It didn’t matter. Now she was free.
Dimly, she sensed her Guard around her, following her lead as she led them through the city. They were running, all of them, for Row Finn’s creatures were right behind them, and now Kelsea could also sense the man himself, not far back, all of his attention focused upon her. Sometimes she thought she could even feel his eyes. Several times her guards stopped to loose arrows into the street behind them, but Kelsea knew they would hit nothing. Row’s children were too quick.
They crossed the Circus and Kelsea sensed, rather than saw, people scattering from her path. They didn’t seem to matter, all of these people. Their problems were so small; Kelsea sensed them as she flew by: problems with spouses, with money, with drink.
They should scatter, she thought grimly, as though this journey were an argument in which she had been somehow vindicated. They should scatter. I’m the Queen of Spades.
They circled around the outside of the Gut, where the houses and buildings descended into a valley, the cup between two hills. Once upon a time this depression had held an amphitheater, where William Tear’s utopians would meet and decide things by popular vote. Democracy in action, but not really. Behind everything had been Tear, always Tear, and when that driving force was gone, the Town had nothing, left open to the lowest common denominator. Leadership was all that stood between democracy and the mob. As they crossed the Gut, Kelsea sensed the Creche beneath, a great anthill of chambers and tunnels, built God knew when. Thinking of that deep dungeon sunk in the earth, Kelsea wondered if the Creche had been built by Row himself. Who knew what he might have accomplished in the dark?
If only I could stop it, she thought, the thought now so familiar that it seemed to run a set course, a well-worn groove in her mind. If only anyone could have stopped it! As they began to leave the Gut behind, Kelsea sent a massive crack running through the earth, just as she had done when she cracked the New London Bridge all those months ago. The street beneath her trembled, but she didn’t stay to watch the effects of her handiwork. She knew how it would go, could predict it as surely as Simon could predict the operation of one of his many machines. The crack would travel deep, all the way down through that warren of tunnels where the dark heart of New London lived. Struts would collapse, foundations would sink, even the streets themselves would begin to tumble into the fissure she had made. It might take hours, or days, but eventually the Gut, the Creche, these would be nothing more than an archaeology site, infinite layers of wood and stone for someone to excavate in the distant future.
“Lady, no!” Mace shouted. “The girl! Aisa!”
Kelsea shrugged that off, annoyed at his interference. What possible value could one life hold against the vast expanse of pain that had gone on beneath these streets? Perhaps, given enough time, the entire city would fall through a hole in the earth, settling into so much detritus. That outcome seemed entirely right. How could you rebuild on a broken foundation? They would have to wipe it clean and start over.
That’s Row talking.
The voice was Katie’s, but Kelsea shrugged it off as well. Rebuilding could come later. Now, she wanted only to punish. Down the Great Boulevard, where people scattered before her approach. She made eye contact with a woman standing in front of a milliner’s, and the woman began to scream.
What do they see? Kelsea wondered. She turned, meaning to ask Mace, but he was nowhere to be seen. Twenty feet behind her, Elston was struggling with several men in the black uniforms of the Mort army.
Mort? she thought bemusedly. Here?
She turned her attention to the Mort soldiers and they dropped to the ground, the chests of their uniforms darkening with blood. The rest of her Guard was still with her, but Kelsea couldn’t help noticing that they did not look at her, that they worked hard to keep their eyes elsewhere. No one had ever liked the Queen of Spades . . . not Mace, not her guards, not anyone. The sapphire throbbed against her skin, and now she could feel Row Finn inside her head, his long life, a seemingly endless accumulation of experiences, no time to linger on a single one, but she saw
Her own pudgy fingers playing with jacks on wooden floorboards
Her worthless mother sitting at the table, weeping by candlelight, and Kelsea stared up at the woman and felt something that was almost hatred, contempt coursing through her heart
William Tear standing across the road, staring at her from a distance, his face betraying both suspicion and sorrow
Following Jonathan Tear up the road, both of them young, no more than ten or eleven, but Kelsea’s heart burned with hunger, the hunger to be someone special, a golden child in the eyes of the Town