Undercity (20 page)

XVIII

The Hidden

As I ran along a midwalk toward the Maze, I sent out my green beetle to find the closest Kajada punker. So of course it found the thug who had tried to blast me with a carbine yesterday. Bad luck, but I had no idea where to find Dig and no time to locate anyone else.

The punker is jogging on the midwalk of the canal to your left
, Max told me.
Just on the other side of the wall that separates it from this canal.

Good,
I thought.
How do I get over there?

My maps suggest a passage through the wall lies a few meters ahead.

I slowed as I approached an archway in the wall. Unlike many passages here, this one didn’t come from damage to the ruins; it was a real entrance built by the ancient architects to provide access from one canal to the other. I stepped through the archway and walked down a short tunnel to the next canal. We were near enough to the Concourse that this one had a few street lamps. Four gangers were clustered on the midwalk across the canal, and a rider stood farther down, talking into a comm on her tech-mech arm. Spreading the warning, I hoped.

Looking in the other direction, I spied the Kajada punker up ahead, loping along the midwalk. I followed, easily gaining on her. When I was about ten meters away, she suddenly stopped and spun around, holding up a long blade that glittered.

I skidded to a halt and lifted my hands, palms facing her. The pulse revolver in my holster showed, of course, but I made no attempt to draw the weapon.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“I need to talk to Dig.”

“Fuck that.”

“Fine,” I said. “You give her the message. Tell her Vakaar has ISC guns. Hammer is going to attack. Fifteen minutes. Maybe less.”

She stared at me. “Vakaar doesn’t have shit.”

I didn’t have time for this posturing. “Vakaar has plenty of shit. Tanglers. Carbines. Tell Dig. You don’t, Kajada dies. It’s on you. GO!” With that, I took off again, running past her. She tried to threaten me with the knife, but I was already beyond her reach before she even finished turning.

Max, send the green beetle after her,
I thought.
Let me know if she contacts Dig.

She’s running after you.

She won’t catch me.

She turned into another tunnel. She’s heading down-city.

I hoped that meant she was seeking out Dig.
Where’s my red beetle?

At the casino.

Has Jak folded up the place?

No.

Damn! But why would he fold? After being closed for a while, he was probably raking it in tonight. He had no idea what was up with the cartels.

I headed for the Black Mark.

* * *

Jak came around a bend, jogging toward me. How he knew I was coming, I couldn’t have said, but he had always had a top-notch network. We stopped in front of each other, breathing heavily from the run.

“You got to close the Black Mark,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. “Got a good night going.”

“Braze sold ISC arms to Hammer. Vakaar is going after Kajada. Now.”

He stared at me. “Shit.”

“Yah.”

He pulled me to a tunnel entrance behind a curtain of stone. As he moved, he tapped out a code on his belt. Light flickered on a slender conduit embedded in the leather, hardly noticeable. The better the tech, the smaller, and he could afford the best.

I squeezed with him into the hidden tunnel. “Are you warning the Mark?”

“Yah.” He pulled me along a narrow passage lit only by my stylus.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Drug-bliss kid.”

“You found one.”

He spoke grimly. “More than one.”

“Where?”

Jak drew me into a wider portion of he tunnel and pointed to a set of roughly hewn stairs on our left. “Go see the family at top. They took in the baby and the boy you found. Say I sent you.”

“You’re going back to Mark?”

“Yah,” He kissed me, quick and fast, then took off running back the way we had come.

Well, so. No one had ever kissed me before I went into a fight before. I’d figure out how I felt about that later. Right now, I took the stairs two at a time. They wound around like a demented spiral staircase, some parts a natural progression of ledges, others hacked out by humans. In one place, I had to drop to my knees to push past an overhang blocking the way. On the other side, I kept going up and around. At the top, I stepped into a small foyer surrounded by rock. An opening stood across me, an archway tooled out of the stone like a work of art bordered by abstract carvings.

I walked over and stepped just inside the archway, unsure if I should go further. People lived here. The furniture was sculpted from rock formations with the same artistic beauty as the archway. Plush cushions softened them, embroidered with gold threads. Gorgeous tapestries hung on the walls, all woven in the undercity style, with glowing colors. They depicted scenes of canals and caves, shimmering in metallic threads, red, blue, green, gold, amber. Some showed fanciful depictions of how the aqueducts might have looked in ancient times, running with water.

“Heya,” I called.

A man walked out of an inner doorway. He was holding a knife just as long and as ugly as the one the drug punker had brandished at me in the canal.

“How get here?” he demanded. Somewhere deeper in the home, a baby cried.

“Jak sent me,” I said. “Said you took in the orphans I found.”

His posture eased. “You’re The Bhaaj?”

“Just Bhaajan.” I wondered why he put “The” in front of my name.

He lowered his knife. “Come with.”

I followed him through another sculpted archway and into a room with more tapestries on the walls. A lamp with an exquisite glass shade stood in one corner, its colors glowing red, blue, and gold. It was fastened to the wall and the shade was too high for a child to reach. The other corner sported a water desalination apparatus partially hidden by potted plants with blue and red flowers. They grew in modified canal dust. Hand woven rugs warmed the floor, their colors more subdued than the wall hangings, but their artistry just as exceptional. Toys were strewn everywhere, balls, dolls, and holo-readers. On my right, a curtain hung in the archway to another room. The place was uncommonly beautiful, and so utterly different from anything in Cries, it was hard to believe we all descended from the same culture.

“Nice,” I said.

The man nodded.

The curtain rustled as a woman pushed it aside to enter the room. I recognized her as one of Jak’s bartenders. She was holding the baby I had found in the tunnels, and it snuggled in her arms, cooing softly. The curtain fell back into place, then moved again, just enough to let a boy peek out at me. Pack Rat! He looked much less scared and much less dusty than the last time I had seen him. He smiled shyly, then let the curtain drop into place, hiding him.

I nodded to the woman. “Children doing better.”

“Yah.” She nuzzled the baby’s head. “Was close for this one.”

Behind her, the curtain shifted and a girl of about seven walked out. She stepped behind her mother and looked around her, watching me large brown eyes.

“Three children?” I asked. That was counting the two orphans they had taken in.

“Four,” the mother said.

The father spoke to me. “The older girl is a dust knight.”

So that was why they recognized me. Their daughter must have been one of the three that indicated she had parents. The Cries authorities would undoubtedly cluck with concern about children living in caves, but a home like this could be a wonderful place to live.

I wondered, though, why their older daughter wasn’t here. “Did she warn you?”

“Warn us?” the man asked. “About what?”

“The cartels are going to war,” I said. “You stay here. Be safe. Don’t go out.” This home was well hidden. The cartels had no reason to come here. “She’ll be home soon.” I hoped to the gods that was true.

“We will stay,” the man said.

“You come to see the blissers?” the woman asked.

“Yah.” I hesitated, looking at her younger daughter, who seemed healthy, with clear eyes and well-brushed hair. Pack Rat finally came out of hiding and went to stand behind the girl. He was cleaned up, his face washed, his clothes fresh, the desperation gone from his gaze. It would be a long time before he forgot the nightmare of his mother’s death, if ever, but with this family he might heal, as I had healed when I returned to the undercity from the orphanage. I had felt scorned and ignored above-city, worthless, or so I thought, until Jak, Gourd, and Dig became my family and the aqueducts became my home.

“Your children aren’t blissers,” I said.

“Not ours,” the man said.

“We found them in a cave near here,” the mother said.

The father spoke quietly. “Dying.”

Was it a bad batch of the drug, or did phorine kill? “I come with,” I said. “To see them.”

“Yah, we go.” The woman gave the baby to her daughter, who held it with practiced ease. Given that she had no younger siblings until a few days ago, she had probably held the babies of her friends. We all did that in the undercity, everyone looking after the children in our circle.

The woman took me to a tapestry across the room and pulled it aside to reveal a tunnel with polished sides. Someone had carved shelves into the wall at chest height and engraved their surfaces with graceful arabesques. As we entered the tunnel, she let the tapestry fall into place, leaving us in darkness. My ears ramped up, enough to hear someone run into the room we had just left. A girl spoke, out of breath, saying they should stay home, stay here, away from the canals. I recognized her voice; she was one of the older knights. I closed my eyes, hit with a wave of relief. Even if I hadn’t come, this family would have heard the warning.

A light flared in the tunnel. The mother was holding a mesh cube that glowed with ads for various above-city vendors.

“Nice cube,” I said.

She glanced at me. “Bought it on Concourse.”

Bought. Not “found,” which meant stolen, or “bargained for,” which meant she traded for it in the undercity economy or on the black market. Bought meant purchased with above-city credits. Jak paid his employees in either credits or food and water, whatever they preferred, apparently enough that she could purchase amenities beyond what they needed for survival. It told me a lot about Jak, all of it good.

“Good work at the Black Mark?” I asked.

“Yah.” She led down the finely tooled passage. “Enough for family.”

I thought of the orphans she had taken in. “Got two more now.”

“No worries.” She raised the cube, letting more of its light fall across me. “Better to have children than cubes, heh?”

“Guess so.” The orphans were fortunate to end up here. Then it hit me. This family had another potential source of income, something people from all over the Imperialate would pay a great deal for. I doubted it would occur to them; it wouldn’t have to me when I lived here.

“Got good tapestries in your home,” I said. “Glasswork, carvings, all of it. Nice.”

“My husband makes them,” she said.

Her husband was an artistic genius. And they were married. Although many couples here committed for life, most couldn’t afford a marriage license or simply didn’t fathom its purpose. We had our own ceremonies, none of which Cries recognized, but they meant more to us than a formal license. You also needed to go into Cries to get the license, which most of my people loathed doing. Some couldn’t even take the light, their eyes had become so accustomed to the dark.

The Concourse, however, was more accessible. So I said, “Sell tapestries on Concourse,” and waited for the explosion.

The woman swung around to me. “What! Crazy.”

“Not crazy,” I said. “Tourists will pay more for one tapestry than Jak pays in a tenday.” At least they would if she and her husband knew they could get away with charging that much. “Your man can sell his carvings, too. And his glasswork.”

“Got rocks in your head.” She resumed her walk down the tunnel.

Rocks, pah. My people could make exquisite weavings, carvings, and glasswork, and nothing matched the haunting beauty of our music. Gods only knew how many were creating works that literally never saw the light of day. Tourists would pay huge sums for the arts of such an enigmatic, dangerous community. Beauty in the darkness. Yah, it would work. They would take the art home and talk about how they dared venture into the Cries undercity. Never mind that no one who actually lived undercity considered the tame, commercialized Concourse part of our world. Technically it belonged to us, and Cries vendors promoted it that way in their advertising.

“It’s not crazy,” I said as I followed her.

The woman just snorted. No matter. I’d work on the idea with both my people and Cries. Undercity vendors would need a license to set up a stall on the Concourse and that required a fee, not to mention approval by the city bureaucracy. It wouldn’t be simple, but we were citizens of Cries and we had the right to file.

Somewhere in the distance, shouts reverberated, an echo that carried even to this secluded area, which was probably several kilometers away. The woman stopped, turning toward the noise.

“Cartels,” I said. “Got to hurry. How far?”

“Not much.” She glanced back at me. “These three, they took node-bliss only twice. After that, no more. They shook and jerked for days. Screamed. Cried. Begged for more.”

If phorine induced a withdrawal that severe after only two doses, they must be powerful psions. “Are they all right now?” I asked.

“Some.” The woman stepped into a crevice in the wall.

I followed her into a small room. More tapestries graced the wall, fluffy pallets with quilts lay on the floor, and a carved table was set with food and water.

Three people huddled on the beds. One was a young man. He lay on his side, curled in a fetal position, his arms wrapped around his stomach. An older teen in a clean tunic and loose pants sat on the pallet next to his, slouched against the wall, her knees drawn to her chest. A younger girl was sleeping on the bed next to hers.