The lower city died street by street.
Adam knew this the way he knew that fire climbed and water ran downhill — not as theory but as the texture of the morning pressing against him from all sides.
He had a route.
The route lasted approximately eight minutes after the lower gate gave way, at which point three of the five streets he’d memorized were either on fire or had a wall across them where a building had come down in a way that nobody had planned for.
He was now improvising.
The eastern quarter was the first to break.
The Nilfgaardian column that had probed the lower wall in the night had not been a probe — it had been the pin that held the gate long enough for the main approach to position.
When the main approach hit the Marnadal crossing, it hit fast and wide and the Cintran force on the south approach, which had been braced for a slow siege it could hold, found itself flanked inside of an hour by men who had been marching all night and didn’t care.
Adam had not seen the crossing.
He felt it the way you felt a held breath finally release — in the sudden silence of the street he was in, a second-long quiet before the sound changed register from alarm-noise to something rawer and closer.
He went north.
North meant the keep road.
The smoke was the real problem.
The Breath-sense read it immediately — air currents distorting, the normal pressure-map of the lower city scrambled by heat rising in half a dozen places simultaneously.
He’d been navigating by feel of the city’s air-pattern for three weeks; the fire was rewriting the pattern in real time.
He went by wall-memory instead: third left past the fuller’s yard, straight until the road widened, left again where the chandler’s overhang would be if the overhang was still there.
It was not still there.
He went through the gap in the fallen overhang at a crouch, shielding his face against the heat, and came out in a street he recognized, and stopped.
The street was full.
Not soldiers — people.
A family, maybe two families, a grandmother being carried, two children who weren’t moving fast enough, a man trying to pull a cart through rubble that was getting higher at its far end because the building on the left was falling.
Slowly.
The way that buildings fell in fires — not all at once but by degrees, the wall going first, then the upper floor finding there was nothing holding it, then the rest concluding that the upper floor had the right idea.
He had thirty seconds, maybe forty, before the street became a different kind of problem.
He also had a window to the keep road that was already narrowing. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
The Breath-sense found the wall’s weak point without his asking it — the section at the far end of the collapse, where the load was still routing through a partial span of floor-timber that hadn’t gone yet.
If the timer was wrong and he stopped and the span held another three minutes, the people in the street had three minutes.
If the timer was right and he stopped, he lost the window to the keep road and maybe nothing and maybe everything that came after.
Adam looked at the grandmother.
Looked at the children.
Looked at the cart that was going to catch on the corner rubble at the street’s far end and block it for everyone behind.
He ran forward and hit the cart hard from behind, putting his weight and momentum into it, and it moved — not much, but enough to clear the corner, and the cart kept going on the slight downhill grade once started, and the woman driving it looked back at him with the expression of someone too frightened to say thank you and then she was moving and the family was moving behind her.
Adam turned and ran north.
The collapsed building fell in his wake — he heard it, didn’t look back.
He didn’t know how many of them had cleared it.
He ran the calculation forward instead: the keep road, the postern, the girl on the parapet.
These were the things he could still affect.
The smoke was thicker in the northern quarter.
The Breath-sense told him why — a granary somewhere to the east, the stored summer grain burning with the concentrated fury of something that had been drying for months, sending a column of white-grey smoke across the whole north end of the lower city.
It smelled of burning bread.
Under it was the smell he’d been dreading since his first night in the Vels’ room — the doused-cookfire smell of a fire that had been stopped, but in this case it was the inverse: fires that had not been stopped and would not be.
He exhaled.
Directed.
Twice.
The first gust went sideways into the smoke column, not enough to move it — he was not trying to move it — but enough to thin it for four seconds in a corridor wide enough to run through.
The second gust cleared a burning timber off the stairway he needed, the one behind the fuller’s yard that cut up toward the market road.
Forty seconds of air at this spend.
Use them.
He used them.
He went up the stairs fast and came out on the market road above the worst of the fire, and the market road was chaos but passable chaos — the kind with direction, people flowing north and west, and a boy moving against the current at speed wasn’t remarkable because everything was remarkable this morning and remarkable cancelled out.
A Cintran officer at the top of the market road had a line of frightened men pressed into the wall, trying to hold some kind of order, trying to form something that wasn’t quite a line and wasn’t quite a retreat and wasn’t quite anything because the line needed a purpose and the purpose was a gate that was already gone.
He looked at Adam moving against the current and opened his mouth.
Adam looked straight ahead and moved faster.
The officer had other problems.
The officer had several dozen other problems in various states of disintegration and a boy running north at speed was about fourteenth on the list.
The keep road’s foot was a hundred meters ahead.
He could see the first black-armored shapes on the switchbacks above — not the main host, an advance unit, maybe twenty soldiers moving up the keep road toward the upper gate, which was the thing the lower city’s collapse had bought them: the keep was open, or nearly open, or open enough that twenty men felt comfortable walking up the road to it.
He ran.
The keep road’s foot smelled of pitch — someone had tried to fire the road itself, which made no sense as a defensive measure but was the kind of sense that got made in the last ten minutes of a city’s resistance.
The pitch had burned through and what remained was the smell and the char.
Behind him, at a distance he judged at two hundred meters, the lower gate finished what it had started an hour ago.
The sound of it was not loud — it was heavy, which was different, the specific thud of stone that had been held in place by other stone for four hundred years and had finally concluded that the other stone was gone.
Adam felt it in his feet.
Ahead, up the switchbacks: riders.
Twenty soldiers at least, probably more, and the smoke above the keep was not the smoke of a fire already put out but the smoke of something still beginning, and the girl who was supposed to be safe in the keep above the fire was at the top of those switchbacks, and he was at the bottom, and the riders were between them, and he had a bent nail in his shirt pocket and air in his lungs and nothing else.
I’m barely in time, he thought.
Maybe barely.
Maybe not.
He started climbing.