Chapter 174: Into the Shambles

The inner road between the Fifth Bastion and the Center Gate was a mile long.

Encrid had walked it a hundred times. At an easy pace, it took a quarter of an hour.

He ran it in less than six minutes.

Holt’s men ran beside him, thirty of them, with spears and shields and the heavy breathing of men who had not slept properly in six days. Nobody spoke. They could all hear the screaming ahead.

It grew louder with every step. ℯℯ𝑙.

As he ran, Encrid made himself think.

It was the only useful thing he could do. He was not strong enough to stop the horde with his sword. Thirty men were not enough to stop it with their spears.

So he thought about the ground.

The Center Gate opened onto a cobbled courtyard about eighty paces wide. On the inner side of the courtyard, five streets led away into the Shambles. Three narrow lanes. Two wider roads, wide enough for carts.

Right now, the Roamers were coming through the gate passage and spilling into the courtyard.

And from the courtyard, they were running into the streets.

Every street they entered was a street full of people.

Encrid could not stop them from coming through the gate. Not yet.

But he could stop them from leaving the courtyard.

"Holt!"

"My lord!"

"When we get there, we don’t go into the courtyard. We block the streets."

Holt looked at him while he ran.

"Block them with what?"

"With whatever’s there."

✧ ✧ ✧

The courtyard was worse than Encrid had imagined.

He came out of the inner road at the western corner and stopped.

The cobbles were covered with Roamers. Grinners mostly, and Reevers. They were running in every direction, the way animals run when they find themselves somewhere they have never been before. Some were already fighting the men of the Sixth Watch who had been on the parapet above the gate and had come down the tower stairs.

Some were feeding.

Encrid did not look at that for long.

Near the gate towers, the bread sacks from the morning delivery had been torn open, and loaves were scattered across the ground among the bodies.

Every few heartbeats, something new came through the gate passage. It was not only small Roamers anymore. Encrid saw the long grey arm of a Talljack reach out of the arch, grab the edge, and pull itself into the light.

"There," Encrid said, pointing.

A pair of kitchen carts stood abandoned at the mouth of the nearest wide road, still half full of bread sacks. Beside them, outside a tavern, someone had stacked empty ale barrels.

"Carts across that road. Barrels on top. Then the lane beside it. Everything you can move."

Holt was already shouting.

His men ran. They threw their shoulders against the carts and tipped them on their sides across the road. Others rolled barrels. Others pulled doors off their hinges and wedged them into the narrow lanes.

It was not a wall. It was nowhere near a wall.

But a Grinner running at a barricade does not climb it. It turns.

And if every street it turns toward is blocked, it turns back into the courtyard.

"Spears on the barricades," Encrid said. "Don’t chase them. Let them come to you."

The first Grinner hit the overturned carts and bounced off. A spear came down over the top and pinned it to the cobbles.

The second turned away and ran along the barricade, looking for a gap.

It found none.

Encrid loaded his crossbow.

✧ ✧ ✧

Three streets were blocked within minutes.

The fourth was harder. It was the widest road, the one that ran straight from the courtyard into the heart of the Shambles, and by the time Holt’s men reached it, Roamers were already in it.

Encrid ran to the corner and looked down the road.

It was lined on both sides with the kind of buildings the Shambles was known for. Cookshops. Bathhouses. A tailor. A laundry with wet sheets still hanging on lines across its yard.

People were running.

Most of them were running away. Some were running toward their doors, trying to get inside. A cook stood in the doorway of his shop swinging a cleaver at a Grinner. A man was dragging a child by the arm toward a cellar door.

And in the laundry yard, a heavy woman with red arms was pushing three children through a back door one by one.

Encrid knew her.

Berra.

The laundress who had lost her entire stock to the sheets. She had cursed at him for a full minute in front of the Quartermastery. Then she had sewn for two days straight alongside the other women and refused to take any payment for it.

She got the first child through the door.

Then the second.

A Reever came over the laundry yard’s wall.

Encrid raised the crossbow.

He had perhaps forty paces. The Reever was moving. Berra was between it and him.

He could not take the shot.

Berra saw the Reever. She did not run. She shoved the third child through the door and slammed it shut behind him and put her back against it.

Encrid moved sideways, two steps, three, until he had a line.

He fired.

The bolt hit the Reever in the shoulder.

It was not enough.

The Reever did not even turn.

Encrid looked away.

When he looked back, the door of the laundry was still closed.

That was the only thing he let himself think about as something uncontrollable moved within him.

He clenched his teeth as he thought, ’The door is still closed.’

"The road!" he shouted. "Close the road!"

Holt’s men dragged a baker’s wagon across it. Someone threw sacks of flour onto it. Someone else pulled the laundry’s hanging lines down and wound them through the wheels.

It held.

✧ ✧ ✧

The fifth street was the one closest to the Gleaning’s hall.

Encrid did not go to it. He sent six men, and a runner behind them to find Gus.

The runner came back before the six men did.

"The hall’s doors are shut, my lord," he gasped. "The boy’s standing in front of them. There’s fire all around him. The Grinners won’t go near him."

Encrid let out a breath.

White-gold fire. Ember Veil.

"Tell him to stay there. Whatever happens, he stays there."

The runner went.

By now, the courtyard had changed.

Every street was blocked. The Roamers could not get out. They were running in circles inside the eighty paces of cobbles, crashing against the barricades and falling back, and more of them kept pouring in from the gate passage every moment.

The courtyard had become a pen.

And a pen could be emptied.

"Archers," Encrid said. "The rooftops. The tower windows. Anywhere that looks down."

Men were already climbing. The Sixth Watch soldiers who had fought their way out of the courtyard were going up onto the roofs of the taverns with bows. They began to shoot down into the crowd of Roamers below, and every arrow hit something, because there was nowhere else for the arrows to go.

It was working.

It was working, but not quickly enough, because the gate was still open.

Then a figure dropped from the eastern gate tower into the middle of the courtyard.

She landed on a Talljack’s shoulders. Her sword went down through its neck and out its chest. It collapsed under her, and she stepped off it before it hit the ground, and red light ran the length of her blade.

Ysolde Marr.

She did not look at Encrid. She did not look at anyone.

She simply began to kill.

Encrid watched for a moment. Then he turned to see where the rest of the Second Watch reserves were.

That was when a man crawled out of an alley between two taverns.

He was wearing the grey of the Sixth Watch. His left leg was torn open from knee to ankle, and he was dragging it behind him, leaving a red smear on the cobbles.

He saw Encrid’s coat and reached for it.

"Watcher." His voice was barely more than a breath. "Watcher, I was on the winch."

Encrid knelt beside him.

"Which winch?"

"The gate. The portcullis."

The man’s hand closed on Encrid’s sleeve.

"We didn’t open it," he whispered. "I swear. We didn’t open it. The Commander sent us down."

✦ ✦ ✦