The switchbacks were worse than the road.
The road at least had direction — two ways, up or down, everyone in agreement about which was which.
The switchbacks were where that agreement broke apart.
People coming down the keep road met people who’d been pushed up from below by the advance, and the result was a human tangle on every hairpin, nobody quite sure whether the fire behind them was worse than the soldiers above or whether the soldiers above were Nilfgaard or Cintran or some confused mixture of both trying to kill each other through a crowd of civilians.
Adam went up and to the right, which was the side less likely to have people trying to decide whether to go up.
He pressed against the rock-cut wall and moved fast.
The Breath-sense was crowded.
A hundred bodies on a narrow road threw off heat and movement in a continuous wash that made the normal quiet read of air currents into noise.
He could feel the fire below — a broad warm pressure rising off the lower city’s burning like a second sun — and somewhere above, a sharper cold where a staircase was channeling the keep’s stone-cold air downward.
He used that: the cold was his direction marker, the keep’s lungs breathing down at him as he climbed.
He’d walked this road in his head every day for eleven days.
The first switchback was wide — a platform cut into the rock where supply carts could pass each other.
The second was narrow, walled on the left, a fifty-foot drop on the right.
The third was where the road bent east and the sightline to the keep’s gate opened up.
He reached the third switchback and stopped.
It was gone.
Not “choked” or “held” — gone.
The section of road that had bent east, the section he’d walked in his head past the fountain-house and up toward the outer ward’s gate, had been demolished.
Not by fire — deliberately, the stones pushed off the cliff-side in a controlled collapse, the kind of defensive destruction you did in the last hour when you wanted to slow an army for twenty minutes.
Someone up in the keep had ordered a road-section collapsed and had not accounted for the fact that the road was still full of people.
The refugees who’d been climbing on that section were now on the wrong side of a five-meter gap, looking back at him across rubble and a drop he didn’t want to measure.
The third switchback, he thought.
I had the third switchback as a route marker.
He moved while he thought.
There was no profit in standing and looking at what wasn’t there.
He scanned left — the rock-cut wall offered a ledge system, narrow, built for drainage, not built for a thirteen-year-old to move along in a hurry.
He scanned right — the drop, and below the drop, the lower city burning.
He went left.
The blinded woman found him on the ledge, which was not what he’d expected from a ledge twelve feet above a collapsed road.
She had a hand out and she had it on his arm before he understood she was there — a firm grip, the kind that came from knowing you couldn’t afford to let go, and a face that was tracking him by sound and touch because the smoke had taken her eyes an hour ago.
“Up,” she said.
“I need up.”
He looked at the gap.
Looked at the ledge continuing past the collapsed section.
Looked at the cost, which was in front of him and measurable.
Two minutes, he thought.
Maybe three.
“Yes,” he said.
He moved her along the ledge with one hand and used the other to manage his own balance, and the ledge was narrow enough that the movement required his complete attention, and below them was the gap and the road and the people who had not gotten across yet and who were now making decisions he couldn’t see from here.
The smoke was thicker at this height — the thermals were collecting it in the convex stone face of the cliff.
He exhaled twice, gently, lateral pushes that cleared a corridor of air without spending more than he could recover.
The smoke thinned.
He could see three more meters of ledge.
They reached the other side of the gap.
He handed her off to a man who was crouched at the ledge’s end, looking back across the gap with the stillness of someone who had already decided not to cross and had not yet admitted it.
The man looked at the woman’s burned eyes and put his arm around her shoulders without saying anything, and that was fine, and Adam kept moving.
The postern was fifty meters ahead.
He knew it by the buttress pattern — the second buttress past the fountain-house, the iron arch just visible in the smoke.
He’d memorized the angle from the tanner’s alley three weeks ago, standing in a city that was still alive and counting down. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
The buttress was there.
The fountain-house was still standing, one wall scorched.
The arch was there.
The soldiers in the arch were not part of what he’d memorized.
Four of them.
Two with the body of a Cintran guard across the threshold — not moved aside but left where he’d fallen, a statement about the threshold’s new ownership.
Two more flanking the arch itself, helmeted, efficient, the posture of men who were holding a position and not looking for a fight because they’d already had one.
He crouched behind the fountain-house’s scorched wall and looked at the four soldiers and the arch and the Cintran guard dead in the gateway, and understood that the postern he’d spent eight days treating as his route into the upper keep was now someone else’s back door.
Three weeks of scouting a gate that’s already been taken.
He pressed his back to the wall and breathed, carefully, counting the cost of the morning.
Two smoke-thinning gusts.
One ledge-traverse with a blind woman.
The Sight had tried to give him the third switchback three times this morning — he’d reached for it in his memory each time and found it intact, and each time the ground where it should have been was gone.
That wasn’t the Sight failing.
That was the Sight running on information that was twenty-two days old, and the world had changed under it, and the gap between what he remembered and what was actually on the road was the gap the Sight didn’t know how to bridge.
He had a postern that was taken.
He had Nilfgaard between him and the girl who was on the other side of that postern.
He had air in his lungs.
Insufficient, said the part of his mind that did arithmetic.
Work with what you have, said the rest.
He moved along the wall, away from the soldiers, looking for the next option.
There was always a next option if you kept moving.
The thing about standing still was that it turned options into observations, and observations into the thing that happened while you were watching, and he had spent enough of his life watching things happen to know exactly how much he hated it.
He was already moving before he finished the thought.