The stone beneath Jiang knocked twice, and the funeral cloak changed direction.
It left the taller spill chamber and began walking toward him.
Jiang remained on his belly in the shallow channel. Deep Lung had returned his breath quickly and stolen the herring from everywhere that mattered. Hunger cramped beneath his breast. His failed flipper scraped the wet floor whenever he tried to rise.
River stones carried the cloak without tiring. They kept coming.
Above Jiang, the palace horn repeated King Edric's order to bring Aylin home.
The buried answer struck twice again.
Each knock lifted silt from a narrow seam under Jiang's feet. A copper cup lay beneath the stone, upside down and trapped inside old saltglass. A black-green cord from the cloak's hem dragged toward it.
The accepted death was trying to reach the lower warning line.
Jiang shoved the loose guide rope against the wall with his beak and struck twice.
Outside, the reply came through the fibers rather than the stone. Two pulls. A pause. One.
It was Tovin's pattern.
Jiang looked at the round iron tongue in the ceiling. The guide groove ran through its center before climbing toward the side wheel. One pull from outside made the tongue shift and settle back. The second pull arrived while it was still loose.
Metal opened a finger's width above him.
Tovin had brought Torren's doubled knot to the right door.
Jiang caught the guide line and pulled once, then twice without a pause.
The wheel groaned overhead. Dagna shouted. Ossin answered with language that suggested Last Gate had been built by somebody he disliked personally.
Aylin's voice cut through both. "Again."
The guide line snapped tight twice.
The ceiling tongue lifted far enough for water to pour through its socket. Light entered around it, along with flour from Ista's sleeve and the end of Dagna's broken spear.
"Jiang, answer me," Aylin called.
He struck the spear once.
"He is there," Dagna said. "Push."
The human team leaned into the side wheel. Jiang heard Ossin counting effort in curses, Rian warning about a lower catch, Ista telling someone to keep dirty boots off her paddle, and Tovin hauling the guide line with one hand.
The inner jaw rose.
Its lower edge stopped at Aylin's knees. She dropped, shoved her uninjured arm beneath it, and crawled into the channel. Dagna followed with the spear shaft. Ossin turned sideways and forced his shoulders through. Rian and Ista remained at the wheel long enough to wedge it with the oven paddle, then came under after them.
Tovin stayed outside on the guide line.
No royal blood touched the gate.
The cloak reached Jiang before Aylin did.
Its copper name strip swung at the height of his exposed shoulder. Jiang rolled onto his good side, letting the first pass scrape the empty edge of his harness. The second came lower.
He caught the strip between his beak edges.
Black-green light ran across the copper toward his mouth. The mark under his feathers heated in answer, but cloth and salt cord still separated them. Recognition needed touch. Jiang intended to keep disappointing it.
The cloak walked over him.
River stones struck the floor on either side of him. Any human chest would have filled the gap and taken their weight. Jiang flattened his white belly to the water, folded his working wing, and let his dark back disappear under the hanging cloth.
The copper strip remained trapped in his beak behind him.
Forward steps pulled the cloak against its own name.
Salt cords tightened from collar to hem. One crossed Jiang's open shoulder. Pain blurred the chamber, yet the route beneath the cloth became visible through touch: one cord to the name strip, one to the pale-blue winter seal, and one black-green length leading toward the buried cup.
Biting harder, Jiang kicked backward until the stone-filled cloak stopped. Aylin entered the spill chamber on her elbows and reached for the copper strip over him.
"It is touching you."
Jiang struck the floor once with his good claws.
One strike meant wrong.
He turned his shoulder enough to show the cloth between copper and mark. Then he pointed his free foot at the cord leading to the buried cup.
Dagna understood first. "The strip is the bridle. Cut the name and the stones lose their direction."
Ossin drew a belt knife and offered it handle first.
Aylin took the knife.
From the cloak's empty collar came Edric's same road-home sentence.
Its empty collar faced her. The winter seal inside it caught the light from the lifted gate, pale blue and scratched where someone had pressed it into wet stitching.
Aylin touched the edge of that seal with one finger.
"My father held this," she said.
Rian crouched beside the lower channel, keeping both hands clear of the black-green cord. "Someone with his seal held it."
"He walked behind it."
"Someone walked behind it," Rian said.
Aylin looked at him with enough fury to make Ossin shift his hook between them.
Rian stayed where he was. "If you want grief to be proof, you learned nothing from the face that climbed out of River-Open."
That hurt because he had chosen the right wound.
The cloak pulled against Jiang's beak. Black-green cord reached the rim of the buried cup. A dull note rose under the chamber.
Aylin could preserve the winter seal, the stitching, and the shape her father might have followed through Last Gate. She could spend another heartbeat trying to save one clean piece.
With the copper strip trapped in his beak, Jiang pointed one foot at the heartbeat traveling along the cord. Aylin followed it from cloak to cup.
Aylin put the knife beneath her own copper name.
"Dagna, split the cloth when I pull. Ossin, scatter every stone off the salt seam. Rian, keep that cord out of the cup."
"And me?" Ista asked.
"Hold the gate above our ribs."
Ista looked back at the oven paddle holding a royal gate above her ribs. "At last, a job suited to my education."
Aylin cut through the thread.
Wet thread parted around the copper strip. Jiang released it before the knife reached his beak and drove forward under the cloak.
Dagna's belt blade opened the cloth from collar to hem. Ossin hooked the first stone and threw it into the unsalted runoff. Ista shouted the two-beat pull through the gate, and Tovin answered outside.
Rian trapped the black-green cord under the lead edge of his sealed order without opening it, while light crawled over the winter seal instead.
Beneath the cloak, Jiang found the salt cord. The gap between drilled stone and wet hem fit his beak, and a hard bite severed fibers already stretched by Aylin's missing name.
The final cord snapped.
River stones fell in every direction.
One struck the buried saltglass and cracked it across the copper cup. The gate shuddered. Aylin's burning name above the arch lost its final letter, while the inner stone sank onto Ista's paddle and bent it into a shallow bow.
The winter seal broke against the floor.
Aylin caught one blue shard. The rest slid into the runoff with the split cloak, taking the intact shape of her funeral beyond recovery.
Black-green light abandoned the cloth and fled through the crack around the buried cup.
Jiang went after it for one body length before hunger folded him. His feet lost the floor. Aylin caught him under the breast with her good arm, clear of the mark and shoulder.
"No," she said. "You found the road. We bring more than one bleeding animal into it."
Jiang wanted to object to her count.
His beak hurt too much.
Behind them, the last funeral stone rolled off pale mortar. The torn cloak stayed down.
Glasswash had seen enough through the lifted jaw. Some people called Aylin's name. One man cursed her for destroying the only grave his children had known. Ista's apprentices began pulling others away from the unstable gate.
Ossin looked at the cracked cup below and the palace horn above.
"Lower the hooks," he called to his line. "Nobody kills either of them until Eres explains why its king has two mouths."
Rian freed the sealed order from the dead cord. "I trust neither voice."
"Good," Aylin said. "Help me reach the lower one."
The palace horn gave its order again. Then King Edric's voice rose from the cracked copper cup beneath their feet.
"Do not bring my daughter to the palace."