Chương 96: The Footing

The hill of water came on without breaking, and the boats went up the face of it and over, digging for the piers with everything their crews had left. The nearest one went up so steeply that its bow pointed at the sky, hung on the crest, and came down the far side still rowing. Nobody was fighting anymore. Dobbs's order from first light was already running, and everything Calder had was getting out of the water. The middle of the hill opened, and the thing underneath came through.

The water it pushed ahead of itself arrived first. A surge went the whole width of the harbor and broke on the steps higher than a man. The hauling line went down in a tangle and came up holding on to each other and the mooring rings. One swimmer was carried clean off the bottom step. Tench had him by the wrist before the surge finished pulling, and dragged him back onto the stone against the weight of the sea.

"Clear the steps!" Dobbs, from the pier.

"Everybody above the water line and stay there!" The hauling line went up the stairs backward, eyes on the harbor. The first of the thing out of the water was a head as wide as one of the boats, with the same blunt face as every small one, and nothing on it to see with. Then came the front legs, folded too many times, each one longer than a boat. Then more of it, and more. It came up through the field of its own dead and pushed them aside like chips of wood.

People on the wall were still working out what they were looking at while the length of it was still coming out of the sea. It was the dark red of wet brick, the same as every one they had killed since Thursday, and it was as long as the shed the crews mustered in. Up the hill, the Bell House bells stayed quiet. There was nothing left to warn anyone about. The crowd went back from the edge of the wall in one movement, up the rise, further back than even that thing could reach, and stopped there, still looking.

People grabbed children who were already being held. An old man sat down right where he stood, and two women got him up again without either of them turning their heads.

"Up the wall!" Dobbs's voice carried over everything, flat even now.

"Boats to the piers, everybody up the wall, NOW!" Off behind the wall, the escaped ones were still loose in the drowned streets, and crew four was still somewhere in there after them. Nobody could spare them a look now. At the steps, Tench and the hauling line were dragging the last swimmers out onto the stone. The last boat was Purnell's, coming from the far end of the curve, and it wasn't going to reach the piers. The thing turned toward the sound of her oars. It did not lunge and it did not leap.

One front leg unfolded across the water, longer than the boat itself, took hold of the stern, and pulled. The boat was simply gone from under its crew. The punt came down upside down thirty feet away. Its crew were in the air, and then in the sea. Ropes went out from the pier before the boat had finished coming down. Cottle came up swimming with his boathook still in one hand, and racked it before he sat down.

"So you're all going up this rope in front of me," Purnell was saying, before her head was fully out of the sea, and the pier hauled them in one after another. The thing let them go. It had already turned toward the steps. On the piers, men stood holding boathooks they knew were nothing now, and held on to them anyway. One of the guards put his hooked pole into the side of it as it went past the end of the pier, and leaned on it with his whole weight. The pole came back off it bent.

Abe stood in the shallows between the thing and the steps, the scrap one in both hands. The flat gray bar had killed every one of them so far. The sword he had paid for was still six weeks from finished, somewhere in Leeds. The bar was what there was. The only order he had was still the order: whatever got through the line was his before it reached the stone, and the line was gone, and this was through. It came for the steps, and he went to meet it.

It came in low, the same as the small ones, with the legs doing the work. The wake it drove ahead of itself reached him before it did. It hit him at the knees, hard enough to take a grown man off his feet, and did not move him. He had watched these things lead with the same front leg for three days, every one of them, and the big one led with it too. So he was already moving when the head came down at him like a falling wall.

He went inside the leading leg instead of away from it, which was the whole trick of the opening he had drilled all winter. The first four seconds belonged to SECOND MEETING, and the skill did not waste one of them. The bar went in at the first joint with his hips and his back and the stone behind it. Then the head, on the turn. Then the head again, backhand, in the same place. The full sequence, every blow landing exactly where three days of dead ones said it should go.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. He felt the blows land, all the way up the bar. The length of it stopped in the water for one breath, and the wall above him made a sound like the roof coming off a building. Then the four seconds were gone, and it kept coming, and now it knew exactly where he was. It struck three times, fast, the head and both front legs. He was not under the first, and not under the second. The third he took on the bar with both hands.

The force of it drove him a full step backward through the water, and his feet never left the stone. For a while he stayed ahead of it. It turned in the water like something a tenth its size. The first time it reached for him, he was not where the claw came down. The second time, he was closer in than it wanted him, inside the swing of the leg. The bar cracked off the joint he had already hurt, and the limb pulled back short. The wall above him was one long wall of sound.

Croft was screaming at him to get out of the water, and he was not the only one. Up on the wall, Mrs. Amery had come out of her chair. Once, it looked past him. The head swung toward the steps, where the last of the swimmers were still being hauled onto the stone, and it started to go around him. He stepped in front of it and hit it in the face. The head came back around, and it did not look past him again. Twice it drove its own wave at him, a shoulder of harbor water with its weight behind it.

Twice the water broke over a boy who did not move an inch, and the wall roared at that too. His feet were the whole fight. That was Set Stance, drilled through a winter of nights, and as long as he had the stone under him, it could not put him anywhere. Up on the wall, Prosser had his watch in his hand and was not looking at it. Abe was not getting out of the water. Every step it took toward the steps was a step toward people who could not stand in the sea, and he could.

So he stayed in front of it, and gave ground slowly, and hit every leg it sent at him. The water was past his waist now and rising with every yard he gave. The thing put one leg through the upturned punt where it floated and did not seem to notice. His arms had never worked like this in his life. It was like fighting weather. Somewhere in it he understood that nothing he had was going to kill this. That was fine too. He did not need to kill it.

He needed it looking at him until the water behind him was empty of everybody else. Then, behind him, he heard the last of the swimmers go up the steps, and the shallows were his alone. He could have gone up the steps then, and the thing would have come out of the water after him, into the city. So he stayed where it could reach him, and kept it looking at him. The leg he had hurt came around low, under the water, where nobody on the wall could see it.

It hooked him behind the knees and pulled, and for the first time since a mat in Leeds, the ground went out from under him. The blow came while he was still in the air. He never saw which leg it was. It was like being hit by a swinging dock beam. It took him off the top of the water and put him down in the shallows ten feet away, and the splash he made was small under the sound the crowd made watching it. Then every sound on the wall stopped at once.

Six hundred people had watched him all morning, and nothing in the water had touched him, not once, in three days. Now the boy was down in the shallows and the thing was coming over him. For one breath, the high ground of Calder was silent enough to hear the other fight, streets away behind the wall, still going. He came down rolling. He came up eight feet from where he had landed, on his feet, facing it, with the bar still in his hand. His mouth was full of blood.

He moved the bar to his right hand, because the left wasn't answering properly. He was standing. The stop on the wall broke into screaming, all along it at once, and under the screaming Dobbs was roaring something from the pier that nobody could hear. The wall wasn't telling him to get out of the water anymore. It was just noise now, six hundred voices of it. Somewhere back up the rise, in the six hundred, Peg and June were watching this. He kept his eyes on the thing in the water.

It did not give him a second exchange. He was still finding the stone with his back foot when the water around his legs moved the wrong way. It had learned him. This time it did not swing, and it did not lunge where he could read it. A claw came up out of the churn and closed around his leg from ankle to knee. There was no more hurry in it than in a man picking up a tool he means to use. He hit the joint of it with everything he had left, twice, and it did not stop this time.

He got the end of the bar under the claw and leaned all his weight on it, and the claw did not move. The water came up his chest. He was being walked backward off the edge of the shallows, hitting the claw every step of it. Behind him, the deep water off the mouth of the cut stood black and open. Along the top of the wall the crowd moved with him, keeping level with one boy going backward through the sea. He tried for one full breath, and the water closed over his mouth halfway through it.

Then it went backward into the deep, and took him with it. Stopping the world takes fifty seconds of calm. He had a claw around his leg and half a breath in his chest. The last he had of the surface was sound: the wall screaming, one voice roaring his name from the pier. Then the sea shut over his head and took all of it away. The harbor smoothed itself over the place where he had been. On the high ground, six hundred people stood and watched the water. The crews on the piers watched it.

Dobbs stood at the end of the pier with a coiled rope in his hands and nowhere to throw it, and watched it with them. Purnell stood beside him with the sea still running off her, and said nothing. The water stayed shut. The boy did not come up.