Tourist -9-



WARNING: This chapter is slightly gory. It is meant to reemphasize the coldness of this universe. Take caution. In the words of the inexorable William Goldman, “There’s a lot of bad stuff coming up. Torture you’ve already been prepared for, but there’s worse. There’s death coming up, and you better understand this: some of the wrong people die. The wrong people die, some of them, and the reason is this; life is not fair.”



“Never stay and fight. Always run.”

Darren and I slipped along the shadowy piping of the drained sewers, his hair falling into his face in clumped strands. I watched as he ran his hand along the curve of the wall to guide his way in the total dark, fingers roughing along the brick.

“Why?” I whispered, frowning as my voice echoed along the corridor.

“Because we never win, that’s why. They capture you, and they try and sell you off to the government for an extra food coupon. The government, meanwhile, will either incinerate you or put you to work in a forced labor camp. Unless they decide you know too much, in which case they’ll torture you to give them the names and locations of your teammates.”

I felt like he was testing me with that. There was no way I would ever betray Darren or any of the small band of rescuers I had joined with. But why would Darren think otherwise?

“I thought this place had no crime,” I recited what I’d heard the others say.

I heard Darren swear as he stumbled, and I caught his arm to steady him. He shook me off and moved forward again. “It has no civilian crime. But the federal crime is incredible. They’re slaughtering whole countries and the populace is completely subdued by the whole idea of burning their sewers to erase a few inconsequential artists that they’re afraid might topple the socialist regime that has eaten the souls of-”

He jerked to a stop and I almost slammed into him in my concentration to follow the curve of the wall. He tilted his head as if listening intently. Then:

“Absolute silence from here on out,” he breathed, and then his footsteps were falling lighter than ever on the rough concrete. I glanced up into the vast black-hole-mess of pipes above my head. I knew they were there, and in my mind’s eye, I could picture someone crawling among them.

I rushed to catch up with Darren.

~*~*~

It was only after an hour or so of trailing Darren that I realized two things.

The first was that he was a superior stealth. He had mastered the arts of silent communication, invisible footsteps and controlled breathing. He moved like a jaguar, sliding from shadow to shadow. I felt like a clumsy hunter tracking him.

I couldn’t keep my hand off the grip of the Siri. This made me feel only slightly safer, though I had to make conscious effort to not let the open blade scrape along the moldering sewer walls. Because of my extra effort to emulate my guide, I was not expecting all the bodies.

They began shortly before we reached the Round. A corpse or two was bad for me, but did not seem to phase Darren in the least. We continued, delicately picking our way over motionless bodies. Darren would stop once in a while to stoop, stony faced like the dead he attended, to slide someone’s eyes shut. No one I recognized. But my leader’s hands shook, and that was enough for me to register our total loss.

The second realization was the sensation of walking through water.

By the time we reached the faint illumination of the Round, I was sure that the drained sewers were now flowing. I could even begin to see the glimmer of light on water against my boots.

I reached out for Darren’s shoulder just as he was about to step out of the tunnel and into the Round, pulling him back. He furrowed his brow at me in silent confusion, but I had already drawn the sword and placed the tip in the water.

The surface of the Round’s floor had always been recessed about 10 inches from the lower lip of the pipes that spilled out into it. I raised my blade and the bottom 8 inches came away coated in a dark liquid.

Blood.

Darren’s features flickered in realization as I cleaned the blade and kept it drawn. After a moment, he nodded and stepped purposefully into the Round.

The stagnant pool rippled up over his boots, coming almost to his ankles. He made his way through the darkness of the pool towards the North tunnel of the musician’s quarter. I grabbed one of the few torches that still flickered ominously on the circular walls of the Round and made after him, trying not to disturb the liquid and to ignore its smell at the same time.

At the beginning of the North tunnel, the dead began in earnest.

I saw a few familiar faces. The man who had led me to Darren my first night in this alien world. The twins who had flanked the bonfire when I’d first come in lay side by side in death. Ben’s scouring crews, still ratlike in death, were spread farther apart. Other than those few, however, I felt as if this mass grave was full of strangers. Nameless shadows of death.

Darren, however, was finding it hard to move forward. He leaned heavily against the wall, letting my torch cast shadows on his teammates. there were more of them than I had ever realized, close to a hundred bodies lay in the long stretch of piping that joined the round to the Guild of Musicians, and I knew there were more around the corner. People who Darren had known all his life. And we were walking among them, walking *in* them; their blood had drained into the Round.

I ventured farther down the tunnel, finding footholds between the slaughtered brethren.

“Even the burned,” Darren muttered, forgetting his own pledge of silence. He met my questioning gaze. “There’s no point now,” he said, choking back his anger. “Everyone here is dead. They won’t come back.” He looked down, pointing to one woman who had been slit form chin to stomach, gutted like a fish. “She was burned to death, and they till bled her. She was already dead.” He looked up at me, his eyes shining intensely black in the torchlight.” “Why?”

I shook my head. I had no idea.

He moved past me then, walking with purpose, no longer distracted by the copse of corpses. I jogged along with his rapid pace, trying to slow him down. I couldn’t imagine much worse around the bend in the piping.

Darren could.

Instead of slowing, he grabbed the torch from me, dramatically enhancing his fury-filled eyes with the shifting of the light. “They’re here,” he growled, and I had no time to register his words until we were around the bend and there they were.

Two armed guards, laughing with glee as they slashed open another pair of the already dead. Black blood seeped onto the stone floor, mixing with the pool we splashed through.

The first guard barely had time to turn before I’d taken his head off, the Siri questing smoothly through his flesh.

The second guard Darren had grabbed and thrown against the wall, his head cracking sharply on impact. “How many more?” Darren’s voice was shrill.

“None!” the guard cried out and I realized Darren had the flame from the torch pressed against the guard’s left hand, searing.

“Why did they do this? Who ordered it?” Darren’s voice was still quaking.

“I don’t know! I swear-” The man’s protest was arrested in a scream as Darren ground the torch against his lower arm.

“Wrong!”

“I don’t know anything, please...” The man sobbed, crying in earnest now.

Darren released him, throwing the guard away from the wall. “Run,” Darren menaced, and the man took off past me, toward the Round.

Darren slumped against the tunnel wall, chest heaving with suppressed sobs. His face contorted, turning away from me.

“Feel better?” I asked, staring at the decapitated guard and the fresh blood on my blade. I felt as hollow as the corpses at my feet.

“No,” came the dark reply from the shadows.

Neither did I.

tbc in part ten...