Nightmare journey

bravery was expected of him. “This?” he asked Belmondo, indicating the drain.
    “For the rain waters,” the innkeeper explained. “When there is a storm, or when the river rises, the cellars gather water; they are imperfectly made. The sewer bleeds off the excess.”
    The General smiled and clasped both hands behind his back, pausing to deliver a few theological observations. “A human town, a Pure enclave, fashioned by the hands of untainted men, is never plagued by such problems.”
    Belmondo said nothing.
    “We see here,” the General added, turning to his soldiers and sweeping them with his forceful gaze, “another indication of the supremacy of the Pure strain. From a distance this village appears clean and quite efficient. Closer, one sees it is filthy and somewhat deteriorated, though one still feels it offers adequate shelter for the animals who built and live in it. Inside, at the core, however, one discovers that it is painfully flawed, as flawed as were the hands and minds and genes of the tainted creatures who constructed it.” The General was a wise man with complicated philosophy in every sphere but religion. Religiously, he was terribly naive. But then so were all his kind.
    Belmondo said, partly in defense of his people, partly because he felt he was expected to play the devil's advocate, “But the village is very old, and all things fall apart in time.”
    “Not all things,” the General said. “The enclave is countless centuries older than this place. It dates back to a time just after the Last War, perhaps twenty-five thousand years. Yet it is in as excellent a condition as the day it was finished.”
    “But,” Belmondo said, “it was constructed with forgotten machines, with the tools of the prewar men.”
    “Exactly,” the General said, pleased with himself. “That is just my point, you see. It was built by Pures, built to last.”
    “Yet,” Belmondo said, rolling his huge eyes, his black tongue flicking nervously at his lips, “the machines that built the enclave, and the others like it, have all decayed and been lost. If they survived, our own village could have been built with them, could have been made to last. I'd say it is not so much the fact that we were tainted that led to our constructing an imperfect town-but that we simply lacked the knowledge that man once had, the same knowledge even you, Your Excellency, now have no access to.”
    The General stared at him for a long moment, his eyes hard as bits of ice, his lips parted to show the sharp edges of perfect, white teeth. When he spoke, the good-natured, philosophic tone had vanished, and his voice was gruff and mean again. “You begin to bore me and to insult,” he said. “I expect the former, from a tainted creature, but never the latter.”
    Belmondo was quiet, though he longed to speak.
    The General returned his gaze to the open drain. “The sewer continues beneath the entire town?”
    “Yes,” Belmondo said.
    “And where does it empty?”
    “That is not known, Your Excellency.”
    The big Pure turned and stared hard at the tainted, his fierce eyes the brightest points in that dank chamber.
    Soldiers shifted, waiting for the worst.
    Belmondo said, hastily, fearfully, “That is the truth!”
    “I find it difficult to believe. Convince me.”
    Belmondo said, “The town was built some thousand years ago. Many generations have passed through it, lived and died in it. And the public records were burned during one of the Pirate sweeps through these parts-a hundred or more years ago. Since then, the knowledge of the subterranean system has been lost. We know the drains work, and that is all we wish to know, for we suspect that beasts of various sorts live in them.”
    The General reluctantly accepted that. Pures held the tainted in such low regard that they always underestimated the mutated folk. This misjudgment was the sole reason the tainted had survived at all. If the Pures could have seen through a true perspective instead of through the colored prism of religion and theocratic distortion, they would have hastily exterminated all who carried impure genes. This time, however, Belmondo told the truth. Rebellion still flared in him, but he was intelligent enough to understand that he would not survive the morning if he allowed it to surface once more in the General's august presence. A devil's advocate was appreciated only when his arguments could easily be cast in doubt and swiftly discredited altogether.
    “If there are beasts below this floor,