The wall came down in the south quarter at the hour of the morning when the shadows were shortest.
A camera might have seen it from the east cliff, from a height — the dressed stone shuddering first, the mortar line between the third and fourth course running grey-white in a single horizontal thread, and then the whole section finding that the thread was the only thing holding it, and choosing to stop being held.
The dust went south and east, which was where the wind was going today, which was also where Nilfgaard’s eastern column had been positioned for the past hour, waiting for exactly this.
The dust hadn’t settled before the column moved.
Inside the keep, in a laundry shaft that smelled of lye and old wool, two small figures descended on a rope made of knotted sheets and the occasional strip of curtain from the rooms above.
The first figure moved quickly and knew the shaft’s dimensions precisely, feet finding the walls with the assurance of someone who had memorized this particular route at some point in childhood.
The second moved more carefully, trusting the rope, moving in the dark by feel and by the sound of the first figure’s breathing below him.
Thirty feet.
Twenty.
The smell changed at the bottom — from the kept-clean smell of the upper shafts to the outdoor smell of a courtyard with a stone drain and a year’s worth of ash in the crevices.
The first figure hit the ground.
The second landed a moment later, lighter on his feet, and then they were in the lower courtyard, which was not on fire but had fire on three of its four sides, the specific geometry of a place where the burning was being organized from outside.
They went west.
The western approach from the lower courtyard ran through a gate that had been held by two Cintran guardsmen three hours ago and was now held by nobody, which was in some ways better and in some ways worse.
No one stopped them.
No one saw them to stop them, and the fire that had taken the gate’s wooden elements was still burning and was currently the courtyard’s most active occupant.
The boy’s hands were up.
Not a surrender — a working.
Anyone watching from outside the fire’s logic would not have understood what they were seeing: a thirteen-year-old boy walking through a burning gate with his hands at shoulder height, palms slightly forward, and the fire bending away from the two of them at approximately the radius of an extended arm.
Not extinguished. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Bent.
The flames leaning west as if a strong wind was pushing them there, except the wind direction was east today, and the source of the lean was not the wind.
It cost him.
This was visible to no one but him — a continuous expenditure, not like the gust that had dropped a soldier in a corridor, but like carrying something heavy for a long time, the kind of effort that was not dramatic and was not singular and was simply the price of each step.
They walked through the burning gate.
On the other side, in the city proper, it was worse.
The eye could not follow them into everything that came next and remain only an eye — so it didn’t.
It held the wide shot: two small figures moving northwest through a city that was reorganizing itself around its own death, the smoke above so thick it had taken on its own geography, the fire in the lower quarter visible as a continuous glow under the smoke rather than individual fires, the specific color of a thing that had passed the stage of burning and was now simply what it was.
They moved.
The eye moved with them at distance.
Twice, the boy stopped.
The stops were brief — three seconds, five seconds — and during the stops the air around them changed in ways that were not explicable by the city’s existing wind-patterns, and after the stops they were moving again, through gaps that had not been obvious before the stop.
The postern in the south wall was the destination — the postern he’d scouted three weeks ago, the one that had been overrun, the one with the iron latch and the sound hinges.
The eye picked them up again at its approach, and saw what they could not from inside the smoke: the four soldiers who had been holding the postern were gone.
Not removed — gone.
The courtyard between the postern and the outer wall was empty in a way that suggested the soldiers had found better things to do in the past hour, or had been redirected, or had simply concluded that holding a back gate when the city was already taken was a waste of attention.
The postern was held by no one.
The boy went to the iron latch.
He had a bent nail from his shirt pocket.
This was the thing he’d been carrying for three weeks and had not needed until now, and the nail fit the angle the way a tool fits a job it was made for, and the latch moved. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
The postern opened.
Beyond it was the outer city, the ring of buildings between the wall and the countryside, which was currently occupied by the tail end of the Nilfgaardian advance — the logistics chain, the camp-followers, the unmilitary machinery of a campaign that had already decided it won.
Not soldiers.
Not the people who had been in the city.
It was a passage.
Narrow, maybe sixty meters, between a warehouse wall and a tannery fence.
If two small figures moved along that passage quickly and did not run — running was the thing that was noticed; walking in a direction was furniture — there was a road at its far end that went north.
The eye watched them go into the passage.
Then it did the thing cameras did when something larger than a corridor needed attention — it pulled back.
Up and away, so that the burning city was a view rather than a presence.
And from that height the eye saw what no one at street level could see: the shape of the Fall as a whole, the fire in the east and south, the Nilfgaardian organization in the west, the keep above with its banner changed, and in the north, just past the second wall, two small figures on a road.
Moving.
The eye pulled back farther.
And for one second — not in the city, not at ground level — the air above Cintra did something.
A column of warmth rising from the burning, which was normal, and inside the column, a single thread of something that was not warmth and was not any of the four things fire was made of: a pressure, a current, a note at a frequency that had nothing to do with the Continent’s physics and everything to do with a much older physics, the physics of Conjunctions and seams and the things that moved between worlds when the seams were thin.
It lasted one breath.
Then it was gone, and the city burned as cities burned, and the column of smoke rose as columns of smoke rose, and the eye continued to pull back until the city was a glow on the horizon and the horizon itself went to dark.
Far away, in a cold place that had no geography a Cintran map could name, something that moved along dimensional currents — something that had been moving for a long time without a particular destination — stopped.
It turned.
It looked south, toward a glow on the horizon that had nothing remarkable about it except for that one second, that one thread, that note at the frequency of a seam opening.
It began, very slowly, to pay attention.