Suddenly there was a shout, and William saw a shadowy form heading toward him. He heard more than felt the blade of Lieutenant Franklin slash out, and the attacker fell back.
Another shadow appeared to the left of the first, on William’s right hand, and the nearly blind Knight-Marshal of Krondor lashed out with his sword.
Then William, child of Pug the magician and Katala of the Thuril Hill People, born on an alien world, felt pain, quickly followed by darkness.
James moved slowly through the knee-deep sludge. The echoes of fighting rang through the sewers and his men walked with swords drawn. They opened shuttered lanterns from time to time to get their bearings, but mostly they negotiated through the murk by the faint light that came from above as they passed below culverts and drains from the streets.
‘We’re here,’ said a voice.
‘Give the signal,’ said James, and a shrill whistle was blown.
One of the men kicked open a door and James could hear other doors being opened nearby. He followed the first two men into the cellar, and up a flight of stairs. They burst into a room illuminated by candlelight because it was still below ground level.
As James expected, resistance was light, but he was almost split by a crossbow bolt fired from behind a table, overturned to provide shelter. ‘Stop shooting!’ he shouted. ‘We’re not here to fight.’
A moment of silence was followed by a voice saying, ‘James?’
‘Hello, Lysle.’
A tall old man stood up from behind the table and said, ‘I’m surprised to see you here.’
‘Well, I thought as long as I was passing by, I’d give you a chance to get out of here.’
‘Things are that bad?’
‘Worse,’ said the Duke, motioning for the man who went by Lysle Rigger, Brian, Henry, and a dozen other names, but who, by any name was the Upright Man, the leader of Krondor’s Guild of Thieves: the Mockers. James looked around. ‘Things haven’t changed much - except it used to be more crowded.’
The man whom James would always think of as Lysle said, ‘Most of the brethren are out of the city, running for their lives.’
‘You stayed?’
Lysle shrugged. ‘I’m an optimist.’ Then he said, ‘Or a fool.’ He sighed. ‘It’s a tiny Kingdom, the Mockers, but it’s my Kingdom.’
James said, ‘True. Come along. There’s one place we may survive.’
James and his soldiers took Lysle and a scruffy assortment of thieves in tow and moved back into the sewers. ‘Where are we going?’ asked Lysle as they slogged their way through the muck.
‘You know where the river enters the city beside the abandoned mill?’
‘The one that’s paved over?’
‘That’s the one,’ said Jimmy. ‘We used it when we were smuggling with Trevor Hull and his lot, too many years ago to remember. If you’d been in Krondor when the Mockers and Hull’s smugglers were working together, you’d have known about it. There’s a huge staging area we’ve been stocking for months.’
‘For months?’ said Lysle. ‘How did you manage that without us noticing?’
Laughing, James said, ‘From above. We did it during the day, when you and your thieves were asleep below ground.’
‘Why did you come fetch me?’
James said, ‘Well, you are the only brother I know about, so I couldn’t let you die alone in that basement.’
‘Brother? Are you sure?’
‘Sure enough to wager on it.’
‘I’ve wondered about that,’ said Lysle. ‘Do you remember your mother?’
‘A little,’ said James. ‘She was murdered when I was a toddler.’
‘At the Sign of the Boar’s Head?’
‘I don’t know. It could be. I was taken off the streets and raised by the Mockers. You?’
‘I was seven when my mother was killed. I had a little brother. I thought he was dead, too. I was packed off to Romney and raised there.’
‘Father didn’t want both his sons close by, I guess. Maybe we were targets for whoever killed our mother.’
As they reached a huge intersection of culverts, with water flowing down from above to spray the center of the passages, Lysle said, ‘I always thought it odd that my foster parents in Romney raised me to work for a thief in Krondor.’
‘Well,’ said James as they moved around the small waterfall, ‘we’ll never know. Father is dead many years and we can’t ask him.’
‘Did you ever find out who he was? I never did.’
James grinned in the dark. ‘Yes, I did, as a matter of fact. I heard his voice once and heard it again many years later, and after doing some snooping, I sussed out who was the original Upright Man.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Did you ever have the displeasure of meeting a particularly surly and evil chandler whose shop was down by the south point, near the palace?’
‘Can’t say as I remember one like that. What was his name?’
‘Donald. If you’d met him, you’d have remembered him, as he was a right nasty piece of work.’
‘A bit of a criminal genius, though.’
‘Like father, like sons,’ said James.