The silhouette of a heron moved across a sky red with twilight. “Is that one of Dah’mir’s?” Singe asked.
Geth squinted, then shook his head. “I can’t tell.”
“We only need to get across the street.” Natrac pointed ahead. “There are stairs leading down to the canal just to the left of the bridge. That’s where we’re going.”
Singe twisted around and looked for Dandra and the others. They were less than a dozen paces away, pressed back against a wall. Singe caught Dandra’s eye and gestured to the stairs Natrac had indicated. She nodded. He turned back to Natrac. “Let’s go.”
Darting across the street and down the stairs for no other reason than the distant presence of a bird actually felt vaguely ridiculous. A half dozen similar-but much more deadly-situations that he had experienced over his years as a mercenary flitted through Singe’s mind. Running for cover on a battlefield in Cyre as arrows fell. Infiltrating an enemy camp. Leaping aside as a hostile wizard hurled bolts of lightning at him. Retreating through the shadows of Narath as the soldiers of Aundair, countrymen he had left behind when he joined the Blademarks of House Deneith, flooded the streets …
Dodging around strolling shoppers might have felt ridiculous, but his heart was still racing as he paused on the stairs to be sure that Ashi, Orshok, and Dandra made it into hiding as well. Dandra came last, shepherding the others before her even though, he knew, she could easily have outpaced them both. He fell in beside her as they hurried down the long flight of steps toward the canal below. “You saw the heron?”
She nodded. “Do you think it saw us?”
“I hope not.” Singe gave her a closer look. There was a particular set to Dandra’s chin and the line of her jaw that Singe had come to recognize as an expression of her unstoppable determination. It was an expression that she wore only when she was up against formidable resistance-most particularly internal resistance. His eyes flicked to the yellow-green crystal hanging around her neck, then away. “Is Tetkashtai bothering you?” he asked.
“Does it show?”
“If you know what to look for.”
Dandra grimaced, but nodded again. “She’s terrified at even being in the same city as Dah’mir,” she said. “All she wants to do is get away from him.”
“I can’t say I entirely blame her. Even if Geth’s right and he’s weak, I don’t like knowing he’s this close.” He twitched his shoulders. “It puts me on edge.”
“You might be on edge,” Dandra said tightly, “but I know you’ll step back. Every time Tetkashtai gets this way, she comes closer to falling over.”
Her eyes flickered as some inner dialogue passed between her and the presence. Singe raised an eyebrow as her face tightened a little more. Tetkashtai could hear what Dandra heard. “What does she say?” the wizard asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
Singe bit back the curiosity that her answer roused in him. The very first time that Dandra had touched his mind in the mental link that kalashtar called the kesh, she had shown him Tetkashtai as she saw her: a formless aura of yellow-green light, at the same time both part of her and something separate. That was as close as he could come to experiencing the union that Dandra had with the presence-and he knew that it was as close as he should come, too. Dandra was the only one who could stand up to Tetkashtai. Geth had tried drawing on the presence’s power once and almost ended up a prisoner in his own body. Singe knew better than to try.
Even though it cut him to see Dandra struggling alone with such a shadow across her fiery, determined personality.
At the bottom of the stairs, the wooden island of a landing spread out. Only one edge of it faced onto the canal-the rest of it extended back beneath the platform of the street above. Skiffs skirted the landing, making deliveries and ferrying passengers along the canal, but when a boatman called out to Natrac, offering his services, the half-orc just dismissed him with a wave and a scowl. Instead, he led them away from the stairs and further into the gloom below the city. The massive pillars and stilts that supported Zarash’ak rose above them like naked trees. The last hints of the fresh smell of the herb market were cut off, replaced by the stink of the silty water that moved sluggishly past their feet.
On the opposite side of the landing from the stairs, one end of a tangle of planks and rope had been secured to spikes driven into the wood. The other rose up at a sharp angle toward the shadows overhead, creating a trembling construction that was half ramp and half rope bridge. Singe lifted his head, following the lines of rope.
Hidden in the darkness of the underside of Zarash’ak, long spans of suspended walkways bounced, shifted, and swayed in a complex network like the weavings of some enormous spider.
“The webs?” Singe asked.
Natrac nodded.
“Grandmother Wolf!” said Geth, his eyes wide and shining in the dim light. “They’re incredible. Who built them?”
“Goblins,” Natrac said. “Clever little vermin. There aren’t that many of them in the city and they like their own space. The webs are still mostly their territory but there are other groups in Zarash’ak who use them, too. I don’t think even Vennet would try looking for us down here.” He stepped cautiously onto the angled bridge. The ropes creaked at his weight but held. “Be careful,” he said over his shoulder and began to climb.
One by one, they followed after him. To his surprise, Singe found that the bridge was actually very well constructed. It bounced and swayed as they moved along it, but only within a narrow range of motion. Under the lighter weight of goblins, the bridge might not have even shifted at all. It had been built with more than goblins in mind, though-there were two ropes on either side of the foot bed, one low for small travelers, the other higher for human hands and arms. The overhead walkways, once they reached them, were similarly well-built, though cramped. Two humans would have been forced to squeeze together if they wanted to pass on the walkway and the rough, age-darkened wooden patchwork that was the underside of Zarash’ak hung just a few feet above Singe’s head. Only the dim vista of slow water and massive pillars broke the oppression, a spectacular sight in its own way.
For a moment, Singe was reminded of the fantastic bridges and skyways that leaped between the towers of Sharn-except that the bridges of Sharn smelled a lot better than the shadowed webs. Singe wrinkled his nose as a ripe stink welled up from below and enveloped them. “Twelve moons,” he said, taking shallow breaths through his mouth. “Does the smell just keep getting worse?”
“There are dead spots in the flow around the stilts,” said Natrac. “Anything that gets caught in one just floats until it rots.”
“How far do we have to go?”
“Around to the other side of the city.” The half-orc made a face, thrusting his tusks out. “The problem is that paths through the webs don’t run under everything and they don’t always take the most direct route.”
“Then keep moving,” Ashi said. “The sooner we reach our destination, the better.”
As long as he could keep track of which of the patches of twilight that penetrated the darkness below Zarash’ak marked the canal where they had entered the webs, Singe felt like he knew where they were. As soon as he lost that point of reference, though-and all it took was glancing away at the wrong moment-he felt instantly disoriented. The paths of the webs were strange. The ropes and cables that supported the walkways and bridges weren’t perpendicular like the walls of buildings. They ran at odd angles. They crossed and knotted and merged. The walkways rose and dipped, flowing around the strange upside-down architecture of Zarash’ak’s underside: the hanging cellars of buildings. the enormous beams that lay beneath the streets, the huge bulges like barrels the size of ships’ hulls that Natrac said were cisterns.