“Linay!” she gasped. The mob was all around them.
The magician grasped her arms and hauled her up, and for an instant they were face-to-face, forearms clasped, like warriors.“Flee this city,” he whispered as one of the pikemen pulled him toward the gate and the others tried to keep the crowd from killing him. Stones and mud came flying. Linay snuck Kate a smile. It was boyish, terrified, and amazed. The pikemen jerked him away.
“Linay!” Kate shouted after him.
And again, she saw his frightened eyes snatch at her, like a drowning man. She threw out a hand—
But it was too late. His smile hardened, and he was gone.
“Katerina!” Taggle and Drina were fighting their way sideways toward her as the crowd started to push again to enter the imagined safety of the city. The gate was still half raised. Linay wouldn’t stoop to go under it; the guards couldn’t bend him. The portcullis—it was a huge thing of iron-backed oak—screeched upward while behind it more guards lowered and braced their pikes.
Then, somewhere in the field of tents and desperate people, lightning struck. The noise of it shook the ground; its passage opened the air and cold rain poured down. The crowd screamed like one animal and surged against the gates. The girls were shoved along as if at the front of a wave. Kate hit her head on the gate and then was under it. Taggle leapt from Drina’s arms and dove between the pikemen. “This way!” he shouted. They went at a staggering run, following the cat as he darted out the other end of the gate tunnel and turned sharply down a tiny alleyway.
The crowd roared on; the people of the abandoned country poured through the gates, unstoppable as a river. Kate and Drina followed Taggle. They scrambled up a water barrel and onto the roof of a shed, and from there onto a higher roof. They knocked loose slates that went skittering down the steep pitch and fell into the rushing crowd. Faces turned up toward them. The two girls lay back panting, out of sight, while Taggle peered over the gutter edge like a gargoyle.
They huddled there a long time, until the crowd thinned and only the dead were left in the gate square below.
“Well,” drawled Taggle. “Now how do we stop him?”
seventeen
the stone city
“He wants to be burned,” said Kate. “Oh, God, he wants to be burned. He said it would need a great spell to join the shadow and the rusalka together. A great spell—a great sacrifice. He’s going to sacrificehimself.” The cold downpour washed over her. She remembered Linay’s face, terrified and exultant. He would join the rusalka to the shadow with his own death. The winged thing would kill everything it touched. Everyone. The whole city. Kate shook. “He told me to flee.”
“Hmmm,” said Taggle, picking his way over the loose slates. “Fleeing is not a bad plan.”
Kate ignored him.“Where will they take him?” she asked Drina. “Where did they take Lenore?”
“Katerina—” Taggle began.
“Drina, where?”
Drina looked shattered.“The courts,” she whispered. “At the center of the city. But, Kate—we can’t. We tried. When they took my mother, we tried. They only laughed. OurBaro said we were lucky they only laughed.”
Below them the guards had begun to trickle back into the gate square. They were making piles of the dead: the crushed pikemen and those who had been crushed against the pikes. Kate didn’t look, but she couldn’t shut out the scrapes and heavy thuds. “Taggle,” she said, “find us a way to the center of the city.”
The cat regarded her thoughtfully, steady as two isin-glass lamps. Then he turned and led them away, across the rooftops, fearless and nimble.
The downpour slowed to a cold soaking rain. The steep roofs were slippery, but they didn’t dare go into the streets. Men in the dark garb of the city watch roamed in packs and harried the refugees from doorways and alleys. So Drina and Kate stuck to the roofs, inching, sliding, scraping, keeping out of sight. It was slow and excruciating. The light was sinking by the time they came to a rooftop overlooking the great square.
Across from them towered the city hall, with its pitched roof and heavy-lidded windows, and a church, its spire thick with monsters. A squat building filled the space between church and hall, its windows barred and its windows guarded.“The courts,” Drina whispered. “And there—” She stopped speaking and pointed down.
On a little stage in the center of the square stood the weizi, the carved pillar that should be a town’s heart. But this one was uncarved. And it was stone. That was so strange to Kate’s carver’s heart that she could hardly take it in. A plain pillar—no, Kate realized, it was not a pillar, it was a stake, a burning stake on a little stage, which had seen who knows how many deaths. She swallowed and for a moment wanted to just let the city fall under the rusalka’s wings. That quick death was better than this city deserved.
The stone city, Linay had told her once, had a stone heart. And here it was. Nearby, the canal where Lenore had drowned slapped under the lip of the docks.
The dimming day was quiet and the lid of the sky twisted sounds. Kate wasn’t quite sure whether she could hear screaming. “Linay…” she whispered, and gripped the gutter to steady herself. “Drina. How long do we have? Will they—will they burn him tonight?”
Drina shook her head.“They’ll have a trial…an ordeal.” She was silent so long that Kate almost asked her, almost had to think of a way to ask:How long did they torture your mother?
“Tomorrow,” said Drina, before Kate had to find those words. “They’ll torture him tonight, make him confess. They’ll burn him tomorrow. When people can watch.”
Kate pushed the dripping hair out of her eyes and peered at the squat bulk of the courts, its little windows barred and squinting.“We have to get him out.”
“The grand duke’s army could not get him out,” said Taggle.
“I don’t want to watch him burn,” whispered Drina.
Kate tried to stay practical, and so answered Taggle:“Maybe we can get in.”
“Oh!” said Taggle brightly. “And kill him in his sleep in there!” Despite his cheerful tone, the look he threw the black building was skeptical. “There’s bound to be a cellar or two, I suppose. I will look.” And he jumped fearlessly from the edge of the gutter, sprang down to a ledge Kate hadn’t even seen, down again to slip across a windowsill, and down again to vanish, gray, into the gray light.
The ghost of the scream came again in the chilly twilight.“I’m going to be sick,” Drina choked. She backed away from the edge. Kate turned her back on the square and followed. Farther back on the roof, jammed against a taller wall, they found shelter. It wasn’t much: a ruined dovecote between two huge chimneys, with a scrap of roof and a rain-wrecked honeycomb of dove boxes, white droppings thick over everything. It smelled sharply sour, like the bear cage in which the Roamers had kept the chickens, and in which Kate had been burned. The smell made her skin shudder and her mouth taste metal.
She was sure of it now, as the night felclass="underline" Somewhere nearby, Linay was screaming.
¶
In the darkness, Kate waited for Taggle’s return. She held the burl wood carving of Lenore’s face in her hands, using the edge of her knife to polish a rough bit here and there. Drina dozed shivering beside her, the heavy clouds pressed close over her, and the city slept restlessly below her. Taggle was gone a long time, long enoughfor Kate to struggle in and out of dreams: She was bent over her cabinet box in Samilae, carving, only she had wings instead of a shadow. She was lost in a maze of stone streets and someone was screaming, and then the stones melted. She was holding Taggle’s body in her arms.
She woke with Taggle’s cold nose nudging hers. His fur was damp and smeared with foul mud. She stroked him and loose hairs clung to her hands.