Chapter 170: The Machine With His Teeth

Dane Rook was the only wagon at Rainhouse that dawn, and he sat on the waystation's doorstep while a man with a crushed shin was lifted onto somebody else. He was a blind mimic chest in a wagon's shape, cracked down one side, and nothing that bled could ride him, because blood on his boards woke the hunger. So Harl Fen, who did the measuring for Istra the road rescuer, went up instead onto the plates she walked on, swearing. The House, a walking street of swallowed inns, had taken the Rookfall road north at first light, and he felt its twelve legs through the step, fainter each time they landed.

He wanted to reach Rookfall before the House did, Dane thought, and he could not even carry a man with one shin.

Ada Sorn, the guild medic who had built the splint on his cracked side, put the keeping of it into the chalky hands of Vera Pike, Ash Company's mage: two wedges and an opinion. The opinion was that the wedges would hold exactly as long as he did nothing stupid. Everyone else stayed to keep Rainhouse, except Hest and Marda, who had taken their rake and gone at first light, after the House. That left seven for the road, counting the wagon.

By midday the road north had dried to grit under his wheels. Rookfall was Vera's town, and she had gone ahead with Kril, the company's scout. The rest followed at the speed of a cracked wagon. Istra kept to his good side, joined at the waist to her six plates, and her charge hummed in his crack like a wasp in a wall. Harl rode behind her with his splinted leg stuck out, a yard above an empty wagon bed, muttering slopes.

Senn Parr, Rainhouse's keeper, walked at his front corner, her bar and her dragging boot an arm's length from his mouth. Her brother Nate's belt knife lay behind his teeth, where it had been since the hour Dane killed him, and she was going wherever it went. The voice in that knife had confessed to being a spike once, for cutting rooms off living shelters, and it had said keepers remember what a spike was for. It had not spoken since she fell in beside it. Nor had she asked again for her brother's last words. Dane owed her those, and there were three, and his voice came in fours or not at all. He would not put a word of his own in a dead man's mouth to round up the count. So he rolled, and owed.

Tess the fixer, who had sold him once and had not been asked along, came last on quick light feet, smelling of pepper. She had given Kril his blade back on the doorstep.

"Two coppers a line," she told Harl, who had not asked. "That's what the guild board in Rookfall takes to post a name where the whole town reads it. Mule strayed, husband wanted back and no questions. There's a queue."

His wife would be at the front of a queue like that. The winter the power went out, June had sat at their kitchen table with a flashlight in her teeth and put both their names and numbers on the back of a grocery receipt for his wallet. Names matter when the systems go down, she told him. He laughed, and he carried that receipt until the printing faded off the front and only her handwriting was left. A crosswalk in the rain had let him through to this place, and June had been in it with him. Maybe it had let her through too. If it had, she had put her name on the first thing in town that people read, and she went back every morning to check under it. Rookfall had a guild board.

A rut took his bad wheel, and after it the road tipped downhill into air that smelled of wet stone and rotted leaves.

"That's the cut, Rookfall's storm channel," Harl said. "One pier, and a causeway built for loaded wagons. It won't carry a street."

The House was on it anyway. Its front feet rang hollow, and it was crossing two legs at a time, careful as a roofer on wet slate.

Chalk and the air after lightning came back up the road at a run, Kril's blade scraping grit behind, and Vera's slow three-beat pulse was not slow now.

"An hour," she said. "In an hour it's off the far end and in the lower town, and that causeway's the only road over. There's never been another."

"Then you know the gate," Senn said. "The cut's only dry because of it, and last night's rain is standing behind it. The wheel's in the far wall, and it takes a keeper's bar through the hub, so no fool with a crowbar floods the cut on a bet." Her bar knocked the road. "Water makes the House let go. I want this in that wheel."

Dane felt the next thing before anybody heard it. Something heavy came down on the far end of the causeway, hard enough to reach his wheels through the stone. A second weight landed, then a third, and after the third nothing, so whatever it was stood on three legs. With it came the hum he knew from Istra's plates and a smell like a new furnace burning off its packing grease.

He dragged one wheel in a long scrape across the grit and turned his lock down the hill. Trouble, where my lock points.

"Oh, what in hell," Vera said. "There's a machine on the far end, black-gold like Istra's plates, on three long legs, and it's got... Dane, it's got a lid. It's swung out a lid with teeth, and it's bitten the House in the leg. I know that lid. Somebody's built you out of metal, and badly."

The lid had come down while she was talking, on a note he had been making himself for months and had only ever heard from the inside. A machine with his teeth, Dane thought, and nobody had run the drawings past him. On the causeway, twelve legs stopped.

Then a man's voice came down off the machine, calm, with no breath in it. It sounded like the recording that had once told Dane for forty minutes how much the gas company valued his call.

"Vera Pike," it said. "I can make the next hour quieter."

Her pulse tripped. "Thorne," she said. Lord Thorne was her patron, and he had wanted a certain mimic chest for longer than Dane liked to add up.

"That is my Harrow," Thorne said. "I sent it to collect two things, the chest at your side and the House, and it has begun on the larger."

A ruined hand rapped Dane's lid, and the pepper came with it. "He won't come himself. He never does, he talks through the thing," Tess said. "I've seen what one costs. There's a drum in it with five shapes of this one pressed on: chest, door, coffin, wagon, stall. It wears one at a time as a frame, a crude copy, and clamps it round whatever it's sent for. It's got his shapes and it'll never have one of his choices, and they're all on the one drum. If that breaks, the copies are gone for good."

"Tess Crowe is accurate," Thorne said, "and free of charge, which is unlike her. The copy is crude. A frame holds better with the original in it. Send me the chest, Vera Pike, and I keep the town."

It was the first bill of this life that Dane could have paid in full. He was never going to beat the House to Rookfall on these wheels, and within the hour it would be off that causeway and into a town where every door it showed people would open inward. One chest against one town, he thought. He had never known that sum to come out any other way.

He knocked once, a wheel on the road. Yes. It did not cross his mind to ask anyone. He let the slope have him, and Ada's opinion caught up ten yards on, and he kept rolling.

Vera shouted his name, but it was Senn who got in front, near the bottom. Her bar came down under his front wheel, the wheel rode up it and stuck, and her dragging boot stepped over and stood where the wheel had to go next.

"No," Senn said, out of breath, and gave the reason anyway. "That's my brother's steel in your mouth, chest. It's not going up into a lord's machine because you felt generous."

Dane pushed her words at the steel, every one, and the steel spoke for the first time since Rainhouse.

From Nate's knife, at the back of Dane's mouth where only he could hear it, Saint Rust said, "For once the keeper and I agree, cupboard. Don't be noble with us aboard."

"Don't you knock at him," Vera said. Her wrapped hand came down flat on his lid, and she had no breath to shout with. "He asked me. That's my town and my patron and he asked me, Dane, and I hadn't got my mouth open before you'd... you always do this. Somebody names a price and you've paid it with yourself while the rest of us are still hearing the number, and then we have to come and get you. I am sick of coming to get you. Go on, count. Count where you've got us."

Six hearts, by the hunger's count, and every one was down here with him, even the man with the shin. He had meant to hand over one chest, and he had put all seven on the causeway approach, within reach of a street on twelve legs and a machine on three.

The sum still came out right to him. He had the sense not to knock about it.

"One knock is assent, I am told," Thorne said. "The goods have accepted, Vera Pike. The keeper will stand aside."

Up in all that metal, wood creaked. There was no wood in a machine, Dane thought.

"Dane." Vera's hand had gone still on his lid. "There's a door in the machine's lid. A wooden one, between the teeth, and it wasn't there a minute ago. It's opening inward."

Thorne was still talking. "My frame will hold until the original is..."

He had not once stopped for breath. He stopped now, in the middle of a sentence.