She had forgotten that the Caden were not fools.
In hindsight, she realized that they must have known something was up from the very moment she had discovered Father Tyler. She had felt uneasy, leaving him down there, and her worry must have showed. When she slipped them, they had not gone on up the tunnel as she had thought, but had waited, hiding, to see where she would go and what she would do. It was only this morning that she began to suspect that she and Father Tyler were being tracked through the tunnels, and by that point, it was too late to make an alternate plan. They were on the southern edge of the Gut, an area of the labyrinth that Aisa did not know well and could not navigate with any skill. It seemed their best hope to get up and outside, but this, too, presented dangers, and they had been forced to wait until dark.
As soon as Father Tyler was up and out, he resumed shoving the manhole cover. His leverage was better now, and even on his own, he was able to move the iron disc well out of the way. He reached down into the hole.
“Come, child. Boost yourself up.”
Aisa did. She usually resented being called a child, but somehow, coming from the old priest, it didn’t irk. She took his hands and bent her knees, preparing to spring upward, then shrieked as a hand clutched her ankle.
“Where do you think you’re going, girl?”
Kicking frantically, she peered downward and saw the dim white circle of Daniel’s face. Her kicks were ineffective; his hand on her ankle was like iron. Again she thought of simply letting go. She was close to death, had been so for days. Only concern for the priest kept her fighting that grim spectre off.
“We gave you a clean shot, girl,” Daniel hissed. “And how do you reward us? That’s a ten-thousand-pound bounty you’re trying to hold for yourself.”
“I’m not after a bounty,” she panted.
Daniel’s face moved closer, and she realized, alarmed, that he was climbing the ladder beneath her. His other hand encircled her calf, squeezing until she squealed.
“We’re a guild, you little cheat. No one holds back money from the guild.”
“That’s a lie!” she gasped. “You did! They told me! Lady Cross! You let her go and kept the money and they threw you out!”
Daniel gaped at her, and in that moment Father Tyler leaned over the edge of the hole and swung his satchel in a short, sharp arc. The business end of the bag thumped Daniel in the face and he fell, howling, from the ladder.
“Come, child!” Father Tyler cried. “Now!”
Aisa took his hands and let him pull her up from the hole. She saw immediately that she had misjudged their position; they were not in the Gut any longer, but on the edge of the Lower Bend. She could find her bearings here easily, but they were at least a mile from the Keep Lawn. It was too far. She could barely walk, let alone run. Her arm was a dangling web of agony.
From the hole at her feet came a string of curses, then the deep gonging sound of boots climbing the ladder.
“Child, we must go!” Father Tyler grabbed her good arm and pulled her along. Aisa blinked, half blind with pain and fever, seeing little, hearing a deep voice inside her head, long ago. A father’s voice, but not Da’s.
“Pain,” she whispered to the priest, covering her eyes as the brightly lit windows passed by them, an endless panoply. “Pain only . . .”
Her legs tangled and she began to collapse. A moment later, though she barely felt it, the priest had picked her up and begun to run with her in his arms. Each step made Aisa feel as though her head would split open, but she thought Father Tyler must know where he was going, for he darted down a nearby alley, then another, wending his way carefully around the edge of the Gut, heading for the center of the city.
Javel was hungry. He could feel the hunger, like a rock, deep inside his stomach, a gnawing, cloying sort of pain, so closely aligned with nausea that sometimes he could not tell the difference. For a while the pain went away and he forgot it completely, but all it took was one whiff of food, and hunger came surging back. They had already begun to ration the provisions, and now, no matter how hard the Gate Guard worked, they were down to two small meals a day. The Keep was still relatively well stocked from the Mort invasion, and if needed, the food would last for a long time. But siege was siege.