“Report.”
“I didn’t see any Wolves, and there’s no activity on this side of the river.”
“What about the far side?”
“Hard to tell. I hit the roof and watched until I heard you approaching. I didn’t see anything near here. There’s something happening about ten blocks northeast—a fire, perhaps a clash between a few of the groups we noted in this area last night.”
“Maybe that’s what pulled them away from the bridge.”
“There aren’t enough of them to watch all of the bridges normally anyway.”
Dylan shifted closer to both of them, crouching down beside Kara. “Do we have to cross the river here? It’s too exposed.”
“We could head closer to the distortion along the river’s edge and try for another bridge, but then we’ll be closer to the River Rats,” Allan explained, never taking his eyes off the bridge and the river beyond. “I’d rather risk the smaller, less organized groups here. The Rats can be vicious.”
Glenn’s eyebrows rose. “And these groups aren’t?”
“We’ll cross here, all in one group, all at once.” Allan motioned toward the window. “Same order as before. Cutter, aim for the southern edge of the bridge. We can use the shadow of the bridge’s wall as we cross.”
Cutter nodded, already scanning out the window. Kara felt for the knife sheathed at her side, although she barely knew how to use it, then drew her hand across her slick forehead.
At a gesture from Allan, Cutter slid down to the empty doorway and out into the street, Kara following the rest in a line. She stayed hunched over, like Allan and Cutter before her, gaze cutting left and right until she reached the hedges of the park. Leaves brushed her shoulders and branches caught in the cloth of her shirt, but she didn’t want to move out of the shadows.
They reached the end of the park, clustering in a corner, the bridge twenty steps away. In the distance, she could now see a column of smoke rolling into the sky, lit from beneath by the pulsing orange of a fire.
As soon as Glenn and Tim had joined them, Allan touched Cutter’s shoulder, and the tracker sprinted across the walkway to the lee of the bridge wall. The rest were on his heels. The first statue—an elderly man in Prime Wielder’s robes—slid by overhead, hands on either side of the dead globe. Kara glanced up at him, at his faintly arrogant features, then behind—
And caught a hint of movement in one of the buildings beyond the park.
She cried out, but caught herself, choking it off. It still snagged Allan’s attention. She halted, crouched low, weight on her heels. He hesitated, then returned.
“What is it?”
“Movement, in the shadows of the café two buildings to the left of the bakery.”
Dylan and the others had caught up to them, but Allan motioned them to keep moving.
“What was it? Did you see?”
“It was too quick. But whatever it was, it kept low to the ground.”
It could have been anything. Someone crouched down low, like them, or an animal now living in the abandoned city.
Or one of the Wolves.
They waited, but twenty breaths later there had been no other sign of movement.
“Maybe it was nothing.”
Allan gripped her arm, pulled her toward the far end of the bridge. “Come on. Go ahead of me. I’ll watch as we move.”
They reached the far side, Allan pointing toward a mercantile of quarried white granite. As they crossed the thoroughfare to duck into its huge wooden double doors, Kara heard an echo of people shouting and the roar of a fire, far distant. But the sounds died out as soon as she entered the building.
“What did you see?” Dylan asked.
“Nothing. There wasn’t anything there.”
Dylan looked skeptical, but Allan said, “Go up Traveler’s Row,” cutting off anything else he might have asked. “It’s nearly a straight shot to the area we want.”
They stuck to the shadows in the street after leaving the mercantile through a different set of doors. The fire and noise from the fighting receded as they skirted block after block. The distortion neared, its fractured sides rising into the night sky.
A hiss from Cutter and Allan’s arm shoving Kara against the nearest wall brought her attention back to the street. Allan motioned toward the rooftops opposite their position.
Figures were silhouetted against the glow of the distortion. Kara hunched down farther into the darkness as the figures leaped from roof to roof. They moved with a fluid, eerie silence, racing toward the disturbance farther up the street. She couldn’t see individual faces, but as they passed directly across from her, shifting from the diffuse light of the distortion into darkness, then vanishing, she realized they were dressed in rags, carried spears, a few with bows, and they were all children, or at least young adults.
Kara waited until Allan gave the signal to move again, then grabbed his arm. “Who were they?”
“River Rats.”
“They were Morrell’s age!”
“And they’re dangerous.”
Kara didn’t need him to elaborate. She’d felt it as they ran past, even from four stories down and a street away.
She glanced behind them as they continued down Traveler’s Row, but saw no sign of the River Rats again. At one point, she thought she saw movement between the columns of another mercantile, but she said nothing.
Then Cutter slowed. They diverged from the Row and the trading houses vanished, replaced by more domestic housing—apartments and smaller shops, inns and taverns. They were in a neighborhood similar to the one Kara had grown up in within Eld. The streets were littered with abandoned or broken carts and the detritus of a thousand lives interrupted or destroyed by the Shattering. Trunks and household items were scattered in the dust, dropped as people fled. Kara stepped over discarded clothes, a child’s rag doll, a broken urn, as they crossed a street to another building, where Cutter halted inside.
“You’ll have to lead us from here, Allan.”
“This is close enough.”
Allan motioned them deeper into the apartment building, across the foyer, and into the back halls. They exited through the back.
As they continued, Kara noticed that the buildings were more damaged than they had been earlier, now that they were closer to the distortion. Walls were cracked, entire sections collapsed, leaving gaping holes into the rooms beyond. Roofs had caved in, along with some of the upper floors. They crawled over heaps of stone before entering another building and emerging onto another street. Allan halted and glanced around, orienting himself, then headed toward the distortion at a trot, Cutter a few paces behind him with bow ready. Glenn and Tim brought up the rear, both with swords drawn, but they saw nothing.
A short time later, the distortion appeared ahead, slicing down from the sky, cutting through half of a building to the right and into the cobbles of the street. Kara knew without reaching out with her Wielder senses that the distortion sliced through the ground beneath, probably through the ley tunnels and underground barge system itself.
Allan stopped a few paces from the shard. Both Kara and Dylan drifted up behind him. Through the strangely flat facet, tinged a pale orange, Kara could see the street continuing on as if uninterrupted. Same for the buildings to either side. Much farther ahead, the street ended at a square.
“This is it.” Allan pointed. “The apothecary I found is to the left, just before the square. We should probably hit that first. If you can release the shard without destroying what’s inside, that is.”
“Let’s find out.”
Allan stepped back, ordering the Dogs into defensive positions around them. Kara let the sounds wash over her as she stared up the wall of the shard, her blood thrumming in her veins. She couldn’t help smiling a little, even with the threat of the Wolves and River Rats and others hanging over them.
“It’s a little thrilling, isn’t it?” Dylan said.
“And daunting. We haven’t practiced with the ley in a while. We should take it slow. Let’s both investigate it separately first. Then we’ll compare what we’ve found.”
“Agreed.”
Dylan stepped away from her, moving along the shard’s edge. Kara reached out with her hands, although she couldn’t bring herself to touch what appeared to be a hard surface; she’d experienced too much horror as a Wielder in the city when it came to the distortions. Instead, she closed her eyes and felt the distortion through what Hernande and the University mentors called the Tapestry.
It felt like every other distortion she’d ever encountered. She could sense the cracks all around her, radiating outward from the center, slicing the remains of the city into distinct pieces. If this had been a normal-sized distortion, she would have attempted to surround it, trace out the damage, and then begin to repair it, healing each fracture one careful step at a time, all while anticipating the destabilization of the distortion and its sudden closure. But she couldn’t do that here. She would never be able to sense all of its edges, never be able to piece together what needed to be repaired first.
She focused on the single shard before her instead. It was three times the size of the largest distortion she’d handled in Erenthrall before the Shattering, and oddly shaped. Four sides were relatively flat, like the sides of a gemstone, but the far side was broken up into a dozen or more facets with no obvious pattern of formation. She couldn’t visualize how these fractures related to the surrounding shards, to the distortion as a whole.
She pulled back in frustration, opened her eyes and grounded herself again. Dylan was still working silently to one side, his face creased in concentration.
Allan came up to her side. “Well?”
“I don’t know. We can’t approach it the same way we did before, that’s for certain. If we collapse the inner walls, we’ll be healing parts of the adjacent shards as well, releasing them. It might set off a cascade reaction, each shard collapsing into the next, until the entire distortion folds in on itself.”
Dylan gasped and staggered back a step, one hand rising to massage his temple. He drifted toward them. “This is going to require a delicate touch.”
“What were you thinking?”
“As you said, we can’t heal all of the sides. But we can leave all of those touching adjacent shards standing and just release the faces that are free, like this one.”
“Then do it.”
Both Wielders turned to Allan. He shrugged. “That’s what we’re here for. And the longer we wait, the more likely someone will find us.”
The ex-Dog walked away, leaving Dylan and Kara alone.
“You’d better take the lead, Kara. The ley here isn’t stable, and it’s not as strong as it was before.”
Kara had noticed that as well. “I’m going to try to heal this one face. I’ll need you to stabilize the sides.”
She reached for the Tapestry again, while at the same time stretching out to the nearest source of ley. There were a few weak lines running beneath them, not strong enough to help her if she needed the ley’s power. An immense pool stood off to their left, but south of them, caught in the distortion, so she couldn’t access it. Another had formed outside the distortion to the west. She linked herself to it, noting that it acted like one of the pits inside one of Erenthrall’s old nodes. In fact, a strong line branched out from it, angled west, away from them.
Then she concentrated on the shard before her. Dylan joined her, connecting his strength to hers. The shard’s face had five edges, none of them the same length, and as she prodded the surface she realized it was weaker farther from the edges. She found the weakest point, a spot a foot above the cobblestones of the street to their right.
Glancing toward Dylan, whose jaw clenched to indicate he was ready, she began putting pressure on the weak spot.
It resisted. A ripple ran through the face of the shard. She pushed harder, but the face merely bowed inward.
She pulled back. She didn’t understand. She was doing what she’d always done to heal a distortion—reach out and encompass the shattered reality, then smooth out the edges, from the outside in.
But she couldn’t surround the face. And she didn’t think she could pry one of the edges free, not without also affecting the connecting shards.
She needed to pierce the face somehow, then work with the hole she’d create.
Gathering herself, she formed the Tapestry into a sharp point, like a needle, then jabbed the needle forward—
And felt it punch through.
She jerked back, half expecting the face of the shard to burst like a bubble, but it held. Reaching forward, she pried mental fingers into the tiny hole she’d created and began healing. One of the Dogs swore when the hole she’d created became visible. Sweat broke out on her forehead as she continued, but Dylan added his own strength to hers. She drew some from the distant ley as well, and the hole widened, large enough now for them to step through.
After a certain point, the healing sped up on its own and Kara pulled back, watching the rest of the face disappear into the edges of the shard on either side, as if she’d reached a critical limit after which the shard could heal itself. Dylan tensed as it reached the edges of the adjacent faces, but the healing halted as soon as it hit the face’s boundaries.
Kara stood silent, breath held. A breeze brushed past her, coming from inside the shard. She exhaled, tasted the stale air as it escaped, dry and dusty. It smelled of death and decay.
She glanced down. Where the shard had intersected the street, a thick line cut through the cobbles, the earth churned and broken where the shard’s wall had been.
A hand on her shoulder made her jump.
“Is it safe?” Allan asked. The rest of the Dogs were grouped behind her and Dylan, blades drawn, eyes searching the newly revealed street, their mostly empty satchels ready.
“It’s stable.”
“Then let’s move.”
The Dogs crossed the old threshold cautiously, but broke into a trot on the far side, following Allan as he led them toward the apothecary. Kara grabbed Dylan’s arm and hauled him inside as well. They hugged the buildings on the left until they neared the square. The apothecary stood with its door open and Allan and the others ducked inside without hesitation. They stuffed bottles into their satchels, glass vials clinking together. But the fountain in the square snagged Kara’s attention, the angel statue with wings spread and face lifted to the sky making her pause. The stone ledge of the basin beneath circled the statue, and leaning up against the basin—
Her breath caught. She could see at least two bodies at this distance, what might be a third lying on the ground at their feet, stacks of supplies surrounding them.
“They killed themselves,” Allan said from behind her, making her start. “They waited for someone to come and then they gave up.”
“How long?”
“Long enough to scrounge and gather up all of the useful supplies in the area. But time was moving faster in this shard, so it could have been weeks or months, maybe even a year from their perspective. How long would you wait if you couldn’t get out?”
Kara didn’t know.
“We need to get as many of the supplies they gathered as we can carry. Stay here if you want.”
“No. I’ll go. If we keep opening up shards, we’re likely to find much worse than this.”
Allan said nothing, but stepped around her and moved toward the fountain. Kara followed.
He hadn’t warned her about the baby, clutched in its mother’s arms. Kara hesitated, thinking that something should be done for them, but she didn’t know what. They couldn’t bury them here, in the middle of the city. They couldn’t burn them without drawing attention to the shard and their activities.
Finally, she whispered a small prayer she’d heard her mother use on occasion and then began filling her empty satchel with jars. Pickled eggs, cauliflower, crushed tomatoes. When she tried to pick up a sack of rice it split down the center, the grains scattering in all directions. She swore and began scooping it up into the sack’s two halves, tying the wide ripped mouths together with twine they’d brought with them. She used a cup to scrape what was left directly into her satchel.
By the time she’d finished and filled the rest of her sack with more jars, the others from the apothecary had joined them and were topping off their own bags.
“Did you empty the apothecary?” Allan asked Cutter.
“Everything we could find that wasn’t broken or obviously spoiled.”
“Good. We won’t be able to take everything that’s here, but we can come back for the rest tomorrow night.”
“Assuming that it’s still here,” Glenn said. “It might not take long for the other groups to realize this shard is now open.”
“We’re in the middle of Wolf territory. No one will likely come here. And the Wolves aren’t interested in food like this. They want meat.”
“We should have brought the others with us. We could have taken nearly all of this with us.”
“I doubt we would have gotten here unnoticed with the entire group,” Allan said, “especially if we’d brought the wagon. Besides, this isn’t enough to make the trip from the Hollow worth it. We’re going to have to open up more shards before we head back. We’ve got time.”
They fell into the same order they’d used to get there, returning down the same side of the street. But once they left the shard, Allan motioned Cutter onto a different route, although they would need to return to the same bridge.
As they left the shard behind, Kara glanced back once, the opening in the side of the distortion like a wound. But they’d done it. They’d healed part of the distortion. It was only one of thousands of shards, but it had been repaired.
Threading the Needle Page 7
