rose before his eyes. He got an arm around her shoulders but could not gain a solid purchase. No one answered their cries.
Eyil slipped down even farther, her nails raking the flesh of his hips.
“Oh-! Help me, Harsan!”
Her body threshed and bucked, and he could hear her nails rasping at the slime-slick walls. Her tangled hair whipped and coiled at his thighs as she flung her head to and fro. Harsan groped for her wrists, touched her head and shoulders but could not hold her. Now Eyil’s nails drew blood from his calves. Then her hands were pulled away entirely, and her screams dwindled into the blind darkness below.
Then they stopped.
Hard, clawlike fingers seized his own ankle. Harsan bellowed, humped up against the ceiling to keep from sliding, elbows and knees splayed out against the walls. Nothing availed. Slowly he slithered down along the mucky floor of their cell. Spikes of pain drove into his fingers, and he knew that his own nails were broken and bloody. The taste of fear gagged in his throat, and he threw back his head to yell again.
A voice from below hissed, “If you would only quit howling, priest, I could tell you that we are friends. Can you not hear me?”
Amazement choked him. Before he could collect his wits, the hands upon his ankles dragged him tumbling down through the opening at the foot of the cell to sprawl in slimy, stinking water.
More hands gripped him, pulled him to his feet. Bodies bumped against his. Someone swore fervently in the rude language of the gutters.
“Cha! How these two smell!”
“As you will for a month, after we’re all free of this!” another, higher voice answered. “No lights yet, not till we’re out of these sewers.”
“Eyil?” Harsan rasped. He heard ragged weeping near him and reached out. Her body came trembling into his arms, and relief swept over him.
“She’s all right, priest; just frightened,” a third, hoarse voice said. “If you’d heard us calling when we opened the grate, you’d have known we were no corpses from the pits!”
“We must have been asleep-”
“No matter now. Come, watch your head. This place is just high enough to stand. It’s used to carry off the sewage and remove the dead from the Chalices. Say no more as we pass below the other cells, or we’ll have all the other customers belling in chorus as well.”
Someone said something reassuring to Eyil, a smaller, lighter man by his tone. Guiding hands pulled Harsan around and led him splashing and stumbling along the narrow tunnel. Life returned to his legs in a numbing tingle.
Metal clanked against stone as somebody replaced the grating at the foot of their cell.
They proceeded a hundred paces or so along a black passageway. Then his unseen pilot helped him find the entrance to a winding stair that spiralled up to emerge into a larger tunnel.
“A light, let’s have a light,” a voice complained.
They halted, and a luminous blue sphere appeared from a pouch or sack. In its nacreous azure glow Harsan had his first look at their liberators.
There were three men. One wore the leather harness and brown livery of the Legion of Ketl, a grizzled older man, as thick as a Chlen — beast through the shoulders. The second was smaller, with a lined, bitter, big-nosed face. He was attired only in a frayed breechclout like that of a labourer or dockworker. The third man was young and whip-thin, with the indefinable air of a marketplace dandy about him. He had a sword slung in a leather baldric at his waist and a pleated kilt that might have started the day clean.
Yet it was not upon these that Harsan’s gaze lingered but upon the fourth member of the party, he who held the blue-glowing sphere.
It was a Pe Choi-a male, all gleaming black chitin!
“Chtik p’Qwe-” Harsan cried. But it was not his friend. Eyes that glinted with their own inner scarlet fires looked back at him in puzzlement. “No-you are not he. I–I took you for another…”
“Through here-to the river gate,” the soldier said gruffly.
“As riddled with tunnels as a tree full of O. w-beetles!” the small man growled. He must be from somewhere in the north; the beetle he named did not favour these hot southern climes.
“Come,” the soldier replied, “we must be out of here before I am missed. The watch changes at dawn, and some poke-nosed guard may wander in here to piss before breakfast.”
“You are of the temple of Thumis?” Eyil addressed the younger man, he with the sword.
He looked her raffishly up and down, let his gaze linger upon her nudity. “Not so, my Lady. Let us say only that we dance to the same measure in this endeavour.”
Harsan drew abreast of the Pe Choi. “Do you know one Chtik p’Qwe,” he asked, “a Scholar Priest in the temple of Ketengku? I seek news of him. ’ ’
The other shrugged, his small upper limbs pressed tight against his gleaming black thorax. “I have only heard his name.” The accent was oddly foreign and bore an uncharacteristic lilt. This Pe Choi was not from Do Chaka then-perhaps some place beyond the Mu’ugalavyani frontier to the west?
Harsan tried again. “We would know who you are. And whom you serve.”
“My identity is of no import. What matters is that you and the girl be delivered safely to Purdimal-to friends there.” The creature put out one of his middle pair of limbs to steady himself. “You must leave the city tonight.”
Something pricked at Harsan’s mind, but he could not think what it was. Could this be some charade of Prince Dhich’une’s, meant to coax him into easy collaboration? He had to know. He spoke again, this time in the Pe Choi tongue:
“Some currents lead not to the shore but out into the whirlpool. Tell me at least the name of him who sent you.”
The Pe Choi did not reply but only opened its long, lipless mouth in an imitation of a human smile.
The young swordsman came forward and hissed, “No more talk! Time for that later.”
The tunnel ended at a corroded metal door. This stood ajar, and Harsan smelled the cold, yet gloriously free, odour of the river. Beyond, a flight of steps led down to a ledge. A boat was made fast there to a green-crusted bronze ring, rocking and chuckling gently upon black water. The burly guard went down first, followed by the Pe Choi, then Harsan and Eyil. The hard-faced little man and the swordsman brought up the rear.
“Hand down the girl first,” the soldier called up. “Better for balance. Past this cavern is the river gate; then we’re out. The watchman there is my man.”
Eyil pressed close to him upon the stair. “Know you these people?” she whispered. “They are none of ours.”
There was time only to shake his head. The Pe Choi stood aside to let her by, then shifted the blue sphere from one of his central pair of hands to the other in order to help Harsan.
There was something strange about this gesture. Harsan stopped, and the bitter-faced man behind bumped into him.
“Why,” Harsan asked in the Pe Choi tongue, “do you never use your uppermost limbs? Do you suffer a paralysis? Never was it the custom of your people to assist a friend only with your Fge-hands-your middle limbs!”
The creature hesitated, then turned away muttering something.
“Your nest contains despicable chewers of K’nekw- bark,” Harsan added conversationally in the same language. He switched to Tsolyani: “Do you not agree?”
“He knows, master!” the man behind him cried. And flung himself down upon Harsan striving to pinion his arms.
The attack was not unexpected. Harsan stooped and let the fellow lunge right over his back to tumble into the Pe Choi. The blue orb spun free and bounced out onto the ledge. The creature scrambled after it shouting words in a harsh, breathy tongue Harsan did not recognise. A slithering noise on the stair behind warned him that the swordsman had drawn his weapon. He yelled and heard Eyil’s answering cry in return. A string of oaths, a splash, and a barking scream told him that she must have got in a surprise blow against the prison guard.
He had no clear idea what to do; only a determination not to be taken alive for more of Prince Dhich’une’s
