It struck a chord.
The edge to his voice softened. “First time you’ve seen a massacre?”
“No.”
Her answer surprised him, and that single bladed word held a thousand more. Her gaze might have been the unread pages of a book, a story burning within.
One Zen suspected he would be achingly familiar with.
His jaw hardened. “Then you know there is nothing we can do but survive.”
The girl blinked, and the raw emotion on her face vanished. She stepped forward, and her gait was steady, grounded, as though she were a performer back at the Teahouse switching from one act to another.
“Keep up,” she said, and slipped into the shadows.
—
The bells tolled across the city of Haak’gong.
The crowds had been sent into a frenzy, and the Elantian city guard was out in full, marshaling people like fish into nets. The girl led Zen through back alleys, keeping to grime-slicked streets and narrow, crumpling walls that bled misery. She darted before him like a phantom, surefooted as a mountain goat.
Haak’gong was a port city, one side open to the sea and the other three surrounded by tall walls—built thousands ofcycles ago to keep out Mansorian invaders, reinforced in the era of fear instilled by the now-infamous demonic practitioner the Nightslayer toward the end of the Middle Kingdom. Now the Elantians used them as a means to control the workings of thecity and keep its people in. The walls were high, nigh impossible to scale, and, as Zen saw now, patrolled by archers.
Zen and the girl crouched in the borrowed darkness of achipped clay roof, surrounded by spavined houses. They’d reached the edge of the slums, which huddled beneath the shadows of the western walls. Torchlight flickered by the watchtowers, providing a lick of light against the night. Zen could see White Angels patrolling, their pale armor winking between crenellations like a macabre game of hide and seek.
He’d have to time it well. Get to the highest vantage point possible, seek the darkness between watchtowers, the space between one Angel and another…and then they’d take their chances.
Zen turned to the girl. “We have to get up to the roof.”
“What, you’re going to do one of your tricks again?” She waved a hand erratically, and it took him a moment to realize she was mimicking his practitioning.
“No,” he said, trying not to feel insulted. “They—the magicians—will sense it.”
She stared at him a moment longer, and it occurred to him that she wouldn’t understand anything he spoke of in terms of practitioning. After all, the common folk thought practitioners were just beings of lore and legend.
The Imperial Court had made sure of that.
The girl waggled her eyebrows at him in an expression that might have been cheeky—one thatdefinitelywould not have been tolerated by certain masters at his school—before turning away. With a light hop, she was on a window ledge; another little shimmy, and she’d hauled herself over the protruding terra-cotta eaves.
It was almost humiliating how much longer it took him to get up without using any practitioning. By the time Zen had scrabbled over the roof, he was sweating profusely, his side aching with sharp, stabbing pains that did nothing to improve his mood.
The girl was crouched low, her eyes trained on the walls. She glanced at him, pressed a finger to her lips. “Magicians,” she murmured, and pointed.
Blinking the haze from his eyes, Zen squinted. Past the roofs of the slums to the main roads of Haak’gong, he saw something that chilled his blood. Winding through the streets was an entire unit of Elantian Royal Magicians, recognizable by their cloaks, which fluttered like torn pieces of blue sky. Even from here, he could see glints of metal on their forearms.
He and the girl needed to get out,now.
Zen touched a hand to the wound in his side. It was stillbleeding freely, but he’d see to it once they were outside the walls. He was aware of how shallow and labored his breathing had become, how his vision slanted and slipped out of focus.
With tremendous effort, he stood and held out a hand. “You will need to hold on tightly to me.”
There it was again, that shadow of fear that flitted across her face at the prospect of touch. Zen understood—and he related more than she might ever know.
The Elantians had left their marks on both of them, in ways both visible and invisible.
The girl cocked an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t we be focused on running away instead of embracing?”
In spite of the rising urgency he felt, heat rushed to his cheeks. “Weare,”Zen said. The dizziness was now gripping his stomach. Soon he would not have the strength left to carry both of them out. “I will get us over the wall.”
