The first palace hook dropped toward Aylin's throat.
Its chain caught with the iron point close enough to shine against her skin. More hooks descended across the approach, sealing every path between the flood drain and the white palace doors.
Inside Pell's shirt, Jiang shook hard enough to click his beak against a button.
He wanted the hook away from Aylin's throat. Food came a close second, and his body kept voting for it with every shiver.
The palace had dressed its walls in mourning cloth, lit salt for a dead princess, and chosen farm equipment for the welcome. He had attended warmer family reunions in New York. Most of them had also served food.
"Knees," called the woman above the gate. "Open hands. Put the marked animal on the stone."
She stood between two hook crews in a white-lacquer breastplate scarred down to the wood beneath. The black strip tied around her upper arm marked the funeral watch. Unlike the hunters beside her, she kept her own hook lowered and both hands free.
"He has a name," Aylin said.
"Then his name can wait beside him."
Jiang disliked her already, which was reassuring. A frightened fool would have shouted for arrows. This woman was arranging bodies so that one mistake would kill only the bodies she had selected.
Aylin did not kneel. She turned enough to show the people still climbing from the drain behind her.
"Captain, count them before you decide what reached your gate."
The woman's gaze moved across Pell carrying Nemi, Ista with soot ground into the lines of her face, Brann's ruined fingers, the burned workers, and Whitewake hunters wearing the damage of Glasswash.
Pell lowered Nemi beside him. Her burned leg buckled, but she caught his shoulder and remained upright.
"Captain Orra Sen," Ossin called. "Those people came out of First Row alive."
Orra found the empty place at his belt. "Huntmaster Ossin. Where is your palace horn?"
"Holding a cellar gate until it split."
"And the hook in your hand?"
Ossin lifted the bent iron still in his hand. "Less useful than it was this morning."
The answer did not comfort her.
Orra looked at Rian next. "Your sealed order."
"Burned in the cellar."
"After you read it?"
"Before I broke the seal."
That answer comforted her even less.
"The east root spoke in King Edric's voice," Orra said. "It named Princess Aylin dead and warned that her face would return carrying a marked beast. Now her face has climbed out of a royal drain with exactly that beast. Nobody crosses the Wake Gate until I know which part of this was arranged for me."
Aylin's injured arm tightened around Jiang. The cradle shifted and trapped the damaged joint beneath her forearm. He struck the brass buckle once with his beak, and she loosened her hold at once.
"If I use my blood to order you," she said, "will your gate obey me?"
Orra's hunters shifted at the question.
"There will be no blood on my stone," Orra said.
"Good. Judge the people behind me. Then judge the gate that told you not to see them."
The hook nearest Aylin moved.
No crew touched its chain. The point turned against her coat and tugged toward the pocket where she kept the broken blue shard.
Jiang saw the other movement first because his head was below everybody's elbows.
A black-green bead swelled beneath the nearest hook carriage. It clung to the underside of the white saltglass rail, hidden from the guards above, then crawled along a wet seam toward Orra's boots.
He hammered Aylin's buckle.
"Down on the stone?" she asked.
He hit it again.
Aylin crouched and set him on Pell's overshirt. Warm cloth remained beneath his belly, but cold stone found his feet through it. His unreliable foot folded. He caught himself with his good flipper and pointed his beak beneath the carriage.
Orra followed the gesture.
The hook behind her ripped sideways.
She drove one hunter to the floor. The iron point tore through her mourning cloak where his neck had been and struck sparks from the parapet.
"Brake the upper rail!" Orra shouted.
Four hunters hauled the brake poles. The carriage rolled against them.
The hook at Aylin's coat pulled harder. Blue light leaked through the burned wool over her pocket, and the funeral chain began dragging her toward the gate.
Ista flung a fistful of furnace sand beneath Orra's carriage.
The dry grit turned black wherever it touched the creeping bead. A thin wet line appeared under the whole rail, bent around two copper joints, and disappeared inside the gate wall.
"There is no water in that carriage," Orra said.
"Your water disagrees," Ista replied.
Brann crouched as low as his knees allowed. "Pre-flood feed channel. They built the new rail over it."
"Can you stop it?"
"From up there? No."
He pointed beneath the moving carriage. A copper tongue shivered behind the lowest chain wheel, close to the stone and inside the hook's sweep.
"That catch drops the pull chain," Brann said. "Leave the black pin alone unless you want the whole rail in your lap."
Jiang looked at the narrow space beneath the carriage. A human chest could not pass through it. A penguin belly could, assuming its owner had no affection for comfort, dignity, or an uncracked beak.
Aylin reached for him.
He slid off the shirt before she could lift him.
Cold seized the wet feathers along his breast. His numb claws scraped uselessly at the stone, so he pushed with both webbed feet and let his belly take his weight. The carriage shuddered above him. A hook passed over his back close enough to comb the loose feathers at his neck.
"Pull him out," Orra ordered.
"You'll pull his damaged wing out first," Aylin said.
She stepped with the chain dragging at her coat, keeping herself between Jiang and the nearest guard.
Dagna drove her spear shaft across the approach. "Witnesses to the wall. Tovin, take the burned side."
Tovin looped his guide cord around Pell's waist with his useful hand. "Nemi, you have made your point."
"I had a better one before the furnace cooked it."
She let Pell lift her clear as the wild hook tore a groove through the place where she had stood.
Under the carriage, Jiang reached the copper tongue.
It had a ring meant for a worker's hook. He caught the ring in his beak and pulled. The cracked tip answered with a bright line of pain. The tongue moved no farther than the width of a feather.
Above him, the chain at Aylin's coat snapped tight.
She stumbled through the first gate arch. The blue shard struck the stones beneath her pocket and made the old salt flare.
Jiang planted his good foot against the rail base. The other slid. He turned until his broad belly wedged between stone and chain housing, found purchase with both feet, and threw his body backward.
The copper tongue came free.
The pull chain dropped.
It struck the approach with a weight Jiang felt through his breastbone. The hook released Aylin's coat. Orra's runaway carriage stopped short of her fallen hunter, but the freed chain did not go slack.
It poured through the open Wake Gate like something being reeled from inside.
Brann's face changed. "That catch should leave it dead on the floor."
"It found another wheel," Ista said.
The outer flood bars began to descend.
Palace hunters scrambled for the side levers. Orra looked from the people trapped on the approach to the chain vanishing under her own gate.
"All crews inside," she ordered. "Civilians remain beyond the bars."
"The chain is following this." Aylin pulled the broken blue shard from her pocket. It shone through her fingers while the dropped iron links jumped toward it. "If I stay with them, your gate keeps cutting through them."
"If you enter, you may be giving it exactly what it wants."
"Then close the bars behind me."
Orra stared at her, perhaps searching for the princess who should have demanded obedience. Aylin gave her no help.
"People who know that channel come through," Orra decided. "Everyone else stays where my wall can see them."
Ista and Brann crossed first. Ossin followed with Rian. Dagna sent Tovin ahead, then backed through the arch with her spear between the falling bars and the survivors.
Pell held Nemi outside. The apprentice caught Aylin's eye over his shoulder.
"The palace has already buried you once," Nemi said. "Do not make us climb another drain to complain."
"Keep them where the gate can count them," Aylin answered.
"I am difficult to overlook."
The bars struck stone between them.
Aylin snatched up Pell's shirt with Jiang still sprawled beside it. She wrapped the cloth around him without trapping his failed flipper and carried him beneath the gate. Orra entered at her shoulder, not as an ally, with her bare hook ready between them.
Wake Court waited beyond the wall.
White saltglass channels crossed its floor beneath iron rails. Funeral chains hung from every arch, their points aimed toward the path a royal body would take to the palace doors. Torch smoke dragged low under a ceiling crowded with brake wheels.
The chain Jiang had released scraped across the court and vanished into a black slot beneath the road leading uphill to the throne.
Orra stopped. "There is no mourning carriage under that road."
One hanging hook turned away from Aylin.
Then another did the same.
All across Wake Court, the funeral chains dropped to the floor. Their iron points faced the sealed stone beneath the throne road.
Every chain pulled at once.