Chapter 171: Let Them Have Each Other

The two things that wanted to own Dane Rook took hold of each other that afternoon on the Rookfall causeway, and he listened from the foot of it, blind, a mimic chest in the shape of a cracked wagon. The House, which kept whatever crossed its sills, had stopped with its front feet on the crown, the hump over the causeway's one pier. From the far end the Harrow, Lord Thorne's machine on three long legs, had clamped a frame on one of the House's legs: a crude metal copy of Dane's own chest, lid, teeth and all. A wooden door had opened inside that lid, and now timber was creaking through the metal.

His people were six heartbeats, as the hunger counted them, bunched around him, and he wanted them off this road. If two things were going to fight over him, Dane thought, he wanted it to cost them both. The afternoon sun lay on his lid, one front wheel was propped on a keeper's bar, and the splint on his cracked side sat on two wedges. He could fold down into a plain chest whenever he liked, but only after somebody took that splint off.

Thorne, who talked through his machine without stopping for breath, had got as far as "My frame will hold until the original is" and gone quiet. A smell of sawdust and lamp oil came down off the causeway. The Harrow heaved back, three feet scraping stone, and the frame on the House's leg stayed shut.

He turned his lock toward Vera and waited.

"The House is growing through it," said Vera Pike, in a smell of chalk. "There are boards coming out through the teeth, Dane, and a damned window halfway up the arm, and the machine still won't let go. Why doesn't it... oh. It can't, can it. That's you. That's you on your first day, a lid that only knows how to close."

On his first day that lid had come down on Nate Parr, the first man he killed, and nothing Dane told it had counted. He had spent every day since teaching it a second thing. A few minutes ago Dane had knocked yes to getting inside Thorne's copy of it.

At his front wheel the bar that had stopped him ground on the road. Senn Parr, Nate's sister, had heard Vera too.

The steel behind his teeth had been on Nate's belt that day, so Dane pushed Vera's words at it. "A lid that only closes," Saint Rust said, for no ears but Dane's. "I remember him, cupboard. Dreadful company."

He was owed that, Dane thought.

Then the Harrow quit hauling and wrenched sideways, out over the cut. The lid could not open, so something else did. The House's side tore from the caught leg upward, with a sound like a crate coming apart under a pry bar. Through the road Dane felt the causeway tick once.

Twelve legs came back off the stone in a stagger, and the House fetched up on the near bank, off to his cracked side. He turned his lock to Vera again.

"It's torn the whole side out of it," she said. "I can see right in, like a doll's house. Every door in there opens inward. Except one, up near the top, that opens out. It's hanging off its doorframe in two pieces. That was blown, Dane, from inside. And there's a smear on the outside of the frame. Blue, about the size of a thumb."

"Its way is in." That was Istra, on six walking plates whose charge hummed in his cracked side.

"Somebody went the other way," said Harl Fen, who rode those plates with a crushed shin splinted out in front of him.

Nobody had anything to add, and across the cut Thorne finished his sentence.

"...delivered," he said, as calmly as he had left off. "I was wrong, Vera Pike. It did not hold. The terms change. I will take the original now, and I no longer undertake to keep the town."

Something heavy clacked inside the machine. Its arm shook a mouthful of timber into the cut, and the frame it swung up next opened on the longer hinge and lower note of Dane's coffin.

On the bank a room slid out of the House toward the road, doorway first, pushing warm air ahead of it. He had cost it forty guests and a stolen room at Rainhouse, and it had evidently kept count. So both were coming, and he stood among six people. All he could do was take the thing everybody wanted somewhere else, and the causeway was the one stretch of road with nobody he liked standing on it.

Senn settled it without meaning to. A keeper meets a door with her bar, and hers was under his wheel, so when she snatched it up the wheel came down. He took that for permission and rolled, and the causeway boomed under him.

"Dane!" Vera shouted. "I am not coming to get you! Do you hear me?"

He knocked once, a wheel on the stone. Yes. He kept on as far as the crown, the one spot he knew both of them could reach, and stopped to wait for two things.

Behind him great feet came back onto the causeway, and the room slid out along it with its sill held level with his wagon bed, the way a dock meets a truck. Ahead, the hum of the arm came over him and the sun went off his lid.

The warm sill touched his back boards. That was one. Above him the coffin's lid reached the top of its swing and started down on its note, and that was the other, because once it started, nothing in it knew how to stop.

Both of them had measured him for a wagon, Dane thought, and a wagon was only the tallest thing he knew how to be.

He let go of it.

Wheels, bed and a wagon's length of him folded in at once. Nobody had taken the splint off, so the fold took it off for him with a bang along his cracked side, and one of its wedges skipped over the edge. He did not hear it land. What was left was a plain chest squatting on the crown, low enough to step over.

The coffin came shut a hand above his lid. Where it had been promised a wagon it got empty road and the front end of the House's room, which had slid into the place his bed used to be, and its metal teeth went into sill and doorposts. The House did what it did to anything that crossed a sill, and held on.

They could have each other.

Over his lid the machine heaved back, because tearing loose was the only way it knew to let go, while the House hauled its room home with the frame still on it. That causeway had been built for wagons. Under his base the ticking started again and did not stop.

That was where he found the hole in the plan. A chest has no wheels.

Quick light steps came up the stone beside the straining room, with pepper on the air and a blade scraping after. Tess hooked her ruined fingers through one handle, and Kril put a blade through the other. They dragged him out from under and ran him back along the lip of the causeway, while behind them the far span was falling away under three metal legs.

The Harrow stepped back onto its own bank without opening its bite, and the front of the room tore off and went with it. The House took its feet off the stone and took the rest of the room home. Then the near span went, close behind Kril, and after it he heard nothing but stone finding the bottom.

They set him down on the bank. Tess dropped the splint and one wedge on his lid, and Vera's hand came down after them, harder.

"I didn't come and get you," she said. "I sent people. Don't think that's better."

"The pier's standing, crown and all," Harl said. "One rib of the near arch left between us and it. A boot wide. That's a spur, and it's all the road there is."

Rookfall was Vera's town, and he had dropped the only road into it down a hole. The House could not step over a gap that wide, so the town was safe tonight. The six hearts on this bank were not.

"Vera Pike," Thorne said, small and clear across the cut. "I am on the wrong side, and I have the wrong specimen. Neither is beyond repair. I can wait."

Vera still had not answered her patron.

Thorne waited. By dusk the warmth had gone out of the ground, the air smelled of rain, and twelve legs had walked round until the House stood across the hill road at their backs. The first drops were ticking on his lid when it let something down behind them, then another, and another, a row settling onto the bank. Warm air rolled over all seven of them, smelling of lamp oil and clean wool.

"It's put rooms down," Vera said. "A whole row, all lit, doors open. Dane, it's making beds."

Harl had ridden Istra's plates since dawn with a crushed shin, and he had not approved of one yard of road all day. His heart was going thin and quick when he spoke.

"That's a good bed."