A moment later the creature stopped and said, “We'll be getting out of the drains now.”
“How?” Jask asked.
“Can't you see the entrance cover overhead?” the bear asked.
The question had simply been meant to taunt Jask, to repay him a little for his brusque rejection of the quasi-man's sympathy. Still, he peered into the pitch darkness overhead, staring hard, desperate for a glimpse of the outline of a door. So far as he could tell, there was not even a ceiling above them, only unlimited, empty space.
“Here,” the bruin grunted, gripping something heavy, straining upward, rattling a heavy stone slab out of place. A few seconds later he had lifted the shield out of the way and slid it onto the floor of the room above. Faint, gray light shone into the sewer entrance, doing little to dispel the darkness but enough to quiet some of Jask's fear. The air that came with the light was dry and warm, somewhat stale but infinitely preferable to the degrading stench of the drains.
“What's this?” Jask asked.
“A warehouse,” the bruin said.
“Is it safe?”
“Perfectly.”
“You seem to know the drains well.”
“I've scouted them,” the bear-man said. “Against just such a need as this.”
He gripped the edges and muscled himself through the manhole, collapsed onto the floor above and swung out of sight.
Jask jumped, gripped the edges of the trapdoor and strained for all his might, with little reward.
“Here,” the bruin said. “I'll give you a hand.”
“No,” Jask said between gritted teeth, sweat dripping into his eyes and gliding slickly across his pale face like beads of oil across a sheet of plastic. “Never mind. I will be fine. Just fine… on my own… thank you, anyway.”
The bruin snorted sarcastically. “Is this meant to prove something?” he asked, looking down through the hole, framed by the stone edges, offering his huge, hair-matted paw with the claws drawn back into their sheaths.
Jask grunted, grappled desperately for a second, felt his arms go limp, lost his grip and fell backwards, splashed into a viscous mess of water, mud and dark fungus. A heavy, bulbous spoor sac popped open before its time, casting out thousands of unformed, undried germ seeds like droplets of mucus. The odor, when it caught Jask square in the face, was like a rotting corpse.
The bruin leaned closer, stretching his arm deeper, and he said, “Are you all right?”
Jask rose out of the muck without speaking, without brushing himself off, and he jumped for the rim of the hole, grabbed it again, struggled with all his will.
“Look,” the tainted creature said, “that posse we just barely avoided back there in the cellar of the inn is going to be close on our trail. They're sure to have put men down in the drains after us, and those men will have good, bright lights. Which means they'll be able to make very good time. If you don't swallow your stupid pride and take my hand, you'll get us both caught. You understand? You want that?”
At last, weary, Jask took hold of the bruin's massive paw and was lifted out of the dark drain into a much more pleasant place: a large, windowless room where hundreds of crates and baskets were neatly piled in parallel rows.
The bruin slid the flat stone slab into its niche, effectively sealing the drain exit. Even if the Pure soldiers followed the fugitives' trail, they would never be able to lift that heavy stone. For the moment, then, Jask and his tainted companion were safe.
5
Two-thirds of the way between the floor and the ceiling, a walkway protected by a wooden railing circled the main warehouse room and led to a loft at the front of the building, which served as offices for the establishment. From this loft the two espers could look out onto the main street of the town, through two dirty windows, observing but unobserved.
The fog had all but dissipated, and the sun's golden fingers lay over everything.
“There,” the bruin said. “Two of them.” He pointed west along the dusty street. “See them?”
Jask could see them well enough: a pair of robed Pures waiting by a street entrance to the storm drains, their cloaks hanging in the still air, their skin so white they looked inhuman. Was Jask's own skin as pale as that? And why had he never noticed such things before?
“And over there,'' the bruin said, pointing much closer to the warehouse.
Two Pures loitered in a darkened doorway to a shuttered taproom, waiting anxiously for something to happen, their chalky faces almost brighter than their robes in the concealing fall of early morning shadows. They looked terribly tiny, frail and utterly ineffectual of themselves — but they carried two heavy rifles that appeared to be well-maintained and capable of causing damage on a scale that only the prewar humans could have planned.
“There, too,” the tainted creature said. He pointed eastward to where a single Pure soldier, armed with an even more deadly looking weapon, patrolled the flat roof of a boardinghouse. “They must be everywhere in town.”
“The General did not spare any effort,” Jask agreed, remembering the length of the column of soldiers that had twisted its way down the white cliff from the fortress. “When a — a tainted creature is found among the Pures in an enclave, the community feels — betrayed, used. The proper disposal of the traitor then becomes a matter of vengeance as well as a religious necessity.”
The bruin snorted and turned away from the grimy window. Head held low between his thick shoulders, he lumbered across the creaking loft floor and disappeared down a set of rickety, wooden stairs to the main warehouse level.
Jask followed.
Among the rows of carefully stored goods, the bruin located a crate that clearly had special significance for him. He grinned when he saw it, revealing a great many sharp teeth, and he said, “I'm still one step ahead of them.”
“Of whom?” Jask asked.
The mutant did not respond. The crate that drew his interest was stacked atop another exactly like it, in a row of fifty that matched. He reached up, put his thick arms around it, tilted it back against his chest, tottered backward and set it down in the middle of the aisle. Moving swiftly now, still grinning, though the grin appeared to be more of a rictus than evidence of genuine amusement, he slipped his wickedly sharpened claws beneath the plank lid and, straining upward, his muscles bunched mightily beneath his musty coat of fur, tore the crate wide open. He tossed the nail-studded lid aside as if it were a scrap of paper; it clattered loudly on the stone floor.
Curious as to what the box could possibly contain that might have any bearing on their predicament, Jask stepped forward and peered into it. In the dim gray light that filtered weakly down from the loft windows he could see nothing more than a dark, formless lump.
For a terrible, brief moment he thought the crate contained a dead man.
The bruin reached into the box, wrestled with the contents, and lifted out an enormous rucksack that appeared to be packed tight with all manner of gear. He put it down on the floor between them and checked the many straps and buttons. “Seems okay.”
“What's in it?” Jask asked.
“Food, tools, maps, a book or two — just about everything you'd need to survive in the Wildlands.”
“No one can survive in the Wildlands,” Jask said.
The mutant did not deign to answer.
“You knew that you might have to run for it?” the Pure asked, slightly perplexed by the manner in which the tainted being seemed capable of dealing with any eventuality.
“Of course,” the bruin said. “Didn't you?”
“No, I—”
The tainted bear-man did not wait for Jask to finish his reply. “I knew, when the talent first came to me — gradually at first, then with more power — that I wouldn't always be able to conceal it.” He wiped a huge hand across his wrinkled, dark face, pushing at his blunt nose and snuffling as if to clear his head and think more soundly. “The talent becomes second nature to you. It would be just as easy — or difficult, rather — to hide the fact that you had two legs or eyes.'' Satisfied that the rucksack had gone unmolested, he stood up and stretched. “Besides, the power's like — a compulsion, a need. I tried to ignore it, because I knew it could ruin me, make me an outcast. But I learned it would never go away and that I couldn't suppress it. When it's not used, it sort of builds up, a heavy pressure inside — and then it manifests itself when you're not expecting it.”