Then they lowered it, its end touching the roof on the far side. The bridge slanted downward slightly, but those waiting didn’t hesitate, scrambling up over it to the safety of the island. Others prodded the prisoners onto it with their spears. The prisoners weren’t as confident, edging along its length cautiously as the Rats harried them.
As soon as everyone crossed, the Rats piled on the end of the bridge, lifted it up, and dragged it back onto the roof. The prisoners were led toward the central fire, the Rats harassing them the entire way with hoots and mocking shouts, a few smacking them with their spears, dancing around them. Only the leader of the group and the two walking with him remained calm. They grabbed one of the spits and bit off a piece of charred meat, settling in, while the rest yanked the prisoners to a halt and shoved them down to their knees.
The prisoners were close enough to the fire to recognize now. Temerites—the trimmed beards of the men stood out against their lighter-skinned faces. And not simply members of the group that had laid claim to the largest section of the destroyed Erenthrall; the Rats had captured guards.
Allan swore.
The Rat’s leader ate as more and more of his fellow Rats gathered, pouring out of the buildings on all sides. They surrounded the group, the noise rising. Allan shifted, anxious to leave, but unable to step away. He needed to see how much more dangerous the Rats had become since he’d last been here, how much control this new leader had over them.
As soon as the leader finished eating, he tossed the bone aside and turned toward the prisoners. The roar from those gathered escalated, and someone handed the leader a spear. He advanced on the nearest of the Temerite guards, halting a pace away.
He planted the butt of the spear onto the roof and the entire group fell silent.
Allan couldn’t hear the words when he spoke, but he knew their intent. He’d seen this happen before, when he was part of the Dogs. He’d participated himself. The interrogations done by Hagger in particular had been brutal. He still remembered how Hagger had forced him to beat their captured Kormanley terrorists in an attempt to discover where the group intended to strike next. It had been one of the main reasons he’d left the Dogs behind and fled.
Below, the leader motioned to one of his betas, who stepped behind the man they were interrogating and wrapped his arm around the man’s neck. One of the other prisoners protested, half rising, but without even an order from the leader one of the Rats slammed the butt of their spear into the protestor’s shoulder. Allan heard the scream as the guard crumpled to the roof. The first man struggled against the arm choking him, although Allan could tell they weren’t trying to strangle him. Not yet. The Rat’s arm wasn’t tight enough. The Temerite guard realized it as well and settled, although his face was now flushed.
A Rat stepped forward and pinned down the guard writhing on the roof. The screams died down. The leader began asking questions again, pacing back and forth. The man in the chokehold answered, but it must not have been what the leader was looking for. He spun, casually, and sank the end of his spear into a third guard’s gut.
No scream this time. The man hunched forward, hands flying to the handle jutting from his stomach. He looked up toward the leader, opened his mouth as if to speak, but only blood poured out.
The leader jerked his spear free and the man fell forward and rolled onto his side. Blood pooled beneath him. The guard in the chokehold began to struggle again, bellowing something in defiance.
The leader didn’t like whatever it was. With a gesture, the Rats on all sides fell on the remaining four men with a sudden roar. Allan saw the one holding the chokehold wrench the man’s head around, snapping his neck. The other three screamed, one cut off in a wet gurgle. The leader and his two betas turned and walked away as the rest of the Rats picked the bodies up and hauled them to the roof’s edge. One of the Temerites was still alive, although he’d been gutted. They tossed all five of them over the side, the bodies hitting the Tiana with a silent splash, the current taking them instantly.
On the rooftop, the Rats broke into a chant, the sound almost tribal. As they began to celebrate, Allan drew back from the edge of the tower and climbed down to the slanted roof. Being careful not to draw attention to himself, he eased the trapdoor open and descended back down to the street.
He ran from the River Rats’ island silently, his neck prickling as if he were being pursued, although he never caught sight of anyone following him. Nausea finally forced him to stop. He took refuge in a small apartment, crouching down with his head between his knees, breathing in deep. When the urge to vomit passed, he raised his head and leaned back against a wall, sliding down to his butt. He let his hands dangle over his knees.
“They’re only kids. The leader couldn’t have been more than fifteen.”
He hadn’t been much older when he’d joined the Dogs, he realized.
He pushed away from the wall and stood, searching the street outside before leaving. He almost headed back to the safe house, to report what he’d seen and to warn everyone they’d have to be more careful and avoid the River Rats completely. But only Gaven, Aaron, and a few Dogs would be there; the rest wouldn’t have returned yet.
Mentally cursing, he hesitated at an intersection, then cut left, moving toward the distortion. He may as well check out some shards, work his way toward where the others were going to practice. Maybe he’d run into them before they were done.
He crossed the Tiana at a section where it had diverted itself into one of the unused ley channels, the bridges for the main streets that had once arched over the ley still intact. He kept himself in shadow as much as possible, and kept his ears open for the slightest sound, but all he heard was the roil of the river and the general background noise of the ruined city at night.
At the edge of the distortion, he hesitated again, glancing behind one more time. Nothing moved, so he stepped up to the distortion’s face, and then stepped through.
It resisted at first, as it had before, something compressing his chest, as if he were underwater, but then he slid out of the face and into the shard. He sucked in a breath and immediately began coughing, one arm rising automatically to cover his mouth. The air was thick with the stench of putrescence and something else, something toxic that burned his throat. Taking in air through his mouth in shallow gulps, he ran for the nearest adjacent shard. The street was filled with stone debris and dropped trunks, clothes and other possessions spilled out onto the road. He tripped over a pile, but caught himself—
Except it wasn’t a heap of clothing, as he’d first assumed. It was a body. A woman, fallen face-first to the ground, her cheeks sunken and hollow with decomposition.
Allan backed away, then scanned the street again. There were bodies strewn everywhere, sprawled as if they’d been fleeing the city and had dropped dead in their tracks. Based on the decay, they’d died only a week before.
Time must be moving slower in this shard. They had to have been caught when the distortion quickened.
Mouth still covered with his arm, he stumbled back, then turned and pushed into the next shard, gasping as he passed through the wall. The air here was fresh, and he leaned over and sucked it in, trying to rid himself of the stench.
When he’d stopped trembling, he began to explore the shard, looking for anything they could use in the Hollow to survive, anything like the apothecary they’d raided the night before. He moved swiftly, entering buildings, taking stock, then passing on. The first shard had little to nothing, mostly a park. In the second, it was raining, so he didn’t linger. The results varied after that. In one, he found a small mercantile, the shelves already raided, but there was a hidden trapdoor with steps down into a storage basement that hadn’t been disturbed. The food on the shelf was still good, time frozen here. In another, a fabric shop had survived the blast, colorful bolts lining the walls. The candlemaker next door had thousands of candles in a back room. Before
the Shattering, the candles would have been oddities, since everyone used ley globes. Now, candles were more precious than erens.
He traveled through ten shards, marking out locations on a makeshift map using a scavenged piece of paper and some charcoal. He tried to indicate where the fractures cut through the streets and buildings as he went, but it was difficult, since the planes of reality were skewed in all directions and intersected at odd points.
He had nearly decided to return to the safe house when he stepped through a plane into the next shard and halted abruptly. A breeze brushed past his face, chilling after the summer warmth of the last shard. Something was wrong, though. Something he couldn’t quite—
He gasped and reached a hand up to empty air. He’d stepped out of the distortion. Except that wasn’t possible. He was nowhere near its edge.
Unless—
“Kara?”
His voice sounded too loud and hollow in the space. No one answered.
He stepped forward, out into the middle of the street he’d been following, turning as he did so. The windows of the surrounding buildings, only two stories high, were all empty.
His hand settled on his sword as he edged further down the street. “Dylan? Cutter?”
The street emptied onto a marketplace. Allan halted at its edge, staring up to where the facets of the distortion loomed directly overhead, to where the distortion ended three blocks distant beyond the square.
Kara and the others would never have been able to heal this much of the distortion in one night. Which meant—
“Someone else has been here. Someone else is healing the distortion.”
Six
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN someone else has been healing the distortion?”
Allan ignored Dylan and Kara, who had both leaped to their feet at his announcement upon returning to the safe house. Instead, he motioned to Glenn and Adder, and they stepped into the hallway and headed up the stairs. Allan halted at the door, one hand raised toward Kara, who had moved to follow them.
“Stay here. I’ll tell you all about it once I deal with this.”
The stairwell was dark, but Allan was familiar enough with it that he trotted up to where Glenn and Adder had paused inside the door leading to the roof. They didn’t step outside.
“We may have a problem.”
“I’d say so,” Glenn said, “if someone else is messing around with the distortion.”
“It’s not that. It’s the Rats.” He told them what he’d seen from the roof—the Rats’ leader, the prisoners, their deaths. “Whoever the pup is—and he’s just a pup, no more than fifteen—he’s managed to organize the Rats into something deadlier than they were before. They aren’t cowering in the darkness and seizing opportunity when it appears safe anymore.”
“What can we do about it?”
“Make certain we don’t run into any of them. I want to move farther away from their island. We’re more vulnerable than the Temerites, and they managed to grab five of their guardsmen.”
“They were probably scouts.”
“I don’t care. They still managed to snatch five of them, hold them prisoner until they returned to their nest, and then slaughter them. The Temerites aren’t going to sit back and let that slide. We need to move.”
“We don’t have a safe house further west than this.” Realization dawned and Glenn’s shoulders sagged. “You want us to scout one out.”
“As fast as you can. I want to be out of here within two days.”
“Why not leave Erenthrall altogether?”
“I’m going to try to convince Kara and the Wielders to do that, but we came here for supplies, and right now we have almost nothing. The raid on the apothecary’s shard barely filled the back of our cart. What I found looking tonight will help a little, but it’s mostly cloth and some food. We need seed for planting, if we’re going to feed everyone in the Hollow this coming winter, and raw metals for weapons, if we’re going to try defending ourselves against those brigands on the plains.”
Both Glenn and Adder considered this in silence.
Then Glenn scrubbed at his face, the sound scratchy. He hadn’t shaved since they’d reached Erenthrall, nor slept much with their rotating watches. None of them had. His eyes looked bruised. “We’ll start looking today, while the rest of you sleep.”
Allan patted his shoulder, then turned and headed back down the stairs, the other two following. When they reached the main room, both of them wasted no time gathering up their supplies and heading out.
The Wielders, Gaven, and Aaron watched in silence. Allan didn’t think Kara had moved since he left.
“What was that all about?”
“Nothing to be concerned about right now.”
“Who’s healing the distortion?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you certain it wasn’t what we healed earlier tonight?” Artras asked. “We did clear a significant section, but we ended a little early after a minor scare.”
“Did you clear away a few blocks?”
All of the Wielders looked startled. Kara looked sick. “No, we didn’t.”
Allan turned to Kara. “We need to get out of Erenthrall altogether. The situation here is changing. We have no idea who is healing the distortion, and it’s obvious that the tension between the rival groups here is escalating.”
Kara held his gaze, but he couldn’t read her expression. The other Wielders were watching her.
“It has to be other Wielders,” Artras said. “Or Primes. It’s stupid to think that we’re the only ones who survived.”
“But Allan’s right. We don’t know who these other Wielders are, or what their purpose is. Until we do, we should back off.”
“No!” Carter threw up his arms in disgust. “Are we going to return to the Hollow with practically nothing and tell them we ran because someone had already started healing the distortion? Who knows when they freed that section. It could have been months ago. For all we know, they got what they wanted and are now gone.”
Kara turned at that. “Do you really think they’ve left Erenthrall with only a few blocks released from the distortion? Don’t forget the node. Someone placed those barriers around Tinker, cut that node off from the network. Someone is already messing around with the ley system here, and I don’t think they’re finished.”
“Don’t forget those people trapped in the shard today. Are we going to abandon them?”
“No. We aren’t going to abandon them. We can’t.”
Allan stepped forward. “Why haven’t you freed them already? And what do you mean someone cut off Tinker from the network? I didn’t think there was a network left in Erenthrall.”
“There is a network here, it’s simply chaotic at the moment. We were going to heal the distortion and then try to stabilize the network, once all of the old nodes were free. The main reason it’s so chaotic now is that the ley keeps trying to reestablish its old lines and can’t, because the distortion is cutting it off. So the ley gets backed up, creates the pools, the geysers, or simply gouges out new ley lines where it can. But from what we’ve seen so far—”
She halted, brow creasing in concern.
“What?”
“This Wielder—or group of Wielders—is trying to stabilize the ley by working around the distortion, bypassing the old nodes. They sealed off Tinker so that the ley would be forced to flow into new lines. One in particular, out toward the west.”
“Don’t forget the old node in that town we passed on the way here,” Artras added, “in that abandoned town.”
Kara’s eyes widened.
“What old node?”
She looked at Allan. “Remember? We passed an active ley line on our way here, in one of the towns before we hit the city. It was attached to an old node, a stone formation near the town. At the time, I assumed the ley had rea
ched out toward some of its old nodes naturally. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe someone reactivated that node.” She spun back toward Artras. “And that old node was funneling the ley toward the west as well.”
“Not quite the same direction.”
“No, it was angled farther south than this one. But that would make sense if—”
“If they were funneling the ley toward the same location.”
Behind them all, Carter’s eyes were following the conversation, although he was frowning in confusion. “What are you saying?”
“Someone is trying to create a new focal point for the ley. A new Nexus.”
The young Wielder’s eyes opened in shock. “After what happened with Erenthrall? Are they insane?”
“They may simply be trying to end all of the chaos in the ley. I doubt they plan on causing another Shattering.”
“Augustus thought he had the Nexus in Erenthrall under control, and look what happened.”
No one responded, all of them no doubt thinking about those horrifying moments trapped beneath the broken Amber Tower, or wherever they’d been when the Nexus had exploded.
A rustle snatched Allan from his own grisly reverie and he found Gaven holding up a flask of water. Aaron was putting together a small plate of food behind him. He’d forgotten the Hollowers were even there.
“You should eat something, and drink. You didn’t stop for anything once you returned.”
Allan’s stomach growled and everyone nearby smiled. He reached for the flask and took a long swig, Aaron ready with the plate when he was done. A hard biscuit and a hunk of meat from what looked like a rabbit, along with an apple.
He took a huge bite out of the meat, then glanced toward the Wielders again. “You never said why you didn’t release those people caught in the shard.”
“Because of the Wolves. Also, the edges of the shards cut right through some of the people in the wagon, so we couldn’t open a face without killing one or all of them. The only way to release them is to heal the entire section all at once, but if we do that, then we release the Wolves as well. There are three of them.”
Threading the Needle Page 10
