There were other elements to the smell. Sweat and blood, urine and feces, birth and death: all were collected together with no real outlet. On top of that, the smell of cordite; of the grease used to keep blasters in working order; the sickly sweet smell of the dyes used on cloth; the tannery and the blacksmith; old food and rotten vegetable matter, and something else…
It was a smell that Jak recognized too well. The sweet-and-sour smell of human flesh, roasted and charred. That had to come from the furnaces, from the disposal of the chilled children that they had helped return to the ville. And yet, Jak was puzzled. If the furnaces had a proper outlet for their smoke, as they surely had to if the ville wasn’t to be permanently smoked out, then why did this smell linger so long? The other smells staying around he could figure: the air was fresh if not clean, so there had to be some ventilation shafts down here. But the furnace needed to have had a direct outlet built for it.
So why the smell? More than that, it didn’t have the other elements that Jak would expect. There was no wood smoke mingled with it, and he remembered Dean telling them briefly that the furnace was wood fired. There had been something else the young Cawdor had wanted to say, but he had held his tongue.
Jak was naturally suspicious and cautious. It couldn’t even be called second nature, as it was so much a part of him. It was why he was alive despite the things he had seen and lived through; it was why he was here now, and not some pile of bleached bones picked clean by scavengers.
It was why every nerve and fiber in his body was screaming at him that there was something very wrong in the ville of Raw.
This feeling, mixed with the claustrophobia he was beginning to feel beneath the ground, had driven him out to explore the tunnel system that comprised the ville. He wanted to know how the ville was constructed and get advance notice of any little surprises that Alien may have waiting for them…not that he distrusted the baron that much. There were no alarms ringing in his brain when he saw him. His wife was another matter.
Jak was used to redoubts. They were deep underground, but the rooms were generally large, well constructed and were connected by corridors that were also expansive. Another thing about redoubts was that they were all constructed along fairly similar lines, so that it was easy to get a general picture of the layout.
Raw was different. As a patchwork of cellars and basements, service tunnels and railways and sewers, it worked as a winding and labyrinthine construction of tunnels and rooms, some spacious but most constricted. Narrow so that you couldn’t go more than two abreast, or low so that you had to stoop, they were connected by makeshift shafts and stairways that had been hacked out at strange angles. Sometimes it seemed that you were going back on yourself when you were still going forward. There were sharp angles and blind corners; niches where ambushers could hide, and great stretches where there was no cover. And there was little light. This was perhaps less of a problem for Jak than for the others. His eyes were sensitive to light, and he could register the lower levels much better than any of his companions. Even so, in places it was still too dark for him to feel that he could proceed without the utmost caution.
It was quiet now. Most of the inhabitants of Raw were asleep. He passed curtained-off partitions where the sounds of snoring and deep breathing could be heard. Once, he paused as he heard the sounds of moving bodies. He continued on only when he realized it was a couple taking the rare opportunity to make love, the woman’s small cries reassuring him that the inhabitants weren’t ready to jump out and attack him.
The living quarters of the ville seemed to be similar in every section he visited. Like the quarters they had been given by the baron, the private areas were little more than holes in the walls of the tunnels, small anterooms and sectioned basements that were protected from the run of the tunnels by a few scraps of material or a few pieces of old boarding. Not for security, but only for the lowest level of privacy. There was probably nothing to steal, as it didn’t look like a rich ville.