The next two minutes were agonizing, as Thasha tore at the knot around Rain’s chest, and the doctor batted her in confusion. At last she gave up, seized Dastu’s knife and slashed off the rope above the knot. She hurled the shortened rope down to Pazel and Druffle. There were a few awful moments of paralysis, as each begged the other to climb first, and the voices grew louder, nearer. At last Druffle relented, and scurried up the wall like a monkey.
“Tell them to lie down!” said Pazel, “flat and quiet, and away from the edge. Hurry, Mr. Druffle, please!” He looked back anxiously at the glass wall and the doorway. The dog had vanished; from some distance away he heard it barking. He heard Druffle grunt as he rolled over the edge. Thasha tossed him the end of the rope. Even as he caught hold of it a door smashed open. Pazel climbed, wishing he had Thasha’s strength, as the others hauled him upward. “Faster!” hissed Thasha through her teeth. Pazel gasped, pulling, swaying as feet pounded down the corridor. He hooked a leg over the roof, and Chadfallow seized his shirt and wrenched him up with one great effort. Pazel caught a glimpse of torchlight through the glass. He rolled away from the edge, and those still standing threw themselves down. No one moved.
Angry voices, men’s and women’s both, sounded from just outside the glass wall. “They’re in the bedchambers! Open the door, open the door!” Keys jangled, hinges gave a rusty shriek, and a mob forced its way in, shouting, raging. “Don’t let them bite you,” a male dlomu cried. “And don’t get their blood on you, either. Turn your faces away before you cut them down.”
Pazel felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. It was the voice of the man who had led the mob the day before. The one who had promised to come back and kill them.
The cries changed abruptly: “Not here, Kudan! The place is empty! This brainless dog’s guarding an empty cage!”
“But I heard something.”
“They were here, it’s been lived in. Maybe they were moved to the south wing.”
“Spoons, cups, plates. Earth’s blood, they were treated just like men. And so much food!”
“Some of it’s mine,” said Rain aloud. Neeps pounced on him, covering his mouth. Fortunately the old doctor was still catching his breath, and his voice did not reach the dlomu.
“We’ll have to burn all the food,” one of them was saying, “and the mattresses too. Just the same as their bodies. Fire for the cursed, as they say.”
“Best do it well outside the city. Somewhere too far away for the curse to come back. The Black Tongue, maybe.”
“The Black Tongue! Surely we don’t need to go that far, Kudan.”
“We still have to catch the humans,” said their leader. “Come, it’s time to talk with those physicians again.” Some nervous laughter, then: “Get along there, dog! No treat for the likes of you.”
The voices faded. For several minutes no one moved. Pazel found himself shaking from head to foot. “Don’t move, anybody,” he whispered. “They’re still looking for us, remember.”
For nearly ten minutes they lay silent; even Dr. Rain seemed to have comprehended the situation at last. Pazel gazed past his own feet: above them rose more mountains, more city, more waterfalls. He had the strange sensation of looking at the same picture through a smaller window: Masalym was still looming above them, as it had from the deck of the Chathrand, but now he was inside the Middle City, peering between its domes and towers and solitary trees, at what was surely the Upper City, the highest level, where the mountains came close to one another, and the river squeezed through to fall over one more cliff, in one more white mass of foam.
Cautiously, they sat up. “What now?” whispered Thasha.
No one appeared to have an answer. Pazel turned his gaze left and right. The Conservatory was a larger complex than he’d realized: eight or nine whitewashed buildings, connected by arches and covered breezeways. There were three other spacious courtyards like the one they had just escaped, and a grand approach with white marble stairs and flowers blazing red and yellow. The whole place might have been mistaken for the mansion of some eccentric lord, except for the walled-in enclosures on the eastern side, where the tol-chenni huddled in frightened packs.
“We know what we have to do,” said Neeps. He pointed north to the cliff. “Sneak over there, climb that fence, tie off the rope and slip down into the Lower City. Right?”
“Impossible,” said Dastu. He gestured at a squat stone building half a mile away, constructed right up against the cliff. “That’s a barracks. It’s full of men keeping watch on the Lower City. See, there’s another beyond it. They’re all along the cliff.”
“The Middle City’s on guard against the Lower?” said Neeps.
“Don’t you understand?” said Dastu. “The Middle City is for richer sorts. The ones down there are nearly starving. These people don’t want them swarming up here, making life difficult, begging for work or food. Anyway, we don’t stand a chance of slipping down the cliff by daylight. Besides, the rope is too short. Even dangling from the end of it we’d have a forty-foot drop.”
“How did you and Thasha get down?” asked Pazel.
“We ran a mile nearer the mountain, where the cliff’s not so high,” Thasha answered. “But Dastu’s right, we’d never get away with it by daylight.”
Mr. Druffle, who had moved nearer to the street, crawled back to them on his belly, scowling. “It’s even worse than you think,” he said. “Those ruffians are all over the streets, looking for us. And there’s more of them than before. A few hundred, I’d say.”
“Well, that decides it,” said Pazel. “We’re not going anywhere soon. Maybe they’ll give up by nightfall.”
“Nightfall,” scoffed Uskins. “We will never make it to nightfall! All those towers. Someone is going to notice us, and then we’ll die. You were a fool to bring us up here, Muketch.”
“Call him a fool,” said Marila. “We’d be dead already if we’d stayed down there, like you wanted to. And the only tower near us is that giant thing straight ahead, and it looks abandoned to me.”
The first mate sniffed. “Twenty minutes, at the very outside. That’s how long I give us. Assuming that quack can keep from howling again.”
They lay down, as far from the edges of the roof as they could, as the Middle City went about its bustling, grumbling, early-morning routine. Now and then they heard dlomic men in the street, asking about them, sometimes with open suspicion. Once a nearby voice erupted in rage: “Harmless? Harmless? Sister, they’re devils! Haven’t you heard what went on at the port? They’ve brought the nuhzat back among us! They’re reviving old curses, inventing new ones. We went to them humbly, we asked how we could make amends. They wouldn’t answer.”
“Maybe they couldn’t,” replied a dlomic woman, “because they didn’t know what you were asking.”
“They knew!” shouted the man. “It’s not justice they want, sister, it’s revenge! This day was foreseen!”
After the two dlomu moved on, the angry voices sounded less frequently, and with more discouragement. But when the humans peeked down from the roof they saw that the streets were still crowded. There was no means of escape.
Twenty minutes passed, then twenty more. Pazel, Thasha, Neeps and Marila lay on their backs, a bit apart from the others, with their heads close together and their legs sticking out like the spokes of a wheel. Pazel realized, almost with shock, that he was comfortable. The sun was bright, the roof warm against his back. He looked at Thasha and thought he had never seen a more beautiful face, but what he said was, “You could use a good scrub.”
Thasha gave him a pained sort of grin. She needed to laugh, he thought, but how could she, after those terrible hints and guesses about where she came from? Hercol might believe what Admiral Isiq had claimed: that his wife Clorisuela had finally succeeded in bearing a child, after four miscarriages. But Thasha didn’t. And Pazel could find little reason why she should.
It was not that he believed a word Arunis had spoken. But Neeps’ ideas were another matter. Thasha had done some extraordinary things, in the Red Storm, and in the battle with the rats. She controlled the invisible wall. She’d been watched over her whole life by Ramachni. And who else could Thasha have meant when she said, I’ll never let her come back?