Chapter 6: The Lower Streets
The rain found the back of Vin's collar while he was holding the gate chain.
He had forgotten how much he disliked that particular sensation. Water ran between his shoulder blades, cold beneath the damp shirt, and collected where his belt pressed the fabric against his skin.
"Again," he said.
Across the winch housing, Serren turned the handle. The chain tightened. Beneath the water, the gate moved a finger's width and stopped.
The worker on the ladder swore.
Vin held the strain until Serren set the brake. Then he eased his hands free, one finger at a time.
"The hinge?" she asked.
"Still crooked."
"Can you heat the collar?"
Vin looked at the wet iron disappearing beneath the canal.
"I can boil the man standing beside it."
The worker climbed one rung higher.
"Not a recommendation," Vin told him.
Serren wiped rain from her eyes. The crowd had thinned to stallholders taking down cloth and guards checking the lower stairs. Across the water, the lamps beneath the eastern root had come on early. Their reflections trembled in the current.
A rootward inspector knelt beside the covered tub. She had opened it only far enough to lower a glass rod toward the dead fish.
The light in the rod clouded.
She closed the lid.
"Found anything?" Serren asked.
"Corruption."
The word changed the work around them. Even the man on the ladder stopped moving.
The inspector rose.
"I need the upstream catch baskets lifted. Both sides. No bare hands in the water."
Serren pointed to two guards. They went without waiting for their names.
"One fish?" Vin asked.
"One that we've found."
"How advanced?"
"Enough that I don't want to guess what else has come through."
Serren drew her whistle from beneath her coat and sounded two short notes. The remaining guards turned toward her.
"Clear the canal edge. Close the water stairs. Take the footbridge in pairs and keep people moving toward the upper streets."
Nobody ran. That was good. Running guards made running crowds.
Vin looked toward the bridge Ren had crossed.
They would be beyond it by now.
He made himself turn back to the chain.
Ren had reached the dyers' street when the water came over her shoes.
It arrived from the gutter first, a shallow brown sheet that spread across the paving and carried a blue ribbon against her ankle. Tavi jumped onto a doorstep. Selka caught the back of his coat before he could leap into the next puddle.
"Enough."
Shin held his lantern against his stomach. Beneath the hood, his face had the pinched expression he wore when he was trying not to complain.
Ren looked back.
People were still coming over the canal bridge. A guard stood at its near end, directing them away from the lower turn. Behind him, the root's pale curve had nearly vanished into the rain.
"The bakery," Selka said. "We can get them dry there."
Ren nodded. Their house was only a little farther, but the boys were cold and Selka's ovens would still be warm.
They kept to the raised edges of the street. At the dye shop, a man pushed a rolled sack beneath his door. His wife was moving jars from the lowest shelf, handing them up to a girl on a stool.
"Does it come in often?" Ren asked.
"Not from this end."
He looked toward the canal, then pressed the sack harder into place.
Ren lifted Shin onto her hip. He was getting too heavy to carry far, especially with a wet coat and the lantern between them, but his feet were already soaked.
"I can walk," he said.
"I know."
He let his head rest against her shoulder.
By the time they reached the bakery, water had begun to gather beneath its front step.
Selka unlocked the door and sent Tavi inside.
"Upstairs. Dry socks. Bring a pair for Shin."
"Mine won't fit."
"Then bring the ones that don't fit."
He went.
The shop smelled of the day's bread and cooling iron. Ren set Shin on the counter, stripped off his shoes, and pressed her hands around his cold feet.
He kept looking at the door.
"Your father knows where we've gone," she said, then wished she had chosen different words. He knew their route. He did not know they had stopped.
She took out the slate Selka kept for delivery notes and wrote a message. When a guard passed, she opened the door just far enough to hand it to him.
"For Vin Nobohide. At the lower gate."
The guard read it and nodded.
"Stay above the ground floor if the water rises."
"What's happened?"
"We're clearing the canal."
He moved on before she could ask more.
Behind her, Shin was trying to put his wet shoe back on.
The first catch basket came up full of reeds.
The second was torn.
Serren held a lantern over it while the inspector examined the broken wires. They had been forced apart near the bottom, leaving an opening large enough for Vin to put both hands through.
"The barge?" he asked.
"Wrong side," the inspector said.
She touched one wire with the end of her rod. Black residue clung to it in a thin band.
Vin took off his good coat, which he had put back on against the rain, and left it beneath the winch cover.
Serren watched him draw his sword.
"You think it's still here?"
"I think we stop standing at the edge."
They moved the worker off the ladder. One guard brought a hooked pole. Another fetched the broad iron screen used to block the landing during maintenance.
A guard came down the steps carrying a delivery slate.
"Your family's at Selka's bakery," he told Vin. "Your wife sent this."
Vin read the few words, then set the slate beneath his coat.
"Thank you. Tell her to keep the children upstairs."
The guard turned back toward the street.
The water beneath the walkway bulged.
Vin saw it because the reflection of a lamp broke in the wrong direction.
"Back."
Something struck the underside of the boards.
The impact lifted the loose end of a plank. A guard stumbled. Serren caught his collar and hauled him toward the stone steps as a narrow gray head forced through the gap.
It might once have belonged to a river runner, one of the long-bodied animals that hunted fish along the banks. The jaw was wrong now. It opened too far, exposing small teeth grown in overlapping rows.
One foreleg hooked over the plank.
Vin stepped toward it before it could bring the other up. He drove the point of his sword down behind the jaw, aiming for the base of the skull.
The animal twisted. Steel cut through the side of its neck instead.
It fell back into the canal and struck the pilings hard enough to shake the rail.
"Get the screen across," Vin said.
The guards dragged it toward the gap. Beneath them, something scraped along the boards, moving downstream.
Vin followed the sound to the next opening. He cupped his free hand and released a brief tongue of fire across the water, lighting the space beneath the walk.
The creature was already beyond his reach.
For an instant he saw its pale flank, then the dark mouth of the drainage arch behind it.
The floodwater carried it inside.
Serren was beside him when the light died.
"Where does that go?"
Vin looked up the dyers' street.
The inspector was already opening a waterproof roll of plans. She traced a line with one finger.
"The bakery's service drain joins this one."
Vin was moving before she finished.
Shin did not like Tavi's socks.
They had rough seams at the toes and folded beneath his heels when he walked. But he liked the blanket Selka had put around his shoulders, and he liked sitting beside the oven while rain drummed on the shop awning.
Tavi placed their lanterns on the counter.
"We can do it here."
He turned on his little lamp. The fish began to circle.
Shin watched them, then looked toward the door again.
Outside, grown people kept calling to one another. Their voices sounded ordinary at first, but the spaces between them were getting shorter.
Anet arrived carrying Meret's basket in one hand and supporting Meret by the elbow with the other.
"I can walk," Meret said.
"Then do it faster."
Water streamed from both women's clothes.
Ren took the basket. The guard had reached them moments before, repeating Vin's warning; she had been gathering the boys' things to take upstairs.
"Is our lane flooding?"
"The drains are pushing back," Anet said. "Guard at the corner told us to come uphill."
Meret sat heavily on a chair. Inside her basket, wrapped in a cloth, stood the little pot she kept on her front step.
Shin peered over the edge.
"You brought your plant."
"Of course."
"Is it scared?"
"It has better manners than to say."
She held out her hand, and he took it.
Across the room, Selka began moving sacks away from the door. Anet helped without being asked. Ren put a chair beside Meret, then went to the window.
Shin could see only the lower half of her face beneath the curtain.
It had stopped looking like the face she wore at celebrations.
The baker's service drain opened into a narrow courtyard behind the ovens.
Vin reached it through the side passage, with Serren and two guards behind him. Neighbors were gathering beneath the shop's front awning, trying to get out of the rain. He heard Ren's voice inside and made himself keep moving.
If the animal was in the drain, the courtyard was where it would emerge.
The yard was no more than six paces across. Wood was stacked beneath a lean-to on the left. On the right stood the oven's brick wall. The kitchen door opened at the far end, above two shallow steps.
The drain cover lay beside its opening.
Something wet had crossed the paving toward the woodpile.
Vin raised a hand. The guards stopped.
From beneath the lean-to came a slow scratching sound.
"Kitchen door," he told Serren.
She moved along the oven wall, keeping the pole between herself and the woodpile.
The animal came out low to the ground.
Its back should have been level with Vin's knee. Swelling along the spine had raised it higher, and one hind leg dragged at an angle that made his own joints ache to see. Dark threads worked beneath the thin skin of its throat.
It stopped when it saw him.
Vin set his feet. He could not use a broad flame here. The wood was dry beneath the roof, and smoke would enter the bakery through the open kitchen vent.
Behind the creature, a small stream of blood thinned in the rain.
He had hurt it. That mattered. He wished it mattered more.
Serren reached the kitchen steps and struck the door with the butt of the pole.
"Keep this shut."
Inside, Ren answered immediately.
The creature turned toward her voice.
Vin stamped once on the paving.
"Here."
It came at him.
Ren heard the impact through the door.
A hard scrape. Vin's breath leaving him. Something striking the brickwork.
She turned the key with fingers that wanted to hurry too much.
"Upstairs," she said.
Selka stopped lifting a sack.
"Now."
Anet put down the other end and went to Meret. Tavi was already on his feet. Shin stood beside the counter, staring at his mother.
Ren crossed to him.
"We're going up with Tavi."
"Dad's outside."
"I know."
"He said he'd come."
Another blow struck the kitchen door. The key jumped against the wood.
Shin flinched.
Ren lifted him, blanket and all. For once, he did not argue about being able to walk.
Selka ushered Tavi toward the stairs. Anet helped Meret rise. Everyone was moving, but the room seemed full of things in the way: chairs, sacks, a bucket placed beneath a leak.
Ren kicked the bucket aside.
Water spread over the tiles.
"Hold the rail," she told Tavi.
He went up first. Selka followed with a lamp. Behind Ren, Anet guided Meret one step at a time.
Halfway up, Shin twisted in her arms.
"Birds."
The lantern was still on the counter.
"We'll get it later."
"It'll get wet."
He reached back toward it, suddenly frantic. The repaired wing. His father's careful hands. All morning waiting for the birds to turn above the water.
Ren held him firmly against her.
"Look at me."
He would not.
"Shin."
He looked.
"I'm carrying you. That's what I can carry."
His mouth trembled.
She could hear men shouting in the courtyard. None of the words were clear.
"Hold on to me."
He put both arms around her neck.
She climbed the remaining stairs without looking back.
In Selka's room, the ceiling sloped so low that Anet had to bend beside the window.
The children sat on the bed. Meret took the chair nearest the door. Ren stood between the window and the stairs, unable to choose where she was needed more.
Through the rain-streaked glass, she could see the courtyard roof, but not the paving beneath it.
A flash of light struck the underside of the eaves.
The room filled with a sharp smell of scorched hair.
Selka put a hand over Tavi's mouth before he could call out.
Downstairs, something broke.
Then came three heavy knocks against the kitchen door.
"Ren."
Vin's voice.
She was already moving.
"Stay upstairs," he called. "Keep away from the back window."
She stopped on the landing.
He had spoken carefully, as though each word required a separate breath.
Behind her, Shin slid off the bed.
She went back before he reached the door.