The City (59 page)

Now he was hurrying through unknown corridors expecting the
clang of the alarm at any moment. He had no idea where the emperor was, or how big the Keep was, or indeed if anyone else lived in there.

If I were an emperor, where would I be?
he thought.

Upstairs, of course. No emperor would live in the depths of the palace, near the drains and sewers and rising flood water. So each time Riis had a choice he went up. Yet he seldom
had
the choice – the Keep seemed to be leading him ever downward, corridors shelving away steeply, leading to blind alleys and more darkly descending steps. After an hour or so he guessed he was lower than where he started.

Sliding through double doors, unguarded, he came to a great empty chamber lit by many torches but still cold and dank. It was a round room, high and deep. A wide staircase travelled round the curved wall, spiralling down to the distant floor. He entered at the top, looked down and saw the only other way out was far below. A chilly miasma seemed to cling to the distant floor. He shook his head. He had no wish to go down there. He left again quietly, retracing his steps.

He had expected to dodge servants and soldiers, as he had when he shadowed Amita during her night walks. But in the Keep there was no one, and the only sound was his traitor heart and the sigh of his breath on the still air. He stopped often, alert for movement. After a while he found himself listening hopefully for sign of life.

He was in a narrow, dank corridor, smelling of tainted meat and stagnant water. This is a place of the dead, he thought, and he realized he was terrified. Battling the urge to flee, he unsheathed his sword. The rasp of metal cheered him a little, and the firm feel of the leather grip in his palm.

Then he heard a sound, a sliding sound, soft and deliberate. It was coming from further down the corridor, where darkness pooled between torches.

Riis realized he was holding his breath, and he let it out silently, then stepped forward, sword raised.

In the gloom he could make out a still shape. With relief he saw it was a gulon. He took a deep breath and felt his chest ease. Just a gulon. Standing in his way. He had seen them in the streets of the City from time to time. This was a big one, though, far bigger than any he had seen before, its snout almost up to his shoulder. Round its neck it wore a wide gold collar like a pampered lapdog.

It gazed at him with its eerily human eyes, and its long lashes seemed to tremble in the damp air. It made no move.

‘Shoo!’ he said, a bubble of laughter rising to his lips. He raised his sword and stepped forward, though he had no intention of harming the beast. ‘Out of the way, you dumb animal.’

It stood its ground, unmoved by his bluster. Riis decided to push past it, then wondered if it would bite him. Do gulons have teeth, he asked himself? Perhaps it would be simpler to just kill the thing. But he was reluctant, as it stood there regarding him with its darkly human eyes.

It opened its mouth and made a small sound like a baby’s cry. Its breath carried the stench of sewers. Riis shuddered. He lowered his blade, intending to barge past it. He stepped to one side and simultaneously it stepped that way too. Riis grinned. So you want to play, he thought.

Then, as if unleashed, the gulon lunged forward with unearthly speed and closed its jaws round his throat.

In the caverns far beneath the Keep those other creatures that lived and died in the Halls, the rats, paused briefly in their perpetual search for food to watch the invading army pass by. It was making slow progress. Though the going was now flatter and firmer, they were still ankle-deep in slippery mud, and the soldiers watched their step, mindful of the moving river of sludge to their right. The stench was appalling and some of those whose stomachs had happily endured the choppy seas and who had laughed at their weaker colleagues now suffered in turn, vomiting regularly beside the path as they marched. They all carried plenty of water, for Indaro had made them aware that dehydration could be a problem by the time they reached their destination.

She was trudging along at the back of the group when there was a sudden hush and the army faltered to a halt. Like the rest of them, she gazed ahead and her heart sank.

The river curved towards the south here, and a mountainous pile of debris had built up on the outer side of the curve at some time when the flow was at its highest. It was impossible to say how long it had been like that – an hour, a year. It was completely impassable.

Indaro looked across to the other side of the river, now unreachable,
where the path was clear and flat. We should have gone that way, she thought.

Gil cleared his throat. ‘We cannot go on and we cannot cross the river,’ he said tiredly. ‘Therefore we go back the way we have come.’

‘Then go where, sir?’ a Petrassi soldier asked.

‘Elija?’ Gil turned to the boy.

‘There are other paths, plenty of them,’ Elija answered. ‘We thought this the best way but we were wrong. They shift with every rainstorm. We will have to try another way.’

‘We guessed this would happen,’ Indaro added, trying to sound positive, as if it were part of the plan. ‘That is why we gave ourselves so much time.’

One by one the invaders turned and started back the way they had come. ‘Be careful,’ Gil ordered. ‘Watch your feet.’ There was a constant drip and drizzle of water on their heads from the unseen roof above them, and the churned mud underfoot was doubly treacherous going back. Gil knew there was always a temptation to hurry when retracing your steps, a need to chase time, and they could ill afford to lose warriors before the battle even began.

There
was
still plenty of time. Yet Indaro was discouraged by the setback. She missed Doon, for her friend had been a constant in battle, and without her Indaro’s left side felt strangely vulnerable, unarmoured. When they left Old Mountain they had ridden first to the high plain where Fell had left Doon’s body. Together they had buried her in the hard ground, facing the sunrise, while Gil and his men watched. Indaro had spoken the familiar words, commending Doon to the gods of ice and fire and privately, in her heart, to Aduara, goddess of the blood of women, whose worship they shared. As she walked through the sewers Indaro daydreamed that one day, when the war was over, she would ride, perhaps with Fell at her side, to the small farm in the southlands where Doon’s mother might yet live, and tell her of the heroism of her daughter and the courage with which she gave her life for the City. She felt tears welling and she wiped her face.

She dropped back to speak to Stalker. The extra leagues they were walking would be a torture to him. She fell in beside him, noting he had taken out the stick he carried in his pack and was using it to support his right leg.

‘We will be stopping soon,’ she told him, guessing. ‘I expect Gil
will call a halt when we have returned to where we started.’

‘What do you want, woman?’ he replied irritably, glaring at the ground. ‘To send me back in the boats? Well, I’ll not go. I’d rather die in this arsehole of the City than be sent to safety like … a woman.’

She grinned at him and eventually he smiled back, despite his anger, when he realized what he’d said.

‘I was going to say,’ she told him, ‘that I’ll strap your ankle again if you think it’d help.’

‘No, thank you,’ he replied curtly. ‘I’ll get Garret to do it. You’ve got all the mothering skills of a wolf monkey.’ She waited, brows raised. ‘They eat their young when the going gets hard.’

Indaro smiled. ‘Only the smallest and sweetest,’ she said.

They marched on companionably for a while. Indaro found she had become absurdly fond of the northlander, but she knew it might be as Fell said – he would have to be left in the lightless sewers if the worst came to the worst. For some reason she thought then of Broglanh, whose part in all this she didn’t entirely understand, and she yearned for his easy confidence, his unquenchable good humour. Would even Broglanh lose his good spirits in the endless blackness of the Halls?

When finally they returned to the rotten bridge, and could see the distant daylight outside again, Gil called a halt and they rested on an outcrop of rock. The soldiers drank from their water skins and kicked the sticky mud off their boots. Gil called Indaro and Elija to him.

‘Which way now?’ he asked.

Elija had brought the plans from his pack and was wrestling the large, flimsy sheets out of their waterproof packing.

‘Here!’ he said, pressing his finger on the paper. ‘This is another way – it leads to the Fallowly Dike, which goes under the palace.’

‘But this shows it goes underwater,’ Gil said, frowning.

‘We could take it as far as we can – until we reach the flooding – then strike off to higher ground.’

‘Indaro?’

Indaro looked at the map. ‘It is better to go the way we are uncertain about than to follow a path we already know is flooded,’ she argued. ‘The Fallowly Dike is high, only just under the surface, high above all the floods. And it’s been raining outside, remember, raining for
three days now. We need to take the highest way to get there. I don’t think this is it.’

Gil looked at the boy. ‘Elija?’

He looked conflicted. ‘There are many ways to the dike, according to the plans. That way is very narrow,’ he said. ‘A narrow way is more likely to be flooded than a wide one. This way,’ decisively he tapped again on a line on the map, ‘I’m sure I remember it.’

Indaro was racked with uncertainty. She only had Elija’s word that he knew a path through the sewers, and he was seeming more unreliable by the moment. She took another long look at the map, trying to fix in her head the way to the Fallowly Dike. Her sense of direction had never yet played her false. She knew the dike was to the north-east of them, and if they kept on roughly in that direction they could not avoid striking it. She nodded reluctantly.

The way very quickly became grim, the tunnels narrow and steep. Gil still led the way, while Elija and his guards stayed in the middle of the army, and Indaro and Stalker brought up the rear. Water ran constantly by them, mostly fresh, Indaro noted, often half filling the tunnels they struggled through. The water was icy and they were soaked and freezing. The lanterns kept going out and were only relit with difficulty. Indaro found herself wishing for the reassurance of a flickering torch.

At the back of the slow-moving army Indaro and Stalker had long waits, sometimes in awkward places, while the rest of the soldiers ahead of them negotiated one obstacle after another. Word was sent down the line each time, but it was frustrating to wait in the drenching water, sometimes, it seemed, for an hour or more, while two hundred men made their way through a tiny crack in a tunnel wall or up a steep vertical drain. In her previous life underground, Indaro had mostly kept to the well-worn paths through the high Halls, walking with torch aloft and one hand on her sword, watching the rats and the Dwellers scurry fearfully out of her way. She had never had to endure this, burrowing like a mole in the semi-dark, a blind mole in a waterlogged tunnel, with the great weight of the City bearing down on them.

She knew Stalker was finding it much harder than she, for he was not agile, and his broad shoulders barely fit into some of the narrow crevices they had to climb through. Each time they came to a new opening she measured it with her eyes, wondering if he
would make it this time, or whether she would have to leave him in the dark.

At last, when Indaro was starting to believe she could tolerate no more, she squeezed through a long narrow tunnel and came out into an open space with a torrent of water running through it. She could feel by the air pressure that they were in a high, wide tunnel, and Indaro guessed it was the Fallowly Dike. All the soldiers were sitting resting on the sides of the dike, waiting for them patiently, and a ragged cheer went up as Stalker struggled out last.

Gil nodded a greeting to Indaro, then raised his voice above the roar of water. ‘We have made good time now. We will all eat and spend two hours resting, then move on. The way should be easier from here.’

Elija wandered over to sit with Indaro, and greeted Stalker with a shy smile.

‘Is this where you expected to be?’ asked Stalker.

Elija frowned. ‘The maps don’t show these narrow cracks and drains we’ve been through. But I think we’re in the Fallowly Dike, so we’re going in the right direction.’

Indaro offered, ‘But I find it strange that such a major waterway, if this is it, is at such a low level. It had been raining for days when we entered the caves.’

Elija nodded. ‘All the tunnels should be full. Yet we have not been once stopped by water.’

He pulled out the maps again and spread them in the dim light. ‘If I’m right, then we are here,’ he said, jabbing his finger at the map. Indaro peered at where he was pointing.

‘Then we are near the palace. The dike doesn’t go under the Keep, but very close to it.’

Elija’s face was pale grey, translucent as water. Indaro wondered how a boy so frail could have endured all he had. She felt afraid for him, just as she felt afraid for Stalker. A fine commander I make, she told herself, worrying about my men when my eyes should be on the mission –
my
mission, to rescue Fell and get us away safely. Then Elija and Stalker and Garret, and the hero Shuskara, all of them can find their own way home.

Home. When she thought of the word it no longer conjured visions of her father’s house on the Salient. That was long ago lost to her. Home meant safety, an enduring safety where she would go to sleep
each night without a sword within reach. And it meant Fell. In her heart of hearts she truly believed that she would first bring Fell to safety, then he would bring her safe home, wherever that was.

They set off again feeling a little refreshed, and with lighter hearts, knowing they were close to their goal.

But a while further on Gil called a halt and raised his hand. He listened, cocking his head. The soldiers faltered to a halt and fell silent, trying to hear what Gil was detecting above the roar of the torrent. Indaro thought she could hear it too, a groaning sound like the timbers of a house in a gale. Cautiously Gil moved forward, Indaro at his side with lantern raised.