Then Keilin heard a high-pitched thin whine. He knew what came next. It had happened three times before. The guardsmen didn't appear to be able to hear it . . . or didn't know what it meant. With frantic strength the boy lunged forward and bit his captor's lower bicep with all his might. Sill grunted with pain and jerked the boy away; Keilin desperately threw himself downward. The guard's chest, and a tardy lock of Keilin's hair vaporized. So did half the wall behind them, and the door beyond that.
Keilin didn't wait for them to have a second shot at him. He was off, bolting through the new-made way out of the dead end. His one glance backward showed that the Guard-Captain had made his escape through the same hole. The man seemed to have no intention of following him, though. Kemp was just running in blind panic.
Keilin slipped into a narrow multibranched alley, and waited hidden behind a lip of brickwork. No footsteps followed. After a few minutes of swallowed panting and gradually slowing heartbeat, the boy slipped quietly away in a different direction. Finally, as the sky was beginning to pale, and the first sounds of stirring of the city's dayside began, he dropped over a wall, and then shimmied up a drainpipe. This gave access to a narrow ledge surrounding the building at third-floor level. He edged along the dark line of crumbling bricks, and around the corner to a small window.
It wasn't barred . . . most unusual for Port Tinarana. In fact it only appeared to be closed. A fingernail under the edge of the rusty steel and it opened silently, or should have, after the amount of stolen oil that Keilin had lavished on it. Instead, it opened quietly a little way and then . . . stuck. Keilin was standing on a four-inch-wide ledge, trying to apply outward leverage. He cursed in a whisper, using language no fourteen-year-old ought to know: not just because it was obscene, but because it was obscene in an extinct language. Perhaps as a response, the obdurate window flew open abruptly, nearly tumbling him down for perhaps the twentieth time. He had fallen once, and the memory of the fear in those stretched-out moments was still with him. He was shaking as he pulled himself into the musty darkness.
His eyes adjusted to the dimness as he closed the window behind him. Relief washed through him as he looked at the familiar cracked washstand from his perch on the toilet cistern. This was one of the port's original buildings, and here, unusually, the plumbing still worked. In most public places the fittings had long since been looted, to become nonfunctioning ornaments in some wealthy merchant's house, or perhaps cut and fitted to the normal bucket and seat arrangement. But here . . . this place was largely forgotten. Those who did remember its existence treated it with superstitious awe. This is the fate of libraries in largely illiterate societies.
After a long drink of the slightly rust-flavored water, Keilin slipped out, through the crowded stack-room, and into the little kitchen the librarians used. He knew that he was in trouble, and needed to think of some way out, but for now he let his familiar rituals carry him. Years back Keilin had worked out that the mistake that most thieves made was to try and attack the food chain at too high a level. If you're hungry, don't try to steal meat pies, or gold for meat pies. Those things are well guarded, and thieves are hunted down. The port grain silos however . . . well, they were poorly defended against rats and pigeons, and easily accessible to a nimble boy. The porridge he made from the mortar-crushed wheat wasn't nearly as appetizing as a meat pie, but Keilin, unlike most of his peers, wasn't malnourished. Also, the grain made good bait for the pigeons he trapped on the roof. Keilin looked down at the porridge and sighed. If he'd not been tempted into trying for peppers, he wouldn't have been spotted and chased into that alley.
He cleaned up meticulously. Everything was left in its exact place. He'd been using the kitchen for three years now without its legitimate owners being any the wiser. By the time they got in, the little alcohol stove would be cold, and any smells lost in the odor of yesterday's curries. He sometimes stole a little of these too . . . but very circumspectly. He went to wash, a ritual he'd taken up when the head librarian had smelt Keilin's far-from-delicate alley bouquet, and had spent the next hour zealously hunting dead rats around his hideout. Keilin had spent the time silently between fear and chagrin. There were no rats in the library, now. But they'd been his main source of food when he'd first taken shelter there.
His mind kept turning back to the previous night. For now, the "Die Hards," the street gang who had caught him first, thought he was dead. But, by tonight, the word would be out. Anyone who denied that the city watch had links with the gangs was just naive. So . . . what passed for the law—the gangs and the watch—would be out to kill him. He didn't know what story the Guard-Captain had come up with to explain his men's sudden demise, but he was willing to bet the truth hadn't figured in it. The man wasn't going to rest easy until Keilin was dead. As for the other gangs . . . they would go along. To keep the peace, any of them that caught him would hand him over to the Die Hards. But the worst was that the whining killers had found him again. He sat down with the book he was currently reading and tried to lose himself in it. Keilin knew that being able to read was all that set him apart from the other scavenging children of the city . . . but this time he couldn't see how it could help him. Gradually the book swallowed him.