Chapter 81 Flight Risk

The old skybridge crossed the river gorge on four cable towers, and two years of condemnation notices flapped from a chain across its southern approach.

Damien reached the northern tower at twenty to midnight, ahead of the convoy, by taking a maintenance ladder that a sane person would have refused.

’Four carriages on a deck rated for nothing, in the dark, over a gorge, yeah, and they will still make it if nobody interferes.’

The convoy came onto the span at ten to midnight, lead carriage first, sixteen guards riding the flanks with lamps hooded down to slits.

Celene’s compartment was the second carriage, armored, with a seal press bolted to the floor and four house blades sitting on the roof.

Damien went down the tower’s inner face while they were still on the first quarter of the deck, and dropped onto the lead carriage from nine meters up.

The driver reached for a horn, which Verdict removed along with its bracket and a section of the seat rail in one cut.

"Get off, jump left, then take the rope on the tower rail," Damien told him, watching the man go over the side with impressive enthusiasm.

He cut the lead carriage’s traces on the second stroke, turning four tons of vehicle into an unguided object moving fast across rotten decking.

’Now the bridge does most of the work, damn, and I get to be the reason a condemned span finally lives up to its paperwork.’

The lead carriage slewed sideways, taking out the guardrail, the plank bed and eleven meters of stringer beam.

Everything behind it stopped, since horses have opinions about holes, the convoy’s careful order became sixteen guards in the dark on a collapsing bridge.

[Debt: 0 → 96]

The first four came at him down a lane, which was a gift, since Silver Rain suits that shape and Gutter Style handles whatever happens after.

He put the first over the missing rail, took the second at knee and elbow with the saber’s guard rather than its edge, then let the third’s own weight finish him.

The fourth stopped, looked at the gap in the deck, and made the correct professional decision to leave.

The four on the armored roof came down together, which was the trained response, precisely what Damien had spent two months learning to punish.

Flicker put him behind them mid-drop, the Blood Ledger started earning properly.

[Debt: 96 → 388]

[Interest: ×1.2 per exchange]

The deck went at the third quarter while they were still fighting, a full bay of planking peeling away with a sound like a cough.

Damien got a hand on the armored carriage’s rear step as the whole thing began to slide toward the gap.

’Fine, no more clever, just hold on and let physics carry us both to the far tower.’

He rode it across the broken span with his boot braced on the axle housing and sixteen meters of nothing under his left shoulder.

The carriage hit the far tower’s stone apron at a speed nobody had designed for, and Stay of Execution went up half a second before the impact.

[Stay of Execution active]

[Deferred: 60% of impact damage]

[Timer: 14 seconds]

The compartment door was armored, the lock was a Marlowe house pattern, and Damien did not have eleven seconds to be delicate about it.

He put Verdict through the hinge line twice and tore the entire door off the frame with the tally running silver up the blade.

Celene sat inside with her back against the far wall, twenty-six years old, wine-dark travel coat, hair coming out of its pins and both hands flat on the bench.

She had a knife on the seat beside her without reaching for it, which Damien filed as the first intelligent thing anybody in her family managed that week.

"Ah, so the boy from the evidentiary hall came through the door instead of the guards," she said, not moving her hands.

"And you are the custodian signature on an acquisition record your nephew sealed under privilege," Damien answered.

’She is not surprised, yeah, she has been waiting four days for somebody to open this door, she just expected different hands.’

"My nephew will burn every road out of this city before he lets me speak in that hall," Celene replied.

"Then it is fortunate that I am not taking you to a road," Damien said.

The Stay came due at fourteen seconds, sending thirteen hundred points of deferred impact through his shoulder and hip while he still stood in the doorway.

He stayed upright out of pure spite, which Celene watched happen, and something in her face changed in a way that mattered later.

Vivienne arrived at the tower head ninety seconds after, having crossed the northern approach on foot while the deck was still falling into the gorge.

She had blood on her left sleeve that belonged to somebody else and a cut across her cheekbone that did not.

"Right, six came at me on the northern approach and four of them can still walk," she said, coming down the apron stair.

"Then they will describe an unnamed swordswoman to a house that already has too many enemies," Damien answered.

He put a hand out for the tower rail and she caught his wrist instead, since it had been heading somewhere approximate rather than anywhere real.

Her grip stayed there through three full breaths, which was one longer than the situation required, and neither of them mentioned it.

’Her hand is shaking and mine is not, which is the wrong way around, damn, she came across a falling bridge and did not know what she would find.’

"Your pulse is doing the thing it does after you have paid a Stay," Vivienne said, letting go.

"The bridge charged me thirteen hundred and I am current on the account," Damien replied.

Mina came up the tower road with Bram twenty minutes later, the four of them loaded Celene into a grocery van that smelled powerfully of cabbage.

’Half the great houses in this country are hunting her and she is riding east under a vegetable tarp, yeah, that is the whole plan and it is going to work.’

The safehouse was above a shuttered fishmonger in the eastern district, chosen since Bram’s aunt’s supplier had a key and no opinions.

Celene sat in that room with a cup of tea she did not drink and Petra’s signed statement on the table in front of her.

She read it twice, and on the second pass her hands shook hard enough to make the paper audible across the room.

’She did not know about the girl at all, shit, Evander kept his own aunt off the staff list for exactly this moment.’

"The girl was nineteen and she fed those cases for eight silver a week," Damien said. "She never knew what she was feeding and neither did you, which is the only thing the two of you share."

"None of that matters, since I put my own name on the record with my own hand," Celene answered.

"You signed a form your nephew set in front of you at an hour he chose, for a compound he described, and then he sealed your name so nobody could ever ask you about it," Damien replied.

’She has been carrying that signature like a verdict for two months, damn, he built the whole frame out of her guilt about a form.’

She did not confess, he did not push her, since a confession extracted in a fishmonger’s flat is worth nothing under a truth brand.

’Let her sit with the girl’s name for four days, yeah, the brand will get a real answer instead of a rehearsed one.’

Damien went to the window at two in the morning to find the eastern district too quiet, in the specific way cities fall silent when somebody has paid for it.

[Death Flag detected: Safehouse assault - Fatality 84%]

[Hostile arrival estimated: 40 minutes]

’Forty minutes, yeah, and Evander did not send house blades this time, since house blades leave a house record.’

He woke Vivienne, told Mina to seal the stairwell, and put the witness in the back room with the only door in the building that locked from inside.