Chapter 109: The Last Party Came Back Wrong

A wooden hand cleared the tower floor.

A hooked chain snapped around its wrist and tore it back through the stone.

Stone buckled around the hole. A broad man in a dust-gray coat came up behind the chain, boots braced on a root below the broken grating. He wrapped the links around one forearm and hauled until the thing beneath him struck the underside of the street.

"Varn!" Hest shouted from the doors.

"Stop standing on my ceiling," Varn Coil shouted back.

Under his boot, the wooden hand opened.

Four more pushed through the floor around him.

Varn released the chain and climbed into the Glass tower before the roots split under his weight. Delver hooks crossed his back, worn bright where the chain ran through them. He looked once at Kedra, once at Aylin, and longer at Jiang wrapped beside a salt brick.

"Why is there a penguin in the healer tower?"

"He found the wash valve," Pava said.

Varn accepted that faster than he accepted the two matching women. "Then keep him where he can see the floor."

All five shapes of the Last Party rose together.

They had human height and none of the small failures that made a human body alive. Rootwood formed their limbs without joints beneath the surface. Roadglass covered blank faces. Black-green water moved through all five chests.

None blinked when glass dust struck their faces. None favored a bruised knee or adjusted a bad grip. The delver shape had fed its chain backward through the shoulder hook; any living worker who pulled that arrangement would strip the flesh from his own arm.

Varn saw the reversed chain and bared his teeth. "Do not call them by the names of people you lost. Whatever came home did not bring the hands that knew those tools."

A delver below him started to answer, then closed her mouth and reset her chain.

A Roadwright knife filled the first shape’s hand. Bronze thread ran from its blade into the floor.

An iron bar crossed the tower exit in the second shape’s grip.

A healer’s clear hook rose from the third shape. Every wounded person in the lower ward coughed at once.

A delver chain dragged from the fourth shape and wrapped around the cracked tower supports.

Last came a bone bow with no string. A white outline appeared across Aylin’s ribs when the hunter shape aimed.

"Those are not our missing people," Varn said. He stamped on the first wooden hand until it split open. "Recovery built bodies around the tools. Something wet is wearing the work."

Broken fingers flowed into the nearest root and grew back on the Roadwright shape.

Pava pulled Kedra’s carrying board behind the broken pipe rack. "That distinction will comfort me when they stop trying to bury my patients."

Without taking a step, the healer shape swung its hook.

White mist pulled from the ward masks and crossed the tower in long strands. Pava caught two with a glass splint and wound them around her wrist. The splint clouded, trapping the breaths before the hook could add them to its chest.

"Healers, close mouths and move beds!" she called. "Anyone who can complain carries someone who cannot."

From below came an angry sound from the woman with the wrapped chest.

"Excellent," Pava said. "You are promoted."

The woman kicked the loosened footboard herself. One peg broke, then another. An assistant caught the falling wood and turned the bed through the aisle while she clung to her own mask with both hands.

The healer hook pulled at its strap. Pava’s trapped breath strands tightened around her wrist, dragging her toward the pipe rack.

Aylin planted one boot against the rack and caught Pava by the back of her coat. Pava used that brace to break the glass splint across the hook’s mist. The trapped strands recoiled into the masks they had left, and the woman’s next cough stayed inside her own chest.

"Promotion confirmed," Pava called down.

Hest ducked under the iron bar blocking the door and drove his bent gate bar into the warder shape’s middle. The root body folded. Its own bar dropped across Hest’s back and pinned him against the pipe rack.

Aylin seized the loose end and lifted. Kedra caught Hest’s coat with her good hand. Together they dragged him out before the healer shape could fasten glass over the break in its companion.

The effort pulled Kedra’s supported shoulder forward. She went pale but did not release Hest until his boots cleared.

"You were told not to use that arm," Pava said.

"I used the other one. This shoulder is merely dramatic."

"It is bleeding through the padding."

"Very dramatic," Kedra agreed.

Pava pushed fresh cloth beneath the support while Hest got his feet under him. Aylin held the knot and waited for Kedra’s nod before tightening it.

Jiang watched from floor height.

At first he saw five separate pairs of rootwood feet. Then the healer assistant moved his sling closer to the ward stairs, and the angle changed. Beneath the roadglass toes, each shape narrowed into a wet root no thicker than Jiang’s beak.

All five roots disappeared through different cracks.

Black-green water pulsed through them on the same beat.

Bronze made the Roadwright root tremble in quick scratches. Iron drove a slower knock through the warder root. Glass hissed, Rootwood groaned, and Bone clicked against stone. Different craft covered the surface, but each pulse paused at the same instant before beginning again.

Jiang pressed the unbroken side of his beak to the floor. The separate rhythms met beneath his jaw and traveled west as one low vibration. Five bodies stood above him. Only one wet thing moved below.

Jiang left the salt brick.

Warmth resisted the cold floor for one step. Frostwake waited inside that warmth, close enough to call. The nearest hostile root lay wet beneath his foot.

It also crossed a clear pipe carrying heated water to the ward.

Two assistants were sliding an occupied bed across that pipe. A skin of contact ice would lock the hostile root, burst the warmed glass beneath it, and drop the bed through the grating.

Jiang stepped off without using Frostwake.

He lowered himself onto his belly and followed the pulse instead.

His black back vanished against the root shadow. The white breast that had hidden him in forge glare now caught the Glass tower’s scattered light, so he dragged a fallen strip of gray healer cloth over himself. It snagged on his failed-flipper cradle and pulled against the open shoulder.

He kept crawling as the cloth dragged over glass.

The Roadwright shape turned its knife.

Floor cracks shifted around Jiang. The straight route to the common pulse bent toward the delver chain, which had tightened into a loop wide enough to take his neck.

Valea dropped from the maintenance stair. She struck her road knife against the shape’s blade and forced the bronze threads between them into view.

"That balance cut," she said. "Kedra, look."

Kedra stared past Aylin’s shoulder.

The wooden Roadwright held its knife with two fingers loose beneath the guard. A notch cut into the handle matched the hidden mark the traveler coil had shown before Kedra destroyed it.

"Mine," Kedra said. Then she corrected herself. "Or made to look mine."

The shape cut toward Valea’s wrist.

Valea blocked, but the bronze route beneath her boot turned. Her knee struck the floor. The second cut came for her throat.

Kedra slid from the carrying board.

Aylin caught her around the waist, stopping her injured shoulder from taking the fall. Kedra braced the Roadwright knife she had borrowed against the pipe rack and set its edge beneath the shape’s marked handle.

For one breath, the two knives rested together. Kedra could have preserved the handle. Valea might have read its maker, its road, or the hand that had worn the notch.

The wooden shape lifted Valea’s blade away and opened her throat route.

Kedra drove her knife upward.

The marked handle broke.

Bronze thread whipped out of the Roadwright shape’s arm. Valea rolled clear and cut the exposed line. Hest struck the blank roadglass face with his gate bar while Varn caught both wooden ankles in his chain.

"Pull it down!" Hest called.

Varn could have tightened the chain and torn the shape apart cleanly.

"Ankles set!" a delver called from below. "Give us the pull!"

One order would finish the exposed body. Everyone in the tower could see that kill. Following Jiang’s deeper pulse meant putting hooks into the root lane holding the lower street, with wounded workers still hanging from its back chains.

Varn tested the weight through his forearm. The secure choice tugged toward the wooden ankles. Jiang’s evidence thudded beneath the floor, out of sight and strong enough to shake dust from every link.

Jiang barked from beneath the floor cloth.

The five roots did not end under the shapes. They bent together beyond the tower footing, where one black-green strand ran below the guild street.

Jiang drove his beak through the cloth and pecked the common strand’s direction. Once. Twice. Then he slapped his reliable foot against the stone whenever all five pulses met.

Varn followed the sound with his eyes.

"You have the Roadwright," Hest said. "Finish it."

Varn looked at the wooden ankles in his chain, then at the floor where Jiang had marked the deeper pulse.

He let the killing loop go slack.

The Roadwright shape began to rise.

Varn threw his free hook through the floor crack instead. It caught the common black-green strand beneath the street.

"A body is bait," he said. "I want what keeps bringing it back."

Every delver on the lower root heard him. Chains tightened under the tower.

The common strand pulled once.

The guild street answered with a crack that ran from the Glass doors to Westbell.

Varn’s root lane dropped.

Two delvers vanished to their waists before their partners caught the back chains. Stone tilted under the tower. Pava threw herself across the carrying board while Aylin caught Kedra and the healer assistant caught Jiang by the loose gray cloth.

Varn dropped onto one knee and wrapped his anchor chain around the nearest sinking delver’s chest. His source hook remained buried below the street. Pulling the worker free with one arm cost him the clean tension on both lines, but he refused to release either person or evidence.

"Back chain to me," he ordered. "Source chain stays where the bird found it."

The Roadwright shape fell into the opening.

Varn’s lower team crossed chains beneath it and pulled in opposite directions. Hest drove the broken marked knife through its chest. Valea severed the final bronze thread.

The first Last Party body came apart.

It did not die properly.

Black-green water rushed from its empty chest into the four surviving roots. The warder shape straightened. Cracks in the healer shape sealed. The delver chain doubled around the tower support. A bone string appeared across the hunter’s bow.

Above Ninebell, Bronze struck the Roadwright note without a Roadwright body to carry it.

Iron answered. Glass followed. Rootwood shook beneath the tower.

The final call had begun.

White funeral lines closed around Aylin’s and Kedra’s throats. The four shapes turned away from the people fighting them and faced the same wall.

High on that wall, the Bone Hunter bell opened its mouth.

A narrow chime duct coughed black-green water through a grate near the floor. It was too tight for Varn’s arm and lower than Hest could kneel.

Every surviving Last Party shape bowed toward it.

Jiang looked from the opening to his own broad white belly.

The duct had been built for sound, not a person.

It might admit a penguin.