The city was transformed. The wide streets seemed dangerous, too open and leaving someone too easily seen. The shadows called to Clara, promising protection in their obscuring darkness. From the way that Sabiha walked close to her, she guessed the girl felt the same. These dark buildings and blackcobbled streets weren’t the city they’d lived in, but someplace unknown, unsafe, and malign wearing a mask of their home.
They reached the square where in daylight farmers would sell their goods to the servants of the great houses on the western side of the Division. The smell of rotting leaves in the gutters marked where the last day’s fallen greens had been bruised into muck. Across the way, a crowd of men strode into the square, torches held high above their head. Without so much as a word, Clara and Jorey stepped into the alcove of a little shop, pulling Sabiha along after them. The torchlight seemed too bright; it hurt to look at too closely. The men were shouting to each other, rough voices drunk with violence and wine. They were going back the way Clara had just come. Toward the mansion and Dawson. Clara squinted, trying to make out the colors the men wore, trying to guess whether these were allies come to reinforce the position or enemies ready to kill and loot and burn. She couldn’t tell, and she didn’t dare go closer.
When the last of them had passed, Jorey snuck out and Clara and Sabiha followed. Sabiha took Clara’s hand and wouldn’t let it go. Clara pulled the girl close. Somewhere to their right, a woman was screaming. If the city guard was in the street tonight, Clara saw no sign of them. The woman stopped suddenly, and Clara could only tell herself that someone had come to her aid; she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.
Halfway to the western gate, they came to a barricade in the street. Tables, chairs, crates, and a wide overturned cart. There were men on both sides of the obstruction. She couldn’t tell if it was meant to stop people like her trying to escape to the countryside or to block soldiers and thugs coming into the city. The men wore no uniforms. The pennants of no houses flew. If war was a violence conducted with rules and traditions on a field of honor, then this was not war, but something worse.
“What do we do?” Clara asked in a whisper.
“Come with me,” Jorey said.
The back alley was filthy, but Clara couldn’t bring her self to care. If the hem of her-cloak dragged through the gore of a slaughterhouse, it would only be what the night called for. Etiquette and delicate sensibilities had their place, but it was not here. Jorey was craning his neck, looking up it seemed at the night sky as if the stars might sweep down to carry them away. His small grunt of pleasure caught her attention.
“What?” she asked.
“That roof,” he said, pointing at a single-storied taphouse with its lights doused and its shutters locked. “If I lift you up, can you get onto it?”
Clara looked at the structure. It had been decades since she’d been a little girl climbing where she wasn’t wanted. And even then it had for the most part been trees.
“I can try,” she said.
“Good,” Jorey said.
They lifted Sabiha up first, and then Jorey lifted Clara into Sabiha’s waiting hands. He scrambled up last. Gesturing in silence, he led them along the rooftop to an alcove where a rough wooden ladder hid in the darkness.
“If you go up here,” Jorey whispered, “there’s a place where we can lay the ladder across the alleyway and get past that barricade. Providing they don’t look up.”
“I am beginning to think I raised you poorly,” Clara said, but she took herself up the ladder. From the top of the second story, the street looked very far away. The men at the barricade laughed with each other, joking in a way that made the fear and tension in them clearer than sunlight. Sabiha clambered up at Clara’s side while Jorey knelt and began lifting the ladder one rung at a time.
Clara looked out over the city. Her city. There were more columns of smoke, but the one nearest the Kingspire was beginning to fade. Either someone had organized a fire team or the building set alight was exhausted of everything but stone. Far away, the walls of the city were dotted with torches and the low half moon seemed about to rest its head on the western gate.
The western gate.
“Stop,” Clara said. “You can put the ladder back down.”
“No, it will work,” Jorey said. “I know it doesn’t seem sturdy, but I’ve done this before. It was a bet we used to make when I was—”
“The gates are shut,” Clara said. “Someone’s sealed the city.”
Jorey appeared at her side. The wall of the city wasn’t so far from them. In daylight and sanity, she could have walked from the street below them to the huge gates in only a few