Inventing a Tinker

Part 8

By the time the bell chimed the workday's end, I felt drained. It was taxing on the mind, being constantly surrounded by people who know you as someone else. Casual conversations that should have been easy strolls turned into dark alleys fraught with peril. One wrong word, one misspoken reply, and I might have made a disaster of Erefan's life.

Erefan. Who was this other me? A stamp man for great thinkers' ideas? A minor functionary, set apart from his fellows by suffering slightly less of the universal scorn of his betters? A man who had somehow won the affections of the lovely and mystery-filled Jennai? It had to be some concoction of all of those.

As the patent office let out, I stepped cautiously among the throng of kuduk office workers in the tunnels. Jennai's warnings were fresh in my mind. Don't cause trouble. Don't talk to anyone. Meek. Quiet. Harmless. If it weren't for trying to impersonate Erefan, I might have taken offense at the implication of all but meekness. I was no troublemaker back then, and I've never made a habit of striking up pointless conversation to hear the sound of my own voice. In Khesh, I was the very model of a proper citizen: law abiding, hard working, uncomplaining. Why should it have been any different in Eversall Deep?

With my eyes on the shuffle of feet around me, I was jarred unexpectedly by someone's shoulder. Say this for the kuduks: they are rugged folk. The gentleman kuduk in the soot-dusted jacket—whom I suspected had placed himself deliberately in my path—barely budged. I, however, stumbled into a gray-haired kuduk woman in a dress adorned in frills and lace.

"Hey," I snapped. "Look what you made me do." I turned to the woman I'd jostled and put a hand to my chest in a gesture of contrition. "Madam, I am so—"

"Enforcement!" the woman screamed. "This filthy creature accosted me!"

I held up my empty hands to show I was unarmed. "Madam, I'm terribly sorry. This is all a misunderstanding."

"You saw him!" the woman continued, aiming a pudgy, accusing finger my way. There were mutters of agreement from the crowd.

I whirled to confront the soot-stained miscreant who had started the altercation. I would point him out and clear the whole matter up. The instigator was nowhere to be seen, but that was the least of my worries. A pair of kuduks approached wearing thick leather coats and helmets and carrying leather-wrapped iron truncheons. They were even larger and more imposing than the typical kuduks I had encountered.

I suddenly remembered the word for them: knockers. Short for head-knockers, it was a slang term for the officers working for Judicial Enforcement. They were no friend of a human amid a crowd of outraged kuduk citizens. I ran.

The crowd made little attempt to apprehend me. They seemed more concerned about getting out of my way than into it. Impeding my escape wasn't their problem; that's what the knockers were for. At their best, the kuduks didn't appear to be an athletic bunch, but the knockers were exceptional among their kind in this regard. They gained on me.

I needed a plan. The knockers were faster. They were armed. Presumably, they knew who they were and had more than a day's knowledge of the city's layout. That didn't leave me many advantages. I took a turn at the first tunnel I came across, hoping to break their line of sight and perhaps find somewhere to hide.

There was a string of shops around that corner. The variety of storefronts provided me with options. Women's apparel—possible concealment, but risky. Toffee emporium—useless. Tools and hardware—perfect! I ducked into Sudert's Screw and Wrench and found myself in a wonderland. Shelves were stacked with bins of a dizzying array of nuts, bolts, and washers. Pegboard walls held wrenches of every size, alongside hammers, pliers, and every other tool I could imagine.

As I tried to devise some form of makeshift weaponry from among the wares, heavy booted footsteps grew closer by the second. I ducked out of view of the doorway glass as the two head-knockers stampeded past. This bit of subterfuge was not lost on the proprietor, who saw the whole thing from behind the counter. "He's in here! The human's in here!"

Some choice words sprang to mind for the shopkeeper, but I lacked spare breath to voice them. I bolted, taking a return path back the way I'd come; my legs pumped like Jennai's steam engine if someone had lit a bonfire beneath it. At the intersection, I turned a different way on sheer instinct. Same with the next corner. Citizens along the path of my flight conspired with knockers to give me away.

Tucked away in a corner of an alleyway tunnel—little more than a cut-through between main shafts—was a sewer grating. It was set into a depression where a thin trickle of water drained from the streets. Without hesitation, I crouched down and pried the grating loose. It was heavy, but my arms were up to the task. A maintenance access ladder was set into the sidewall of the vertical shaft that led to the sewer ducts. I climbed down and pulled the grate back into place behind me.

I hit the water with a splash. It was only ankle deep, but none too clean. Sparing a moment to wonder how I'd be clean enough for work the next day, I chose a passage and started down it.

"He's gone down there!" someone shouted. I quickened my steps as I heard the grating removed once more. But now it was my turn with the advantage. The sewer system of Eversall Deep ran between layers of the city; each layer essentially had an independent system, interconnected at a few main pumping and filtering stations. The layout of the system was second nature to me. Its twists and turns, the illogical interconnections where old construction met new construction met ancient construction, the junctions with spark, steam, and ventilation shafts, it was all there in my mind—Erefan's mind.

They stood no chance. The acoustics in the tunnels made tracking by ear impossible, and every time the knockers paused to consider which way I might have gone, I put a little more distance between me and them. It took an hour and a half of skulking, splashing, ducking, and climbing, but I managed to traverse the layers down to the one where Jennai lived; I finally emerged two tunnels over, dripping fetid water.

A few passing humans gave a nod or a hello as I passed, familiar faces whose names were at the tip of my tongue. No one mentioned or looked twice at me for having exited the sewer system in the middle of a public tunnel.