The Kahn spoke to his disfigured expert. Mal-Greb, confused at first, listened, nodded and bowed his head like the slave he was. Jani Beg momentarily seized with energy grabbed the smaller man by the shoulders and breathed into his face “Hurl them back to Hell!”The wild look in the Kahn’s eyes was something that Mal-Greb understood.And so they began.
Underground, in the dark wet hole that was home to the spiders and the rats, something moved. It had no right to be down there but it belonged nowhere else. Half drowned half alive it pushed the water ahead of it into the culverts and drains as it passed. Right under the city and out into the suburbs and fields these tunnels fed into the river and the network of canals that had fed the industrial revolution. A thousand eyes, some blinded, that had never seen the sun strained in the soiled darkness. It struggled on and it listened with a thousand ears not its own and it cried.