The delegation broke camp in the order Bragen had not announced and nobody needed announced. Bragen, Seren, Cael, Wren, Illan, Lirae. Third put three bodies between Cael and whatever the boot was walking toward and two bodies between him and whatever it had left behind. Cael accepted the arithmetic and walked third.
The first print was where Bragen had said it was. The frost had fully formed on its edge — a small precise rim of white, delicate as the rim of a cup.
Bragen crouched. "Six hours old. Full dark. Middle of the night."
"Someone walked past our camp while we were asleep," Cael said.
"Walked past. Did not stop. Did not circle. Walked straight up the Walk. With Seren and Illan and Lirae on the three watches that cover the full dark. None of whom heard a thing. The walker is not loud and the walker was not trying to be."
Forty paces above was a second print. Forty paces above that, a third.
At the fourth Bragen stopped.
"This is my stride."
"Bragen?"
"Forty paces. My stride. A man in his seventies with a little stiffness in his left hip. Not the Free City guard's parade stride — that was shorter and flatter and landed on the heel. This lands on the outside edge and rolls forward the way mine does because of the hip. The boot is walking the way I would walk it today."
"You are saying —"
"I am saying the boot was walking the way I walk before I started walking today. In the full dark, six hours ago. I had not yet decided how my hip was going to be this morning. The boot was walking the way I was going to walk before I knew how I was going to walk."
Cael waited.
"Which means one of three things. The walker is a man older than me who walks the same way I walk by coincidence. Or the walker has been watching me walk for a long time and is walking the way I walk on purpose. Or the walker is —" He looked at the fourth print for a long count. "— Helyn's idea of a joke. Helyn's jokes were famously specific."
"You think Helyn's ghost is ahead of us in parade boots."
"I think someone who knew Helyn well enough to use her jokes against me is ahead of us in parade boots. I am afraid of the difference. The difference is the shape of the chapter. Keep walking."
Seren, dry, over her shoulder: "Whoever is in the boot does not want us to arrive late, and does not want us to arrive exhausted. That is the first courtesy we have received on this road. Courtesies are the things you have to be most careful about."
Illan, from the back, ledger open while walking: "Prints counted: nine. Spacing consistent. Confidence in same walker: one-point-zero. New column: Walkers We Are Following Who Should Not Exist. I have been creating a lot of columns this week."
Lirae, from sixth position, in her formal Glasswater voice: "I would like it on the delegation's record that I am currently walking sixth in a formation arranged by an old soldier, following prints made by boots last seen on a parade ground that ceased to exist a hundred years before I was born. If I die on this track I would like my cause of death correctly described in the Glasswater diplomatic register as absurdity compounded over six days."
"Noted," Illan said. "Cause of death pre-assigned. Confidence one-point-zero."
"I am not actually dying, Illan."
"The ledger is prepared either way."
Cael heard the sentence underneath Lirae's diplomatic voice — she is papering her unease so the delegation does not have to carry it for her — and did not laugh. He half-smiled over his right shoulder. The three in her cadence was a little deeper.
He walked on. The cord held at two and a half inches. The token in his inside pocket was warmer than it had been at dawn. He filed the warmth-change under tell at the next halt.
They followed the prints for two hours.
---
At the top of a rise the Widow's Walk forked. The main track continued west along the ridgeline. A second track — thinner, more the idea of a track — dropped down the south shoulder into a depression where the morning mist had not yet burned off.
The parade-boot prints stopped at the fork. Not branched. Not continued. Stopped, as if the walker had lifted off the ground between one print and the next.
Bragen read the stopping. "The walker wanted us to see the fork. The walker does not want us to take the side-branch."
"Which do we take."
"Main track. But the side-branch is a track I do not remember. I walked this Walk for three days with Helyn and I do not remember a fork here. Either my memory is wrong, which I do not believe, or the side-branch is new."
Wren, quietly, from fourth position: "Cael. Ask the side-branch its name."
"Wren?"
"If the walker does not want us to take it, the side-branch is the one with a question on it. If it gives you a name, we know it is a road. If it does not, we know it is a gap. The asking is free."
Cael turned his face toward the depression below the fork. He gave the mist a sideways smile, in Helyn's register.
"Little side-branch. What's your name, little side-branch?"
The mist did not move. Twelve count. Fifteen.
Then Lirae stepped forward two paces from sixth position — the first time on the walk she had broken formation — and placed her hand on Cael's shoulder, the small professional touch a Glasswater diplomat used to pass information without writing it.
"Cael. I know the side-branch's name. I did not know I knew it until you asked. Its name is the Courier's Shortcut. I know it from a Glasswater trade-map I read in my second year at the merchant academy. The trade-map was a forgery — produced by a rival house to mislead my house's couriers. One of the false tracks on it was the Courier's Shortcut. The forgery was caught and the Courier's Shortcut became a cohort-joke — the name we used for any route that looked good on paper and was not there on the ground."
Her hand stayed on his shoulder. Transmitting.
"A forger in Glasswater thirty years ago made up a name for a track that did not exist, and now there is a track here, and the track is asking for the name the forger made up. I am handing you the information because I do not know if it means the track is false or if it means the forgery was true."
Bragen was silent for a count of eight. Bragen was not often silent for eight.
"We do not take the side-branch. The only way a forged name attaches itself to a real track is if someone has been walking the map into being. That is a Moren thing. The side-branch is a Moren track."
"Agreed. Main track. Lirae — hold the Courier's Shortcut in your pocket. We come back to it."
"Held."
Her hand left his shoulder. She stepped back into sixth.
Illan, walking: "Second road named on the way to the answer: the Courier's Shortcut. Confidence in road existing: zero-point-six. Confidence in road being a Moren construct: zero-point-eight. New column: Roads We Refused to Walk Because Their Names Came From Forgeries. At the current rate my ledger will have more columns than rows by the end of the volume. I am going to need a wider ledger."
"Gallick keeps wider ledgers," Bragen said without looking back. "Ask him by pigeon at the first inn."
"Pigeon queued."
They took the main track. The Courier's Shortcut sat behind them, un-walked, the mist still not moving.
---
At the Ninth, Yevan was on a roof.
He had climbed the north watch tower ladder looking for the cat, had not found her, and had crossed the connecting-roofs toward the flat section above Cael's former office. Yevan had been the Ninth's spymaster before he had been anything else; he knew which planks were load-bearing because thirty years ago he had mapped them at night.
The seat in his sternum walked with him, smaller out here than in the chair.
The cat was on a small flat tile at the eastern edge, tail curled, looking east in the direction the delegation had walked yesterday. She did not turn her head when Yevan stepped onto the flat section. Her ears had already done the knowing.
Next to the cat, on the same tile, was a small wooden box Yevan had never seen. The size of a man's two cupped hands. Cael's small personal mark — not the formal one — carved into the lid. Closed with a single wooden pin.
Yevan sat down slowly so as not to startle her, and opened the box.
Inside: one folded piece of paper, one small plain ceramic cup, one slip of dried apricot.
Yevan. If you are reading this, you climbed the roof to find the cat. Good. The cat has been coming up here every morning for the last four months on the hour the grain storeroom used to expect her, because the grain storeroom has apprentices now and the apprentices are loud. I did not tell you about the roof because I did not want to turn the roof into a thing the Ninth's governance tracked. I am telling you now because you are the governance now and you get to decide whether the roof is a thing or whether the roof stays a quiet thing between you and the cat.
The cup is for the cat. The cup holds water. The cup should be refilled once a day, in the morning, after you check the tile for frost, because the cat does not like a frosted tile and you should warm the tile with your hand for a count of ten before you put the cup back.
The apricot is for you. It is the Ninth's last apricot from the summer harvest. I was saving it. I am giving it to you now. Eat it on the roof. Eat it slowly. You have earned the roof. — C.
Yevan read the note three times.
The cat stood up, walked two paces, and sat down on Yevan's foot.
"Cael," Yevan said quietly to the empty east sky. "You did not tell me about the roof."
The cat, who understood none of the words and all of the sentence, did not move off the foot.
He folded the note into his inside pocket — the same place Cael carried the warm wooden token — and ate the apricot slowly. It was better than Yara's measurement-day honey bread.
"All right," he said to the cat when the apricot was gone. "I am going to warm the tile for a count of ten. Then I am going to refill your cup. Then I am going to climb down and go back to the office and open the 'for the day the council fractures' envelope because I am lonely — except I am not, because opening the envelope on a day the council has not fractured is the first mistake a new spokesman makes, and I am not going to be that spokesman. I am going to tell Gallick and Yara about the roof at supper and nobody else. The roof is a quiet thing between me and the cat, and Cael said I get to decide."
The cat, still on his foot, slow-blinked at him.
Yevan, who had lived sixty-three years without ever owning or wanting to own a cat, read the slow-blink correctly by an instinct he did not know he had. He slow-blinked back.
The cat approved by standing off his foot and walking three paces to a different tile — her way of certifying him as a roof-person.
He warmed the tile for a count of ten. He refilled the cup from the water-skin at his belt.
He was standing to leave when he heard Gallick's boots on the connecting-roof plank.
Gallick arrived with the expression of a man who had put down a requisition mid-sentence to climb a roof.
"Spokesman Yevan. I have located you. I am adding cat located and spokesman located to the operations log. I am charging for both. The rate for locating a spokesman is higher."
"Gallick. Sit down. There is half an apricot."
There was not half an apricot. Gallick understood the offer exactly and sat down. The sit had a hitch — a new one, the kind a man developed when he had been carrying a missing friend in his left shoulder for a day and a half.
"Half an apricot is a senior operations incentive. I accept." The cat did not slow-blink at him. She was reserving certification.
"Do you know what I was doing in my office just now."
"A requisition."
"The second-longest of my career. Replacement inkwells for all four remaining offices. I am writing it in the longest possible form because the writing is the thing I am doing in place of missing Cael Ardyn. The requisition is my coping mechanism. I am telling my spokesman about it instead of not telling him, which is the new thing I am doing this week."
"Approved. Bring it to me after second bell. We sign it together."
Gallick stood up. The hitch was still in his shoulder.
"I will leave you with the cat, spokesman."
"Gallick. The cat is a quiet thing."
"Noted."
Gallick walked back across the connecting-roofs. The cat slow-blinked at Yevan a second time, which he understood to be permission to leave. He climbed down.
---
The delegation reached the ridge in the late afternoon.
The ridge arrived the way Bragen had said it would: a cleft in the track, a sudden widening of the view, a westward fold of hills that opened on the long horizon. And on the long horizon, for the first time in the walk, the air was a color none of them had seen before. Not a color exactly. A lack. The air any air became when it had been breathed by something that did not breathe like a person.
Bragen sat down on a flat stone at the ridge's crest. He did not take a drink of water. He looked at the horizon for a long moment — long enough that Cael understood the silence was not the silence of a man gathering his thoughts. It was the silence of a man who had been gathering his thoughts for sixty-one years and was about to put the gathered thing down.
"My first teacher on this track was not Helyn."
Nobody said anything.
"My first teacher was a man named Torren Fel. Torren was the Free City's night guard captain before the fall. Torren taught me the Widow's Walk when I was twenty-two. He walked this ridge with me on the day I made captain. He sat on this stone — the stone I am sitting on — and told me the Widow's Walk was a road the Free City guard used to walk on the day before a guard's wedding, because the walk was long enough to give a man time to decide whether he actually wanted to marry the woman he was about to marry."
Cael had stopped moving the moment Bragen said Torren Fel — two words Cael had never heard in his life, said in a register Bragen did not use for living people.
"And because the ridge had a view of the ruins that, at the time, were the ruins of the Free City's previous city — the city that had stood here before the Free City, and which the Free City's founders had built on top of."
Wren made a small sound. Not a word. A sharp intake of breath being held.
"I am telling you now that the Free City was itself built on the ruins of a previous city. And the previous city on another. Torren told me on this stone that he had counted the layers down six deep at least. He suspected there were more below the six he could count."
He did not look at anyone. His seeing eye was fixed on the horizon.
"So when we walk into the Free City's ruins in four days, you will understand that we are walking into a ruin that is sitting on top of at least five older ruins. The question we are asking — what destroyed the Free City — has a shape in our minds, but the shape is probably wrong. The Free City is one death in a series of deaths, and the question is really: what has been killing this place for so many cycles that the killing has its own architecture."
He took a breath. The breath was the kind a man took after holding a previous breath for a very long time.
"I have been carrying this since I was twenty-two. I did not know I was going to have to tell anyone until Cael asked the Widow's Walk her name yesterday. The practice came back, and the practice came with the memory, and the memory came with Torren's voice. Torren said tell the delegation on the ridge. I am obeying Torren's voice sixty-one years after he died. That is all. Get water. We walk another hour before camp."
The delegation was silent.
Wren was the first to speak.
"Six layers," she said. "At least."
"Torren said at least."
"The Causality Sect foundation lecture's eleventh paragraph — which I was required to know but not required to believe — the eleventh paragraph says: the central wasteland is a single grave that has been dug six times. I have known the paragraph for thirty years. I believed it was a metaphor. It was not a metaphor. It was an architectural description."
She turned her face toward Cael.
"Cael. The eleventh paragraph is also a thing I now believe. That is two paragraphs in two days. My believing-rate has gone up by a factor I did not know was possible, and I am afraid of what I am going to believe by the time we reach the ruins."
Cael, quietly: "Believe what the walking shows you. If what we find is not in your eleventh paragraph, the paragraph was incomplete. If what we find is in it, the Sect knew more than it was willing to say. Either way, believe."
Seren, from the edge of the ridge: "The air over the ruins is a different color than the air we are standing in. I cannot tell you what it means. I can tell you I have not seen air that color anywhere else in my life."
Illan, already writing: "Air color at ridge. Different from anywhere else in my life. New column: Phenomena That Do Not Have Names Yet."
Cael took the token out of his inside pocket and held it up in the late ridge-light so the others could see it.
"The token is warmer than this morning. It was warmer this morning than yesterday. It has been getting warmer as we walk toward the ruins. I am telling you because I promised Seren I would not withhold, and the promise is larger than Seren now. It is all of you. If it gets warm enough to hurt my hand, I will tell you."
Lirae, after a beat: "Cael. Thank you for the promise-upgrade."
"Noted," Bragen said. "Temperature reading on the record. The token is reading the ruins through you. You are an instrument the walker is using. Keep walking."
Cael put the token back. The cord eased by a hair at the promise-upgrade. The listener was listening.
They drank water. They walked another hour before camp.
---
The camp at dusk was a small cleft in the stone a little past a second widening of the Walk. Bragen took first watch. Seren laid her blanket out.
Bragen made his first perimeter circle — the twenty-pace circuit he walked before the light fell — and at the western edge of the perimeter he stopped. He crouched. He read the ground for a count of six and came back to the camp.
"A second print."
"Fresh?" Cael said.
"Within the hour. Not frosted. West-pointing. Deeper than the morning. The walker is carrying something he was not carrying this morning, or he has been walking for twelve hours without a break. He did not enter our camp. The walker is still ahead of us. Not catching up. Not falling behind. Keeping our pace."
"How does the walker know our pace."
"He is watching us — which I have ruled out, I would see the watcher — or he is being told our pace by a third party, which means there is a second presence with us we have not detected, or the walker is the third party and is using a tracking I do not know about. All three are worse than they were this morning."
Seren looked up from her blade.
"Cael. I am asking for permission to cultivate the tenth form tonight in camp. Lie-detection. I want to use it on the direction the print is pointing. The form will not tell me who the walker is. It will tell me whether the walker is lying about where he is going. If the west-pointing print is a feint, I will know, and we will know where not to walk tomorrow."
"Permission granted. Any objection."
Wren: "None. The tenth form is consistent with the fourth paragraph of the Sect lecture, which I have always half-believed. If it works I would like to watch."
Illan: "Logging as experiment. Confidence zero-point-seven on the form producing a result on a direction rather than a person."
Lirae: "I would like it on the record that I am not volunteering to cultivate anything tonight. The only form I know is Glasswater negotiation, and you cannot negotiate with a direction. If any of you discover a direction that can be negotiated with, wake me."
Illan: "Noted. Column: Directions That Can Be Negotiated With. Currently empty."
Bragen cleared his throat. "A cultivating watcher is a distracted watcher."
"Bragen is correct," Seren said at once. "You take the watch. I hold the form in camp. We trade back when it is done."
"Agreed."
The old soldier and the heroine swapped roles without rancor.
---
Seren sat cross-legged at the edge of the fire-ring, facing west. She closed her eyes. Her hands did not move. Her breath did not change. The tenth form did not look like anything from the outside. She was simply sitting.
Wren watched without blinking — thirty years of a half-believed paragraph finally in the field. Illan's pencil was still, which meant he was recording. Lirae, true to her word, was asleep. Bragen walked the perimeter.
The minute passed.
Seren exhaled — long, slow, deliberate — and opened her eyes. She walked the three paces to the fire-ring and sat opposite Cael, close enough that the firelight was on her face from below. Her voice was the precision voice she used when she wanted none of the delegation to misremember.
"The direction is telling the truth. The walker is going where the print says he is going. The walker is not lying to us about his destination. The walker is not trying to mislead us. The walker is walking straight to the ruins."
Cael let out a breath he had not known he was holding.
"But the tenth form told me one more thing I was not asking for."
Cael's breath stopped again.
"The walker is not walking alone."
Wren, very quietly: "Seren."
"There is a second presence walking with the walker. The second presence is not wearing boots — when I extended the form forward the form did not register a second set of prints. The second presence is walking beside the walker in a way the ground does not record. I am telling you what the form told me. Bragen —" She raised her voice just enough for the perimeter to hear. "— what walks beside a man without leaving a print."
Bragen was silent for a count of five. Not the count of a man thinking — the count of a man sorting through sixty-one years of things he had chosen not to name.
"A shadow. A memory. A ghost." He walked three more paces of his perimeter. "Or a man who has not yet decided he is a man — a trainee of the Causality Sect in their third year of cohort training, who is taught to walk at half his own weight for the duration of a field assignment."
He did not stop walking.
"Wren. Did the Sect's third-year cohort training include the half-weight walk."
The count before Wren's answer was very long.
"Yes."
"Wren —"
"The half-weight walk is the fourth field form. I was taught it in my third year. I never saw anyone use it in the field. I did not know it worked. If someone is using it on our track tonight, the someone is a Sect-trained field operator of at least cohort level four, walking beside a man in parade boots from a dead city, both of them heading straight for the ruins ahead of us."
Her voice was the delegation-voice now. Operational register.
"Cael. I am telling you I am afraid, and I am telling you in the delegation-voice, not the private voice, because the fear is operational. We are not following one walker. We are following two. And one of them is invisible to every reading we have except the one I was taught in a classroom thirty years ago by a teacher whose face I have not remembered until just now."
The fire moved in the ring.
Cael looked once at Seren, once at Bragen's back on the perimeter, once at Wren, and then at the dark beyond the firelight — where two walkers, one booted and one not, were keeping the delegation's pace toward the ruins.
"Then we walk more carefully."