Watershed by Jane Abbott Read Free Book Online Page B

as well as carting out our waste without drawing attention. So we made use of the Sea when we could.
    Of all the tunnels winding their way through the compound, only seven would actually get you out of the place; the rest had been blocked to become a maze where a man could easily lose his way. All of us had been dispatched on occasion to search for a new raw who hadn’t reported for duty; usually we found them cowering and blubbing at the end of some dark dead end, terrified not of having got lost but of Garrick’s resulting disparagement and wrath. And I reckon that showed they had more sense than most.
    But as difficult as it was for us to get out, it was almost impossible for any intruders to find their way in. Four main tunnels, double barred with old sluice gates that could be rolled across if necessary and the heavily-boarded outer doors, led beyond the walls of the Citadel, each opening above ravines or basins that would’ve once held water but were now nothing more than dustbowls; the exit doors were hidden, close enough to each of the roads that star-pointed north, south, east and west from the Citadel but not so close that a casual observer could follow our comings and goings. Two vertical tunnels, up a couple of long iron ladders, would get you into the Citadel itself. All six exits were guarded day and night by shifts of sentries, everyone’s ins and outs recorded for Garrick to check at his leisure. The seventh was just a long circular climb to the top of the Tower, a locked open-bar gate at its base and, reportedly, a sturdy iron-strapped door at the top, Garrick the only one with keys to both.
    Taking the south tunnel and checking out with the sentries, I paused inside the small cavern to pull the cowl up over my nose and the hood down to shield my eyes, before squeezing through anarrow crevice in the face of granite. Even protected, and despite the early hour, I had to squint to adjust to the sudden brightness. But worse was the heat, hitting hard, like a fist in my stomach, driving out the air and almost bending me double, the dry choking my throat.
    The trek was downhill, most of it steep. Preferring my own company, I avoided the road and picked a trail along the ridge of the deep gorge, clambering over the remains of the old weir wall and making my way down into the winding gully that’d been carved long ago by a river’s spill to the Sea. But even there in the dead dusty pit of the earth, its voice heightened to a raucous moan, the wind still found a way to blow and tease, a whore of a thing that’d sucked the world dry and now demanded double for the service.
    The rising sun soon beat back any shade offered by the steep sides of the canyon, long shadows shrinking to nothing under its red baleful glare. The base of the old waterway was mostly ground grit and rock, my path hindered in a few places by tumbles of dislodged boulders and spills of sand. And every now and then, under the grit, beneath the tread of my boots, I’d feel the newer bedrock of bone, scattered and broken and long forgotten. Stopping only twice to drink, I made good time, arriving a few hours before midsun. The return journey would be harder and hotter but the exercise would do me good, readying muscles for the journey to the Hills.
    Like most people I knew, I hated the Sea, hated everything about it: the cold of the water, the feel of it sucking and pushing me, so much stronger than I was; the brown of its foam and the sting of its salt, that tight prickle as it dried on my skin; the filth of it, full of debris, decades-old dead world remnants still floating in on every tide; its constant noise, never a whisper, always a roar; the murky blueness that teased and licked the brown crusted coastline. But most of all, I hated the dark turgid grey of it further out, wherethe waves swelled like mountains before falling away to nothing beneath the relentless rain, where anything smaller than a Catcher