by Mel Odom
“We won’t move against them,” the knife wielder said. “Not until we talk to Gasparl about them.” He turned his attention to Juhg. “Up. Easy.”
Cautiously, feeling the sharp prick of the knife at his throat and the warm trickle of blood sliding down his skin, Juhg got to his feet. As if he could see in the dark, the man guided him to the rear of the building where water had collected. It looked like the building had sunk into the canal, filling up with the brackish water.
The other man waded into the water and shook out a fisherman’s net.
“Hurry up,” the knife wielder said. “I don’t like being up here while they’re wandering around.”
“Just a—”
Feeling the sharp bite of the knife loosen at his throat, Juhg seized the opportunity and threw his right arm forward, popping his captor’s arm loose and the knife from his neck. Then he ducked from his captor’s smelly embrace and dropped to all fours. His hands were instantly in water, and he realized he hadn’t known the man had walked him out into it.
The knife wielder cursed, but still kept his voice low.
Juhg ran, streaking for the door the rat-men had pulled him into the building through. He filled his lungs and yelled. “Craugh!”
He was surprised at how easily the wizard’s name came to his mind when he was so full of suspicion. He ran, managing two more steps, and drew in his breath to yell again.
Then a murky shape flashed in front of him, came back at him, and wrapped around him. He tripped on the fisherman’s net and went down, stopping short of falling on his face on the marble tile by inches. Stunned, his hands hooked clawlike into the net, he stared at the tilted floor. A moment later, the net gathered at his ankles, like a birder taking a prize, and he was yanked backward. The stone hammered at him as he skidded over it, softened only somewhat by the thick mud that covered it.
“Cra—!” Before he could get the wizard’s name out again, Juhg was dragged into the water and pulled under. Dirty water entered his mouth, tasting foul and coating his teeth with grit. He floated a little, and tried at once to fight free but was unable to escape the net.
He held his breath, but he knew he wasn’t going to be able to hold it long. He’d spent his last breath trying to scream. Struggling against the net, he was pulled deeper into the water, and that didn’t make any sense because the water hadn’t looked that deep.
Above him, though, the moonslight that barely illuminated the room faded and drew back. The net tightened around him as the man holding him pulled him even deeper.
11
Smugglers
Locked in the unforgiving embrace of the fisherman’s net, Juhg fought to be free. The opening above him grew steadily smaller. The man bearing him down swam with an uneven stroke, jerking his prize deeper and deeper.
Juhg wasn’t sure that Craugh and the others had heard him. Or that he hadn’t called them to their doom. In the darkness, he couldn’t be certain they’d even known where he was. He doubled up in the net, trying desperately to reach the knife sheathed at his ankle, but the net stayed taut, closing on him like a sausage wrapper so that he wasn’t able to bend down and close his fingers on the blade.
His lungs burned with the need for air. Still his captor dragged him down and down. The pressure on Juhg’s ears grew steadily stronger. The Grandmagister hadn’t mentioned how deep Skull Canal was in his journal. Maybe he hadn’t known and maybe it hadn’t mattered. The secret rooms the Grandmagister had finally reached were well below the sea surface.
Black spots swam in front of Juhg’s vision even though he couldn’t see. He tried to put a hand over his mouth and nose to keep himself from breathing in but he couldn’t reach.
Thankfully, the swimmer started upward, pulling him after (though Juhg still felt certain the man had a pair of gills and could breathe like a fish). Another light dawned above him. He chose to take heart in that, though he was just as sure that the man meant him no good. Any death except by drowning suddenly looked appealing, though.
Almost passed out by the time the man clambered onto a narrow shelf at the bottom of a huge rectangular room, Juhg hung limply in the net as he was hauled from the water. Two other men met the first, dressed in rat hides just like the first. Together, they tied a rope through the bottom of the net and flipped it over a long boom arm.
Coughing and wheezing, shuddering from the rapid beating of his heart against his chest, Juhg struggled weakly against the net as he was lifted up the rectangular shaft. He spun as he rose, and his dizzying view almost caused him to throw up.
From his new view, Juhg saw that the rectangular chamber had been a lower floor in a large building that had evidently once been a large entertainment area. The decor had been stripped, and what had been left had rotted away after centuries of flooding and hardship. Bubbling mold clung to the walls. Abandoned refuse, clothing, and armor and other detritus that couldn’t be identified, as well as broken skeletons littered the floor.
Rats and spiders had made nests on the walls and on ledges between the spacious rooms. The presence of the rats and insects let Juhg know there was a way that fresh air got down into the structure, otherwise they would never have made the trip through the water.
Someone held up a lantern on the second floor. By the low light, held out at arm’s reach, Juhg noted at least a dozen figures around the second floor opening.
“What have you got there, Civak?” a man’s voice demanded.
“An intruder,” the man who’d captured Juhg called back. He scrambled up the side of the building, following broken marble stairs for a time, then shifting over to a rope ladder to make the last leg of the climb.
“What makes you think he was an intruder?”
Juhg jerked with dizzying abandon at the end of the long pole as he was drawn up. He’d only just gotten his breath back, still couldn’t reach the knife at his ankle, and was certain he was going to be sick.
“He was poking around outside the bridge,” Civak answered. “Come up on the building where the secret entrance is like he knew it was there.”
“Is that right, halfer?” the man with the lantern demanded. “Was you come looking for the entrance to this place?”
Juhg drew even with the man.
The man held the lantern close to Juhg, eyeing him with open speculation. He wore his long brown hair loose, but it mixed in effortlessly with the rat hides he wore. He was an ugly man, his face crusted with hard bone beneath sallow skin scarred by a bad case of the pox in his youth. Scars left proud flesh around his right eye, which had obviously suffered horribly because it was covered with a black leather patch adorned with a stylized silver rat done in beads.
Juhg couldn’t help wondering if Sharz had done the beadwork. He was cold and miserable inside the net. The rough rope tore at his flesh with bruising force.
“Do you know me, halfer?” the man demanded, shining the lantern directly into Juhg’s face.
“No,” Juhg answered in a voice that cracked. Despite the bright light shining into his eyes, he saw that the men with the one-eyed man were equally clad and looked just as fearsome.
“You don’t know who I am or what this place is?”
“No.”
Behind the man, a fire burned under a spit filled with rat bodies. Sleeping pallets that looked like they’d been there a long time lay around the fire. Some of those pallets had rat bodies moving through them. Hammock webs containing large spiders with glowing eyes like embers hung in the corner of the roof above the pallets. Evidently the long-term camp had attracted an entourage.
The one-eyed man laughed. “Then how is it, halfer, you’ve come to the wrong place?”
“I’m new to Imarish,” Juhg said. “My friends and I got lost.”
Glancing over his shoulder, the one-eyed man asked, “How many friends, Civak?”
“Four. An elven maid, an old man, a dwarf, and a young black man, Dusen.”
“Really?” Renewed interest and avarice gleamed in the sing
le dark eye as Dusen returned his attention to Juhg. “And you’re new to Imarish?”
“Yes,” Juhg said. Helcun’s First Rule of Lying advised lying small—just enough to save your neck from the gallows, friends and neighbors! Or to put coins in your hat if your life has come to that!—and staying with the lie.
“How new?”
“I arrived only yesterday.”
“From a ship?”
“Yes.”
“What ship?”
Juhg panicked. If he’d been on his toes, he would have noticed the other ships in harbor yesterday. He and the Grandmagister had developed that skill while on the mainland. But yesterday, with Craugh stalking him like some great bird of prey, Juhg hadn’t even taken notice of the other ships.
“One-Eyed Peggie.” Juhg was fairly convinced that the name would mean nothing to Dusen.
“I don’t know her.”
“She’s from the north,” Juhg volunteered. “A trade ship.” And part of the time, One-Eyed Peggie was exactly that.
“Where are you from?”
Keep it simple, Juhg warned himself. “Kelloch’s Harbor. I worked as a cook.”
“A cook?”
“Yes.” Cooking was a skill that Juhg enjoyed, and one that could find him employment almost at once in any big town along the mainland.
“What brought you here?”
“I heard Imarish was a safe place to work.”
Dusen grinned at him. “So your friends thought they’d come along to watch you work?”
Swallowing hard, realizing that Dusen was more intelligent than he’d given him credit for—but who wouldn’t underestimate someone wearing rat hides?—Juhg remained silent.
Dusen handed the lantern off to one of his cronies. He placed a boot against Juhg inside the fisherman’s net and shoved.
Juhg arced out over the empty expanse, then pendulumed back and forth. His stomach revolted and a sour bubble burst at the back of his throat.
Reaching out lazily, Dusen caught the net with one hand and halted the spinning. He turned the net so his face was presented to Juhg’s.
“I smell lies, halfer,” he growled. “It’s a gift I’ve had since I was a child.” He smiled. “Now I’ve heard two stories about a halfer coming to Imarish. The first was about a halfer, an old man, an elf, a dwarven warrior, and a young black warrior that got into a fight with another group of strangers in the Garment District. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Juhg didn’t say anything. Helcun’s Second Rule of Lying advised giving no lie at all when an audience—singular or many—didn’t believe a word that was being said.
“The second story I heard was about a man named Valeithar who was willing to pay a dear price for a dweller answering your description. What do you think about that?”
“I don’t know anyone named Valeithar,” Juhg replied.
“He’s a wizard. Like your friend in the pointy hat,” Dusen said. “I’ve done business with him before. There was another halfer through here before my men and I seized this place as a base of operations. He was a redheaded dweller.”
The Grandmagister, Juhg realized.
“Moog followed him down here,” Dusen said, hooking his thumb over at a slightly built man with crooked teeth that matched his rat hide outer garments. “Found this secret passageway after that, and we’ve been using it for our smuggling operation ever since.”
Juhg’s head hurt from being suspended upside down. The men operating the boom arm showed no inclination to swing him around to put him on solid ground, or to turn him around upright.
“What,” Dusen mused, “makes a dweller so important? And what brings you down here after the other halfer was here all that time ago?”
Juhg waited, wondering if he friends were all right. He wished that the Grandmagister’s journal had warned about the smugglers, but if he hadn’t run into them, there was no way any mention of them would have been made in the encoded journal.
Dusen pushed Juhg again, swinging him precariously out over the open expanse of the water some forty feet below. The rope creaked threateningly and Juhg had sudden worries about how old the rope was and whether it had been properly cared for. Given the surroundings and the fact that the men wore rat hides, he sincerely doubted that anyone had ever thought of caring for the rope.
“If he ain’t gonna answer your questions, Dusen,” one of the other men said, “there’s no reason to keep him around here. Just be one more worthless mouth to feed.” He pulled a long knife from a scabbard at his belt, then laid the blade’s edge on the rope. A few of the strands parted.
Then the man’s head jerked back suddenly. The violet-and-white-fletched arrow stood out sharply in the lantern light for a moment, jutting from the man’s eye socket. Without a word, the dead man toppled over the edge of the second floor of the building toward the dark water below.
Jassamyn! Juhg thought. There could be no mistake about the arrow, not with those fletchings. Or about the archery. He tilted his head and looked down at the water.
Shadows moved there, and the bright green magic of Craugh’s staff as well.
Two more arrows plucked smugglers from the wall, then they moved back, snarling and cursing their unseen foe.
“To arms!” Dusen roared. “Grab those rocks and that pitch! We’ve got invaders in our midst!”
Peering through the darkness, Juhg saw that bodies floated in the water. For a moment he was afraid that they might belong to his friends; then he saw Cobner break free of the water with a bull’s roar of challenge and his battle-axe held high, somehow finding the strength to pull himself along a rope that had been anchored somewhere inside the room below. Clad in armor as he was, he would never have made the swim without the rope to guide and hasten him.
Following the line of the rope with his eyes, Juhg spotted Raisho racing up the decrepit marble stairs with his bare cutlass in one hand. A smuggler on the lower reaches struck from hiding. Raisho blocked the blade with his own, then attacked, blocking the smuggler’s sword up over the man’s head. Reaching in with his free hand, Raisho grabbed the smuggler by the shirt front, fell backward, and used his feet to propel the smuggler over the stair railing.
“Jassamyn!” Raisho velled.
Smooth as a bead of perspiration on an icicle, the elven maid turned and released an arrow at the flailing smuggler falling toward her. The shaft pierced the man’s neck and his corpse slammed limply into the water.
Cobner clanked up the stairway after Raisho.
“Cut the halfer free!” Dusen ordered. “Let his friends fend for him!”
Fear scratched at the back of Juhg’s neck as he realized Jassamyn was aiming at him. Time slowed and he saw her release the shot. The arrow zipped through the air quicker than thought. Unable to move, Juhg watched as the broadhead closed on him, then it kissed the net near his right hand, loosening the weave of the net.
Her next three shafts buried themselves in the two smugglers that jumped to do their leader’s bidding. One man fell from the second story landing, but the other pitched backward with an arrow in his belly, wounded mightily but not dead.
“Fire the pitch!” Dusen yelled.
A smuggler ran back to the campfire and picked up a flaming brand. With the angle he was at, he was safe from Jassamyn’s bow. Crossing to the barrels of pitch that other smugglers held at the ready, the man fired the barrels. Yellow flames sprang up slowly, accompanied by thick black smoke that made the spiders scurry across the huge webs on the ceiling.
“Heave!” Dusen ordered.
Smugglers shoved four of the flaming barrels of pitch over the side. Spinning and twisting, the barrels plummeted toward the water below.
“Look out!” Juhg warned.
Jassamyn took one more shot, catching a smuggler who peeked over the side. Evidently the smuggler had thought he was safe … up until the moment the arrow plunged through his head and he dropped like a child’s doll.
The flaming pitch h
it the water and submerged for an instant. Even underwater, the fire refused to go completely out, feeding on the oil. Then, since it was lighter than water, the oil spread out across the flooded lower floor. In heartbeats, the whole surface of the water was ablaze.
Jassamyn raced for the stairs just ahead of the lake of flames that sped after her. She pulled herself onto the marble stairway just before the fire reached her.
Smoke boiled up at once, turning the area below murky. The acrid stink of it burned the back of Juhg’s throat and made his eyes water. He shifted inside the net and found the weakness Jassamyn’s shot had caused. Plunging his arm through, he got purchase and began turning his body, working his head and shoulders into the hole and hoping he didn’t get stuck.
The water below was covered completely by fire. If he fell, there was a good chance he’d never survive without inhaling flames when he came up for air. And he doubted that he could swim underwater in all the confusion to reach the marble stairway where the others were. Getting back topside in the dark without knowing the way didn’t seem like a safe bet even if he could find the rope Raisho had evidently guided the others with.
Even if Juhg succeeded in his escape attempt, the first piece of The Book of Time was in this building. He’d have to return.
The smugglers threw large rocks and pieces of mortar from piles that had been stored there for that purpose. Raisho was able to avoid most of them with his quickness, but Cobner used his shield to block them away with thunderous claps.
Once his head and shoulders were through the opening Jassamyn’s arrow had made in the net, Juhg shot through the net like an eel through a mud pit, falling toward the hot flames below. He twisted and threw out a hand, just managing to hook his fingers into the net. His weight hit the end of his arm and nearly pulled him loose. Then he swung his other hand up and secured a hold.
Just as he took a deep breath, a crossbow bolt whizzed by his head, missing killing or blinding him by inches. Galvanized into action, he climbed the net like he would rigging back on One-Eyed Peggie or Windchaser. By the time he reached the boom arm, stretching tall to get it, Dusen had spotted his escape attempt.