"I can see that." I look at the group — at the people standing guard over strangers in a street that has shadows moving in it two blocks away — and I feel something that I don't entirely have a word for. Not pride, exactly. Something larger and more complicated than pride. Something that has to do with what Reva said in the warehouse: it was worth it. Coming into that house.
"Get the family down," I tell Oren. To the eight: "Can you get yourselves out once they're moving?"
"We know the routes," the old woman says. "The Ghost of Lowtown's been leaving maps for three years."
I stare at her. Oren makes a sound beside me.
"Small ones," she says, slightly defensive. "Scratched into the walls. Not everyone, just people who knew what to look for."
I left those marks. I left them so that if I were ever gone the routes would survive without me. I never considered that they might outlast my anonymity.
"Follow the western route," I tell her. "Tell anyone you meet: west, then Coppice, then harbour. Tell them Lady Vhol'ir says the route is clear."
She nods once like we've made a deal. They go.
I stand there for a moment with the noise of the city dying above me and the underground going quiet below me, thing about what it means that people are standing in streets with hatchets and kitchen knives guarding each other's children because of laws that exist on paper because two people built them from a very strange and very political and very real marriage.
Whatever Sevareth believed about himself — whatever the Maw wanted him to believe, about being feared, about power being the only thing that made him worth something — this is what he actually built. Not the fear. This.
I close the sewer entrance. I go find the ritual chamber.
26
SEVARETH
The northern gate holds for four hours.
I know this because I am at the northern gate for three of those hours, and because I am also, by the fourth hour, no longer entirely certain where the northern gate is.
When the Maw does when it takes over. It is not violent, as a beginning — that's what I always assumed, that losing control would feel like a loss, like something being taken. It doesn't. It feels like a simplification. The city stops being complex. The coalition forces stop being human beings making choices in response to fear and resources and propaganda. They become vectors of threat. They become things that should be stopped, and the Maw has very efficient methods for stopping things, and for a while — I am being precise — for a while those methods feel like mine.
Then Draevik pulls me out of what's left of the fourth platoon's forward position and says my name twice before I hear it.
The forward position is rubble and shadow and three soldiers who are very still in ways that have nothing to do with taking cover.
"My lord." Draevik's voice is very controlled. He's standing in front of me with his hands out, palms forward, the way you stand in front of something that might decide you're a threat. "Come with me. Right now."
"I—" I see the shadows still moving along the rubble's edges. "Did I do that?"
"Yes. Come with me."
"They were House Vhol'ir soldiers."
"They'll recover." A beat. "Most of them."
I let him move me. I'm aware that's what's happening — that he is physically steering me away from the forward position and I'm allowing it — and I'm aware that my awareness itself is intermittent, that there are gaps in what I can account for in the last forty minutes that I cannot reconstruct.
The Maw is not whispering anymore. It hasn't been whispering for hours. It's something else now — a presence rather than a pressure, a co-occupation rather than an influence, and the part of me that knows this is the part that is also very clearly losing ground.
Draevik gets me behind the estate's inner wall, into the small courtyard that hasn't been breached. He doesn't ask me how I am. He has too much respect for both of us to ask me that.
"Casualties on our side?" I ask.
"Twenty-three confirmed. Forty wounded. The three from the forward position are — they're alive. Shaken. My lord. I need to know if you can hold it."
"For how long."
"Mireya has gone to the chamber. She needs time to reach it, find Vaustren if he's there, and perform the ritual. I don't know how long. Hours, possibly."
