walked close to her, she guessed the girl felt the same. These dark buildings and blackcobbled streets weren’t the city they’d lived in, but someplace unknown, unsafe, and malign wearing a mask of their home.
They reached the square where in daylight farmers would sell their goods to the servants of the great houses on the western side of the Division. The smell of rotting leaves in the gutters marked where the last day’s fallen greens had been bruised into muck. Across the way, a crowd of men strode into the square, torches held high above their head. Without so much as a word, Clara and Jorey stepped into the alcove of a little shop, pulling Sabiha along after them. The torchlight seemed too bright; it hurt to look at too closely. The men were shouting to each other, rough voices drunk with violence and wine. They were going back the way Clara had just come. Toward the mansion and Dawson. Clara squinted, trying to make out the colors the men wore, trying to guess whether these were allies come to reinforce the position or enemies ready to kill and loot and burn. She couldn’t tell, and she didn’t dare go closer.
When the last of them had passed, Jorey snuck out and Clara and Sabiha followed. Sabiha took Clara’s hand and wouldn’t let it go. Clara pulled the girl close. Somewhere to their right, a woman was screaming. If the city guard was in the street tonight, Clara saw no sign of them. The woman stopped suddenly, and Clara could only tell herself that someone had come to her aid; she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.
Halfway to the western gate, they came to a barricade in the street. Tables, chairs, crates, and a wide overturned cart. There were men on both sides of the obstruction. She couldn’t tell if it was meant to stop people like her trying to escape to the countryside or to block soldiers and thugs coming into the city. The men wore no uniforms. The pennants of no houses flew. If war was a violence conducted with rules and traditions on a field of honor, then this was not war, but something worse.
“What do we do?” Clara asked in a whisper.
“Come with me,” Jorey said.
The back alley was filthy, but Clara couldn’t bring her self to care. If the hem of her-cloak dragged through the gore of a slaughterhouse, it would only be what the night called for. Etiquette and delicate sensibilities had their place, but it was not here. Jorey was craning his neck, looking up it seemed at the night sky as if the stars might sweep down to carry them away. His small grunt of pleasure caught her attention.
“What?” she asked.
“That roof,” he said, pointing at a single-storied taphouse with its lights doused and its shutters locked. “If I lift you up, can you get onto it?”
Clara looked at the structure. It had been decades since she’d been a little girl climbing where she wasn’t wanted. And even then it had for the most part been trees.
“I can try,” she said.
“Good,” Jorey said.
They lifted Sabiha up first, and then Jorey lifted Clara into Sabiha’s waiting hands. He scrambled up last. Gesturing in silence, he led them along the rooftop to an alcove where a rough wooden ladder hid in the darkness.
“If you go up here,” Jorey whispered, “there’s a place where we can lay the ladder across the alleyway and get past that barricade. Providing they don’t look up.”
“I am beginning to think I raised you poorly,” Clara said, but she took herself up the ladder. From the top of the second story, the street looked very far away. The men at the barricade laughed with each other, joking in a way that made the fear and tension in them clearer than sunlight. Sabiha clambered up at Clara’s side while Jorey knelt and began lifting the ladder one rung at a time.
Clara looked out over the city. Her city. There were more columns of smoke, but the one nearest the Kingspire was beginning to fade. Either someone had organized a fire team or the building set alight was exhausted of everything but stone. Far away, the walls of the city were dotted with torches and the low half moon seemed about to rest its head on the western gate.
The western gate.
“Stop,” Clara said. “You can put the ladder back down.”
“No, it will work,” Jorey said. “I know it doesn’t seem sturdy, but I’ve done this before. It was a bet we used to make when I was—”
“The gates are shut,” Clara said. “Someone’s sealed the city.”
Jorey appeared at her side. The wall of the city wasn’t so far from them. In daylight and sanity, she could have walked from the street below them to the huge gates in only a few minutes. Even in the darkness, there was no question that the wide bronze doors had been closed. Closed and likely dropped from their hinges, as they would be in time of war.
“We’re trapped,” Sabiha whispered.
“We are,” Clara agreed.
Marcus
It was raining in Porte Oliva when the reports came, the kind of flooding summer storm that began in the morning as a scent on the wind under a perfect blue sky and by mid-day was squalling against the streets and walls. It turned the streets into ankle-deep Rivers And Washed The Trash And Shit and dead animals from their hidden corners and out to the sea. Marcus struggled against the wind, but he didn’t run. Roach had brought word that Pyk needed him at the counting house. Within a minute of stepping outside, he’d been soaked as wet as it was possible to be. Running now seemed pointless.
The tulips in their bowl were vivid red. Several of the petals were lost, and as he came close, a gust of screaming wind whipped another free. Marcus watched it spin away on the surface of the flood: a tiny scarlet boat on a vast river. He pushed his way through the door.
Pyk was pacing the room. Sweat beaded on her wide fore-head, but rain had cooled the room to the point that she could at least move. Yardem sat on a tall stool smelling like wet dog and looking at least as drenched as Marcus. No one else was present.
“Bird came this morning,” Pyk said without preamble. “Sent from the holding company.”
“Good it didn’t wait for afternoon,” Marcus said, wringing out his cuffs. “Did they decide to send a fresh auditor?”
“Other people are going to start getting word of this in the next day or two, so we’re going to have to move quickly. There’s trouble in Antea. According to our man in Camnipol, someone tried to stick the Lord Regent full of knife-sized holes. They’ve closed the gates, and there’s been fighting in the streets ever since. Odds-on bet is civil war.”
The words took a moment to resolve. Yardem’s wide brown eyes were on him, watching him understand.
“I have a list of the contracts I want placed,” Pyk said, “but it has to be done today. Once the word goes out, the prices on grain and metalwork are going to head toward the sky. We may only have hours to do this, and so of course, this is the day we can wash all the ink off a piece of paper just by walking it down to the corner. God hates me, but we’ll do what we can.”
“What about Cithrin?” Marcus said.
Pyk scowled. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“The note doesn’t say. The chop is Paerin Clark’s, so he’s the one making report. She’s not mentioned.”
“But she’s in Camnipol,” Marcus said, his voice growing hard. “She’s with him.”
“She went there, but I don’t know how she stands. Safe, dead, or missing, he wouldn’t have spent space on the page for word of her. This isn’t gossip. It’s what will make us coin. He sent us what we need to help the bank, and now it’s ours to follow his lead.”
“I’m going for her,” Marcus said. “You can work the contracts yourself.”
“God’s sake, Wester,” Pyk said, “it’s Camnipol. It’s weeks from here on a fast boat and more over land. By the time you got there, it would all be done. Even the bird’s not going to tell us what’s happening there now. Maybe it’s resolved. Maybe the whole place is burned flat. Either way, our work’s here.”
“I don’t accept that,” Marcus said.
