road, not choosing angles, the way a thing acts when it has never had to learn to.
"Hold it at the line," Ryo said, feeling his voice drop a fraction lower without trying to make it. People set their feet. Salt lay thin and white. The rope sagged with blood and paste. The carts creaked.
The alpha stopped with its nose over the salt like a man smelling bread he hadn't paid for yet. It opened its mouth. The howl that came was wrong in a new way—echoed, like a second throat inside a first one had decided to sing behind it.
It put its foot on the salt.
The line held it like mud for the beat of a heart. That was all. It shoved. It came forward like a door forced off a hinge.
Ryo didn't back up. He drove his pole into the joint of the front leg and barked "Down!" at men and line both. The alpha lunged, the rope snapped, and the carts jumped their ruts. As the beast's shadow fell over him, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a shape by the shrine—Brann's thin man, free of the stocks, a pin in his hand and a grin he hadn't earned.