Chapter 174 Ownerless

The Unsung lurched down the avenue toward the palace, each step cracking the road and shaking dust from the lamps. Riven ran along the rooftops above it, Syncopation singing in his chest as his allies’ rhythms locked in behind him.

"Yukine, left knee," he shouted, "on the downbeat!"

Yukine’s frost raced up the left leg exactly on the beat, locking the knee in a thick sleeve of ice. Veska’s lightning struck the right knee one heartbeat later, pitching the giant forward onto its open palms with a crash.

"Left knee is frozen, but ice will hold only eight seconds under that weight," Yukine reported from the next roof.

Isolde ran two roofs behind him, her thread trailing from his forearm, binding the cut and staunching blood at speed. She took each rooftop jump like a procedure, landing where Riven’s next beat told her to land without a stumble.

"Keep the arm still, I am not redoing this one," she called.

Riven grinned over his shoulder, "Yes, ma’am... I’ll treat it like a sleeping cat."

A loose chimney pot slid off the roof beside him, tumbling toward his head with a creditor’s very patient menace. Offbeat Step carried him half a pace sideways, leaving the pot to shatter against the gutter where his head belonged.

[ Collections: chimney pot, evaded | Debt owed: 3,000,000 ]

’Collections is keeping up with me. Three million says the next one won’t miss.’

"Another one, left side, a whole shutter!" Nix shouted from the avenue.

The shutter whirled out of an upstairs window like a thrown plate, but Syncopation told Mara where it would land. She plucked it from the air with one hand, flung it onto a passing hay cart, never breaking stride once.

"Nice catch... I was about to dodge that shutter myself, honestly."

Ysabel stood on the avenue with both hands raised, pressing the giant’s ankles toward the road until paving slabs buckled. Her weight slowed every step to a crawl, buying Riven the few seconds he needed to reach the monster’s back.

"Hurry up, I’m not holding it forever," she called.

He cupped a hand to his mouth, "You’re doing great, Madam President... the city owes you a statue."

He leapt from the roof onto the giant’s back, driving Overdue between two plates and hauling himself up the spine. The skin was warm under his gloves, trembling with a hundred half-remembered lullabies that nobody ever got to finish singing.

"Article three says nobody dies on this bridge... I am enforcing it," Veska announced from the street.

Cassen ran along the gutters behind the Company with Dawnblade burning low, Lucas puffing at his heels with the token. Every few steps Lucas called out what he saw, the Record holding each word steady beneath the paling sky above.

"I witness: the left knee is frozen," he gasped, "the giant is falling forward."

Bram planted himself at the mouth of the bridge, arms raised, bracing a leaning bell-frame above the last evacuating citizens. His bucket sat upside down on his head like a helmet, leaving him entirely at peace with the whole situation.

"Bridge ahead," Mara said, her voice carrying up from the street. "The river is right behind it."

"Then I’ve got until the bridge."

Between the shoulder blades a single red thread ran upward from the cords, thin as hair and taut as wire. It rose into the dawn and vanished northward, tied to a vacant Hero Route with no one standing on it.

’There’s the empty chair. Cut it and the Choir’s hero never gets born.’

A door cracked open in the air beside the giant’s shoulder, Nix leaning out grinning wildly, hair full of dust. She hauled Sarn through by the wrist, the older woman stumbling onto the giant’s back with her cords dragging behind.

"Sister, tell them to let go," Riven said, steadying her elbow.

"They are nine voices," Sarn answered, "and they no longer listen to me."

"They’ll listen if you say their names."

"If they let go they will fall," she said, "and I will have killed them twice."

"Mara and Veska are standing under them, trust me."

Kneeling on the shuddering back, she pressed both bloodied palms flat against the gilding, drawing in one very slow breath. She sang no hymn this time, only names, each one lowered into the song like a candle into a cellar.

"Dorrit," she sang, "Elsin, Ketta... let go, my loves."

One by one the voices inside answered her, each name rising slowly from the gold like bubbles from a pond. The giant’s arms sagged and its great knees buckled, the whole body slowly losing its shape against the brightening sky.

"Hold on to something... I’m cutting it now."

He planted his feet on the trembling spine and brought Overdue down in one clean arc, its red-gold crack blazing. The blade met the thread with a single bright note, then the song stopped from the cathedral to the river.

For one full second the city heard nothing at all, no bell and no voice.

"Everybody catch something," he shouted, "right now!"

The Unsung came apart into nine ordinary people, tumbling from its crumbling frame toward the dark water below the bridge. The gilding dissolved into gold dust and blew across the roofs, glittering for a moment over the whole waking city.

"Nine of them, I have the left five!" Mara shouted.

"The current is slow by the piers, aim for the pillars," Yukine called.

Mara threw herself off the bridge rail in a streak, her shadow-panthers leaping ahead of her toward the falling singers. Veska hurled a spiral of storm-wind after her, the air thickening beneath the singers like a spread blanket of feathers.

"The wind will hold for ten seconds, not one more," she called from the bridge.

Riven caught Sarn’s wrist as the giant’s back dissolved under them, swinging her safely onto the bridge rail beside him. Below, the river swallowed nine bodies in a ragged rhythm, then returned nine coughing heads, every one of them breathing.

"All breathing," Nix called up from the water’s edge. "I counted twice—"

"Verified."

A hundred soldiers and townsfolk crowded the bridge rail now, staring down at the river in silence.

Sarn sat on the rail with her wet cords limp around her, staring at the river while singers climbed out. Nobody tied her wrists, because nobody on the bridge could look at her and see anything but a tired woman.

"Will they ever let me see them again, after what I did?" she asked quietly.

"Ask me after breakfast," Riven said, "everybody sounds braver on a full stomach."

’She hopes. That’s a dangerous thing to hand a woman who just lost her whole choir.’

The singers sat dripping on the riverbank in a circle, wrapped in coats and cloaks donated by passing city soldiers. Dorrit, the youngest, was already asleep against Elsin’s shoulder, one thumb tucked under her chin like a much younger child.

"Nine for nine," Mara said, wringing out her tail, "nobody lost a single one."

The severed thread did not fall with the dust but coiled in the air, glowing red against the rising sun. Then it whipped away north over the roofs, straight toward the Weaver’s chapel on the hill above the palace district.