but when she’d gone in a half dozen yards, she called back. It opened wider. There was space. They should join her.
Aster had gone next, the stones scraping under him. Cithrin had kept calling until he found her.
And then it was his turn.
When he’d been a boy Aster’s age, he had been the son of the manor in Rivenhalm. There had been no boys of his station within a day’s ride in any direction. Climbing trees, leaping from precipices into distant water, crawling through caves. These hadn’t been the things of his childhood. He had no experience of adventure to draw from. Inching forward, the daylight fading behind him, Geder was aware of the great weight above him. The old stone pressed on the air, thickening it. The rubble grew deeper, pressing his back against the ceiling until he almost had to slither, snakelike. The stink of cat piss grew stronger. At one point, he felt sure that he’d turned the wrong way in the darkness, that he was lost and buried alive.
But then the glimmer of Cithrin’s candle caught his eye. When he tumbled down into the half-filled chamber, he was sure there would be blood soaking his knees and forearms, but the candle revealed only a few pale scratches.
Aster had volunteered to go back out to the actors waiting under the open sky. His eyes had been bright and excited. When he came back, he had a string tied to his ankle. Together, they pulled a tray through the tiny crawl- space: candles and blankets and sealed jars of raisins and water and dried meat. It wasn’t enough to live on for long, but it would get them through the day. Cithrin shouted her thanks, and the faint voices of the others answered and then went away.
The room was part of a buried garden. The flowerbeds were still visible between ancient columns. An open turning led to a smaller space where the corpse of a tree lay against the still-standing stones of a great wall. A crushed doorway led deeper into the bones of the city, rooms that might once have been a house. The space was too small for anything that wasn’t a cat, and the dust on the ground was thick and undisturbed by human feet. Everything stank of cat, but Geder found that the scent faded with time.
“Well,” Cithrin said. “This will do nicely.”
“We should look more in the back,” Aster said. “Might be another way out.”
“Better that we don’t. It’s not on anyone’s path. If we go farther in and find a space that people are using, we might be discovered. Better that we stay here where nobody goes.”
“Who would be down here?” Geder said. “This place is a hole. Literally. It’s a hole in the ground.”
“Every city in the world has its poor,” Cithrin said. “And say what you want about this. It’s shelter. That’s why we’re here.”
More than the violence, what haunted Geder was the betrayal. He lay in darkness, hands behind his head. Cithrin had gone out for food and news. The cats whose lair they’d appropriated were staying away except for the occasional distant scratching of claws on stone. Aster’s deep, regular breath said the boy was sleeping. He wished he could sleep too.
When he closed his eyes, he saw Dawson Kalliam. He saw the knife in his hand and the blood on Basrahip’s fingers. It didn’t make sense. This was Jorey’s father. Geder had helped the man expose and destroy Feldin Maas. He’d trusted Dawson with his armies. Dawson Kalliam was a friend. A patron. He saw the knife again, the cold hatred in Dawson’s eyes.
If Dawson was an enemy, then anyone could be. For any reason or for no reason at all.
It was terrible and crushing, and since Aster was asleep and couldn’t know, Geder let himself weep a little from the fear and desolation.
There were small noises here. The cats who still stalked the deeper ways, tentative scouts coming near and then scrabbling away in panic. There were neither rats nor mice, the prey kept away, Geder assumed, by the stink of the predators. Now and then, he also heard the ticking of pebbles and flakes of rock as something small dislodged. Over years and centuries, those tiny bits of stone and rivulets of rainwater would fill in the spaces like this. Once, men and women had walked on these stones, admired the violets in these beds. Now even the open sun was gone. And one day the sand and stone would claim even this small bubble of air. Anything could be buried below Camnipol, and no one would ever find it. It was a city built on lost things.
Someone grunted. Stones shifted in the little crawlway. Geder sat up, licking his lips nervously. He couldn’t see anything. The darkness was perfect. He drew his little dagger, his breath coming ragged.
“Are you awake?” Cithrin asked, and Geder heaved a sigh.
“I am,” he said, softly. “Aster’s sleeping.”
“All right,” she said. “Light a candle for me, will you? I didn’t dare while I was outside.”
“Why not?”
“It’s night. Someone might see.”
Geder lit the candle, and the woman slipped down into the buried garden. Her hair was pulled back in a fierce pony-tail, and grime and dust covered her hands and knees. Her skin, pale as a wraith, seemed almost to glow in the candlelight. With the thinness of her mixed blood, she seemed fragile, weak. It was only the way she held herself and the confidence of her movements that gave that the lie. If she’d been a Firstblood, he would have thought she was little more than a girl, at least from the smoothness of her skin. But she was the magistra of a bank, and likely older than he was. A woman who traveled the world. She knelt, untying the rope at her ankle, and pulled. The tray skidded and scraped as she pulled it toward them.
“The news isn’t good,” she said softly so as not to wake Aster. “There’s still fighting in the streets. Some of it’s private guards and noble houses, but there are looters too. Gangs of them. If it looks like a nobleman’s house is standing empty, they’ll strip it to the walls. And there seem to be some old vendettas coming due. Five men in masks took away a merchant named Deron Root and threw him off a bridge this afternoon, and no one seems to know why.”
“What about Basrahip?”
“The temple’s scorched, but it’s still standing. Mikel and Sandr didn’t find anyone there, but they didn’t find any bodies either. Some got killed, there doesn’t seem much question. There are also stories that people have seen the priests about, but so far we haven’t found any.”
He sat forward, shaking his head. The tension in his shoulders ached. It was all too much. It was falling apart. And if he didn’t have Basrahip or Dawson either, he couldn’t imagine what he would do if he ever rose back up out of the earth.
“What about the city guard?” he asked. “What are they doing?”
Cithrin reached into the darkness of the crawlway, grunting, and pulled the tray back with her.
“They’ve got their hands full,” she said. “There’s no law out there right now. Honestly? We three are probably the safest people in Camnipol tonight.”
“Unless your friends betray us,” he said.
“Unless that,” she agreed, taking something wrapped in cloth from the tray and setting it on the ground at her feet. “They’re not likely to, though.”
“Why not?” Geder said, thinking of Dawson Kalliam’s face again. The blood on his knife. “Any of them could. Why wouldn’t they?”
“One of them did before,” she said. “They saw how that ended.”
She took a jar down from the tray, and then three wineskins. The last thing on the tray was a tin chamberpot that she held up in the candlelight with a rueful smile.
“Very nearly forgot the necessities,” she said. “Do you think we set up the tree over there as the privacy room, or should we push in and see if we can’t find someplace a bit farther from nose range.”
Geder tried to imagine relieving himself where she could hear him, and his blush felt hot.
“Farther in would be better, don’t you think?”
“All right,” she said. “The first one who needs it picks the place.”
By the light of the single candle she unwrapped the cloth. There was enough food for several small meals: roasted chicken, raw carrots no thicker than her fingers, half a rabbit boiled in wine, hard rolls so stale they sounded hollow when she knocked them together. They sat together in the gloom. She drank wine with the certainty of long acquaintance, and Geder found himself pushing to keep up. When the last of the chicken was reduced to bones and gristle, they had just cracked the third wineskin’s neck, and from the way she held it, he was certain it would be empty before she slept.
