Chapter 177: Closing the Gate

The iron bar would not move.

Encrid and Ysolde put their weight on it together. Then Ysolde put her Star behind it. The red light ran up her arms and into her hands, and the bar groaned.

It did not move.

Trask had not only jammed it through the spokes. He had hammered it in. The end of the bar was sunk into a crack in the stone wall, and the drum had been turned half a notch against it so that all the weight of the portcullis was pressing the bar deeper.

"If I break the bar," Ysolde said, "the drum spins free."

"And the portcullis drops."

"Yes."

"That’s what we want."

"If the drum spins free with the chains on it," Ysolde said, "it will take the arm off anyone standing near it. And the portcullis will fall too fast. It will crack the passage."

Encrid looked at the drum.

Then he looked at the chains.

There were two of them, each as thick as his wrist. They ran from the drum down through two slots in the floor. Below, they would be fastened to the top of the portcullis. And somewhere in between, they passed over a pair of heavy iron pulleys set into the ceiling of the gate passage.

"We don’t need the drum," Encrid said.

Ysolde looked at him.

"The portcullis is held up by the chains. Not by the drum. The drum just winds them." He pointed at the slots in the floor. "Cut the chains below the drum, and the portcullis falls under its own weight."

"Straight down."

"Straight down. Onto whatever’s under it."

Ysolde did not waste any more time talking.

She picked up her sword.

She went to the first slot, set her feet, and looked down through it at the chain running into the dark.

Encrid felt her Star through Attunement. It gathered. It narrowed. It became something very thin and very sharp, the way it had been on the sparring yard months ago, when the air had seemed to thin along the edge of her blade.

She cut.

-Chaang!

The chain parted like string.

The portcullis lurched. Somewhere below, a Roamer screamed.

Ysolde went to the second slot.

-Chaang!

For a single heartbeat, there was silence.

Then the whole tower shook.

The portcullis fell. Encrid heard it more than felt it. A long, grinding shriek of iron against stone as it dropped through its grooves, and then an impact so heavy that dust fell from the ceiling of the winch room.

And under the impact, cut short, the sound of things being crushed.

Encrid went to the window and looked down into the courtyard.

The portcullis was down.

Nothing more was coming through the gate passage.

But the great doors were still standing open on the far side, and the passage between the doors and the portcullis was packed with Roamers that could no longer go forward or back.

And the courtyard was still full.

"The murder holes," Encrid said. "Above the passage. Oil."

"The oil is on the parapets."

"Then someone needs to bring it down."

"Someone already has."

The voice came from the stair.

Encrid turned.

Iolan Vire stood in the doorway of the winch room in his leather apron. Behind him, on the narrow stair, stood a line of Lampwrights. Men and women in the same aprons, each carrying a small barrel on their shoulder.

Vire looked at the six dead guards. At Trask. At the jammed drum.

His face did not change.

"The oil channels run along the parapet above this gate," he said. "My people open and close them. When I heard the bell, I thought someone might need them."

"You thought right," Encrid said.

Vire nodded to the Lampwrights behind him. They came into the room and went straight to the row of small square openings in the floor along the northern wall. The murder holes. Built two hundred years ago for exactly this purpose.

The Lampwrights opened the barrels and poured.

Encrid heard the oil splash onto the Roamers below. Heard them screaming and scrabbling at the walls.

Then one of the Lampwrights took a lantern from her belt.

It was an ordinary lantern. An ordinary yellow flame. Encrid noticed that, and a small part of his mind wondered why.

She dropped it through the hole.

The gate passage went up in fire.

✧ ✧ ✧

The courtyard took longer to clear.

With the gate closed, the Roamers inside had nowhere to go. They were trapped between the portcullis, the barricades, and the arrows coming down from the rooftops.

But there were still hundreds of them.

And trapped animals fight.

Encrid came down from the tower and stood at the corner of the courtyard with his crossbow. He did not fight much. He shot when he had a clear target. He called out where the next rush would come from. He sent runners to the barricades that were bending and pulled men from the barricades that were holding.

Ysolde went back into the middle of the courtyard.

She did not say anything to anyone.

She killed.

Halvic Ostrand sent forty men from the Eastern Gate. They came in from the east side of the courtyard and pushed west. Serapha Lund sent thirty from the Main Gate. They pushed east.

Around the second hour of the afternoon, Gus came back.

He came down the fifth street, climbing over the barricade there with the white-gold fire of Ember Veil still flickering around his shoulders. His clothes were scorched. His face was black with smoke.

He found Encrid at the corner.

"The children are sake," he said before Encrid could ask.

Encrid closed his eyes for a moment.

"Good."

He wouldn’t have been able to show his face to Rael otherwise.

"One of the Grinners got onto the roof," Gus said. "I had to burn the roof. I’m sorry."

"The roof doesn’t matter."

Gus looked at the courtyard. At Ysolde in the middle of it. At the bodies.

"Young master," he said quietly. "What happened?"

Encrid did not answer right away.

"Someone opened the gate," he said finally.

"Who?"

Encrid looked up at the winch-room window.

"Someone we trusted."

✧ ✧ ✧

By the fourth hour of the afternoon, the courtyard was empty of living Roamers.

The fire in the gate passage had burned down to a smoldering heap. The Works had come with timber and stone blocks, and they were filling the passage behind the portcullis, the way Dael had filled the passage at the Western Gate.

The Center Gate would never open again, because the chains were no longer attached to the portcullis.

Encrid stood at the edge of the courtyard and looked at it.

The cobbles were covered in dead. Roamers mostly. But not only Roamers.

A cook lay in the doorway of his shop with a cleaver still in his hand.

A boy lay on the steps of a bathhouse.

Near the laundry on the wide road, the door to the yard was still closed.

Berra was lying in front of it.

Her back was still against the wood.

Encrid walked over and stood beside her for a moment. Then he knocked on the door.

"It’s safe now," he said. "You can come out."

For a long time, nothing happened.

Then the door opened a crack. Three small faces looked out.

Encrid picked up a blanket from a washing line and put it over Berra before they could see her.

✦ ✦ ✦