Harth rang its bells from first light, one for each hour after it, and the Ashgrave line broke on the fourth.
She had expected that.
Ashgrave had a good name and a bad century behind it, and any company that spends more on its surcoats than its boots is telling you what it intends to do when the boots matter.
The Silvered Company broke at the fifth, which she had not expected.
That was worth something.
Somebody down there had trained them past what they’d been paid to be, and she made a note to find out who, later, when the shouting had finished and she had the leisure to be interested in a person.
For the moment there was nothing to do but stand in the road and let the morning arrive.
This was the part nobody warned you about, and nobody warned you about it because there was nobody left in the category of people who could.
The preparation took decades.
The arrival took an hour.
And then there were the long flat stretches in between, in which the outcome was settled and the participants had not been informed, and she was obliged to remain standing in it until they caught up.
A man ran past her with another man over his shoulder.
She stepped left so that he could.
Six hundred years.
Four kingdoms, and the last of them had taken her a single morning.
Somewhere around the third kingdom a suspicion had arrived and had not since left, which was that she had run out of things she had not already done, and that the remainder was going to be this.
Standing.
Waiting.
Watching people work out in real time what she had known before she set out.
She had not moved from the spot since the third bell.
There had been no call to.
Over at the corner the two bound constructs were still going at each other.
That meant the binder was alive somewhere and still had the discipline to hold them, and nothing else the ward had produced that morning came close to it.
She watched.
The alternative was not watching.
That was when she noticed the building.
It was the dullest thing on Marrow Street.
Grey frontage, shuttered, no sign, the sort of storage annex that belongs to somebody else and has always belonged to somebody else.
Her eye had crossed it twice that morning without reporting anything.
The problem was the roof.
The chandler’s spar had come down through the roof of the house on one side.
The wool merchant’s wall had taken a bolt through the middle and was standing on habit alone.
And the grey shuttered nothing between them had not a mark on it.
Not shielded.
She would have felt a shield from the far end of the street, felt it like a hand on the back of her neck.
This was worse than a shield.
This was a building the morning had simply declined to involve.
She had not been curious in a hundred and forty years.
The sensation arrived like a joint moving after too long in one position, and it was not pleasant.
She took a step toward it, and then another, and somewhere around the fourth she registered what she was doing.
Nothing that morning had been worth crossing a street for.
Not the wall.
Not the binder.
She had come to Harth with an outcome in mind and the outcome had not required her to go anywhere in particular, and she had been standing in one place long enough that the cobbles under her boots had stopped being warm.
She was walking.
Because of a roof.
Halfway across, the frontage changed.
Glass, where there had been grey board.
Two storeys of it, held in frames too thin to be holding it.
Behind the glass, light.
Not lamplight, not anything burning.
An even white light that filled the whole space at once and threw no shadow she could work with.
And behind the glass, thirty inches from her and much further away than that, a man.
He was holding a paper cup in both hands.
He was wearing a garment with a picture on it, a small figure with yellow hair, rendered in a style she had no reference for.
His face had the grey cast of a man who had not slept and had stopped intending to.
There was a fork sticking out of the cup.
He looked at her.
She waited.
There was a shape to this and she knew every part of it, though not the part most people assumed.
Nobody had ever picked her out of a street.
That was not modesty.
In six hundred years she had stood in the open at nine sieges and walked out of every one of them unremarked, because the people who survived to write it down had been looking at the wall, and a wall coming down holds the eye rather better than a woman who is not doing anything.
Harth had a name for her by now.
Harth had no idea it had been standing next to her since the third bell.
So the shape was never recognition.
The shape was this: eventually somebody’s eye snagged on the one person in the road who was not hurrying, and their body worked out before their mind did that this was wrong, and they went away from her without ever deciding to.
It took between one and four seconds.
She had watched it happen several thousand times and had come to think of it as the only honest review she had ever received.
The man behind the glass looked at her for much longer than four seconds, and did not go away.
Then he raised his hand, and waved her in.
The gesture was small.
Flat, palm down, two fingers tipping toward himself.
It was not a summons.
She knew summonses, had broken three that morning, and this was not one.
It was not a challenge either.
She stood in the middle of the burning street with her hands behind her back and turned the gesture over, and could find nothing in it except an invitation to come inside, extended by a tired man in a picture shirt, to her, on Marrow Street, two hours after the wall came down.
Something went through her then.
It took her a moment to place it, because it had been a hundred and forty years, and when she placed it she disliked it intensely.
She went to the door.