The southern gate opened at the ninth hour of the sixth day, and the capital began to empty.
The first through the gate were the people whose proximity to the gate and whose awareness of the breach's implications had combined to produce the specific urgency that flight required: the merchants of the southern market district whose shops' inventory was portable and whose family members' locations were known and whose calculation of the capital's remaining defensibility had produced the answer that the calculation always produced when the answer was obvious.
The merchants loaded their carts with the goods that the carts' capacity allowed, left the goods that the carts' capacity did not allow, and drove through the southern gate with the specific haste of men whose professional instinct for calculating risk had been the instinct that made them successful merchants and that now made them successful refugees.
