Chapter 10: Marrowgate
He traveled on, the landscape yawning into a three-day monotony of freezing wind, shallow gullies, and the black veins of marshland that grew fatter as he approached the river.
The banks had long since collapsed, taking half the ancient causeway with them, so that his crossing was less a march than a series of leaps from stone to stone, with a dozen chances to drown or snap an ankle along the way.
The first night, he slept beneath the upturned hull of a wrecked river skiff, gnawed by mites and the memory of a lullaby that might have been his own.
On the second, he found a half-abandoned shrine, its walls scorched with the sigils of every faith that had ever tried and failed to claim the hinterlands.
He left a coin for the dead, though he doubted any would bother to collect.
By the time the towers of Marrowgate came into view, Apollo was half-starved and wholly filth, and more than once had to pause and spit blood into the mud just to keep moving.
The city was a contradiction: a ring of pale, ossified ramparts rising out of the salt marsh, its flanks swaddled in the blue haze of woodsmoke and the stink of boiling tallow.
The gate itself arched, ribbed in bone-white stone, stood open to the morning, guarded only by two children in armor so mis-sized and patched that it looked like a carnival mockery of war.
He passed through the gate in silence. Neither child challenged him. The streets within were a warren of alleys, each clogged with refuse and the industry of the desperate.
Vendors hawked roots and scrap, mending women squatted in the gutters with their baskets of ragwork.
Above, the tenements leaned together like drunks, their windows stitched with the yellow light of crowded lives.