Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,34

so good, kid.>

They sat in silence.

he said quietly.

Clef sighed.

* * *

She moved from Foundryside to Old Ditch, and then on to the Greens, which earned its name due to a curious fungus that merrily feasted on all the wood in this neighborhood, turning it a dull lime color. The Greens ran along the Anafesto, one of the main shipping channels, and the area had once been the thriving heart of Tevanne’s fishing industry. But then the merchant houses had built up a surplus of scrived ships for the wars, and they’d started to use them to fish instead, which drove everyone else out of business, since they were about a hundred times more efficient. The Greens looked a lot like Foundryside—lots of rookeries, lots of low-slung slums and shops—but rather than being constrained by the campo walls, all the housing came to a sharp stop at the decaying industrial ramble running beside the channel.

Sancia walked along the Anafesto, eyeing the dark, decrepit fisheries ahead. She kept looking to her left, toward the lanes of the Greens. This area was a lot quieter than Foundryside, but she took no chances. Every time she spied someone, she stopped and watched their movements, sensitive to any suggestion that they might be there looking for her, and she didn’t move on until satisfied.

She was anxious because she had Clef, of course, and knew all the threats that invited. But she also had her life savings in the pack on her back—three thousand duvots, almost entirely in coinage. She’d need every penny of it to get out of Tevanne, provided she even got that far. And though she carried her usual thieving kit, this offered little in the way of defense beyond her stiletto. It would be darkly funny if, after all she’d been through, she wound up getting mugged in the Greens by the luckiest street urchin of all time.

Once she got close enough she took the back way to the fishery, crawling across crumbling stone foundations and rusting pipes until she approached it from a narrow, shadowy passage. Probably no one thought she’d approach from this angle, including Sark. The fishery was a two-story moldy stone structure, a place so rotted and decayed it was hard to tell its original purpose anymore. Sark was waiting on the second floor, she knew, and the first floor would be riddled with traps—his usual “insurance.”

She looked at the dark windows, thinking. How in hell am I going to convince Sark to run?

said Clef.

She started toward it, feeling somewhat comfortable for the first time that night.

She silently crept around the corner, then past the big iron doors—which she knew she shouldn’t use, since Sark had trapped them—and slipped through a broken window. She landed softly, took off her gloves, and touched her bare hands to the stone floor and the wall beside her.

Bones, blood, and viscera flooded her mind. The fishery had been the site of so much fish gutting that it almost always bowled her over every time, all the accumulated sensations of so much gore. There were still piles of fish bones here and there throughout the first floor, delicate tangles of tiny, translucent skeletons, and the scent still lingered, of course.

Sancia concentrated, and soon the traps lit up in her mind like fireworks, three trip wires running across the room to three hidden espringals