“They’ll have the alley covered,” she said. “But maybe … come on!”
They were in the kitchen now, and she was pushing a button underneath the counter. The stove swung aside, and Faral saw that there was a trapdoor set into the tiles beneath. Blossom grabbed the recessed handle and pulled the door upward, revealing a circular, brick-lined shaft. A vertical ladder of rusty iron extended downward into darkness along one side of the tunnel.
“Get inside,” said Blossom. “Go.”
From the front room the blaster sounded again—a group of two shots, then a burst of three. Blossom grabbed a hand torch from its charging bracket on the kitchen wall and started down the ladder herself without bothering to wait.
Faral went in after her, with Jens so close behind him that his cousin’s boot soles were on the rung above his head. As soon as Jens’s head was below the level of the kitchen floor, the trap fell. Except for the glow of Blossom’s hand torch, down in the shaft below them, they were wrapped in darkness.
The ladder ended in a horizontal passage. A stream of water ran through the tunnel ankle-deep, and the air was thick and foul. Based on the smell, Faral was glad that in the limited light he couldn’t see what the water looked like.
“Come on,” said Blossom, stepping down into the malodorous stream. She began moving away from them, her feet splashing in the foul water as she went, and he had no choice but to follow her. “There’s a chance they won’t figure out right away where we’re heading.”
They waded on in silence for a while. The way was slippery underfoot, with half the stone covered by flowing water and the rest of it coated with mud and slime. When Faral put a hand on the tunnel wall to steady himself, his palm came away smeared with something viscous and unnameable. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his right boot had a leak in it—his sock was beginning to squish. The thought failed to cheer him.
He drew a deep breath—regretted it when the thick miasma in the tunnel made him cough and wheeze—and said, “Who exactly is ‘they’?”
“The people who were shooting at you, of course.”
“Ah.” That was Jens, bringing up the rear. From the sound of his voice, he didn’t like the stink of the tunnel either. “
Those
people. Tell me, Gentlelady Blossom, if you possibly can—what in the name of hell is going on?”
“Bindweed and I object in principle to customers getting killed in our shop,” she said. “It’s bad for business.”
I
N THE back room at Huool Galleries, Miza watched the info-glyphs on her desktop shift and transform themselves as the situation changed. Bidding intensity at the Atelier Provéc had plummeted; at the same time, a disconcerting ripple of excitement and anxiety had begun to manifest itself nearby. She waited long enough to make sure that the ripple was genuine and not an artifact of the graphing process, then tapped the comm link to the outer office.
“Gentlesir Huool, I think you ought to see this.”
Most people, Faral suspected, would have lost track by now of how long and how far they had been slogging through the tunnels of Sombrelír’s waste-disposal system. Most people, on the other hand, hadn’t been brought up in the unmarked forests of Maraghai. For his own part, he had a good idea of both the time and the distance—he could retrace the route later at street level if he had to—but he didn’t think the knowledge was going to prove useful anytime soon.
Blossom halted, finally, at the point where another iron ladder, identical to the one in the kitchen of the tea shop, led up toward the arched ceiling of the tunnel. She directed the beam of light from her hand torch upward at what looked to Faral like the bottom side of a trapdoor.
“There,” she said. “We should be safe now.”
*Such an air of confidence,* Jens muttered to Faral in Trade-talk—the Maraghaite pidgin of Galcenian and the Forest Speech. *I love it.*
Blossom paid no attention. She started up the ladder, climbing briskly for a woman of her years who had just spent half an hour wading through chilly, ankle-deep water. At the top, she knocked on the trapdoor with the butt of her hand torch, waited a few seconds, then knocked again. It wasn’t long before Faral heard a heavy sliding sound, like a piece of furniture being shoved aside. A crack of bright yellow light appeared among the shadows overhead.
“Come on,” said Blossom as the trapdoor opened the rest of the way. She climbed through the opening and vanished from sight. With a shrug, Faral started up after her.
The glyphs on the desktop had stabilized. Miza wasn’t certain what they portended, and she suspected that Huool didn’t know either.
The Roti clicked his beak and ruffed up his neck feathers. “Disturbing. If I did not know better, I would swear—”
A sharp rapping noise interrupted him. Miza stared about, trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound. Huool’s hearing was keener than hers: by the time the rapping came a second time, he was shoving at a stack of crates in the far corner. Miza left her desk and went to help him.
Together they shifted the boxes away from a section of tiled flooring that appeared, at first glance, to be no different from all the rest. On closer inspection, Miza spotted the hair-thin lines that marked off a hidden door. Huool bent and pressed a taloned finger against what looked like—but obviously wasn’t—a flawed spot in the tiles, and the trapdoor lifted and turned.
A nasty, sewer-reek odor billowed out of the opening, followed by a reed-thin, grey-haired woman in white shirt, black trousers, and a proper Ophelan-style apron and cap. The shirt and apron were mud-stained and streaked with rust.
“Huool, you old pirate,” the woman said. “Are you glad to see me?”
Huool chittered with amusement. “Speaking as one pirate to another, Gentlelady, I certainly am. What can I do for you today?”
“Got a couple of lads here with me that need to get off-planet fast.”
As she spoke, a dark-haired young man stuck his head up above the flooring, paused for a moment, then clambered the rest of the way out. A moment later another youth followed, this one taller than the first and as fair as the other was dark, with long yellow hair tied back from a lean, intelligent face. Both of the young men, like the woman, were smeared with sewer muck and rust—though Miza suspected that given a chance to wash themselves and change their dirt-stained jackets and trousers for less bedraggled clothing, they would clean up to something entirely presentable.
Huool chittered again. “I see you won the bidding.”
“We didn’t even know there was an auction going on,” the woman said. “Not until the bill collectors showed up, anyhow. Three, maybe more, from the Green Sun gang.”
“Not cheap talent,” Huool said. “But … it appears … not terribly
talented
talent. Or perhaps merely outclassed.”
“It’s good to learn we haven’t lost our touch,” said the woman modestly. She turned to the pair of young men. “Who knew that the two of you would be coming to the shop?”
The fair one shrugged. The gesture had a casual grace to it that Miza thought might be Khesatan; his voice, when he spoke, confirmed her suspicions. “Since we hadn’t planned on it beforehand … no one, I suppose.”
“No.” The other youth shook his head, frowning. He had a solid look to him that Miza approved of, and his manner was free of airs and affectations. She couldn’t place his accent at all as he said to his fellow, “We didn’t plan on Gentlelady Blossom’s tea shop, true enough. But you spent half the morning asking for directions to that music store right across the square. Thalban’s, or whatever it was called. And
it
came recommended.”
The woman called Blossom glanced at him sharply. “Recommended by whom?”
“A fellow on board
Bright-Wind-Rising.
We were talking about things to do while the ship was in port.”
“Have you got a name on him?”
“No. He was an ordinary-looking guy—dark hair, plain clothes. A bit older than Jens and me.”
“Where was he from?” Blossom demanded. “What kind of business? When did he board?”
The two youths looked at one another. Miza could see the suspicion—
a bit belated,
she commented to herself;
we’ve definitely got a pair of sheltered innocents here
—making itself visible in their eyes.
“He didn’t happen to mention it,” the fair-haired one said after a moment or two. Miza got the impression that he was choosing his words with considerable care. Maybe Blossom hadn’t brought in a matched pair of innocents, after all. “And we didn’t speak with him for all that long.”
“You were a whole fortnight in transit,” Blossom demanded, “and you didn’t even get to know your shipmates?”
“We weren’t traveling for the sake of the giddy social round.” The young man paused. “Turnabout is fair play. What I want to know is how
you
knew how long we were in transit.”
“Because I know who you are,” Blossom said. “You’re Jens Metadi-Jessan D’Rosselin and the short one over there with all the muscles is your cousin Faral Hyfid-Metadi. And you’re both in a world of trouble.”
“I’d never have noticed if you hadn’t mentioned it.” Jens Metadi-Jessan D’Rosselin took a step backward, set his shoulders against the storeroom wall, and pulled a blaster out of his front coat pocket. His fair skin had gone much paler, Miza noted, and his blue eyes were very bright.
“The gentlesir in the tea shop dropped this,” he said. “And yes, I do know how to use it. So if you don’t mind, my cousin and I will leave now. Thanks for the help and all, but we have a ship to catch.”
Huool ruffled his feathers in agitation. “My dear boy!” he exclaimed. “You have no appreciation of the seriousness of the situation. You are, how shall I say this, hunted?”
“Think about it for a minute,” Blossom added. “You need to make it to the port and get off-planet. We want you to make it to the port and get off-planet. There shouldn’t be any problem working something out.”
“My mother told me that I should be careful talking to strangers,” Jens said. “And I’m afraid you know more of our names than we do of yours. Nobody is working out anything until we’ve had some proper introductions.”
Blossom looked more amused than Miza thought quite proper for an elderly gentlelady being held at blaster-point. “When a young man with a blaster asks for my name,” the tea shop owner said to Jens, “I believe in giving it to him. And as it happens, I owe a duty to your House.”
She made a deep bow, after some style of etiquette that Miza didn’t recognize; not the local Ophelan mode, nor yet the generalized manner of a seasoned traveler. But her next words explained much. “I’m Tillijen Chereeve, quondam Armsmaster to House Rosselin of Entibor.”
The dark youth—Faral, it seemed his name was—growled a foreign-sounding phrase somewhere in the back of his throat. “For a planet that got blown up fifty-something years ago,” he added, “there are entirely too many of you people running around.”
“My sentiments exactly, coz,” said Jens. He hadn’t lowered the blaster, and the note of suspicion wasn’t yet gone from his voice. “One question more, Gentlelady Tillijen—if you are indeed who you say you are. Who was the Number One gunner on
Warhammer
back when Granda was a privateer?”
“That was Nannla Rue,” said Blossom promptly. “She and I worked the
’Hammer’s
guns together, with Ferrdacorr
ngha-
Rillikkikk in the engine room and Errec Ransome in the copilot’s chair.”
Jens nodded. “Then, Gentlelady Tillijen—”
“Call me Blossom. It’s what I go by these days.”
“—Gentlelady Blossom, if what you say is true, and the attack in your shop was not merely an elaborate charade you’ve staged in order to gain our trust—then what would you have us do?”
“The first thing,” Blossom told him, “is to get yourselves tidied up. You can’t go wandering around town looking like you’ve been crawling through the sewers. People will talk.”
“Easily handled,” said Huool. “Miza, take our young guests upstairs and show them the washing facilities. Make them clean.”
Miza stared at him in surprise. “Me?”
“Consider it part of your education, young one. I’ll see that you get extra credit.”
In the Old Quarter of Sombrelír, the metallic wail of sirens cut through the quiet afternoon, and a smell of wood smoke drifted on the wind. Mistress Klea Santreny, her polished staff of Nammerin
grrch
wood firmly held in hand, strode across the open square. Ophel was a civilized planet; an Adept’s staff was sufficient to win passage for her through the barricades that local fire and security forces had put up to keep out gawkers.
Around her, the flashing lights of emergency vehicles made a disorienting jumble of garish color against a background of neatly trimmed trees and pastel shopfronts. A vertical-lift aircar with City MedServ insignia took off in a roar of heavy-duty nullgravs. The aircar hovered for an instant at rooftop level, then darted away toward where the hospitals, tall and sleek, raised their platforms above the crowded buildings of the modern city. On one side of the square, underneath a sign proclaiming the shop behind it to be the home of the finest shoes in the world, a team of medics worked over a prone body.
I haven’t seen a mess like this since the war
, Klea thought. She noted on the shoemaker’s wall the distinctive blast patterns of an energy lance.
Looks like a near miss. A hit wouldn’t have left enough for the medics to bother with.
Across the plaza, people wearing the caps and armbands of Sombrelír’s Civil Guard were talking into autoscribes and pointing hand recorders at the scene. The focus of their activity seemed to be Bindweed & Blossom’s tea shop. The front of the building was stained with soot, and most of the downstairs windows were broken out. A line of scorch marks showed where somebody had swept a blaster set on “continuous fire” across the painted stucco wall.
Klea moved nearer to the iron fence that surrounded the tea shop’s trampled garden. The Guild Master’s wayward nephews were not, she hoped, in this place any longer, but if she wanted to pick up their trail, this was where she would have to do it. Unobtrusively, she opened her mind to the search—and felt the hairs rise on her neck as the presence of Mage-work came to her like a bad smell on the wind.
She looked about for the source of the unpleasant sensation, and saw a man approaching the shop from her left. Like her, he wore black and carried a staff; but his staff was the short, silver-bound rod of a Mage, and he wore a Mage’s featureless black mask under the hood of his cloak.
This is Ophel
, Klea reminded herself.
People here don’t feel about Mages the way we do back home.
The Mage in question strode purposefully forward, his goal apparently the same as her own—the blast-marked façade of Bindweed & Blossom’s. Klea moved to intercept him, stepping up beside him and placing a hand on his sleeve.
“Hold, friend,” she said.
He halted, and made a nodding acknowledgment of her presence. “Mistress Santreny.” His accent was strong: harsh in the consonants and oddly pitched in the long, musical vowels. “I beg your pardon, but I am engaged.”
“You have the advantage of me,” she said, not letting go his arm. “I’m afraid that I don’t know you at all.”