Ambassador 4: Coming Home (22 page)

Reida pushed open one of the flaps and stuck his head out.

“Urgh.” He came back inside. “Something dead in there.”

“How far down is it?”

“Quite a way. If we get the tallest people to go out first, they can help the others.” That was a nice way of saying that they thought I needed help to get down.

Marin Federza had already taken off his pretty shirt and put the bundle into his bag. He wore a plain undershirt of khaki fabric that looked locally produced: felt made from fibres of a seagrasslike plant.

He put his arms through the handles of his bag so that it sat on his back, while Reida knocked out the metal division between the two valves. Federza’s shoes were sturdy but quite pretty. They wouldn’t be so pretty after all this.

He stuck his head out through the valve. “Someone hold up this piece of metal, or it will slam onto my fingers.” Not a word about smell or dirt. A few weeks ago, I would have expected him to complain about getting dirty, but I didn’t know about Federza anymore

Reida pushed the flap up and Federza stuck one of his legs in, shimmied his body through and pulled through his other leg. He made me think of a giant grasshopper when he did this, all thin limbs and elbows and knees. Then he let himself down while still holding onto the edge. Reida held the valve open so that it wouldn’t slam on his fingers. A waft of humid air came into the storeroom. It smelled like mould and decomposing leaves that had been in water too long.

“All right, here I go.” His voice sounded hollow out there in that drain. His head and hands disappeared. There was a scraping sound and a splash, and a voice said, “Shit.”

“You’re all right?” Reida asked through the hole.

“Yeah. It’s just really slippery down here. All right. I’m ready for the next person.”

Lilona was the next tallest. I gestured to her. “Come on, in you go.”

She took a few steps forward and stopped. She looked at the hole, her eyes wide.

Reida held a hand out to her.

I wondered how strong she was. Not very, judging by the thinness of her limbs. Reida let the valve fall into its original position and grabbed her hand which she held out reluctantly. She dropped to her knees.

Reida pushed the valve back open. Lilona peered into the dark gap. “It’s dark and dirty in there.” Her legs were trembling.

“Unfortunately, dark and dirty is all we have,” Reida said.

“But I can’t . . . My captain says . . .”

This wasn’t going to work. I said, “Thay’ you go first. Then you can help her.”

Thayu dropped to her knees, wriggled backwards through the hole and jumped down on the other side.

Scrape, splash.

“Oh, shit. It really is slippery down here.”

“No one ever believes what I say,” came Federza’s voice.

The guard went through next. He was a fair bit wider than either Federza or Thayu. His hands were visible in the opening while he hung onto the edge. We heard him ask, “How far down is it?”

Thayu replied, and then he was gone too, accompanied by a couple of swear words in keihu. Next, Evi and Telaris, and then it was my turn. I stuck my foot in the dark hole, wriggled through sideways. Thayu waited at the bottom of the drain with a small light. She was right, it was quite a way, and the drain was a concrete tube with curved sides and nothing hold onto on the way down.

I let go, slid down the side and ended up in the smelly, stagnant puddle at the bottom. “Oh, fuck.”

They all laughed.

“Shh,” Reida said. “Hurry up, because someone upstairs is trying to get in. Come on, down you go.” The latter to Lilona.

She climbed onto the ledge, awkwardly, trembling. Reida had to help her get her second leg out. Then she froze.

“Come on, let go.” I tried to walk up as far as I could, but could only reach the bottom of her legs. And even doing that almost made me slip.

“No,” she said. “I can’t.” She sounded terrified.

I tried to imagine what it would be like growing up in a sterile, neat ship and then being asked to shimmy into a disgusting hole and slide into a disgusting drain, and could not. “Just pretend you’re a kid and this is a slide.” Did the Aghyrians even have kids? If they did, did they have childhoods anything like ours?

She just hung there, helpless. I couldn’t reach her properly because of the curve of the tube and because the concrete where I would like to put my feet was covered in algae and as slippery as fuck.

“Come on!” I called to her. “Let go. You’re just going to slide down the side and end up in the water. You won’t hurt yourself.”
You might teach us some Aghyrian swear words
.

“No.”

“I’m coming out,” Reida said, now sounding urgent. He managed to get out while Lilona was still hanging onto the edge. “I think they’re inside. Come on.” The latter to Lilona.

“No!”

“Freaking let go. You’re the least likely to hurt yourself. You’re the tallest of us!”

But she was paralysed with fear.

Reida grabbed her hands and forced them off the ledge. She managed to grab onto his legs to stop herself sliding down.

“No!” she screamed. “No!”

Reida let go, and the two of them slid unceremoniously down the side of the tube into the water. Reida quickly scrambled to his feet, cursing and wiping his hands on his trousers, but Lilona sat in the water, crying.

“Come on, get up.” Thayu was trying to drag her to her feet, but almost slipped herself. She cursed. “Come on. We don’t have all day!”

“My captain, my captain,” Lilona was crying.

“I don’t give a fuck about your captain,” Thayu yelled. “Get the fuck up and stop being stupid.” In our relationship, I was the one who did all the swearing, and if she started, that was a fair indication she had enough, in this case of Lilona’s behaviour.

“Wait, Thay’.” I pushed past her, almost slipping in the sludge.

Reida called out. “What are you doing? We have to get out of here before they discover us.”

Yes, but I had just realised that something monumental had happened. Emotions had broken through Lilona’s mask.

I crouched in the sludge and took her shoulders. Pushed her chin up until she looked me in the eye. There was something inherently Coldi about the gesture, and even that fitted the situation.

“Calm down. It’s all right.”

Her face was dirt and tear-streaked, a far cry from the emotionless mask she had worn for the past days. Her bottom lip shivered. She whispered, “No. No.”

“Tell me what bothers you. But be quiet because we don’t want to advertise where we are. And get out of the water. It will make you sick.”

She carefully climbed to her feet. Her legs and right side were covered in dripping, slimy mud. She trembled so much that she almost slipped again. I leant her my shoulder to steady herself. Her hands were so cold that I could feel it through my shirt and armour.

“Come now.”

We shuffled forward. It was slow going and Lilona wasn’t getting any steadier on her feet. She kept quiet, but continued sobbing quietly. I asked her if she was scared but she didn’t answer that. Then I asked her if she was cold, seeing as that might be an easier-to-understand emotion. She said she wasn’t. Her hands felt like ice.

She didn’t mention the captain once.

We went a short distance until we came to an intersection. Here the recent concrete drainage tube joined a much older, square tunnel. A stone grate above let through a smattering of light—from a street light probably—and a whiff of fresh air. The soft stone walls were covered with moss and ferns and various types of fungi. A trickle of water flowed through the bed of the tunnel, and there was a narrow walkway along the side, wide enough for one person. We walked in single file, slowly because the stones were slippery and Lilona wasn’t steady on her feet.

A chorus of ringgit echoed through the drain from elsewhere. Thankfully they were quiet in our section of drain—the noise could damage your hearing.

Every now and then, the council sent men with smoke bombs into the drains to smoke the creatures out, for all the two weeks’ worth of relief that brought.

A bit further down, the drain opened into a channel. At the end, I could see an arch-shaped patch of light where a streetlight stood at a jetty where the channel boat would moor. A tree next to the drain entrance obscured the street and houses above. I suspected that we were somewhere in the block between Market Street and Fountain Street.

The ledge along the side of the drain widened out. This was part of the very old drainage system. There was a little platform at the edge of the water where in the old days servants would come to draw water for their households. There was also a semicircular bench, called a lovers’ seat, where people would sit in the relative coolness of evaporating water in the extremely hot and humid days before the start of the monsoon. It was quite pleasant here where the cool moist air mingled with the freshness above. The walls were made from limestone and covered in ferns and moss. The occasional ripple in the water indicated water life below.

“Wait here,” Thayu said. Her voice echoed in the hollow space. She had stopped at the lovers’ seat bench and unstrapped her belt. She laid out her weapons and equipment and rearranged them. For what purpose, I didn’t know.

I helped Lilona down to the stone bench where she sat, shivering. I said to Thayu in a low voice, “I’m worried about her.”

She didn’t react to the fact that we were talking about her.

Evi crouched and looked into her face, holding both sides of her head. “She’s hypothermic.” He pulled down her eyelids with his thumb. “Look at how narrow her pupils are. It’s some kind of shock.”

“I guess running to the station from here is out of the question?”

“We should take her to the hospital.”

“I’m not going back there.” The island had a small medical post. That would have to do, when, or even if, we got there. “How bad is it?”

“I don’t know. I’m not familiar with this. I don’t know what prompted it.”

“Unfamiliarity. She must have gotten too scared.” I crouched next to Evi. He was right. Her hands were really cold, and she had freaked out badly when Reida dropped her into the tunnel. “Come. We’ll take you back.” Although I wasn’t sure how we were going to manage that. “Back to your captain.” I cringed at the thought of explaining to him what had happened, although on second thoughts, he might not even care about her.

She was shivering. Telaris took off his jacket and wrapped it around her, but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“Reida and I will fetch us some transport,” Thayu said. She had strapped all her gear back on. Everything now sat on the outside of her clothes, clearly displayed. It never ceased to amaze me how much stuff she could hide under regular clothing. She glanced at Reida and hooked her thumb at the tunnel’s entrance. “Come.”

The Barresh guard cleared his throat. “Well, if you’re done with me, I would like to go back to the Guard Station and report that I’m still alive.”

“Don’t tell anyone that we were with you, at least not yet,” I said.

“I was going to do the opposite. Warn them so that they can provide backup security for you.”

Thayu pulled a face behind his back.

“We have evidence that at least certain sections of the Barresh guards are compromised.”

“You don’t trust us?”

“Not unless we’re sure that your unit isn’t one of the compromised ones.”

The guard gave a
how dare you?
huff. “Well, that’s just . . . quite a heavy accusation.”

“Again, this is a trustworthy source, and it may not apply to your unit.”

“I would think not.”

“But do us a favour and keep the news back a bit. Even if your unit is perfectly fine, and the whole office where you work is perfectly trustworthy, there still
are
sections in the guards that are not fine and that contain Tamerians, maybe under false names.”

“Well . . .” He scratched his head, clearly disturbed and no longer denying my statement. “Well, if you wish . . .”

“Yes, thank you, I do wish to keep it quiet. Go back and report on the collapse of the jail. Tell them how you got out if necessary.”

“What am I supposed to say about you? They know you went down. It becomes a lot more complicated if a delegate of
gamra
is involved.”

“For the time being, you’re going to tell them that we’re buried under a pile of rock.”

“Well . . . they’re probably in the jail already, and it wasn’t that big a pile of rocks that came down the stairs. They’re going to discover you’re not there if they haven’t already.”

“I know. That’s why we must hurry.”

Thayu and Reida were off, and the guard left, too, after having agreed not to volunteer information about our location.

Evi and Telaris said that they’d guard the entry to the tunnel, leaving me with Lilona and Marin Federza on the lover’s seat.

It was very quiet here. Somewhere in the darkness, water trickled into a deeper pool. The familiar sound of meili squabbling in a tree drifted in from the entrance.

I sat on the stone bench next to Lilona. She was staring at her knees, while holding her arms clamped around herself. “You really have to make an effort to walk. It won’t be far.” And when she didn’t react, I added, “I’ll take you back to your captain.”

No reaction, but her eyes widened briefly. Fear? Happiness? It was hard to tell.

Federza walked around the bench and sat on the other side of her.

I continued, “Aren’t you happy about that?”

She looked at the tunnel entrance. Avoiding me?

There was nothing to do but to continue talking. I was probably annoying her, but time for finding out what Asha wanted to know was running out. I couldn’t see myself putting pressure on her—she’d probably go into a deeper shock—but I had to keep trying. “I don’t know what sort of society you have on that ship out there, but you are safe here. In this place, no one can hear what you say. You don’t even have to go back on the ship. You can stay here, with our Aghyrians. They will look after you”

She looked at me, and then at Federza, who nodded, once.