Threading the Needle

by Joshua Palmatier

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “I told you,” Artras said. “It’s like the blackouts before the Shattering.”

  “Not quite. Even during the blackouts, the ley was there. It wasn’t strong, but it was there.”

  “This isn’t natural.” Carter looked unsettled.

  “No, it isn’t.” Kara began descending the stairs. Most of the others followed, only Cutter and Glenn remaining up top.

  The sense of wrongness increased until Kara reached the floor, stepping out into the center of the pit. Whoever was on pit duty was responsible for immersing themselves in the local ley network, centered here at the node. They would ride the ley, regulating it, searching out disturbances and correcting them if they could. If they couldn’t, one of the Wielders on duty would be assigned to check out the anomaly in person. The concentration of ley in the district should have been the strongest where Kara stood, the node the focal point, but again she felt nothing.

  The others had begun circling the pit, Artras brushing her hands along the stone sides. She halted near one of the openings to a channel.

  “Artras, Carter, Dylan, each of you take one of the channels and see if you can find the ley along its path. I’ll do the same.”

  “What are we looking for?” Dylan asked, stepping up to the channel closest to Artras.

  “A reason why the node is dead.”

  All three of them halted, then stilled, a sign they were reaching through the Tapestry in search of the ley. Kara closed her eyes and chose the northern channel near Artras at random, flying down its length. The unnatural emptiness continued for nearly four thousand paces before she ran up against a barrier blocking the channel. She felt along its edges, but discovered she could pass through it—

  She gasped. There was ley on the far side. An entire pool of it. It wanted to flow toward the node in Tinker, but the barrier kept it back, funneled it away instead, toward the southwest.

  She took a moment to trace along the northern path, then toward where it had been redirected, before returning to the pit. None of the others had returned. Adder stood beside her, obviously uncomfortable. He fidgeted and glanced up to where Cutter and Glenn stood, each occasionally casting a look downward.

  Dylan returned first. As soon as his eyes opened, he shrugged. “Nothing. The line runs into the distortion. After that, it’s fractured by the shards. Some of it contains ley, some doesn’t.”

  “You didn’t encounter a barrier?”

  “Not unless you count the distortion.”

  “There’s some type of barrier on this line,” Carter said. “I can’t penetrate it, although I can sense that there’s ley on the far side.”

  Artras sucked in a deep breath and released it with a shudder. “There’s a barrier here as well. But you already know that, don’t you, Kara? I sensed you when you returned. You flew right past me.” She turned to Dylan and Carter. “There’s a pool of ley on the far side, and the flow’s been redirected.”

  “Where?” Dylan moved toward Kara.

  “Southwest somewhere. I’d guess another node. I didn’t travel to its end.”

  “But why? Was the barrier natural?”

  “No. Someone put it there specifically to alter the flow of the ley.” Artras caught Kara’s eye. “We’ve wondered if any other Wielders survived the Shattering. I’d say this answers that question. Only a Wielder could have set up that barrier.”

  “Or one of the Primes.” None of the other three liked that thought. Tensions between the Primes and the Wielders had escalated before the Shattering. The only reason Kara, Artras, and Dylan had survived the explosion of the Nexus was because they’d been arrested by the Dogs and placed in the cells beneath the Amber Tower. None of them had ever found out why they’d been arrested, but Kara would bet the orders had come from Prime Augustus.

  “Should we take the barriers down?”

  They all looked at Kara.

  “We don’t know why they were put up. Or when. Something may have happened immediately after the Shattering that forced the survivors here in Tinker to set them up to protect the area. Remember, the pit was sealed from the outside.”

  “The ley was extremely unstable after the Shattering,” Artras added. “Maybe it was overflowing here, surging out of control.”

  “If we release the barriers, who knows what would happen. I think we should leave them. For now, at least.”

  The others nodded. Taking that as a signal, Adder began herding them toward the stairs, anxious to be out of the pit. They closed the metal doors behind them, replaced the bar, then Adder doused the torch before cracking the front doors. Cutter scanned the street, then waved them out.

  They skirted the ley station, circling away from the River Rats’ location before angling back toward the distortion. Again, they saw and heard nothing except an explosion and brightening of the sky much farther south, where the city had burned after the fire started in West Forks. By the white light that lit the thickening clouds overhead, Kara assumed it had something to do with the ley, but it was too far away to investigate.

  They were almost at the base of the distortion when they rounded a corner and were brought up short.

  She’d forgotten about the Tiana.

  The street they’d turned onto sloped downward here, toward what had once been an intersection. Except now, twenty steps away, it was submerged under water. Kara couldn’t tell how deep it was, but the river had flooded at least one level of the buildings below, rushing through doors and windows, lapping against stone siding and steps. At the center, where the five streets came together in an odd shaped star, the hands of a statue rose from the water, holding the base of an urn. On each of the street corners, the tops of ley lamps hooked up and out over the rippling surface, the dead ley globes nestled in ornate ironwork at their ends.

  “How do we get across? There aren’t any bridges here.”

  “Do you think we would have brought you this way if there wasn’t a way across?”

  Adder motioned them down the street and up the wide shallow steps of a trading house. The main doors, twice the height of regular doors, stood open behind thick colonnades and spilled out into a grand main hall, the marble floor stretching toward a series of work tables to either side. The room was littered with discarded papers, the winds blowing them into drifts against the far corners. The room lay open overhead for three floors, walkways surrounding the hall on every side, with numerous doors opening onto what Kara assumed were offices.

  Adder headed straight toward the three doors in the wall opposite the main entrance, angling toward the left. Cutter had fallen into the rear position, Glenn in between. Kara’s feet scuffed through the papers as she cut between the tables, noticing abandoned ledgers, bottles of ink, and quills. Some of the ledgers were open, as if the traders had been interrupted in the middle of recording transactions. On one table, the inkbottle had tipped, long-dried black ink caking the open pages of the entire ledger in a smear. A black palm print from someone’s hand stood out on the light wood of the table to one side.

  The rooms beyond the main hall were small, the corridors maze-like. They ascended to the third floor, Kara catching glimpses of the black surface of the river through the windows as they climbed.

  At the top, Adder halted, letting everyone catch their breath. Cutter slid past him and vanished into a corridor to the left.

  The main part of the building stood to their right. There should have been nothing to the left but a drop to the street below.

  Kara stepped forward, around Artras.

  A large opening led to an arched walking bridge, enclosed in a glass tunnel made up of diamond-shaped panes. Scattered sections of glass were tinted various colors. Some of the panes were cracked or missing. The walkway was made of sheets of metal, iron rails on either side. A horse and cart could have traversed it, with room to spare. It arched o
ver the street—now the Tiana—to the building on the far side.

  “The buildings were owned by the same trading house,” Adder said. “They added the walking bridge later. It was the pride of Tinker, for a few months.” He stood with hands on hips, surveying the bridge. “I grew up here. Well, not in Tinker. In Issard’s Row, the next district over. Those in Tinker would have nothing to do with us.”

  Kara didn’t know what to say to the bitterness in his tone. But a harsh whistle sounded from the far side of the walk, and Adder motioned her forward. She trotted across the bridge, glancing toward the river below.

  Then they were in the second building, descending back toward street level. They passed through a set of offices and corridors like the first, into another main hall with the same layout of tables and tall doors, but with a circular stained glass window in the ceiling overhead.

  Once they reached the street, the Tiana behind them now, it took only minutes to reach the base of the distortion.

  Carter stared up at it in awe. Unlike Kara, Artras, and Dylan, he’d never been this close to it; the group who’d fled the University with Hagger and the Wolves on their heels had already been beyond its reach before it quickened.

  “It’s huge.” He raised one hand toward the nearest face as Kara had done the night before.

  “You couldn’t tell that from a distance?”

  Carter shot the elder woman a disdainful look.

  “Spread out a little.” Kara motioned in both directions. “Let’s check out the shards and see if there’s one we should work on first.”

  The other Wielders dispersed, the Dogs and tracker keeping an eye on the surrounding buildings and streets. Kara walked up to the nearest section of the distortion and peered through its slanted face. The fractures here were more numerous, probably because one of the main swirling arms of the distortion seared the air a brilliant green overhead. When a distortion opened, it bloomed like a flower, the edges of its petals curling out from its center in curved arms of various colors. Too high for Kara to reach, she could still feel the weight of this particular arm pressing down on her, even without reaching out to touch the Tapestry.

  The shard immediately before her contained a corner of a square, an edge of a park, part of a side street, and the corner of a building that looked like a café. The trunk of a tree in the park had been sliced in half, along with several branches and a bench. The small round tables and numerous chairs at the café had been scattered and overturned, some lying in the street. Two of the chairs had been broken, jagged edges pointed in all directions, as if they had been run over by a cart. A breeze rustled the leaves of the tree, although Kara couldn’t hear or feel it herself.

  She moved down the edge of the distortion to the next shard, toward the park, but here one of the jagged edges of lightning cut almost horizontally at chest height. She ducked down and noted that the park continued, only a small portion of the square captured on the right side. There were a few shrubs and pathways, and the rest of the bench, all lit by what appeared to be midday sunlight.

  She straightened. Above the edge, the shard was dark and the leaves of the trees captured inside were dried and dead.

  The contrast between the two shards disturbed Kara at a gut-churning level. She began to move on, but Artras suddenly cried out, “Oh, gods!” and staggered back.

  Everyone converged on her position.

  Inside the shard—a continuation of the square and street Kara had looked at first—a cart with five people loaded in back, bundled in ragged clothing and covered in soot, raced away from three Wolves, the malformed animals caught in midsnarl. The two men, one woman, and two children had looks of terror on their faces. The driver of the cart half stood in the seat, reins in midsnap. The horses attached to the cart were straining forward, their hides flecked with sweat, their eyes white with fear. All of them were frozen, locked in time.

  And slicing through the center of the cart and the two horses, cutting through the woman and the small boy clutched to her chest, through the legs of the driver and the two horses, were multiple planes of the distortion.

  “We have to get them out,” Artras said.

  “We can’t. The cart and the people must be in at least three different shards.”

  Artras turned on Kara, angry. “If the distortion closes—”

  “I know what will happen! But we can’t save them. Not yet. We barely know how to free a single shard. This—” She waved to the cart and shook her head. “We can’t free one shard alone, it would kill anyone already caught in both it and one of the other shards.”

  “Not to mention you’d free the Wolves at some point,” Adder added. “I don’t know if we could handle three at once.”

  “We’ll have to free all of the shards at once, and have everyone ready to handle the Wolves when we do. We aren’t ready for that yet. We’ll have to come back for them.”

  Artras subsided, disgruntled.

  “I found a few shards we can practice on. They seem harmless.”

  “There’s one that appears to have filled up completely with water.”

  “We’ll work around it. Dylan and I will show you how it works and then we’ll have the rest of you try one on your own.”

  She led them back to the first shard she’d looked into, the one with the café. As soon as Dylan was ready, she reached out and pierced the nearest face, Dylan supporting the edges. A breath of heated summer air washed over them as the face fell away.

  Two hours later, they’d cleared all of the shards surrounding the cart and the Wolves, completely isolating the group from the rest of the distortion, with only one terrifying moment when Artras lost hold of an edge and three faces collapsed at once in the space of a breath. For that blinding moment, Kara saw the entire distortion closing in her mind’s eye, taking the central part of Erenthrall with it.

  But after the three faces fell, the surrounding shards had stabilized, only a minor tremor vibrating through the nearby structures.

  After that, she ended the practice and had Cutter and the Dogs lead them back to the safe house.

  Allan didn’t head straight for the distortion after breaking away from Kara and the others. He trotted east for a few blocks, until he neared where the Tiana cut through the middle of the district, and then headed north.

  He wanted to check on the River Rats.

  He’d been surprised when he’d seen them scrambling toward the clash near the Temerites the night before. The River Rats had always run from conflict, acting more like scavengers, looting the dead afterward and stealing whatever they could. But last night they’d been sprinting toward the conflict. And they’d been prepared to fight.

  Something in the group had changed. They could have simply been running toward the fight in hopes of taking advantage after it ended, but he didn’t think so. Not the way they’d carried themselves.

  He followed the river, paralleling it through side streets as it cut through markets, down plazas and squares, and through the center of an entire block of tenements once he left Tinker behind. When he neared River Rat territory, he slowed, then chose one of the taller buildings and ascended to the roof.

  This section of Erenthrall had been built in a different style to the squat warehouses of Tinker. Instead of flat stone or brick facades, the buildings here were adorned with bay windows and wrought-iron balconies. Windows were capped with stone designs, or had wide ledges for plants, and the brick walls were inlaid with intricate patterns. The roofs were gabled, and a few had mock crenellations at the edges and miniature rounded towers at the corners.

  Allan emerged onto a sloped roof through a trapdoor at the top of the stairs, keeping low as he slid down the tiles to the crenellated edge. In the shadows thrown by the light from the distortion, he slunk to the nearest stunted tower and climbed up onto its flat, rounded top.

  From there, he could see down into
the River Rats’ island.

  They’d taken over an entire block of apartments built on a small rise where the Tiana split at one end, surging around the compound before merging again on the far side. The water flowed briskly. The buildings at the edge were partially submerged, the water rising halfway up the first level, swirling in and out of doors and windows, but the tenements in the interior weren’t flooded.

  Firelight glowed in some of the windows in the higher levels of the buildings, with watch fires along the roofs. Makeshift bridges connected each of the buildings, with ladders between those at separate levels. Allan counted a dozen of the young Rats on watch, their silhouettes passing before the flames of the fires as they patrolled. They carried bows, and one or two had spears. Others were roasting what looked like birds on spits around a firepit at the center building, with a few large pots set in the coals to one side.

  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  Before he turned, though, a drum sounded a warning.

  Those on patrol reacted instantly, the closest rushing toward the drummer. Shouts rang out, the words unintelligible at this distance. Allan couldn’t see what had caught the Rats’ attention at first, but then a group appeared on the closest roofline—more Rats, fifteen at least, herding along a group of five others, trussed up. The prisoners stumbled to a halt at the roof’s edge, surrounded, and hand signals were passed from Rat to Rat between the buildings. The street below was flooded by the Tiana, the gap too wide to jump.

  A moment later, orders were shouted and Rats came running—half of those on patrol, along with a few from the buildings below. They raced to something lying flat, grabbed handles on either side, and dragged it to the edge of the roof. Angling it upward, they shoved it out over the edge, the Rats at one end dropping back as they reached the roofline to help those behind. They kept it balanced until only ten feet of it remained on the roof, the rest jutting out over the flooded street.