that ruined ship.
'I'm not sticking around for that,' I said. Wilson agreed. Panic had a firm handle on those men. Panic and fear, and a deep belief that such things could be handled with firearms. I shucked my blanket and crept to the side of the barge, out of sight of the docks. When we were good and close, Wilson and I slipped into the water and started to swim.
Tough thing to do, to slip into that cold, black water after what we had just been through. All the way in I kept imagining dead fingers slipping around my legs, kept seeing bloated faces just beneath me in the water. I fought the urge to go straight in. We swam to one of the burned-out wrecks that were tied down just beyond the docks. The water around them was thick with ash and wreckage. Stopped long to rest our lungs, refusing to look down into the water, our arms draped over the charred remains of a barrel.
By then our raft was taking on agents of the Badge. They came out in tiny boats, yelling at the captain through bullhorns and bristling with longrifles. I waited until they were fully occupied with the boarding process before I nodded to Wilson and pushed off towards the docks.
One of the tricks to the Ebd-side harbor has to do with its inlets. The Ebd feeds into the much larger Reine, providing ship access to both rivers. Smaller vessels from the outer provinces travel the Ebd to where it meets the Reine, then transfer their cargo to one of the huge rafts that ply the wider river.
This meant a lot of cranes, and not just cranes but towering monsters that lived out in the water so the Ebd boats could pull right up next to the Reine-bound rafts and have their cargo offloaded directly to the larger vessels. This meant that the Ebd-side harbor was an archipelago of cranes and drawbridges and iron towers, an infinitely permeable system of platforms and docks. Quarantine depended on the goodwill of the ship captains, rather than the iron rule of the Badge. We didn't have to go far before we found a crane tower that had been abandoned in the excitement, and hauled ourselves up to its covered platform. The iron belly of the engine was still warm. Wilson huddled next to it, his thin arms shivering against his ribs.
'We can't stay here,' he said. I nodded and stripped off, laying my shirt and pants across the warm shell of the engine. He grimaced impatiently. 'Jacob, the men on that boat know our names. The Badge is going to ask questions, and then they're going to notice that we're not around. They're going to figure out that we slipped off before they boarded.'
'That they are,' I said. There was a stack of fire blankets by the engine, for smothering embers. I unfolded one and tossed it to Wilson, then wrapped myself in another and sat on the other end of the engine, my back against the metal.
We sat quietly for a while. Steam from my clothes mixed with the fog that curled across the platform. We lost sight of the raft, but could still hear the voices of the Badge. Other horns sounded in the distance as ships came in to dock and were quarantined.
'What do you think is going on out there?' Wilson asked quietly, after about twenty minutes. The fog was starting to burn away.
'I think our little event wasn't isolated. I think that whatever happened to the Fehn, it happened to a lot of them. I'm guessing lots of boats went through what we went through.' I turned to Wilson and sighed. 'And I'm guessing a lot of them didn't make it out.'
'If it was all the Fehn, everywhere,' Wilson scratched his eye and peered out at the ghosts of other towers and ships that were finally becoming visible. 'That means a lot more than just the river. There are Fehn in the cisterns, in the canals. They're all through the lower city.'
'Yeah. Which means the Badge has a lot on its plate right now.' I stood up and peeled my clothes off the engine. They were warm and stiff. 'It's going to be a while before they start asking questions.'
'Not forever, though.'
'Nope. They'll come looking for us, eventually.' I finished dressing and shook the last numbness out of my fingers. 'So let's go find some answers, before they ask them.'
It was worse than we imagined, out on the crane. There was a collapsible raft in the emergency cabinet of the tower. The seals had gone rotten, so our boots got wet on the way in, but it didn't sink until we were safely on dry land. No one saw us make shore because they had other things on their mind. Lower Veridon was in chaos.
Veridon is a city of terraces. The old city sits in stony quiet at the top of the delta, draped in gentle waterfalls and ancient canals. The canals travel the whole length of the delta in a series of locks or decorative waterfalls, sometimes disappearing into cisterns or underground rivers and pipes, until they finally feed into one of the city's three rivers. The Reine itself continues into parts of the city, where the streets are built up over stone arches. Many of the homes in Lower Veridon have private docks in their basements that lead to some tributary of the Reine or Ebd.
When the Fehn rose from the water, their bloated hands suddenly violent, those private docks became gates into the city. The monsters tore their way through living rooms and formal dens to spill out into the streets. The result was horror, evenly spread throughout the Lower City.
We climbed out of the river about half a mile from where the raft was quarantined. Wilson looked terrible, between the fight and the soaking we had taken. I couldn't look much better. But the streets were crowded with panicked citizens, flushed from their houses by fear of their own basements, all of them in various states of dress and injury. Some had been in fights, some had just woken up when the screaming started. All of them were very nervous.
'Right out of the basement,' one man whispered to his neighbor. 'Just right through the door like it wasn't there. Molly dropped her breakfast and started screaming. It was the screaming that snapped me out of it.'
'Godsbless the Badge, though,' the woman I assumed was Molly said, standing nearby. 'Godsbless them. If they hadn't come in the front door I don't know if we would've made it out.'
'To hell with the Badge,' her husband answered. 'If I hadn't cleaned and loaded the hunting rifle that morning, we'd still be in there. Bleeding to death.'
'You won't talk like that in front of the children, Howard, you won't!' The woman was nearly in tears. She had blood on her face and hands. I didn't see any children. 'If the Badge hadn't come in when they did…'
We moved on. Similar conversations were happening everywhere. Lots of folks were armed. The whispering quickly became an angry murmur. For all that people were willing to bless or curse the Badge, there didn't seem to be any officers around to hear it. No one here but citizens.
'This could get nasty,' Wilson said. 'If even one of our drowned friends stumbles into this crowd.'
'Yeah. Nothing like panic to make everything infinitely worse. Come on.'
We left the crowd behind. There were others like it, mobs of nervous fathers and mothers standing in their morning clothes, clutching brooms and shotguns and peering nervously at their own houses like they were seeing a nightmare. Which they probably were.
'You there!' someone hailed us. 'You! What have you seen of the river?'
Hard to deny we hadn't been near the river that morning, not in our state. I turned to see who was talking. A very proper man, improperly dressed. He was unarmed, but the crowd behind him was bristling with antique hunting rifles and polo mallets. We had moved into a more expensive neighborhood, then.
'Hard to say, in the fog. Something's happened, though. What about here?'
'Bloody Fehn, trying to take over the city. We've killed a dozen here.' He nodded over his shoulder and the crowd murmured. 'The dead stay dead on Barling Street.'
'Heard much from the rest of the city?' I asked.
'No. Folks are staying to their own. Badge is a damn mess, running around. Never around when you need them, but always there when you don't.' He didn't seem like the kind of man to get into the kind of trouble where he wouldn't want the Badge around. I smiled, and he took it for agreement. 'What district are you from? Where are you headed?'
'Just trying to get away from the river. Think I might head up, maybe to the Torch.'
Before he could answer there was a shout from the crowd, and then a shot. I ducked and looked behind me.
One of the Fehn, the legitimate Fehn, his skin gray and soft, was creeping out of an alleyway. He turned toward us, startled, then disappeared.
'After him, boys!' the proper gentleman yelled, like a master at the hunt. The crowd whooped and gave
