Karis could not be hurried. One step at a time they took her down the stairs. When they came up they had climbed at a distance from each other to keep the treads from creaking, but now they could not be so artful. Karis had no shoes. Her steps were silent but her weight was not. The building sighed under the burden of her.

On the floor above them, a door opened and there were footsteps. A moment later the four of them slipped into Annis’s room and Emil eased the door shut. “It has no lock,” he breathed, and began moving furniture to block the door.

A shout echoed down the stairwell. Medric had already gone out the window and was halfway to the ground. Footsteps thundered up the stairs. How long would it take for the building’s occupants to figure out what had happened? The confused guard out m the courtyard would insist no one had come in or out. How long would it take for them to realize that rescuers must have come in through a window? Emil was pulling up the rope. They would have to lower Karis, who scarcely seemed able to place one foot in front of the other and certainly could not be expected to climb down a rope.

Zanja abruptly took out her knife and hacked Annis’s bindings to tatter. Annis jerked the gag out of her mouth.

“I need your help,” Zanja said.

“After you made a fool out of me? I think I’ll just do the same to you. It seems fair!” Annis leapt off the bed and started for the door, clearly expecting Zanja to jump her.

“Annis, this is no game. Karis is the G’deon of Shaftal. Settle with me later, if you must, but help her now.”

Annis stopped short. “What? Is this another one of your tales?”

“It’s the truth. Come and help us lower her to the ground– she’s too heavy just for the two of us. Come! There is no time!”

Annis hesitated, but she had always been impulsive. “Oh, all right!” she said, but her face glowed with excitement.

Emil was ready. Despite, or perhaps because of the smoke, Karis looked panicked as they dropped her over the edge. The three of them popped their shoulder joints and burned the skin off their hands lowering her safely to ground, but then Medric had her, and Zanja could breathe easier. Annis went out the window, followed by Emil. Throughout the building, doors were being slammed open, but no one had yet been sent out to check the surrounding streets. Mabin’s people still thought that Karis was still somewhere in the building.

Emil had reached the ground. The sky opened up in a fresh downpour. Zanja swung out the window and only then remembered the raven. His feathers were fluffed comfortably m the warmth of the fire, and he seemed disinclined to leave, but finally flew to the windowsill the third time Zanja called him. She slid down the rope as Annis’s door crashed open.

There was a pistol blast, and the raven exploded like a feather pillow ripped open. In the street below, Karis uttered a terrible, wordless cry, and fell to her knees.

Chapter Twenty‑three

Annis said, “This way.”

They ran, propelling Karis forward with one person pulling at each arm, and another pushing at her back. Annis darted ahead, light‑footed, grinning like a child set loose to play. They ducked into a narrow back way. Behind them, Mabin’s people jammed the house’s single doorway, struggled into the courtyard, and shouted at the guard to unlock the gate. With no idea which way the fugitives had gone, Mabin would have to divide her forces at every turn. Soon, Zanja and her companions would outnumber the pursuers. Pistols would not fire in the rain; she and Emil might well be testing their long unused daggers before the night was done.

“This way,” Annis called. They fled down an alley where garbage piles awaited the trash wagon. They trampled through a vegetable garden, where squash vines tripped them and soft mud clung to their ankles. They crashed through a gate into another garden, and then between buildings to more gardens, and at last to the wall.

“There’s a door in the wall right around here,” Annis said. “So people can escape to the river should they need to.” She hopped on one foot, belatedly putting her shoes on muddy feet. She had put on a shirt, but her breeches were still tucked under her arm.

Zanja could hear Mabin’s people shouting the village awake behind them. Karis leaned in her embrace, cold and soaking wet, gasping for breath. She heard a bolt shoot open, and Emil said, “Annis, don’t take the path. That way, through the woods.” Annis leapt forward, happy in the chase. The three of them followed, compelling Karis through the thicket, where a tracker might be able to follow their route, but not until daylight and not until the rainfall had ceased. They made their way to their horses and put Karis on Homely. The rest of them went on foot, heading westward, into the wilderness.

It rained all night and well into the morning, and then the sun split the clouds open like a bright hammer upon gray stone. Zanja, trudging across the rocky landscape with her hand on Homely’s stirrup, sensed a quickening in the giant riding beside her, and looked up to see that Karis had lifted her hanging head and was squinting up into the sun. “Karis, are you awake?”

Karis glanced bleakly down at her.

Zanja put her hand upon Karis’s sodden knee, wondering if she would even feel the touch. A steady tremor ran through the muscles under her hand, like the vibration of a heavy wagon upon cobblestones. “Should I explain what has happened?”

Karis shook her head.

If reason and will broke free of smoke’s paralysis before bone and muscle did, then Karis had been considering her situation for some time already. Perhaps she felt the vacancy of amputation where her raven had been; perhaps she had sorted through the dreamlike memories. She seemed, now, to become aware of the hand upon her knee, and she covered it with her own. Her hands already were trembling.

Zanja said, “I took the box of smoke from your room. You still have your smoke purse.”

Karis dried with her sleeve the wretched tears that had streaked her face. “Can we stop?” she slurred.

Zanja shouted ahead at her companions, who had outpaced Homely and his heavy burden, then led the horse to a bit of a rise, which she hoped might be less muddy, and helped Karis to dismount. Karis lay down with her back against the earth, like an uprooted plant digging herself back into the soil.

Zanja took hold of her hand again.

“Help me.”

Zanja had cobbled together courage before, using whatever poor bits and pieces of strength she had at hand. But to do it for another person, when she herself felt hopeless, was not an easy feat. She stated the bitter facts, as Norina would have. “If you continue to use the drug as you have been doing, you’ll die. But if you stop, that also will kill you.”

A tremor rippled through Karis’s form, like a small wave running ahead of a devastating flood. “Another choice,” she gasped.

Wouldn’t there have to be a tenuous route, halfway between one death and the other? If there wasn’t one, what harm was there in pretending like there was one? “A dance,” Zanja said. “A balance. Use enough smoke to keep you alive, but not enough to kill you. Every time you smoke, wait a little longer. In time, you will be using the drug just once a day again.”

Karis said hoarsely, “And in the interim, this agony. Death sounds easier.”

“No doubt it is easier. No doubt it would have been easier had I chosen death a year ago, when your raven gave me the choice. There’s been a number of times I wondered why I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?” she gasped. Her eyes were blank with pain.

“I knew I was caught up in something, and could not endure to die with my curiosity unsatisfied.”

Karis smiled faintly. She placed Zanja’s hand upon her breast, where the hard outline of her smoke purse lay under the shirtcloth. “Take it.”