A ragged thuttering sounded behind him, and bits of brickwork disintegrated in clouds of stinging dust and flakes of stone close by his head. A woman screamed, and people on the walkways scattered for cover. He collided with a young man in ragged street clothes, nearly knocking them both to the ground, and then he was past and running wildly down the street.
"Halt!" Halt or we fire!"
They were closer! Which way? He twisted between a pair of businessmen in richly dyed formal cloaks and tunics, leapt across the legs of an old man sitting on a crate beside the alley entrance, and plunged into the shadows of a narrow alley between two buildings to his left. Behind him, Grayson heard piping whistles and the clatter and shouts of running men.
As he ran, he saw a two-meter-high fence directly in his path. Putting on even more speed, he launched himself from an overturned produce crate, throwing his arms and one knee across the top of the fence. It creaked and swayed as he pulled the other leg across, but he landed like a cat and continued racing toward the next street.
Down this street... turn... down another... turn again. Could he lose them running blindly this way? He had come to a narrow, cross lane that curved between two of the major avenues leading out from the hub of the Palace Gardens. It was an ill-kept area. The sunshade had collapsed in places, filling the street with flat chunks of jagged-edged ferrocrete. The rest of it
was layered with wind-swirled mounds of sand, empty bottles, and garbage steaming in the sun.
There were people here, too, dozens of them stooped in the shade pools of surrounding buildings, or sprawled with their legs in the street. They wore rags and layers of caked mud and dust. Many were barefoot Some appeared asleep or unconscious amid the litter of empty bottles of alcohol, but the rest watched Grayson with wary, shuttered eyes.
Forcing himself to slow to a walk, he made his way along the debris-choked road. Somehow he had to find a place to hide or at least a place where he could blend in with the background. Glancing continuously over his shoulder as he went, Grayson's heart froze, then began to hammer at his throat when something behind him moved. He relaxed then, thinking at first it was just another derelict. But no, it was the man he'd collided with on the street in front of the Palace Grounds. Had the man been following him? It could well be that any citizen who turned him in to the Guard would be rewarded, which certainly would be a temptation for any of this ragged lot. Grayson quickened his step. He didn't KNOW that he was being followed, but...
Moving down the littered street, he was so startled to feel the squish of mud against his boots that he stopped where he was for a moment. All along the street there were places where secondnight ice had melted off roofs, flowed down rusted gutterspouts, and pooled in curbside depressions worn hollow over the years. In most spots, the surface water was sucked away by the thirsty sand, but here the meltwater was trapped in pools of black mud, where it would remain until the next freeze. The sight of it gave him an idea.
Removing his cloak as he walked, Grayson dropped it beside a half-naked derelict leaning against a worn stone wall. There was no time to hide it. The soldiers were mere seconds behind him. Then he went to work unraveling his head bandage, which he crumpled and stuffed into an already overflowing garbage bin. A bit farther ahead, there was a stretch of road unoccupied by street people or anyone else. Kneeling by a mud pool, Grayson gathered a double handful of the stinking stuff, and lathered it over his head. It burned like fire when it touched the inflamed wound on the side of his head. He knew he was begging for an infection, but the thought of the Interrogators drove him on.
By the time he was done, Grayson's yellow hair, his face, and his tunic were generously coated with black mud. What else? he thought, mind racing. His clothes were nondescript enough, except for his boots, so tight his feet were aching now. They were much too shiny and new to belong to a mud-smeared derelict
After a moment's thought, Grayson pried off the boots and carefully set them together nearby, then muddied his feet as well. The final touch would be two empty liquor bottles he found in a mound of garbage across the street. Grayson then lay down with his feet sprawled well into the middle of the street, his head close by the noisome pool, with a bottle cradled in each arm. It was only seconds later that he heard the scuffing of booted feet rounding the curve of the street.
There were five of them, Palace Guards in dark green and gold, four with wicked-looking assault rifles held at port arms. They picked their way cautiously along the street, stepping around or past the worst of the mud and garbage.
"Here!" one of them shouted. "His boots!" The soldier swooped down and grabbed the shiny boots. Grayson opened his eyes in his best imitation of bleary-eyed dullness, and saw that one of the soldiers already had tucked his cast-off cloak and the bloodied strips of bandage under one arm. Another one probably the leader, judging by his imperious hands-on-hips stance and lack of a rifle stood over Grayson and nudged him with the toe of his boot. "You!"