The bell kept tolling, and Kael wished it would stop. The sound was wrong in a way that had nothing to do with distance. It was iron-heavy and waterlogged, like something that had been drowning for a very long time and only now remembered it had a voice. Every toll passed through his chest and left a cold vibration in his bones that refused to settle.
Lira walked beside him with her head down and her shoulders tight, and she kept rubbing at her sternum with the heel of her palm. Kael could tell from the way her jaw was set that she felt the bell as deeply as he did.
"I hate that sound," she said, and her voice was hoarse but steadier than it had been in the crack. "I hate everything about this place, actually, but that sound especially."
Kael nodded without looking at her. "It feels like it's ringing inside my ribs. Like it's coming from inside me instead of somewhere ahead."
"Maybe it is," Lira replied. "Maybe that's exactly what it's doing and we just don't know it yet."
He did not have an answer for that, so he said nothing. They walked for a while in silence, and the doors watched them pass. Wood and stone and rusted iron lined both sides of the street in every shape and size. Some hung open on absolute black. Some were sealed so tight they looked like they had never been opened at all. None of them had handles that made any sense, and one door, a narrow thing made of pale wood, had a handle shaped like a small hand reaching out.
Kael made a point of not looking at it as they passed.
Lira noticed anyway. "That one had a child's hand for a handle," she said, and her voice was carefully flat, the way someone speaks when they are trying very hard not to sound affected.
"I saw it," Kael said.
"Did it bother you?"
"Everything in this city bothers me. That one just bothered me more than the others."
She nodded slowly, and her hand drifted up to rub at her sternum again before she caught herself and let it fall. "Fair enough. I don't like the ones that whisper. At least the hand was honest about what it was. The whispers feel like they're trying to trick you into something."
Kael glanced at her. Her face was still a mess of dried blood and grey exhaustion, but her eyes were clearer than they had been. The rest in the crack, if being crushed between two walls could be called rest, had given her something back. Not much, but enough to walk and talk and be sharp with him again, and he found himself oddly grateful for that.
"I think that's exactly what they're doing," he said. "Trying to trick us into opening them."
"Then why haven't you opened one?"
"Because I don't want to know what's behind them. And because you told me not to."
Lira made a sound that might have been a laugh if she had the energy for it. "You listened to me. I'm almost impressed."
"Almost?"
"Don't push your luck."
The street began to widen. Not by much at first, just a few feet, enough that they could walk side by side without their shoulders brushing. The grey light was steadier here, and Kael could see further ahead, where the street opened into something larger. A plaza, maybe, or a courtyard. The buildings fell back on either side, and the doors thinned out until there were only a few, scattered like afterthoughts against the dark stone.
And then they heard it. A sound that was not the bell. A dry, rustling whisper, like dead leaves skittering across stone. It came from ahead, from the open space, and it was growing louder.
Lira stopped walking. Her hand found his arm and stayed there, her fingers pressing into the fabric of his sleeve. "Tell me that's not what I think it is," she said, and her voice had gone very quiet.
Kael listened carefully. The rustling had layers. Many small sounds moving together. Wings. Legs. Bodies too light to make noise on their own but loud in numbers. The older orphans had told stories about creatures like this, things that fed on what the larger predators left behind, and they had called them Ashwing Carrion.
"It's Ashwings," he said. "Scavengers. They don't hunt the living."
"How many?"
"I don't know. A lot. Hundreds, maybe more. It's hard to tell from the sound alone."
Lira looked back the way they had come, and the street of doors stretched behind them, silent and waiting. She looked ahead, and the rustling was louder now, a dry chorus that set Kael's teeth on edge and made the fine hairs on his arms stand up. "Can we go around them?" she asked.
"I don't see a way. The street opens into whatever that is, and they're inside it. We'd have to go back through the doors to find another path."
She considered that for a moment, and then she shook her head slowly. "I'd rather walk through a thousand scavengers than open one of those doors."
"That's what I was thinking."
"So we walk through them."
"They want the dead. We're not dead. If we move slowly and don't make any sudden sounds, they might ignore us completely."
"And if they don't ignore us?" Lira asked, and her voice was tight.
"Then we run and hope they lose interest."
Lira took a breath and held it for a moment before letting it out slowly. "Running draws attention. You told me that yourself, back when we first met."
"It does. But standing still while a thousand scavengers decide we're close enough to dead will draw even more attention. Sometimes you have to choose which rule to break."
She looked at him for a long moment, and then she shook her head again, but this time there was something almost like resignation in it. "If this gets us eaten, I'm going to be very angry with you," she said. "I want you to know that. I will spend whatever comes after this life being furious at you specifically."
"That seems fair."
"It's more than fair. It's generous."
They moved forward. The street opened into a wide courtyard, and the courtyard was full of wings. Ashwing Carrion covered the ground like a carpet of dried leaves, their bodies small and dark, their wings translucent and veined like old parchment. They crawled over each other in slow, mindless waves, and the sound of their movement was a constant dry rustle that filled the air and made it hard to think clearly. In the center of the courtyard, something large lay still. A corpse. One of the blind leviathans, maybe, or something similar. The Ashwings covered it completely, a living shroud that pulsed and shifted as they fed. Kael could not see what lay beneath them, and he was grateful for that.
He stepped into the courtyard. The Ashwings nearest to his feet scattered, then flowed back. They crawled over his boots. Light. Inquisitive. He kept walking, slow and steady, and Lira walked beside him with her jaw clenched and her eyes fixed straight ahead. A wing brushed his hand. Dry. Papery. He did not flinch.
Another crawled up his leg and perched on his thigh for a moment, its tiny legs prickling through the fabric of his trousers. It tilted its head, seemed to consider him, and then skittered off to rejoin the swarm. The rustling was everywhere, inside his ears, inside his skull. He focused on the far side of the courtyard, where the street resumed and the doors began again. That was all he needed to do. Walk. Keep walking. Do not stop.
They were halfway across when the corpse in the center moved.
Not the Ashwings. The thing beneath them. A spasm. A last, mindless twitch of dead muscle. It was nothing. It was the body remembering that it had once been alive. But the Ashwings did not understand that.
The swarm erupted.
Wings beat. Bodies rose in a dark cloud, and the rustling became a roar that filled Kael's ears and drowned out everything else. He grabbed Lira's hand and ran. The cloud swirled around them, wings slapping his face, his arms, his neck. He could not see where he was going. He could not breathe without inhaling the dry, dusty scent of them. Lira's hand was a death grip in his, and he pulled her forward, toward where he thought the far street was, toward anything that was not this.
They burst out of the cloud and stumbled into a narrow street. The Ashwings did not follow. They settled back onto the corpse, and the rustling faded to a whisper, and then to nothing at all. The courtyard behind them was still again.
Kael leaned against a wall, gasping for breath. His lungs burned. His skin crawled with the memory of all those tiny legs. He brushed at his arms, his chest, his neck, trying to shake the feeling off.
Lira bent over with her hands on her knees and retched. Nothing came up. There was nothing in her to come up. She stayed like that for a long moment, breathing hard, and then she straightened and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
"I hate this city," she said, and her voice was raw and scraped out.
"I know," Kael replied.
"I really, truly hate it."
"I know that too."
A new sound cut through the fading rustle. Not the bell. Not wings. A deep, grinding growl. It came from somewhere ahead, somewhere in the streets beyond the courtyard. It was answered by another growl, and then another, each one closer than the last.
The Ashwings had not been the only things drawn by the corpse. The larger predators had smelled it too, and they were coming to claim what was theirs.
Kael pushed himself off the wall. Lira straightened beside him. They looked at each other, and neither of them said anything for a long moment. There was nothing to say. The city was waking up around them, and they were standing in the middle of it with nowhere to run.
"We need to move," Kael said finally.
"I know."
"Now, Lira."
"I know," she said again, and there was an edge to her voice now, something that was not quite anger and not quite fear. "I'm moving."
They moved. The street ahead was dark and narrow, and the growls were growing louder with every step.