“Folks salvage what they can when they rebuild,” Malkin told him. “Usually there’s only bricks and not too many of them.”
The tall woman led him further down into the city. Soon he could smell the river and the mud flats that lined it. They must be almost to the end of the town, Wiz thought.
The river flowed under the bridge between mud banks that took up most of the bed. In spring it must be a torrent, but now, in late summer, there was only enough water to fill a narrow channel.
In the failing light Wiz could see that the earth the town sat on wasn’t ordinary dirt at all. It was heavily mixed with bits of brick, old paving stones and rubble. Here and there vitrified pieces glinted dully in the light of the setting sun.
Wiz realized the entire hill the town sat on was composed of the remains of earlier towns, like ancient Troy. Except here it wasn’t earthquakes and human enemies who had laid down layer after layer of debris to serve as the base for the builders, it was dragons.
“Malkin, look at that.”
“What?”
“The river banks. That’s not dirt. That’s rubble from older towns.”
“So?”
“So this place has been destroyed and rebuilt a number of times.”
Malkin shrugged and kept walking, unconcerned by her hometown’s history.
How many times had the town been destroyed by dragon fire? Wiz wondered as they proceeded across the bridge. How many times had the survivors returned to try to rebuild?
Yet Malkin didn’t seem to care. To her it was just a fact of life, even though it could happen again at any time.
That, Wiz decided, was the scariest thing of all.
The stone bridge was wide enough for two wagons abreast, and well-maintained. The town on the other side of it wasn’t. Almost as soon as they stepped off the bridge the streets narrowed into muddy lanes and began to twist like the tracks of a herd of drunken cows. The aroma told Wiz they weren’t cleaned regularly either. The smell of sun-warmed garbage and ripe raw sewage held a compost-like overtone that suggested they hadn’t ever been cleaned.
“Bog Side,” Malkin explained as Wiz tried to shut off direct communication between his nose and his gorge. “It’s the place to come for entertainment.”
The tall tumbledown houses and maze of narrow garbage-strewn byways didn’t look like Wiz’s definition of Disneyland. The characters who swaggered or skulked or slunk along the streets didn’t remind him much of Mickey and Snow White either. In fact, they made the inhabitants of North Beach and Sunset Strip seem innocuous. Wiz found himself pressing close to Malkin for protection.
Malkin swaggered along, ignoring the others or shouldering them out of her way like so many gawking tourists in a shopping mall. A couple of the more flashily dressed women eyed Wiz and a few of the larger men looked him up and down speculatively, but either Wiz’s reputation as a powerful wizard had preceded him or they knew Malkin too well to try anything. Except for an occasional hand lightly brushing his belt for the pouch that wasn’t there, no one interfered with them.
Malkin led him deeper into the twisty maze of lanes and alleys, between houses that sagged out over the street to support each other like staggering drunks, down alleys over piles of garbage and through open spaces where buildings had collapsed into heaps of broken brick and rotted timbers. Once they passed a long row of substantial brick buildings, sturdy and windowless but stained with time and marred by graffiti and abuse.
“Almost there,” Malkin said as she turned into an alley even narrower and more noisome than the last. Wiz was utterly lost, but from the overtone of mud and long-dead fish permeating the general stench, he thought they had doubled back toward the river.
The alley suddenly opened out into a square facing the river and Wiz blinked as he stepped from the gloom into the mellow light of the setting sun. Not that the view was much of an improvement. The open space was small and piled more than head-high with rubble and garbage. The buildings on either side leaned alarmingly and one of them had already slumped down into a pile of brick spilling out into the square. The opposite side was formed by the burned-out shell of another of the windowless brick buildings. Looking at the blackened brick and fire-damaged mortar Wiz wondered how much longer it would stay standing.