Chapter 197: The Line We Wouldn’t Cross

(Commander Renn POV)

The parapet had broken away on its western side in a ragged gap a little wider than a cart. Below it, the slope fell steeply toward the valley floor, broken stone and dry grass, and beyond the valley the brown hills went on to the far ridge, bare against the sky.

At the lip, the stone was scraped in long dragging marks, as though something had come over the edge heavily and badly. A little further down, the scree had slid in a broad fan. Some of that, the surveyor said, would be the parapet coming down. Some might not.

"The students say it went down this way," said the magistrate.

"They watched it go over the lip, all five of them. Lord Vortex heard it after that, stone sliding down toward the border country, until the ridge was between them." I looked down the slope. "Lord Vortex says it was dragging the leg on the same side as the shoulder Vellaroux had burned."

"That’s better evidence than marks," said the magistrate, and the surveyor, to his credit, nodded.

"Then we’ll take the marks as far as they go," I said, "and no further."

I sent four of my men down on ropes with the surveyor, in daylight, with orders to search the slope to its foot and not one pace beyond it. They found a long drag in a patch of bare earth forty paces down, deeper on one side than the other, which the surveyor said he would lean toward calling the thing and would not swear to. Below that, the ground was rock and wiry grass, and four days of wind had been over it. At the foot of the slope, where the valley began, they found nothing at all.

The magistrate watched them climb back up. Then she turned to me.

"It’s wounded," she said. "It’s four days ahead, on three good legs, in dry country. You have soldiers. I have soldiers. If someone sent it, whoever sent it is out there too, and every day we stand on this ridge, they both get further away." She said it evenly. It wasn’t a demand. It was an argument, and a good one. "I’d go after it."

"I know you would."

"And you won’t."

I looked at the foot of the slope, where my men had stopped.

"The slope is ours," I said. "We’ve searched it. Past the foot, that valley is the first country the joint patrols are meant to walk together. They haven’t walked it yet. I couldn’t tell you whether there’s a clause that forbids us walking it alone. I can tell you what it would look like. Five days after Her Highness set her father’s seal on that treaty, twenty Crown soldiers with spears go down into the first valley it was meant to share, after something nobody can name, on the strength of a drag mark. Whatever the clause says, that’s how the other side would read it, and they’d be right to."

"And if it comes back?"

"Then it comes back to a ridge where every yard of dead ground is walked before anyone stands above it," I said. "And it comes back to a fort that knows it’s there, which is more than we knew on the eleventh."

"That’s a defensible decision, Commander."

"I know," I said. "That’s what I don’t like about it."

She looked at me a moment longer. Then she took out her book and wrote in it.

"I’m noting that I’d have gone further," she said. "So that if I was right, somebody knows I said so."

"Note it," I said. "I’d do the same."

***

We wrote the report in my gatehouse in the early afternoon, with the door shut.

It was her report. She dictated, and the clerk wrote, and I sat across the table and kept my mouth shut through most of it. What had been observed. What could fairly be concluded. What was not known, which was the longest section, and which she read back twice to make sure nothing in it had crept into the section above.

I spoke twice.

The first time was at the line about the western slope.

"Add that a probable route of withdrawal isn’t evidence of origin," I said. "Somebody in the capital will read went west and stop reading."

She considered it, and nodded to the clerk.

The second time was at the line she added herself, near the end of the conclusions: The attacker’s conduct, as described by the Princess and corroborated by the site, is not consistent with an attempt to kill quickly. Its purpose is unknown.

"That’ll frighten people," I said.

"It should," said the magistrate. "It frightens me. I’d rather they were frightened of the right thing."

I let it stand.

When she asked about the five advancements, I told her they were in the healers’ reports, which went where the healers sent them, with Master Alzette’s countersignature. She noted that the medical findings were held separately by the physicians and included continuing restrictions on all five, and went on. It was an inspection, she said, not an infirmary.

Then I gave her my recommendations, and she copied them into the report in my words.

The western lip of the near ridge to be watched day and night, from the platform and from below it, until the convoy was gone and after. Dead ground below every lookout and lip on the patrol path to be walked by a guard before anyone stood above it. The Foreign Office to inform the border commission and the joint patrol planners before the first patrol went out, so that nobody walked that valley without knowing what had come out of it. A request, through the commission and nowhere else, for a joint search of the western valley by those with the right to walk it. And the Speakers’ people asked, through their liaison, to report anything strange in their own country to ours, without anybody from either side going after it alone.

At the end, she signed, and the clerk signed as witness, and she turned the last page round on the table so that I could read what she had added beneath her name.

The Crown’s inspection of the western lookout has been conducted and is complete. Inquiries continue.

It was the first of the two things I had said we were waiting for before we moved.

It was not the one that would let us leave.

***

Her Highness received us sitting up in bed, with her left arm in its sling and a shawl over it, as she had received everyone for four days. She read the report herself. The magistrate didn’t summarise it first, and Her Highness noticed that, and liked her for it. I could tell.

She read slowly. When she had finished, she didn’t start with the treaty. I had half expected her to, and I think I’d have understood.

"My guards," she said. "They truly saw nothing."

"Clean stone, Your Highness. Your two, from a few paces. The others, once they’d reached the steps. And me."

"I could see them." She hadn’t meant to say it aloud; I watched her decide to go on. "All of you. The older one came three paces closer. The younger one ran to the edge to look for me. I said I’m here twice, the second time quite loudly. Nobody turned."

"I know. I’ve read your statement." I hesitated. "Your guard kept his hand on it. From the moment you went until the moment it ended. He didn’t take it away."

She looked down at her good hand on the blanket for a while.

"Thank him for me," she said. "I’ll do it myself when I’m allowed to stand. Tell him today."

"I will."

She turned back to the report and put her finger on a line.

"It says the area was concealed. It wasn’t only the area. Everything inside it was hidden from you. But I could see out. Seeing worked in one direction, whatever else didn’t. I’d like it to say that."

The magistrate took the page back, wrote a line in the margin, and initialled it.

Then Her Highness came to the hollow under the lip, and stopped.

"It was there before I came," she said.

"Before you stood on the parapet. How long before, we can’t say."

"I stood on top of it with a map." She said it quite steadily. "I was checking a sightline."

"So was I," I said. "From the gate. I had doubled the watch on that slope, Your Highness. Every man on it could see the horizon. None of them could see four yards under your feet. Nobody can, from above. That’s mine, not theirs."

She looked at me for a long moment. I think it was the first time anyone had told her plainly that the arrangement she’d made one reasonable decision at a time had been made on top of mine.

"And the line about its conduct," she said. "That it wasn’t trying to kill me quickly."

"That’s from your statement."

"I said I was nearly sure." She looked at the page. "I didn’t think anyone would believe it. I’m not certain I believe it myself, at night."

"I believe it," I said. "I don’t know what it means. That’s in the report as well."

She almost smiled.

"Then I’ll tell you what changes," I said. "When you’re outside these walls again, nobody stands you at an edge with ground under it that my men haven’t walked first. Every lip, every overhang, every bit of slope you can’t see from the top. And one of your guards stays close enough to touch you. Not three paces back."

"Would that have kept him with me?"

I had asked myself that as well.

"I don’t know," I said. "It might have put him inside it with you. It might have left him outside with his hand on nothing, a pace nearer. I can’t promise you either. I can promise you that we won’t leave that ground unexamined again. Whether that’s enough, I don’t know."

Her Highness considered that. She has a way of considering things that makes you feel she’s reading the clause beneath the clause.

"That’s honest," she said. "It’s also a good rule." She folded the report. "My guards will be delighted. They’ve been trying to stand closer to me for years."

The diplomatic part took less time than I’d feared. The Speakers would have the findings through the Foreign Office and their own liaison, on their record as well as ours: no evidence that any signatory had organised or assisted the attack, the attacker unidentified, the inquiry continuing, the western approach watched while the patrol plans were reviewed, and no search of either side’s country by the other. She asked for the last line to be in their copy as well as ours. It already was.

Then she turned to the magistrate. "And our route. The one somebody sold to the Tigers before Merrow’s."

"Still mine," said the magistrate. "Still open. Nothing on that ridge belongs to it, on present evidence. Nothing rules it out, either. It stays a separate inquiry until something joins them, and if something does, you’ll hear it from me before anyone else writes it down."

Her Highness nodded slowly. I think she had wanted the two kept apart as much as the magistrate had. A sold route was a thing people did. The ridge was something else.

"The Crown’s inspection is complete," I said. "That’s the first condition."

"And the second is my horse."

"The second is Healer Sorel saying you can sit one. Master Alzette agrees with her. I’m told that’s unusual for specialists."

She didn’t tell me she could ride. I think she suspected that if she tried, I would hear the lie in her voice. I would have.

"Then we wait for Sorel," she said.

"We wait for Sorel."

I took the magistrate out and closed the door quietly behind us, as though Her Highness were already asleep.

The clerk made the fair copies in my gatehouse before the light went, with Her Highness’s line in the margin copied into the body of each. The magistrate read every one and sealed them herself at my table: one for the Crown, by relay; one for the Foreign Office official to carry to the border commission and the Speakers’ liaison; one for my files. The relay rider took the first east before supper. By then I had already sent men to walk the dead ground under every lip on the patrol path, and they had found nothing under any of them, which was what I had wanted to be sure of.

Afterwards, I stopped by the gatehouse window and looked west at the lookout, small and square on its ridge, with my men on it.

I had gone looking for my mistake for four nights, and this morning I had found it, four yards under a lookout. It was real, and it was mine, and I could put it right. Dead ground gets walked. Guards stand close. That much I knew how to do.

It didn’t explain a wall I couldn’t put my hand through. Walking every yard of that slope would not have opened it, and standing a man at her elbow might not have either. For that, I had nothing yet, and no procedure I knew of would give me anything.

It wasn’t enough. It was what I had.

***

( Beyond the Western Ridge )

At dusk, it came out from under the rock.

It came slowly. On one side, the leg that had dragged off the ridge folded further than a leg should when it took weight, and the shoulder above it, where the burning had gone in, folded with it. It stopped. It shifted onto the other three. It went on.

Hunt the Akashic Key. Nothing answered.

It lifted its head and turned it east, toward the ridge. For a breath there was something, faint, almost the shape of what it had followed. It took two steps toward it, and it was gone.

It turned north. Nothing. West. Nothing, and then a flicker, and then nothing again.

A small animal broke cover in the valley below. The creature dropped low against the stones, the pale lines dimming under its hide, and stayed there long after the sound had stopped.

When it rose, it did not go east. It went down into the valley, along the bottom of it, keeping to broken ground. Every few hundred paces it stopped, lifted its head, and turned it, and found nothing. Its bad side hitched at every step. Twice it stumbled.

Behind it, on the near ridge, a lantern burned on the old lookout. Two men stood at the western lip and watched the dark, and saw nothing in it.