I pedaled further down the boulevard, looking for AB. After passing three more side streets with no sign of them, I turned around and went back to the bankish-looking building with the cupola.
“I know it was here,” I said, and pointed down the crooked street to where an earthen pot containing a dead treelet lay overturned in the street. “I remember that. I guess the rain washed away the marks after all. Come on, Rades.”
I pedaled slowly along, eyes peeled for the next set of initials, feeling uneasy. Because they were a chain, weren’t they? Sort of like the chain that had led from my mother’s fatal accident on the goddam bridge to Mr. Bowditch’s shed. If one link was broken, there was a good chance I’d be lost. You would still be wandering in that hellhole at nightfall, Claudia had said.
Further down this narrow street we came to a lane of ancient deserted shops. I believed we’d come that way, but there were no initials here, either. I thought I recognized what could have been an apothecary on one side, but the slumped, vacant-eyed building on the other didn’t look familiar at all. I looked around for the palace, hoping to nail down our location that way, but it was barely visible in the sheeting rain.
“Radar,” I said, and pointed at the corner. “Do you smell anything?”
She went in the direction I’d pointed and sniffed at the crumbling sidewalk, then looked up at me, waiting for further instructions. I had none to give, and I certainly didn’t blame her. We’d come on the three-wheeler, after all, and even if we’d been walking, the downpour would have washed away any remaining scent.
“Come on,” I said.
We went down the street because I thought I remembered the apothecary, but also because we had to go somewhere. I thought the best plan would be to keep sighting on the palace and try to work my way back to Gallien Road. Using the main thoroughfare might be dangerous—the way Mr. Bowditch’s signs had skirted around it suggested as much—but it would lead us out. As I said, it was a straight shot.
The problem was that the streets seemed to insist on taking us away from the palace rather than toward it. Even when the rain slacked off and I could see those three spires again, they always seemed farther away. The palace was on our left, and I found plenty of streets leading in that direction, but they always seemed to dead-end or bend back to the right again. The whispering was louder. I wanted to dismiss it as the wind and couldn’t. There was no wind. A building with two stories seemed to grow a third in the corner of my eye, but when I looked back, there were only two. A square building seemed to bulge out toward me. A gargoyle—something like a gryphon—seemed to turn its head to watch us.
If Radar saw or sensed any of this, it didn’t seem to bother her, maybe she was just reveling in her new strength, but it bothered me plenty. It was harder and harder not to think of Lilimar as a living entity, semi-sentient and determined not to let us go.
The street ahead of us ended in a steep-sided gulch full of rubble and standing water—another dead end. On impulse I turned down an alley so narrow that the trike’s back wheels scraped rusty flakes from the brick sides. Radar walked ahead of me. Suddenly she stopped and began barking. They were loud and strong, powered by healthy lungs.
“What is it?”
She barked again and sat, ears cocked, looking down the alley into the rain. And then, from around the corner of the street to which the alley connected, came a high voice I recognized at once.
“Hello, savior of insecks! Are you still an irritable boy, or are you now a scared boy? One who wants to run home to mommy but can’t find his way?”
This was followed by a squall of laughter.
“I cleaned away your marks with lye, didn’t I? Let’s see if you can find your way out of the Lily before the night soldiers come out to play! No problem for me, this little fellow knows these streets like the back of his hand!”
It was Peterkin, but in my mind’s eye I saw Christopher Polley. Polley, at least, had a reason to want revenge; I’d broken his hands. What had I done to Peterkin besides making him stop torturing an oversized red cricket?
Embarrassed him, that was what. It was all I could think of. But I knew something he almost certainly didn’t: the dying dog he’d seen on Kingdom Road wasn’t the dog I was traveling with now. Radar was looking back at me. I pointed down the alley. “GET HIM!”
She didn’t need to be told twice. Rades sprinted toward the sound of that unpleasant voice, splashing up brick-tinged water from her paws, and darted around the corner. There was a surprised shriek from Peterkin and a volley of barking—the kind that had scared the hell out of Andy Chen once upon a time—and then a howl of pain.