People cried out in pain, children screamed, dust and smoke filling the air – and then, from the floor, the sounds of rubble falling, striking things far below, bouncing, tumbling down, down…
'Bottle.'
At Strings's voice, he crawled forward, towards the gaping hole. He needed to find another rat. Somewhere down below. A rat my soul can ride. A rat to lead us out.
He said nothing to the others of what else he had sensed, flitting among life-sparks in the seeming innumerable layers of dead, buried city below – that it went down, and down, and down – the air rising up stinking of decay, the pressing darkness, the cramped, tortured routes. Down. All those rats, fleeing, downward. None, none within my reach clambering free, into the night air. None.
Rats will flee. Even when there's nowhere to go.
****
Wounded, burned soldiers were being carried past Blistig. Pain and shock, flesh cracked open and lurid red, like cooked meat – which, he realized numbly, was what it was. The white ash of hair – on limbs, where eyebrows had once been, on blistered pates. Blackened remnants of clothing, hands melted onto weapon grips – he wanted to turn away, so desperately wanted to turn away, but he could not.
He stood fifteen hundred paces away, now, from the road and its fringes of burning grass, and he could still feel the heat. Beyond, a fire god devoured the sky above Y'Ghatan – Y'Ghatan, crumbling inward, melting into slag – the city's death was as horrible to his eyes as the file of Keneb and Baralta's surviving soldiers.
How could he do this? Leoman of the Flails, you have made of your name a curse that will never die. Never.
Someone came to his side and, after a long moment, Blistig looked over. And scowled. The Claw, Pearl. The man's eyes were red – durhang, it could be nothing else, for he had remained in his tent, at the far end of the encampment, as if indifferent to this brutal night.
'Where is the Adjunct?' Pearl asked in a low, rough voice.
'Helping with the wounded.'
'Has she broken? Is she on her hands and knees in the blood-soaked mud?'
Blistig studied the man. Those eyes – had he been weeping? No.
Durhang. 'Say that again, Claw, and you won't stay alive for much longer.'
The tall man shrugged. 'Look at these burned soldiers, Fist. There are worse things than dying.'