Not that there were not scoundrels and cutthroats among canalmen. There were; and bodies quietly slipped into the Det's bay, and boats got robbed, particularly little boats of partnerless canalers who found themselves up some dark bywater with retreat cut off from either end. But Jones was too canny for that. She handled her skip mostly without the ancient little motor, which worked only fitfully at best; she used the pole and the hook, worked in and out the traffic of high day with a deft shift of bare foot and shove of the pole that sped her through tight spots, but she took no chances by night: she left the deep nooks to the combines and the gangs that ran them and did her night tie-up usually by the Hightown Bridge, wherever she could find a spot at the fringes of the other canal-folk, an ungainly midnight collection of ramshackle craft, some real fishing boats of! the Det and out of the harbor, overnighted on a supply trip; mostly canaler-craft; some skiffs or hired-poleboats or smallish barges and numerous skips like her own.
She fished a bit in her idle hours—for eels, mostly; the canals were noxious, but the channel in the harbor was still wholesome, and when things were truly slow and after storms when the sea was boiling into the Dead Harbor and onto the marsh and the Port Flat, she nursed the lame motor out round the Rimwash, built a fire of driftwood on the beach to stake out her territory, and fished and combed the Sundance shingle for what the tide washed in, which was sometimes nets and sometimes line and now and again a bit of plank or a rare shell to dicker with or a -bit of canvas to trade or sell.
And regularly, the only regular trade she had, she would pole up to the back door of taverns here and there, where she would buy up a few barrels; it was up the canalside steps and knock at the back and the potboy would unchain the barrels and sell them off for the few pennies she had; she would resell them to old Hafiz the brewer up the canal and haul a freight of beer and whiskey back again. So the trade went, not much pay and late hours, but it was bread to go with the river eels.
And now and again, at Moghi's tavern by the Fishmarket Stairs, her first and best customer, there was a different sort of trade, a few barrels of very fine brandy to take down-canal to Hafiz with the empties. How that got to Moghi was a good question, coming from high up the Det as it did, or even from the Chattalen. But Hafiz had his uptown clients and when mat fine brandy went down the canal, a big load of Hafiz' best beer came up it, and a bit of real coin came her way at either end.
Tonight might be one of those nights, since there was a Nev Hettek riverboat warped into port Detside, and that meant illicit goods filtering into Merovingen-under-the-bridges, same as it meant tine goods uptown. Altair Jones scented possibilities.
So she came in the dead of night, poling lazily past the gathering of barges at the Hightown Bridge as if she were looking for a mooring-spot, and then going on the Grand Canal under the pilings of the Fishmarket Stairs, where a winding set of steps came down from the triple bridgeways of Merovingen-above. The high board buildings went up level upon level above; catwalks laced the space between them, all silvery gray in the moonlight; and Fishmarket Bridge crossed the canal, on stout pilings that stood like a watery black forest by one of the few solid bits of rock in Merovingen. And tangled amid it all, the back porches of a second-hand store, a spicery, a bakery, and Moghi's dilapidated tavern, where the light of a porch-lantern danced on the waters and invited approach despite barred, shuttered windows and closed door.
There at that corner of Moghi's porch, Altair snagged a convenient piling and looped the tie-rope around, the current carrying the skip up against Moghi's porch ladder, an unobtrusive and rickety span of nailed boards. But when her ears caught a flurry of footsteps on boards, above the slap and ripple of the canal water, she stopped with her hand on the ladder; and her sharp eyes, scanning up and about, caught a move in the moonlight up amongst the back and forth lacery of the Stair, up along the nether tier of the triple bridge.
Men in cloaks. She froze right as she was, hugging her skip to that piling and keeping low by that lamplit porch, because there was more than one kind of vermin that skulked about the bridges of nightbound Merovingen. She pulled her cap-brim down low to shade her eyes from any glimmer of Moghi's porch lantern, and held the rope tight to keep the boat from swinging and bumping against the porch. A shiver set into her muscles, which was the cold and the strain on her arms.
There were maybe a half-dozen of them, all dark-cloaked, out on that bridge not so far above. She heard the mutter of their voices as they came to the rail. Up to no good, it was very sure. Sometimes smugglers dealt with Moghi, on business they wanted private-—that was one kind of trouble. But these looked like something else, all cloaked and hooded and hunched over some weight they carried together to that rail.
Something pale gleamed among them, fitful glimmering; it shone like a body then, suddenly airborne in the night, and hit the black water with a splash that threw water on her. Altair sucked in her breath, huddled tight against the piling as the laughter drifted down to her; another shiver got to her taut muscles, and the current tried to take the boat this way and that, but she resisted it with a steady pull of her arms.
"See him?" one asked, faintly, above her head.
"No," said another. "That's done 'im."
The figures went away then, a flicker of shadow among the railings, and the thump of leather-shod soles up the Fishmarket Stair. Sound diminished. Trouble left the riverside and ascended to Merovingen-above, maybe where it had come from in the first place. And not a thing stirred from Moghi's.
Altair let go the piling; the skip bumped and bumped again in the water-motion, and she fumbled at the tie-rope with cold fingers. No barrels tonight, by the Ancestors. Not a crack would Moghi's porch door open right now, not to any knocking, if they had wind of that, but there were other doors Moghi's bully lads might stir from if they heard that trouble, and she had no wish to be caught in explanations. She jerked loose, coiled the rope, anxious to be away.
Something splashed out of time with the water. She squinted outward. A disturbance broke the ripple-pattern near the pilings of the high bridge's southward jut, a trick of the eyes—no, again, again. Whatever, whoever they had flung in had floated. She froze stock still, cursed to herself and swayed to the motion of the water that was pushing on that floating body too, taking it and her loose boat the same way, beside the webwork of Fishmarket, in the shifting glimmer of the moon and Moghi's reflected porchlight. Black pilings of me high bridge drifted by. A ripple-spot emerged and ebbed in the black-shining water where it caught Moghi's porchlight.
Something struggled there. Death did not attract her. But a struggle for life—that deserved audience, at least. Deserved curiosity. Or some kind of human sympathy.
A gleam of white, then, a splash in the dark. Not wave-motion. The water slapped the pilings out of time to mat sound. She ran out the pole as silently as she could and probed the water at middle depth.
A hand broke the surface. Broke it again near the boat, fingers reaching up a piling, failing as they found no purchase.
She got down on her knees on the slats at the sloping prow and probed with the pole down by that piling, not wanting to do that at all, no; what someone threw in the canal was their business. But this lonely battle was persistent, horrid, down in Old Det's dark bowels. Old Det had eaten something that went down hard: and being water-rat, Altai; was on the side of the something and not greedy black old Det.