“You're perfectly correct, friend,” the bruin muttered. “And unless you place that blade in one of two vulnerable spots, I'd hardly notice the pain.”
“I must have privacy in my own mind!” Jask snapped.
“So that you can plot against me?” the mutant inquired, chuckling loudly, clearly enjoying the exchange and not the least bit frightened by the Pure's momentary thought of murder.
Jask said nothing at all, plodded on, miserable.
Something danced across his foot, squeaking loudly, terrified. He jumped, shivered at the thought of having been touched by the tainted creature. He was thankful, now, that the tunnel was in complete darkness. The bruin, if he had heard the tiny creature, gave no indication of concern.
The mutant chuckled again and said, “By the way, I do have a name. I'm getting weary of seeing myself referred to so vaguely in your thoughts — mutant, tainted creature, quasi-man, bruin, bear-man. I'd prefer to be called Tedesco. It's the name I was born with.” A bit farther along the drain he said, “We've got a long, long journey ahead of us, Jask. It's best that we call each other by the right names and learn a bit of tolerance, if we can.”
Heresy, Jask thought.
An animal had no name, no personality.
“The name's Tedesco,'' the bruin said. “And I'm no animal. I'm a man.”
6
The reluctant Pure was led into the presence of his General, where the great man rested on his power sledge beneath a giant, sprawling oak tree in the main square of the tainted village. The sun had fully risen now and had seared away the last floury clouds of white fog, baking the town like a muffin in an oven. The white cliffs reflected the sun like a mirror and nearly blinded the eye if one looked in that direction. The buildings, on all sides of the square, made of stone, thatch, hand-hewn timbers and poorly formed glass, lay silent and heavy beneath the oppressively warm blanket of air. Beneath the oak tree, the shadows were cool and deep, the silence even more complete than in the waiting streets. The oak and the General seemed to complement each other, two examples of Lady Nature's power, though the oak was almost certainly not a pure species. The Pure soldier, aware of the sin he had committed, trembled visibly in the company of oak and General, devoutly wishing he were dead.
“You are the coward?” the General inquired, nothing in his tone but disdain.
The Pure soldier nodded, unable to look at the great man or at any of those who had accompanied him here.
“You were sent with Dyson Prider to investigate one arm of the storm drains. You knew that your mission was essential to the capture of these two espers.”
“Yes,” the accused said.
A slight breeze rustled the leaves of the oak, only for a moment, died away again, as if it were Lady Nature's own comment on his lack of courage.
“You panicked and turned back,” the General said, adjusting his cloak as he spoke, “forcing your companion, Dyson Prider, also to abandon the hunt in that arm of the drains.”
“Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Ribbert Keene, Your Excellency.”
“Are you an animal, Keene?”
For the first time the Pure soldier looked up, a glint of defiance in his eye. “I am a man. I have a fine family history with no trace of genetic damage.”
“Would a man have turned back from a mission he knew to be of the utmost concern to his race and his enclave?” The General was not even looking at the accused, but upward into the thickly interlaced branches of the tree, as if he found it physically painful to direct his gaze on such a morally bankrupt man.
“The drains are pitch black, Your Excellency,” Ribbert Keene complained.
“You had torches.”
“Which dispelled the darkness only for a short way. Corruption lay on all sides — things crawling in mutated fungus, tainted mosses underfoot, mutated-rats, insects, scampering before and behind…”
“Nevertheless,” the General said, still staring upward into the cool, green leaves, his face a broad blandness that belied the fury boiling just below the surface, “you will submit to thorough genetic testing as soon as we have returned to the fortress. You will abide by whatever recommendations the genetic specialists make, based on whatever they discover about your gene patterns. Judging by your unmanly performance here this morning, I suspect the tests shall prove anything but negative. Dismissed.”
To his guards, who fenced him with ready weapons to ensure his safety, the General said, “Now we have only one team of men in the drains, and we can no longer count on trapping the fugitives below ground. Since these are desperate creatures, neither can we rely on their proceeding rationally. Logic, of course, never has been a normal tool of tainted beings. With this in mind I believe we should widen our search pattern and not expect them, necessarily, to show up somewhere in the town itself. They may try to reach the forests bordering the Chen Valley Blight.'' He shifted in his seat and looked away from the oak. “See that our men are better dispersed so that paths between the town and the forest are patrolled.”
One of the guards, who doubled as the General's chief messenger, moved away from the small park in the square to carry out his master's orders.
7
Merka Shanly (female: Pure) and her partner, Kane Grayson (male: Pure) — dressed identically in blue-white cloaks, blue boots and metal-studded black fabric belts; both carrying deadly prewar weapons; both with flashlights held before them — came out of the mouth of the drainage tunnel into a wide stone-walled chamber that was the hub of the storm drains, six spokes radiating from it. A low but vaulted ceiling was the home of web-building spiders and curious, green and yellow fungi that appeared to defy the laws of gravity by growing down and then, gradually, horizontal, until they laced together, forming living nets for no clear purpose other than — inexplicably — that of rivaling the delicate work of the spiders. The walls were patched with iridescent moss, with black moss and with a deep purple slime that writhed subtly whenever their lamps illuminated it. In the far corners, searching out holes in the decaying mortar, roaches and centipedes of unholy size skittered out of sight, so large and weighty that the tapping of their many feet was audible. A six-legged creature that might have been descended from a pure rat turned a baleful yellow-eyed stare at them, then hopped clumsily out of sight into the mouth of one of the other tunnels. A stone promenade, perhaps six feet wide, connected all the open tunnel mouths, though the center of the room was occupied by a pit, all cobbled in water-worn stone, that dropped straight down, out of sight, ready to carry storm water into the bowels of the earth.
“What now?” Kane Grayson asked, standing warily in the center of the promenade width, neither too close to the pit, out of which anything might crawl, nor too near the wall, behind which rodents and insects of tainted heritage were certain to be lurking.
His voice echoed softly from the damp walls.
“We cannot guess which of the other five ways to take,” Merka said, sweeping the dark, forbidding tunnels with the barrel of her rifle. “I see nothing for us to do now but sit and wait until the espers appear.”
“If they appear,” he said.
“Why shouldn't they?”
“Perhaps the other team got them — Keene and Prider.”
She said nothing, but set her thin, bloodless lips in a tight line that expressed her reluctance to accept that.
He said, “Or perhaps there are other collection rooms like this one, dozens of other collection points for the water and, therefore, many other branching tunnels.”