Episode 79 · At the Threshold

The footsteps came closer.

The first Hunter came out of the tunnel on his feet, the way Soles had. He did not come through the wall. He came the way Soles had come, through the water and the mouth of the arch, stooped under the low ceiling, and straightened his back only in the chamber. He was tall, in black clothes without any insignia, wet and clinging to his body.

The flashlight beam fell straight on his face, and Soles could not have said, then or later, what he looked like. There was nothing to remember in that face. No expression. The stillness of a river stone after a thousand years of water.

Behind him, in the tunnel, more footsteps could be heard.

The Hunter looked neither at the carvings, nor at the slab, nor at Soles, and yet Soles felt clearly where his attention had gone: under his jacket, to the place under his arm, where the oiled leather lay pressed against his ribs.

The Hunter took a step.

He was in no hurry. He had no reason to be. Behind him, the second came out of the tunnel, straightened up and stopped an arm’s length behind the first. The third stayed in the mouth of the tunnel, shoulders hunched under the low ceiling, closing off the way Soles had come.

Hold.

Leonatus’s word was close to his ear. Soles kept his feet beneath him. The soldier could lend him steadiness; the hand, the rib and the men closing the tunnel were still there.

Soles knew. He felt in his bones how much they would still carry him: his knees were trembling, the cracked rib carried a third of what it should, his head could barely stay on his neck under all the weight of the city poured into him. He was not a man who could fight. He was a man who could barely stand.

And at the edge, the three were waiting.

They were not pushing him. That was the strangest part, and Soles understood it only then, with the flashlight trembling and the blood drying on his chin. This time they would not come in without being let in. Until now they had come on their own, as echo, as reflex, as a knot tied in sleep, when they wanted.

He had seen them apart in the garden: a soldier who did not think him trained, a king who expected obedience, a tired man intent on his work. None had lived this moment for him. He would be asking them to move through a body they did not have to mend afterward.

He wanted Maxim’s voice behind him. Something stupid about the flashlight, something he could answer without thinking. The tunnel gave him only the scrape of a third man’s boot.

He had brought them away from the house. That had been the plan. Here he was, away from the house, and the plan had nothing left in it.

If I let them in, who holds the blade?

His right wrist still ached where the man under the bridge had caught it. He tightened his fingers around the flashlight until the shaking became worse, then stopped. He could feel the power waiting in his bones. He could not make his hand obey him with a light in it.

The first Hunter watched that hand. Soles knew what he had shown him.

He took a breath through his mouth. There was blood drying on his teeth. Whatever he chose next, he would have to live with it, if there was enough of him left.

They waited for his decision.

The Hunter took another step. Then another. There were about five steps left between them.

Soles left the door open.

He could not say how. Only that, in one instant, he was holding on to the edge of himself with both hands, and in the next he was no longer holding on. And they came in.

The soldier first. Soles’s body sank low, on spread feet, the weight on the heels and the good shoulder forward, in the stance of a man who has stood in a shield wall and knows that the first thing you do is not fall. The rib screamed. The soldier did not let him listen.

Then the straight, cold one. He did not move his body. He moved his gaze. Soles looked at the three Hunters and no longer saw three. He saw an order. The one in front decided. The second waited to see what the first decided. The one in the tunnel guarded, and nothing more. They were not three hunters.

They were one hunter with two extra hands, and those hands did not know how to move on their own. The cold one had seen this in men dressed in silk, in high-ceilinged halls, and had not been surprised then either.

Then the hurried one, who counted. Two steps back to the slab. Four forward to the Hunter in front. The Hunter’s reach was an arm and a half of Soles’s. The hands were in black gloves, but the arm bent at the elbow like any man’s. That meant it could be locked at the elbow. The hurried one had seen men who hunted like this before.

Somewhere else, under another light, and he had not escaped. He was counting now with a cold fury, so it would not happen again.

Last came Phenom, with the sharp thing held quietly in his hand.

Soles’s hand went under his jacket, undid the knot of the oiled leather strap and drew the blade.

He had never held it like this. He had lifted it from the chest, wrapped it, carried it pressed against his ribs for days, but he had never drawn it against anyone. Now it sat in his palm as if it had sat there a whole lifetime: an underhand grip, tight, the blade turned back along the wrist, the thumb on the guard. It was not the grip of a man cutting bread. It was the grip of someone who knew this thing had not been made for bread.

The Hunter in front stopped.

The second stopped too, a moment later.

Soles looked at them through four pairs of eyes at once and felt the face he was wearing. It was not his. Nor any of theirs. It was a face made of all of them, held in front of his own with both hands, the way the third face on the wall held its mask. Underneath it was still him. Only, for the moment, he was no longer the one looking out.

And to make room for them, something had to leave.

He felt it like a brick taken out of a wall to let a beam through. It did not hurt. It was worse than pain: it was coming loose. Somewhere deep, in the place where the things from home were kept, something small wobbled and began to slide. A sink. Mary’s hands, wet, taking out of the pocket of a pair of overalls something small, with plastic covers, its pages stuck together by the water.

Her voice, annoyed, not loud, tired: you left it in your pocket again. And Kale, laughing in the doorway, his hands black with oil.

Soles tried to hold on to it. He gripped with everything he had left. That small thing, with plastic covers, that he had been looking for. Why had he been looking for it? He had looked for it in the box, on the floor, on the tiles, among the gloves. He had looked for it because…