City of Steel and Shadow by Jacob Peppers

Author:Jacob Peppers [Peppers, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-27T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Perishables’ leader might have been reticent to answer Dekker’s inquiries, but they didn’t have to wait long to figure out what had struck Merle as so funny.

As they made their way through the city the wanderer and those with him moved in small groups so as to arouse less suspicion by anyone that noted them. A precaution that was likely unnecessary, as what few people traveled the city streets seemed far more concerned with not being noticed themselves than anything else, skittering away into alleys and side streets like rats fleeing from a storm when they saw the wanderer and the others.

The wanderer had spent a significant amount of time in Celes when training with Soldier, and having been born and rasied in a backwater village, he had always been shocked and excited by the vibrant, constantly moving life of the capital city. It had always seemed to him that no matter what time of the day or night, the streets were teeming with men and women and children. Hundreds, thousands of families going about their lives.

Now, though, those streets were desolate, or at least nearly so. He remembered a time, long ago, when he and Soldier had been staring out one of the high windows of his castle at the city below, full of people. The lifeblood of the city, the man had called them. He had been teaching the wanderer a lesson about leadership—or at least trying to. Explaining that it was not a city’s castle or leader, nor its soldiers and guards, nobles or merchants, which made it thrive, which kept it alive. Instead, it was its regular citizens. The people who worked and lived within it.

If that were true—and the wanderer believed that it was—then indeed the city of Celes was sick. And maybe not just sick…maybe dying. And those men and women he saw giving them furtive glances as Clint led them toward the poor district were no more than the vultures and flies gathering at the signs of that death, waiting to feast upon the remains of what had once been one of the finest cities in the world.

The walk depressed him, seeing a city he had once loved fallen to disrepair, most of its shops and buildings boarded up, windows and doors both. Trash and filth littered the street. As Clint led them down one side street they saw the corpse of a mongrel dog that looked as if something—or someone—had taken bites out of it. Anything living was always in a state of dying, of course, but a city—unlike a person—might be renewed, its life, as it was, extended pretty much indefinitely. Such renewing was done by the guards and the street cleaners, by the shopkeepers and the people who visited their shops, but now those renewers, it seemed, had, like a healer deciding their patient’s affliction was beyond their ability to cure, given up.

Each boarded window, each looted building or piece of detritus that littered the street felt like

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