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Blop could barely keep up with Ruchi. The tall guard's back had just disappeared around a bend in another alley, they were piercing the lower tier like a blood vessel bursting in the eye. The friends moved toward the eastern part of the City through the darkest and dirtiest areas. Even the most experienced thieves and murderers, embarrassed to be seen in such a place, rarely showed their face there. The dampness and the source of natural gas created a unique aroma that could not leave a person for years. This place was popularly known as a "cesspool" or "bog." The direct light of the stars never reached here; the only illumination was from a system of gas lanterns burning with a cold blue flame.
"Wait," Blop shouted, out of breath, hardly able to drag his legs, "Wait for me, I don't want to be alone here!"
"How will you get to the Mist Quarter then?" Ruchi shouted back spitefully, not even thinking of slowing down. "Think of it as a test!"
"But my armor is too heavy!" Blop continued to plead. "I can't go that fast."
"You got that one yourself. What was that you said? 'So the bullet doesn't get me'," Ruchi mocked, disappearing around the corner.
Blop sighed, shook his head, and followed his friend.
"Boo!" Ruchi jumped out from around the corner.
Blop hopped up in fear and fired. The bullet ricocheted around and disappeared somewhere in the air. Ruchi stared at his friend in silence, only fixing the cuffs on his broken arm with the bar that held it in place.
"I know. I know I'm a chump," Blop said angrily as he stood up, "There's no need to say anything."
Ruchi leaned over to his friend and picked at the fresh dent in his cuirass.
"It really didn't get you," he smiled as he helped the fat man up.
"Do you think the shot caught someone's attention?" Blop asked, looking around.
"I think it just scared them off," Ruchi replied as he turned into another alleyway.
"How do you know where to go?" Blop wondered, quickening his pace again.
"I grew up here," Ruchi said, "I spent my whole childhood over there, behind the gas storage facility," he pointed to the left.
"But there's no one here, does anyone live here?" Blop was surprised.
"You just don't look intently," said the tall one, "There's someone's toys left," he pointed to a pile of stones, "And there are signs of a hasty romantic meeting," he grinned, lifting his foot from a heap of dirty rags, "It's just the locals will never show themselves to the guard," he continued, adjusting his gun, "They would rather kill us unnoticed, when we don't expect it."
"Ruchi! Why? Why did you take us this way, couldn't you have taken us through the central sewer?" Blop chirped.
"Of course not, my foolish friend. Not only would they not let us in, they would laugh at us for mentioning Sept's message. Everyone laughs at him until he comes to them," Ruchi chuckled and jumped over a small puddle, "Careful, it's deep."
Blop took his foot off the water at the last moment and walked along the edge, gingerly peering into the murky darkness.
"How far is it?" he asked, twitching with nausea from another scent coming from the dark alley.
"Not far, just past the gas holder, down into the catacombs," Ruchi said, peering into the darkening building ahead.
"Gas-what?" Blop asked, bumping into his suddenly halted friend.
Ruchi raised his hand and pointed to the building ahead:
"Gas storage. There it is. But..."
"But what?" said Blop, frightened.
"There's someone there," Ruchi frowned. "Lurking and waiting."
"Oh, moons! Who, Ruchi?" Blop asked with horror, hiding behind the tall guard's back and grabbing his arm.
"How should I know!" Ruchi jerked his injured hand away. "Who do you think I am, the fortune-teller from the Moon Alley? I only see the tracks. There are five of them."
"What are we going to do?" Blop asked, adjusting the helmet that was sliding down over his eyes.
"There's no way out, so we'll talk," Ruchi grunted and walked forward, saying to Blop over his shoulder, "Reload the gun."
The fat man began frantically yanking the bolt.
"Just don't shoot me, please," said the tall guard, turning around and raising his eyebrows high.
Holding the rifle with both hands, he stepped into the light of a gas lamp hanging from a half-destroyed column, coughed, and shouted:
"We need to go into the catacombs. None of you are of interest to us. We keep our way, you keep yours."
There was no reply. Ruchi stood for a moment, looked back at Blop, beckoned him with his hand, and shouted again:
"I take silence as consent."
The fat man stepped out of the shadows in a trembling gait and moved forward.
"Keep up and use your eyes," the tall one said over his shoulder.
Their lengthening shadows scattered from their own footsteps, dancing on the stone walls and sidewalk. Blop gripped his rifle so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He ran his eyes over the darkness in front of him, but saw nothing but specks of gaslight clinging to the sparse corners of houses and the bumpy road. Sweat drenched his eyes and ran down his forehead, but he could not move his rifle-clutching hands. There was a rustle to his right, and something dark flew into Ruchi. The rifle bounced in Blop's hands. A shot rang out. Blop only had time to wipe away his sweat before he saw Ruchi standing with the smoking rifle, a black body falling on him from the darkness.
The guard stepped back, jerked the bolt, and the body collapsed into the light of the lantern.
"There's no point in dying," Ruchi shouted into the darkness, turning the muzzle of his gun against his thigh in different directions, "We'll just walk away."
He turned to Blop and froze: a black shadow was surrounding the fat man. It encircled his neck with a chain of sharp spikes, gleaming even in the dull gaslight, and they were now swung toward Ruchi.
"One move," the shadow hissed, "And the 'claws' will taste his blood."
Ruchi swallowed hard, but didn't put the rifle down, pointing it at Blop. It slid treacherously across the bar on his injured arm. The guard could not hold it with both hands.
"I'll shoot you," he said calmly, the shadow twitching, "So you'll suffer less," Ruchi continued, and it became clear that he was talking to Blop.
The shadow retreated indecisively into the darkness, escaping the light of the lantern and dragging the fat man after it. Ruchi, on the other hand, managed to put the gun in his injured hand and jerked the bolt.
"There's no point," he muttered and took aim at the fat man.
The shadow twitched, and Ruchi fired again.
Blop jumped up and fell to the floor with the shadow.
"I missed," muttered Ruchi at a loss, and ran to the fallen ones, but he felt a blow and fell to the ground, dropping his rifle.
Another "shadow" in rags was on top of the tall guard and pounded his face and helmet with its fists.
"Die, you upper!" shouted a sobbing female voice.
A shot rang out, the shadow jumped off Ruchi and disappeared into the darkness. The guard looked up and saw Blop with the smoking rifle. He was shaking so violently that he could not pull the bolt. There was no shadow behind him, and all that lay on the ground was a chain, covered with sharp spikes, as a reminder that what had happened was not a dream.
"Put the gun down," the tall guard said slowly and wrinkled in pain, leaning habitually on his injured arm, "We have to go."
The fat man lowered the muzzle to the ground, looked back, shrieked softly, and jumped away from the chain.
"Come on! Let's go!" Ruchi hissed, grabbing Blop by the arm.
They hurried around the building, away from the dead body, which seemed to Blop to have already disappeared from the light of the lantern. Just beyond the building was a wall with a wide archway and a black void gaping behind it.
"Quickly! Over there!" Ruchi shouted, hanging his rifle on his back and removing the oil lamp from his belt.
Sitting down in front of the entrance, he lit it with matches and handed it to Blop.
"Down! Careful, the steps are steep!"
The trembling fat man obediently accepted the lamp and began to crawl down slowly, keeping the source of light close to his feet so as not to stumble. Glancing back, Ruchi followed him.
They walked a long way down the stairs, and the lower they descended, the steeper the steps became, so that they had to jump off the last one. Water flowed at the bottom, caught in the stone grip of the shallow embankments suitable for rats, covered by a broad arched vault.
"What river is that?" Blop asked.
"I don't know," Ruchi answered, "It was dry when I was growing up." He looked ahead, spat, and breathed heavily.
"You hit me," Blop said thoughtfully, touching a new dent in his cuirass, "We're lucky I took this armor."
"Yes," muttered Ruchi.
He sat down, with his back to the wall, and dipped his boots into the babbling water. Tears streamed down his eyes.
"Hey," the fat man was surprised, "Come on, don't, I'm alive after all."
"It has nothing to do with you," the tall guard replied, squinting and jerking his head.
"How so?" Blop was taken aback. "I'm alive, we're alive, everything's fine, isn't it?"
"You're an idiot," Ruchi said with his head down on his hands folded in his lap.
"Well... maybe I am, Ruchi, maybe I am," the fat man said angrily, "But you're a jerk, too, shooting point-blank at me. Is this your lunar day or something?"
"You don't understand anything," growled the tall guard.
"Of course," Blop said with his hands at his sides, "Of course I don't. You're the smart one here. You understand something about the world, sitting here in this hole you brought us into, and you don't even remember if it was here or not. Now you're whining! And I'm the one who doesn't understand anything. Blop is a fool, Blop is an idiot, Blop is the worst of men. Only Ruchi, only Ruchi is a hero, incapable of getting into anything but his self-righteousness! Crybaby! Maybe they're sick with the gray plague, and he was touching, touching my neck!"
Both were silent. When the murmuring of the water was interrupted by a stone falling down the stairs, Blop shuffled his foot as if awakened from a heavy dream, then picked up the lamp and said, addressing something in the darkness:
"Let's go."
He staggered down the narrow passage between the wall and the bubbling dark liquid, but after a few steps he stopped and turned to his friend. Ruchi hissed, wiped his face with his hand, and began to rise slowly, leaning against the wall and tapping now and then with the rifle butt and muzzle against the cold stone.
"I used to like to catch bugs on the roofs when I was a kid," Blop said a little later, when Ruchi got close to him. "I used to collect them in a jar. At first, I didn't know why they kept dying, then I made a hole in the lid to let them breathe. Got a lot of them, found a bigger jar. I stole clean earth and grass from the market."
Ruchi followed him silently into the depths of the sewer.
"Then one day I caught a very big green grasshopper, put it in a jar with the others, I came in the morning to feed them as usual, knocked on the jar, and there was only the green one sitting, all the rest were dead. It turned out to be a locust, as one man at the market told me later. Bought it from me. Said he was trying to make a joke on somebody. I wonder if he has."
"What rooftops did you get bugs from, anyway?" the tall one asked sarcastically.
"My mother worked as a window cleaner, we were often on the second tier, and a lot of critters were brought into the City by the wind from the Trocchia 'Garden'."
They walked on in silence for quite a long time before Ruchi knocked the rifle butt on the wall near a small grating door. Blop stopped. Yanking the door, Ruchi picked up the rusty lock on a chain, grinned, gave his friend a hand sign, Blop put a lamp next to the door, and they both backed away. Ruchi reloaded his rifle, took aim and fired. The bullet rattled, scrambled hysterically against the walls and disappeared somewhere in the water.
"I wonder how much longer we'll be so lucky," Blop said thoughtfully as he opened his eyes.
Ruchi shrugged and yanked the lock, which fell down with the chain. Then he yanked on the door, which reluctantly budged and creaked open.
There was a high-pitched squeak behind Blop's back that immediately gave him a headache. The fat man looked around in horror, but there was nothing to be seen in the thick darkness.
"Hurry," cried Ruchi, squeezing through the narrow passage. Blop rushed to the door and got stuck, his rifle caught between the bars and his fat body wedged between the wall and the door. He began twitching and shouting something unintelligible. Ruchi rushed over to the fat man, and began to cut the leather strap on his gun with a knife from a small sheath on his belt. Blop felt something grip his helmet tightly. He yanked his head and the helmet came off. The strap broke away, the door budged with difficulty, and Blop squeezed inside, and Ruchi slammed it shut just as the teeth of a huge gray rat clanked on it. Flashing its bloodshot eyes in the light of the broken lamp, it squealed in anger and frustration that almost cracked the heads of the two guards, and banged its forehead against the door. Ruchi, pushing as hard as he could, blocked it with Blop's rifle.
"I can't hold it much longer, run," he shouted to the fat man who had just managed to get up.
The guards raced through the narrow tunnels, turning at random, and before he knew it, Blop had stopped hearing his friend's footsteps. He was still running as if in a fog, unable to see his way, and then he found that the fog was real and filled everything around him. Blop stopped. The darkness receded. The walls appeared to be of moonstone and emitted a faint greenish glow. Breathing heavily, he stretched out his arm and couldn't see his fingertips. Frightened, he pressed it abruptly to himself and shrieked. It echoed somewhere deep in the tunnel.
"Ruchi!" shouted the fat man in a trembling voice, "Ruchi! Moons damn you!"
Large tears rolled from Blop's eyes.
"Traitor!" he bellowed, losing his voice. "Snotnose!"
In desperation, he punched his fist into the wall. It suddenly budged, shifting under the impact, so that Blop fell forward into a narrow flight of stairs and, hitting his head, lost consciousness.
He woke up in a pool of his own blood, frozen, with a sore throat and his head ringing so badly that he found it incredibly difficult not only to order his thoughts, but to even stand up. With a hand groping his wet forehead, he cried again and lay there, shuddering, for several minutes. The tears helped, and the headache receded a little. Gathering the rest of his strength, he fumbled for the wall, on which he immediately slid his hand, but then he caught himself on the ledge of one of the metal plates of his armor and managed to sit up. The fat man's head was spinning, but overcoming the nausea and pain, he stood up. In annoyance, he kicked the sharp step that had split his forehead, but he only hit his toe. So he remembered that he no longer had enough money for good boots.
After standing by the wall for a while and coming to his senses, the guard slowly walked up the steps. They turned abruptly a couple of times, but pretty quickly ended in a wooden door with a deadbolt.
"Praise the Heart!" said Blop and lifted it.
The door opened with a creak, but nothing changed. The fog was the same dense blanket ahead. The stone sidewalk outside the door glowed the same gloomy greenish glow. It was even darker here, because there were no walls to light the guard's way through the corridor. Blop gulped and took a tentative step outside.
"Anybody here?" he said quietly under his breath.
And then there was a heart-rending squeak behind him. Blop jumped out into the street and slammed the door shut with his whole body against it. Something hit the door on the other side, and Blop heard the bolt fall into place. He loosened the pressure a little, and something struck the door again, but it was firmly locked. Blop took a step back. The door jerked under the impact, but did not open, and the fat man rushed forward, stumbling and slipping on the wet sidewalk.
A wall appeared out of the fog in front of him. He barely had time to put his arms forward and cushion the collision. His cuirass clattered against the stone, the guard stopped, listened, and walked quickly along the wall, switching to running from time to time, but after a few steps he stopped again and twisted his head. From somewhere came the echoes of a melody that sounded like the music of a barrel organ. Blop sat down, then stood up and walked along the wall again, turning suddenly around the corner. The music grew louder. The fog seemed to grow fainter there, and Blop could make out the outline of the square and the fountain in the middle. The melody was now playing clearly, and indeed it seemed to be a wind-up record, with hammers playing a simple tune.
The guard saw something moving in the fog near the fountain, and immediately hid back. His armor tinkled treacherously again. Breathing heavily, he hesitated to look around the corner again. But nothing happened, and finally curiosity overcame. Cautiously, with one eye, he peered out and saw movement again. This time on both sides. Blop waited and discerned a figure as if walking in a circle, then another, and then he realized there were three. The figures moved continuously around the dormant fountain to the rhythm of the music. Somehow the number three gave Blop courage, and he came around the corner and took a few steps toward them. Now he could see that they were metal rooster figures. They were bending and unbending, as if they were pecking at grain, standing on poles that went underground, where the mechanism that moved them must have been located. The guard looked up to see what was driving the roosters and at the same time dispersing the fog next to the fountain, with a huge windmill sticking out in the middle of it, rotating its blades slowly and in a dignified manner high above. Blop walked around the fountain and, finding nothing else of interest, wanted to go on, but he could not remember which way he had come.
"The witches' circles," he muttered to himself, "Have confused me completely."
He stomped his foot in frustration and froze because the sound of his wooden soles had somehow become stony. He looked back and saw another figure, much taller than them, moving among the leaning roosters. Slowly treading, it walked straight toward the guard. There was no way Blop could see what it was. The figure was carrying something long in its hand, and with that long thing it began to swing at him. The fat man managed to bounce back at the last moment when the big two-handed sword dropped where he had been standing a second before. Blop rushed to run again, but in the direction his body had twitched, there was already another figure like that, raising the sword for a swing. The guard had no time to think and instinctively lunged at it, hitting the metal armor that crumbled from the impact with his whole body. The figure broke a leg and fell backward. Frightened and surprised, Blop collapsed on top of it, crushing its chest. Floundering in the rusty metal, the fat man could not find any support and stand up. Finally, when he rose, he saw that the other rusty knight had torn out its arms, trying to lift its sword, and was now standing beside them, staggering sadly.
"Serves you right," Blop said.
He stepped closer and kicked the knight, causing it to lose its balance and fall right under the head of the metal rooster. It pecked the knight as it continued its dance, snagged the helmet, and dragged it around the fountain. The fat man jerked his leg, shaking off the rust, and turned around, almost tripping over the little girl standing right in front of him, wearing a white scarf and dark blue cloak, with a basket at her elbow.
"If you don't kill me, I'll take you to your friend," the girl said ingratiatingly.
"Kill you?" asked Blop, taken by surprise.
"So, are you going to kill me?" the girl asked sadly. "Well, all right," and she knelt down, took a small harp from her basket, and began to play a tune that was unfamiliar to Blop.
At a complete loss, Blop sat down beside the girl and looked at her carefully. She was very pretty, like children of ten, with soft and sad features and large eyes, half-closed, as if she were in a trance while playing a musical instrument.
"I'm not going to kill you," Blop said in as friendly a manner as possible, "I've never killed anyone."
The girl stopped playing and looked at the knight, who was being dragged around in a circle by the rooster with a terrible squeak.
"They're not alive," the fat man said uncertainly.
"Who is then?" the girl asked with a frown, "Only those who are made of meat?"
"I guess so," also uncertainly said Blop.
"The Heart gives life to all," the girl looked firmly at the fat man, "There are no differences."
"Okay," Blop shook his head, "Did you say something about my friend? How do you know I have a friend and what happened to him?"
"He has the same number on his chest as you," the girl pointed to the engraving of the guard's personal badge on Blop's cuirass, and continued just as casually, "And he's dying."
"How? Where?" exclaimed Blop.
"Around here, not far," the girl nodded her head toward the thick fog.
"Take me there! I promise, I promise I won't hurt you or your loved ones!" Blop gibbered pleadingly.
"Promising is dangerous," the girl frowned, "But all right, I'll take you to your friend."
She stowed her harp in her basket and shuffled down the stone sidewalk, glowing with the afterlife green light, into the mist.
"Wait," the fat man exclaimed, catching up with her and taking her hand, "I'm afraid of getting lost in this terrible fog."
"I don't know what you are talking about," the girl shook her head and pulled him after her.
Blop hurried after her, afraid of crashing into something or letting go of her hand, which now seemed to him to be tantamount to death. Eventually his fear came true, and he ran headlong into the corner of the stone house, letting go of her arm and banging his cuirass on the stone, backing up a few steps, but then he jumped up and nearly knocked the girl off her feet.
"We're here," she said reproachfully.
He looked down, where a ladder began to disappear into the fog, and on it, he saw Ruchi's hand. Apparently he had crawled up it, and was a few steps short of climbing it. Blop rushed to his friend and shook him.
ns 15.158.61.23da2
