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Porland’s eyes were but pinpricks of light as he stepped back into the dark alley. Watchmen hurried past, oblivious to him, their hastily bound armour clanging and rattling and jingling like a giants jewellery on a scrawny child and he watched their passing with unblinking interest.
His breathing was quick and loud. A give away any other night but tonight the city watch had problems. Big problems.
Slowly he made his way to the neck of the alley and turned his head first to the left and then to the right. Happy he could move undetected he took a step out from the alley and hurried across the street.
Porland had made it all the way from Apple Street to Walled District. He was tired with the panic and the exertion of the flight but he’d made it, Lawskin too.
They took back ways, secret ways, to Kane’s bakery, checking over the shoulder at every opportunity, fearing the Turned that had moments earlier come smashing through the walls of the Old Quarter. It’d killed a lot of watchmen. It was terrible and Porland couldn’t help but think about it.
They moved quickly to the rear of the bakery but, before rapping a code on the door, Porland cocked an ear to the night. “Do you hear it?” he hissed and Lawskin looked frightened and confused and didn’t know what to say.
It was quiet in this new part of the city as residents were unaware of the terrible thing that had broken into Old Quarter.
Porland strained harder to make any sound out. “I can hear it,” he finally admitted, for when he stood still and held his breath and focused hard on nothing, faint sounds, cries, carried on the still city air and he shivered with fear. “It’s like the wail a child would make. It turns my guts.”
“I feel sick,” said Lawskin rubbing his own.
Porland tapped twice then once then twice more and the reinforced bakery door swung open immediately. “Make way,” he blustered, pushing the hunchbacked doorkeeper aside. “We’ve got to see Mister Kane.”
They took some steps down into a network of narrow corridors, torch lit and reeking with the suffocating stench of pitch and flame. “We’ve got to see Mister Kane,” Porland repeated and all the time he demanded to see Maver Kane he and Lawskin were being led by those higher up in Kane’s administration; cowled men with quick lithe bodies and jittery, spidery movements. These were thieves that had proven their skill and were valued members of Kane’s brotherhood. Porland and Lawskin had yet to prove their worth.
“What is it, Porland? Have you found where the Blade is?” asked one of them. He was a hooded man with a big nose and he held a lamp up head height that blinded Porland whenever he half-turned to make conversation.
“No, but we have a more immediate problem,” Porland replied, blinking rapidly.
Buck toothed Millet appeared from nowhere. He had a cruel shaped hatchet looped through his belt and another fixed to a baldric around his shoulders. He beckoned Porland and Lawskin with both hands. “Kane’ll see you now.”
“Where are you taking us?”
“To Kane.”
They were taken down another level, down seven smooth and slippery steps. Interest in them both waned quickly and the following numbers bored and broke away and save for Millet they were soon alone.
“This is where you brought Ordesky,” Porland recognised this part of the hideout.
The damp tunnel ended with a door. Millet removed the bar and leant it against a wet wall then gestured for Porland and Lawskin to go through. They hesitated.
“Go on. Kane wants to see you.”
“Can’t we see him later?”
“You said we have a more immediate problem, Porland. I think you should tell him exactly what it is, don’t you?”
This was ominous. The tone in Millet’s voice, the uncertainty of what waited for them in the room Ordesky had been tortured in, the sudden lack of witnesses. “Yeah, but maybe it could wait.”
Millet shook his head. “No,” he said assertively. “It couldn’t.”
It was cold in the room, colder than the torch lined corridors and tunnels they had moved through to get to here, and the sweat on Porland’s face tingled. It was dark too. A traveller’s lamp hung from a crossbeam, its tangerine light highlighting shadow and depth and a drain cover askew in the middle of the floor. There was a length of rope snaking out from beneath the cover.
“This is where you brought Ordesky,” Porland said righteously.
The door slammed shut with an echoing bang and Porland and Lawskin felt cold, hard steel poke into the smalls of their backs.
“Lot of things happening in Old Quarter,” Kane’s voice oozed with menace and he pushed the daggers just a little firmer into their flesh. “What have you done?”
“Nothing,” said Porland raising his arms in the air. “I’m supplicating mister Kane. Please, I ask for mercy. We did nothing.”
“I sent you to Ordesky’s factory, the remit to go quietly, to pass like shadows. No one was to know you were in there rooting through his stuff, taking what you fancied. Then I hear that the whole of the Old Quarter blows up. And we have the watch running about in full armour. I ask again. What have you done?”
“Nothing, Mister Kane, I promise you. We were about our job when the thing came bursting through the walls. It’s a Turned.”
“The bells were ringing but it climbed up and silenced them.” Lawskin noticed Porland raise his arms so he did likewise. In one hand he still had hold of the piece of wood he had taken from Ordesky’s factory.
“It’s a giant of a Turned and now it’s sat wrapped around the bell tower of The Eagle and the Rose. Some of the guard thought to get it off the tower but they’re all dead. We saw it eat them. It’s horrible and ugly and quick. It moves real quick.”
The pressure in his back lessoned but Porland kept his arms up high. “Honest mister Kane,” he spluttered. “We couldn’t find nothing in the factory and would still be in there searching but this Turned had a following, an army of sorts. They came at the watch with sickles and things but the watchmen put them down. The watch can’t touch the Turned though. Lost a lot of men trying I’d guess.”
“And what of the Neverens, the Roses?” Maver Kane referred to the soldiers, the royal guards, as ‘Roses’ because of the red cloaks they wore. It was a popular allusion and one that had sat firmly in the psyche of the city for hundreds of years. The Eagle and the Rose was home to the retired Roses, and those Neverens crippled in service to their King.
“We didn’t see a soldier. None at all. Don’t think any been out and about since his majesty was killed. But the watch have their hands full alright and make no mistake.”
“This changes nothing,” said Maver Kane, sheathing his daggers. “This is a city problem, not mine. I still want to know about Flendin the Dark. I want that shield of his. Get Ordesky up and out of that drain. I’ll beat the information out of him this time. If he tells me nothing I’ll kill him.”
Porland jumped to action, motioned for Lawskin to help him with the drain cover and together they moved it. Next he grabbed the rope, wrapping it twice around his knuckles, and effortlessly he started to pull. There was no weight to it; no weight at all and when the last of the rope came up over the lip of the drain there was no Ordesky struggling on the end of it like a desperate maggot on the end of a hook.
“He’s escaped,” Porland gasped. He looked at Kane.
Kane’s eyes were wide and glowering and they were staring straight back at him.
“The Holes have eaten him,” Lawskin sounded in awe, and he looked from the drain to the rope and back again. “They’ve eaten him all.”
“There are no such things as Holes you bloody idiot.” Maver Kane balled his hands into exasperated fists.
Porland thought that his eyes looked even madder now, if that were possible.
Kane swung his head back, flung his thick arms out and screamed. He would want something to snap, to hit or to kill so Porland took a tentative step backwards out of harms way.
Others burst through the door, drew swords, sabres and anything else sharp and shiny. “What is it Mister Kane?” some of them asked, heads whipping round all ways trying to catch sight of something subversive, something that could’ve angered their master.
Maver Kane levelled a finger at Lawskin. “Get down that drain and hunt him down. The pair of you get me Ordesky or you’re both dead men.”
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Ordesky had never run so hard and so fast before but he had to keep moving. The backs of his legs burnt with exertion, so too did his lungs and there was a pressure in his head, sharp and painful and fit to burst, but he couldn’t stop, not yet. They’d come after him, Kane’s men, and when they caught him they would drag him back to Kane. So he had to run, run for his life.
He was unsure on his feet and he collided with the side of the tunnel and fell in a heap in the shallow water. Dirty water splashed his face, fell in his opened and gasping mouth and he spat it out and retched and coughed.
Noises echoed behind him. Noises like that of many legs whipping through the water in pursuit so he forced himself to stand. “Got to get out of here,” he gasped, trying to motivate himself to go. He broke into a run but his legs were just too tired to move and he fell over again.
A faint shout behind him and he was up and moving. But slowly, so very slowly.
“Ordesky, you bastard. Get back here,” a desperate cry echoed down the tunnels and it sounded close.
A spasm of terror quickened his heartbeat. They would be upon him soon.
He took a step forward then another, his body burning all the time with the painful memory of his recent incarceration, of rope biting into his wrists and stomach, of feeling desperate painful hunger and of nauseating fatigue that just made him want to sleep. “Move it,” he told himself. “Move it Ordesky, or die like a dog.” But he had no energy, no fight.
It had taken all his willpower and strength of body to wriggle free from his wrist bonds, to pull at the knot that held him fast around the gut and when he finally succeeded and dropped like a stone from the rope, he landed with a thud in the sewage below and remained stunned and hurting for some time.
It hadn’t taken them long to realise he was gone and now they were bearing down on him fast. He had to run, had to get that defeated, aching body of his to move. He didn’t want to go back. He wouldn’t let them drag him back. Damn his tortured body for hurting and for being stiff and for seizing up with the pain, but he wouldn’t let them drag him back to Kane. He would sooner die in the sewage than face Kane again. Then he saw it in the dark grey of the tunnel light and he touched his groin in reverence to good fortune. A dull glint of reflected light winked at him. “Thank the saints,” he gasped for there, a few feet ahead, was the cold iron rails of a ladder. It would lead up to the streets. He would be safe in the streets.
He threw a hand out and started to climb. His thighs throbbed with the agony, felt heavy and dead but he forced himself to take one slow step at a time. He’d forgotten about his pursuers so screamed when a hand suddenly reached up from below and fixed around his boot. It pulled on him and he nearly slipped.
He was losing his strength and wouldn’t be able to hold on for much longer.
“I don’t want to go back. Leave me alone,” he cried and again the hand pulled on him. This time his legs came free from the bottom of the ladder and he tried to kick his assailant off but the grip was too sure and he too weak and he felt his hands begin to slip too.
There was a sudden movement above him and a chain-mailed arm reached down and felt for one of his hands locked desperately around the side of the ladder.
In no time it prised him free and started to pull and violently Ordesky was being stretched.
“Help,” he screamed. “You’ll pull me in two. Help!” The pressure in his head was building up and just when he thought he couldn’t take the pain any longer his legs kicked free and he travelled swiftly upwards.
He fell back onto the cold hard cobbles of a Walled District street and gasped fresh air into his lungs. “I...I thought they had me then,” he panted breathlessly.
“Ordesky the Mouse,” said the watchman nonplussed, “You’re under arrest.”