“The people who come here do not want to be found,” the guard rumbled.
“He is an eight-year-old boy who has no idea what he wants,” Harper said. “I have been told he was spotted here.” Faking desperation in his expression, Harper changed his voice to a pained whisper. “Please, my sister is going mad with worry. I need to find the boy.”
The guard’s eyes softened. “I have not seen him, but I do not work here all the time.”
Harper gave him a grateful smile. “Can I ask around to see if anyone else remembers seeing the boy?”
The guard frowned. “I think that would be rather bad for your health. Stepping up to people that you do not know here is likely to get you killed when you leave.”
“Oh…” Harper said, fear in his expression and tone.
The guard sighed. “But if you want to go round the food vendors and ask them, I will allow it.”
Harper nodded enthusiastically. “Thank you—you have been kind.”
The guard snorted and waved them into the building.
“You are a very convincing liar,” Pandral said as they walked towards the food shacks.
“Is that a problem?” Harper asked, giving Pandral a questioning glance.
“It depends on whom you are lying to.”
“Myself, mostly,” Harper replied, shrugging off Pandral’s penetrating gaze.
The first three food vendors claimed not to have seen the boy, although Harper knew one of them was withholding something. The fourth vendor they visited held Rodin’s picture up to his myopic eyes and gave a grunt.
“This is your boy?”
“No,” Harper replied. “He is my sister’s son.”
The vendor held out a dirty palm. “You owe me eight bits.”
Confused, Harper frowned. “You want me to pay you for information as to the whereabouts of the child?”
The vendor gave a wet snort. “Ha! I have no idea where the little animal is, but last moon he and his grubby friend stole two of my pies. They are four bits each—pay up.”
Thinking the vendor had no right to accuse anyone else of being grubby—or a thief, considering the extortionate cost of his pies—Harper merely glared at him, his voice hard when he spoke.
“How do I know if you have actually seen him?”
The vendor gave him a sneer. “Because his friend called the boy Rodin. That is his name, is it not?”
Begrudgingly, Harper nodded, reaching for his belt purse. “What did this friend of Rodin’s look like?” he asked as he counted out the eight bits into the man’s hand.
“Older boy,” the vendor said, watching the money. Harper waited for the man to continue. There was silence. With a sigh Harper placed a ninth bit into the man’s palm. “He had dark brown hair,” the vendor added, his eyes watching the money expectantly. Harper added another bit to the pile. “Now I remember,” the vendor said with a cunning smile. “He looked like his nose had been broken, and not set as well as yours.” Again there was silence. Growing tired of the exchange, Harper placed two silver brins, the equivalent of twenty-six bits, into the vendor’s hand. The vendor immediately tightened his fist around the money and withdrew his hand.
“The boy’s name is Hari,” the vendor said. “I have seen him around the food market sometimes; he has others who run with him. He often wears an expensive-looking black cloak. That is all I know.”
“I believe we were overcharged,” Pandral murmured.
“All sales are final,” the vendor barked, stepping back into his stall.
Harper shrugged, wincing slightly at the pain it caused him. “We have somewhere to start.”
“Exactly,” the vendor replied. “I hope you find the boy and get to belt your money’s worth out of his useless hide.”
Harper nodded grimly, moving towards the next stall.
“That was expensive,” Pandral said quietly. Surprised that a Lord of Mydren had any concept of money, Harper him a sly glance.
“You owe me thirty-six bits,” he said, and Pandral sighed.
The other vendors had little information to add to what they had already learned; although several of them had seen Rodin, the sightings were all over a month old. Giving the guard a nod of thanks as they left, Harper walked slowly, deep in thought, in the direction of the Central Tower, more on instinct than because of any real desire to go that way. Up until a month ago Rodin appeared to have been alive; he even had a friend—possibly a group of them—and had been eating. The food was stolen, but for a child living on the streets in Mydren, that summed up every meal. So where had he disappeared to a month ago?
“We are heading in the wrong direction,” Pandral said, a frown on his face.
Pulled out of his thoughts, Harper looked at him. “Pardon?”
“We should be heading for the food markets. They are on the other side of Hemtark.”
Harper nodded. “Sorry, I was thinking.”
“Evidently not about where you were going,” Pandral replied. Harper flashed him an apologetic smile and followed Pandral as he changed direction, heading towards the north edge of town.
The food market was winding down for the day when they arrived, and most stall owners were happy to talk to them, thankfully without a demand for payment. Rodin and his friends undoubtedly stole from the market, but the stall owners, whilst making halfhearted efforts to stop it, seemed to also accept the shoplifting as a sort of civic duty. They even charged slightly more to their actual customers to cover the cost, to ensure the children did not starve. Harper found it odd that Pandral did not seem the least bit surprised by this revelation.
The stall owners reported several sightings of Rodin in and around the market with another, older boy and several other children of various ages. He had not seemed ill or injured. And the other children had appeared to treat him with great respect, the younger children often stealing food for him. However, as at the warehouse, all sightings of the boy and many of the other older children had stopped about a month before.
In the fading light of the setting sun they walked around the irregular edges of the food market, hoping to catch sight of one of the elusive street children so they could ask some questions. Harper was tired and in pain. The deep angry throb of his back was becoming impossible to ignore and seemed to be urging on the headache that was grinding behind his eyes.
“So far your theory has proven to be correct,” Pandral said, his voice pitched so that they would not be overheard by the stall owners, who were packing up their produce for the day. “What do you think happened to him?”
“Any number of things,” Harper replied. “Very few of them good.”
“Morose generality aside, you may be right—but I want details,” Pandral said.
Harper was irritated at having to work out all the vile things that could have befallen a child in Mydren—something Pandral could have done just as easily if he wanted to—and he felt like he was being manipulated for some reason. He gave a curt nod, his voice sharp when he spoke.
“He could have starved to death, become ill, been injured or murdered. He could have been snatched from the streets to be used as free labour, or worse.” Harper took an angry breath. “Or he could have just left town.”
Pandral nodded, ignoring Harper’s tone. “He seemed quite good at feeding himself and he seemed to have friends. If he had become ill or injured, his friends would perhaps have been seen even if he was not; but they seem to have disappeared at the same time. If he had been murdered, it is likely we would have a body by now, and of the seventeen bodies found in the last three moons, none was a child.” Harper raised an eyebrow at this body count, which seemed very high, even for a town the size of Hemtark. Pandral nodded. “Yes, I know, we have a problem. I am working on it.”
“It might help if you released these figures to your Protectors and involved them more in actually solving crimes, instead of just leaving them to settle disputes between whores and their customers and to beat up the occasional drunk or begga
r,” Harper said.
“A conversation for another time,” Pandral snapped. “Concentrate! Of the scenarios you presented, which seems the most likely to you?”
Distressed and distracted by the possibilities of what might have happened to the defenceless boy, Harper struggled with the question. While no real answer presented itself, a way of finding out did.
“I have no idea, but if we can speak to his friends, there is a strong possibility they will know.”
“So we need to find and question the children?” Pandral replied. “Any idea how we can do that? Because they are not here!”
The Lord sounded uncharacteristically annoyed and frustrated. I must not be thinking fast enough for him. Harper tried to order his thoughts. If I were a child living on the streets, where would I go? Hemtark in all its wretched, putrefying nastiness unfurled in his mind like a map. Thinking about all the places a child might go, all the places an adult would not consider, he contemplated the town… but nothing became obvious. His headache kept dragging the detail away.
“Again, I do not know,” Harper admitted. “The children would want to go somewhere as warm and dry as they could find, but hard for adults to get into, to offer some protection and keep them hidden. Do you know of anywhere like that?”
Pandral let out a long slow breath—not a sigh, exactly; more a release of tension, as if he had just made a big decision.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
Looking at the Lord in the fading light, Harper saw the mixture of fear and determination that, in his experience, signalled an act of bravery in most people.
“Come on,” Pandral ordered, before Harper could speak—or perhaps before the Lord changed his mind. “I will show you.”
They walked in silence through the twilight. There were no clouds in the sky, but a serein drizzled down, making the cobbles slick and giving the warmth emanating from the buildings around them a clammy feel. The rain meant the streets were emptier than they might have been, but Harper still felt exposed. He had asked Pandral several times where they were going, but the man was being cagey. Harper was too tired to keep pushing, so he walked behind, all his concentration going into keeping up and remembering the route. At last they stopped in front of the Glass Blowers Guild near the centre of town. Pandral looked up at the dark building, several stories rising above them.
“Here?” Harper asked, utterly confused.
“Here,” Pandral told him, sounding pensive.
To the side of the building was a narrow, enclosed alley; Pandral headed down it without hesitation. Soon they were hidden from the street and from prying eyes. He stopped before a semicircular iron-barred grate fitted into the bottom of the wall, beyond which all was pitch-black. Then, dropping to his stomach with an easy grace, Pandral pulled hard at the middle two metal bars. They pulled out easily, making no noise. Someone’s greased those. Wriggling forward, Pandral squeezed himself through the gap, disappearing into the darkness as his body and legs slithered through.
“Pandral…?” Harper’s whisper was made harsh by his sudden fear that something had happened to the man. Wonder how long they’d let me live once I explained this situation?
“Harper! Hurry up!” Pandral’s abrupt, disembodied voice seemed to rise out of the very ground.
Getting down on his stomach with a small whimper of pain, Harper squirmed forward and through the bars head first as Pandral had done. It was a tight fit, and the top of the grate scraped mercilessly down his spine. But once his hips were through, his body hanging precariously over a black abyss, the rest of him followed in a rush. The drop was brief, yet just long enough to make his heart lurch in shock. He landed on his side on hard stone flags; the breath was knocked out of him and pain raced up his back as blood trickled down it.
“Oww!” he moaned into the darkness, waiting for his watering eyes to adjust to the lack of light.
“The drop is farther than I remember,” Pandral said in a low voice. “Get out of the way, Harper. I need to replace the bars.”
Harper dragged his aching body across the floor. The light outside the hole they sat in now made the way they had come in obvious. Reaching up, Pandral put the bars back in place. The natural way he did it… it made Harper think it was an action of muscle memory.
“You have been here before…”
Pandral turned to him, his face illuminated in lines of light and shadow from the grey glow coming in from the grate, making him impossible to read.
“You finally figured it out. Some investigator you are,” he teased, sounding amused.
Tired, hungry and in pain, irritation surged through him. Harper’s brain, using the adrenaline his body had injected into him as he had dropped through the grate, at last managed to connect the evidence.
“I think I can be forgiven for failing to deduce that a Lord of Mydren started out life as a street rat in Hemtark,” he said, angry with himself for not figuring it out sooner.
There was silence.
“We all have to come from somewhere, Harper,” Pandral said eventually. There was pain in his softly spoken words as well as fear, Harper realised; fear of being rejected because of his beginnings. He thinks I’m angry with him for hiding his origins. What Pandral must have done to pull himself up, from where he started to where he was now, was unfathomable. The determination and the scale of deception was staggering. No wonder he has no tolerance for self-pity! Harper’s estimation of the man grew, and he felt the need to allay Pandral’s fears.
“Where you come from is irrelevant, Pandral. Who you are inside and where you are going—these are of much greater importance.”
There was another, longer silence.
“Get up, Harper,” Pandral said, reaching a hand down to help him to his feet. “We have a child to find.”
One hand on the wall to his left, the other resting lightly on Pandral’s back, Harper followed the Lord into a darkness that he was navigating from memory. With nothing for his eyes to focus on, Harper found his other senses straining. He could feel the warmth in the smooth stones his fingertips trailed along as he took one trusting step after another.
“It is warm,” Harper whispered.
“From the heat of the glass kilns in the basement of the guild above,” Pandral whispered back.
We’re below the basement? They walked along a corridor, turned left and went down a flight of crooked, irregular steps; Harper counted twenty-two to the bottom. Far below the basement! On the dry, slightly stale air came the smell of food and the sounds of voices. Another forty paces later and the buzz of conversation was considerably louder, while the smell was making Harper’s mouth water. Then they turned a final corner, and Harper could see a golden glow spilling through a tilted stone doorway.
Pandral stopped, blinking, getting his eyes accustomed to the light. Harper squinted slightly, doing the same. They inched forward until they could see through the doorway. It was not what Harper expected. Before him were the remnants of a theatre, complete with stage, seating levels and boxes. It looked as if a large hand had slammed it into the ground. At the back of the space, rubble indicated where the outer wall of the theatre should have been. The ceiling, which still held much of its beautiful gold leaf mouldings, was now only ten feet above the stage. The tiers of the dress circle had crashed down into the stalls below, and the thick beams of the wooden structure had split, buckling along a huge crack in the floor that ran through the middle of the theatre, stopping a foot from the front of the stage.
There were children of all ages everywhere. The collapsed stalls faced the stage across thirty feet of simple stone risers. Most of the children filled this area. The smaller ones were running and playing around groups of older youngsters, who sat playing cards or talking. The stalls themselves had been turned into sleeping areas, and Harper could see several small bodies resting on piles of blankets. On the stage a kitchen had been set up with tattered tables and chairs, and the smoke from the cooking fire was being funnelled through
a chimney built from the rubble, which poked up and out of a hole in the ceiling.
“The last earthquake to hit Hemtark was about eighty years ago,” Pandral whispered. “It dropped this place right into a crack. The Glass Blowers Guild built over the top of it and the building was forgotten.”
“I have never seen a building like this before,” Harper whispered back. Or at least, not in Mydren, he silently amended.
Pandral shrugged. “This is the only one, I believe. They used it to put on plays here. It was quite successful at the time, or so I have read, but the Players Guild were trying to have it shut down, as those who worked here did not seem to think they needed to be part of the guild to operate. When the earthquake hit, when it did this to the building, it was considered bad luck. No one ever built another.”
“So do we just walk in and announce ourselves?” Harper whispered.
“That was my plan, yes,” Pandral said.
Harper stepped forward and felt something snag at his ankle. Terror shot through him in the fraction of a second it took for his brain to understand. Booby trap! Still stepping forward he saw movement, the impression of speed and bulk, something swinging down like a pendulum into the doorway. Turning to face Pandral, whose eyes were beginning to register surprise, Harper tried to shove him down—but exhaustion dragged at him and he lacked the speed to act quickly enough. A heavy, solid something hit him a glancing blow to the back of his skull and he crashed into Pandral, reaching for the back of the Lord’s head to protect him from the landing. Both of them hit the ground, Pandral slamming the cushion of Harper’s hand into the unyielding stone of the floor, numbing Harper’s entire right arm. Despite Harper’s efforts to land to the side, there was a squeak of breathless pain from Pandral as Harper landed partially on top of him.
“It seems…” Pandral panted. “That the security… has… been improved…”
Pandral was still speaking, but to Harper, the words were muddled. A thick, wet warmth was running through his hair. Then the blackness swallowed him, and Harper knew no more.
Will (Book 2) Page 63