Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(24)

Then, just as he was about to straighten up, Manker’s gave a low, horrible groan. The crack of splintering timber sent the dog bolting away as the alehouse’s roof sagged in on itself, crumpling like wet paper, shedding slate tiles that fell in a deadly rain onto the street. The whole thing lurched toward the bay, then teetered horribly on its stilts. The people inside began to scream.

“The door!” Lin yelled, but Valyn was already moving. The two of them had spent enough time studying demolitions to know what happened to anyone trapped inside a building when it collapsed. People would be crushed or worse, drowned when the structure finally sloughed into the bay, dragging those pinned inside beneath the waves.

The whole building had peeled away from the alley, leaving a gap of several feet between the crumbling dirt of the lane and the listing doorway. Valyn glanced down—twenty-five feet or so to the water—a trivial distance, except for the jagged ends of the shattered stilts thrusting up like pikes. Anyone who tumbled into the space risked getting impaled on those splintered ends or ground into the murky water when the building finally collapsed. A hand appeared on the doorframe, groping desperately from the darkness within. Valyn swore once and vaulted the gap.

He caught the low lintel of the door with one hand, steadied himself, then reached through the door with his other to catch the wrist. He hauled, and Juren emerged, coughing and swearing. Blood poured from a nasty gash across his bald scalp and his ankle twisted sickeningly as he put weight on it, but other than that, the man appeared to be unharmed.

“Stay there,” Valyn said. “I’ll hand the others out to you. You can steady them before they jump over to Lin.” He jerked his chin to indicate his companion, who waited warily on the bank a few paces away.

The man flicked his eyes toward the interior of the tavern. Something had arrested the slow, inevitable collapse, but over the screams of the injured, Valyn could still hear the cracking of posts and beams warped past their tolerance.

“Fuck that,” Juren spat, his lips curled into a desperate rictus. He gathered his weight on his good leg, then leapt for the far bank.

“You shit-licking coward…,” Lin began, yanking the man painfully to his feet by the ear as soon as he hit the bank.

“Leave it, Lin,” Valyn bellowed. “I need you over here.”

Ha Lin snarled, backhanded Juren across the face, measured the gap at a glance, then leapt, alighting on the opposite side of the doorframe from Valyn.

“You or me?” she asked, peering in through the door.

“I’m stronger,” Valyn said. “I’ll drag them to you. You get them across.”

Lin eyed the gap. “Right.” She caught Valyn’s gaze, hesitated, then waved him ahead. “Work fast.”

He nodded, then stepped inside.

It was even worse than he had anticipated. Manker’s had been a gloomy den before the collapse, and the buckling ceiling and slumping walls had almost entirely blocked the few windows. Wreckage lay everywhere—ceiling timbers, busted tables, chunks of lath and plaster cracked from the crumbling walls. Half a dozen small fires—kindled, no doubt, when the lanterns smashed against the dry timber—licked at the jumble of broken beams, illuminating a thousand scattered shards of glass. Valyn paused, trying to get his bearings, trying to get his ’Kent-kissed footing on the floor, which sloped as precipitously as the deck of a clipper under full sail. People were shouting, moaning, crying for help, but at first he couldn’t even see them in the fitful gloom.

“’Shael take it,” he swore, shoving a board out of his way with one hand, trying to shield his eyes from the dust and debris.

He almost tripped over the first body—a thin, sallow man, his chest staved in by one of the collapsing timbers. Valyn dropped to a knee and put his fingers to the man’s neck, checking for a pulse, though he knew what he would find. As he rose, he heard a woman’s voice sobbing nearby. Salia—the serving girl.

She was trapped beneath a fallen rafter, but seemed alert and uninjured, if terrified. He took a step toward her, and the entire structure shrieked, pitching another few feet toward the bay.

“Val,” Lin shouted from the door. “Time to get out. The whole thing’s going down!”

He ignored the warning and crossed the few remaining steps to the trapped girl.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, dropping to one knee and running his hands along the beam, trying to discover what held her down.

Salia looked up at him, her dark eyes terrified, reflecting the fires that raged all around them now, singeing his face and her dress.