When he returned to his room, he found a note had been slid beneath his door.
“Meet at the fish market at mid-afternoon to learn where the prison is,” Hamilton’s note was short, to-the-point, and unsigned.
Silas restlessly walked around the city during the day, until mid-afternoon, when he paced around the fish market, walking up and down the rows of displays of fish and other foodstuffs from the sea. He spotted Hamilton and felt relief that he finally would have to wait no longer to learn the information that the trader had to offer.
“So you want to see the Koch prison?” Hamilton said. He gestured for Silas to follow, as he began to move briskly through the aisles of the market.
“It’s over the crest of this small ridge, and then down in the valley behind,” Hamilton told Silas as they walked up the slight incline of a road.
“This is a very old part of town. It’s above the sea level, but not by much. There are old sewer lines through here that used to just wash everything directly out into the harbor, but they grew old – some broke or clogged, and so they’ve been abandoned and forgotten mostly,” Hamilton seemed to give Silas a peculiar and irrelevant travelogue as they walked.
The steps took them to the road’s cresting of the ridge Hamilton had mentioned, and they both breathed at a slightly elevated rate from the exercise.
There, straight ahead, the road descended again, to a level that appeared to be slightly higher than the city had been on the harbor side of the ridge, and then it appeared that the spread of buildings rose again in the distance. But before that rise occurred, Silas saw a large, dark stone building.
“Yes,” Hamilton seemed to read Silas’s mind, “that’s it.”
Silas looked at the tower. It was a tower, but not a tall one. A squat tower that jutted up from the windowless, squat Koch fortress, it didn’t impress or overwhelm. But in the other hand, it wouldn’t be easy to enter. There was a gate, but only one was evident.
“Those old sewer lines I told you about run right under that prison,” Hamilton mentioned negligently.
“Will there be anything else? I need to get back to my office – the trading world goes on,” Hamilton told Silas. “If you go to the second alley on the right, you’ll see a manhole that enters the sewer lines,” he added, then the man turned without any further interaction, and walked away.
Silas watched him for several seconds, then turned, and looked at the prison once more. It was dark and intimidating, as it glowered in the middle of the city.
He needed to know more about it. Silas strolled down the incline on the back side of the ridge, and walked on the side of the street opposite the prison. He walked slowly past the prison, his head twisting to and fro as he examined the walls of the prison – its structure, limited windows, stonework – and then looked down the alleys and at the sidewalk and up at the buildings beside his walking path, feeling like a Tracker-in-training once more, as he examined clues and noticed oddities and tried to grasp a full understanding of the environment around the prison.
At the end of the block, Silas turned the corner, and continued to circle around the prison, checking a second side of the forbidding building. He reached the end of the block, and turned left once more, starting another section of examination.
The buildings that faced the prison seemed as cheerless as the prison itself. That made sense, Silas mused, as he continued to walk and his eyes continued to record the world around him. Who could be cheerful near such an unhappy place?
Minutes later, after he finished viewing the fourth side and returned to the road that had taken him down the ridge to the prison, he decided he’d seen enough of the prison for the day. He had some ideas, and he would explore them further after nightfall.
Silas took a circuitous route back to the warehouse, exploring new neighborhoods and roads, then stopping at a small neighborhood market and buying some food stuffs that he carried back to his room. He sat at his table and ate his food and watched the sun set over the harbor in the west, until nightfall was complete.
When he was satisfied that the city had darkened, he went down the flights of warehouse steps and out into the streets. His eyes captured all the rays of light that existed, and used them to the fullest measure, allowing him to walk with confidence and surety through the empty ways of Amenozume.
He was going to explore the sewers. Hamilton had made a point of mentioning them, while mentioning very few other features of the cityscape. That seemed to indicate something; Hamilton didn’t waste words unnecessarily.
Silas had seen manhole covers in a few places, once he had begun to look for them. When he saw each one, he tried to make a mental note of its location, relative to the others he had seen, and in his mind, as he used the skills he had been taught about mapping in the Heathrin academy, and the instincts he had used while tracking in the mountains, a clear pattern emerged. There was a straight line that connected all the manholes, and that line did indeed lead directly to the prison.
He stood at the mouth of the alley that Hamilton had pointed out hours earlier, then began to carefully step off the distance down the sloping road to the prison walls, carefully estimating the length of the sewer line that extended down the hill. He counted his paces again when he walked back to the mouth of the alley, and found that the two lengths matched well enough to give him confidence in his count.
Inside the alley, he found that the manhole was a thick slab of oak, one that his wonderful knife helped him carefully lever up out of the mouth to the dark pit below, as a faint sheen of yellow and purple sparkled along the metal edge of the blade. Even his extraordinarily enhanced eyes found the darkness of the sewer daunting. And his nose wrinkled at the odor of mildew and decay that inhabited the abandoned darkness. The holy cave in the mountains had been clean and odor-free by comparison, except for the astonishing colored gasses, of course, he told himself.
He lay on his stomach, his head dipped into the opening, studying the space below for several seconds, gathering as much information as he could in the darkness, thinking of the ramifications. He heard a small sound, evidence of some rodent that lived in the space below. It was reassuring, if anything, to know that creatures could actually live down in the fetid air underground.
He heard the sound of water slowly dripping as well. There was probably more than one spot where water from the city surface leaked down into the dark, brick-line pipe, making Silas speculate about where all the collected water ran, and if it accumulated in some pool that left no air available in the closed confines of some low portion of the pipe. It was an unanswerable question for the moment, one that he would only solve by going down into the sewer.
There was no other way into the prison, short of walking up to the gate and asking the guards to let him enter.
He took his shirt off, thinking that it might stay dry, and be available to make him warmer when he returned from his first exploration of the dark world below. He placed the shirt on the large oaken lid, then sat at the lip of the manhole opening, and slid down, before he released his grip and dropped the last short gap to the bottom of the pit.
He knelt, feeling the damp, gritty floor of the sewer beneath his hands and his knees, then set himself into motion, crawling forward, counting his forward movements. He tried to keep each movement even, an exact length that he could measure in his mind. Each shuffling hand motion ahead in the darkness was one additional fraction of the number of paces he had counted on the surface above. And that was the only means of tracking his progress that he could rely on.
He traveled slowly, as he kept his head down and snuggly fit in the low, narrow pipe. Dampness was always present, but not water, while odors were always noticeable, but not gasses. The pipe interior grew so dark that even his own special sight failed to see any features around him, as he slowly inched forward, counting the downhill motions that took him closer and closer toward the prison site.
There had to be a manhole entry inside the prison, he told himself
, and he prayed to the gods that it was someplace inconspicuous. Even though Mene had assured him that there were no regular guard patrols in the prison at night, he didn’t want to tempt fate in any way.
Silas felt the slope of the pipe, as it dropped in elevation along with the surface of the city above, and after a long crawl of hundreds of motions forward, just when his calculations of distance told him he should be near the bottom of the trough in the city, he felt the angle decrease. The leveling of the pipe was good.
The sudden presence of standing water was less appealing.
Silas estimated he needed to travel the equivalent of another twenty paces to reach the walls of the prison. The water on the floor of the pipe was growing deeper with each movement of his hands forward. The knees and shins of his pants were wet as well, and he still had to move forward, realizing that even under the best of circumstances, he was going to undoubtedly get wetter and more uncomfortable.
He counted his movements carefully as he advanced. The water was deeper as he went, and by the time he reached the exterior wall of the prison, it was up to his elbows. Any place that he could discover that would let him rise to the surface, anyplace going forward, was going to be the place he would hope to use to take him into the prison.
He changed his posture, and began to move slower, using one hand to move forward, while his other hand ran along the top of the sewer. He felt the cool, rough surfaces of the bricks, and he felt the places where the bricks had crumbled away, leaving holes. His senses were tuned to finding the place where there was a void, the place where he could stand up and reach up to find another manhole cover that he could push aside.
For the first several minutes, as he inched forward, he found nothing, but then there was no longer any ceiling above, while there was a slight flow of air dropping down. And what’s more, Silas realized, as he began to painfully lift himself up, there was faint light once again.
Silas held his knife in one hand, as he bowed his back and stretched, then rubbed his knees that were numb and sore somehow at the same time. Up overhead, he saw a pair of small twinkling lights, lights that turned out to be stars, he realized.
He was looking through a grate. He was beneath a surface drain in the prison.
He stood up on his tip toes and pressed against the grate, but felt no movement, no give, no surrender to the pressure he applied. He poked his knife tip against the rim of the grate and felt it jar the metal ring. The pressure of the knife produced a popping noise, and the grate shifted slightly.
Silas pressed upward again, making the metal bars slip upwards and sideways, opening a partial space that was too narrow for him to climb through, but wide enough to show that success was possible. He pressed against the side of the grate, making it edge further open, though he winced at the sound it made, fearful that it would alert any nearby guard or observer.
Silas paused, listening for steps or sounds of speech nearby, anything that could alert him to danger before he moved irreversibly forward. There was no sound, and then a low, rolling rumble of thunder dropped from the sky.
I don’t need rain filling the sewer line, Silas thought grimly to himself. He ought to try to work quickly, to carry out his rescue before the rain started to fall and bring its unhappy consequences.
And that’s when he realized; what had begun as an act of exploration and experimentation, an effort to find and test the sewer pipe, had morphed into the actual rescue. He was going to try to set Mata free that night.
Chapter 7
Silas reached up and grabbed the edges of the open manhole, then strained his arms as he cautiously pulled himself up to look above the surface of the prison for the first time. His head rose above the ground level, and he carefully examined the environment around him.
He was on the edge of a cobbled courtyard, one whose surface sloped down towards his drain from all directions. The bulk of the courtyard was to his right, while a blank wall was just a few feet to his left. He saw no one walking, standing, or otherwise active in his field of vision.
The intruder grunted as his arms lifted him higher, so that he raised his torso above the courtyard grade, then bent onto the ground and pulled his legs free before rolling away from the drain.
He was in the prison now, truly and fully. He lay with his belly on the ground, inconspicuous in the darkness, the darkness that favored him with his enhanced eyesight. He saw four doorways leading into the court yard, one centered in each of the four walls. Two doors were extremely wide, large enough for horses and wagons, while the other two were manageably sized for the guards and prisoners to handle and use.
He craned his neck, then rolled over. The tower that he sought was behind him and overhead. He had his target and his bearings.
Once up on his knees, Silas crouched forward upon the cobblestones and went towards the smaller door that was most accessible to him. With the tower located, his mental map was clear in his mind. He knew that the main entrance to the prison, the gateway from the street, the place where the guards would be most active, was to his right, and so he headed to his left.
The door was small in comparison to the larger, vehicular door on the right, but it was heavy nonetheless, stout, reinforced oak. And it was locked.
Silas slid the blade of his extraordinary knife into the seam between the doors, and jimmied at the latch, until he heard a sharp click. With another tug, the door creaked open, making Silas wince and freeze momentarily, before he slid through the opening and into the interior of the structure.
The prison had once been a fortress, or perhaps a palace, Silas couldn’t remember clearly what the women in his room had told him the previous night. Whichever of the two options the place had once been identified as, Silas could only think of it as a prison as he slid along the interior wall away from the door.
It smelled of excrement and waste and mildew, with walls that were undressed stone and brick, of unsavory colors. There were no torches evident in the long hallway he stood in, one that appeared to run the entire length of the building.
The tower was to his left, and he began to cautiously lope forward, watching the doors that were widely placed along the hallway. They appeared to be ordinary doors, not suitable to hold captive prisoners behind them. He had never been in a prison before, and had no idea of the practices that were expected, but he guessed that captives would be behind stout, barred, locked doors. The prisoners were perhaps held higher up, above the ground level and further from any potential avenues of escape, he tried to reason.
When he reached the end of the hallway, he saw the stairs that rose upward in the tower, and he saw a flicker of light from down the intersecting hall, and then he saw two guards walking – walking towards him at no great distance.
Silas darted into the cramped corner behind the stairs, and squatted down.
“Did you see something?” one guard asked the other, his voice audible to Silas, who felt his heart pound furiously.
“Probably a rat,” the other guard dismissed the question.
“No, bigger,” the first guard insisted. They had stopped walking as they talked, far too close to Silas for his comfort.
He needed to distract them, to make them reverse course and wander away from the stairwell. He needed someone to call them back to where they had come from.
Silas could send his speech in different ways than other Wind Word Speakers. He could talk to ordinary folks, people he knew like Jade, or even Mata – his head rose as he realized he could inform her of his approach. But in the meantime, perhaps, he could send his Voice to Speak to the guards.
He didn’t know them. He had heard their voices, but he hadn’t truly clued in on them to identify them as targets for his Speaking voice, the way he could so easily attune his words to reach those he knew like Jade and Mata; the matching of his voice to his intended listener was something that seemed intuitive – he’d never been taught any such thing, for there was no one else who knew of or could do such a task.
&n
bsp; He had little sense of the guards. But perhaps, as he thought about the potential to distract them, he knew enough just from their brief exchange to find the right tone to deliver. The guard who had dismissed the first guard’s alarm, seemed complacent, perhaps even lazy, Silas judged from his tone of voice more than his words.
“Hey, guards, come back!” Silas pitched his voice to sound sharp and frightened, then aimed it at the targeted guard, making it seem to come from right next to the man’s head, if the voice was pitched correctly, while the man next to him would hear nothing at all.
The softly-spoken words left his mouth, and Silas watched as there was no reaction from the guard.
His distraction had failed. The guards still posed an obstacle, and a threat, to his success.
“Guards!” he pitched his voice again, slightly more fearfully.
“Who said that?” the other guard immediately turned in a circle, looking around.
“What?” asked Silas’s intended target.
“Did you say something?” the first guard asked the other as the man finished twisting about.
“No, you did! What did you want?”
“Help, back here!” Silas reprised the voice that had worked so well.
Both guards turned to look back along the corridor they had traveled, then simultaneously looked at each other.
“What’s going on?” asked the first to speak.
“I heard that as clear as if you said it to me,” his colleague replied.
“But I didn’t say it!” the first replied.
“Stop fighting! Help me!” Silas tried to keep frustration out of his finely tuned voice, as he waited for the two ineffective guards to do something.
The Pearl Diver Page 5
