The Steel Remains

A map of the south side’s maze of streets flared into view behind her eyes. The krinzanz collided with the fury in her veins, inked in the Citadel and the path they’d likely take on their way back to it, stitched it onto the map in pulsing red.

“How many of them?” she asked, more calmly now.

“It was six, I think, milady. In the livery of—”

“Yes, I know.” She sheathed the knife, felt a muscle twitch in her cheek. “Get the doctor. Tell him if Kefanin lives, I’ll double his fee. If he dies, I’ll have him driven out of the fucking city.”

Then she took off, running.

SIX MEN, CITADEL LIVERY.

The streets were packed, no way to ride a horse through it faster than a slow clop. She wasn’t uniformed, had no baton and whistle or blunted saber to clear her way. And anyway, they’d see her coming a hundred yards off.

She cut left, up a little-used dogleg back alley she knew, sprinting flat out as soon as she had the space. Abrupt relief from the heat of the sun in the narrow angles of the passage. A couple of chickens panicked screeching away from beneath her booted feet as she took the corner, but nothing else got in her way. She hit the teeming cross street of Horseman’s Victory Drive—where now, ha fucking ha, you couldn’t even take a horse unless it was hauling produce—shouldered through the crowd, and got to the whitewashed stone steps that led up onto the roof of the Lizard’s Head tavern. From there, she could get her bearings, make a match with the map in her head. Then vault the alley on the other side, get onto the onion-domed rooftop sprawl of the covered bazaar.

“Hoy, you can’t come up—”

She shoved the heavy-gutted publican back in his deck chair as he tried to rise. Danced past, ducking and dodging lines of washing. Grabbed a look amid the glaring white of hung sheets and rooftops beyond. Right, Archidi. Think. Bazaar. Clothmaker Row. The Hustray strait-back Narrows. If they’d taken the most direct route for the Citadel, by now they were headed up Desert Wisdom Drive, off the main boulevard at a forty-five-degree angle. To cut them off . . .

She ran at the lip of the roof, flexed legs into the jump, and over onto the flat top of the bazaar. Pain jarred up into both knees, but she came up running. No time, no time. Around the first of the onion-dome protrusions, and shit, shit, right onto a broad stained-glass skylight. She—

Staggered, threw herself into an ungainly, flailing leap.

Caught a fragmentary glimpse of shoppers moving fishily through a red-and-blue-tinged crowd below, saw herself crashing through and down among them—

Made the other side instead, cleared the glass by inches, landed awkwardly, swayed back, pinwheeled her arms desperately for balance and—

Upright. Running again, looping between the onion domes and roughly southeast.

It was like sprinting across the top of the world. Sounds of the city lost below, the glinting sword of sunlight and a cooling breeze out of the west. The tall rows of houses that fringed Desert Wisdom Drive angling in, closing from the left.

The market beneath her feet was one of the largest in the city—not quite up to the sprawling grandeur of the Imperial Bazaar north of the river, but it still covered several city blocks. She used its roof to cover ground in minutes that would have taken the best part of half an hour at street level.

Fetched up on the eastern edge, trotted rapidly along the guttering until she spotted a grain cart parked below and leapt down into it. Startled oaths and the slugging pain of the impact along arse and back and one thigh. She rolled up from the fall, stood unsteadily, up to her ankles in the grain. Faces peered in at her.

“Fuck was that?”

“Hey. Listen, bitch, that’s my—”

“Oooh, no, but look at ’er, Perg, she’s black as a burned bun. It’s a fucking keeriass, it is.”

“Kiriath,” she snarled and jumped down among them. Shoved her way clear and set off at a fast jog along the sparsely used delivery and storage alleys that constituted the Narrows. She dodged among tradesmen laden with trays of produce, past squatting laborers sharing bread. Six men, Citadel livery. If Menkarak was playing true to type, that meant an invigilator–advocate general to oversee the legality of the proceedings—he’d be oldish—and five men-at-arms.

In the pulse of the krin, it seemed like pretty good odds.

The Narrows spilled out at various points along a curved and crooked street called Bridle Trail Walk. It was lined with low-end jewelers and curio shops, and busy with citizens browsing the iron-caged windows. Archeth skittered through, pushing and cursing, getting angry looks until her color registered, and then averted eyes and a few wards against evil.