The River Road

They left at first light on Day 213, five of them in a line along the river road: Captain Tomas Brandt in front, then Ren Okada scouting twenty metres ahead of the Captain because that was what a scout was for, then Jace, then Nia, then Davor Kessel at the back with the big pipe wrench he refused to trade for a proper blade.

"Twelve kilometres," Brandt said. "We walk it in three hours if nobody does anything stupid. We clear the outpost, we find out why the radio died, we are back inside Greywall before dusk tomorrow. Nobody lights anything. Nobody."

"You've said that four times, Captain," Davor said.

The river road was mostly clear. The ash had settled into the tarmac and made it grey and soft, and it took prints well. Ren Okada read them as she went. Shamblers, Tier 1, a dozen of them drifting north a week ago. A runner, Tier 2, more recent, dragging one foot. And then, at the eighth kilometre, something that had walked on four legs and left a print the size of a dinner plate with a dark, glassy crust in the bottom of each one, as though the ground had been cooked.

"Tier 3," Okada said. "Mutant. Big. Burns where it steps."

"Cinder Hound," Brandt said, and it was the first time Jace had heard the name. "Harrow Bridge radioed about one on Day 205. Said it was circling. Said it was keeping to the tree line because of the heat on the wall at noon. I told them to keep the wall cold and sit tight."

"They sat tight," Nia said, "and then they stopped talking."

Jace pulled up his window while they walked, because looking at it steadied him. Stage One Peak. Vitality 310. Strength 285. He had two greens in his pouch and fourteen whites, and he had thought about absorbing both greens that morning and had not done it, because a green pushed numbers and he was not short of numbers. He was short of the thing that opened the door, and nobody knew what that was. Ren Osaka, who was not an awakener and had no business having opinions, said it opened when you killed something that was more alive than you were.

Harrow Bridge came into view at the tenth kilometre, and the wall was down.

Not breached. Down. A ten-metre section of the shipping-container wall had been knocked flat from the outside, and the containers were scorched black along the seam, and the ground in front of them was that same cooked glass.

"It burned through," Okada said quietly. "It leaned on the wall until the steel went soft."

Brandt did not say anything for a long moment. Then: "Kessel, Nia, with me. We take the gatehouse and the radio room. Okada, Jace, the cellar. Dana Pell's brother is down there if he's anywhere. Nobody goes further than shouting distance."

The cellar was under the old bridge-keeper's house, and the door was intact, and it was barred from the inside. Jace knocked, and said his name, and said the Compact's name, and said Greywall, and after a long time the bar came up and a man with a beard like a hedge looked out at him with a kitchen knife in his hand.

"Petr Pell," Jace said. "Your sister Dana sent me."

Petr Pell started to cry. Behind him in the dark were six more people, three of them children, and the smell of a week in a cellar with one bucket. None of them were awakened. The outpost's one awakener, a Stage Two Early named Hollis who had held the wall, was not among them.

"It came at night," Petr said, when he could talk. "Day 208. We'd had no fire, I swear to you, Hollis checked every room. It didn't matter. It came anyway. Hollis went up on the wall with the rifle and it just... leaned. He shot it nine times. It leaned on the wall and the wall went red and then he was gone, and we came down here and put the bar across."

"Where is it now?"

"It sleeps in the daytime. Under the bridge. In the water. It likes the water because the water keeps it cool."

Okada was already moving. "Captain needs to hear this. Stay here. Bar the door." And she was gone, up the steps three at a time, and Jace stood with seven strangers in the stink and the dark and heard, very distinctly, from the direction of the river, something heavy stand up.

What happened next took less than two minutes, and Jace would spend a long time afterward putting it back in order.

The Cinder Hound came up from under the bridge the way a dog comes out of a pond, shaking itself, and where the water hit the ground it hissed. It was the size of a small car. Its hide was black and cracked and the cracks glowed orange like a log that has been in the fire too long, and the air above its back shivered. It had no eyes. Where the eyes should be there were two more cracks, and they glowed brighter than the rest.

Davor Kessel was between it and the gatehouse. Davor Kessel was Stage One Mid, forty years old, a plumber, and he had a pipe wrench, and he did not run. He put himself in front of the gatehouse door with Nia behind it and the Captain behind her, and he swung the wrench into the thing's jaw with every one of his two hundred and ten points of Strength, and the wrench stuck in the glowing crack of its mouth and started to melt.

The Hound closed its jaws on him. Jace was close enough to see the exact moment Davor stopped being a man and became a shape, and the heat that came off the Hound's mouth was so great that the shape did not even bleed.

Jace did not remember deciding anything. He remembered Brandt shouting his name and Nia shouting something else, and he remembered that his hands were already on the thing's neck, on the hide between two of the cracks where the surface was merely hot rather than molten, and he remembered the window flaring open in front of his eyes without being asked, every number in it burning red, and he remembered driving his knife into the glowing crack at the base of its skull and leaning with all of his weight the way the Hound had leaned on the wall.

The crack went dark. The Hound dropped like a dropped engine block, and the ground under it hissed, and Jace rolled off it with his palms smoking and lay on his back in the ash and looked at the grey sky, and he could not feel his hands.

Ren Okada was the one who cut the nucleus out. Nobody else could get close enough through the heat. She did it with Davor's own knife, because Davor's wrench was a puddle, and she came back with it in a wet rag and put it in Jace's lap, and the window that came up was not one he had seen before.

"Epic," Nia said. She was sitting on the ground beside him, and her face was wet, and she was not looking at the nucleus. She was looking at what was left of Davor Kessel. "The exchange board goes Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary. Osaka's never had an Epic through the exchange. Not once."

"I'm not trading it," Jace said.

"I didn't say trade it."

Brandt came and stood over them. The Captain's hands were shaking and he put them in his pockets so nobody would see. "Kessel's dead," he said, which everyone knew. "We're not leaving him here. We'll carry him back. The outpost is finished, the wall's gone and the Stage Two is gone, so Harrow Bridge comes off the board as an outpost until the Warden says otherwise. Petr Pell and the six in the cellar come with us. We move now and we're inside Greywall before dusk tomorrow if we walk through the night, and we will walk through the night, dark, because that thing was not the only thing on this road."

They walked through the night. Jace carried the nucleus against his chest in its rag and felt it tick with heat like a cooling engine, and he carried one corner of the tarp that held Davor Kessel, and Nia carried the opposite corner, and neither of them spoke.

Somewhere past midnight, far to the east, the singing started again.

It was not one voice. It was many voices, all on the same note, and it rose and fell the way breathing rises and falls, and it came from the direction of Carrow City. Petr Pell, walking beside Jace with his kitchen knife still in his hand, heard it too.

"Hollis called that the Choir," he said. "He said it started on Day 200. He said the Hound came after it started, like it was called. What is it, Hand Marrow? What is the Choir?"

"I don't know," Jace said. Stage One Peak, the window still said, as though nothing had happened. "I don't know what it is."