In moments, Merik was off the roof and approaching the ramshackle tavern. The crowds settled into cursory background noise, vague colors of no import.
Then he was there, at the Cleaved Man and staring at the sign creaking on the breeze. The blackened eyeball painted on the wood felt a little too familiar. A little too … real.
The door swung wide. Merik ducked his head as two sailors staggered into the day, drunk even at this hour. Behind them, though—that was what interested Merik. For somewhere within, darkness slithered and dead men walked.
Merik found the entryway just as he remembered from past visits, half the lamps unlit, the blue rugs muddied to brown, and everything coated in the sheen of ox tea. The Cleaved Man brewed many varieties of alcohol in the basement, but their most famous was ox tea, which was neither tea nor related to an ox.
But it got a man drunk. Fast. And in a world torn apart by enemies and empty stomachs, patrons wanted to get drunk. Fast.
Merik reached the bar’s main space. It spread before him, candles flickering from fat chandeliers. Wax dripped onto people at the dozens of rickety tables. Merik was halfway to a door in the back corner, when he realized a hush had wrapped around the room. The revelers had stopped reveling, and at the nearest table, a sailor sat immobile with a flagon of ox tea halfway to his lips.
A nudge from his neighbor. A cough from nearby. Then all at once, wood groaned, vibrating through the floor as every person who sat abruptly decided to stand.
“I told you he would come.” A man’s voice, greasy and familiar, snaked through the silence.
Merik whirled toward the bar, to where a sweaty Serrit Linday held his arm outstretched.
For the briefest fraction of a moment, the world slowed. Stopped entirely. I saw you die, Merik thought. Yet here Linday stood, a second dead man walking—and now speaking too, with almost giddy delight, “Arrest him, soldiers. Arrest the Fury.”
*
Safi, Vaness, and the Hell-Bards burst out of the inn mere minutes before it crashed to the ground in a cacophony of black seafire. They bolted through the bathhouse, using plumes of smoke to hide themselves, before tumbling into a scalding midday that had no business being so sunny, so blue.
Zander led the way, though as far as Safi could tell, every street looked the same. More buildings cradled in ruins from a forgotten past. The blood from Vaness’s nose gushed at a rate that no body could sustain, much less while sprinting at top speed through a hostile city. With Lev on one side and Safi on the other, the empress managed to maintain at least a stumbling jog onward.
Caden kept the rear, an iron longsword—created by Vaness from the two rapiers—in hand.
As Zander led them into a five-way intersection, elm guttered and Baedyed bannered like every other in the district, Vaness planted her heels. “Must … stop,” she panted, doubling over.
Safi circled back with Lev, and horror pummeled through her. Blood from Vaness’s nose streaked behind them, a trail that any idiot could follow. Think like Iseult, think like Iseult. First things first: the blood. They had to stop it from falling.
But Lev was already tearing fabric from her sleeve. “Here.” Crouching, Lev pressed it to the empress’s nose. “We have to keep moving.”
“I know.” Her voice was thick beneath the dark cotton. “I’ll manage. Just let me breathe … for … a moment—”
“We don’t have a moment!” Caden rushed in. He pushed Lev aside and hooked his much larger, much stronger arm behind the empress. “The Baedyeds are right on our tail. We need to move.” As Safi released Vaness, he lugged the empress back into a jog.
Just in time, for a man wearing Baedyed gold was most assuredly sprinting their way. Fast.
But Caden was already gone, already ducking low and wrenching Vaness down the narrowest of the five streets. “Meet you around!” he shouted, leaving Safi with no choice but to ratchet her legs faster after Lev and Zander.
Except that they were gone too, lost in the crowds, and now a second Baedyed was barreling right for her.
“Muck-eating bastards!” Safi screeched, running for the only route left to her: straight ahead. As her heels pounded hard on the packed earth, her temper flared straight up from her toes. The shit noggins had left her! And meet you around where, precisely?
Safi hooked left, into a clump of men bowed low beneath creaking laundry baskets. As they angled onto another road, Safi angled too. She shoved at the nearest man. He tripped, his basket fell, laundry bursting forth to trip the men behind him. Traffic halted, but Safi was already through.
At the next intersection, Safi ran smack-dab into Caden and Vaness. Oh, and there was Zander and Lev too, hurtling ahead and clearing a way through traffic.
She amended her estimation of muck-eating bastards. Though only slightly.