a breath and ducking under the upper grille to emerge on the other side, looking back through the bars at Tsata with her hair plastered across one side of her face. The pipe was big enough to stand in if she hunched over; the river water came up to her waist. Tsata followed her through, letting the grille close behind him after checking that there was no apparent locking mechanism.
‘If it comes to that,’ Kaiku said, reading his thoughts, ‘I’ll blow them apart.’
Tsata knew what she implied. It had been enough of a risk to send the warning to Cailin; even though the Weavers had not caught her, they might well be more alert now if they had detected it. To use her kana in here would be a virtual death sentence; but for all that, she would use it if she had to. She was merely making that clear to him, and to herself. Whatever Cailin advised, her power was her own, to use as she would.
Tsata found himself smiling. If ever she took the robes of the Red Order, Cailin would have a fight on her hands to keep this one in line.
They made their way into the pipe, the gentle splashes as they forged the water aside echoing amid the sussurance. Other sounds came to them, distant grindings and irregular clumps and scrapes, made eerie by reverberation. Darkness closed about, utter blackness, with only the faint slitted circle of the pipe mouth providing any kind of touchstone to their location. Once they had gone inward for some way, they stopped. Tsata began unwrapping the candle that he had tied in a waterproof bag on his belt.
‘Wait,’ Kaiku whispered.
‘You need the light,’ he said. He did not need to point out that he did not, at least not yet. He had vision like an owl’s, an inheritance from the purestrain Okhambans that had bred with the refugees from Quraal all that time ago and produced the Tkiurathi.
‘Wait,’ she said again. ‘Give me time.’
Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness fast enough that she could actually see shapes appearing out of the blackness: the blank curve the pipe, the shifting contours of the water.
‘I can see,’ she said.
‘Are you sure?’ Tsata asked, surprise in his voice.
‘Of course I am sure,’ she said, amused. ‘Put the candle away.’
He did so, and they went onward. They had guessed that the pipe would not be very long, since the buildings they fed from were set close to the riverbank, and Kaiku found it was not so much of a trial as she had expected. The claustrophobia of her situation did not bother her as she had thought it might, as long as she did not dwell on the possibility of all those tons of water smashing into them. But she was confident enough in the unwavering regularity of the evacuation, and confident enough in herself that she was not plagued with her usual doubts and fears.
With a faint hint of wonder, she realised how much she had grown since Aestival Week: since she had been tricked by Asara and outmatched demons in the Weave; since she had healed a dying friend by instinct alone and spent weeks living on her wits, killing Aberrants, relying only on herself and this foreigner with his barely comprehensible ways. She was fundamentally the same as she always had been, but her attitude had changed, matured, bringing with it a selfassuredness that she never knew she had.
She found that she liked herself that way.
Presently, the sporadic clanks and groans became louder, enveloping them, and chinks of what seemed like firelight began to appear in the pipe, minute rust-fractures hinting at what lay beyond. Then, as they rounded a bend so slight that they had barely noticed it, they came in sight of the end.
Kaiku blinked at the brightness. The pipe appeared to widen as it neared its termination, joining with the second pipe that ran alongside it to make one huge oblong corridor. Its floor sloped upward so that it was above the level of the river water that they had been wading through. Beyond it she could only see what looked like a wall of dull, bronzecoloured metal.
She glanced at Tsata. He murmured something in Okhamban, his eyes on what lay ahead.
‘What does that mean?’ she whispered.
Tsata seemed faintly taken aback that she had heard him. He had not meant to say it aloud. ‘It is like you might say a prayer for protection,’ he replied.