'You'll see,' Juto promised, laughing.
'You said they lived there…?' Phaeca inquired of Lon.
'I saw them. After they left Axekami and I sent you that message, after that they came back. After they'd been to Juraka.'
Kaiku did not trouble to ask how he knew about that. 'And you saw them?'
'I was right near the pall-pits. They bring a murk with them; it covers everything so you can't see, so they can move in secret. It covered the city, worse even than what we have now. But I was close enough; I saw them go to the pits. Into the pits.'
'There wasn't any… murk at Juraka,' Phaeca observed to Kaiku.
Kaiku shrugged. 'It would have hampered their own troops in Juraka. Perhaps they wanted us to see them. To let us know what we were up against.' She turned her attention back to Juto. 'And that is where we are going? These pall-pits?'
'Unless you have any other suggestions?' Juto replied.
'We will need to get close if we are to determine the veracity of Lon's information.'
'My lady, I can get you so close you can jump right in if the mood takes you.'
She let his irreverence slide off her. 'Have the feya-kori emerged again since you saw them return?' she asked Lon.
He shook his head and coughed ralingly into his fist.
Juto leaned out of the window and looked down into the street. A few lanterns burned in the depths of the houses, but none outside. Shadows were thickening. 'It's nearly time.' He turned back to them and gave them another of his nasty grins. 'Whatever gods you've got, pray to them now and hope they can still hear you in Axekami.' The night was shockingly dark. With moonlight blanketed by the miasma that the city seethed under, and without street lighting, it was difficult to see anything at all. What illumination there was came from the feeble candle-glow that leaked from the buildings of the Poor Quarter.
Juto took them up onto the flat roof of the building, which was cluttered with debris and bricks, and made them stop there while their eyes adjusted. For the Sisters, there was no such need: their kana modified their vision, without any conscious thought on their parts, until they could see as well as cats. They waited for the others to catch up.
Beyond the Poor Quarter the hillside was crowded with pinpricks of brightness, topped by the clustered windows of the Imperial Keep. It might have been possible to look on such a sight and imagine the Axekami of old, but even at night the Weavers' influence was evident. The streets were black and quiet where once they had teemed with people in the lanternlight, and around the city the Weavers' buildings were islands aglow in their own industry, a red illumination from within that seeped through slats and vents: the glare of the furnaces. They stood out like sores, angry coronas limning the surrounding buildings that they hid behind. The air tasted of metal, thick with corruption. It did not seem to bother the others, but the Sisters found it made them claustrophobic, penned in by the threat of suffocation.
'I'm worried, Kaiku,' Phaeca said quietly.
'As am I,' Kaiku replied.
'No I mean… about them.' She motioned with her head to indicate the others; they had drifted a little way apart from the group.
'Juto and Lon?'
'And Nomoru.'
'Nomoru?' Kaiku was surprised. 'Why?'
'There's something between them. Something they don't want to reveal to us.'
Kaiku was inclined to agree. While Cailin's teaching left her less and less time to see her friends, it brought her into closer contact with the other Sisters, and of them Phaeca was her natural ally in temperament. Through sharing the trials of the Red Order's apprenticeship, they had come to understand one another very well, and Kaiku knew better than to dismiss Phaeca's intuition where people were concerned.
'They used to be in a gang together,' Kaiku murmured. 'It could be anything.'
'They're not pleased to see Nomoru.'
'Who is?' Kaiku returned dryly.
'But Nomoru volunteered…'
'Which is entirely unlike her.'
'Exactly,' Phaeca said, clapping her fingertips against the heel of her other hand. 'They didn't know she was coming, but she knew that they would be here. There's a history between them, that much is certain. And it's Nomoru who has chosen to dredge it up.'
Kaiku sighed, rubbed the back of her neck. 'We must be careful.'
'You ready?' Juto said, walking over to them. 'We'd better go. It will take us most of the night.' Behind him, Lon was manhandling a plank into place with Nomoru's help, lowering it to form a bridge across the narrow alley to the next rooftop.
Juto caught Kaiku's gaze and smiled. 'We're not going down to street level until we don't have any other choice. Not scared of heights, are you?'
Lon scampered across the plank and secured the other side as they approached. Kaiku looked over the lip of the alleyway into the empty street below. Nothing moved.
'Get on with it,' Nomoru hissed.
Kaiku gave her a disdainful stare and stepped up onto the plank. It was thick and solid, wide enough so that she would have thought nothing of walking its length if it were not suspended above a bone-breaking drop. Taking careful steps, she crossed the alleyway and stepped past Lon onto the next rooftop, which was similarly flat. The others followed without mishap, and then Juto and Lon hefted the plank between them and went to the other side of the roof.
'There, that wasn't so bad, was it?' Juto grunted as he passed. 'We're great improvisers here in Poor Quarter.'
In that way, they began to head round the hill on its westward side. Juto's preparations were certainly thorough. Though most of the rooftops were not flat but made of patchy slate, he had mapped out a route that meant there was always one adjacent roof or balcony that they could use. It was circuitous and indirect, certainly, but caution was needed over speed, and his method did not require them to touch the ground for the greater portion of their journey. The buildings of the Poor Quarter were crowded close enough that it was often possible to jump the alleys without needing the plank, and they began to spot other people doing the same thing as them, passing by stealthily in the distance.
As they went, Juto explained how this kind of travel had evolved in response to the curfew, and was used all throughout the Poor Quarter, which was the only place in Axekami where there were enough flat roofs to make it viable.
'It's a sort of truce,' he murmured, as they darted quietly across another dark expanse littered with derelict shacks. Men idled there, watching them as they passed. 'There's people who live in these buildings who'd cut my throat in the daylight; but at night, they give us free passage, and our gang will do the same for them. We might be dirty bastards, but we'll be gods-damned if we'll let the Weavers imprison us in our own territory.'
'Could we not have got closer to the pall-pits during daylight, and gone from there?' Phaeca asked. 'We would not have had so far to travel then.'
Nomoru snorted a laugh. Juto's lips twitched in response.
'You don't know the Poor Quarter,' he said. 'Believe me, that dump where you met us was as close as any of our gang could safely get. The pall-pits aren't far; it's just slow going.'
And it got slower, for the Aberrant predators were appearing in numbers now. More and more often Juto froze as if in response to some signal, and they crept to the edge of their rooftop or balcony to see the dark, sleek shape of a shrilling loping through the street below, its soft pigeon-warble drifting up through the night to them. Eventually Kaiku realised that the clicks and taps that she had thought were the sounds of boards settling in the night were being made by the men and women who lounged on the rooftops: they were lookouts, communicating in code, warning each other when Aberrants were nearby. She found herself marvelling that such a disparate group of antagonists could be so united in purpose against a greater enemy. It was like the battle for the Fold, when the people of the Xarana Fault had joined against the Aberrant army. Perhaps Juto was wrong; perhaps there was hope for an uprising, if the folk of the Poor Quarter were willing to put aside their differences and resist their new despots.