in doubt, run.
I took off again, along dark streets, lost but knowing in time that I would hit the river and gain my bearings anew. Running blind is apt to get you a broken nose, and since I had one of those already and wasn’t keen to find out what came next I kept my pace on the sensible side of break-neck. I normally find that showing trouble my heels and putting a few miles behind me makes things a whole lot better. As I ran though, breathing through my mouth and catching my side where a muscle kept cramping, I felt worse and worse. A general unease grew minute by minute and hardened into a general crippling anxiety. I wondered whether this was what conscience felt like. Not that any of it had been my fault. I couldn’t have saved anyone even if I’d tried.
I paused and leaned against a wall, catching my breath and trying to shake off whatever it was that plagued me. My heart kept fluttering behind my ribs as if I’d started to sprint rather than come to a halt. Each part of me seemed, fragile, somehow brittle. My hands looked wrong, too white, too light. I started to run again, accelerating, any fatigue left behind. Spare energy boiled off my skin, rattled through me, set my teeth buzzing in their sockets, my hair seeming to float up around my head. Something was wrong with me, broken, I couldn’t slow down if I wanted to.
Ahead the street forked, starlight offering just the lines of the building that divided the way. I veered from one side of the street to the other, unsure which path to follow. Moving to the left made me worse, my speed increasing, sprinting, my hands almost glowing as they pumped, head aching, ready to split, bright light fracturing across my vision. Veering right restored a touch of normality. I took the right fork. Suddenly I knew the direction. Something had been tugging at me since I picked myself up off the cobbles. Now, as if a lamp had been lit, I knew the direction of its pull. If I turned from it then whatever malady afflicted me grew worse. Head toward it and the symptoms eased. I had a direction.
What the destination might be I couldn’t say.
It seemed to be my day for charging headlong down the streets of Vermillion. My path now followed the gentle gradient toward the Seleen where she eased her slow passage through the city. I started to pass the markets and cargo bays behind the great warehouses that fronted the river docks. Even at this hour men moved back and forth, hauling crates from mule-drawn trolleys, loading wagons, labouring by the mean light of lanterns to push the stuff of commerce through Vermillion’s narrow veins.
My path took me across a deserted marketplace smelling of fish and fetched me up against a wide expanse of wall, one of the city’s most ancient buildings, now co-opted into service as a docks warehouse. The thing stretched a hundred yards and more both left and right, and I had no interest in either direction. Forward. My route lay straight ahead. That’s where the pull came from. A broad-planked door cracked open a few yards off and without thought I was there, yanking it wide, slipping past the bewildered menial with his hand still trying to push. A corridor ran ahead, going my way, and I gave chase. Shouts from behind as men startled into action and tried to catch me. Builder globes burned here, shedding the cold white light of the ancients. I hadn’t realized quite how old the structure was. I charged on regardless, flashing past archway after archway each opening on to Builder-lit galleries, all packed with green-laden benches and walled with shelf upon shelf of many-leaved plants. When, about halfway through the width of the warehouse, a plank-built door opened, slamming out into my path, all I had time to think before blacking out was that hitting Snorri Snagason had hurt more.
I came back to consciousness lying horizontal once again, and hurting in so many places that I missed out the blissful ignorance stage and went directly into the asking of stupid questions.
‘Where am I?’ Nasal and hesitant.
The bright but flickering light and the faint unnatural whine helped me to remember. Somewhere with Builder-globes. I made to sit up and found myself tied to a table. ‘Help!’ A little louder. Panicked, I tested my strength against the ropes and found no give in them. “Help!”
‘Best save your breath!’ The voice came from the shadows by the door. I squinted. A thickset ruffian leaned against the wall, looking back at me.
‘I’m Prince Jalan! I’ll have your fucking head for this! Untie these ropes.’
‘Yeah, that’s not going to happen.’ He leaned forward, chewing something, the flickering light gleaming on his baldness.
‘I’m Prince Jalan! Don’t you recognize me?’
‘Like I know what the princes look like. I don’t even know the princes’ names! Far as I’m concerned you’re some toff who got juiced up and went swimming in a sewer. Just your bad luck to end up here. Horace though, he did seem to know you from somewhere. Told me to keep you here and off he went. “Keep an eye on that one, Daveet,” he said. “Keep a good watch.” You must be some kind of important or you’d be floating down the river by now with your throat cut.’
‘Kill me and my grandmother will raze this quarter to the ground.’ A blatant lie but, spoken with conviction, it made me feel better. ‘I’m a rich man. Let me go and I’ll see you’re fixed up for life.’ I’ll admit I have a gift for lying. I sound least convincing when I tell the truth.
‘Money’s nice an’ all,’ the man said. He took a step away from the wall and let the flickers illuminate the brutality of his face. ‘But if I let you go without Horace’s say-so then I wouldn’t have no fingers to count it all with. And if it turned out you really were a prince and we let you go without the boss’s say-so, well me and Horace would think having our fingers taken was the easy part.’ He bared his teeth at me, more gaps than teeth, truth be told, and settled back into the shadow.
I lay back, moaning from time to time, and asking questions that he ignored. At least the strange compulsion that had me running headlong into this mess in the first place had now faded. I still had that sense of direction, but the need to pursue it had lessened and I felt more my old self. Which in this instance meant terrified. Even in my terror though I noticed that the direction that nagged at me was changing, swinging round, the urge to pursue it growing more faint by the minute.
I drew a deep breath and took stock of my surroundings. A smallish room, not one of those long galleries. They’d been growing plants there? That made no sense. No plants in here though. The broken light probably meant it wasn’t suitable. Just a table and me tied to it.
‘Why—’ The door juddered open and cut through my nineteenth question.
‘Good lord it stinks in here!’ A calm and depressingly familiar voice. ‘Stand our guest up, why don’t you, and let’s see if you can’t sluice some of that filth off him.’
Men loomed to either side, strong hands grasped the table and the world turned through a right-angle, leaving the table standing on end, and me standing too, still bound to it. A bucket of cold water took my breath and vision before I had a chance to look around. Another followed in quick succession. I stood gasping, trying to get a breath – no mean task with your nose clogged with blood and water everywhere – whilst a fragrant brown pool began to spread around my feet.
‘Well bless me. There seems to be a prince hidden under all this unpleasantness. A diamond in the muck as they say. Albeit a very low-carat one.’
I shook the wet hair from my eyes, and there he stood, Maeres Allus, dressed in his finest as if bound for high company … and an opera perhaps?
‘Ah, Maeres! I was hoping to see you. Had a little something to hand over toward our arrangement.’ I never called it my debt. Our arrangement sounded better. A little more as if it was both our problems, not just mine.
‘You
