Sigrud walks them all, following his marks. The man and woman flee from the university and do not lead him on an especially merry chase: they are not professionals, and are quite blind to the art of the street. They bicker loudly, then softly, then loudly again. Though Sigrud keeps his distance, he hears some of it.
The man says, This was expected. You were told this might happen. The woman answers, first softly, then louder as she gets angry: … these people showing up at my place of work! Where I spend my days, where I breakfast! Where I mopped floors for decades! Then the man: You knew there were dangers! You did! And you waver now? Do you not have faith? And the woman is silent.
Sigrud rolls his one eye. The incompetence of it all is dispiriting. He’s not even sure whether he wants to bother hiding himself anymore. His burgundy coat is rolled up and stuffed under one armpit, since this of course is a conspicuous flag, but still, a six-and-a-half-foot man would normally never lend himself well to obfuscation. But Sigrud knows that crowds are much like individual people: they have their own psychology, their own habits, their own natures. They unthinkingly assume specific structures—channels and corridors of traffic, bends around blockades—and break apart these structures in a manner that almost seems choreographed when you watch it. It’s simply a matter of placing yourself within these structures, like hovering in the still side of a school of fish as it twists and darts across the ocean floor. Crowds, like people, never truly know themselves.
The couple stops at one teetering, oddly rounded apartment building. The woman, gray-faced, twitching, nods as the man whispers his final orders to her. Then she enters. From the cover of a stable, Sigrud makes careful note of the address.
“Hey!” A stableboy emerges from a side door. “Who’re you? What are you—?”
Sigrud turns and looks at the stableboy.
The boy falters. “Uh. Well …”
Sigrud turns back. The woman’s companion is starting off. Sigrud stalks out of the stable and follows.
This chase is … a little different. The man plunges ahead into a part of Bulikov that was obviously much more ravaged by the Blink, the War, and whichever other catastrophes happened to get wedged within that rocky period of world history. The number of staircases practically triples, or quadruples—it’s a little hard for Sigrud’s eye to count them. Spiral staircases rise up to halt completely in midair, some only ten feet off the ground, some twenty or thirty. There is something faintly osseous about them, resembling the rippled horns of some massive, exotic ruminant. Birds and cats have nested in the top steps of some. In one ridiculous instance, a huge, basalt staircase slashes down through an entire hill, sinking a sheer forty feet into the earth in a veritable chasm that has apparently managed to undermine several small houses, whose remains totter unnervingly on the lip of the gap.
Sigrud’s quarry, thankfully, never mounts or starts down any of these truncated steps, but trots through the alleys and the streets, which are often just as schizophrenic as the stairs. Sigrud casts a bemused eye on the buildings that have seemingly been blended into other buildings, like toys shoved together by a child: what appears to be a rather stodgy law firm has one-quarter of a bathhouse sticking out of its side like some kind of unseemly growth. In some places these invasive buildings have been messily excised: a chunk of a shoe store has obviously just been tugged out from where it was previously lodged inside of a bank.
The pace of the hunt quickens. Sigrud’s quarry zags left. Sigrud follows. His quarry ducks through the crumbling remains of a large wall. Sigrud stalks through a different gap, but maintains visual contact. His quarry—whom Sigrud is almost positive remains ignorant to his surveillance—sprints up a wobbly staircase to mount the roof of an old church. Sigrud—with some strategic, ginger steps—hops up after him, closing the gap.
Sigrud crests the top and peers out over the roof. He sees his quarry running toward the edge, but the man shows no sign of stopping. Not when he is thirty feet away from the edge, or twenty, or five, and then he …
Jumps.
The last thing Sigrud sees of the man is the flutter of his gray coat as he plummets to the street below, arms outstretched and fingers spread.
Sigrud frowns, climbs onto the roof, and walks to the edge.
The street is nearly forty feet below. Yet there is no body, nor any mark of one ever being there. There is nothing the man could have jumped to: all the walls near this spot are blank and sheer. It is as if he fell, and then simply …
Vanished.
Sigrud grunts. This is inconvenient.
He considers trying to scale the wall and decides this would be unwarranted. So he returns down the stairs and out to the street.
There is no one, nothing. This part of Bulikov appears powerfully deserted.
Sigrud touches each cobblestone. None of them are warm; all of them are solid.
He sighs.