that you got to see the scions of god fight, not since Amon had been bound and burned and drowned. So they stood and gaped. I gave them a smile and a short salute, and let them have their look.
All but one of them. A girl, twisting her face quickly away from the barricade, slipping shoulder-ways into the press of bodies, squirming through. She was dirty-faced, skinny-armed, the thick matte mane of her dark hair pulled back in a messy tail that spilled in curls across her shoulders. Black robe, black hood pulled back, the sleeves torn away to disguise the garment's origin. She wore an Amonite's robe. The girl. Cassandra.
She was gone, and now the crowd was staring in horror at me, at the bully I had pulled and was now pointing at them, at the space where the girl had stood, my finger tight on the trigger. They began screaming. Understandable, considering the mad fury in my face. The murder in my eyes.
The Justicar ran up next to me and put a hand on my gun arm. Without thinking I shrugged my shoulder into his chest, cracking the hilt of the still-sheathed blade across his teeth, then hooked his flailing arm and hip-checked him into the crowd, all without thinking. Reaction, and my hunter-mind was finally smoothing through the shock and anger. I put a heel into Owen's chest as I jumped over him and into the seething crowd. In pursuit.
I locked down the dozen questions that pushed for space in my brain. How the girl had escaped her chains. If she knew where the Fratriarch was, what had happened, if he was still alive. Why she came back to this place. Locked it down and ran.
The crowd thinned out after the immediate press around the barricade, but it was still a busy street in a busy city. Vendors and pedigears and carriages filled the streets, along with a loose river of pedestrians. Most of them were oblivious to the chase, only a few looking behind them in confusion as the girl ran past, wondering why she was in such a hurry. I pushed past them, following the invisible line of the Amonite's path through upset carts and startled citizens. I was as gentle as a tiger is to grass, as quiet as lightning before thunder's wake. I still had the bully out, barrel up, ready to snap forward should a shot present itself. Too many people, though. Too much interference. The girl stayed ahead, a glimpse of black robe or the bobbing cascade of ringlet hair the only sign that I had not lost my quarry.
One clear look, the girl rushing into an alleyway between two illmaintained buildings. I slid to a stop at the entrance. It was clogged with junk, and absolutely dark. A rapid hissing sound, then a thump. There were no other sounds of flight, no footsteps, no panicked breathing, no debris being shoved out of the way by a hurrying girl in the dark. Iron groaned in the blackness, and something fell from high up, dancing against metal as it dropped. Silence again.
I slid the bullistic into its holster and drew the blade, then stepped into the shadows and invoked the Torches of the Fellwater. My eyes began to glow with a pale, bluish white light that wisped in twisting tendrils across my cheekbones and into my hair. The bright street behind me washed out into brilliant light, but the alley resolved into blocky grays and blacks. I slid forward, sword at guard, looking for any sign of Cassandra.
The alley was cluttered with a carefully constrictive jungle of trash. The stone walls to either side were lost behind cardboard boxes and stacked iron pilings, tumbling down on the ground like a child's game of sticks. I stepped between them carefully, maneuvering between piles of junk, doing everything I could to keep the sword in a guard position. No sign of the girl. I looked up and saw that there were platforms above, suspended from a rough framework of metal tubing that was anchored into the hidden wall, behind piles of junk. A rope dangled loosely beside the rough structure, still slithering with recent movement. Quick climber, maybe.
'What is this place?' I asked myself quietly. This was not just a haphazard collection of trash in the crevices of the city. This had been built and hidden. Peering up into the alley's heights, I was momentarily blinded by the strip of early morning sky. I blinked the image away, startled into dropping the invokation of night sight. Darkness shrouded me, but in the few seconds before I lost my vision, I thought I saw a form flitting between platforms, high above.
Squinting, I felt my way to the rope and gave it a tug. It pulled down loosely in my hand. A pulley, or something. The end of the rope on the ground was heavily weighted. So it was some kind of escape route. One end of the rope was tied to the ground, the rest hooked over a pulley high above with the weight dangling from it. Run up to it, cut the rope, and hold on as the weight dragged you up. Simple, and completely oneway. I tugged the rope once more, hard, and the other end of it cleared the pulley high above and fell heavily to the ground. It was a lot of rope. She could be anywhere up there. Sighing, I felt my way to the nearest platform, then reluctantly put away the blade and started to climb.
The way was tough. It might have been easier with more light, but even then the handholds were irregular and ramshackle. The Fellwater was very difficult to power up once it had been snuffed. There was something in the story about spies dousing the spare torches in swamp water, so that the army had been blinded when they tried to switch the blazes out. Details of history could be inconvenient sometimes. I cut my hands on raw iron, and scraped my cheek and shins on loose stone that slid free when I put my weight on it. The framework tower creaked and shifted around me.
Thirty feet up, I paused. I sat cross-legged on a platform, my tired hands resting on an iron pipe that served as the bottom rung of a rickety ladder. Still trying to convince myself that this ladder was worth climbing, that this was the way Cassandra had come. She could have cut the rope and then hidden, and how would I know? A false path, maybe? Or did the Amonites have some sort of technology that deadened the sound of a stack of lead smashing into the ground? Who knew? Who knew what those bastards were actually capable of doing?
At the very least, I was curious where all this structure had come from, and where it led to. Curiosity was losing out to grim practicality, though. The girl could be anywhere by now. She could have kept running straight through the alley, past the false path of the elevator. She could have just hidden, waiting for me to get high enough before dashing back out into the street and away. Even if she was up here, if she had taken the makeshift elevator she could have gotten awfully high awfully fast. It just didn't seem likely I would catch up with her. I sighed and started preparing myself for the descent. Owen would be along soon, with his patrol and his wagon with its spotlights. We could surround the building and conduct a tedious, pointless search. Maybe even find some evidence that Cassandra had been here, hours ago. It was the best I could hope for, once the quarry had been lost.
I was considering if it would just be easier to shield up and jump when the girl's face resolved out of the shadows across the way like a half-moon sliding from behind the clouds. She was sitting on an intersection of iron braces, her legs tangled in the crossbars, her arms looping casually over her head. I jumped up into a low squat and went for the bully.
It was the fastest I had ever heard the Cant of Unmaking invoked. The girl whispered a heavy chant that rolled across the chasm in waves of power. The pistol began to come apart in my fingers even as it cleared the holster. Bolts shivered free of the weapon, jangling like loose change as they were joined by the cycling rod, the hammer, finally the cylinder itself. The barrel followed the quick trajectory of my draw, spinning like a knife across the alley and smacking into the girl's shoulder. Cassandra winced and stopped her cant, but all that I held was a loose collection of familiar pieces that wouldn't jigsaw back into a bullistic, no matter how tightly I gripped them. Let them go and drew the blade, yelling.
My first step found the weakness in the tower, my boot kicking free a bar of metal, quickly followed by an avalanche of metal pilings that shuffled into the yawning darkness below. I gasped, trying to steady myself, but everything I touched loosened and slid away. Across from me the girl looked terrified, her wide eyes watching each piece fall. Cassandra's own perch began to falter, and she scrambled higher. I was too busy with my own gravity issues to watch her go.
The Cant of Unmaking must have clipped the tower, because the structure that had supported me all the way up here now folded away like a magician's trick knot. My platform tipped and I was falling, dropping a few feet before I slapped against another platform which in turn clattered free. Soon I would be swallowed by an avalanche of loose boards and spinning pipes. I looked across the alley and saw that the other structure was still standing, its platforms and struts loose but in much better shape than my own tower. A long way, but no other choice. I screamed and jumped and fell and closed my eyes as the air whipped past my head and I was falling, falling, crunch.
My teeth sang with the impact of the tower. I crashed through a thin wooden railing and onto a platform several levels below where Cassandra had been sitting. Blood filled my mouth and the air left my lungs, but I pushed myself up to a kneeling position. Across the alley my former tower collapsed like a castle of dust, the roar of metal and wood deafening in the tight canyon between the two buildings. A cloud of debris swirled up from the ground, choking me and stinging my eyes. I covered my face and spat. The platform under my feet swayed but did not give way. I looked up for the girl.
