Chương 8: Chapter 7 – The Road South

Morning came grey and indifferent, the city waking up the same as it always did, with nothing in it that cared one way or the other whether Ant was still in this doorway or not. Ant hadn't slept much. The decision was still there when he opened his eyes, exactly where he'd left it — solid, uncomfortable, and no easier to hold than it had been the night before. He rolled his shoulder once, testing it. Still stiff. Still his.

He checked what he'd gathered — the coat, the waterskin filled properly now, the second loaf, the coil of cord tucked into a deep pocket — and found it hadn't grown any more impressive overnight. Not much, set against a wasteland that had already swallowed three proper expeditions without a trace. More than he'd had two days ago, though. That would have to count for something. There was no one to tell he was leaving. That thought came quieter than the rest, and stayed anyway.

He could vanish from this doorway today and the only thing that would change was the stone becoming free for somebody else to sleep on. He stood, pulled the coat tight, and stepped out into the street. No one to tell — and some stubborn, contrary piece of him decided, somewhere between that thought and standing up, that it wasn't going to stay true if he had anything to say about it.

The southern gate sat at the far end of the district, past the last of the market stalls and the tanning yards that always smelled worse in the morning cold, and Ant kept his pace even the whole way there, neither fast enough to draw attention nor slow enough to look like a man reconsidering. A trader's lenses flickered over him as he passed and found nothing worth a second look. Still unreadable. Still just a man in a coat that didn't quite fit.

The baker's cart was set up near the gate itself, one of the handful of stalls that caught the traffic heading out before the city proper opened its doors — an older woman, heavyset, flour worked permanently into the creases of her hands, arranging a fresh tray behind a boy who was already calling prices at the empty road. Ant recognized her before he'd fully registered why.

Three years of lifting bread off her racks four streets from his own doorway, and here she was standing at the last stall before the road, close enough to the gate that half the district's leaving traffic passed within arm's reach of her without knowing it. She saw him and didn't look away, which was rare enough that Ant slowed without quite deciding to.

"Haven't seen you take anything this week," she said. Not an accusation. Just an observation, the way she might have commented on the weather.

"Wasn't planning to today either." He glanced past her, toward the gate, toward the road beyond it he hadn't reached yet.

"Leaving the district. Thought I'd say something first, for once, instead of just going." Her expression eased into something more careful — a woman recalculating a person she'd already decided she understood.

"Leaving for where?"

"South." She didn't ask further, and the not-asking told him she'd heard enough about what lay south to know exactly what kind of answer she wasn't going to get if she pushed harder. Instead she reached behind her, into a basket by the cart, and came back with a small, hard roll, the kind that kept for days without spoiling.

"On the house," she said, holding it out.

"First and only time. Don't get used to it." Ant looked at it a moment before taking it.

"I've stolen from you for three years."

"I know exactly how many loaves. I've been keeping count since the second month, out of spite more than anything else." She said his name — Byrren — like she'd always known it, which unsettled him more than he expected.

"You always looked like you hated doing it. That's the only reason I never called the watch. A man who hates what he's doing usually stops, eventually, once something better shows up."

"And if nothing better shows up?"

"Then he keeps hating it, and I keep counting, and neither of us gets anywhere." She shrugged, easy, like the thought weighed nothing at all.

"But you're leaving. That counts as something better showing up, whatever it turns out to be. I won't ask what." She looked him over once, the way she might size up weather before deciding whether to bring the washing in.

"I've watched plenty leave this district over the years. The ones who don't come back are usually the ones who stopped asking questions about where they were headed." Ant turned the roll over once in his hand. He didn't have a ready answer for her.

"Thank you," he said, finally.

"For the bread. All of it. The stolen kind too."

"Don't thank me. Just don't die out there stupidly." If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. She was already turning back toward her cart, the boy behind her still calling prices, the moment closing the way most moments in this district closed — without ceremony.

"And if you find whatever you're looking for," she added, not quite turning back, "don't forget where you started. People who forget that end up worse than the ones who never had anywhere to begin with." She didn't wait for an answer to that one either. Ant stood at the edge of the road a moment longer, the roll held loosely in one hand, something unfamiliar sitting in his chest that took him the better part of a block to name as gratitude.

Then he walked through the gate, and the guards barely looked at him — checking for contraband, for cargo worth taxing, and a man in a coat that didn't quite fit passed beneath their notice without effort. The road stretched out beyond it across open scrubland, and Ant kept walking. The rhythm of it settled fast — step after step, the ground even underfoot, the sound of his own movement filling in where the city's noise used to be.

Other travelers dotted the road ahead and behind, spaced far enough apart that nobody paid much attention to anyone else.

A group of academy trainees passed him within the first hour, their Kithren moving alongside them with the restless energy of animals that hadn't been asked to work yet, and Ant watched them go without meaning to — one bonded to a creature built low and fast, shoulders rolling with contained power, another keeping pace beside a taller creature built for distance, covering ground with an ease that made the effort look invisible. They moved without doubt, exactly where they were supposed to be.

He forced his attention back to the road. By midday the scrub had thinned into patches, the soil growing lighter underfoot, and the road narrowed as it wound down into a shallow cutting between two low banks — the kind of place a road builder chose for convenience without once considering who might use it for other reasons. He heard them before he saw them. Two men stepped out from behind the near bank, unhurried, with the ease of people who'd done this before and didn't expect trouble doing it again.

"Not far to walk before you're past all this," the first one said, tipping his chin south.

"Be a shame to make the trip on an empty stomach. Or an empty purse, if you've got one." Ant stopped. There wasn't much choice in it — the second man had already drifted around behind him, closing off the way he'd come.

"I don't have much," Ant said, which was true, and which he already knew wasn't going to matter.

"Everyone says that." The first one smiled, easy and practiced.

"Doesn't mean we won't check." Ant weighed the two of them fast. Neither bonded that he could tell, no Kithren in sight — closer to even odds than most of the last two days had offered him. Two against one, though, and nothing sharp in his own hands to close the gap. He backed a step, angling himself so the cutting's wall sat at his shoulder instead of open ground at his back, and closed his hand around the coil of cord in his pocket. Not a weapon. Weight and reach were weight and reach.

"Come on," the first one said, some of the ease dropping out of his voice.

"Don't make this the hard way."

"You first," Ant said. It bought him half a second. The second man came in low and fast, and Ant swung the coil anyway, full weight behind it, and felt it connect — a solid crack across the man's forearm that pulled a genuine curse out of him and knocked his reach off line. It wasn't a win.

It was never going to be one, and the first man closed the rest of the distance while Ant was still finding his balance, an arm locking hard around his throat from behind, a knee driving into the back of his leg until it buckled.

"There," the man said, close to his ear, breathing harder than he had a moment ago.

"That's the version where nobody's hand slips and cuts something they didn't mean to. Yours, in this case." Ant went still. Not by choice. The arm across his throat had made the decision for him.

"Take it," he managed, when he had enough air for it. His voice came out rough. It didn't shake.

"It's not worth dying over." The arm eased, and the man let him drop back onto both feet before stepping around to join his partner, who was still flexing his forearm, glaring hard enough to matter. The first one shook his head once, and whatever the second man had been about to make of it passed without becoming anything worse.

They went through his coat's outer pocket at their leisure — the loaf, the waterskin, the roll from the baker gone into a bag at the man's hip before Ant could think to argue for it specifically. The coil of cord got turned over, dismissed as worthless, and tossed back at his feet. The first one paused, one hand still in the bag, and came back out with the baker's roll. He tossed it back underhand, easy, and it landed against Ant's chest before dropping into the dirt at his feet.

"For your compliance and donations," he said, grinning like he'd earned the line somewhere and had been waiting to use it.

"Sensible," the second one said, still rubbing his arm, no real warmth in it.

"Most people aren't, this far out. Good luck finding anything past here worth eating." They didn't linger. No further violence, no lingering threat — two men who'd done this enough times to know exactly how long it took, and not a moment longer, gone back over the bank the way they'd come. Ant stood in the cutting a while, breathing harder than the encounter should have earned. He picked the cord back up and turned it over once — worthless to them, and still the only thing in reach that had made one of them flinch.

He held onto that. It wasn't much. It was something. He picked the roll up too, brushed the dirt off it, and put it back in his pocket. Barely any food now. No water beyond whatever the morning air still carried. Two days' walk from the last place that would sell him more of either, and the wasteland somewhere ahead of him regardless. He kept walking. Stopping wasn't going to fix any of it, and turning back would have meant admitting the whole morning had been for nothing.

By afternoon the cutting was well behind him, the road climbing out of the scrubland and onto flatter, harder ground where the grass thinned to sparse, bristled clumps that gave way more and more to bare dirt. The sun had burned off the last of the morning's grey, and with it went most of the other travelers — the road ahead sat emptier the further south it ran, until Ant realized he hadn't passed another living soul in the better part of an hour. That should have bothered him more than it did.

Mostly it just meant fewer people left to steal the little he still had. He kept his pace even, watching the flat horizon for any sign the land ahead was starting to change. He found one before he expected to. A wooden post leaned out of the dirt a little way off the road, weathered grey, its painted marking long since scoured down to a pale ghost of whatever warning it had once carried.

Past it, the road itself had stopped bothering to stay a road — the packed surface cracking into loose plates, grass giving up entirely where the cracks ran deepest, as if the ground this far south had simply lost interest in holding itself together. Nobody had replaced the post. Nobody had repaired the road either. Ant kept walking toward it anyway.