The Cathedral Doors

They reached Darklume before dusk, and everything the man on the road had said was already visible.

The gates were damaged. Not destroyed; not even, on first reading, breached. Worn. They had been, at some point in the recent past, struck repeatedly from the outside, with whatever force the strikers had at their disposal, in a sustained pattern that had not stopped at the point where any one striker would have given up. The wood was beaten in long unfamiliar bruises on the outer face. The hinges, when Ryder leaned in, showed the small bright scratches of repeated stress. The doors had held. They had been meant to hold; Darklume, for all the kingdom's smiling at it, had been built in a century when builders had still believed that doors might one day need to do more than welcome guests. The doors had held, and that was the only good news the gates had given them, and the gates had given them no other good news.

The ground at the foot of the gates was the second piece of news.

It had been disturbed. Not in any orderly way. Patches of fresh soil sat unevenly over older soil, in a pattern Ryder's training did not have a category for. He crouched beside one of the patches and lifted a handful of the topsoil between his fingers, and he understood at once that the soil had been moved upward — not by any tool, but from beneath. There were no tool marks. There was no spade-cut. The soil had been displaced as if from underneath, as if something below the surface had pushed the surface up and aside in order to come out, and the surface, after the something had passed, had been left where it had fallen.

There were footprints in the patches. Many of them. He counted, and stopped counting at thirty, and stopped counting because the act of counting was beginning to do something to his hands that he did not want the column to see. The prints had no consistent direction. They wandered. They overlapped. They went in a slow uneven loop around the gates, the way a crowd of people might walk a slow uneven loop around the edge of a fire, deciding, by collective small motions, what to do next. They were the prints of dozens of feet. The feet were not all the same size. They were not all the same age. They were the prints of many people, and the people had been there, walking in their slow loop, in the very recent past.

He did not say more. He did not need to. He looked at the doors, which were closed from the inside, and he gestured one of the soldiers forward.

Knock.

The soldier hesitated. Then he stepped up to the doors and rapped them with his fist three times, firmly. The sound of his fist on the wood was loud, and disordered, and ordinary — for a moment Ryder was almost grateful for the ordinariness, because it meant that the air around the cathedral, at least, had not been emptied of its capacity for normal sound.

There was no answer. The column waited. After a long count there was a movement on the far side of the doors. Wood shifted. A bar slid. One of the doors opened the smallest possible distance — perhaps a hand's breadth — and a face appeared in the gap.

You shouldn't be here.

The voice was the worn voice of a man who had not slept in some time, and who was not, in any of the ways a sleepless man might be, irritable. It was the voice of a man whose tiredness had moved past the stage of irritation and into the stage of consideration. Ryder saw, through the gap, only the eyes and the mouth — but the mouth was the mouth of a man who had been holding it level by deliberate effort for several days, and was starting to find the effort unsustainable.

We're already here. Whatever we shouldn't have come for, we have come for it. Open the door.

Silas studied him. The studying lasted long enough that Ryder, behind Raven, began to think he might refuse. Then Silas's eyes moved, fractionally, from Raven's face to the standard of the column behind him, and back to Raven's face.

Silas studied him a moment longer. He nodded, once. He stepped back. The door opened wider.

They went inside.