The half-collapsed siege-rampart on the city’s eastern edge was not, technically, a rampart anymore.
It had been one four hundred years ago, back when Cintra’s walls were a different project entirely and the eastern approach was defended by layered earth-works rather than dressed stone.
Time and two sieges and a deliberate post-siege demolition had reduced it to a forty-foot slope of old rubble and compacted earth that angled away from the newer wall at about thirty degrees and ended in a ditch that someone had helpfully filled with sand at some point in the past century.
Adam had found it six days ago while learning the city’s edges.
He had looked at it and thought: that is a ramp.
He had not done anything about that thought until this morning, Day -3, with the Vels three days gone on their bad road and the Breath confirmed and the city going to die in seventy-two hours, give or take whatever margin the scout’s advanced count shaved off.
The guard on the eastern wall-walk changed at dawn.
The new watch took seven minutes to settle into their posts, during which they were looking west at the city waking up, not east at a rubble slope that hadn’t been worth looking at in four hundred years.
Seven minutes was enough.
He climbed the rampart from the ditch-side, where the slope was gentler — loose rubble underfoot, the old compressed earth crumbling a little with each step but holding enough to push off of.
The Breath-sense was already awake, reading the air currents off the wall above him, the small turbulences where the wind split against the crenellations.
Air moved differently in the city than it did in open ground.
It eddied.
It pooled.
It ran along warm stone and lifted off cold stone and did twenty different things in the space of fifty meters.
He was, at thirteen, in a body that had spent most of its short life hungry, standing on a pile of rubble at dawn with two coppers in his pocket and a carved wooden wolf against his sternum, planning to do something he had only ever seen animated.
This, he thought, is either going to work or it’s going to be embarrassing.
He went.
The first three steps down the slope were normal — feet finding purchase on the rubble, body angled back against the grade.
At the fourth step he exhaled, hard, and the air came out differently than air usually came out: it went down, past his feet, between the slope and the soles of his shoes, and the world did a small, vertiginous thing.
He didn’t fall.
He skimmed.
Not cleanly.
Not like the cartoon, which had made it look like standing on a moving river.
More like standing on something that was almost solid and kept renegotiating how solid it was going to be.
His feet stayed under him but each correction was its own small working — a push here, a compensating gust there — and each working cost a thread of breath, and the breath was going fast.
The slope was thirty degrees and forty feet and his lungs were burning by the second second and the air was doing something complicated in the narrow space between him and the rubble.
He was grinning.
It was the first time since arriving in this body that the Breath had felt like something other than a problem he was solving.
The fruit-cart gust had been a scramble.
The candle-flame exercises had been work.
This was the cartoon, badly animated by a thirteen-year-old who was running out of breath, and it was still the best thing he’d done since waking up in a doomed city and deciding to stay.
The rampart collapsed at the twenty-foot mark.
Not dramatically — a section of old compressed earth that had been held in place by nothing but stubbornness and the specific angle of the other rubble decided, in the middle of his glide, that it was done.
It went out from under him in a small avalanche, and he went with it for two feet before the Breath-sense registered that the surface below his feet was no longer a surface and he pulled, hard, with the last of his current reserve, everything he had left, a single full-body exhale that pushed down and outward and slowed the fall into something almost controlled.
He hit the sand-ditch at the bottom with his feet and immediately folded forward onto his hands and knees.
The impact was not bad.
The three seconds after it were bad — lungs empty, blood-sugar already in the hole from the morning’s training, hands dug into cold sand while the grey crept in at the edges of his vision.
Same cost as the fruit-cart, he thought, which was not true, but was the comparison that arrived.
The fruit-cart had been one small lateral gust.
That had been forty feet of sustained working followed by an emergency pull.
Different thing entirely.
His hands were shaking.
He was still grinning, a little, which he recognized as a problem.
“You!
The boy—”
The guard was on the wall-walk above and to his left, looking down, plainly not having expected his dawn shift to include this.
He was young — early twenties, new enough to the watch that his plate still fit properly — and he had the build of someone who was going to be very fast once he found the stair.
Adam got up, which took longer than he wanted, and ran.
The ditch-side of the rampart opened into the outer ring of the lower city — the area between the newer outer wall and the older settlement, a strip of storage buildings and tanner’s yards and the kind of small industry that needed space and didn’t need windows.
Adam knew this ground because he’d mapped it.
He went east along the ditch-line, put a storage building between himself and the wall, cut north through a gap between two tanner’s yards, and was back in the warren’s outer streets before the guard reached the bottom of the stair.
He stopped in a doorway and breathed carefully, the way you breathe when you’re managing a bill you’ve already run up and can’t pay down fast.
His right knee was bruised where it had caught the rim of the ditch.
His hands had sand in the scrapes from the landing.
The Breath-reserve was empty — not the shallow empty of a morning’s exercises but the real empty, the one that took half an hour and food to begin filling back. This chapter is updated first at novelping.com.
His right shoulder ached from the sudden pull at twenty feet.
He thought about the grin and was not entirely sorry about it.
The grin had cost him something and he’d taken it anyway, on purpose, because the Vels were on a bad road and the city was going to burn in seventy-two hours and he was thirteen and alone and he had exactly one thing in this world that was his, that he’d built from nothing in a borrowed body, and he had wanted, once, before the burning, to feel what it felt like to actually use it for something that was just for him.
The guard’s voice had carried.
Not to the watch-sergeant — he’d checked the direction before running — but along the wall-walk, where two other soldiers had heard it.
One of them had said something.
The other had looked in Adam’s direction before he’d cleared the storage building.
“A boy who flew.”
The phrase that would go from those two soldiers to their sergeant to the tavern where the watch drank, and from there into the general lower-city rumor that was the city’s actual information network.
Adam couldn’t stop it.
The fruit-cart had been ambiguous — an overloaded wheel, a lucky gust.
The glide down the rampart was not ambiguous to anyone who’d seen more than two seconds of it.
He ate the last of his bread sitting in the doorway and thought about what that meant for his next three days.
The rumor was loose.
The rumor was going to travel.
In the specific ecosystem of a city that was quietly dying and starving for anything that wasn’t bad news, a story about a boy who’d surfed a crumbling rampart on the air was the kind of thing that grew in the retelling.
By tonight it would be a boy who’d flown over the wall.
By tomorrow it would be a mage-child.
By the Fall it would be whatever version was most interesting, and the most interesting version was never the true one.
He had three days to be somewhere else when the interesting version arrived looking for him.
Manageable, he decided, which was getting a lot of work lately.
Somewhere in the city behind him, a wall-officer who was more thorough than most found a blank watch-slip, scratched three lines on it — a boy, white hair, moved air, eastern rampart, Day -3 — and folded it into the satchel of a city clerk who was planning to leave tomorrow.
It rode out with the clerk’s other papers two days later.
Adam didn’t know about the slip.
He would learn what it cost him later, on a road where someone with better information would be looking for what matched those three lines, and matching would mean something different by then than it did now in a dying city’s dead-end paper trail.
He got up and went back to work.