He swore that if the opportunity ever presented itself, he would take revenge against the Transports and Duke Costa.
He soon came to level ground—an expanse of slick clay soil, littered with rocks and thriving shrubs. He crossed this quickly and found himself standing at the top of a forty-foot cliff; below him, through a bed of white sand, flowed the green water of the Malachi. During the summer the river was a leisurely, curling stream, knotted with oxbows, but it was a spring breeze that now plucked at Frank’s tattered clothes, and the river was young and quick.
The painstaking labor of ten minutes got him to the bottom of the cliff. After diving into the cool water and incautiously drinking a quantity of it, he set about looking for objects on which to float downstream. He found two warped wooden doors dumped behind a clump of bushes and decided to use these, one on top of the other, as a raft. If he sat up on it, he discovered, his raft had a tendency to flip over; but a passenger lying down had no difficulties. He tore a wide frond from one of the dwarf palm trees that abounded and used it to shade his face from the midmorning sun. Soon he was moving along with the current, and when he remembered Howard’s rapier it was too late to turn back to retrieve the weapon. He shrugged at the loss and drifted on, warmed by the sun above him, cooled by the water below, shaded by his palm frond, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion.
THUS he drifted east, through the Madstone Marshes, under the towering marble spans of the Cromlech Bridge, and through miles of forests. Any eyes that may have spied the makeshift raft felt that neither it nor its passenger were worth bothering. By midafternoon the walls and towers of Munson rose massive ahead.
At the western boundary of Munson, the Malachi divided in two; the first channel, its natural one, took it under the carved bridges and around the gondola docks, across the sandy delta to the Deptford Sea, sometimes called the Eastern Sea. The other channel, built two centuries previously by Duke Giroud, entered a great arched tunnel and passed underground, beneath the southern section of the city, to facilitate the disposal of sewage. The city had declined since Giroud’s day, and most of the sewers were no longer in use, but the southern branch of the Malachi River, the branch called the Leethee by the citizens, still flowed under Munson’s streets.
Frank was still asleep when he drifted near the ancient gothic masonry of Munson’s high walls. Two arches loomed before him, foam splashing between them where the waters parted. The great walls with their flying buttresses dwarfed even the couriers’ car-racks that sometimes passed this way, and none of the river scavengers of the west end noticed as an unwieldy bit of rectangular debris hesitated, rocked in the swirl, and then drifted through the Leethee arch and slid down into the darkness beyond.
BEARDO Jackson tamped his clay pipe and sucked at it with relish, blowing clouds of smoke up at the stones of the ceiling. Below him in the darkness the waters of one of the many branches of the Leethee could be heard gurgling and slapping against the brickwork, washing in a dark tide below the cellars of the city.
He struck another match and held it to the wick of a rusty lantern beside him. A bright yellow flame sprang up, illuminating the cavernlike chamber in which Beardo sat perched on a swaying bridge. The light flickered over the walls of tight-fitted stones reinforced with timber in many places; the arched tunnel-openings that gaped at either end of the bridge remained in deep shadow.
“Morgan!” Beardo called. “Come along, the tide’s high!” His voice echoed weirdly, receding up the watercourse until it reverberated like a distant chorus of operatic frogs.
A woman appeared at the opening on Beardo’s right. She carried a coil of fifty-pound fishing line; before stepping out onto the bridge, she looped one end of it around an iron hook imbedded in the wall.
“Don’t yell like that,” she said. “You never know who might be around.”
“Oh, to hell with that,” he sneered. “Everybody within a cubic mile of here is scared stiff of me.” He slapped the sheathed knife at his belt and laughed in what he believed was a sinister fashion. The woman spat over the rope rail and stepped out onto the bridge. She was sloppily fat, and the bridge creaked and quivered as it took her weight.
“Easy, woman,” Beardo said. “The bridge was built for frailer girls.” He grinned up at her. The whites of his eyes were almost brown, and his face, loosely draped over the bones of his skull, was as wrinkled and creased as a long-unchanged bedsheet. His beard was ragged and patchy, as were his clothes.
“And what would frailer girls be doing on it?” she asked scornfully. Beardo rolled his eyes and made lascivious motions with his hands, implying that there were any number of things frail girls might do on it.
“You rotten toad,” Morgan snarled, slapping the old man affectionately in the side of the head.
“We’ve no time for fooling around,” Beardo declared. “Where’s the hooks?”
Morgan pulled a chain of small grappling hooks from a bag at her belt, and proceeded to tie one of them to the fishing line. She tossed it into the water so that it trailed downstream.
“Okay now, keep your eyes open on this side, so we’ll know where to swing the line,” Beardo said, facing upstream. “If anything scares you, just call me,” he added sarcastically. A week ago a dead lion had floated by under the bridge—its hide would have made a fine catch, but Morgan, terrified by the glazed feline eyes, had twitched the trailing hook away from it. Beardo had not yet entirely forgiven her for it.
“Oh, bite a crawdad,” she said.
They were silent then, staring intently into the lamplit water. Beardo and his woman were, in the understreet slang, “working the shores”: scavenging the debris the Leethee brought in from the upper world. Many of the understreet population of Munson made a profitable living at this trade.
Suddenly Beardo stiffened; something was drifting downstream, something that bumped frequently against the brick walls. “Look sharp, girl,” he whispered. “Sounds like a piece of wood coming along.”
Presently the thing was dimly visible. “It’s a midget raft! With a guy on it!” whispered Morgan. Beardo poked her with his elbow to shut her up. The raft, which was indeed a notably small one, rocked forward into the light. Morgan gasped when she saw the passenger, for its head appeared to be a cluster of rigid green tentacles.
“Beelzebub!” she cried.
The figure sat up on the raft abruptly, making hooting sounds. Morgan screamed. The tiny craft flipped over, dumping its rider into the cold black water.
Beardo, who had seen the palm frond fall away, and knew that this underground mariner was only a puzzled-looking young man, slithered under the rope bridge-rail and dropped into the water ten feet below. He caught the floundering intruder and pushed him toward the ladder rungs set in the brick wall. The young man caught the rungs and began to haul himself out of the bad-smelling tide. His black hair was down across his face, and he stared up through it with bloodshot eyes. Morgan wailed and scrambled on all fours off of the bridge; she disappeared into one of the tunnel mouths, still wailing.
The dark-haired youth pulled himself up onto the bridge and sat there shivering. Beardo climbed up right behind and sat down beside him. The old scavenger smiled, pulled out a long knife and began cleaning his hideous fingernails.