As if the metropolis was waiting to discover who would be its master.
Motoring out of sight in the half-submerged world beneath the city’s structures is like cruising down a huge flooded sewer, the hulking barnacle-encrusted concrete pontoons looming huge on either side, overhead a distant, shadowy roof or the narrow slit of Shieldlight permitted by overhanging buildings. Here the turnings are largely unmapped, and navigation is largely by instinct and by compass. Uncharted half-worlds filled with equally uncharted humanity block the channels and impede progress.
Now something large and black runs along a half-world gangway on Aiah’s left, then disappears into a darker piece of shadow. Aiah’s heart leaps, and her eyes strain into the gloom. Nothing moves. Whatever—whoever—it was remains hidden.
Ahead, a bright patch of Shieldlight transects the channel. Aiah gnaws her lip, looks hopelessly at the map pinned to the table in front of her, then takes one of the boat’s spotlights and trains it on the side of the pontoon near the splash of light. Every pontoon is required to have identification numbers painted on each end, and there are also supposed to be hanging metal signs giving the names of the various nautical lanes and channels; but the usual Caraqui slackness has been applied to the regulations, the signs have been scavenged for their metal, and what inspector would ever visit the underworlds anyway?
Aiah motions with her hand and the boat slows while she scans the pontoon, and then the pontoon opposite. Narrowing her eyes, she can faintly make out the flaked, weathered paint, centuries old, only visible because there is no real weathering down here. Each numeral is twice her height, and the pattern is only visible at all because it’s so huge. 4536N: a coordinate. She returns to her map, squints down at it, looks at the boat’s compass, then back at the map.
“Left,” she says, hoping she’s worked the compass deviation correctly—this close to the Pole, the deviation is enormous—and that the new course will take them all west, to their target at Fresh Water Bay.
The turn takes the flotilla into a narrow alleyway overshadowed by tenements of brown brick. The place actually has a name: Coel’s Channel. The sky is a long, narrow slit directly overhead, dark cloud skimming low overhead. Far above, laundry strung on lines floats gray in Shieldlight. Arrangements of guy wires and planks, sometimes at dizzying heights, connect the buildings over the little canal. A female hermit, long gray hair shrouding her face, hangs like the laundry from a wire in what looks like an old flour sack.
One of the boat’s crew has been listening to the radio, earphones pressed to his head, turning knobs as he stares fixedly at yellow glowing dials. He looks up with a start.
“Listen to this,” he says, and turns another knob, and an official-sounding voice comes from the buzzing metal grid of the speaker.
“—al Government of Caraqui,” it says, “was formed in order to unite those patriotic citizens determined to free our metropolis from the pernicious foreign ideas of the ex-Metropolitan Constantine and his gang of outland mercenaries.”
“Who is this?” growls Davath—large, twisted, a stoneface with features like pitted concrete. The answer to his question is obvious enough.
The enemy has finally declared himself publicly.
“I will now surrender the microphone to our president, Kerehorn.”
“Keretora?” asks Prestley. “Which Keremath’s that?” “Kerethan’s son,” Aedavath says.
“No, Kerethan’s son was Keredeen, and they both got killed.”
“Kerethan’s other son.” Stubbornly.
“No, he’s dead, too.”
“Hush.”
Kerehorn’s voice is reedy and uncertain. “Greetings, fellow citizens. The day of liberation is nigh.”
“Nigh?” someone offers. “Who wrote this?”
The speech is a vitriolic personal attack on Constantine, along with his “gang of foreigners and oppressors.” Other major figures in the government, Drumbeth and Parq and Hilthi, are not even mentioned. But Kerehorn is not much of a speaker, and the whole speech falls flat, interrupted every so often by the rustle of paper as he tries to find his place in his prepared text.
Aiah looks at the others as they all listen: their faces show skepticism, amused contempt, grim humor. They’ve lived under the rule of the Keremaths, and she hasn’t: they know better than she how to take this. Apparently their respect for Kerehorn, or any of his family, is limited.
“We pledge ourselves to the restoration of the ancient liberties and traditions of the Caraqui people,” Kerehorn says, and cynical laughter floats from one team member to the next.
“Why does he even bother to justify it?” someone says.
Cold certainty suddenly floods Aiah’s mind: Kerehorn is not the real leader. This unprepossessing a character could never have organized something as dangerous as the coun-tercoup. He is a figurehead, intended to provide a degree of legitimacy for the coup’s genuine leaders. But whose figurehead is he? Radeen’s?
Perhaps Radeen is using the Keremaths’ money to wedge himself into power. Perhaps they are both pawns of someone else. Or perhaps there is no real leader, only a group of people, each with different reasons for wanting to destroy the current government…
Coel’s Channel comes to an end up ahead, and the waters of a wide canal open out, its water bright green with algae and home to a flock of pelicans preening themselves in the unusual stillness. The boat’s helmsman throttles back. Aiah looks at the map again.
Ideally she wants to go straight on, but looking ahead she can see nothing but the gray slab wall of a pontoon on the far side of the canal. Obviously they will have to traverse the open canal for at least a while before turning west again.
The helmsman reverses the engines briefly to bring the boat to a complete stop, its prow barely jutting out beyond Coel’s Channel. Another crewman airily steps out onto the foredeck and peers left and right past the high concrete walls on either side. Aiah can tell from the sudden stiffening of his spine that he sees trouble. He returns to the cockpit, and Aiah’s mouth goes dry as she sees his grim expression.
“There’s a bridge to starboard, right in our path,” he says. “I can see a police roadblock on it, several cars, maybe a dozen cops.”
“Armed?” Aiah asks.
An unreadable expression passes across the crewman’s face. “Of course.”
An idiot question: Aiah doesn’t know what she’s going to do, what she can do, and is just playing for time. She delays further by going onto the foredeck herself, moving far less surefootedly than the boat’s crewman; she peers gingerly around the corner, heart pounding, and sees the bridge a few stades away. Suspension wires curve in a graceful arc, and the iron uprights are covered with an untarnishable black ceramic impressed with the oval cameo profiles of long-dead Caraquis. Square in the middle of the span is the roadblock: cars drawn across the span with their lights flashing in silence, uniformed men standing with long weapons in their hands. Should they choose to fire down into boats passing beneath them, they could cause a massacre. But getting around them will require an endless amount of backtracking, with little assurance of not encountering another roadblock somewhere else along the way.