Nightmare journey

sight.
    Jask jumped, gripped the edges of the trapdoor and strained for all his might, with little reward.
    “Here,” the bruin said. “I'll give you a hand.”
    “No,” Jask said between gritted teeth, sweat dripping into his eyes and gliding slickly across his pale face like beads of oil across a sheet of plastic. “Never mind. I will be fine. Just fine… on my own… thank you, anyway.”
    The bruin snorted sarcastically. “Is this meant to prove something?” he asked, looking down through the hole, framed by the stone edges, offering his huge, hair-matted paw with the claws drawn back into their sheaths.
    Jask grunted, grappled desperately for a second, felt his arms go limp, lost his grip and fell backwards, splashed into a viscous mess of water, mud and dark fungus. A heavy, bulbous spoor sac popped open before its time, casting out thousands of unformed, undried germ seeds like droplets of mucus. The odor, when it caught Jask square in the face, was like a rotting corpse.
    The bruin leaned closer, stretching his arm deeper, and he said, “Are you all right?”
    Jask rose out of the muck without speaking, without brushing himself off, and he jumped for the rim of the hole, grabbed it again, struggled with all his will.
    “Look,” the tainted creature said, “that posse we just barely avoided back there in the cellar of the inn is going to be close on our trail. They're sure to have put men down in the drains after us, and those men will have good, bright lights. Which means they'll be able to make very good time. If you don't swallow your stupid pride and take my hand, you'll get us both caught. You understand? You want that?”
    At last, weary, Jask took hold of the bruin's massive paw and was lifted out of the dark drain into a much more pleasant place: a large, windowless room where hundreds of crates and baskets were neatly piled in parallel rows.
    The bruin slid the flat stone slab into its niche, effectively sealing the drain exit. Even if the Pure soldiers followed the fugitives' trail, they would never be able to lift that heavy stone. For the moment, then, Jask and his tainted companion were safe.
    5
    TWO-THIRDS of the way between the floor and the ceiling, a walkway protected by a wooden railing circled the main warehouse room and led to a loft at the front of the building, which served as offices for the establishment. From this loft the two espers could look out onto the main street of the town, through two dirty windows, observing but unobserved.
    The fog had all but dissipated, and the sun's golden fingers lay over everything.
    “There,” the bruin said. “Two of them.” He pointed west along the dusty street. “See them?”
    Jask could see them well enough: a pair of robed Pures waiting by a street entrance to the storm drains, their cloaks hanging in the still air, their skin so white they looked inhuman. Was Jask's own skin as pale as that? And why had he never noticed such things before?
    “And over there,'' the bruin said, pointing much closer to the warehouse.
    Two Pures loitered in a darkened doorway to a shuttered taproom, waiting anxiously for something to happen, their chalky faces almost brighter than their robes in the concealing fall of early morning shadows. They looked terribly tiny, frail and utterly ineffectual of themselves-but they carried two heavy rifles that appeared to be well- maintained and capable of causing damage on a scale that only the prewar humans could have planned.
    “There, too,” the tainted creature said. He pointed eastward to where a single Pure soldier, armed with an even more deadly looking weapon, patrolled the flat roof of a boardinghouse. “They must be everywhere in town.”
    “The General did not spare any effort,” Jask agreed, remembering the length of the column of soldiers that had twisted its way down the white cliff from the fortress. “When a-a tainted creature is found among the Pures in an enclave, the community feels-betrayed, used. The proper disposal of the traitor then becomes a matter of vengeance as well as a religious necessity.”
    The bruin snorted and turned away from the grimy window. Head held low between his thick shoulders, he lumbered across the creaking loft floor and disappeared down a set of rickety, wooden stairs to the main warehouse level.
    Jask followed.
    Among the rows of carefully stored goods, the bruin located a crate that clearly had special significance for him. He grinned when he saw it, revealing a great many sharp teeth,