The sewers were Aressa’s pride: They were the reason the streets were not foul with the stink and sight of slops from the shops and houses. From following Father Knosso’s research, however, he had learned that they were not built for that purpose—they were really drainage tubes to carry away the water that used to make this whole land a sinking swamp. The man that he, Umbo, and Loaf saw poling his boat along a bayou lived in the time before the swamp was drained. Only later, when ten or twenty feet of silt and dust and garbage had been piled up and buildings built on the heap, did people begin to connect pipes from their houses to the drainage tubes and use them as sewers.
The tunnel Rigg and Param were about to use, however, had been built much later than the sewers, perhaps five or six hundred years ago, during an age of turmoil; Rigg believed that among the paths he saw were several occasions when the scholars of the library had fled in a group, no doubt carrying their most precious books and writings with them.
Rigg pushed the wall closed from the other side and then flipped the lever that automatically rotated the pins back to their starting position, and brought the dumbwaiter back down to the main floor.
As they carefully made their way through the dry escape tunnel, groping their way where the slitted skylights did not illuminate very well, Rigg scanned the paths ahead, to make sure there were no nasty surprises waiting for them at the entrance he planned to use.
He quickly saw that there was a great tumult in the city. Apparently when the soldiers poured out and took their places inside and outside Flacommo’s house, it had roused the mob—people were running here and there through the city, vast crowds of them, and around the house the cordon of soldiers was fully engaged keeping the mob at bay. There was little chance they were searching for Rigg and Param now.
In the little park near the entrance, there were Umbo and Loaf, waiting right where he told them to wait.
And as they moved toward the passage leading up to the park, Rigg saw a group of a dozen soldiers move into the park and leave at once with Loaf and Umbo surrounded.
As Param had warned him. General Citizen was not one to leave things to chance. He must have been observing Loaf and Umbo all along. Maybe he even had spies watching when Rigg met with them, so he knew right where to send his soldiers.
Even if Rigg were as ruthless as Mother, willing to let them die while he made his escape, he knew that in the long run such a course would never work. He needed Umbo to get him through the Wall. And if they didn’t get through the Wall, eventually they would be found and killed. The new dynasty demanded it.
Rigg immediately backtracked. While General Citizen’s soldiers did not know how to open the passageway in the park, there were still a dozen of them waiting there in case Rigg was so foolish as to blunder out into the open without checking.
“They got my friends,” he said to Param. “We have to go another way.”
She mutely followed him along another path. He only knew two dry paths—the others involved getting into the city’s sewers, which was not just wet but also disgusting. What if General Citizen knew this as well? What if he was watching all the sewers and the only other dry entrance?
No. The sewers he might watch, but General Citizen could not know about the dry tunnels, because there had been no traffic through them for more than a century—long before the People’s Revolution. Perhaps the last monarch who knew of the paths died without telling anyone. So the other entrance would not be watched—though that was no guarantee someone would not notice them by accident.
It was a long walk, and Param was not used to covering so much ground, or walking for so long at a time. Even though it took her ages to cross a room when invisible, to her it was a few quick steps. Where could she have walked, inside Flacommo’s house, that would give her any exercise? Rigg had been able to run with Olivenko back and forth between the library and Flacommo’s house, building up his endurance again, but Param had had no such opportunity.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s hard, and I wish I were as big as Loaf, so I could carry you.”
“You’re saving my life,” said Param. “But since I’m getting so tired, why not rest a while? The only urgent appointment we had won’t be kept now anyway.”
Rigg saw the wisdom of this, and found a short flight of steps where they could sit down.
To Rigg’s surprise, Param climbed the stairway and lay down on the floor of the upper part of the tunnel.
“There might be rats,” Rigg warned her.
“If a big enough one comes along, kill it so I can use it for a pillow,” she said.
All right, so she wasn’t bothered by rats. Or maybe she’d never actually encountered one, so she didn’t know whether it would bother her or not. She fell asleep quickly.
But it was too early in the day for Rigg to want to nap. He had schooled himself not to need sleep again until after noon. So he sat on the top step with Param sleeping behind him.
At first he couldn’t stop his thoughts from going back to Mother and General Citizen. He had known Citizen to be a formidable opponent—but he was nothing compared to Mother, because he hadn’t thought she was an opponent at all. Oh, yes, he had entertained the possibility that she was untrustworthy—even that she might harbor plans to kill him. But after months of being with her often, he had come to like her, to love her, to trust her. And all the time, she was . . .
No, not lying. Not really. She really did like him, and love him, and she certainly trusted him. She was simply doing the same thing Rigg had done, and Father, too, for that matter—holding her most secret plans in reserve. The real difference between Rigg and Mother was not that one of them was more dishonest or untrustworthy. It was that Rigg’s plans included saving his mother, and her plans included letting him be killed. No, arranging for him to be killed.
I can’t keep thinking about this. I certainly can’t let myself keep feeling things about it.
But he was almost as panicked and grieved and angry about this betrayal as he had been about Father’s death nearly a year before. And, like then, he was immediately plunged into the problem of staying alive when there were people who wanted him dead. He had thought the villagers—including Umbo’s father—posed a real threat to him when they wanted to kill him for failing to save Kyokay. Now their threat seemed laughable compared to what Mother had tried and Citizen intended. But if the villagers of Fall Ford had killed him, he would have been just as dead as if Mother’s brutal plan with the iron bars had blown him and Param to smithereens.
Rigg forced himself to scan the city, looking for Loaf and Umbo. It wasn’t hard to find them—General Citizen knew whatever Mother had told him about Rigg’s ability to find people, so he hadn’t bothered any kind of concealment. Besides, he wanted Rigg to find them, so he would come to save them.
They know I’ll come and save my friends. That’s something. They know that, unlike them, I have honor.
Of course, that honor’s going to get me killed.
Mobs were still prowling the streets, and more and more soldiers were coming into the city to restore order. Those large interwoven paths were easy to see and trace. But as Umbo’s and Loaf’s paths passed through other recent ones, it took all Rigg’s concentration, at such a distance, to stay focused on them.
At last the paths came to an end. Loaf and Umbo were being held in a large room with a strange pattern of paths in it. A large seating area, almost like one of the theaters in the city, but nowhere near as thickly attended. And down front, instead of the paths of actors or musicians on a stage, there was a large clear area where no one went, and around it, various stations where the same people returned and stayed for hours at a time, again and again.
Only when he recognized the path of Erbald, the Secretary of the Council, did he realize where Umbo and Loaf were being kept—in the Council House itself. They were seated right at the table, as if they were part of the government. And the rest of the Council was seated around them, with soldiers standing against the walls. No one at the table left, though servants came and went—feeding them?