The Dreaming Void (58 page)

“I'm not sure. It's difficult with the main service on—”

Angry shouts up ahead made Edeard look around. His farsight could sense several minds inflamed with fury. Around them were minds blazing with sour determination; they began to move faster and faster.

Shouts reverberated under the awnings.

“Stop them!”

“Thieves. Thieves.”

“Kavine is hurt.”

“Thieves in the market!”

Identical longtalk cries flooded into the ether. Jerky image-gifts of faces clashed in Edeard's mind: too many and too poor to make any sense.

His farsight swirled around the shifting commotion, contracting on the center. Men were running, their arms flailing as people swarmed. Hands gripped long metal blades, swiping wide, keeping everyone away. Overtones of fear bubbled into the clamor of longtalk.

“That's us!” Sergeant Chae shouted. “Come on. Constables! Clear the way! Constables coming through.” His longtalk was directed to warn people sauntering between the stalls at the same time he shouted. He began to run. Edeard immediately followed, as did Macsen and Kanseen.

“Move! Move aside!”

After a moment of shock, Boyd took off after them. Dinlay had frozen, his mind radiating dismay.

Edeard was running hard, keeping close to Chae. People were jumping out of the way, pressing themselves against the stalls to open a path. Women were screaming. Children shouted, excited and fearful. The theft ahead was still kicking up a hurly-burly.

“Remember, act together,” Chae told them with remarkably calm longtalk. “Minimum of two at all times; don't get separated. Keep your shields up.”

Edeard sent his ge-eagle streaking through the sky, heading toward the edge of the market, where the thieves surely would emerge. Every street beyond the rippled roof of canopies had a covering of pleasant saffcherry trees, their pink and blue blossom clotting any view of the pavement and people below. His farsight still was concentrating on the criminals as they sped from the scene of the robbery. There were four of them, three wielding the blades while the fourth was lugging some kind of box. From what Edeard could sense it was full of metal, and plenty of the stalls around him were displaying jewelry.

Chae drew his truncheon as they burst through a group of people gathered around a couple of overturned stalls. A man lay on the floor, groaning and thrashing, blood pooling beside him.

“Lady!” Chae exclaimed. “All right, stay back, give him air.” He scrambled for his medical pack and knelt beside the fallen stall holder.

“A doctor?” Chae's longtalk demanded, rising over the general clamor. “Is there a doctor in the Silvarum craft market? Wounded man.”

Edeard's farsight still was following the criminals. “Come on,” he yelled at Macsen and Kanseen.

“Where?” Macsen demanded. “I've lost them.”

“They've just reached the edge of the market. Albaric Street. I can still sense them.” He plowed through the clutter of bystanders.

“Edeard, no!” Chae yelled after him.

Edeard almost stopped at the command, but he could not ignore the fleeing thieves.
We can still catch them.
It would be their first real arrest. So far all they had done in their four probationary months was clear drunks off the streets and break up fights, never any real constable duty. He charged along a narrow passage between rows of stalls. Macsen and Kanseen were racing after him.

“Come back,” Chae bellowed.

Ignoring the sergeant sent a flash of wicked glee along Edeard's nerves.

Stall holders were cheering the three probationary constables as they sped through the market. Edeard and Macsen were using their longtalk to order people aside. By and large it was working. They were closing the gap on the fleeing thieves.

Edeard's ge-eagle swooped low over the saffcherry trees of Albaric Street, its wings skimming inches above the waving blossoms. The four thieves were pounding along the pavement underneath the trees, heading straight for the Great Major Canal. Their blades had been sheathed so as not to draw attention. Even so, the minds of people around them pulsed with curiosity and alarm.

“Where are they going?” Kanseen demanded.

“Got to be the canal,” Macsen replied. There was a lot of exhilaration flooding along his longtalk voice.

Edeard finally saw the end of the market ahead; the striped canvas roof gave way to the hazy radiance of blossom-filtered sunlight. “Can you locate any other constables?” he demanded.

“Lady, it's all I can do to watch where I'm going,” Macsen complained.

“What are you planning on doing?” Kanseen asked, all apprehension and doubts.

“Stopping them,” Edeard said.
Isn't that obvious? What is wrong with her?

“There's more of them. And they've got blades.”

“I'll take them down,” he growled. Her uncertainty flowed away from him as if it were another landmark he had left behind.

They were closing fast now. Albaric Street was almost deserted compared with the busy market, allowing the constables to race onward, weaving around the occasional recalcitrant pedestrian.

The ge-eagle flashed over the last saffcherry tree. It showed Edeard the street ending abruptly at the edge of the Great Major Canal. The big waterway stretched away on both sides, cutting the city in half. Away to the west was the Birmingham Pool, intersecting the Outer Circle Canal; to the east the High Pool formed a junction with Flight Canal and Market Canal. There were only two bridges between Silvarum and the Padua district on the other side, one beside each pool. Like every bridge over the Grand Major Canal, they were narrow and steep; most people preferred to use a gondola to cross the hundred-fifty-yard width of water. Several were bobbing at a mooring platform where the street ended.

“Got them,” Edeard exclaimed. “They just ran out of street.” His jubilant mood suddenly dropped as the four criminals sped down the wooden steps to the platform and hopped onto a waiting gondola. It looked scruffy and badly maintained compared with the craft that normally slid along the city's waterways, with dull scratched paint and a drab awning. There were two gondoliers standing at the back, each holding a pole. “Oh, Honious!”

“What?” Kanseen demanded. She was red-faced and breathing heavily but keeping up.

“Boat,” he gasped back at her. “Come on; we can still catch them.” Right in front of him a very grand-looking old lady in a billowing black and white dress and her entourage of younger handmaids were leaving one of Albaric Street's high-class restaurants. His longtalk demands to move did not seem to be registering with any of them. He dodged around the old lady, cursing. A third hand swatted at him as one might strike at an annoying insect. He flashed her an exasperated look.

The ge-eagle spiraled up, watching the shabby gondola ease out from the mooring platform and into the multitude of craft flocking along the big canal. Downmarket the gondoliers might have been, but they knew their watercraft. With two punts available and working in harmony, they soon were moving a lot more quickly than anything else on the water. The four thieves flopped down on the benches and started laughing.

Edeard, Macsen, and Kanseen hurtled up to the canal bank, coming dangerously close to toppling down into the water as they stopped at the top of the mooring's wooden steps.

“Bastards!” Macsen shouted at them.

One of the gondoliers raised his green and blue ribboned boater in a mocking salute. They were already twenty yards downstream. Edeard knew with grim certainty that they would be going all the way down to Sampalok, and the wounded stall owner would be ruined. “Help us,” he called down to the gondolier who was moored below. “Take us after them.” This gondola was a fancy craft, its black paintwork shining in the afternoon sun, the awning embroidered with a scarlet bird crest. Somehow Edeard knew it belonged to the old woman behind them.

“Not a chance, pal,” the gondolier called back. “This is Mistress Florell's private gondola.”

For a moment Edeard considered shoving him into the canal and commandeering the craft to set off in pursuit. Except he didn't have the first idea of how to use a punt pole.

“Somebody help,” he called with his voice and longtalk. That drew a few interested looks from the gondoliers out on the canal, but no one even asked what he wanted.

A chorus of jeering carried over the water. Thirty yards away, the criminals were leaning over the gunwales to wave and gesture. Edeard stared at his tormentors with a rage that chilled his blood. He smiled back savagely. Some hint of his fury must have flashed out. Macsen and Kanseen swayed back. The jeering stopped.

Edeard reached out with his third hand and plucked the box from the man holding it. Hands grasped empty air in futility as he lifted it ten feet above the gondola. The thieves exerted their own third hands, trying to prize it back. “Is that the best you can do?” Edeard taunted. They never even managed to unsettle his grip.

People on nearby gondolas watched in silence as the box drifted sedately through the air. Edeard's smile turned malicious as it landed softly at his feet. He crossed his arms and gloated. “Don't come back to our district,” he longtalked to the departing gondola. “Not ever.”

“You're fucking dead, you little shit,” came the answer.

Edeard pressed his third hand down against the bow of the gondola, causing it to rock alarmingly. But it was too far away for him to capsize, and the six of them hurriedly erected a strong enough shield to deflect him.

Macsen started laughing. His hand came down hard on Edeard's shoulder. “Oh, Lady, you are the greatest, Edeard, the absolute greatest. Did you see their faces!”

“Yeah,” Edeard admitted with a malign grin.

“They won't forget today,” Kanseen said. “Heavens, Edeard, you must have frightened the life out of them.”

“Let's hope, eh.” He smiled at his friends, very content with the way they had bonded that little bit more from the shared event. A frilly parasol hit the side of his arm. “Ow!”

It belonged to the old woman they had pushed past. “In future, young man, you will display the correct courtesy due to your elders and betters,” she snapped at him. “You could have knocked me over the way you were charging about with complete disregard for anyone else. At my age, too; I would never have gotten up again.”

“Er, yes, madam. Sorry.”

“Mistress Florell!” she said, her wavery voice rising an octave with indignation. “Don't you pretend you don't know who I am.”

Edeard could hear Macsen chortling behind him. It was muffled as if a hand were over his mouth. “Yes, Mistress Florell.”

Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. Edeard thought she looked at least as old as Master Solarin. “I shall be reporting you to my nephew,” she said. “There was a time in this city when the constabulary had decent people in its ranks. That time is clearly over. Now get out of my way.”

He wasn't actually in her way, but he took a step back, anyway. She brushed past with a swirl of her tentlike skirt to descend the steps to the mooring platform. Her entourage followed with immaculately shielded minds. A couple of the handmaids flashed him amused grins. They all settled in the gondola.

“See,” Macsen said, sliding his arm around Edeard's shoulders. “That's our true reward, the respect of a grateful populace.”

“Who
is
that?” Edeard whined.

That set Macsen to laughing again.

“You really don't know, do you?” Kanseen said incredulously.

“No.”

“Among other family connections, Mistress Florell is the Mayor's aunt.”

“Oh. I suppose that's not good, then.”

“No. Every Mayor for the last century is some relative or other to her. She basically decides who the Grand Council will elect.”

Edeard shook his head and checked the gondola below. Mistress Florell had vanished under the awning. The gondolier gave him a wink and cast off.

“Let's get back,” Edeard said.

A cheerful Macsen bent over to pick up the box. He shot Edeard another look as he felt the weight. “I can sense a whole load of necklace chains in here. Must be gold.”

“I hope he's all right,” Edeard said.

“Chae?” Kanseen asked. She sounded slightly nervous.

“No. The stall holder.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

High above the Grand Major Canal, the ge-eagle soared lazily on a thermal, keeping the shabby gondola in sight as it hastened toward Sampalok.

         

Most of the crowd had gone when Edeard and his companions returned to the scene of the crime. Several stall holders in their distinctive dark green aprons were fussing around the stalls they had righted, restoring the display of goods. Boyd and Dinlay were helping fix the awning directly overhead, which had ripped free when the stalls had been shoved over.

The wounded stall holder was still on the ground. A woman was tending to him, a doctor's satchel open at her feet as she knelt beside her patient. Two young apprentices were aiding her. Between them they had bandaged the stall holder's chest. Now the doctor was holding herself perfectly still, eyes closed, her hands pressed gently on the bandages as her telekinesis operated on the torn flesh underneath, manipulating blood vessels and tissue. Her distinguished face was puckered with intense concentration. Every now and then she would murmur some instruction to her apprentices, who would apply their telekinesis as she directed.

Edeard watched intently, trying to sense with his farsight as well. Old Doc Seneo never had used her third hand to operate with, though Fahin had always said the technique was in the Doctor's Guild's tuition books.

“You three okay?” Boyd's longtalk asked.

“Of course,” Macsen retorted.

Boyd glanced over to where Sergeant Chae was talking to a group of stall holders. “Careful,” he mouthed.