Chapter 842: The Gapmaker

"Tell me what it is," Big D said.

Hessa sat by the fire with her hand pressed over her eyes. Her voice was low and careful, the way it got when she was trying very hard not to be afraid.

"It’s big," she said. "Not as big as the Lull. Gray. It looks like a man made of wet clay, but hunched over, as tall as a house. It’s kneeling at the line on the north side of Greywatch."

"What’s it doing?"

"It puts its hands on a stone." Hessa swallowed. "Flat, like this. Both palms. And it waits. And after a while, the light in the stone goes out. Then the stone crumbles. It just turns into sand and falls apart."

Nobody said anything.

"Then it walks a little way around the ring and picks another one," Hessa said. "It doesn’t go in order. It started at sunset. It’s done four."

"It’s breaking the line," Rudra said slowly.

"It ends lines." Hessa lowered her hand. Her eyes were wet. "I’ve lived inside a line my whole life. I’ve never heard of anything that could do that. Nobody has. Not in any story."

Big D looked out into the dark, toward the south.

"How many stones in Greywatch’s ring?" he asked.

"Two hundred and six. I’ve counted them a hundred times."

"And how long does each one take?"

"Two hours. Maybe three."

Big D was quiet for a moment, working it out.

"Two missing stones next to each other," he said. "That’s a gap. Something small could slip through a gap that size."

"Yes," Hessa whispered.

"It’s done four already. How long until there’s a gap?"

Hessa did not answer. She did not need to. The answer was on her face.

"It’s two days from here to Greywatch," Natalia said quietly.

"Then we go now," said Big D.

They left Emberfall’s line an hour before dawn.

It was a small party. Big D led it, with his shoulder bound up tight where the ice spear had gone in. Rudra came with his blistered hands wrapped in strips of cloth. Then Natalia and Hessa, and the Pyreking, who would not hear of being left behind. Behind them came a hundred of the Regalon hunters with orbs.

The Warlord stayed to hold Emberfall’s line. The Empress stayed with Kael.

Kael had woken up just before they left. He was lying in a tent by the shoot, pale as paper, with the Empress sitting beside him. When Natalia came in, he managed to turn his head.

"You’re going," he said.

"We’re going."

"I can’t stand up." He sounded annoyed about it. "I tried. I fell over."

"Then don’t try again." Natalia knelt beside him and opened her hand. She was holding the long, thin sliver of white ice from the Stillfrost’s leg. It still had not melted. "I kept this for you. Big D snapped it off. It’s broken once already."

Kael looked at it for a long moment.

Then he put one shaking hand on it.

Break.

It folded. It left a small, sharp orb, white and clear as ice.

[Power Orb: Shatterpoint]

[Quality: E]

[Strike a thing where it has broken once before, and it breaks again.]

Kael closed his hand around it. The orb sank into his palm.

"Next time," he said, and his eyes were already closing, "I’ll have a handle."

"Next time," Natalia agreed.

They walked hard.

Hessa walked in the middle of the group with one hand over her eyes most of the time, and Rudra holding her elbow so she would not trip. She called out the count as they went.

"Six," she said, at noon.

"Seven." That one was in the late afternoon. Her voice cracked. "That’s the first one beside another. Six and seven. They’re next to each other."

"A gap?" Big D asked.

"Not yet. Not big enough. The stones are a few paces apart, but a line is more than the stones. It’s the space between them too. With two gone, the space is thin." She pressed her hand harder against her eyes. "Orla’s there. At the gap. She’s got thirty people with spears. They’re just standing in it."

"What are they standing against?"

"Nothing yet," Hessa said. "But something will come."

Something came at dusk.

Hessa stopped walking so suddenly that Rudra nearly fell over her.

"Scavengers," she said. "At the gap. A whole pack. They’ve been following the Gapmaker. They’re... they’re testing it. Sniffing at the space between the stones." Her breath caught. "One of them just got through."

The whole party stopped.

"Orla killed it," Hessa said. "She killed it. It came through and she put a spear through it." She let out a long breath. "But the others saw it get through."

"How far?" Big D asked. "To Greywatch?"

"A day," Rudra said. "At least."

Big D looked at the hundred hunters behind him. They were all tired. Most of them had fought the Stillfrost the night before. None of them had slept.

"We walk through the night," he said. "Anyone who can’t, stays here and catches up. Nobody will think less of you."

Nobody stayed.

They walked through the dark under the pale rings of the higher layers.

Hessa called the count every hour. She did not need to say how bad it was. Everyone could hear it in her voice.

"Eight."

"Nine. Two more of the scavengers got in. Orla’s people killed them. Someone’s hurt."

At midnight, she stopped calling numbers and just started talking. It was as if she could not stop.

"They’re all at the gap now," she said. "Everyone in Greywatch who can hold a spear. Fourteen hundred people, and maybe four hundred can fight. They’re standing in a line across the gap, and the scavengers keep coming, and they keep killing them." She swallowed. "There’s an old woman with a cooking pot. She’s hitting them with it."

Nobody laughed.

"There’s a boy," Hessa said. "He’s about ten. He’s carrying water to the fighters. Back and forth. Back and forth."

"Keep going," Big D said quietly. "Tell us everything."

"The Gapmaker has done the stone on the other side of the gap now. That’s three in a row." Her voice was shaking badly. "The gap’s wide enough for something bigger now. It’s wide enough for..."

She stopped.

"For what?" Rudra asked.

Hessa did not answer.

At dawn, they came over the last hill and saw Greywatch.

The low hill. The wooden wall. The ring of white stones around its foot.

On the north side, there was a gap in the ring.

It was wide, and it was ugly. It was three stones wide, and a fourth was dimming as they watched. The Gapmaker knelt beside the fourth stone with both its clay hands pressed flat against it.

And through the gap, things were coming in.

There were scavengers, dozens of them. There were two Closers, and a Husher. Its silence had spread out over the whole north side of Greywatch, so that the fighting there looked like a nightmare with the sound turned off.

And there was a thin line of people across the gap. They were holding spears and knives and farm tools and one large cooking pot, and they were not giving ground.

Orla stood in the middle of them. Even from the hill, Big D could see that she was bleeding.

"There," Hessa said. She was crying openly now. "There, there, there. We’re here. Orla, we’re here."

They came down the hill at a run.

Big D did not shout orders. There was no time, and there was no sound to shout into inside the Husher’s silence. He simply ran, and they all ran behind him. A hundred hunters and two C ranks and a weeping warden poured down the hill toward the gap.

Natalia raised her hand as she ran.

Mark.

Red light bloomed on every Ender inside the gap. Every scavenger, both Closers, the Husher. Through walls and through bodies, every one of them lit up at once.

Inside the gap, the people of Greywatch saw the red marks appear. They looked up the hill. They saw the hunters coming.

Someone in that thin line threw their spear in the air and screamed. Nobody could hear it. But everyone could see it.

The Regalon hunters hit the gap from behind.

They moved the way they had learned to move over a month in the grass. They were tied together on Thread and carried orbs in their hands, and they had a red mark to aim at on every single Ender. The scavengers inside the gap turned to meet them and found themselves trapped between the hunters behind and Greywatch’s spears in front.

The Pyreking went for the Husher.

Hearthflame.

His small fire flared in his blistered hand. It was not much. But it cut through the Husher’s silence like a candle through fog, and for a few yards around him, sound came back. He shouted, and the hunters around him heard him.

"The bell!" he roared. "Under the jaw! Natalia marked it!"

Four hunters went for the red mark under the Husher’s jaw. It went down screaming. The silence broke all at once, and suddenly the whole north side of Greywatch was full of noise. There was shouting and screaming, and the clash of spears, and an old woman banging a cooking pot on a scavenger’s skull.

Big D did not stop at the gap.

He ran straight through the fight. He went past the scavengers and the Closers and the line of Greywatch spears. Past Orla, who saw him go by and shouted his name.

He ran to the Gapmaker.

It was still kneeling beside the fourth stone with its palms pressed flat. The light in that stone was almost gone. It did not turn its head as he came. It did not seem to notice him at all.

Up close, it was even bigger than Hessa had said. Its gray clay skin was wet and smooth. It had no face, only a smooth, round head, bent low over the stone it was killing.

Big D hit it.

He threw his whole weight into its side with his good shoulder. It was like running into a wall. The Gapmaker rocked. One of its hands slipped off the stone.

The light in the stone flickered. It steadied. It began, very slowly, to come back.

The Gapmaker turned its head.

It looked at Big D for a long moment, with no eyes and no face.

Then it took its other hand off the stone, and it reached for him instead.