Beyond the Shutter

“Step left,” Pell said.

Mali had no reason to know what he meant. She moved because he had seen something she could not, and there was no time to inspect his right to say it.

The shutter came down between her and Vale.

Not cleanly. Vale's blade struck its edge and lodged. Pell had pulled too early or too late; the wood caught on the crooked guide, paused, then fell another hand's breadth with a violent crack. Mali's own sword hit the moving crosspiece. The brass guard jarred against stone. Pain opened in her torn palm, and the hilt went out of her hand.

The sword slid beyond the descending wood.

She reached.

Pell shouted something she did not catch. His right hand still held the lever. The shutter's iron shoe struck his wrist as the guide snapped free. He made a sound so abrupt that Mali stopped reaching for the sword.

She caught him beneath the arms and pulled.

His hand came away from the lever. The shutter fell the last distance and hit the floor. On the far side, Vale struck it once with something heavy. The trapped blade rang in the wood.

Pell sat on the stone, staring at his wrist.

“I can't feel my fingers.”

Mali knelt. Her own ribs were a dull, continuous hurt, past the sharpness that told her where they began. She found the clean bandage in her belt pouch and pulled it out with her good hand. It was the clean roll Adra had given her, still dry inside the pouch.

She made the sling too tight at first. Pell flinched. She loosened it and asked where it hurt before moving the arm again.

“Don't try to move your fingers,” she said.

“I wasn't.”

A thin edge of humour, or shock. She could not tell. She secured his forearm against his chest and helped him sit with his back against the wall.

Through the shutter, Vale called her name.

Pell's eyes went toward the voice.

“Don't answer,” Mali said, then stopped. “You can. I won't.”

The clerk shook his head.

Above them, the applause ended. A bell sounded, though no clapper hung in the tower. The note came through the building itself, through a brass route with crystalline fittings she had not reached in time.

“He'll call the sequence early,” she said.

Pell closed his eyes. “The programme has a reserve cue.”

“What?”

“If the performance doesn't finish. If equipment fails. They go straight to the demonstration.”

Mali thought of Rin's hand above the cue desk, Sori giving back the contract, Sena marking closures onto an old plan. They had not expected cancellation alone to stop it. They had expected time to move people before the teachers chose to begin.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

Pell tried to get his feet beneath him. His face went grey. She held him until he was seated again.

“No,” he said.

“The kitchen route?”

“Behind you. Left at the narrow turn. Two doors. You'll hear them.”

She did not want to leave him. She also could not carry him, reach Deren and fetch the person who might carry him all at once. She looked at the little slate beside his knee.

“Can I take that?”

He nodded.

She wrote with her left hand, large and badly: Injured clerk. Lower service shutter. Bring healer. Guard Iss injured at upper stair; breathing when last seen. She added the time as nearly as she could judge from the opening bells and ran the few paces to the kitchen turn.

A porter stood there holding a basket of clean towels. She knew him from the failed junction test, though not his name.

“Read that,” she said.

He did. He looked at her bloodied sleeve.

“You too?”

“After. Please get them.”

He put down the basket and called into the kitchen. Another voice answered. Mali waited until she heard the words repeated, then returned to Pell.

He had not moved. On the other side of the shutter, metal scraped against wood.

“Someone's coming,” she said.

“The guard?”

“Yes. I sent his name too.”

Pell nodded. His mouth had gone slack with the effort of bearing pain without making decisions about it. Mali wished she could offer water, a safe bed, a promise about the hand. The first was around the corner. The others were not hers to give.

She took off the scabbard. It dragged at her belt without its blade, caught on the broken guide and might catch again in the shaft. She laid it beside the wall, away from Pell's feet, scar upward. The sword lay beyond the shutter, within a yard she could not cross.

She had drawn it out of a house two years ago because she refused to make leaving into an act of noble self-denial. Since then it had bought her work, space on a road, the right to be listened to by people who would otherwise have seen a young woman carrying too little money. She did not want to leave it here.

Pell followed her gaze.

“I'll tell the porters,” he said.

“Don't go after it.”

“I can't.”

The answer shamed her into a small, helpless laugh. He almost smiled.

Beyond them, the first ranks began the opening count. She could hear it through the stone now, not the words but the shared pace. The copper loop was gone beneath the stairs. She had nothing left to blacken and tell her what she already knew.

Pell nodded toward the maintenance shaft.

“Not the stairs. They'll have closed the upper door.”

“Does it reach behind the dais?”

“Old inspection hatch. Above the return room. The grate lifts inward.”

“Locked?”

“Not on this side.”

The map had shown it as a narrow line beside the vertical fitting. Sena had asked why it remained when a new stair had been added. Now Mali understood the answer: someone still had to reach a pipe after the important people had covered it with a platform.

She looked up.

The shaft was dark, wide enough for shoulders, fitted with old iron rungs. Dust lay thick on the first. She tested it with her foot while both hands held the wall. The iron did not move.

Pell looked at her injured arm.

“I know,” she said.

“He'll hurt you.”

“I'm already hurt.”

It was not an answer to what he had asked. She stopped with one foot on the rung.

“I need him to hear me before they finish. This is the way I can reach him.”

The clerk nodded. She was glad he did not call it brave.

At the kitchen turn, footsteps were coming. Mali heard the porter telling someone to mind the wet stone, then the clatter of a water jug. She waited until the healer came into sight.

Adra saw her and opened her mouth.

“Pell first,” Mali said. “Then Iss above. Vale gave him a needle. He was breathing.”

The healer went to the clerk. She asked him his name, told the porter where to set the water and began making the room smaller than the disaster, one question at a time.

Mali climbed.

The first rung hurt her palm. The second made her ribs pull. She found a way to keep most of the weight in her legs, using her forearms to brace rather than hauling herself upward. It was slow. Dust entered the cut beneath her jaw and made her want to wipe it with the hand she needed to keep holding on.

Halfway up, she stopped.

Not because she had reached a locked door or felt the signal seize a limb. Because she was exhausted and the shaft gave her no room to pretend a better posture would fix it. She pressed her forehead against cool stone. Below, Adra asked Pell whether he felt pressure or only pain. Above, a hundred people inhaled together.

Mali thought of Anet at the examination gate, kneeling to loosen a boot. Of Hesh telling her they did not owe each other a whole road. Of Sori refusing to let her claim four women's decision as her own sacrifice.

None of them was in the shaft. Their help had not become strength she could spend without limit. It had made a route, and now she had to climb the part that was hers.

She took the next rung.

Near the top, a narrow inspection slit showed the central court in a thin strip. The cloth still covered most of the disc. Beneath it the brass collar glowed pale, light moving down toward the return room. She could not see Ember. She could hear no great blow from below.

He was waiting for something she did not know how to give him.

She went on until the grate was against her shoulder. It lifted inward as Pell had said, scraping the frame. She waited for a shout. None came. The audience watched the dais, the beautiful ranks, the person appointed to tell them suffering could be brought into order.

Mali pushed through onto a narrow ledge behind the platform rail.

Her hands were raw. Her belt was empty. Across the court she could see the west service door opening and Mae helping a woman into the light.

Deren stood less than six paces away.

She said his name without the title.