Marcus Stoneguard's Arc

Chapter 10 of 10

Marcus walked the broken span with his sixteen names counted in his head. The ruined gate stood open to the field. Beyond it a dark keep leaned, towers snapped. Vines choked a low stretch of wall past the rubble. He set his gargoyles where he could, but the math failed him. Sixteen bodies. A wall this wide. Wherever he massed them, the next gap yawned bare. A threat could walk straight through the broken arch and no one would stand there to stop it. "You're spreading them thin," Pebble Groutstone said. The wall troll climbed from a mortar seam, moss on his shoulders, his small face hard. He knew every wall as his own body. He did not soften a fact. "Thin lines break. You need fewer holes, not more guards standing far apart." "I have no more guards," Marcus said. "Then close the holes." Pebble pointed at the low vine-covered stretch beyond the rubble. "That piece is short. Sound. Wake nothing there. Wall it. Pile the fallen stone into the gate. Make the field funnel to one place a gargoyle can hold." Marcus looked at the broken gate, then at the small sound wall past it. He had always guarded. He had never built. "Bindwell's paste is for cracks, not walls." Malthor landed on the rubble, wings loud, the last dragon curled small on his shoulder. He had watched the gargoyles choose Marcus. He watched still, measuring. "You want to close ground," the king said. "Not hold all of it. Hold what matters." He looked at the shattered arch. "An enemy comes through the low places. Block the low places." "With what strength?" Marcus asked. "Mine." Malthor flexed his claws. "For this. Once." Marcus made the choice. He would not thin his order across dead ground. He would shrink the ground. He set eight gargoyles to lift. They dragged fallen stone from the keep's base and packed the broken arch until only a narrow throat remained. Malthor hooked slabs too heavy for the rest and dropped them into the gap. Pebble crawled the joints and called out where the fit was weak. Bindwell's paste sealed the seams. By the low vine wall Marcus posted two gargoyles, and the choked stretch became a fence a man could not slip past unseen. By dawn the field no longer opened everywhere. It opened in one place, and a gargoyle stood in it. Marcus counted his line again. The same sixteen. But now they held a shape, not a scatter. He looked at the sealed gate with something new in him. He had not guarded this. He had built it. Malthor stepped back from the packed stone, breathing hard. "You raised a wall today," he said. "Copsefire has masons who will hear of it." He looked at Marcus. "They tend their own stone. They may not want a gargoyle order deciding which stones stand." Marcus watched the funnel. He had closed the gaps. Now other hands, alive and human, would come to see what he had done to their wall.