CHAPTER TEN
You Have to Die
Pytr
It worked. By all the gods in all their many heavens, the plan actually worked.
I glance around the thick shadows in the alley like I’m trying to convince myself I’m not dreaming.
Our idiotic, insane, impossible plan actually worked.
Reznyk stole a chain. Syrus gave me another bag of coins.
Aveus’s illusion rat-thing was disgusting, and his magic was so subtle even I couldn’t tell where he was hiding.
And the woman standing in the door to the Entrants’ dormitory didn’t even need a bribe. She just turned silently, vanished into the corridor, and came back holding the arm of the blonde woman with the crooked nose.
“Kyla?” I whispered.
The blonde woman nodded.
And that’s when the screaming started, when Aveus’s horrible illusion disrupted the full moon tour. The guards standing at the gate rushed over to the screaming tourists. I pulled Kyla through the gate.
And now here we are, standing in silence in a narrow alley, with the walls that trap the Towers rising behind us.
Someone coughs, and I jump. A tall man in a dark robe melts out of the shadows at the mouth of the alley. I know who it is, who it has to be, but still, my heart climbs the back of my throat.
“Zayne?” I whisper.
The man shrugs, then pulls back his hood. I’m surprised, once again, by how young he looks. When Syrus first told me I’d be meeting with someone from the Mercenary Guild, I pictured a grizzled old man.
“Follow me,” Zayne says.
The woman at my side doesn’t say anything as we turn to follow Zayne through the maze of alleyways that line this side of the wall around the Towers.
The path tilts downhill, leading us toward the Ever-Reaching River, and the smell gets worse and worse.
The wall around the Towers looms in the moonlight like the side of a great, impassable mountain.
Or a fortress, which I suppose is closer to the truth.
Finally, Zayne stops. The stench is as thick as fog here, like dead fish and rotten meat. My eyes catch on a dark, lumpy shape pushed against the wall, and my gut rolls over. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from gagging.
Zayne pulls something from his cloak, then strikes a match. He lights a candle on top of a barrel.
“That’s the signal,” he says, meeting my eyes in the thin, flickering light.
For one horrible moment, I think he means to signal the Towers. That he’ll turn me in for escaping, or for stealing this woman from the Exemplars. But then there’s a gasp, the sound of feet echoing from the wall, and the man who stopped me in the street and begged for help runs into the light.
Kyla makes a sound, a kind of strangled cry, and they fall into each other’s arms, sobbing.
“Gods, shut the hell up,” Zayne hisses. “I told you to be quiet!”
The man chokes back a sob. Zayne rolls his eyes, then turns to Kyla.
“Take your clothes off,” he snaps.
Kyla blinks. A tear rolls down her cheek.
“We need your robes,” Zayne growls. “For this.”
He waves his arm over the dark shape against the wall. In the light from his candle, I can’t pretend it’s anything other than a corpse draped in a blanket. Kyla nods. She looks very pale as she starts to untie the laces around her chest.
“I brought a dress for you,” her husband whispers. He stretches his robe to cover her, and I try to look somewhere that’s not the woman getting naked next to me or Zayne reaching down to pull the blanket off the corpse.
Finally, Kyla hands her mustard-colored Entrant robes to Zayne.
“Great,” Zayne says. “Now, go. Get out of here.”
He waves his hand down the alley. Kyla and her husband stare at each other for a heartbeat before she takes his hand and they run into the darkness together. By the time I remember that I was going to give them the money from Syrus, their footsteps are already fading into the night.
“Shit,” I mutter under my breath.
“Get over here,” Zayne says. “I need your help.”
My gut rolls as I turn toward the corpse. Its naked back is a deep, unhealthy shade of blue mottled with black. Zayne grabs the shoulder, then rolls it over.
“We’ve got to get the robes on it,” he says, tossing the ball of yellow fabric to me.
I stare at the corpse’s empty eyes. And its godsdamned beard.
“That’s a man,” I stammer.
Zayne makes a sound that’s almost a laugh.
“That won’t matter,” he says. “Not when we’re done with it.”
The back of my throat suddenly tastes bitter. “What are we going to do with it?” I manage to ask.
“If you’re going to puke,” Zayne replies, “do it now. We’ve got a long climb ahead of us.”
I swallow hard. “I’m not going to puke,” I say.
And I don’t. I’ve butchered animals before. This is worse, much worse, but at least it’s not my first time holding dead flesh. Together, we shove the stiffening corpse into Kyla’s yellow robes. The dead man’s skin is freezing, and his hair is wet.
“Did he drown?” I ask as I pull the sleeve down over his arm.
“Does it fucking matter?” Zayne growls.
“You’re a real ray of sunshine,” I mutter.
“Get fucked,” Zayne replies amicably. “Now, pick this sad bastard up.”
“What?”
Zayne rolls his eyes again in the light of the rapidly diminishing candle. “You heard me. I’m not hauling him up there.”
Shit. My gut rolls again as I grab the dead man’s left arm and leg, and I thank whatever gods might be listening that I was too nervous to eat tonight. Still, I almost lose whatever’s left in my stomach when I come to my feet and feel the cold weight of the corpse against my neck and shoulders.
“Follow me,” Zayne says.
He blows out the candle, then leads me around a corner and through a doorway so narrow that I have to stoop and enter it sideways. And then we climb, staircase after narrow, dark staircase.
“There aren’t many buildings as tall as the wall,” Zayne says, from ahead of me. The little shit sounds disturbingly cheerful, given the circumstances. “And this is the only one that can’t seem to remember to lock the door to their back stairs.”
“Great,” I growl.
My back is starting to ache, and sweat stings my eyes. The dead man on my shoulders shifts as I climb, and I have to constantly adjust his weight. And the smell—
I almost don’t notice when the stairs end. I pick up my foot, expecting another step, and it crashes down on a landing instead.
“Quiet!” Zayne hisses. “Gods, do you even know what that word means?”
“You’re hilarious,” I snap. “I can see why you hang out with dead people.”
Zayne opens a door, and the light of the full moon floods the narrow space. The mercenary’s teeth gleam as he grins at me.
“Watch your step,” he whispers.
I move forward, and my stomach drops. The wall of the Towers rises before us, topped with crenellations protecting the walkway. It’s so close, I could almost reach out and touch it.
Except for the yawning black emptiness between us.
The street must be below us, somewhere, but I don’t dare stare down long enough to find some point of reference. I back up, trembling all over.
“We drop the bastard from here,” Zayne says. “Make sure you do it face first. Once he hits the cobblestone, no one’ll ever know that’s not the woman inside those robes.”
I slide the corpse from my back, then brace myself on my knees and breathe until the world stops spinning. Gods, I hate being up this high. I didn’t even like climbing the ladder into Liv’s mother’s hayloft. When I glance up, blinking through a sheen of sweat, Zayne is frowning at me.
“I can toss him—” Zayne begins.
“No,” I say, cutting him off. “I’ll do it.”
And I do. I fix my eyes on the rough edge of the Towers’s walls, the even spaces between the stones at the top, and I drag the corpse to the very edge of the walkway.
Because this is the only way to leave the Towers. You have to die.
I push the dead man off the wall. There’s a slight whistling sound, like the wind through grass, and then a final, sickening smack, like a wet boot hitting the floor.
And then I throw up.