Sertorius left four men at the Needle to finish. The rest started walking. The two dozen of us went out through the side gate and into the city. Sertorius moved at the head of the column, not bothering to check whether anyone kept pace. If someone fell behind, they fell behind. "Rally point's at the grain scales," he said. "My men finish at the Needle, then they come find us there. If the Runner crosses the second tower before we reach the scales, they leave without us. If they're not there when we arrive, we leave without them."
Behind us, the Runner, small and dark, was already climbing above the western rooftops, faster than ever. A slower marker would have let everyone lie to themselves about how much time remained. This one didn't allow it. Its quick arc across the sky made every minute obvious, and every delay expensive.
Nobody asked what happened if they missed the rendezvous.
The Legate walked near the center of the column, between two of his own men. Tonight he moved faster than I had ever seen but still slower than anyone wanted him to. Bastien stayed at my shoulder. What remained of the household walked around and behind us, cooks and clerks, none of them soldiers, all of them trying to look like they knew where their feet were going.
A handful of Spark Gap men kept close together near the back, the way people from the same trade do when the trade itself has just been taken from them. Sertorius had brought six men through that gate in total. Four had stayed behind at the Needle to finish the work; the one who walked beside him now, a soldier named Marcus, was the only muscle he'd kept for himself. The perimeter belonged to the centurion and the Legate's own garrison, a dozen men who had been guarding this compound long before Sertorius ever arrived, tightening and slackening around the edges of the column depending on the conditions of the street.
Bastien stopped walking. I felt it in the way his arm brushed mine, and understood why. I followed his stare to a lean young man near the back of the column, well apart from the other Spark Gap men, keeping his head down and doing an excellent job of being looked at by no one.
"That's him," Bastien said, quiet enough that it went no further than me. "The one who took the key."
Tullus, then. The relay operator Bastien had handed Danio's key to, the one who'd never shown his face at the cistern again after he took it. He kept his eyes on the street the same way I kept mine on the uniforms.
I had learned to read a city's fires from a window. Each one told me which party had lit it and why. A crowd three streets over had broken into what had been a Strategos's private stores, the kind of rooms a Helot or a common Hoplite was never meant to see the inside of, let alone empty. They wanted the wine and the dyed cloth their own hunger had apparently paid for. They didn't want a fight and would scatter the moment any serious threat appeared.
A company of Hoplites trading blows with another company outside a billet house didn't concern us either. That fight was about which of them had sworn their oath to a Strategos, and neither side bothered with foreigners.
I watched a particular cut through the shoulder, a seam running from a man's inner elbow down to his lower rib, the kind no ordinary tailor produced by accident. Those men would certainly still have a chain of command that worked. They would know exactly what a foreign soldier looked like, and exactly who to tell.
The second time I steered us wide of a street, it wasn't for the usual kind of danger. A column of perhaps thirty men was moving through it with real purpose. Nothing about them matched: mismatched armor, no two carrying the same weapon, and yet moving together. It was the same unspoken coordination I had watched happen in the Assembly Hall days before, when Ruvuk's people found each other without him ever giving an order. These were leaving the street. Quickly. They'd already decided the capital wasn't a fight worth losing tonight. Their goal was surviving long enough to come back and finish properly. We weren't headed in the same direction and I had no interest in becoming a complication in either of our plans. I kept us to the far side of the street, and we passed within thirty feet of men who never once looked our way.
The third time, I was wrong.
I had watched a ration yard three streets up from the Villa before we left. It had been quiet then, empty scales and nobody but Helots. I sent us through it because quiet was quiet and we didn't have time to confirm.
It wasn't quiet anymore. By the time we reached the yard, men had taken both corners. The ones closest to us wore the same cut through the shoulder I had been avoiding since the gate. I didn't have time to explain how badly I had misjudged the place. Someone behind me shouted. Everything collapsed into noise, and then into the harsh, unmistakable sound a man makes when something enters him that should never touch human flesh.
Marcus went down. He was one of Sertorius's own. He was only three steps behind me when a spear caught him low in the side. I don't remember deciding to grab him. I remember his weight, and Bastien's hand closing on my collar to haul the two of us backward into a doorway. That hadn't been part of anyone's plan. Somewhere behind us a woman from the Legate's household was screaming. Someone else told her to keep moving, and she did.
Sertorius looked at the wound, then looked at the corner. "Carry him. We go around, not through." Then, to no one in particular: "That costs us maybe ten minutes we didn't have."
I carried part of Marcus's weight for two streets before Tullus relieved me. He hadn't been asked, but he settled the wounded man's arm over his own shoulders.
We lost more than ten minutes skirting wide of the ration yard with Marcus.
A patrol of a dozen men had set up an unhurried checkpoint demanding papers from all who passed. Those men were here intentionally, with orders. A looter or a mutinous garrison had no reason to search for a Legion element in the capital. A patrol belonging to the Strategoi would.
Sertorius and his men were a card the Strategoi could trade quietly with the Empire for support against Ruvuk, and backing for their continued rule. Having them alive was worth far more to them than a dead soldier or a diplomatic scandal. A scandal forces everyone's hand; a quiet negotiation lets the Strategoi actually benefit. There was also a domestic angle: catching foreign soldiers destroying Imperial property inside their own capital is genuinely good PR for a leadership that's just been humiliated. It would be a different kind of legitimacy: "we defend Spartovan sovereignty."
We went around through an alley, close enough to hear their voices but not close enough to be seen. We were silent until the sound of the checkpoint was behind us.
We made the grain scales just as the Runner was clearing the second tower. Sertorius's four men were there, waiting. One of them had a lot of blood coming from his scalp. There wasn't time to ask.
"Charges are set," the oldest of them said. "Fuse is long enough to get us clear. But no slack."
We were three streets from the city wall when it went off. It was a flat concussion that swallowed all the city's other sounds. When I looked back, a column of smoke was climbing into an already smoky sky.
I didn't look back at Spartova again. I don't think any of us did. We went through the outer gates, Spartovan guards on both sides too occupied with their own crisis to do more than watch us pass. We were finally outside the walls of Spartova. The sound of the city behind us.
Tullus found me once we were clear of the gate, still carrying more of Marcus's weight than his share of the column's burden. I thought for a moment he meant to apologize. He didn't.
"She wasn't at the cistern this morning," he said instead, not looking at me while he said it. "I checked, before they came for us. First time in eleven days I could get anywhere near it, and she wasn't there."
I didn't know what had happened to her, and I don't think he did either, not for certain. What I did know was that if he'd done what I'd actually asked instead of what he chose to do, none of us would be walking this road right now. There wasn't a version of thank you I could give him that didn't also sound grateful for whatever it had cost him, so I didn't try to find one. "I don't have anything to say to you that isn't a lie in one direction or the other," I told him.
He looked at me directly for the first time since Bastien had pointed him out. "I'd have made the same one twice," he said. "That's what frightens me about it."
I waited to feel safe, but that didn't happen. Just because we were out of the city walls was not sufficient grounds for Sertorius to slow the pace. He didn't relax, even a little. We had crossed one line when we got past the city walls. There was no shortage of others left to cross.