The second installment of Ryan Nock's serialized War of the Burning Sky novel has arrived!
Tired, cold, sore, and directionless, Rantle spent nearly an hour drifting in the crowds of Gate Pass, a press of bodies wilder and more packed than even the greatest turn-outs during the new year’s festival. He saw city soldiers trampling people under wagons as they tried to go the wall to fight back the Ragesians. More than once he passed a family carrying a burnt loved one, dying or dead, the healing houses already too full to admit any more. Some frightened soldiers were trying to press through the crowds to retrieve what healers they could and get them to the walls, while distraught fathers and husbands brawled with them when they tried to leave without healing their children and wives.
He stepped over several corpses in the street, and even if the crowd behind him had let him take the time to move them, he wasn’t sure he would have cared enough. He had just left the closest thing he had known to a family, and it seemed like fortune was mocking him by having brought him so close to the ones he needed to go with – Torrent, the jispin man, and the frightened woman – who by now could be anywhere. Rantle had no idea how to find a group of three people out of the thousands in Gate Pass, and if he did not find them before tomorrow he suspected they would already be outside the city.
There was no route Rantle knew of southward that would not take him through enemy territory, either west through the lines of the Ragesian armies, or east into Shahalesti, which would likely get him captured as a spy, since he looked Ragesian. He could only guess Torrent knew a route through the mountains, but if Rantle had to follow on his own he imagined he would end up freezing to death at the side of some snow-filled mountain road.
As it was, after an hour of aimless wandering, the flights of dractyls stopped, the crowds began to disperse, and Rantle found a dark, looted tailor shop to rest in. A dozen other people, either displaced or too cold and tired to go back to their own homes, huddled inside with him, sharing the warmth of a small hearth which barely managed to win against the chill draft coming through the door looters had smashed open.
For the first half hour people sat together silently, until one man began plucking away a five-beat couster song on a broken guitar. Rantle and a few others recognized the song and began humming or tapping beats along with it. It felt good to help, even for something as sad as this old war song.
Linear Mode
And yet another word from our sponsors
