The Marcher Lord (Over Guard) (2 page)

It was a sort of indirect pride that he had, watching all of it. And though so much of it was foreign
and unfamiliar, a good deal of it wasn't, and it was Bevish now. This new and strange place of people and possibilities, mishandled for so long, was finally where it belonged, and he was here to see it.

Whistling some cockney tune that he'd heard far too many times
aboard the
Regulus
, Ian raised his yeoman, the computing device he'd been issued. It hadn't taken him very long to discover that it wasn't all that much more elaborate than the regulator he'd been given, but he liked how neatly it fit into his uniform’s right sleeve, as well as how light and sturdy it was. The primary display covered roughly the bottom half of his forearm, though the secondary display that it projected wasn't very much larger than that and only came about two-thirds up his palm.

Keying up the location again where he was to report to, he noticed that the yeoman was charting the quickest route through a series of streets that looked like
the one in front of him.

“Probably not,”
Ian said to himself as he canceled that course and began plotting a new one that ran through what were hopefully less traveled streets. The interface was a rotten nuisance though, and it did its best to divert him the way it insisted was faster. It took him more than a couple minutes to figure out how to disable—

             
                                                                      A shorter person stumbled into Ian from his right, the person seemingly off balance and scrambling with his hands to regain himself and dart a quick hand underneath Ian’s shirt—

Ian reflexively shifted from trying to catch the
person—young Chax—and pushed the boy firmly away from him. The Chax boy went quickly to the ground, his hands flailing, empty and then—

Another person dashed past Ian, this second figure slamming into
him a bit and wrenching Ian's regulator off his belt and then sprinting down the alleyway.

“Stop!”
Ian shouted after the second Chax in a spectacularly useless sort of fashion.

Ian
almost started after him, an embarrassed anger in his throat, but he remembered himself just in time to see the Chax youth on the ground scramble to his feet and take off the opposite way back into the main street. Ian spun after him, the bit of hesitation he'd offered almost making the effort a waste. But he was furious, barely able to believe he'd let himself get taken so easily, like he might as well have grown up on the sunny side of Piccadilly. Of course he'd made himself a ripe picking, heedlessly working out directions near an intersection of sorts, never mind that his uniform didn't already have him wonderfully marked. Ian should've at least had his back to the wall, or even better, had been at least a little bit prepared for something like this.

The boy dove into the stream of people, but either because it usually was an effective enough way to lose someone, or perhaps
because he didn't realize that Ian had actually settled on pursuing, the boy only went in a little ways. Then he ducked right for a handful of seconds, finally looping back around toward the side of the street.

Fortunately, timing being what it happened to be, Ian was able to see this and change direction.
He ran as fast as he could manage while wedging himself between the walls and people. The boy’s running had created something of a disturbed trail in the people maybe a dozen paces in front of Ian. The Chax boy was even now casually slowing a bit until he looked back and saw Ian gaining on him. The boy let out a startled cry and sped back up. Ian swallowed what would have been a useless shout after the boy and focused on moving past the people as fast as he could and picking his way around them where he couldn't very easily.

The heat was beating down into his uniform, reverberating in painful waves that the initial rushes of adrenaline had distracted him from. His gait was awkward with his pack and rifle, and the boy was a lot smaller, but that didn't really matter.
Couldn’t matter.

“Come on,” Ian muttered through gritted teeth, putting the heat, his burning embarrassment—everything out of his mind. The factors didn't matter; as long as the boy wasn't able to lose him, it was merely a matter of who gave up first.

The Chax boy seemed short for his age, exceptionally skinny, and wore only a cutoff pair of dirty trousers.

The boy
reached a door’s front stoop, looked back once more to make sure Ian was still following, and then swung himself out of sight on the other side of it.

Ian broke through one
last group of natives and leapt up onto the steps to peer over where the boy had disappeared. Hesitating just long enough to discover that there was a set of steps leading beneath the building's foundation, Ian dropped off the side of the stoop to the steps below, some six or seven feet down.

He ran his hand down along the wall as he went, attempting to
keep his balance as he dropped—

One of his feet slipped
upon hitting the steps, and he toppled forward. A sharp pain ran up his leg, and his palms burned where they hit the rough stone floor that was half-covered with sand. But he surged to his feet, trying to see in the abrupt dimness. At the opposite end of the building, he spotted another similar staircase. In between them was a space seemingly carved out from the foundation with oddly situated pillars holding up the building. And scattered throughout what open area was left were all manner of Chax in various stages of dress—standing, milling, pointing, but mostly sitting and laying on mats—interspersed through all this was a surprising drop in temperature and incredible stench—

“Tak tak,”
came an insistent voice at his side, an old Chax man pulling at his elbow and pointing back up the stairway where Ian had just come.

“Tak tak,” Ian agreed, peering
toward the opposite end of the cellar where a smaller figure was pulling at some sheet from one of the older inhabitants.

Evidently realizing that the deal wasn't going to happen, the boy angrily kicked
at the dirt and ran up and out of the opposite entrance. All this amounted to an especially good thing, as Ian was sure it would've been unlikely he could have picked the boy out if the other Chax had felt inclined to hide him.

Ian started after him again, the first dozen steps especially awkward as cracking
threads of pain shot up through his leg. Grimacing as he picked up speed, a rising ripple of surprised and curious voices ran through the cellar dwellers as he passed, as many of them noticed Ian for the first time.

It was a
measurable shock going back outside again, highlighting just why exactly someone might be so motivated to dig out the underside of a building. The difference of not possessing his regulator was also painfully noticeable.

The boy's route hadn't grown
too complicated in the narrow, but fairly quiet backstreet Ian found himself in. The Chax boy had taken a left and was sprinting, probably just hoping to outrun Ian. This didn't seem to be all that brilliant of a plan, as several of the advantages that had been against Ian weren't so considerable now.

But the boy looked scared.

It felt good. The aged pavement under his boots, the warm—well, hot—wind pushing against him as he pulled hard with his legs, the air excited on his face, in his lungs, his hands. It wasn't so much the startled voices, the breaking of whatever sorts of expectations these people had of someone in his situation—it wasn’t so much Ian passing two different sources of music coming from the corners of a busy street, or even the exhilaration at being here now, alive and able to do what he wanted, to try to take back a stolen army regulator that most would have given up without even the pretenses of a chase.

And he would take it back.
That was the best thing, and being able to see that the boy knew it.

Ian
was gaining on him. He was maybe a dozen arm lengths away when the boy abruptly veered right, down a large connecting street, and made for a space between two store fronts. Ian had a moment of confusion until he saw the small gap between the two buildings. The gap had been walled off save for its bottom few feet, forming something of a boy-sized hole. Genuinely worried for the first time, Ian ran harder, pulling with his arms as he got closer to the boy's back, within a couple arm lengths. The Chax let out a scared sound, running while looking back at Ian. They broke into the shade of the building, the wall looming and Ian’s hand brushing against the boy as Ian prepared to jump at him, but—

The boy
reached the gap and slid underneath, grabbing hold of the gap’s top and swinging through to the other side.

A short fraction later,
Ian crashed into—or rather around—the gap. He mostly caught his momentum in time so that it didn't really hurt anything, except perhaps his pride.

Dropping to his knee
s, Ian scrambled through it headfirst the best he could, which was a great deal harder for him than the boy. His pack and especially the awkwardness of his rifle contributed greatly to the discrepancies in their respective gap-traversing ratios.

By the time
Ian had accomplished this, the boy had regained a decent stretch between them on the very narrow pathway that the two buildings grudgingly allowed. Restarting his pursuit, it didn't take long before Ian had to slow his pace in order to run sideways to appease the width he was allotted.

By this point his uniform was drenched
, and he was beginning to feel the edges of a winded state. His knees were ironically hurting more than his leg was, and he wasn't feeling all that much cleaner than the boy. But he sensed weariness and something else in his thief. Mounting panic perhaps, as the Chax hesitated when he reached the other end of the alleyway. He looked once to the left, as though contemplating a change in plans. But instead he ran straight across the street and jumped down into a lower alley, opposite the one Ian was coming out of.

The streets were growing increasingly less straight, rough angles beginning to form in the corners, the buildings bec
oming more rundown. It appeared to be an older, less considered part of the city. The buildings were tall, but the main streets broken and a thickening web of lower levels of streets and building entrances stretched out for miles.

Ian noticed that he was softly singing a verse from an old army victory hymn—between breaths, anyway. Even as the boy's path became increasingly more difficult to follow
, Ian could feel it. In each failed alley wall Ian had to get through, he could feel it. For every railing, bar, corner Ian had to grab to abruptly change directions. Each change in elevation—whether it was jumping down into a lower alley, or climbing back out of another, it came closer. Its resistance was growing more and more ragged, feebler even as the ringing in Ian’s hands grew. His head was feeling a bit less sure as well, honest signs that he should have had more water.

It was an intangible, evident thing, it was—

Ian came around the corner the boy had just disappeared around, somehow knowing that this was the last one even before he saw that it was a traditional dead end. The Chax boy was bent over and breathing hard, scared.

“Good,” Ian said, as he brought himself to a stop, the restraint feeling strange in his legs. He was breathing at a respectable pace as well, but he managed
, forced himself to hide most of it. “Jolly good.”

“I have nothing,” the boy shouted at him
. “Leave all me alone, I don' have nothing!”

“
No,” Ian agreed, walking toward him and looking around at the fairly deep alleyway they were in. “But I don't think it matters.”

“Leave me alone, don't hurt me,” the boy shouted again, backing up fast and tripping onto his side. “I have nothing—Help, please help!”

“Mos mos, so idiot,” said another Chax boy who stepped out of a gap in the building, his face stony. “You bring him right here.”

“So
wwy, sowwy,” the younger boy said, holding his hands up at Ian and making helpless gestures.

“It wasn't really his fault
,” Ian said, looking at the older boy and deciding that he must have been the one who had taken his regulator. “People aren't supposed to chase him.”

“They ar
e't,” the older boy said. “You’od never catch me, soldier jah.”

Ian
relaxed. He knew what he had to say and was pretty confident he could do this without difficulty, but there was a lot more depending on this than he was used to, beyond just retrieving his regulator. He needed to be careful.

“Maybe,”
Ian said as though he didn't care, as if his head wasn't still swimming with the rush of having beaten them here, into this situation. “This is a nice place, to rendezvous after buzzing something … May I see it?” Ian asked, looking at the older boy firmly enough in the hopes of forestalling any arguments.

There
were only a couple seconds where the lead boy hesitated, the debate almost audibly running across his face. But then he pulled it out from behind him, holding it in a tight fist.

“Would it bring a good price?” Ian asked, feeling as though he should keep talking.