Taniel cleared the roof with space to spare. He skidded to a stop and turned, ready to put his bayonet through her eye. She let go of the roof and fell to the street below.
Taniel swore. He hesitated only a moment before jumping after her. Even in the height of a powder trance his knees ached and his body shivered when he hit the ground. He landed in a crouch next to the Privileged, who was already on her feet. He reacted on instinct, thrusting his bayonet. He felt it slide home.
The woman slumped above him, her gloved hand a mere foot from his head. She had the face of an aging woman who’d once been very beautiful, her skin now lined and weathered, crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes. She let out a gasp, then jerked herself off the end of Taniel’s bayonet.
“You’ve no idea what’s going on, boy.” Her voice was a deadly whisper.
Taniel heard the jingle of Gothen’s weapons as the magebreaker ran up beside him, his pistol leveled.
Taniel felt the earth rumble.
“Get down!” Gothen leapt between Taniel and the Privileged.
The ground splintered and cracked and fell out from under them. Taniel’s whole body screamed at the pressure released. He felt as if he’d been jammed into the bottom of a cannon and used as fuel for an explosion. His ears popped, he felt dizzy. His head pounded.
Masonry rained down all around them.
When the dust began to clear, Taniel saw Gothen still crouching over him, his face in a grimace. The magebreaker opened one eye. His lips moved, but Taniel couldn’t hear a thing. The whole world wavered. Taniel got to his feet and looked around. Ka-poel approached him through the haze. Julene was not far behind. The buildings on either side of him were completely gone, leveled to their foundations, damp basements filled with rubble and hovering curtains of dust. There were smears of blood and bits of flesh in the debris. There had been people in those buildings – people who hadn’t had a magebreaker standing between them and the explosion.
Taniel drew a shaky breath.
Julene marched straight up to Taniel and knocked him off his trembling legs with a shove. Ka-poel slid in between them, her silent glare driving Julene back a step. It was several moments before Taniel could hear well enough to know what Julene was shouting.
“… let her go! You let her get away! You bloody fool!”
Taniel climbed to his feet. He gently pushed Ka-poel out of the way by the shoulder.
Julene stepped forward and punched him full in the face. His head jerked back. He reacted without thinking, grabbing her next blow out of the air and twisting her hand. He slapped her. “Back the pit off.” Taniel turned and spit blood. “She’s dead. There’s no way anyone could have lived through that.”
“She’s not dead.” Julene’s cheeks were flushed, but she made no move to continue the fight. “I can still feel her. She got away.”
“I ran her through with three spans of steel! She wasn’t walking away from that.”
“You think steel can hurt her? You think it can really hurt her? You don’t know shit.”
Taniel took a deep, calming breath, then a snort of powder. “Ka-poel,” he said. “Is she still alive?”
Ka-poel hefted the end of Taniel’s rifle in her small hands and drew her finger through the blood along the bayonet’s edge. She smeared it between her fingers. After a moment she nodded.
“Can you track her?”
Ka-poel nodded again.
Julene scoffed. “I can’t even track her,” she said. “She’s covered her trail. Even wounded she’s far more powerful than you can know. This damned girl can’t find her.”
“Pole?”
Ka-poel snorted and turned away. She paused a few moments to get her bearings, then pointed.
“We have a heading,” Taniel said. “Get yourself under control and watch how a real tracker does it.” He gestured to Ka-poel. “Lead on.”
Taniel shaded his eyes from rain and looked up at Julene. She stood above him, arms folded, a belligerent smile twisting the scar on her face. “It’s been two days,” she said. “Admit your pet savage can’t track this bitch and we’ll get out of this rain and tell Tamas there’s a problem.”
“Giving up so easily, eh?” Taniel kept his hand in the gutter and tried not to think about the substance squelching between his fingers. Storm drains collected everything, from human waste to dead animals and whatever garbage and mud piled up in the streets. During a storm like this, all of it was swept down into the large sewers beneath the city. This drain was clogged, leaving Taniel up to his shoulder in rainwater and filth, and he was enjoying it just about as much as he was enjoying Julene’s constant badgering. “You know Tamas won’t pay you until the job’s done, don’t you?” he reminded her.
“We’ll find her,” Julene said. “Just not today. Not in this rain. She caused this storm. I can feel it. The auras swirl, summoned from the Else. It muddies her trail too much, but once the rain has cleared up, I’ll find her trail again.”
“Ka-poel already has her trail.” Taniel stretched a little farther, his cheek touching the squalid puddle he lay in. He felt something hard, wrapped his hand around it, and pulled it out.
“She’s been scraping her fingernails between street cobbles and having you dig in every ditch between here and… what the pit is that?”
Taniel climbed to his feet. The glob of gray mud in his hand looked like the scrapings from a hundred boots. His stomach crawled at the smell of it and he held it at arm’s length. The whole mass clung to a long piece of wood. With a squelching, sucking sound the puddle at his feet slowly began to drain.
“Broken cane, I think,” Taniel said.
Ka-poel came over to examine the stinking mud. She poked it with one finger, her head held up and away, scrutinizing the whole mass down the bridge of her nose. Her fingers darted in suddenly, then came out, pinched together.
Julene leaned forward. “What’s that?” She shook her head. “Nothing. Stupid girl.”
Taniel washed his arm in the cleanest puddle he could find, then took his shirt and buckskin coat from Gothen. To Julene, “You need sharper eyes. It’s a hair. The Privileged’s hair.”
“That’s impossible. To find a single hair from the Privileged in all this muck. Even if it did belong to her, what can your savage do with it?”
Taniel shrugged. “Find her.”
Ka-poel walked away and opened her satchel. She worked with her back to them for a few moments. When she turned around, she straightened her satchel on her shoulder and gave a brisk nod. She tapped herself in the middle of the chest and then made a grasping motion.
Taniel grinned as he buttoned up his shirt. “We have her.”
They flagged down a hackney cab. Ka-poel sat up with the driver to direct him, and Taniel, Julene, and Gothen climbed inside. Julene made a disgusted sound a moment after the door closed.
“You smell like filth,” she said. “I’d rather be in the rain than in here with you. I’ll be on the footboard.” She swung back outside. A moment passed, and then the carriage jerked forward.
“Ka-poel can track the Privileged with a hair?” Gothen asked after they’d been moving for several minutes, his knees knocking uncomfortably close to Taniel’s.
“Hard to do it with one hair,” Taniel said. “Helps if there’s more. The blood from my bayonet, a discarded nail in the street – this Privileged bites her nails – an eyelash. One bit leads to the next. The more she has, the easier it is to track. If we want to sneak up on this Privileged, we need a precise location.”
Taniel opened his sketchbook and flipped through it, pausing briefly on the sketch of Vlora tucked between two pages, before moving on to a half-finished drawing of the Privileged. He was sketching from memory, but he’d been the only one of the four of them to get a good look at her. Gothen scanned the drawing for a few moments. When he finished, Taniel snapped the book shut, returning it to his jacket.