51. Syneca #3
Ramiel stood, the scarred hunter again from collar to boots. “Heads down,” he said, to all of us. “You’re cargo. You’ve given up. The ones who fight don’t make it this far, so don’t look like one who would.” His borrowed eyes flicked to me last. “Especially you, Reckless.”
I flipped him off with a catty smile before we stepped out. We went up the hill in hunter’s hands.
The crowd peeled away from us the same way it had peeled away from the real hunters, a clear cold channel opening through the press of gray-coated bodies, and not one person met our eyes.
They knew what we were. They knew what it meant.
And they were grateful, every last one of them, that it wasn’t their line being walked up the mountain today.
The road narrowed as it climbed, the city falling away below us until there was nothing on either side but black rock sweating cold, and then the Gate itself rose up ahead.
It deserved the name. It was the only way in.
A single vast mouth in the face of the mountain, taller than any building in Grimora, its doors thrown open onto a throat of stone that swallowed the daylight whole.
There were no guards in the way I’d expected, no wall of soldiers.
There was worse. There were the Chroniclers.
They stood in a long row across the threshold, gray-robed, hooded, each one behind a stone lectern that had been worn smooth by centuries of hands.
They didn’t carry weapons. They didn’t need to.
The air around the Gate hummed with something I felt in my marked palm, an old pressure that pushed against my magic and watched to see if it pushed back.
I kept it banked. I kept my eyes down. I let myself be cargo.
Ramiel walked us forward and stopped at the nearest lectern, and held up a hand.
My hand.
Showing the Hunter’s Promise marked across my palm, the mark that meant I was Ripper’s catch, presented exactly as a hunter would present his right to deliver. The chronicler leaned forward and studied it for a long, long moment.
Her hooded head moved as she read slow, line by line.
She made a small sound in her throat, then reached out one gray finger and touched the parchment, tracing something, a number, a name, the Ripper’s seal, I couldn’t tell, and I waited for the touch to find the edge of the illusion the way Ramiel had warned a hand could find truth under glamour.
I peeked at the four lines, already ruled and numbered in a hand that matched the ledger because Ramiel had been smart and quick. The count was never in question. There was nothing for the chronicler to doubt, because the doubt had been answered before it could be asked.
That wasn’t the danger. The danger was the long, considering stillness of a thing deciding whether to let us cross at all. The humming at the Gate, the pressure of the low sound grew, gripping my throat as tightly as the collar had.
She set the parchment down. Then she lifted her head and looked at us, one by one, and began to write.
I felt her attention move over me like cold water and made myself be cargo, eyes down, shoulders bent, a woman with the fight already taken out of her.
The chronicler’s quill scratched. I risked one more glance and saw the strokes forming: hair a color mine had never been, a height that wasn’t mine, a scar on a cheek I didn’t have.
She was recording the disguise. Every feature Ramiel had layered over me, the chronicler set down as fact, in ink, into the ledger of a place that believed its records before it believed its own eyes.
She moved to Pip. Wrote her down enormous and weeping.
I wondered if Pip’s tears were real and I hated the thought of it.
She was brave. And an actress, I’d decided.
The chronicler moved to Calder, then Silas, cataloging four people who didn’t exist, filing them so thoroughly that the four of us who did would never appear in this mountain’s memory at all.
The quill stopped.
The chronicler looked at the row of us one final time, comparing the page to the lie and finding them identical.
Then she lifted up her stamp, and brought it down, and the sound of it was the loudest thing in the world. “Imprisoned.”
The hum at the threshold released all at once, and the chroniclers stepped back, and the throat of the mountain opened in front of us, swallowing the last of the daylight as we walked into Aventh Gate with iron at our throats and a city of unfortunate people at our backs.
We were in.
The records were somewhere in this mountain too, buried in a hall no witch had ever crossed and no chronicler would ever open, and even if we reached them there was no promise they held the one thing I needed.
So we weren’t going for the records. We were going for the man they answered to.
The king didn’t know the Phoenix had just been escorted through his own front door in chains, and by the time he understood it, it would already be too late for him to do anything but talk.
Now we just had to reach him, take from him what his father had buried, and get back out of a mountain that had never, not once, let anything go.