Leverage

The timber did not move.

Elias braced his feet and pulled with everything in his back and legs. For one hopeful instant he felt the wood shift beneath his hands, but the movement came from somewhere else entirely. Above them, what remained of the roof groaned. A loose slat dropped and struck the ground a pace from Maelin's shoulder, and the trapped man made a sound through his teeth that Elias would have preferred never to hear.

"Stop," Maelin said.

Elias let go. His palms were already raw where the grain had bitten into them, and he stood with his hands half raised, feeling foolish. He had pulled because she had knelt beside the timber, and he had assumed kneeling meant lifting.

Maelin wasn't looking at him. She was looking along the beam, the way Garrick used to look along a length of steel, and after a moment he did the same.

It wasn't simply a timber. It was a rafter, or had been, and only one end had fallen. The far end still rested on the stone foundation of the wall, and across its middle lay a broad section of collapsed roof, shingles and joists and rotten boards tangled together into a single sagging weight. When he'd pulled upward from the man's end, the whole thing had pivoted on the wall like a seesaw, and the roof above had shifted with it.

He saw it all at once, the way a mechanism sometimes arranged itself in his head when he stopped staring at the part that was broken.

"If we lift from here, it slides," he said. "The roof comes down on whoever's pulling."

"Yes."

"We need to raise it straight, not tip it. A lever from the side, with something solid under it as a fulcrum. Close to the leg, so the roof doesn't feel it."

"Yes," Maelin said again, and it was only then that Elias noticed Berric was already returning from the edge of the clearing, dragging a long split fence rail through the grass. Maelin had sent him for it before Elias had finished pulling.

Elias felt heat rise in his face. He had worked the problem out correctly. He had simply worked it out second.

"Good," Maelin said, and he realized she meant it. "Now tell me what happens when we lift it."

Elias looked at the leg. The timber lay across the man's shin, and the trouser beneath it was dark and stiff with blood. It had been dark for hours, judging by the color at the edges.

"We pull him out."

"And?"

He didn't know. He searched for the answer anyway, through the manual and the medical pamphlet he had bought secondhand in the spring. Crush injuries. Splinting. Nothing about this.

Maelin unbuckled the injured man's belt with quick, practiced hands. "That beam has been sitting on him since morning. It's been squeezing everything shut. Take it off fast and whatever it's been holding closed opens all at once, and he empties out onto the grass while we're congratulating ourselves." She slid the belt beneath his thigh, well above the knee, and cinched it. "Stick."

Elias found one and handed it to her. She twisted it through the belt until the man cried out, then tied it off with a strip of his own torn sleeve.

"You won't find that in a book," Maelin said. "Or you will, but three pages after the bit where they tell you to lift the beam."

On the man's other side, Tavian had crouched down and taken hold of his free hand. Elias had not seen him move there. The man was perhaps thirty, with a weathered face and a beard gone patchy where he'd scraped it against the ground, and his eyes kept sliding toward the quarry entrance as if something were pulling them.

"Hey," Tavian said. "What's your name?"

"Fenn."

"Fenn what?"

"Aldmoor."

"Fenn Aldmoor." Tavian nodded seriously. "That's a good name. Sounds like a man who owns a boat."

Fenn stared at him. Something that was almost a laugh escaped him, and then it turned into a wince.

"I don't own a boat."

"Not yet," Tavian said. "Listen, Fenn, the lady with the shield is going to lift this thing off you, and it's going to hurt, and you're going to be very rude about it. Everyone's fine with that. But while they set up, tell me what happened. Slowly. How'd you end up under a roof?"

Elias started to say this wasn't the time, then stopped, because Maelin had tilted her head slightly toward them while she worked, and he realized she was listening too.

Fenn told it in pieces. He and Harl had taken a livestock contract out of Weldon, a village south of the valley. They'd followed the tracks to the quarry, and Harl had heard something moving in the old tool shed and gone to look. Then the building came down, whether from rot or from whatever had been inside it, Fenn didn't know. And then the prowlers came.

"Not from inside," Fenn said. His voice was getting thinner. "From the top. Off the rim. All three. They didn't come for me, they came for the noise. Went over the rubble, then Harl--" He stopped. "Then they went back up. They've been going up and down the east cut all morning. Up top, then down the cut, then back into the quarry. Like a circuit."

Tavian looked up at Maelin.

"The east cut," he said. "That's the path we came down."

Maelin's hands paused on the tourniquet for just a moment. Then she nodded once and called across the clearing.

"Corren. We're not going out the way we came in."

Corren had taken a position at the corner of the ruined shed, where he could see both the quarry mouth and the pale line of the rim above it, with an arrow on the string and the bow held low. He answered without turning.

"Haul road, then. South side. It'll be longer."

"It'll be longer," Maelin agreed.

Elias looked at Tavian. Tavian was already looking back at Fenn, asking him whether Weldon had a decent inn, as though the conversation had never been about anything else. Elias understood suddenly that he'd been about to tell his best friend to be quiet, and that if he had, they would have carried a dying man straight up the path three cliff prowlers were using as a road.

He filed that away somewhere he'd have to look at later.

The fulcrum was a squared stone from the foundation, which Berric and Elias rolled into place against the timber a short span from Fenn's leg while Maelin watched the roof rather than them. Berric took the end of the fence rail first, then shifted his grip, and Elias saw his jaw tighten. The cloth around his right wrist had been wrapped for a reason.

"I've got the long end," Elias said.

Berric looked at him, and for once there was no joke waiting behind it. "It's heavier than it looks."

"Everything today has been."

That earned him a short breath of laughter. Berric moved closer to the fulcrum, where the weight was shorter but steadier, and Elias took the end of the rail against his shoulder.

While they set their feet, Elias looked toward Corren. He knew it wasn't the time, but the question had been sitting in him since the ridge, and he had the terrible feeling that if he didn't ask now, he might not get the chance.

"The tracks," he said quietly. "Up on the hill. You didn't know them."

"No."

"But you know prowlers."

Corren's eyes stayed on the rim. "I've seen them twice. In the high country, two weeks west of here. They live on rock, and rock doesn't keep prints. I've never seen one walk through mud." A pause. "Now I have."

Elias thought about that. Everything Corren knew, he had learned by seeing it once, and today he was seeing something for the first time, same as Elias. The difference was that Corren had spent twenty-five years learning what to do in the meantime.

"On three," Maelin said. "Tavian, you pull him. Straight back, not sideways. Fenn, you're going to hate this. One."

Elias leaned into the rail.

"Two."

He felt the rail bow slightly against the stone.

"Three."

He pushed down with his shoulder and his legs and his whole weight, and at first nothing happened except that his arms began to burn. Then the timber moved. It rose a finger's width, then two, and above them the collapsed roof creaked and settled but didn't slide, because the lift came straight up, just as he'd imagined it. Fenn screamed. Tavian dragged him back across the grass in one long, smooth pull, and the leg came free.

"Down," Maelin said. "Slow."

They lowered it. Elias's arms were shaking so badly that he had to hold the rail against his chest for a moment before he could let it go.

The leg was broken below the knee. Elias could see that from where he stood. The bone hadn't come through the skin, but the shin was wrong in a way that his eyes kept trying to correct. The gash across it welled red, but slowly, held back by the tourniquet, and Maelin pressed a pad of Elias's bandages against it before he had even realized she'd taken them from his pack.

"Your supplies are good," she said, binding it. "Too many of them, but good."

Elias decided he would think about that later too.

They splinted the leg with two lengths of the fence rail, which Berric split with his knife and his good hand. Then Maelin looked at the spears.

"Stretcher," she said. "Mine and yours."

Tavian's hand tightened around his spear. It was only for a heartbeat, but Elias saw it. They were in a valley with three predators nobody could see.

"You can't fight and carry at the same time," Maelin said, not unkindly. "Pick one. Right now we're carrying."

Tavian handed her the spear.

They laid the two shafts parallel on the grass and stretched their coats between them, and Elias's cord went around and through and around again, lashing it all into something that would hold a man. Elias tied the knots. He was good at knots. It felt like the first thing all day he had done before anyone else thought to.

Then there was Harl.

He lay where he had fallen, half beneath the rubble, and no one had gone close to him yet. Maelin went now. She knelt for a moment, and when she stood she held an iron badge in her palm, its chain broken. She closed Harl's coat over his face with the same efficient care she'd used on the tourniquet.

Fenn watched her from the stretcher. He didn't say anything.

"The Guild will send a recovery team," Maelin told him. "I'll file it myself."

"When practical," Fenn said.

"When practical."

Elias remembered reading that paragraph twice at the registration desk, running his eyes over the words as if they might mean something different on the second pass. They hadn't. He had understood them perfectly well then.

He had not understood them at all.

A sound came from above.

It was the clicking again, slow and deep, and nearer than it had been. Elias looked up at the rim of the quarry and at first saw nothing but pale stone and scrub and a strip of gray sky. Then part of the stone moved.

It lay flat along a ledge perhaps sixty feet up, the same broken gray as the rock around it, so that he only saw its shape when it shifted its weight. It was long, far longer than a man, with legs that folded wrong, like a cricket's, and a narrow head held low against the edge. It didn't rise or roar. It just watched them, and from somewhere deeper inside the quarry, another click answered it.

Corren's bowstring creaked.

"Don't," Maelin said. "Walk."

Berric and Elias took the front of the stretcher, Maelin and Tavian the back. Corren walked beside them with his arrow still nocked and his eyes on the rim. They crossed the clearing at a steady pace, neither slow nor fast, toward the old haul road on the south side, where wagons had once carried stone down to the valley floor. Nobody spoke. Elias counted his steps without meaning to, because counting was something he could do.

At a hundred and forty, they reached the trees.

At two hundred, the clicking stopped.

Nobody said anything about that either.

Elias's arms were already aching. The haul road wound south and then east through the trees, a long loop that would add hours to the walk back to Bellhaven, and the stretcher grew heavier with every step, but Fenn was breathing and the bandage was holding. Somewhere behind them was a quarry with a dead man in it, and a creature that could lie on a cliff and look exactly like the cliff.

Tavian, carrying the back left pole, caught Elias's eye over the stretcher.

"You all right?"

Elias considered the question honestly.

"No," he said. "But I think I will be."

Tavian nodded, as if that were a perfectly reasonable answer.

Behind them, Maelin shifted her grip on the poles.

"Good," she said. "Because that was the easy part."