A Shadow on the Glass (15 page)

Saluting Yggur, Dolodha replied, “She has gone down into the sewer, by the shaft at the end of the Horthy passage.”

“Ha! Then close the shaft.”

“That was done at once.”

“And the water shut off?”

Dolodha hesitated. Yggur noticed that she was watching Idlis out of the corner of her eye. “The mechanism broke. The gate is jammed wide open and we cannot free it.”

“How long ago?”

Again the answer came slowly. “It took an hour to find you.”

Yggur swore. He rounded on Idlis. “Get all the Whelm down there and find her. I make
you
responsible.”

“I am least among the Whelm,” said Idlis, his face showing expression for the first time, and uncertainty. “Vartila would be a better choice. Or Jark-un.”

“I have chosen you,” said Yggur. “Do not come back unless you have her. Even the least of the Whelm should be a match for her. But I want her alive.”

“Earlier you said…”

“Maigraith was
linked
to her. She must be a sensitive. I have a use for her. Hasten. I will follow.”

Karan went back to the lower shaft and sat there with her legs dangling down into the darkness. The air that came up
was sour. Feeling in her pack she came upon a small wrinkled quince. She ate it with slow, nibbling bites, savoring every tart morsel, and though when it was finished she felt just as hungry as before, the simple act of eating gave her courage.

There was no way out save down. Karan turned and went backwards down the shaft. One, two, three rungs, then the fourth broke beneath her feet and she fell into the dark, into deep, still and icy water. The cold so shocked her that she dropped the little globe, the water closed over her head and she thrashed, on the edge of panic, in absolute darkness. Her boots pulled her down as though they were stone, but at last she came to the surface, spluttering and wiping slime out of her eyes. When the water was still again she saw the wavering light of her globe far below.

It was not that deep, as it turned out, but the cold water blurred her vision and the lightglass was embedded in the muck. It took five dives before she held it in her hand again and Karan was exhausted. She was a good swimmer, but now, fully dressed and bearing her little pack, it was all she could do to keep her head out of the water.

Treading water clumsily she held up the globe. Gray sludge ran down one sleeve to her armpit. The light showed an oval tunnel made of carefully laid stone, almost half full of water. The shaft above was a black circle, way beyond her reach. Further along Karan saw a narrow platform. She swam down to it and hauled herself up. Her fingers stank of ancient filth.

Karan leaned back against the stone and closed her eyes. Whatever the consequences, she must rest. She searched for some distraction, and it came at once, the tale that she had heard at the Graduation Telling and often thought about since. The threads of it wove together in her mind as though Llian was standing there, telling it just to her. He was magnificent.
She could remember the least detail of his tale and every movement of his endearing, untidy features as he spoke. She smiled dreamily.

Just then the stone against her back shook and Karan realized that she had rested too long. She stripped down to her knickers, jumped back in and headed in the direction that intuition told her was downstream. At intervals there were brass rings let into the rock and, once, a long way downstream, another shelf—evidently a platform for the use of the sludge muckers. When she could swim no further Karan hauled herself up, rested as long as she could bear the cold, then swam on. But on the third of these rest stops she heard that sound again, unmistakeable now. A distant rattling, as of huge chains, and a reverberating thud like a big door being lowered. Her ears popped suddenly and a tremor passed across the surface of the water.

They were flooding the tunnels, one by one! She jumped up, holding out the globe and straining her eyes against the darkness. And, Karan realized, the outlet of the sewer must be blocked, for the water was still. But there was nowhere else to go, so without further thought she leapt into the water, which already showed a sensible rise from its former level, and swam on.

Her guess had been right, for after a few minutes she came to a grating, half-raised, and beyond that the sewer outlet was closed with a wall of sandstone into which had been let a set of metal doors wide enough for six people to pass through abreast. She could tell by the rustic design and the quality of the workmanship that this was a recent construction. The Aachim would never have built anything so prosaic, so out of harmony with the rest of Fiz Gorgo. Yet the metal was solid and the doors secured with an iron bar bigger than she could lift The bar was clearly meant to keep out intruders, but as she came close she saw that it was fixed
on the inside as well, by spikes driven through holes into the door.

The water rose steadily. She climbed onto the bar and tried to think. If she could prise the spikes out she might be able to open the door. After all, surely it was meant to keep people out, not in. They must need to open it at times to drain away floodwaters or seepage or king tides, otherwise they would have sealed it permanently. How long did she have? Two or three hours at most.

Karan caught the hook of her rope over the top of the door, ran out a long loop and tied it off again at the top. With her feet in the loop and the rope held in the crook of her arm, she could work with both hands. Using her knife she prised away at the first spike, but could not exert enough force for fear of breaking the blade. Was there any other way? She examined the door more carefully. The brackets that held the bar were bolted on; there was no way of removing them. The door hinges were massive brass, corroded but still strong. The frame through which the hinge bolts passed into the rock was rusted, though, and the edges of the sandstone blocks crumbly; had she a strong enough lever she might have prised the hinges off.

Karan went back to the bar, which was two-thirds of the way up the door. The water was already lapping at it. Back at the last platform stone had fallen from the roof. She fetched a piece, climbed back up and thumped the spikes with it, one by one. Now she tried the first again. To her joy it moved slightly and by cautious exertion she managed to free it. It was round, as long as her forearm, tapering to a blunt point, and clearly designed to slide in and out. The next came out easily, and the one after, but the fourth and fifth were as difficult as the first and by the time she had freed the last the water had risen to her waist.

As she worked, her thoughts went home to Gothryme.
Though it was poor and barren, it was all she wanted. How far away it seemed. How had she come to this, alone at the end of a foul sewer and, for all her angry words earlier, her debt still to repay?

The second task was more difficult than the first because now she was working underwater, but finally she levered the bar up over the brackets and it fell away.

Karan leapt up and clung to her rope, expecting the doors to burst outward under the weight of water. They shuddered and groaned. Nothing else happened. She beat her fists against them in frustration. What was holding them now? And looking closely at the part of the door that was still above the water, she saw a line of small rivets where the two doors closed against one another. Rivets! She could do nothing against rivets.

Utter hopelessness overcame her then—all Karan could do was cling to her rope and watch the water rise up the door. Drowning was no worse a way than any other. The water was rising quickly now.

But she was not ready to die, would do anything to postpone the end, even for just an hour. She flopped into the water again, looking back up the tunnel. At intervals there had been inspection traps in the roof, small circular shafts with rungs leading down, but they were all sealed at the top. The last of these was beside the grating, just a few spans away. Karan climbed up into it and clung there, shivering. The sewer was almost full and, now and again, long bubbles of air would be pinched off and go wobbling past, tickling her toes, to disappear up the tunnel.

Then, as she clung there, Karan heard a distant clang. Metal striking against metal! Time passed. The water rose. Another clang, less distant.

The water level began moving up inside her little refuge;
more slowly now, yet visibly rising. Her ears popped again. Only minutes remained. Still her mind would not let go. She needed some kind of pointed tool to lever away that rusted frame.

Clang-bang!
Right above her head. So loud and ringing that she fell off her perch into the water. With a shocking horror she realized that they—the Whelm—were breaking open the inspection shaft. This was the end.

S
uddenly the answer leapt into Karan’s mind-the hook on the end of her rope was made of best Thurkad steel; she could not even bend it. But the air was almost gone now. Karan took several deep panting breaths, filling and emptying her lungs until she felt dizzy and her lips tingled, and stroked underwater to the doors. A little air was trapped in a recess above them. She came up to it slowly, the globe in her hand, and saw that from underneath the trapped air made a perfect mirror, a surface as smooth and reflective as quicksilver.

Gulping the air, she went down again. The doors were distinctly bowed in the middle, along the line of rivets, and when she thumped them with her fist they quivered. Yet they held.

Karan caught her hook on the eroded frame around the uppermost hinge, which had pulled away from the stone under the weight of water, braced her feet against the door
and heaved. The metal tore a little. She strained again, it tore a little more, exposing the gap beneath the hinge. Her lungs were spasming.

She drifted up, took another breath of the precious air and swam down again. Easing her hook beneath the hinge she worked it back and forth, holding the globe between her teeth. One of the split bolts that secured the hinge in the soft sandstone came out in a little puff of grit. She levered over and over. Another bolt came out, then the others pulled free all at once, the hinge sagged away from the wall and the door made a grinding sound. But the other hinges held.

There was a muffled clang above, and Karan saw yellow light through the murky water. The light waxed and waned. Now it was blotted out by a moving shadow. She attacked the second hinge furiously. It was harder than the first, because the frame had warped, but at last these bolts came out as well. Up she went for another breath, down again. The last hinge moved, the door groaned, but the bolts refused to budge.

With the last of her breath Karan swam across to inspect the doors again. The globe was fading but the yellow light was so bright now that she didn’t need it. Her head throbbed, her vision had begun to blur from the cold, but she saw clearly that the door was buckled in the middle. Some of the rivets had popped and little streams of bubbles were whirling in through the gap. She put her lips to the stream, greedy for air. It smelled of the sea.

Then the shadow was above her, swimming lazily, its long arms spread. Karan reacted violently. Gripping the right bracket she brought her feet up against the other door and pushed with all her strength.

Flat fingers clamped on the back of her neck and squeezed. Karan jerked free and, still clinging to the bracket, twisted and kicked out blindly. She struck something yielding
and the Whelm jackknifed, clutching at himself. Momentarily his face almost touched hers: eyes screwed tight in his agony, gaping mouth gushing air, filed teeth.

With a shriek that hurt her ears the doors gave, the left one torn completely off by the vast weight of water. The face was snatched away. Her fingers were ripped from the bracket and she was flung through the door in a maelstrom of water and mud and the putrid sludge of aeons.

That would surely have been her death, for there was another grating on the outside, but the great door smashed it to one side, tumbling over and over down the main and eventually out into the estuary where it sank in the deep water.

And Karan came after, the breath driven from her lungs, in her head a roaring and a flashing of black and white and red, tossed and tumbling, bruised and battered and fighting for air. Yet somehow she survived, undrowned, unbroken and with a secret fierce exhilaration at having beaten Yggur and Fiz Gorgo too.

When the current was dead Karan found herself more than a hundred spans offshore, with just the strength to swim back to shore in the darkness. She waded up a creek into the swamp forest but as she splashed along she sensed, just for a moment, the watcher that she had felt the previous night.

She had spent all day underground. Up above, the scorpion nebula was reduced by mist to a formless red blur. She waded through swamps, swam up streams so shallow that her belly touched the mud, but at last, after midnight, confident that she had concealed her trail, Karan crept into the rushes. Even as the Whelm swarmed out of a dozen hidden grubholes and Yggur himself limped to the sewer exit, she rolled herself in her wet cloak and slept, and dreamed of a festival far away.

* * *

Karan had been right about the watcher in the forest. Maigraith’s illusion
had
been broken and it was the same spy this time. Her name was Tallia and she was chief lieutenant of Mendark, the Magister in far-off Thurkad, he whom Yggur so feared and hated, and Llian so fretted about. Tallia was spying out Yggur’s defenses, though it was not coincidence that she was watching when Maigraith and Karan came. There had been word of them from the smugglers.