at the base of the waterfall with a loud splash and a geyser of water. Jean blinked twice before he realized what he’d just seen. “Oh, gods,” he muttered. “Like for like! Barsavi had to be fucking poetic!”
Overhead there was more cheering, more stomping of feet. Barsavi was yelling something; his men were yelling in response. Then the faint lines of red light began to flicker; shadows passed before them, and they began to recede in the direction of the street door. Barsavi was moving, so Jean decided to take a risk.
There was another splash, audible even over the hiss and rumble of the waterfall. What the hell was that? Jean reached beneath his vest, drew out his light-globe, and shook it. A faint white star blossomed in the darkness. Clinging tightly to the wet rafter with his other hand, Jean tossed the globe down toward the channel in which the cask would have fallen, about forty feet to his right. It hit the water and settled, giving Jean enough light to discern the situation.
The little channel was about eight feet wide, stone-bordered, and the cask was bobbing heavily in it, three-quarters submerged.
Bug was thrashing about in that canal, visible only from the arms up. Jean’s light-globe had struck the water about three feet to the right of his head; Bug had jumped down into the water on his own.
Damn, but the boy seemed to be constitutionally incapable of remaining in high places for any length of time.
Jean looked around frantically; it would take him a few moments to work his way over to a point where he could splash down into the right channel without cracking his legs against one of the stone dividers.
“Bug,” Jean cried, judging that the ruckus above would cover his own voice. “Your light! Slip it out, now! Locke’s in that cask!”
Bug fumbled within his tunic, drew out a globe, and shook it. By the sudden flare of added white light Jean could clearly see the outline of the bobbing black cask. He judged the distance between himself and it, came to a decision, and reached for one of his hatchets with his free hand.
“Bug,” he yelled, “don’t try to get through the sides. Attack the flat top of the cask!”
“How?”
“Stay right where you are.” Jean leaned to his right, clinging to the rafter with his left arm. He raised the hatchet in his right hand, whispered a single “please” to whatever gods were listening, and let fly. The hatchet struck, quivering, in the dark wood of the cask; Bug flinched back, then splashed through the water to pry at the weapon.
Jean began sliding his bulk along the rafter, but more dark motion in the corner of his eye brought him up short. He peered down into the shadows on his left. Something was moving across the surface of one of the other waterways in the damned maze. Several somethings—black scuttling shapes the size of dogs. Their bristling legs spread wide when they slipped just beneath the surface of the dark water, then drew in to propel them up and over stone just as easily….
“Fuck me,” he muttered. “Fuck me, that’s not possible.”
Salt devils, despite their horrific size and aspect, were timid creatures. The huge spiders crouched in crevices on the rocky coasts to the southwest of Camorr, preying on fish and gulls, occasionally falling prey to sharks or devilfish if they ventured too far from shore. Sailors flung stones and arrows at them with superstitious dread.
Only a fool would approach one, with their fangs the length of a grown man’s fingers and their venom, which might not always bring death but could make a man fervently pray for it. Yet salt devils were quite content to flee from humans; they were ambush hunters, solitary, incapable of tolerating one another at close quarters. Jean had scared himself witless in his early years reading the observations of scholars and naturalists concerning the creatures.
Yet here was an entire pack of the damn things, leg to leg like hounds, scrabbling across stone and water alike toward Bug and the cask.
“Bug,” Jean screamed. “Bug!”
2
BUG HAD heard even less of the goings-on upstairs than Jean, yet when the cask had splashed down into darkness, he’d realized immediately that it hadn’t been dropped down idly. Having placed himself directly over the canal that flowed from the waterfall, he’d simply let himself drop the fifteen feet down into the rushing water.
He’d tucked his legs and hit like a catapult stone, ass-first. Although