But appearances can be deceptive. The area she was about to enter had been among the first to be built when the Colony was established, and the walls of the houses were strong enough to withstand anything man, or time, could throw at them.
She took a breath and whisked across the street, slipping into the pitch-black passageway. It was barely wide enough to allow two people to pass abreast at the same time. At once the smell hit her: The stale odor of the inhabitants, a reek of unwashed occupation so intense it was like a physical thing, intermixed with all that went with it, with human effluent and the pungent stench of rotting food.
She came out into a gloomily lit alley. Like all the thoroughfares and runnels that cut through this district, it was barely wider than the passageway from which she'd just emerged.
"The Rookeries," she said to herself, glancing around and realizing that it had changed not one jot, this place where the people who had nowhere else to go ended up. She began to walk, spotting a familiar building here or a door there, still flecked with faint traces of paint in the same color she recalled, and reveling in her memories of the times she and Tam had ventured into this forbidden and dangerous playground.
Basking in the warmth of her memories, she strolled down the middle of the alley, avoiding the open gutter where sewage trickled like heated lard. On either side of her were the ramshackle old slums, their uppermost stories overhanging to such an extent that in places they appeared to be almost touching.
She paused to adjust the shawl over her head while a raggedy bunch of street urchins tore past her. They were so dirty as to be nearly indistinguishable from the backdrop of filth coating every surface.
Two of them, small boys, were shouting, "Styx and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me!" at the top of their lungs as they chased after the others. She smiled at their irreverence; if they had done that outside the confines of the Rookeries, the punishment would have been swift and brutal. One of the boys skipped over the open gutter in the middle of the road, past a gaggle of old crones dressed in head shawls similar to Sarah's. They were gossiping intently among themselves and nodding their heads. Almost without looking, one of the women twisted away from the group just as the boy was in reach. Cuffing him with unnecessary roughness, she issued a sharp reprimand. The woman's face was lined and blistered and as pale as a ghost's.
The boy reeled slightly, then, rubbing his head and grumbling under his breath, he hurtled off, undeterred. Sarah couldn't suppress a laugh. She saw in the boy a youthful Tam, recognizing the toughness and resilience she had so admired in her brother. The children were still taunting one another in their high voices, and whooping and screaming with excitement as they hared down a side alley and disappeared from view.
Some thirty feet farther down from Sarah, a pair of brutish-looking men stood talking in a doorway, both with long hair and pendulous, matted beards, and dressed in scruffy frock coats. She caught them eyeing her with vicious sneers on their faces. The larger of the two lowered his head like a bulldog about to attack, and made as if to move toward her. He slipped a gnarled, rootlike cudgel from his thick belt, and she saw the easy way he held it in his hand. This wasn't some vain threat — she could tell he knew how to use the club.
These people didn't take kindly to outsiders straying off the beaten track and onto their patch.
Sarah returned his cold glare but slowed to a crawl. If she were to continue on her original course, it would take her straight by him — there was nowhere else to go. The alternative was for her to do an about-face, which would be perceived as a sign of weakness. If they suspected for even a fraction of a second that she was afraid and shouldn't be there, they'd have a pop at her — that was how things worked in this place. Either way, she new that she and this total stranger were now locked into a showdown and that the situation would need to be resolved, somehow or other.
Although she hadn't the slightest doubt she could handle herself if it came to it, Sarah still felt a frisson of the old fear, the familiar electric tingle running down her spine. Thirty years ago, this was her and her brother's obsession, the start of the contest. Oddly enough, she found it rather comforting.
"Ay! You!" someone suddenly cried behind her, jolting her from her thoughts. "Jerome!"
"What?" Sarah gasped.
She wheeled around to meet the red-rimmed eyes of the ancient hag. Her face was dappled with the most enormous liver spots, and she was pointing accusingly at Sarah with an arthritic finger.
"Jerome," the old woman rasped again, even louder and more confidently this time, her mouth gaping open so Sarah could see her toothless, livid-pink gums. Sarah realized she had let her guard drop, and her face had been in full view of the group of women. But how in the world did they know who she was?
"Jerome. Yes! Jerome!" another of the women cawed, with mounting conviction. "It's Sarah Jerome, ain't it?"
Although she was in a maelstrom of confusion, Sarah did her best to rapidly assess her options. She scanned the nearby doorways, reckoning that if worse came to worst she might be able to barge her way into one of the half-ruined buildings and lose herself in the rabbit warren of passageways that lay behind them. But it didn't look good. All the doors were firmly shut or boarded up.
She was walled in, with only two ways to go — backward or forward. She was looking at the alleyway beyond the old hags, calculating whether to make a break and get herself back out of the Rookeries, when one of them screamed the most piercing of wails:
"SARAH!"
Sarah flinched with the sheer volume of the squall, and a lull descended on the whole place, an eerie, watchful silence.
Sarah spun around, walking away from the women, knowing it would take her straight past the bearded man. So be it! She would just have to deal with him.
As she neared him, he raised the cudgel to the height of his shoulder and Sarah prepared to fight, slipping her shawl from her head and winding it around her arm. She could have kicked herself for not bringing her knife.
She was almost level with him when, to her astonishment and relief, he began to strike the cudgel against the lintel of the doorway and to shout her name in his gruff voice. His confederate joined with him, as did every one of the group of women behind her.
"SARAH! SARAH! SARAH!"
The entire place was stirring now, as if the timbers of the buildings themselves were coming to life.
"SARAH! SARAH! SARAH!"
The cudgel continued to beat time as people turned out from the houses and into the alleyway, more people than she believed possible. Shutters slammed back from glassless windows and faces peeked out. All Sarah could do was bow her head and keep walking.
"SARAH! SARAH! SARAH!" came shouts thick and fast from all over, and people joined in with the beat of the cudgel, the clattering growing as metal cups or whatever else came to hand were struck against walls, windowsills, and doorjambs. It was like a jailhouse chorus, so loud that the tiles on the roofs began to resonate with the singular rhythm.
Still gripped by panic, Sarah didn't slow her pace, but began to notice the grinning faces, infused with wonderment. Elderly men, bent double from disease, and gaunt women, the used-up people that the Colony had consigned to the scrap heap, were hailing her, shouting her name jubilantly.