Port Tinarana was like an old, decaying tart, her face lined with a myriad of streets and alleys, inexpertly caked with a crude makeup of overhanging buildings. The alleyways seemed to grow narrower and more choked in filth with the passing of each year. Judging by the ankle-deep slush, this dead end hadn't had the garbage cleared in the last three hundred of those years. And in a few minutes his body would become yet another once-human part of it. He shrank back against the cold, oozing stones of the overhanging wall. The night haze of fog and coal smoke streamered in twisted eddies about the ragged boys. They were vague, almost ethereal, except for the silver-pale lines of low held knives, moving in slow arcs as they closed in.
"Gonna cut you, dink."
"Yeah! Gonna spill your guts, cull. You bin workin' our turf."
Keilin knew there was no use in pleading. They weren't going to listen. They were all bigger than he was, used to using those knives. He touched the stone of his pendant, pressing it into his thin chest. It was always cool, but now it seemed almost burning cold against his skin. His pale eyes darted, trying to assess his best chance. Oh God, for some kind of break . . . They came closer. . . .
"What've you got there, gutter rats?" The voice was coarse, adult and slightly slurred with alcohol.
The advance of the ragged gang stopped. "Piss off, guardsman, if you want to stay healthy." The rat pack's leader was wary, but defiant.
"Huh! Hear that mates! The rats are worried 'bout my health!"
Another rough voice responded. "Soon have their own to worry about, heh heh!" There was the steely rasp of a sword being drawn.
Keilin knew this was no rescue for him. The city guardsmen protected those who paid their dues. To this brethren of thugs he was as much of a louse on the city's underbelly as his attackers were. The dead end the gang had caught him in had now become their trap, too.
"Wait a minute, Sill. Let's see what they've got first. We might even want it instead of a rat." There was a nasal quality to the voice that failed to overlay the lust. With a sharp metallic click the slide of the dark lantern was pulled back. Light spilled out. It revealed four boys in tattered clothing remnants. They were stunted and malnourished, but visibly between the ages of fifteen and the wispy first traces of beard. Their victim was smaller and younger still.
The light was directed at the victim. "Ooh! Pretty one, isn't he!" The nasal voice thickened. Here, in the deep south, a pale skin, green eyes and red hair were rare, as was the hawksbill nose in the middle of it all. Enough of the light washed back for Keilin to see the holder. His belly crawled. Guard-Captain Kemp. It was widely rumored that Kemp got his kicks from pain . . . and that his young victims ended up dead . . . much later.
"Go on, rats. Get lost. It's your lucky night." As the ragged figures scampered past the guardsmen, Keilin saw the Guard-Captain set the dark lantern down and start fumbling with the buttons on his pants. "Hold him for me, boys. Looks like this one'll fight back." Something in his voice indicated that this would simply add spice.
Keilin struggled vainly against the big hands that held him. He was wild with fear, into the realms of panic, too far gone to feel pain from the sudden bitter cold of the jewel on his chest.
"Holy shit!" The rough hands loosened their grip on his arms. Keilin writhed free, pulling up his trousers. Whatever this was, he was going to run, and he'd not get far with them around his ankles. He heard the scraping sound of swords being drawn. Looking up, he saw just how futile this act was. In the lantern light the bull was huge, filling most of the alley. Living in the gut of the city, Keilin barely knew what the animal was, but hearing the beast's bellow, seeing those long horns lowering, he was sure it was very, very angry.
The city guardsman nearest the beast knew equally little about the temper of an old swamp aurochs. If he'd been from the wide, wild marshes of Vie'en, five hundred leagues to the southeast, where the vast beast had been grazing peacefully in the pale morning a few moments before, the fat one would never have been so stupid. But the nearest thing to this beast he'd ever met was an elderly milch cow. So he waved his sword ineffectually at it, as one might a hazel switch, and shouted, "Go on! Shoo!"
The sweeping horn caught him, sheer weight and power punching it through his rib cage, like a spear through wet tissue paper. His bubbling scream was cut off as he was tossed and flung with bone-smashing force to crack against the wall. He bounced off it, to fall beneath the angry hooves.
The guardsman called Sill grabbed Keilin's arm, and pulled the boy across his body, holding him as a human shield. Such a shield was, of course, meaningless to the three-ton beast that was pawing the rag-doll remnants of the guardsman's former companion.
Then Keilin heard a high-pitched thin whine. He knew what came next. It had happened three times before. The guardsmen didn't appear to be able to hear it . . . or didn't know what it meant. With frantic strength the boy lunged forward and bit his captor's lower bicep with all his might. Sill grunted with pain and jerked the boy away; Keilin desperately threw himself downward. The guard's chest, and a tardy lock of Keilin's hair vaporized. So did half the wall behind them, and the door beyond that.
Keilin didn't wait for them to have a second shot at him. He was off, bolting through the new-made way out of the dead end. His one glance backward showed that the Guard-Captain had made his escape through the same hole. The man seemed to have no intention of following him, though. Kemp was just running in blind panic.
Keilin slipped into a narrow multibranched alley, and waited hidden behind a lip of brickwork. No footsteps followed. After a few minutes of swallowed panting and gradually slowing heartbeat, the boy slipped quietly away in a different direction. Finally, as the sky was beginning to pale, and the first sounds of stirring of the city's dayside began, he dropped over a wall, and then shimmied up a drainpipe. This gave access to a narrow ledge surrounding the building at third-floor level. He edged along the dark line of crumbling bricks, and around the corner to a small window.
It wasn't barred . . . most unusual for Port Tinarana. In fact it only appeared to be closed. A fingernail under the edge of the rusty steel and it opened silently, or should have, after the amount of stolen oil that Keilin had lavished on it. Instead, it opened quietly a little way and then . . . stuck. Keilin was standing on a four-inch-wide ledge, trying to apply outward leverage. He cursed in a whisper, using language no fourteen-year-old ought to know: not just because it was obscene, but because it was obscene in an extinct language. Perhaps as a response, the obdurate window flew open abruptly, nearly tumbling him down for perhaps the twentieth time. He had fallen once, and the memory of the fear in those stretched-out moments was still with him. He was shaking as he pulled himself into the musty darkness.
His eyes adjusted to the dimness as he closed the window behind him. Relief washed through him as he looked at the familiar cracked washstand from his perch on the toilet cistern. This was one of the port's original buildings, and here, unusually, the plumbing still worked. In most public places the fittings had long since been looted, to become nonfunctioning ornaments in some wealthy merchant's house, or perhaps cut and fitted to the normal bucket and seat arrangement. But here . . . this place was largely forgotten. Those who did remember its existence treated it with superstitious awe. This is the fate of libraries in largely illiterate societies.
After a long drink of the slightly rust-flavored water, Keilin slipped out, through the crowded stack-room, and into the little kitchen the librarians used. He knew that he was in trouble, and needed to think of some way out, but for now he let his familiar rituals carry him. Years back Keilin had worked out that the mistake that most thieves made was to try and attack the food chain at too high a level. If you're hungry, don't try to steal meat pies, or gold for meat pies. Those things are well guarded, and thieves are hunted down. The port grain silos however . . . well, they were poorly defended against rats and pigeons, and easily accessible to a nimble boy. The porridge he made from the mortar-crushed wheat wasn't nearly as appetizing as a meat pie, but Keilin, unlike most of his peers, wasn't malnourished. Also, the grain made good bait for the pigeons he trapped on the roof. Keilin looked down at the porridge and sighed. If he'd not been tempted into trying for peppers, he wouldn't have been spotted and chased into that alley.
He cleaned up meticulously. Everything was left in its exact place. He'd been using the kitchen for three years now without its legitimate owners being any the wiser. By the time they got in, the little alcohol stove would be cold, and any smells lost in the odor of yesterday's curries. He sometimes stole a little of these too . . . but very circumspectly. He went to wash, a ritual he'd taken up when the head librarian had smelt Keilin's far-from-delicate alley bouquet, and had spent the next hour zealously hunting dead rats around his hideout. Keilin had spent the time silently between fear and chagrin. There were no rats in the library, now. But they'd been his main source of food when he'd first taken shelter there.
His mind kept turning back to the previous night. For now, the "Die Hards," the street gang who had caught him first, thought he was dead. But, by tonight, the word would be out. Anyone who denied that the city watch had links with the gangs was just naive. So . . . what passed for the law—the gangs and the watch—would be out to kill him. He didn't know what story the Guard-Captain had come up with to explain his men's sudden demise, but he was willing to bet the truth hadn't figured in it. The man wasn't going to rest easy until Keilin was dead. As for the other gangs . . . they would go along. To keep the peace, any of them that caught him would hand him over to the Die Hards. But the worst was that the whining killers had found him again. He sat down with the book he was currently reading and tried to lose himself in it. Keilin knew that being able to read was all that set him apart from the other scavenging children of the city . . . but this time he couldn't see how it could help him. Gradually the book swallowed him.
He slipped out of his reading-induced trance with a start. Surely it wasn't opening time already? Yes. Those were definitely footsteps on the staircase. Damn. No time for a last visit to the toilet. He'd just have to use the bloody jar again. Moving swiftly but quietly, he went across to the inverted V of an old-fashioned bookstand, which stood against the far wall. In the old days he'd had to lift it, but since then he'd managed to unscrew one of the boards, under the lowest shelf. It had taken him many nights of effort, but it was worth the extra speed it lent to getting into his rat hole. He slipped through the gap with some effort, and pulled the waiting board back into place, just as the two elderly and slightly out of breath librarians reached the top floor. He heard them clatter in the kitchen, as he settled into his nest.
He felt his scraped ribs. He was going to have to do something about that plank. Growing was creating all sorts of problems. Then, as he listened to the librarians discussing the street news, he realized he wasn't going to have to worry about the plank after all.
". . . a black magician!"
"There's no such thing, as you well know, Khabo! Only the ignorant lower classes believe in magic."
"Think what you like, Stannel. Gemme's cousin Shanda saw the dead aurochs herself. Killed seven people it did, before they speared it to death."
"Amazing! Shanda got off her back for long enough to see something outside of her own bedroom! I thought she was far too busy for that." Despite the catty comment Stannel was plainly impressed.
"She's thirty years younger than you, old man. If she'd accepted you, she'd have run off with some sailor by now."
"True. Now, instead, the sailors can come to her. So you say they're offering a reward for this so-called magician?"
"Yes! The Patrician himself has put up five hundred . . . in gold! The brave Guard-Captain who stopped the magician is leading the house-to-house search in person. The boy's to be killed on sight, before he can use his black powers!"
Forgetting his supposed disbelief in magic, Stannel interjected, "I thought they had to light black candles, draw pentacles and . . . you know . . . sacrifice babies and things to do their spells."
"Huh! This one did all that years ago! The Guard-Captain said that the magician was raping a baby girl when they caught him!"
"No! Monster! I hope they're going to make him die slowly."
"It's not safe, I tell you! He blasted his way though six buildings and a man to escape. His kind you kill the minute you see them, preferably before he sees you."
"Speak for yourself! If I see him, I'm going to run like hell. What's he look like?"
With a sinking heart Keilin listened to a surprisingly accurate description of himself. Why the hell couldn't Kemp have lied about that too?
"What I don't understand is how come he didn't just blast that Guard-Captain to ash too?"
"Guard-Captain Kemp's a deeply religious man. He believes God protected him against the bolts of the evil and unholy. . . ." The conversation faded off down the stairwell.
Keilin sat there in silence, hands over his face. Holy mother . . . the gangs were after him, the townspeople'd kill him on sight, Kemp was hunting house to house for him, and the whiners . . . and a reward from the Patrician. That one puzzled him though. The citizens of Port T. knew that that bastard never parted with the gold he extracted with infinite care from all his subjects, even the whores, beggars and thieves. And, by all reports, what happened in the cellars beneath the Patrician's palace would make the librarians' idea of black magic look like a Sunday School outing.
There were a few people out there who knew Keilin, but he'd never trusted anyone enough to reveal his hideout to them. He was safe enough here, but if he ventured out . . . well, there were always eyes in the alleys. Sooner or later someone would see him, and then the hunt would be on. He'd never make it back. In the old town alone there were at least a thousand men, and women too, for that matter, who'd slit his throat for a single gold piece, never mind five hundred.
He tried to concentrate on his book again, holding it up to the light coming through the holes he'd made. It was no use. He couldn't divert his mind from Kemp's plot. Hatred twisted at his gut. He'd never killed anyone before, but if he could get that man alone somewhere . . . Still, it was no use dreaming. He must get out, survive, then, one day he could come back and do a little quiet and nasty repayment.
Keilin knew little of the world outside the walls of the port. He'd come here, a fugitive from another dimly remembered city, when he was about seven. He remembered sneaking off the ship in the pale dawn, with his mother. He remembered watching, puzzled and uncomfortable, as his mother had "paid" the bosun for smuggling them off the ship. He remembered in the grim years that followed, as her addiction grew deeper, how his discomfort and resentment had given way to resignation and then acceptance. He stretched his mind back further to misty memories of the city they'd lived in before reaching Port Tinarana. He could remember the sergeant of the Caravan Guards, but not his face.
The boy shuddered. His mind wouldn't let him remember the face. That had been the first time he'd heard the whining sounds. The caravaneer had been a kindly man when he was sober. He'd had Keilin's mother teach the boy to read, and been proud of his stepson's cleverness. He'd started to teach him to use a sword. He'd tried to teach Keilin to swim, and kept Keilin spellbound by telling him tales of far-off places. If only Keilin could remember more of them, but most of it was lost in the vagueness of early childhood . . . But he could remember clearly how the man had changed into a vicious brute when he was drunk.
He'd beaten Keilin's mother . . . slapped her about, humiliated her, called her a whore and far worse. Well, she'd had little option once he'd died, but back then it had been untrue. Keilin hadn't even known what it meant then. The man had beaten Keilin, too. That had been bearable. It was when he'd tried to take Keilin's pendant that it had all happened. Firstly, his mother had flown to Keilin's aid, screaming like a fishwife, beating ineffectually at the big man. And Keilin remembered his own anger and fear, and the coldness of the amulet. It was his! It was all he had of his father. His real father. Nobody, but nobody, would take it from him. He'd clung to the dark jewel with all his strength. His stepfather could have jewels, other jewels, not his! He remembered how the flying tray of baubles had appeared out of nowhere. He remembered crawling away, and the eerie whine. He hadn't been scared of it, back then. It had just seemed strange.
Then he'd been knocked sideways by the drunken man clumsily and greedily sprawling after the stones. And the blast of purple fire meant for Keilin had blown away his stepfather's face. He'd run as fast as his little legs could carry him, squalling in terror. When he came cautiously back, his mother hastily gathered him up, with some of the stones, and fled to buy passage for them on an outbound freighter. She would never tell him just what she'd seen that had frightened her into this headlong flight. It never occurred to her that not knowing could be worse.
He felt at the jewel in the amulet. It was cold and oily feeling as always. His inheritance . . . along with two books. The one with the bright pictures which his mother had begged off a drunken highborn trick. Tales of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. He'd loved that book. The other, Geophysical Survey of Planet IV, had been an incomprehensible thing of lists and strange words. He'd been taught to read from those two books. Before he'd found the library they'd been the only books he'd ever seen. He'd read both of them many times. The latter book had words his mother had said even his great-grandfather had not understood. But he'd been made to read them all, even the strange, burnt-edged pages glued into the back of Geophysical Survey—"Log of the Starship Morningstar." On the last page someone had scrawled:
"Even if everything else is lost, perhaps this will survive."
Suddenly the hideout seemed too small. He needed air, and space around himself, so that he could see them coming. On the lower floors they'd bricked up the chimney. Here on the top floor they'd just pushed the old-fashioned bookstand against it. He'd noticed it when he'd lifted the bookstand to crawl under it, and realized that it gave the hideout its most essential feature—a bolt hole.
He'd loosened the back planks ages ago, but it had taken him a while to brave the narrow, dark shaft. He'd been tempted to use it as a latrine, but instead had decided that digging out the bottom could give him access to the drains . . . his digging hadn't made much progress yet. He'd broken through into the rubble-filled foundations. There was a weary lot of broken bricks, rocks and concrete fragments to shift before he could get anywhere.
Upwards, however, had proved easier. There had been that tiny circle of sky to aim towards. He'd knocked the chimney pot off one stormy night, and come out into the sheeting rain onto the steep tiled roof.
The roof had a low balustrade. The library was one of the tallest buildings in the city, but, naturally, not as tall as the Patrician's palace. That many-turreted monstrosity hung over the harbor, like some tax-gathering vulture. However, on the landward side of the roof it couldn't even be seen. Instead, there was a view out across the desert, with the thin green line of the Tinarana River and the cultivated lands beside it stretching away to the distant, dusty hinterland. Since Keilin had cut away some of the rotting brick of the chimney below the level of the balustrade, and replaced it with a stolen sheet of tin, he came up here often. Sometimes he came to trap pigeons . . . and sometimes just to gaze out across the vast emptiness, and pretend that he was lord of all he surveyed.
After the sea wind had howled for days, and blown away the miasma of coal and dung smoke from the city hearthfires, he could make out the distant purple mountains. He thought again about the colored illustration that painted his mental picture of mountains. Tall trees around a rushing stream that wove through mossy rocks. Huh! Half of the boys in the city didn't even know there was anything beyond the desert. He'd seen the mountains on a map long before he'd come up here . . . That was it! Maps. They'd be watching the harbor. They'd watch the coast road, and the caravan trail. Perhaps there could be another way?
To Keilin the sea was no place of romance. It was symbolized by the garbage tide he and other scavengers picked at along the littered shore opposite the quays. He had fantasies about those mountains however . . . all those trees, and running water . . . surely that was the place where his dreams could come true? He looked out into the heat haze. He couldn't see the mountains today, but that was where he was going. This afternoon, as soon as the library closed, he'd start looking for a map to get him there. He slipped back down the chimney and into sleep, secure in his optimism.
He got busy as soon as the doors below clicked shut. Gradually the optimism was eaten away as he realized that the atlases were at least three hundred years out of date. The surveyors hadn't been aware that the planet had millennia-long alternating pluvial and dry cycles. The wet cycle had ended nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. The maps also held little in the way of guidance for a boy who would have to travel on foot. He sat peering at an array of them in anger and frustration. Why, they were all rubbish! They showed two rivers crossing the desert, the Tinarana, and the Syrah. The Syrah River was supposed to come out a few miles south of the city. But he'd stared out toward the mountains often enough to know there was no green line into the yellow-brown there, just a dusty valley. And this map showing vegetation types indicated the desert as "dry savannah." He'd had to look the word up. Bloody drivel! Everyone knew that ten miles inland there was only sand and more sand.
He'd have to chance it up the Tinarana. But the caravans only went up to the Thunder Gorge, some hundred and fifty miles away. Above this the river had cut so deeply into the rock of the high plateau that farming with its water was no longer possible. Funny, the maps all showed that gorge.
Should he leave tonight? Procrastination, fueled by fear of the unknown, held him. Tomorrow night would be better. He hated the thought of leaving his refuge. Surely the search would be less intense the longer he waited? And he still had food. He could afford to wait a while.
If he'd gone up to the roof and seen the files of torches as the soldiers moved slowly from house to house, he might have been less tempted to stay. The search was not stopping for nightfall. The curfew might be hurting the Patrician's nightly cut from the dock whores, but it was being strictly enforced. The great chain was raised across the channel. The ranged mangonels were readied. Nothing would leave by sea, and the city gates were closed siege-tight.
Testosterone can cause immense problems. Keilin had snuggled down in the early morning cool, enjoying the security of his lair for the last time. Sleep had claimed him rapidly. Actual sex was outside Keilin's experience, but from his observation of his mother's latter profession he knew a great deal about it. He'd made some detailed studies of the library's dusty elderly medical textbooks, studying the much thumbed sections of otherwise pristine texts with care. But arousal made the pendant stone start to grow colder, and even touching himself made the terrible chill bite at his skin. Fear had always been enough to stop him going any further. But of late his dreams had been getting more and more vivid. Normally the cold jewel on his chest woke him abruptly.
A fold of his ragged shirt betrayed him. It isolated the jewel from contact with his skin and allowed the dream to develop in glorious, if slightly confused, technicolor. It was the instinctive thrusting movements at the moment of release that shook the jewel loose from its cocoon of cloth. It touched his skin, and the cold became suddenly intense. It felt as if it was burning into him. He screamed.
Wakefulness was instantly with him. He clapped his hand to his mouth. Had anyone below heard him? Peering fearfully through the tiny hole he had drilled with a rusty nail, he realized that it didn't matter if they had heard his scream. Half the city must know exactly where he was now.
The central keep of the Patrician's palace was a hollow tower, a hundred feet tall. Girdling it was a crenellated balcony, constantly guarded. The only way onto its roof was in a roped basket pulled up the center of the tower. Heavy caskets went up, and precious little ever came down. Perched like a single stalk of wheat stubble on the keep's roof was the treasury. Or used to be. Now the dream of every thief in Port Tinarana was bursting through the roof of the library. No one would come up the stairway for a while, because a torrent of coins was running down it.
Coins pushed aside the plank and came spilling into Keilin's hideout. Instinctively he grabbed gold wheels from among the brass and copper, and thrust them into his pockets. He was rich! He was rich! He would . . . His mind checked . . . halted. He would be lucky just to be alive in ten minutes' time. A whole sea of money wouldn't help him. If he stayed hiding here they'd find him sooner or later. Perhaps he could still run.
The coins left him no room to get out from under the bookcase, so he lifted it, tipping it over. He ran across the shifting coin floor to the window. Perhaps if he went up to the roof and down the drainpipe . . . His first glance told him that this was a futile hope. It was bright daylight, and people were rushing toward the building. His second, more intent look, made him nearly freeze with horror. Most of the crowd were surging toward the doors of the library. Behind him he could hear the screaming and fighting on the stairs. But what had frightened him was the tableau at the far window.
It was Kemp. A dead lamp-oil seller sprawled on his cart, a sluggish stream of blood still oozing from his back. The Guard-Captain was pouring yet another amphora of glistening yellow lamp oil in through the broken window. Keilin stepped back. He could perhaps mingle with the money-crazed hoard on the stair and escape. At the moment he doubted if they'd notice him if he were green, ten feet tall, with horns on his head. He had to get out before Kemp set fire to the place.
Then his eye was caught by something among the coins and scattered jewels. It was enough to halt him, midflight. For a moment Keilin thought it was his own, and clutched at the jewel around his neck. His pendant was still there . . . was this jewel the same? No, not quite. It was the same oily black, with the myriad of shifting colors seemingly within it, but it was smaller, and set on a broad golden ring instead. He hastily stooped and picked it up. And suddenly he heard the high-pitched whine again. It came from the roof. A section of masonry fell in a shower of purple sparks, and a platelike craft dropped through after it. Keilin did not wait to see the hooded passengers. He dived for the shelter of the chimney, a moment before the searing purple blast.
He was falling face-first down the chimney, the newly found jewel still crushed tight in his fist, as cold as his neck amulet had ever been. He didn't see the suddenly materialized marble tombstone that felled the hooded assassins. From their oddly crumpled bodies seeped a puddle of greenish ichor, disappearing into the coins. But he did hear the terrified scream of "FIRE!"
Keilin's scraping, bruising fall was stopped by the first bend in the flue. Disoriented, shaking and frightened, he simply lay still for a few moments. Even surrounded by bricks he could hear the hungry crackling roar of the flames as they ate at the dry paper of thousands upon thousands of books. And above the fire sound there was the thin screaming of humans.
If he went down . . . could he hide under the floor? He could wait until it burnt out, until nightfall. They'd surely think he was dead, and then he could escape. Keilin managed to turn himself the right way up, and began to descend. He reached the small open area underneath the lowest fireplace and curled there miserably, beginning to feel the pain of his rough passage. The fire roared above, and it was growing hotter, harder to breathe. The only relief was the stream of cold, fetid air that poured in on one side of him.
Panic started to rise in him, as the sweat began to prickle at his grazes and cuts. He couldn't stay here. He might as well go up. If it wasn't for the cold air streaming in, he'd have cooked already. Cold air . . . Logic struggled with the fear. It must be coming from somewhere, drawn in to feed the inferno above. If he could follow it, it might lead him out. The rubble lay in the way. If the truth be told, he'd never tried too hard to move it. He had always felt, well, crushed, down here in the blackness. But now he had the need, a dire and desperate need. He put the newfound ring into the thieves' pouch on his ankle, and began pulling at broken blocks and scraps of concrete, shoving them aside with frantic strength, pushing them into the small hollow he'd occupied.
Now that he'd got going he found it wasn't so bad. He could wriggle along quite effectively. In fact the space was growing bigger. Why, he'd almost be able to crawl soon. He followed the airflow. It was cool, damp, and it stank. The city's ancient sewage system was largely unused now. Most of it had long since blocked up, and been abandoned. Instead, folk emptied their stinking buckets into the storm drains. The occasional terrible sea storm would flush these, but it was often a long while between storms. Sometimes the drains became clogged, and well-bribed heroes had to go down and shovel them clear.
Keilin shuddered. When he'd been just eight years old, his mother had "volunteered" him. They'd wanted a small one to get through the remaining space. The price had kept her cloudy-headed for a week. The memory of it gave him nightmares still. Rats he could deal with, but the sea of roaches down in that enclosed place had terrified him. Determinedly he stifled the recall flood and concentrated on the task ahead.
He came to the point where the air rushed in from the big concrete pipe. A thin pipe from the roof above had once joined it here, but corrosion had long ago eaten away the pipe juncture. It was almost certain that the long-dead builders shouldn't have used that handy storm-drainage pipe for disposing of the library's waste water, but, well, there it had been, temptingly close to the foundations. Surely a hand basin's worth of water wasn't going to make that much difference?
The boy felt at the small hole. Stuck. At this point! In frustration he pounded at the edge of it. The concrete crumbled slightly, and small stones fell to splash into the unpleasant liquids that trickled below. The concrete was centuries old, and the pipe juncture had been cut through the steel reinforcing once hidden inside the concrete. Now, exposed to oxygen and often wet, rust had slowly eaten at the steel and the expanding rust had cracked the concrete along the reinforcing lines.
Pounding with a broken slab of tiling, he broke a larger opening. It was still not very wide, but from years of burglary, Keilin knew that where his head and one arm could go, his body could follow. He squirmed through, down into the fetid trickle.
On hands and knees he crawled to where the pipe joined a larger canal. He dared not stop down here in the noisome darkness. The roaches presumed that meat that didn't move was dinner. Ahead he saw light. Distant daylight shone down in a barred pattern through a street grating. Above was the shaft that could take him out of here. He climbed the rusty staples towards it. And stopped. He could hear voices.
He couldn't go up. Not while there was someone out there. But here in the light, the roaches were wary. He hung waiting, waiting for the speakers to move. One voice was high-pitched and lisping. He remembered being herded along to listen to it, just before he ran away from his mother. Only then the man had sounded arrogant, and almost infinitely powerful. Now the voice was wooden, and afraid. ". . . The magicianth dead, I tell you. Nothing could live through that fire!"
The reply was also high-pitched but too full of clicking sibilants to make sense to him, but it was enough to make Keilin begin to retreat.
The Patrician spoke again. His girlish lisping voice, usually so haughty, actually trembled. "I have ordered treble guardth on the wallth and fourfold on the gateth. Thereth patrolth on the coatht roadth. The caravanth have been thtopped. No thips will thail. You can't put your," he hesitated, "men on the gateth. The people would get to hear of it and . . . they'd revolt. I couldn't thtop them. They fear you more than death itthelf!"
Keilin didn't wait for the reply. With infinite care he began to lower himself back down into the dark. He knew now why the Patrician had offered a reward for his capture. Fifteen years ago Port Tinarana had been flooded with a tide of terrified refugees from across the shallow sea. They were fleeing the Morkth and their zombielike troops. These refugee-settlers still made up the bulk of the Port's underclass. Mothers used tales of these Morkth to frighten their children into good behavior. Yet one of these awful creatures plainly had the city's overlord as its inferior partner. It was plain that the Morkth hunted him too.
Why? Why him? Vague fantasies, fuelled by his favorite books, of him being the lost true heir to some great kingdom flitted briefly through his head as he followed the filth stream into the dark. Regretfully he dismissed them. He knew perfectly well who his mother was, and who his father had been. Yes, they'd both claimed to be of Cru blood, but up north, according to his mother, every man and his damned donkey claimed that. Resolutely he put the thoughts away from him and followed the flow of liquid and semisolid dreck. Eventually it had to come out somewhere.