Diverus and Leodora progressed more slowly. The cases made passage along the lane difficult. The corners kept bumping against the uprights in the railing. When the woman in purple reached them, they had to set down the cases and step back into a doorway to let her pass. A cluster of three more people came along behind her, and so they waited in the doorway for the rest to pass, too.
Leodora asked Diverus, “Was the bowl on Vijnagar as decrepit as this before your transformation?”
Diverus peered at it ahead. “It might have been. The beam was crumbling and the walls of it had fallen away like that one. On Vijnagar, the bowl had broken tiles in the bottom, you couldn’t even tell what the mosaic had been. I can’t see from here if this one’s like that, too.”
“Would you dare me to go out on one?” she teased.
He turned to face her. “You’ve never stood in a Dragon Bowl?”
She shook her head. “I’ve meant to. The first spans, Soter argued it was too dangerous. Too public. Someone might notice, and if my uncle came along looking for us, they would tell him. Now that I think on it, that makes almost no sense. Soter’s so protective, even when there’s no reason. I don’t know why. Jax is out in the public and I’m to stay hidden from sight. Even now, you’ll notice, and there’s no chance Gousier’s hunting us here.”
“I thought you said your uncle was dead.”
“I said he might be. I don’t know for certain.” She leaned around him. “As for the beams, Soter wouldn’t allow me near one. I suppose I started climbing the towers to defy him without stepping out on a beam. Your story is the closest I’ve gotten to one.”
The impeding pedestrians had walked on, and the sea-lane was now empty. Soter had moved far ahead. Diverus slid the strap over his shoulder and hefted the undaya case. “Well,” he said, “I think I wouldn’t dare you. Unless it was the only way to get you on one.” He gave her a puckish smile and walked off clumsily with his burden.
They shortly reached the opening onto the beam, and their regard traced the curve of its route that, tentacle-like, nearly surrounded the hexagonal bowl at the end. Not a single person sat or stood anywhere on it. The Dragon Bowl was likewise empty. This was a span where the inhabitants had long since stopped believing in the capricious gods. Diverus and Leodora paused and stepped back as two more people emerged from an intersecting lane and came toward him. They looked at them sidelong as they passed, but neither so much as glanced toward the Dragon Bowl.
Up the lane Soter came to a point where everything looked like the square where the trio had first arrived. The building beside his shoulder, the nearest one, was a ruin. Half the quarrels in its windows were missing. There were one or two places where bits of glossy façade remained, but most of the front of the house revealed an underlying structure of irregular stones and gray, gritty powder. He touched one stone and it crumbled in his fingers. Above, the last story and the roof looked to have collapsed into the building. It was like a house that had been consumed by an attic fire, except that no traces of fire remained, and the rest of the houses as far down the lane as he could see shared its state of decay. Seabirds appeared to have nested in the upper reaches of some of them. The surface of the lane stretching ahead comprised nothing but flinders. The sea rail had disappeared, too, reduced to stubs where the posts had been, making the route more precarious.
Under his breath, Soter said one word: “Tophet.”
He edged forward cautiously, and had only gone a few steps before Diverus caught up with him. Diverus set down his case and scanned the damage much as Soter had. Then he stepped out and peered over the side at the ocean below. “It’s a ruin down there, too,” he said. “Looks like pieces of the houses fell off. There must have been a quay once, but it’s just rocks now. What happened here?”
Soter set down the instruments again. He shook his head at first, but then said, “I wager that, if you followed this line of damage street by street all the way back, it makes a straight