The Ways of Khrem

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  The old artist looked up at my approach and stood to greet me.

  He lived only a couple of houses up the hill from me, and we had met a few times to discuss a possible mural on my dining room wall. He seemed a pleasant old duff, who watched his fellow man at an amused distance. Due to the curve of our road, I could see his back patio from my own, and spied him enjoying the view as I did on many occasions. We often raised cups of hot klavet to each other from our respective outdoor seats in the morning.

  I always wondered how he would take it if he knew I used to make some good money in my younger days by stealing his works from wealthy patrons and selling them to certain private collectors.

  “Ah, Master Cargill,” he said with a solemnity appropriate to the occasion, “have you met Harlo Solitos? It’s a pity I have to introduce you under such circumstances.” He gestured to where the exhausted man in question sat on one of the benches.

  Harlo Solitos cut a classic picture of despair.

  His curly black hair and great mustache were soaked in sweat, his sleeves filthy from what must have been a frantic effort at digging in the hole the servants now labored within. After probably pushing himself to the point of dropping, he stared at the ground from his place on the bench as if trying to summon some miracle by pure force of will…a stage I have seen other men reach when all other options have failed, but giving up is just not an option open to consideration.

  I had no desire to intrude on him at a time like this.

  “Perhaps another time,” Handell demurred, as if reading my mind. With a nod of his head, he gestured for me to follow him away from the group. I followed him with both gratitude and relief.

  “Is there any hope left for the boy?” I asked quietly.

  “It’s fading,” the old artist muttered. “He fell down there a few hours back, right in front of his mother, who had let him outside to play in between the showers of rain. Apparently, the ground just crumbled beneath him. They could hear him crying and calling for help, but he must have slid again because they heard him scream and then he sounded a lot farther away.”

  “That poor boy!” I meant it, too.

  “They think it might be an old well since the boy said he fell into water, but they also said he claimed to have crawled out onto a ledge of some kind, so I don’t know what it is. Regardless, they’ve been hearing less and less from him. There are a lot of reasons why that might be, and none of them are good. It’s been almost an hour since they heard him last.”

  I nodded. Wet, cold and underground did not add up to a recipe for surviving very long—especially for a child. I probably knew more on that particular subject than anybody here. The heavy gray gloom of the day couldn’t be a more appropriate setting for these proceedings.

  This would probably not end well, if it wasn’t over already.

  We wandered over to where the servants were digging, and out of morbid curiosity I looked down into the hole they were expanding.

  They had dug a rather sizeable and deep shaft through difficult and stony ground, but I could see things were about to go from bad to worse. The top of the bedrock showed through the soil at the bottom of the hole, and the ring of their spades confirmed it. They could continue on if they found some picks, but all meaningful progress would be coming to a halt…and with it, any last hopes of the boy’s survival.

  The two men pulled themselves out of the hole and went in search of picks, leaving Handell and I staring gloomily down into the earth.

  The smell of wet soil rose from the cavity, uncomfortably reminiscent of a grave—which, I guess, is what it had really turned out to be. Only this grave hadn’t waited like others did; rather, it opened up on its own volition and engulfed a small boy playing in his garden. I wondered what the odds were of the parents being able to retrieve the body, or if they would just end up filling in the hole and putting a grave marker over it.

  There existed a limit to what a couple of workers could do, even with picks.

  I absentmindedly studied the smaller hole at the bottom of the pit that swallowed the child. It was a rotten way for a kid to leave this world. Dirt and roots framed the black orifice, liked cracked lips on a Turbruckian idol.

  I frowned and squinted at the hole.

  It did look like the mouth of a Turbruckian idol…as in it had a certain rectangular quality to it. Another couple of seconds of examination and I started to get a sneaking suspicion about what I was looking at.

  “Handell,” I muttered, “I want to get a better look at that hole. Let me know if those workers are coming back, so I won’t be in their way.”

  When he didn’t object, I sat down on the edge and dropped down into the pit.

  Crouching on the muddy bottom, I straddled the hole and peered at it from several different angles. Putting my arm in up to my elbow, I ran my hand along the sides, brushing away bits of dirt and lodged rock. After a moment of such activity, my suspicions were confirmed.

  This wasn’t a hole—it was an ancient shaft; a rectangular tunnel carved down through the bedrock.

  And that changed everything.

  As I stared down into the blackness of the narrow little abyss I realized, with a gut-sinking feeling, that I now faced a terrible decision.

  Chapter Three

  “A hero is often heard to say that he only did what anybody would do. This of course, is patently untrue. Others are heard to say that they just did what they had to do. This is often truer than they knew. They are simply remembered because they did it well.” — Vahndall’s Defense of the Second Wall

  This is none of your business.

  I knew this voice well. It was the voice of my former life, the voice of Mr. Chance. It was a voice that had kept me alive in some of the most insane and brutal circumstances imaginable.

  “He could still be alive,” I whispered as I gazed down into the small pit. “He could be down there right now, dying all alone.”

  Maybe. Or maybe not. He’s more than likely already dead, and this isn’t your problem anyway. The voice in my head spoke with all the authority of three decades of hard earned experience and ruthless practicality. You don’t need to be calling attention to yourself.

  “He’s just a kid.”

  You’ve seen kids die before. A lot of them, and sometimes it was nearly you. Did any of these people lift a finger to help you then?

  I had no answer to that.

  Remember Little Mol?

  How could I forget…the first loss of the small tribe of orphans I once led.

  Only four years old and he froze to death in his sick sister’s lap. Where were these people when we needed them? And then, his sister begging that member of the Silent March to take her with him, when he came to collect her brother? Remember that? Where were these people then?

  Kela had followed the monk down the alley, coughing and crying for him to take her with him, begging him to just wait a little longer so she could die with a grown up around.

  She had been only six.

  You don’t owe these people anything, the inner voice persisted.

  And in truth, I didn’t. I didn’t know them, and if they knew me for who I really was, they would cheerfully ask the Watch to take me in and hang me at the next convenient spot on their calendar. They would probably even pack a picnic lunch for the event. I had nothing in common with them. I was completely different.

  And yet, because of those differences, I could possibly be the one man who could save the boy down in that hole…

  …if he still lived.

  I needed to know.

  “Handell,” I called as I stood and looked up at the old painter. “Do you have any canvas with you? Or some other kind of stiff material I could bend and roll?”

  I expected a bunch of questions, but he surprised me by springing to action without the slightest hesitation.

  “Let me check,” he replied with raised eyebrows. “I’ll be right back.”

  I watched him leave, and then turned back to consider
the small hole at my feet. More exploration with my hands revealed the walls to be cut stone, packed with dirt and debris, and held by roots grown in over the centuries. It made the passage narrower than it had initially been, but still wide enough for the boy to slip through.

  And if the dirt and rock were removed from the sides, perhaps a certain smallish former thief who had experience working in tight places could work his way down there, as well.

  But work his way down to where?

  And why?

  One does not lightly decide to go underground in Khrem. Underneath the city stretched a vast network of catacombs, tunnels, chambers and caverns known as the Undercity, a subterranean labyrinth containing its own ecology of predators and nightmarish creatures. In my younger days, I had ventured into the Undercity several times, and almost every time I ended up watching somebody die horribly.

  And in every case, it could have just as easily been me.

  So prudence demanded caution.

  But, on the other hand, not every hole led to the Undercity. As a matter of fact, most did not. And since the boy reported falling into water, in a hole this high up the hill I figured we were just dealing with an old cistern that had been abandoned and sealed when the aqueduct reached Klyburn Hill.

  Still, the voice in the back of my head pleaded for me to crawl out of the pit and go home before I brought a bunch of attention on myself that I might later regret—and the voice was making a lot of sense. Throwing caution to the wind was uncharacteristic of me, and if I didn’t stop soon I would be standing dead center in a drama involving the whole neighborhood. It would be too late to hide.

  I was just thinking up an excuse for exiting the hole and going home when Handell interrupted me.

  “Will this work?” he asked.

  I looked up to see the old artist holding a two-foot square piece of leather. Behind him, the workers stood with picks over their shoulders, looking cross at finding their workplace occupied.

  Oh well, I had committed myself this far. One little experiment wouldn’t hurt.

  “Yeah,” I answered as I took the proffered item and examined it. “Do you know what name the boy answers to?”

  “His parents called him Hollee,” one of the pick wielders replied.

  I motioned for the worker to wait, rolled the leather into a cone, and bent down to the shaft.

  “Holleeee!” I shouted down the hole. “Can you hear me?”

  I put the small end of the cone to my ear and the large end down the shaft. Waving at the people above to be quiet, I stilled my mind and focused my entire concentration on hearing. I learned this trick listening for the soft snores of the owners of houses I “visited” in the past, or the small movements made by guards who might be stationed around the corner in some of the richer establishments.

  For a moment, nothing came back but silence…but then I heard it.

  Just a faint whimpering, barely there, with a “daddy” and a “help” mixed in. He must have been exhausted, cold and close to giving up hope of anything but a lonely death down there in the dark. Everybody he loved and counted on to fix things had been cut off from him, and this time they couldn’t come and make it right. I could only imagine how scared he must have been. But he was still alive…

  …and I intended to see he remained that way.

  Yes, long ago I watched most of my childhood companions die, and many of them died badly. But as I heard that faint whimper, I understood why this time was different. I was no longer helpless and scared, like many of those other times.

  This time a little boy lay dying somewhere in the darkness below me, and I didn’t have to let that happen.

  “Handell, I need you to hurry out to the front of the house and get Grabel for me. Tell him not to wait on you, but to run back here to me.”

  As he hurried from the pit, I turned to the two servants leaning on their picks.

  “You,” I pointed at the younger of the two, “go into the house and see if they have any lard in their storage room. I will also need a hand spade like they use on these flowerbeds. And all the rope you can find. A candle will be helpful, too.”

  I went back to pulling stones and roots out of the shaft as fast as I could. Taking one of the rounder rocks, I held it over the center of the shaft and let it fall. Putting my ear to the hole, I heard it bounce a couple of times, then a pause, followed by a splash.

  Exactly what I thought.

  “Hollee!” I shouted down into the dark. “Hold on! I’m going to try and get you soon. I just want you to sit up and rub your arms real fast, okay?”

  At the sound of Grabel clearing his throat above me, I stood up from the shaft.

  “Grabel,” I ordered, “go get one of those coachmen out front to run you back up to my house. Pay him, if you have to, and I will reimburse you. Go down into the basement and get those coils of rope the workmen who repaired the house left behind. Yes, all of them. And then go into the back corner of the basement and open that chest under the basket of scroll cases. I need the lanterns in there, along with the cloth gloves with the leather palms and fastenings around the wrist. Hurry man!”

  For the first time in my life, I saw Grabel move faster than a stately walk. At any other time I would have stopped and watched his hasty departure just for the novelty of it, but time was of the essence so I turned my attention back to the men standing around the pit.

  “Until they get back, I am going to need a long pole or metal bar.”

  Someone produced a gardening hoe.

  With a shrug, I accepted the tool and turned my attention back to the shaft. Sharp, quick thrusts of the hoe dislodged more rocks and dirt, sending them tumbling down into the darkness. I knew the boy did not lie directly underneath the shaft, so I felt free to knock things loose with gusto. I could hear the faint splashing of falling debris hitting the water in the blackness beneath me, and hoped the sound gave the boy some hope that rescue approached.

  “Oh gods! You wonderful man!”

  The shout shattered the gloom. Alarmed, I stood up in time to see Venita Solitos hurrying out the back door and rushing toward the pit.

  She had the servant I sent back into the house in tow, loaded down with what appeared to be a large urn of lard. He also carried a coil of rope over one shoulder. She parted the crowd like a cargo ship sailing through a paddling flock of ducks, before heaving to a stop at the edge of the hole.

  “Oh, thank the gods for you, sir! May Harib light your ways and bless you with eternal warmth in your soul. You are a true man amongst men. Thank you so much for saving my little boy!”

  Completely taken aback, I didn’t know what to say.

  I wasn’t prepared for this. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for this moment. Nothing. Nobody in my entire life had ever lavished praise on me in such a way before, and I simply didn’t know how to respond.

  These were the kinds of words said to other people, not me.

  I wanted to tell her I hadn’t done anything yet, that there were no guarantees this would work. But those words died unspoken when I saw the look of determined hope on her plain face.

  After this much time, she had likely been told she might have to “accept the inevitable” and that “options were running out.” And from the look on her face in the room earlier, she knew full well what it meant and had already started grieving…and then I showed up out of nowhere, giving orders and making preparations to go down into the hole.

  She had no way to know that nobody else here had both the skills and physique to do what I was about to attempt. She only saw a hero stepping up where all the other men had failed—and that resulted in me being the recipient of a lot more attention, from a lot of people, than I felt comfortable with.

  That little voice in the back of my head had already started doing a sing-song “I tooold you soooo!”

  Intimidated by the praise, the blessings, and all the attention she continued heaping on my head, I found myself at a loss for words and settled for giv
ing her a short bow and returning to the business at hand.

  I directed the Solitos servant to put down the lard and to tie one end of the rope he carried to the trunk of a nearby poplar. Then I had him hand me the other end of the line, which I started feeding down the hole. I continued to feed it down the hole until the coil ran out and the rope ran straight from the tree to the shaft. Looking up, I asked one of the onlookers to go fetch me a piece of charcoal. When he returned, I marked the length of hemp at the point it entered the shaft and then started pulling the rope up again.

  The crowd above me broke into a confused murmur.

  “What I’m doing,” I explained, “is measuring the distance from the top of the hole to the water below. When I get to the part where the rope has been wetted, I will mark it there, too. Then we will stretch out the rope and measure the distance. Those two marks will tell us how far down the surface of the water is, and will help me plan my next move.”

  This quieted the crowd, and a couple of them eagerly assisted in pulling up the rope and stretching it out to pace off the measurement. They were in the middle of this when Grabel returned from my house with the rope and gear I requested he retrieve.

  There were several other items I could have used from my basement, but they would have raised uncomfortable questions too hard to explain away. On the other hand, it took no effort to explain owning rope, lanterns, and gloves…even if the lanterns and gloves were a little unusual.

  The gloves were of rough Teigrin silk with palms made from the skin of a Hessellian Stonedrake. They were light, extremely tough, and provided a grip that wouldn’t slip on the smoothest of surfaces.

  Close examination would have revealed the lanterns to be unusual, too. They were made of high-grade blued steel, and featured several other anomalies which set them apart from normal lanterns. They were designed to not spill oil from their reservoirs if tipped over, and their glass was protected by a cage of thicker than normal gauge wire. And then there was the fact of their sturdy overall construction, like handles that could support my entire weight if need be.