The first hunter through Cliffhook's inland door wore white cloth across his mouth and carried a hook made for Jiang's neck.
Jiang saw the hook from inside Aylin's coat. Its point passed close enough to catch the firelight while boots crowded the steps behind it.
He wanted five quiet minutes and something dry beneath his belly. Whitewake had apparently brought neither.
Aylin closed one side of the coat over his exposed mark. The thin wool trapped a little heat without touching his bleeding shoulder. Jiang stayed where he was. Leaving would require standing, and his left foot had become an unreliable rumor.
The hook bearer stopped when Dagna raised the broken shaft of her spear. "Captain Virr."
"Huntmaster Grell," Dagna replied.
The man behind the cloth had iron-gray hair cut to his jaw and one bare hand marked by old salt burns. He looked first at Dagna's missing spearhead, then at Tovin's wrapped hand, the flooded floor, and the gate wheel resting crooked behind them.
Only then did he look at Aylin.
"Dead royal walking," he said.
His gaze dropped to the shape in her coat.
"Marked beast at large. Eres sent one horn for each. Convenient of you to keep them together."
Aylin pulled the coat lower around Jiang's feet. "You brought more iron for him."
"You still have hands."
"One of them works. On a generous day."
Ossin Grell's face stayed flat. The younger hunter carrying the hook almost laughed, then remembered who stood in front of him.
Dagna stepped between them. "Both reached Cliffhook alive under my field judgment. The beast found the fault in the flood pen. Aylin helped cut it."
"You used her name."
"She has been using it all week."
"So did the thing in our horn."
That moved every face except Ossin's.
Behind him, a broad white horn hung from a hunter's shoulder. Worked salt formed its flared mouth, bound to a dark wooden throat by copper bands. A wet leather wrap covered the mouthpiece. The same horn had called across the cliff while the lower house drained.
Tovin closed his useful hand around Torren's doubled knot. "Did it speak before or after you sounded the hunt?"
"After the first call. Before the second."
"And you still put your mouth on it?"
"I sent Korrin first."
The horn bearer looked offended behind his cloth.
"Leadership," Jiang thought, "remained recognizable across worlds."
Yrsa Pell limped between the bunks with her house maul on one shoulder. "You can compare scars after you leave my smoke room. I have families uphill, a gate on two teeth, and enough water under my floor to drown this argument properly."
Ossin glanced at the broken middle tooth. Saltglass dust still clung to Dagna's snapped spearhead inside the crack.
"What entered the horn?"
"The same black-green strand that entered our bell," Yrsa said. "It traveled through the gate hinge. We cut this branch."
"You believe you cut it."
"You are welcome to put your head in the hinge and improve my confidence."
Jiang liked her more each time she threatened a superior.
Ossin lowered his hook, though he kept both hands on the shaft. "The city call named two quarry. I return with two quarry. Eres can decide what followed you into its road."
"There is no direct road," Dagna said. "Brinehook's causeway is under the tide."
"Then you will enjoy the stairs. Separate them. Cover the mark."
Jiang pecked Aylin's coat buckle once.
She looked down. Each retreating wave sent a faint tremor from the loaded gate through the dry block beneath her boot and into Jiang's breast. A smaller echo shivered through the horn's copper bands, and Jiang struck the buckle again with the next wave.
Aylin followed his beak toward the horn. "Set that down."
Ossin's hands tightened on the hook. "You are in no position to give my line orders."
"Your horn is keeping time with the gate that tried to eat your people. You may call that an order if it helps you obey faster."
Korrin looked at Ossin.
The horn spoke in Aylin's voice before either man moved.
"This road reaches Eres."
No chest rose behind the sound. The wet leather over the mouthpiece stayed tied.
Korrin tore the strap from his shoulder and let the horn strike the step. The hook bearer swung toward Aylin. Dagna caught the shaft under her broken spear and shoved its point into the ceiling beam.
"That voice came from your gear," she said.
"It came from her," Ossin replied.
"Then explain how she spoke with her mouth closed."
Aylin's mouth was open now. What came out was less useful than the horn's answer.
"Father used those horns to call children in from the river wall."
Jiang felt her arm tighten around him. She had crossed two worlds to reach Eres. Every road home had learned how to use that desire as a handle.
He pressed his beak against the coat edge, asking for a lower view.
Aylin crouched without taking her attention from Ossin. The movement put Jiang near the step where the horn had fallen.
From standing height, its inner flare looked white. From the floor, he could see under the curled lower lip. A thread as dark as pond weed lay between salt and copper. Each wave tremor made it pull tight.
Jiang pointed with his beak.
Tovin knelt beside him. "I see it."
Ossin held the hook level. "You saw what the marked animal wanted you to see."
"I watched a bell choose a hinge while this animal was underwater getting bitten for us. Hold the horn still."
Tovin trapped the wooden throat beneath one knee. His good hand found the lower copper clasp. When it refused to turn, he caught the leather tab between his teeth and pulled.
Blood spread through the wrapping on his other hand as he braced it against the stair.
Dagna crouched to steady the flare. "Stop leaning on that hand."
"I have been trying since Brinehook."
The clasp opened, and black-green filament slid from beneath it toward Tovin's wrist.
Jiang drove his beak down on the loose leather tab. Tovin jerked his arm back while Jiang dragged the horn mouth away from him. The filament stretched between copper and salt, thin enough to vanish whenever the metal stopped shaking.
Ossin saw it. The white cloth tightened over his silent mouth before he set the hook against the wall and drew a short hammer from his belt.
"If I break the west horn, Eres receives no warning from us until we reach Glasswash."
"If you keep it," Tovin said, "Eres receives whatever that thing wants to say in your voice."
Ossin looked at Aylin, then at Jiang's mark where the coat had slipped open.
He had come prepared to kill both of them. Jiang could see the easier plan still waiting in the man's grip. Two blows would preserve the horn and leave Whitewake with bodies that could no longer contradict a call.
Dagna rose beside him with half a spear.
Yrsa adjusted the house maul on her shoulder.
Neither woman made a speech.
Ossin brought the hammer down on the copper band.
The horn split along its wooden throat. Aylin's recorded voice broke in the middle of Eres and came out as a wet scraping noise.
He struck again. Worked salt burst across the step, and the black-green filament snapped back through the fragments toward the inland wall.
Hedda dropped a brazier shovel over the nearest piece. Yrsa crushed it before the strand found another seam.
The remaining light fled uphill.
Ossin put away the hammer. "No one touches intact road salt on the climb. No one answers a familiar voice without seeing the living mouth. Virr keeps her two quarry because I would prefer to arrive without fighting my own line."
"They are not my quarry," Dagna said.
"Then your week has been more complicated than the report suggested."
Tovin sat back and retied his hand with his teeth and thumb. Jiang watched the knot come out crooked. Hedda took the end from him and fixed it without asking whether a witness needed pride more than blood.
Aylin lifted Jiang against her chest again.
"Is the coat helping?" she asked.
The honest answer included cold, anger, a torn shoulder, and the fact that her warmth was the only part of him currently improving. He gave her one tap: keep holding.
She understood enough to leave the coat closed.
Ossin retrieved his hook. "We move before the filament reaches another city mouth."
Stone knocked against stone above him.
The hunt line turned.
Something white descended the inland steps behind them. It had no head above its collar and no hands inside its sleeves. River stones filled the hem, lifting and dropping beneath the cloth like feet that had learned walking from a bad description.
A copper strip struck the stair. `AYLIN SERAN` had been hammered across its face.
Aylin stopped with Jiang in her arms.
Ossin looked from the empty funeral cloak to the living woman wearing its name.
"There," he said. "That is the dead royal we were sent to hunt."