SHE MUST HAVE TRIED to get away from that guard. Jumped from the loft to the nearest fly, to head for the safety of Thebes. But there she hung, utterly still, in the middle of the line. Stalled? Why wouldn’t she just drop the makeshift rag and go, hand over hand. Get over the abyss, across that fly.
Runners had gathered at the edge of the Al-Razi. I could hear a frantic search for lines to throw her. Someone said, Just go. She shook her head no.
I saw the reason. There stood the real black-iron guard, where Jamila’s fly met the loft of Al-Razi. He had slipped his sword around the sheath of the silk, leaving nothing but a thin core of invisible thread. Even silk had its limits. Any movement now on the line—if she just shifted to grab the fly itself—would snap it.
Jamila saw me at the edge of Al-Razi and mouthed, Get help. The force of just that much motion caused the fibers near the cut to pull farther apart in a spray of moonlight. The crowd gasped. Halfway across the abyss, Jamila dropped silently, two feet more. She was the lure.
There came the sound of a scuffle in the mob and a yell to get out of the way. I was run over by a Fremantle guard, charging full-on, jettisoning the swords from his back, the knives from his belt, his gauntlets, the visor of his helmet, as he built momentum toward the edge. Bee Wolf. No one in this city ever leapt untethered from an edge. Even as I write this, I feel my pulse throbbing in my hands. Halfway across the abyss he crashed into Jamila. The shred of her fly-line snapped. Fremantle was one strata lower than Al-Razi tonight. Still, too far. Fifteen feet down, fifty out. Chances were none in a million.
When they hit the roof, they lay still in the snow. She stood up; the crowd cheered from Al-Razi.
Errol walked to the edge of Fremantle to pull up the broken fly. He had never seen such a thing. He examined the break and saw what I had seen: the clear cut of blade work. He turned fast, for now he understood—
He knew her, this foundling who stood before him, holding his helmet out to him. He had played a game of preference with her in a tufuga’s tent, and she had known more than she should have, about him and about his mother.
“What did they pay you?” he yelled.
“Pay me?” She wiped blood from her face.
“Was it your freedom? Did you exchange your freedom for this?”
She saw the guards coming down the lines from Al-Razi, coming from all around the roof of Fremantle, running toward the fugitive. She said, “Wiltu hem to ganganne mid thu?”
“What?” Before she could say it again, the guards were upon him.
“Wiltu? Wiltu hem to ganganne mid thu?” She was yelling it now. She pointed to the edge, speaking his mother’s mother tongue.
He looked at her as if she was insane, and then he, too, looked to the edge, to the abyss. He understood then, and shook his head no, as the guards bound his hands and forced him down, with his face in the snow. He struggled for a moment but there were so many of them. He looked up and yelled at her: “Gea.” And she turned and ran. No one cared about the lure now, or cared what she did next. They had their fugitive. The foundling was nothing.
The regnat’s voice boomed as he emerged from Fremantle behind his torchbearers, his guards, his pennons, and furs. A scribe was speaking into his ear, telling him everything. The scribe had his arm around one particular guard, who lifted his visor and, from across the abyss, gave me the gladiator’s thumbs-up, for I had just made him the regnat’s favorite. I turned my back to him, terrified that everyone on the loft had seen that gesture.
The guards stood Errol up, to face the regnat. Instead he turned and looked at Al-Razi. He found me in the crowd. I don’t know what he was thinking. He had no idea what part I had in all of this. Still, I kept Parsival’s visor down for I was sure he would see the guilt on my face.