Dustown, Northgate
Autumn 217, the evening and night of the Dustown Apartment Fires
She’d cried herself out hours ago. Only the hot headache of shed tears and the sting of a rubbed-raw nose remained.
She knew loss. It curled around her past, nestled in her memories, a dogged predator that pursued and found her over and over and over. Yet every time she faced it anew, its fangs tore just as sharp with each fresh wound. Every time she cursed herself bitterly for lowering her guard, for hoping that maybe this time things would stay good, would not change.
That was the way of the world though, wasn’t it? Change. And loss.
So it was with no surprise that, after asking about the Roasted Swan, she found herself overlooking a charred heap.
Aloysius’ burble was barely audible, burrowed into her scarf as he was. She shook her head slightly as dull resignation added to the cannonball in her stomach, remaining crouched inside the alley that debouched on the street the Swan had once stood. She should have known. If Emma had disappeared, it only stood to reason that the place of refuge she’d mentioned would also be gone.
Not for the first time, she wondered what the girl and her friends had been up to. She had talked much, but never enough to fully grasp the picture, only tales of their pranks and laughter as children. Neither of them had pried into the other’s past, the unspoken politeness of refugees.
That was it, then. Her haven was gone, the other option was no longer, and the inquisition was in town. It was time to leave.
As she straightened and turned to leave Northgate, a trace of motion caught the periphery of her vision. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw footprints appear in the dusting of early snow, leading toward the rubble heap. Footprints, and nothing else.
A spike of alarm and hot curiosity shot up her spine, and she went still, trying not to attract attention. Aloysius poked his head out above the scarf and peered toward the ruined building, wriggling his nose inquisitively. She gave a slight, affirmative shrug of one shoulder. He leaped down, spread-eagling and landing on the barrel in front of her with a soft plap, then leaped again and scurried on out of the alley.
She never took her gaze off the footprints as he scuttled amidst the fallen beams, worming his way closer to the target. For a handful of seconds, her eyes glazed over as the pupils telescoped shut, leaving them unnerving discs of gray and green.
A piece of charred beam vanished, quick as a wink, and the footprints stirred and moved away.
Her eyes snapped back into focus. Youth and rat moved in concert, slinking after the invisible walker—not so fast as to attract attention, not so slow as to lose them. Aloysius’ nose saved her when they reached the more-trafficked streets, as the snow ground into the mud underfoot and she lost the footprints in the general activity.
The walker turned into an alley and stopped. Aloysius, exhausted after scurrying as fast as he possibly could, plopped into a drainage hole and complained. Sav ignored him and ducked into an alley on the opposite side of the street, leaping too lightly and catching the edge of the roof with her fingertips. Wriggling up, she wormed her way toward the edge of the roof and peered over, just in time to see a child pop into view from the alley.
Nae a kid, she realized after a second. The face was too old, the proportions too off to be a human child. A halfling? Nae common. Nae old, neither.
He went into the building that formed one side of the alley he’d emerged from, children’s voices spilling raucously from it as the door opened. She turned her attention toward it. Grammy’s Orphanage, the crudely-painted sign nailed to the side proclaimed. The cannonball in her stomach, momentarily lightened by distraction, reappeared again.
Emma’s stories floated up again, of her friends, of a nearly-mythical childhood in a village. Lumotu, the halfling with all the tales, even more than her, she’d avowed. You could never get him down, she’d said—he’d always have something to cheer you up and some way to make you laugh.
Sav doubted it, personally, but she’d been accused of being too dour for her years.
She stayed on the roof, thinking, as Aloysius recovered and scampered over to the foot of the building she perched on. She was still there, Aloysius now mightily irate, when the first flames licked over the roof of the shabby Dustown apartments several hundred feet away. When the cry of warning went up, she was no longer there, the small spot of warmth left on the worn wood shingle roof rapidly cooling in the autumnal night.
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