At the top, Neri scrambled away as Placidio wrestled a large, very angry man, covered in blood and tangled in rope, out of the hole. Germond the ironmonger, face to the ground, was fighting to go back down.
Dumond slammed the trapdoor shut.
“Quickly!” Placidio snapped at me.
As the earth shuddered and terrified screams split the air, I touched the back of the writhing Germond’s neck, and gave him the story I’d planted in the rest of the survivors. He must not remember it was his neighbors forced him out.
“Sigillaré!” Dumond pressed his hands to the trapdoor. Before he could grab the painted square or the rope ladder, thunderous rumbling set the sides of the crater sliding. Dust rose in a great cloud from the hillside above us. A crack, as of the world’s ending, and a booming crash sent us racing and stumbling down the hill.
Placidio shoved the furious Germond into the fleeing crowd and vanished into the mob. Germond staggered.
“Split up,” spat Dumond, grabbing Neri before he could go to Germond’s aid. “No more to do here.”
Yanking off the scarf mask, I let the mob flooding toward the ramps carry me. I was no more than halfway when the frantic ironmonger spotted me.
“Scribe Romy! Did you see those people up the hill?”
“Germond!” I said, forcing myself to face him. He was drenched in blood. Panicked citizens jostled and swirled around us. “Gracious spirits, are you injured?”
“I was buried … with others. But some … people … dragged me out. They had no cause—”
His brow was creased with pain, his eyes clouded in confusion. Grabbing his arm, I urged him toward the ramp. The earth shuddered and rolled. Screams rattled the pounding in my head.
He balked and twisted around, peering behind us. “’Twasn’t righteous. To abandon folk to die alone. Aagh—” He slammed his scarred palms to his head and bent over, as if his skull were cracking. “What’s wrong with me?”
My gut twisted. My vision was creased with fire. My body shook with anger. “Get home to your lover, else folk will have risked themselves for a cursed fool. How dare you question fate?”
“No! I just need to—” He shoved my hand away.
Stumbling, I reached for him. But the human flood caught me up and carried me onward.
When I reached the road, I dragged myself homeward, grieving for the ironmonger, a generous man who must live with memories of horror he could not reconcile, and for those living and dead we had forced him to leave behind. My skin burned with shame. How could I have spoken to him so cruelly?
3
THE MONTH OF SMOKE
THE HOUR OF RESPITE
A sevenday after the earthquake, the city had begun to heal. The earth had quieted. Rubble heaps were hauled away. Repairs begun. The dead buried. Rumor claimed only two hundred—most of them from the coliseum collapse—had died. A modest toll by history’s standard. The grape harvest had begun, always a healthy portent.
But the usual late-summer indolence had been broken. Certain, I had a difficult time shaking off the event. Every night I dreamed of ruin—crumbling walls and crashing roofs in some nameless city or hillside village. I woke in the middle watches filled with rage, shivering as if it were midwinter, and unable to breathe. Rather than improving with the passing days, the nightmares worsened. Now, the cracked pavement, the fallen towers, the crushed houses were always Cantagna.
Guilt forbade me mention my restless sleep to anyone. Many had lost kin or friends or seen their houses crumble or businesses damaged. Parents had children to comfort. I knew it wasn’t just me. The signs were everywhere.
As I hurried through the city on an afternoon sticky with late-summer warmth, it was impossible to miss the change. Almost every window and door was hung with a ghiri—a spiky knot of pomegranate leaves supposed to filter out bad luck. In every piazza, red-robed philosophist advocates harangued citizens about the need to renounce the evils of fortunetellers, spiritists, and potion makers, practices they claimed led ordinary folk to accept the supreme deviance of magic. Even people who spoke too enthusiastically about the return of the Unseeable Gods were accused of undermining the Confraternity’s teaching that no gods remained to protect us. Only human vigilance would keep the descendants of Dragonis from setting their progenitor free to ravage the world.
Praetorians, the enforcement officers of the Confraternity, roamed the markets and shops, hunting for evidence of deviance. Worse, like lizards in summer, sniffers scuttled out of every corner and crevice.
A head sheathed in green silk poked out of an alleyway just ahead of me. His chain leash rattling, he dragged his nullifier from the alley into the middle of the Ring Road and spread his silk-clad fingers as if to catch magic flying past like leaves on the smoky breeze.
I ducked my head as I passed but did not alter my pace, and I gripped Dumond’s bronze luck charm in my pocket as if to imprint my fingermarks in it. Someday perhaps we’d understand whether sniffers could actually detect the dormant magic in our blood or if the charms truly prevented it. Maybe we were simply lucky. Sniffers were captive sorcerers given the choice to die or to live out their days at the end of a chain. They were gelded and kept naked, sheathed in green silk, their eyes and ears covered. We knew nothing else about them.
The sniffer yipped, animal-like, and dragged his handler down another alley. I breathed easier as I circled the last bend in the road.
We four of the Chimera had stayed apart since the earthquake. Neri slept in the deserted woolhouse outside the walls, coming into the city only to work his shifts at the Duck’s Bone alehouse. Even there, where most people knew us, we rarely spoke. Taverner Fesci pursed her lips and tut-tutted whenever I came in; perhaps Neri had told her we had argued. I heard not a word from Dumond or Vashti. Presumably Placidio carried on with his dueling schedule, but he’d not summoned me to our regular sword training, nor had he shown up at the Duck’s Bone for his usual post-match refreshment.
As for our neighbor the ironmonger, he no longer called a cheerful greeting to those who passed by. Rather than singing or drinking at the Duck’s Bone, or lending his help to someone needing the loan of a tool or a strong arm, good Germond spent his evenings sitting on a bench in his workyard, silent, his hands idle, a subdued Basilio ever at his side.
My writing work had provided me useful distraction … until this afternoon when I discovered a folded square of parchment in the sixth message box in the row of them outside my scrivener’s shop. It bore a plain seal and the notation Box 6 in a fine, bold, and most familiar script.
A message so soon after the dreadful events at the coliseum threw me off-balance. Was the Shadow Lord offering a new mission? Or was he calling an end to our brief adventures in these fraught days? Unsure of which I wished for, I’d not opened it as yet. Rather I had dispatched Figi, the trustworthy child of a Duck’s Bone tap girl, with a message to the other three to meet at our usual place at the Hour of Gathering. Our usual place was Dumond and Vashti’s house.
When I reached the end of Cooper’s Lane, I nodded politely to the lanky barrel maker, whose business gave the rutted road its designation, and I waved at Dumond’s dark-eyed daughter, Cittina. The girl, a year younger than Neri’s seventeen, minded her father’s covered stall most afternoons. She nodded my way, while showing an elderly woman her father’s silver jewelry and small bronze castings.