Chapter Five

The Trap

Good times are the most dangerous thing that can happen to a klan, and the Gutscrape had been having them for the better part of a year.

It went the way it always goes. Word moves through a country the way smell moves through water, and the word on Wutzgut's band was fat: fat on eel, fat on rat, fat on smoked meat racked in rows, fat enough to winter without losing its own weakest—which, among the klans scratching at the edges of the grey country, was the sort of wealth that got sung about. There had always been a few small bands at the edges of it, loose and orbiting, near enough to the Gutscrape fires to borrow trouble and far enough to keep their own bosses. That autumn the orbits decayed, one by one, the way orbits do around anything heavy enough. Old Krad's lot folded in from the north side, all cousins and dog-meat and a smell you learned to sit upwind of. The Splitlips came in from the south, a dozen wiry trappers and their boss Grotnab, who bent the neck to Wutzgut with a speed that told anyone watching exactly how the Splitlips' own year had gone. And a scatter of loners and leavings besides—runts, greybacks, one-eyed things—that drifted in and were not driven off, because a fat klan can afford the cheapest kind of generosity, which is the kind that costs it nothing yet.

Wutzgut swelled with all of it, in every sense there was. He held longer fires. He gave out meat with both hands and let the giving be seen. Vragg sorted the new mouths into working lines and did it well—it was, though nobody framed it so, the first real command of his life, and he wore it the way a creature wears a thing it has waited too long for, checking it was still there a dozen times a day—and the whole camp took on the loud, easy, jostling fullness of a thing succeeding. And it was succeeding. That wants saying plainly, because what follows will make it easy to forget: five klans' worth of orruks stood around those fires, the best part of a hundred, under a boss who had never once been beaten by anything he could see—who had walked them out of a dying bog on his own judgment and been right, who had trapped giant rats, pale things, and eels with equal ease, and who was, by every measure the grey country's orruks had ever kept, the most powerful thing of his kind in it. When the boyz boasted at the fires that the Gutscrape could take anything, they were not being fools. They were being arithmetic. Nothing they had ever met had come out of a fight with them holding the ground, and a klan's whole science of the future is built from the fights it has already had.

Moggruk sat at the edge of the fullness and did what he was for.

He watched and he counted. It was better counting than he could have done a year past—he had the stacks now, ten set on ten, the tan thing's arithmetic filed behind his teeth next to the pale country's words—and the count of the klan itself came out at ten full tens, near enough, a number that would have been the whole world once and that he could now hold in one hand. That part of the count was the good part. The rest of it, worked slowly through the winter from his spot at the edge of things, came out simple and came out bad. The mouths had come in over one season. The country had not grown to meet them. The eel-runs, the rat-grounds, the flooded cellars where the blind white fish schooled: all of it was the same drowned ground it had been when it fed one klan comfortably, and it was feeding five klans now, and a country does not care how the mouths above it are organized.

He had watched this happen before, in the old life, to herons. A good year on the far shallows, a crowded rookery, a stripped bank—and the third spring, no herons. The bog had not cared how grand the rookery had been. The bog had a number, and the herons had exceeded it, and that was the entire story, told the same way every time, in every country he had ever watched. The only part that changed was how long the exceeding took to be felt, and a klan, being cleverer than a heron, felt it slowest of all—felt it only as a lengthening of the walk. The near lines came up empty a little more often. Trapping parties went out in sixes where fours had done, and came back with what fours used to carry, and ate some of it on the way home. The racks, which had stood full since the summer they took the dry hall, started showing their poles by midwinter. And the coming-back-later was told around the fires as adventure—look how far we range now, look at the size of us—because there was meat tonight, every night, and is there meat tonight is the whole of a klan's bookkeeping, right up until the arithmetic runs out.

He put the shape of it in front of Nibz one grey afternoon, with pebbles. Mouths in one pile, catches in the other, laid out day by day the way she'd taught him. He had got no further than six days of it when her hand came out and finished the rest herself—quick, sure, her own count evidently already made and kept, waiting only for someone else to say it out loud in stones—and the two piles pulled apart under her fingers, apart and apart, and she looked at the gap where the piles didn't meet and made the small flat sound she made in place of the whimper she'd trained herself out of. Then she looked west, at the dark where the deeper country was, and then at him, and that was the whole of the conversation, and all of it that either of them needed. The count was the count. She had known before he laid the first stone. It was the first time it occurred to him that being the only two creatures in a camp who could see a thing coming might be worse than being the only one.

Wutzgut, to give the boss his full due, arrived at the same place by his own road—hunger being the one report that files itself—and Moggruk, watching him arrive at it, was put in mind of an evening two seasons gone, a spitting fire, half a crab, and the boss biting through a knuckle of claw and saying da bog's et out, trapped flat, bin tellin' ya. It had been true then. He had been the only one saying it then. He had staked the whole klan on it and walked them west out of a dying country into a fat one, and every mouthful anyone at these five fires had eaten since was the proof of his judgment—and now the same judgment, the very same, turned itself over the thinning lines and the showing poles and came out the same way, because it was a good judgment and the facts in front of it were the same facts. The ground is done. The klan moves. There was nothing wrong with any link of it. Moggruk lay at the edge of the light and could not find the flaw in a single step his boss took, and that was precisely the shape of the dread, because the count that mattered was not on this ground at all. It was west, deeper in, where the streets stopped being dead—and it was a count the boss had never taken, of a thing the boss had never seen, and the only creature at any of his fires who had seen it had spent his one telling already, at this very fire, and been paid in a joke about mushrooms. A watcher does not spend twice at a stall that cheated him.

Besides—and this was the part Moggruk turned over longest, because it was the part with no handle on it—the boss was not even wrong about the direction. The rat-things ran thicker westward; every line the trappers pushed that way came back proving it, more sign, more runs, fresher droppings, whole drowned blocks of them chittering in the under-dark, and rats were tough eating but easy trapping. West was where the food was. That was simply true. What was also true—true in a way that lived only behind one set of teeth in a camp of a hundred—was that the rats ran thicker westward for the same reason the eels ran thicker under the pale folks' own walkways: because that was where the country stopped being empty. The klan was not moving toward better trapping. It was moving toward the trapping's owners. And it went singing.

They struck the new ground and the new ground was everything the boss had promised. Rat-runs no line had ever worked, fat and careless. Eel water that had never seen a snare. The klan spread down the drowned streets like floodwater finding a channel, five klans' worth of voices loud in the dark of a country that was listening, and began—because it was what they knew, because it was their whole craft and their pride and the shape of everything they had ever survived—to lay its traps.

The biggest trap went where the best trap always goes: on the widest, most-traveled path, at the narrowest point.

The trap took four days to catch nothing, and on the fifth night it caught the end of the world.

The first the camp knew of it was the horn. Not a klan horn—a high, clean, carrying note, three rising calls of it, a sound made by a made thing, going out over the drowned country like a needle through cloth—and then it stopped mid-rise, the way a sound stops when somebody takes it away from its owner, and the runner from the west line came splashing into the firelight shouting that the big snare on the wide road had gone off, and that it had caught things, and that the boyz needed more boyz.

By the time Moggruk got there with the crowd, the fight, such as it had been, was over, and the road told the whole of it to anyone who could read a road. It had caught five. Four wore the plain wrapped cloth he had watched pour into the stone cup on ten thousand backs, and those four had done the dying—three of them stretched in the shallow water with their long knives still in their hands, having put themselves between the snare and the trappers and stayed there, which Moggruk filed even then, even in the crush, because it was real: no shape, no line, no drill, just three creatures electing to die on a spot, and dying on it. The fourth was pinned under Splitlip boots and had stopped struggling. And among the bodies lay the wreck of the strangest thing the night had yet offered—a chair, splintered, with long poles through it, a chair that had been carried, riding through the dark on the shoulders of its own kind—and Moggruk looked at the smashed chair and the dead bearers and felt the first floor of the cold go through him, because he had it already, before the torch ever came round to the fifth thing. A creature that crossed a country without using its own feet. He had not known such a creature existed. He knew immediately, completely, what kind of creature it had to be.

The fifth was the one in the snare, hoisted, upside down, spinning slowly. And it was cloth.

Not wrapped—dressed. Layer on layer of it, deep colours that ate the torchlight and gave back little slow gleams, a shine at the throat, a shine at both wrists, small stones catching fire down the front of it the way the black lake had caught the torches. Moggruk had spent a season and a half learning to read the pale country's cloth the way he'd once read water, and every line of this cloth said the same word, and the word was the one the tall one had worn open-armed above ten thousand bent heads. Fancy. Not a hat. It had never needed to be a hat.

The thing spun slowly on its rope over a ring of a hundred torchlit orruks, and it was not afraid. That was the next wrong thing. It was furious. It hung there with its arms crossed against the pull of its own hanging weight, and it looked down its nose at them—a trick, Moggruk noted despite everything, that should not have been possible from underneath—and it spoke, and the voice was nothing at all like the tumbling gabble of the boats. It was slow. It was carved. Every sound in it stood alone and cold, like the pale calm faces on their plinths, and though not one orruk on that road owned a word of it, there was not one of them either who mistook what kind of thing was being said:

"Talks fancy," said someone, and laughed, and the laugh went round the ring and came out of it as a roar, and the klan surged in around its prize.

Moggruk did not laugh. He stood in the crowd with the cold going through him floor by floor, because he was doing the one thing he was for, and what he was watching was not a catch. The cloth was rank. The voice was rank—he knew the sound now, the carved sound, effort spent on every syllable: whatever tongue that was, it was to the boat-gabble what the tall one's speeches had been to the calls the polers threw boat to boat—a cloth-of-speech, worn the way the stones at its throat were worn. The chair was rank. And the horn had gotten its three calls out, up a road the pale things poled every day, in a country where sound ran over water like fire over fat. He worked the count nobody had asked him for. A thing that fancy did not cross a country on four knives and a chair. It crossed that way because the country was its own, safe as a larder—and somewhere down the dark of that wide road, the larder had just heard its horn.

He got to Wutzgut. He had not planned to; his feet took him. The boss stood at the ring's centre with his arms folded, admiring the catch the way he'd admire a weight of eel, Vragg at his shoulder, Grotnab of the Splitlips crowding in on the other side already talking shares—and Moggruk came up on the blind side and spent it all in one go, low and fast, because he would plainly not get two.

"Put it back."

Wutzgut turned. Looked at him—down at him—with the firelight moving on his face.

"Dat one's fancy," Moggruk said. "Fancy's wot dey got 'stead of a boss's 'at. I seen it—west, I seen it—dey got bosses wot wear nuffin' on der 'eads, an' more pale fings dan all da lots I ever counted bend to 'em anyway, 'cause of da fancy. Da fancy means da 'ole country knows 'im. Da chair means 'e don't even walk 'is own roads. An' da 'orn woz 'im tellin' da country where 'e is. Dey'll come for 'im, boss. Not boyz. Da country'll come. Put 'im back on da road an' walk us east tonight."

For one whole breath, Wutzgut considered it. Moggruk watched him do it—watched the small eyes actually work, boss-arithmetic, threat against prize—and understood, in that breath, that Wutzgut was not stupid, had never been stupid, was in his own coin the shrewdest orruk of his generation, and that it would not matter. Because the arithmetic the boss ran was built from the fights the boss had had, and every number in it said the same thing: nothing in the grey country had ever beaten him. Rats hadn't. Pale things hadn't—pale fings died on da lines like anyfing else. The bog itself had tried, and he had out-walked it. There was no room in a lifetime of being right for the size of the thing Moggruk was holding, and Moggruk had no words big enough to make the room. He had tried words once, for a smaller wonder, and been paid in mushrooms.

"Or," said Wutzgut, comfortably, to the whole listening ring, "dey come—an' dey find out wot 'appens when fings come at da Gutscrape." He reached out and set the hanging fancy spinning gently with one finger, like a bauble. "Let 'em. Dey can watch me eat 'im. Fanks for da 'orn, yer lordship. Saves us shoutin'."

The roar that went up then was the loudest sound the klan had ever made, and the last of its kind it would ever make.

And that wants saying plainly, one time, in fairness to the dead: there was nothing wrong with any link of the boss's chain. A hundred orruks held that camp—the largest and fattest and most feared thing their kind had built in living memory, under a boss whose whole life was a proof, written in survived winters, that the thing you can see coming is the thing you can beat. Every fight the klan had ever fought agreed with him. A klan's whole science of the future is built from the fights it has already had. The country had simply never sent him its real arithmetic before.

Moggruk spent what was left of his night on the only things left to spend on. He counted the ground: the camp sat in a broad drowned yard off the wide road—one way in from the west, where the road ran; shoulders of tumbled ruin north and south, climbable, everything here was climbable; the east side open, low, running down into reed-water and dark. He marked the east the way he'd once marked every bolt-hole in every bog of his life. Then he found Nibz, and put her by it, and told her with four words and both hands: anyfing 'appens—dat way. Don't wait fer me. She looked at him for a long moment with her arms wrapped round her knees. Then she showed him her open hand, five fingers, her sign for a count she did not like the end of, and folded herself into the shadow of the east wall, and stayed.

And last—because it was all he had left, and because a watcher keeps spending even when the stall has cheated him—he found Vragg at the fire-guard and stood in front of him, which he had never once in his life done, and said it small: "If it goes wrong—don't go in da narrow. Go east." Vragg looked at him a long moment, jaw working, caught exactly between the laugh he owed the boss and the thing in his own gut that had been quietly keeping accounts on the runt for a season. "Get off," he said. But he said it late, and Moggruk filed the lateness, because the lateness was the only coin he was paid that night, and it turned out afterward to have bought more than everything else he owned put together.

They came two hours before dawn, and they came the way the cold comes into water—from everywhere, without a sound, already done by the time it is noticed.

The sentries did not call, and Moggruk, awake and high on the north ruin because he had never once lain down, saw why: there was nothing for a sentry to call about, until there was. No torches. That was the first wrong thing—fire had always come with the pale folk; fire was half of how you watched them—and what came up the wide road out of the west came dark and came quiet, and the road itself seemed to thicken, and then the front of the thickening reached the last of the moonlight and it was a wall. Shields in a line, edge lapped to edge, a hedge of points over it, walking—the fight in the sunk arcade told again, but broad as the whole road and deep past any count he could take in the dark. And above it, on a shoulder of ruin south of the road, where the eye went only if the eye had spent a season learning where to go: a single pale figure with a tall hat, standing perfectly still with its long hands folded, watching.

"UP," Moggruk screamed, and the scream was lost, because the wall hit the yard's west mouth in the same moment, and the night came apart.

The klan came up off the ground fighting, and did what orruks do, which is meet the thing coming at the place where it comes—the whole camp draining westward in one roaring tide to slam against the shield-line in the yard's mouth. And the line gave. Gave the way the rat-fings' line had never managed: smoothly, in step, one pace and another pace, holding its wall, spending nothing, folding slowly backward up the road like a thing losing—and Moggruk, high on the north wall with the whole yard laid out below him, watched a hundred orruks pour themselves eagerly into the narrow throat after it, packing tighter between the road's high broken shoulders, and felt the bottom go out of the night, because he had seen this. He had seen it done with eels, on black water, to a roar of joy. The line that gives and gives and gives on purpose. The pocket that opens like a mouth. Dey showed me, he thought, wild, useless. Dey put it on da water an' da 'ole bowl cheered it, an' I watched it, an' I never finked—it ain't a show. It's a drill.

The hat's long hands came apart in one flat gesture, and the south wall of the road burst.

Not climbed—burst: a section of tumbled ruin the height of two orruks blown outward into the packed road in a sheet of flying stone, and through the breach, downhill, in step, came the five.

Moggruk's mind, which had a file for everything in two countries, had almost nothing for these, and what it had, it had from a high cold angle above black water: the make of the tall one, the make of the forty—the long clean deciding way of moving that no boat-gabbler owned—but built to the scale of the statues and cased head to foot in made metal, black metal, a black with something faintly green-dark living in it where the torchlight found the seams, and worked through everywhere with lines of true glinting yellow that his eye kept trying to price as fire and couldn't. Half again the height of the biggest orruk alive. Wide as doors. Each carrying a single great blade, longer than a grown orruk, held low and easy the way a trapper holds a skinning knife. They did not roar. They did not hurry. They came down through their own breach at a dead marching run, five as one, with a sound like the whole dead city walking, and hit the packed flank of the klan the way the spring flood hits a beaver dam it has been saving up for all winter.

The first of them threw, on the run, without breaking stride—snatched a block of the broken wall up one-handed, masonry the size of a cook-pot, and slung it flat and hard into the crowd. Moggruk marked its whole arc, because it passed close under him, and marked where it landed, because where it landed was Drub. Drub, who was young; who had gone into the bog's brass water keen and come out one-armed; whose shield was the klan's own history bound onto him—a curve of old roof-lead that Brakka had found and worked and strapped to the stump with leather and patience, the worst thing the bog had ever done to him turned by a friend's hands into the thing that kept him alive. He got it up. He always got it up; it was the whole of what the wound had left him to be proud of, and he was quick with it, and he was square to the stone when it came. And the stone came through it. Through the lead, which folded around the hole in itself the way cold lead folds when something harder declines to notice it; through what the bog had left of that side of him; through Drub—the whole keen young weight of him gone backward off his feet into the second rank, and this time there was no brass water to be pulled from, and no Snag close enough to go in after him, and nothing Brakka's hands could ever find in any ruin to make it right.

Then the five hit the flank entire, and the battle the klan thought it was winning was revealed to have been, from its first shield-step backward, a hand holding a thing still so the hammer would not miss.

Flat now. It goes flat now, because that is how it went. The charge broke the packed flank inward; orruks who had never given ground gave it in the only direction available, which was into each other. The shield-line stopped giving in the same instant, as if a signal had passed, and stood, and became a fence, and the pocket closed. And the five worked. That is the word the watching found and the watching kept: they worked, inside the press, at a speed nothing that size was owed, and there was no frenzy in it anywhere—Moggruk hunted for the frenzy, his whole understanding of violence required it to be somewhere—and it was not there. They killed the way the forty had swum. Unhurried. Level. Decided. Each stroke placed, each dead thing already behind them by the time it fell, violence with all the animal boiled out of it, and the last rule of the old country—the one under all the others, the one that said a fight was where you found out which side wanted it more—died in that yard before most of the orruks did, because the five did not want it at all. Wanting had nothing to do with any part of what they were doing. Not one of them, first to last, was even angry.

Grotnab of the Splitlips, who had bent the neck to Wutzgut for one fat winter and got this for the price of it, put his maul up against the nearest—and the great blade came down through maul-haft and face and did not slow perceptibly at either, and the last boss of the Splitlips followed his own halves down into the churned water, and the blade was already elsewhere.

And Wutzgut met them.

He was the boss of the Gutscrape, and whatever else the count says of him, let it say this too, because no one else was left afterward to set it down: he did not run, and he did not blink, and he was magnificent. He took the first of the five head-on over a carpet of his own boyz, and he did what not one other creature in that yard had the eye or the nerve left to do—he read it. Read the metal the way he'd read every armoured thing the bog ever sent him, crab-craft, boss-craft, the oldest craft he owned: took its downstroke on his haft and let the blow drive him under instead of down, rolled inside the reach where the great blade was worth nothing, and put his axe not at the black plates but at the place where plates must give if a thing is to walk at all—the joint of hip and thigh, from behind, upward, with the whole of his weight and forty winters of winning behind it. And the axe went in. Deep in, true in, between metal and metal into the meat of the thing—a killing stroke on anything the grey country had ever grown—and the giant buckled sideways around it with a sound like a wall coming down, and for one heartbeat, one, the whole collapsing night held a shape in which the boss was right again and always had been.

The second one's blade took Wutzgut's shoulder and most of what a shoulder is for. The third's finished it while he was still turning to bite. He went down between them tearing at a wrist as thick as his own neck, and they put him down the way the klan's own trappers put down a snared thing too large to be sentimental about—no anger, a stroke, a stroke—and stepped over him, both of them, before he had finished being the most powerful thing his kind had ever built, and were already working elsewhere in the press. It took, from the axe going in to the stepping-over, the time a kettle takes to start singing.

What saved what was left of the klan was Vragg. This too Moggruk filed, high on his wall, in the middle of the worst of it: Vragg, at the yard end of the killing throat with the fire-guard and the late-waking around him, one heartbeat from hurling the last of the klan in after the boss, because the front was where the boss was and the front was the whole of what Vragg had ever believed in—and the wall burst, and the five came through, and Moggruk saw the big shoulders check. Saw him look east. Saw him, for one splinter of a second across the whole mad yard, look up—at the north wall, at the runt on it—and then Vragg da Bruzah turned his back on the only fight of his life he was ever built for, and roared the fire-guard and everything that could still hear him east, out of the throat, into the reed-water and the dark, driving stragglers ahead of him with the flat of his blade, the only command of Vragg's life that ever saved anyone, made on the word of a runt he'd laughed at, given late, and given in time.

The shield-line let the runners go. Simply let them: opened its files with the same drilled give it had used to bait the charge, and the orruks streaming east and south into the black water ran through the gaps unpursued, because—though Moggruk would not have the words for years—the night had a task in it, and the task was not them. Two of the plain-wrapped ones cut the fancy down from the snare-pole with a care that read, from the north wall, almost like ceremony. The pinned retainer was gathered up. The dead bearers were lifted, each by two, heads kept out of the water. The five fell in around the fancy in a moving wall of black and gold. And the last of them—the first of them, the one the boss of the Gutscrape had opened at the hip with the finest cut of an unbeaten life—rose off its buckled leg, and stood on it, and walked.

Moggruk lay flat on the cold stone in the grey coming-up of the light and watched the wound as the column went west, because the gap in the black metal rode at his eye's own height and he could not have looked at anything else if the looking had cost his life. In the gap, the great gash was closing. Not clotting—closing, the way water closes, lip finding lip, the raw seam paling behind the thing's unhurried stride, until at the bend of the road there was nothing in the gap but a line, and then not a line, and the wide road was empty, and the only sound anywhere in the world was water finding its level in a yard full of everything Moggruk had ever known.

The best cut of the best boss of the best klan in the grey country, and the country it was spent on had unmade it, walking, without once looking down.

He stayed on the wall until the light was full, doing the one thing left that he was for. It was a short count, and it did not get longer. Mouths, catches, mass, reach—klan arithmetic, heron arithmetic; he had been running the wrong books all his life, and the grey country's true ledger had been shown to him exactly once, tonight, and it had one line in it: wotever you kill gets up. Wotever dey kill stays down.

Then he climbed down the east side, where a small tan shape was still waiting in the shadow of the wall with her arms around her knees, exactly where he had put her, because she always kept the count she was given, and the two of them went east into the reeds after the living, the watcher and the counter, carrying between them the only part of the Gutscrape that had come through the night grown instead of broken, which was the file.

They went back east the way water goes back down a channel it has cut before, without deciding to, and the ruins took them in the way ruins take everything, which is without comment.

The gathering happened on its own, over days, the way water finds water. Nobody called it. Survivors came in by the routes their feet already knew, in ones and threes, out of the reeds and the drowned cellars and whatever holes the night had thrown them into, and where they came to was the old place—the dry hall behind the fallen gate, the high floor Brakka's hands had made a home of, the racks, the fire-blacked stones—because a creature that has lost everything walks to the last place it was safe, and no other law was needed. Moggruk and Nibz were there first, and counted them in. It was what the two of them were for, and it was, that week, the only work in the world.

Gobber came in on the second morning, wet to the ribs and grey around the old rat-scars, dragging two of the Splitlip young by the scruffs, one under each arm like wet sacks—having gone back for them, back into the reed-margin of that yard, twice—and she set them down on the dry floor and then sat down herself very suddenly and did not hold forth about anything at all, that day or for some days after. When she moved again it was to start sorting what gear the survivors carried into piles—whole, mendable, gone—because Gobber's hands, like Moggruk's eyes, did not know how to stop being what they were, and nobody asked her to stop, because the sorting was the only thing in the hall that looked like a klan doing something.

Gnik came in that same evening, grey to the lips, one ear gone to something he never explained because nobody asked and he saw no percentage in volunteering it, and the seven small knives still on him. All seven. It was the most Gnik thing that would ever happen, and the first thing in days that made anyone in the hall laugh—one short bark from somewhere by the fire, cut off quick, the laugher ashamed of it—and Gnik looked over at whoever it was and shrugged, and took up a whetstone, and started in on the first of the seven, and the rasp of it became, from that hour, the steady sound under everything, the one noise in the hall that still meant tomorrow.

Snag came in the third day, so mud-caked he was the same colour as the country, and he came in empty-handed and stood at the hall's fallen gate scanning the faces, once, twice, three times—looking for the one face he had once hauled out of the brass water by the harness, with the water collecting its fee off the both of them—and Moggruk, from the edge of the light, watched him not find it. Watched him start the count again anyway, a fourth time, slower, the way you re-walk a line you already know came up empty. Then Snag came the rest of the way in and sat down by the fire and said nothing, and did not ask anyone, because asking had an answer in it somewhere, and as long as nobody asked, the hall still held every face that might yet walk through the gate.

That was the arithmetic everyone in the hall was living by, that week, and nobody had agreed it aloud: nothing was settled. The count was not a number, it was a tide—forty-some when Snag came in, near fifty by the fourth night, a straggler or two still arriving wet and hollow out of the dark with everyone's eyes coming up at once to see which one it was—and it ran the other way too. A Splitlip greyback with a broken arm sat apart for two days saying nothing and was gone the third morning without telling anyone, off to whatever fire would have him. One of the young ones went with him. Nobody moved to stop them, and nobody blamed them aloud, and the rest of the Splitlips stayed—bossless, orphaned twice over in one winter, folding themselves in at the hall's cold end because a klan that had a wall and a fire and a count was still more klan than anything else left standing in their world. Old Krad's cousins never came at all. They had peeled off in the reeds in the first grey hour of the escape, all of them together, dogs and smell and all, north, moving the way a klan moves when it has voted with the whole of its body—and no one said the other thing aloud either, which was that the cousins might have it right.

What was left of Da Sunk Rod came in with the rest—a half-dozen of Bolg's deep-street waders, quiet as their boss had been, and Moggruk counted the faces and did not find Bolg's among them, and set that down where he set the things that could not be afforded yet. They sat down at the hall's edge and did not get up, which was how the Sunk Rod said anything, and it was, in its way, the largest oath sworn in that hall all week. Da Reekfen's remnant came leaner still, the sideways look worn all the way through now, iron back from a forge that failed.

Brakka did not come in.

Nobody said it. That was the rule nobody had made: the hall did not say who it was waiting for, it only waited, and the whetstone rasped, and Gobber's piles grew, and every set of eyes learned the exact sound of the gate. Snag took to sitting where he could see it. Moggruk ran the count twice a day and left a space in it, unnumbered, the way Nibz had once added him back into her books each night as if the books had never been open—and on the fifth day, past noon, when the waiting had gone quiet and started turning into the other thing, the gate scraped, and it was Brakka: listing, one leg bad, using a spear for the wrong thing, and dragging behind him on a rope harness a salvage-sledge he had built—of course he had built it—out of lashed board and a door, with a hurt Reekfen wader on it who could not walk and would have stopped being anyone's arithmetic days ago if Brakka's hands had known how to leave a broken thing lying. Snag was up before anyone. He got a fist in Brakka's harness, the old grip, the brass-water grip, and held on to it a good deal longer than the hauling took, and Brakka let him, and neither of them said one word, and the hall breathed out, and the count that evening was fifty and one, and for the first night since the wide road, nobody watched the gate.

And around Moggruk, where there had been laughter his whole life, there was now a space.

It was not a kind space, and it was not respect either—respect was what the klan had paid Wutzgut, loud, fed, easy to give. This was warier coin. Nobody met his eye, and nobody mocked him, and both for the same reason: every creature in that hall had heard the runt tell the boss to put the fancy back, and every one of them had roared the boss's answer, and the ones who had lived had lived, most of them, by running the way the runt had said to run. There is no comfortable way to sit at a fire with the creature who was right about the worst night of your life. Gratitude would have meant saying what it was for. Mockery had died with its owner. He heard Snag telling the night over to a knot of Sunk Rod waders, in the low voice everything got said in now, and heard him arrive at the part where the wall burst—"an' Moggruk seen it comin'. Told da boss. Stood right dere an' told 'im, put it back, walk us east—" and stop, and not finish, because the end of the sentence was everyone the sentence wasn't about. So the hall gave him the space instead: food passed at arm's reach, eyes sliding off him like water off grease, fifty survivors building, without one word of agreement, a little country of silence around the smallest one of them. Moggruk sat in it and understood it better than any of them did, because he had seen it before. It was the space the boat-crowds gave the pale calm faces on their plinths. It was what a country does with a thing it can neither use nor look at.

Only two creatures crossed the space as though it were not there. Nibz, who had never once been anywhere but the edge of things and treated his edge as the natural extension of her own, folded herself against the wall an arm's reach from him each night and kept her counts where he could see them—mouths, blades, days of meat, the little stones going down in rows, laid out nightly like a small stubborn argument that there was still something worth counting.

And Vragg—Vragg crossed it slowly, over the whole week, in a way Moggruk watched happen before it happened. The big orruk sat where Wutzgut had never sat, off-centre, against a pillar, in nobody's old place, and did the things a boss does because somebody had to and the fire-guard had followed him out of the dark and kept right on following by plain momentum: set the watches, sorted the lines, portioned the meat without once taking the best of it, which Wutzgut had never managed in his life. He did not boast. That was the change the hall could not get used to, quieter than all its absences—Vragg da Bruzah had stopped boasting, and the silence where the boasting had been was the loudest thing anyone had ever heard him say. And every night, Moggruk marked it, the same circuit: the fires, the gate, the roof-line, the runt. The eyes always came round to the runt, and rested there a moment, with something in them that had no name in the old country's whole ledger of looks, and went away, and began the circuit again. He was not mourning what the klan had lost, or not only that. He was learning what it had left.

He came over on the sixth evening, when the hall was mostly sleeping. Not calling Moggruk to him—coming over, across the whole floor, past the banked fires, and lowering himself down onto his haunches at the edge of things next to the smallest orruk of the Gutscrape, and sitting there a while in silence, looking at nothing, which was itself a thing no boss's second had ever done in the history of the grey country.

"Da fing wiv da leg," he said at last, quiet, not looking at him. "Wot da boss cut. You saw it too. Walkin' after."

"Saw it close," Moggruk said. "Saw it shut itself up like a boot-lace."

Vragg's jaw worked a while. Down the hall the whetstone rasped and rasped—the fifth knife, or the sixth. "Da boss done everyfing right," he said, and it was not a question, and it was the whole of Vragg's grief and the whole of Vragg's problem in six words: because if the boss had done everything right and the boss was gone, then right was not enough, and if right was not enough, then everything Vragg had ever been built out of needed a new floor under it, and he did not have one, and he was sitting next to the only creature in the world who might.

"Everyfing," Moggruk said. "Right ain't da fing wot won."

The big head nodded, slowly, at the dark. Then: "You knew."

"Counted it," Moggruk said. "Didn't know it. Countin' ain't knowin' till it 'appens. Den everyone finks you knew."

Vragg turned that over the way he'd once turned over a laugh he owed the boss and paid late. "Da fing you said at da fire," he said. "Da water goin' up. Wiv da pale fings in it. Dat woz true, den. All of it. Da 'ole time."

"All of it," Moggruk said. "Da 'ole time."

For a long moment Vragg said nothing at all. The hall breathed around them, fifty-one bodies where a hundred had sung, the wideness under the roof that nobody would name and everybody heard; and outside the fallen gate the drowned country went on west, mile on silent mile of it, to a wide road that had eaten the biggest thing their kind had ever built and not even kept the bones, and past the road the streets where the pale folk poled and laughed, and past those the black lake in its stone cup, ten thousand voices deep, that not one creature in this hall but the runt had ever seen, and that none of them, now, could ever again pretend was not there. The grey country had stopped being empty. It had been the pale country all along, every stone of it, and the Gutscrape was a small wet noise at the far eastern edge of somebody else's kingdom, sitting in the dark, counting what was left.

Vragg looked west at the gate a while longer. Then he said, quietly, which was the first quiet thing Moggruk had ever heard come out of him:

"Den tell me da rest."