Chapter 6 #2
The Shore will come down this coast next year and they will take everything you have and everyone you have and they will not bring anybody back."
Liam's mind was moving very fast.
"Why do you care," he said.
Rennick turned.
"What?"
"You've got sixty people up the Sound and forty fighters. The Shore is going to win a war on the waterfront and then come down the coast, and you'll be gone before they ever get to Nell."
Liam kept his voice flat. "So why are you standing on this beach in February trying to buy twenty-two starving fishermen with a boy you stole? What's the actual trade?"
The beach went quiet.
Rennick looked at him for a long moment.
And then he grinned, and it was the first thing about the man that had not been perfectly controlled.
"Nell," he said, without taking his eyes off Liam. "Where in the hell did you get this one?"
"He walked here," Nell said. "From Minnesota."
"Nobody comes from Minnesota."
"That's what I said."
Rennick came back to the fire and sat down on his crate and looked up at Liam with his forearms on his knees.
"Boats," he said. "That's the trade. I need boats and I need men who can row them and I need people who know this coast. Nell's got four hulls and twenty-two people who've fished this water their whole lives, and I've got sixty mouths and enough powder problems to keep me up nights."
"You want them to fight for you," Liam said.
"I want them to row for me."
"That's the same thing with extra steps."
"Everything's the same thing with extra steps, son. That's what a world is."
Rennick spread his hands. "But if you want it plain, here it is plain. I'm going to hit that waterfront before the Shore does. In the next four weeks, while their powder's still stacked and their men are still scattered. And when I take it, whoever stood with me eats for the next ten years,
and whoever didn't will be standing on a beach somewhere in November wondering who's rowing toward them."
Nell Rook sat down slowly on a stone.
"You want the market," she said.
"I want what's under it," Rennick said.
Liam did not move a muscle.
He kept his face exactly as it was and his shoulders exactly where they were and his breathing perfectly even, because Tom Darcy had spent three decades reading men and had once told him that the only tell that ever mattered was the one a man didn't know he had.
But something in him had gone completely still.
"Everyone knows about the door," Rennick said.
"You've heard about it, wherever you're from. Steel door under the market with a light on it. Two years and a thousand dead men and not a scratch on it."
He rubbed his beard. "And the thing is, boy, it doesn't matter who holds the ground. That's the joke. Four crews have bled each other white over a piece of hillside they can't open. It's not a door. It's a shrine. It's a thing men die in front of."
"So why do you want it?"
"Because the man from Portland says he can open it."
Liam's blood stopped.
"He says the powder's not for the war," Rennick said.
"He says the powder's for the door. He says he's got a mining charge and a plan and a man who used to shoot rock for a living, and he says that when the Shore takes that waterfront, he is going to bring that hillside down and take whatever's behind that steel, and whatever it is,
it will make him a king."
He looked up.
"And I have thought about that a great deal," Rennick said quietly, "and I have decided that I would rather it was me."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Liam stood on the gravel with the fog coming in off the cove and the fire burning at his knees and the Winchester heavy in his hand, and he did the arithmetic.
Four weeks.
Three hundred miles.
A door that had a code, and a man with powder who did not know it, and who was going to bring four feet of concrete down on top of a room full of medicine because he could not do the one thing that Sarah Vance had folded into oilcloth and put in a girl's pack in Minnesota.
If it were going to shift, it would have shifted already, Isaiah had said, on a broken bridge, a lifetime ago.
Nothing held forever.
"It won't work," Liam said.
Rennick's eyes narrowed.
"What?"
"The powder. It won't open that door." Liam heard his own voice come out cold and level and very sure, and he could not have stopped it if he had wanted to.
"The frame's set in four feet of poured concrete on every side. The hinges are internal. It was built by people who assumed exactly this, who assumed that one day somebody would come at it with everything he had, and they built it to lose that fight and still be standing."
He shook his head. "You could put the whole hillside on top of it. You'd bring the market down and you'd bury the door and the door would still be shut."
Rennick stared at him.
The silence went on a long time.
And Liam realized, with a slow spreading horror, exactly what he had just done.
He had been so busy being right.
"Now how," said Rennick softly, "would a boy from Minnesota know a thing like that?"
Liam said nothing.
The Sawtooth men had gone very quiet. Two of them had drifted, casually, without seeming to move at all, so that they were no longer standing where they had been standing.
Isaiah made a small sound.
Rennick stood up.
He came around the fire, slowly, hands loose and open at his sides, and he stopped four feet from Liam and looked down into his face with an expression that had nothing pleasant in it at all anymore.
"I've been on this coast two years," he said. "And I've watched five hundred men throw themselves at that hillside and I have listened to every fool theory there is about what's behind it. And not one of them, not one, ever said a word about the frame being poured in."
"It's a guess."
"It's not a guess." Rennick's voice had dropped very low. "You said it like a man reading off a page."
"Rennick," Nell said, standing.
"Sit down, Nell."
"He pulled my people out of eight months of—"
"Sit down, Nell."
She sat.
Rennick's eyes had not left Liam's face.
"You know something," he said. "You came out of the east on a stolen boat and you know something about that door, and you've known it since before you ever heard my name."
Liam's hand tightened on the Winchester.
Fifteen rounds. Ten men. Twenty-two fishermen with rakes.
He worked the read, fast, and every branch of it ended the same way, and he stood there on a gray beach with his friend dying behind him on a door and understood that he was out of angles.
And then Chloe Buck said, from the grass at the edge of the clearing, in a voice thin as paper but perfectly clear:
"Ask him what's carved on it."
Every head on the beach turned.
She had gotten herself up onto one elbow. She was white as bone and her lips were cracked and her eyes were burning, and she was looking at Rennick like she was measuring him for something.
"What?" Rennick said.
"The door," Chloe said. "You've stood in front of it. There's a name carved in the steel, shoulder height, done by hand with a chisel, and whoever did it did a bad job."
Rennick had gone absolutely rigid.
"Nobody knows that," he said. "Nobody outside the Pike men has been close enough to read it in two years."
"Marcus Vance," Chloe said.
And she smiled, and it was awful, and Liam felt every hair on his body stand up, because it was not her smile.
"Ask me how I know," she said.
"Chloe," Liam said.
"Ask me how I know, Rennick."
"Chloe, stop—"
"Because his brother told us," Chloe said. "Before he died. In a cabin two thousand miles from here. He gave us the code, and it's in my pack, and it is fifteen feet from where you're standing right now."
Nobody breathed.
And Isaiah, staring at her, said in a voice of pure horror:
"Liam. Her pack's in the blockhouse. She hasn't been near it. She doesn't know where it is."
Chloe turned her head and looked at Liam.
"I don't," she agreed pleasantly.
And her eyes rolled back and she dropped into the grass like a cut string.