Nophel thought about becoming Unseen, but that would have been no help. Whether people saw him or not, the streets were chaotic, and he would be moving against the flow. So he took a deep breath from the nut clasped in his hand and forged ahead.
As he saw the chaos and destruction, the bodies in the streets and the burning buildings, the fear on people's faces and the useless efforts by Scarlet Blades to temper the flow of fleeing humanity, his mind was on the contents of that old, worn box. They signified a pain in his mother's heart that he had never considered-he had always imagined her filled with hate and inhumanity, not sadness and loss. And they drove him on now, because he was doing this partly for her.
She's a little girl with an old woman's eyes, he thought of Rose, and in some ways she was the living memory of the city. Constantly reborn, her knowledge handed down, she was the echo of Echo City in blood and flesh.
Bleeding, coughing, Nophel made his way uphill toward Hanharan Heights. He passed dead people and fallen buildings, but they were invisible to him. He felt the city's doom constantly transmitted through his heels, and at one point, when a dreadful roar came from somewhere to the south, the ground shook so much that he believed this was the end. But the tremors settled, people picked themselves up, and Nophel started to climb again.
He cast his face upward in case the Scopes were watching for him. He would be with them soon. His breath bubbled and blood ran from the corner of his mouth, but after everything that had happened, he could not even consider failure. That would be the cruelest joke that Fate could ever play.
While much of the city fled, he climbed, and it was only as he reached the Marcellan wall that he went Unseen.
The first half of their journey was easy and fast. They crossed the southern border of Crescent into Course, passing the waterfront areas by the Western Reservoir where thousands once spent their leisure time eating, drinking, and sailing; the area was all but abandoned. There were some who had stayed behind, ignoring the strange warnings they'd received or heard from someone else. Several taverns were full to bursting with drunks. The overflow sprawled on the streets outside, fighting, sleeping, some of them fucking under the sunlight as if this was the last day they'd ever see. Perhaps some of them truly believed that, Gorham thought, but it never took much for a drunk to drink like the world was about to end.
There were bodies in the streets. Not many, but enough to show that the relative silence was far from normal. A mother and daughter lay dead beneath a second-story window, and a sprinkling of mepple blooms had fallen across their bloodied clothing. Several Scarlet Blades had been killed and stripped outside a large, faceless building that had once stored produce from Crescent. The warehouse now stank of fruit turning to rot, and the dead Blades were adding to the smell. Each of them had a sword handle protruding from the mouth. Farther on, in a small square where a water fountain still gurgled cheerily, at least thirty people lay dead, with hands tied behind their backs and throats slit.
"Bastards!" Peer said, and Gorham shared her rage. He'd seen this before, three years ago when the Marcellans were cracking down on the Watchers and needed the city to know how serious they were. Back then, most of those killed had been Watchers and their families. Here, he suspected those executed had nothing in common other than a wish to follow their instincts south.
"Why didn't the Blades get the message?" Gorham asked. He thought of those moths, lizards, and bats, drifting or running through the city and spreading the word he had given them.
"Maybe some did," Rose said.
"Not enough." He breathed deeply, taking some comfort from the fact that the Blades had been fed their own swords.
"We can't stop every time," Alexia said. "The city's in turmoil, and there'll be more. Peer and I saw the start of it, and it'll only have grown worse."
"You're right," Gorham said. I'm not sure how much of this I can see without going mad.
The ground shook. Things fell. They walked on.
Rose paused now and then and closed her eyes, frowning. After a couple of these occasions, Gorham asked her about Nophel, but she shook her head sharply and they moved on. Not there yet, he thought. Maybe he's dead. He had no idea what had passed between Rose and the deformed man, and right now he had no wish to find out. They all bore the weight of their own past; he knew that better than most.
When they reached the River Tharin and started across Six Step Bridge, the going became tougher. A group of Scarlet Blades had set up a checkpoint on the bridge, and they were charging people to cross. They were drunk and smashed on slash, and two of the female Blades wore what appeared to be male genitals on strings around their necks.
There were maybe a hundred people sitting across the bridge, some in front of the cafes lining each side, and others apparently camped on the road. Many were drunk. A couple appeared to be asleep, or dead.
Gorham sat down and the others followed.
"We can't let them slow us down," Rose said.
"No pay, no way," a teenaged girl a few steps from them said. She held an empty wine bottle in one hand and a bag of slash in the other. Yet her eyes were clear and her voice strong. She had been crying.
"What's the price of passage?" Peer asked.
"For you…" the girl said, lips pressing together. "Can't you guess?" She pretended to drink from the bottle, wiping her dry lips. Tears streaked her flushed face. "Bommy tried to protect me. He… stood in their way."
"They killed him," Alexia said.
"Threw him in the river. The river! They cut off his… They didn't even have the decency to cut his throat first."
Gorham closed his eyes, trying not to imagine Bommy's final moments.
"I'm waiting," the girl said, leaning forward. "They've been drinking all morning. One of them fell down drunk just now; the others dragged him away. So I'm waiting."
"If you try-" Gorham said.
"I'm not going to try anything. I'm going to do every one of them-with this." She pulled her jacket open, displaying rips in her shirt, scratches across her neck, and, in her belt, the cheap, dull sword she must have found in one of the taverns.
"Come with us," Gorham said. "We're going south."
"Your women going to give in peacefully, then?" the girl asked.
"Fuck them," Alexia said. "Watch this." Lying down behind Peer and Gorham so that she was blocked from the Blades' view, she started to fade away.
"What the-!" the girl shouted, stumbling backward.
Rose was by her side almost instantly, easing her to the ground and whispering, "You're drunk."
The girl-wide-eyed, scared, in pain and mourning-seemed to react to Rose's touch. She looked up into the young Baker's eyes and smiled.
Gorham did not even hear Alexia stand, but he felt a nudge on the shoulder as she passed him by.
"Come on," he said to Peer. "She'll need some help."
"I can't kill anyone else, Gorham," Peer said, almost manically.
"You won't need to." And he smiled at her, because he thought he knew what Alexia intended.
They walked up the slight rise of the bridge toward the roadblock, and the smell of bad wine and burning slash became much stronger. Gorham was careful to keep his hands away from the sword in his belt-in the shadows of a tavern's canopy, he could see a Blade resting a crossbow on a wooden privacy screen-and he tried to offer an appeasing smile. They'll think I'm coming to offer Peer as our crossing fee, he thought, and his smile suddenly felt like a grimace. Relax… relax…
"I don't like this," Peer said.
"When I point, just look that way." He hoped that Alexia was as serious as he thought. He hoped that she was still a soldier. And, most of all, he hoped that these murdering bastards were as superstitious as most Blades he had met.
One of the women with genitals strung around her neck staggered forward. She stopped ten steps from him, drawing her sword and pointing it. It had blood smeared across the blade.