The Dark City Read Free

them, a cave in the hills. Once, coming back there, they had found signs on the walls, as if some other member of the Order might have sheltered there. But the marks had been rainwashed, unclear. No one knew how many of the Order were even alive.
    Galen gazed at the tower for a long time. Then he handed the tube to Raffi, who stared. “Me?”
    “Why not. It’s time you did.”
    Nervous, Raffi took it. It was warm and miraculously smooth, made of the Makers’ strange material, not wood or stone or skin, the secret no one knew. He muttered a prayer over it, then raised it and looked in.
    Despite himself he gasped.
    The fortress was huge, close up. He saw the weeds growing from it, the cracks in the walls. The door was bricked up, a small black slot where two men loitered, talking. He moved the tube carefully; noted the deep pits, the spiked ditch, the strong fence with the walkway behind it.
    “Whoever they are, they’re well-defended.”
    “Indeed.” Galen’s voice sounded amused. “Now touch the red button.”
    He felt for it; the tube stretched itself in his fingers, the focus blurring quickly to his eyesight. Houses and a row of stalls, their goods hanging in the wind, tawdry and cheap. Dogs in the mud. A crowd of women washing clothes in tubs. Smoke. He followed it up, high into the sky, until the small moon Agramon flashed briefly across the glass. For a moment even that looked close, the smooth faint surface, with tiny formations glinting.
    “That’s enough!” Galen’s hand clasped around the tube; Raffi let go reluctantly. The Relic Master folded it into its wrappings, pushed it deep in the sack, and stood up.
    Suddenly he looked dangerous, his gaunt face tense, his eyes dark under deep brows. “Come on,” he said grimly. “Let’s go and ask for Alberic.”
     
     
     
    IT WAS NIGHT when they reached the gates, and the buildings glimmered behind the palisade. The men stationed outside had a lantern; they were playing dice, but they stood up soon enough.
    Galen ignored them. He strode past without a word, through the open gates, and no one challenged him. Hurrying behind, Raffi glanced back; the men were whispering. Planning to shut us in, he thought.
    They walked together between the dark houses, through the mud, the soft pools of water and dung. The stench of the place was appalling. Filthy children watched them from doorways, silent and unsmiling. The buildings were squalid and patched, the wood rotten and green with age. As he squelched through the muck, Galen muttered, “Anything?”
    “People watching. Just curious.” The sense-lines moved about them, invisible, fluid. Raffi held them with some distant part of his mind, easily, from long practice. It had been the first thing Galen had taught him.
    The fortress loomed up. Noise and smoke drifted out from it, laughter, the yells of an argument. In the ruined windows, faint lights glimmered; the strange smooth walls were dappled with moonlight.
    At the doorway, the entrance Raffi had seen through the glass, three men waited. Their weapons were in their hands—long hooked knives. They watched Galen come with a mixture of fear and something else, something disturbing. Warnings rippled in Raffi’s skull. “Galen ...”
    But Galen had walked right up to them.
    “My name is Galen Harn. I’m looking for Alberic.”
    Whatever else, they weren’t surprised. One grinned at the others. “We’ve been expecting you, keeper. Come with me.”
    Inside was dark, a maze of rooms and passages. Voices echoed ahead, or from behind closed doors; smoky torches guttered on brackets. The air was fetid and smelled worse than outside. As they walked down a long corridor, men squeezed past them, a few slaves, two girls giggling behind Raffi’s back, sending the sense-lines rippling. Looking up, he saw something on a wall, marks under the dirt, a symbol he knew. Next to it was a grid of buttons and numbers by a door. Galen stopped too and made the humility sign;