Stalking Darkness

triumphantly. Carrying it to the table, he pinned thecorners down with books. As he reached to secure an upper corner, Seregil saw a ragged tear in his left sleeve that appeared to be stained with blood.
    “What happened to you?”
    Alec shrugged, avoiding his eye. “It’s nothing.”
    “Nothing?” Grasping his friend’s hand, he pushed the torn sleeve back. A rough bandage was tied around the boy’s forearm and stained through with a circle of dried blood the size of a two-sester piece. “Nothing doesn’t usually bleed like that.”
    “It’s just a scratch,” Alec insisted.
    Ignoring Alec’s objections, Seregil drew his dagger and cut away the dressing. A shallow, jagged cut began at a puncture just below his elbow and ended dangerously close to the delicate tendons just above Alec’s wrist.
    “Illior’s Fingers, you could get blood poisoning with a cut like that!” he gasped, fetching brandy to clean the wound. “What happened?”
    “I just slipped going over the roof to his window,” Alec admitted with a grudging sigh. “I figured that would be the safest route in, but it was a little steeper than I thought, and the slates were really slick—”
    “Ever heard of rope?”
    “By the time I realized I needed one, I was already up there. Anyway, my sleeve caught a nail sticking out of the gutter—”
    “The gutter?” Seregil sputtered, feeling his stomach give a little lurch. “You went over the
edge?
It’s a forty-foot drop to stone paving! What in the name of Bilairy’s—”
    “Actually, there’s a shed right under his window,” Alec corrected. “It would’ve broken the fall—”
    “Oh, so you had it all carefully planned, then?” Seregil said with heavy sarcasm.
    Alec shrugged again. “Learn and live, right?”
    Illior’s Light, that must be the same look I give Micum or Nysander when they’re berating me for surviving some stupid escapade!
Shaking his head, Seregil turned to inspect Alec’s work, a crude, gridlike drawing done in charcoal and smudged here and there with blood.
    “This is a copy of a map I found in a hollowed-out post of Rythel’s bed,” explained Alec, frowning down at it. “It’s not very good, I know, but I knew I’d never remember any of it unless I marked it out somehow.”
    “You didn’t steal this parchment from his room?”
    “Of course not! I remembered what Parin said about drawings in his room and thought I might need to copy something. I took all the materials with me.”
    “Except a rope.”
    At first glance Alec’s map, done in a feverish haste by an unpracticed hand, seemed little more than a meaningless scrawl of lines.
    “I think it’s a map of the sewers,” said Alec. “There wasn’t any writing on it, just marks here and there, but it looked a lot like those plans we found at Kassarie’s, remember?” He pointed to a circle near the bottom of the sheet. “I’d say this represents the outlet where they’re working, and this is probably the top of the channel, where we found the sabotaged grate.”
    Seregil nodded slowly, then tapped a spot just beyond where a number of lines radiated out from a single terminus. “Several large channels come together here. One goes west, toward the Noble Quarter; this one here probably leads under the middle of the city—Is this exactly what you saw, line for line?”
    “I think so, but I didn’t get all of it. It was really complicated and I was jumping at every noise. Finally I did hear someone coming, so I just grabbed what I had and rabbited. Sorry.”
    “No, no, you did well,” Seregil mused, still puzzling over the layout. “This is solid grounds for arresting him, but how in hell did he get this much information?”
    “Could the Plenimarans use it to attack the city through the sewers?”
    “Not a full-scale attack, but they could cause plenty of other mischief—enemy sappers opening gates from inside, assassins popping out of the royal privies, or anywhere else in the city, for that matter.” Straightening up, he thumped Alec proudly on the shoulder. “Good work. This is more than I came up with.”
    Alec colored, grinning. “The smiths I talked to from his crew expect to be done in a couple of weeks. That means that Rythel has to complete whatever work he has left on this by then.” He paused. “What I want to know is how he learned all this if he never goes out at night and never leaves the work site?”
    “That’s the real question, isn’t it? Exploring and