Roosing Oolvaya approached. With a little luck he’d be in and out quickly, Max thought. His arm still hurt. He’d made liberal use of some healing gunk or another Karlini had had sitting around or he wouldn’t have been able to move it at all. Not that partial incapacitation surprised him - it was the typical kind of problem for a mess like this. A broad eddy swept him closer to the west bank. The main moon was just rising, low in the east and mostly waned away, and behind the clouds to boot. The walls blocked the light from the city. Max picked out his secondary landmarks as faint silhouettes, sighted on the north-point lighthouse, and struck out for the northeast corner tower.
Cross-currents and whirlpools caught him as he neared the wall. He had expected them, too, and had made allowances for an irregular passage. A final riptide dragged him into the lee south of the tower. Max put out a hand and rested it against the piling supporting a rotting wharf, taking a moment’s rest. The suit of treated hides Karlini had dug out of a storeroom was supposedly waterproof. A trickle was running in down the back of Max’s neck, though, and several other small leaks were accumulating water in the attached booties; just enough to be thoroughly annoying. Max scratched between his shoulder blades, glowered at the suit, and then started measuring his way to the left along the bulge of the city.
He soon came to the end of the old wharf, saw a twenty-foot gap before the next, sighted up at a spire rising beyond the wall, and nodded with gloomy satisfaction. Max felt out with his hand. Three feet from the wharf the stone of the wall ended in an arch. Water smacked against the stone lip, and against the iron grating spanning the outlet. Max took a deep breath, put his head down, and dived.
The grating was solid in the rock. The center section, however, was hinged, and the lock had not surprisingly rusted out. Max secured the gate behind him with a twist of rope. As he’d expected, the magical barrier around the city was short-circuited by the flowing water; he’d felt nothing more than a sensation like a fine-tooth comb being dragged backward through his aura. The culvert proceeded under the wall before turning up, but the ceiling height was more than adequate to allow walking. He slogged inward. The real reason he had bothered with the water-repellant suit was that it also repelled whatever was in the water; Max was notoriously fastidious, and sewers after all were sewers. He kept the bone-and-hide face-mask firmly planted over his nose, breathing as infrequently as possible.
At an intersection he stopped to verify his bearings. Stretching away from him toward the west he could see a round tunnel, awash to mid-thigh level, its lower roof broken by periodic shafts leading up to gratings in the street. Other feeder tubes entered high up on the side surfaces, some spilling runnels of dark fluid. Dim light came down some of the vertical shafts and made strange glittering patterns on the moving water. Max sloshed forward, passing one major turnoff, then another. A clatter ahead caught his attention. The illumination down one shaft abruptly intensified as the manhole cover above was lifted. Twisted and elongated shadows writhed on the wall, Max heard a cry begin and be abruptly stifled, and then one of the shadows separated from the other and came sweeping down. A figure dropped from the shaft into the water. The slow current pushed the man past Max, his throat cut. Max crouched and entered a tunnel to the side.
He threaded his way through the maze. It was difficult to appear completely transparent to sorcerous search, because of the radiative characteristics of auras; to make an aura totally disappear was nearly impossible. Making an aura look like it belonged to somebody else, on the other hand, was much less complex and generally more successful, camouflage being a basic principle of nature. So it was that Max appeared, to even a probing search, as a large and fairly bedraggled muskrat. The disguise was helpful in more ways than one. Some large species lived in the river, but they tended to find the taste of muskrat unappealing. Eventually the tunnel Max was following ended at a massive stone block.
Max stopped to consider. By his calculations the large block was part of the foundation for the north wall. The house of Oskin Yahlei should be a few hundred feet west, south of the wall or perhaps immediately next to it. The neighborhood had been outside the original city. During the reconstruction from a large flood a century or so earlier, in the same spurt of civic zeal that had seen the sewer system established, the wall had been extended north to encompass what was then a thriving district built on a series of low hills.
Also encompassed were a number of Roosing Oolvaya’s original cemeteries. With the periodic floods, putting graves above the water level had looked like a good idea. As far as public health went, the plan had worked out fine; flood waters left the bodies alone. On the other hand, floods weren’t the only things that were interested in them.
The first thing a necromancer did when moving into a new domain was chart the locations of all the local graves. Corpses, after all, were the necromancer’s basic stock-in-trade and source of raw material. A necromancer’s dream house was next to his or her own private reserve. This was what Oskin Yahlei had managed. Max had serious questions about certain parts of the situation, but about one thing there were no doubts. Oskin Yahlei had the potential to be very dangerous.
Max decided to remain with the underground route for the time being. He backtracked to the nearest intersection and went right. The culvert tilted gently up, the current grew faster and gained bite in its force. Max leaned into it; the incline meant he was ascending the underside of a hill. Passing beneath another vertical shaft, he heard the rattle of a small group of men on patrol passing overhead. The clinking faded off into the night. Another opening approached on his right, and Max approached it cautiously.
The water swirled at the intersection, making a small foaming whirlpool with dim blue highlights. Down the side passage the blue glow was stronger. Max peeked around the arch. Beyond the junction the secondary passage widened, increasing in height and continuing slightly uphill. Thirty feet ahead and five feet over the water level he saw a boat landing recessed into the wall, the blue glow emanating from somewhere at its back. Humanoid shapes moved on the landing, their shadows dancing madly on the water.
There were two - no, three of them, virtually reeking of necromantic conjuration; the anticipated zombies, no doubt. Max smiled a not particularly pleasant smile. He reached over his shoulder and removed the top item from his pack. Submerging himself to the neck in the water, he unwrapped the article he had selected, revealing two lead balls connected by five feet of thick cord. A second item fell free into his hand - a hollow reed about a foot long and two inches in diameter. Max glanced around the corner again and checked the clearances. With a little luck it would work, and he wouldn’t even need his injured arm.
Max moaned loudly across the end of the reed. The mournful drone resonated down the passage, hanging in the air with the echo of a wailing drone. He waited a minute, then moaned again. This time Max was rewarded with a chorus of splashes from the direction of the landing. Footsteps sloshed in the tunnel. The creatures were coming, Max thought, and why not? After all, what self-respecting undead could resist the famous Zombie Love Call? Max said a final word to the cord; it too began to glow. Then he popped the end of the reed in his mouth, sank down, and watched the shaft, the top of his faceplate barely out of the water, bracing himself against the current. Another splash sounded, very close now, the blue glow strengthened, a twisted shadow fell upon the water and the far wall, and then a hand appeared around the corner. A web of faint sparks knit the greenish tissue together around its gaps and tears, tendons sliding in plain sight over the stark white bones. Clutched in its grip was a tarnished brass handle.