“You’ll make an explorer yet, Mr Pezzini,” Lawrence murmured. They paddled and poled in and out of the islands for several hundred yards, progressing into more sheltered waters.
Lawrence froze, turning his head this way and that.
“Do you hear that?”
“A kind of pulsing,” Pezzini said, frowning.
“It’s a motor boat with a heavy oil engine.”
Pezzini stared at him, awaiting orders. The main channel of this inland estuary was now out of sight beyond islands—although that was only by the matter of ten minutes’ poling. A determined search by a motor launch could cover all the byways amongst these islands in half an hour. With one ear to the thud-thud-thudding of the oil engine, Lawrence scanned about. The islands around them were more sheltered and therefore better covered with vegetation. The water was shallower, which would hinder the launch if it came nosing this way. It was all a matter of buying an hour here, an hour there. He pointed towards an island about a hundred yards off. It was small, steeper than most others, with a thatch of evergreen rhododendron trees.
“That one. Don’t go mad, just keep it steady. Falling in won’t speed us up. The launch is going away upstream.”
True enough, the sound was fading to the south. Pezzini copied Lawrence in sinking his pole and dragging it back, sinking and dragging. They curved around one end of the island to discover the shell of a ruined brick house cosy amid the bushes, overlooking a flattish gravel beach. Lawrence extracted a final burst of effort from his comrade to roll the raft like a square wheel up and out of sight in the foliage. After which, they hid and sagged limp. Pezzini dropped straight off into the sleep of the utterly spent. Lawrence tried to stay awake but was gone without even being aware of it.
*
When Lawrence awoke, he lay for a while listening. All was quiet. His hands and feet were numb and he was still soaked through. There was a biting edge to the wind he had not noticed earlier. He wrung out his socks and pulled his boots on.
The falling tide had drawn away all the water. Now the islands appeared as hairy warts on a grey hide. This removed all hazard of the roaming motor launch. There were plenty of other dangers; they faced a long November night without food. Fed, they could probably survive even a cold night if they made a burrow to benefit from mutual bodily warmth. Without food, they just did not have much time.
“Are you awake, Pezzini?” he murmured.
“Mmmph.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Tired. Cold. Hungry.”
The big, bureaucratic lump needed distraction from his miseries.
“You never told me what Tom Krossington fogged you for.”
Lawrence only half-listened to the response, whilst he balanced dangers to think through their next actions. It was out of the question to move over the open mud in daylight—their survival on the open water that morning was probably explained by the ultramarines having been taken off guard by value stealing a section of pier as a makeshift raft. The arrival of the launch in this inland estuary confirmed the ultramarines were now fully awake. However, moving at night meant blundering about amongst all these islands. Some areas of mud out there looked pretty soft—disappearing into a mud pool in the darkness was not a death worth dying. All Lawrence could hope for was some moonlight and a steady wind to guide them.
“I was never charged,” Pezzini said. “Two General Wardian officers came to my office and asked me to meet with their intelligence officer. I was more curious than alarmed, until they locked me up in a barracks. Then I was taken by windowless carriage on a long, long trip up hill and down dale, until eventually I was put in the hold of that barge. I believe this was at the Port of Erith on the Thames Estuary. It was there I encountered that disgraceful little degenerate Gnevik. You joined us later at a different port. We passed days saying nothing to each other. I still believed it was all some monstrous mistake and it would be put right. Then weeks later The Captain offered me a career move and I realised there had been no mistake.”
“You must have done something… How can I put it? Annoying.”
“Apparently, curiosity is a major crime,” Pezzini said.
“It’s a capital offence in this world.”
Lawrence was thinking about times now. High tide would be around half past eleven or midnight. Of course, this inland estuary would be out of synchrony with the tides due to the delay in filling up the channel and the estuary itself. Probably the lag was as much as an hour, or longer. Certainly they had to be off the mud long before high tide. He guessed they could roam the mud as late as mid-tide. That gave them until ten o’clock, or about five hours after nightfall, in which time they could put another ten or twelve miles behind them. Then again, they might get lost and go around in circles… He pushed the thought from his mind.
Pezzini had been rambling about having built up a private spy network, all completely independent of the Castle Krossington intelligence service. He merely wished to pursue his curiosity about the pattern of surplus flow in the drains of the south of England.
Pezzini continued: “As you know, surplus flow is counted at orifice plates in the public drains, all the major lands have them. Normally the results are kept within each land. I used my network to collect information from a wide region so that I could build up a greater picture—a surplus flow model covering the whole south of England. I don’t believe anyone has ever done such a thing. What I found was strange. Surplus was vanishing into thin air at Chatham, Erith and other south-east ports. When my duties took me through those ports, I observed that
