Threading the Needle (7 page)

At dusk, Allan, Kara, Dylan, two of the Dogs, and Cutter headed out. Those left behind were to gather the wagon and move to another of Allan's safe houses closer to the distortion, while the main group investigated the shard Allan had discovered the last time he'd been in Erenthrall. Kara wanted to see if it could be healed. She'd brought Dylan in case she needed help.

In the odd half-light of falling twilight and the backwash from the distortion, they edged to the end of an alley, Allan searching the street beyond before motioning Cutter out before them. The tracker sprinted across the street and vanished in the deepening shadows of the buildings. Allan waited to give him a lead and then followed.

They dashed across the street, Kara feeling more exposed now than she had the day before. But no one leaped out of the vacant windows of the buildings and no howl rose from the Wolves. She relaxed once she ducked into the doorway of the far building, tracking Allan by his footprints in the dust and the scrapes and rustlings of his movements ahead. He led them out the back of the building, through a series of rear gardens already ragged and wild, then into another tenement.

They moved swiftly, stayed inside buildings as much as possible, near windows so they could see by the light thrown by the distortion. At one point they descended into a basement, the way forward blocked by a building that had collapsed. Another time, they ascended to the rooftop, jumping over the firewalls and the narrow alleys between buildings. Allan and the Dogs didn't hesitate, as if they'd done this a hundred times; the first few jumps, Kara's heart was in her throat. She was grateful when they returned to the eerily vacant rooms below again. Before stepping into the small enclosure that covered the stairwell, she glanced toward the distortion and realized they were nearly halfway to its base.

The worst part came when they reached the river. The Tiana was wide, the only way to cross one of the many bridges that spanned it. But the bridges were completely exposed, worse than the streets and plazas. And they were deeper inside Erenthrall now, closer to where the fires of the other groups had been.

When they reached the buildings closest to one of the bridges, Allan halted the group. Cutter was waiting for them. They huddled down behind the windows of what had once been a bakery.

They looked out on a wide park, the street leading to the bridge cutting through the low walls, benches, and patches of greenery and trees. The bridge arched up slightly, a wide section for pedestrians on either side. Stone statues rose at intervals, each figure holding a ley globe, most of them still intact but not currently lit. Farther up the river, she could see another bridge, although a section of that one had collapsed.

“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.”