This one didn’t look promising, he admitted as he poked among the rubble. There were bolts of cloth that had been pulled off the shelves, torn and trampled. Boxes of iron rivets had been broken open and the rivets scattered across the floor. Bundles of leather thongs, cracked and rotted hung from pegs on one wall. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where food had been kept.
Still, he was here and a quick check of the other buildings showed nothing more promising. The barracks kitchen had been easy to locate, but there was nothing to eat there. What hadn’t been carried off had been consumed by rats or larger animals.
The City of Night was more complex than he had ever imagined, Wiz thought vaguely as he poked the piles of rubbish in the corners and turned over debris on the floor. Somewhere there had to be food storehouses to feed the people who had lived here. But he didn’t have the faintest notion where.
Wiz stopped short. There, on the very top shelf was a pottery jar with a familiar shape.
Pickled fish, he realized. There were some districts along the Freshened Sea where salted fish was packed in vinegar with garlic, onions, vegetables, and spices and sealed in crocks to age and ferment. To the people of those districts pickled fish was a delicacy. Everyone else made jokes about it, especially about its tendency to produce gas.
Apparently the jokes about pickled fish were universal and whoever used this room had kept a personal cache here rather than listen to them.
With shaking hands he took the jar off the shelf. It was full and the clay seal around the lid was unbroken. Quickly he smashed the lid with a piece of wood from the floor.
The contents were dark brown, definitely past their prime and Wiz had made his share of jokes about pickled fish. But this was the most delicious thing he had ever eaten. Heedless of the promissory rumblings of his stomach, he finished the entire crock.
At 7:00 a.m. the group gathered in the back parking lot of the shopping center.
They were carrying everything from designer luggage to backpacks. One or two of them had laptop computers under their arms. Jerry wondered how well those would work where they were going. A couple more had apparently believed the Afghanistan story enough to bring cases of liquor with them. That, at least, would be useful, he decided.
“Okay, people,” he called out. “Moira here, will . . .” he looked around. “Where’s Moira?”
“Here, Lord.” Moira came trotting up with a large flat box under her arm.
“What’s in the box?” Jerry asked her.
“A present.” She handed it to him. “Will you hold it for me?” Be careful not to tip it.” Then she looked up and frowned at the sky.
“The haze will make it hard to tell the time,” she said. “That complicates matters. Perhaps it would be best to wait for the afternoon time.”
“That’s smog and it’s not going to clear today,” Jerry told her. “If you need to tell the time, use my watch.” He stripped it off his meaty wrist and handed it to her.
Moira shook her head. I must know the time in day-tenths after sunrise,” she said. “Not the time by your local system.”
“Day-tenths?”
“One tenth of the time between sunrise and set.”
“Wait a minute,” said a small man with the face of an intelligent mouse and a mop of brown hair. He stripped off his own wristwatch, and began punching the tiny buttons beneath the face.
“There you go,” he said handing the watch. “I haven’t set it against the Naval Observatory in a couple of months so it may be a tenth of a second off, but I hope it will do.”
Moira studied the madly spinning numbers on the display. They looked something like the numbers Wiz used, but she didn’t know them well enough to use them.
She handed the watch to Jerry. “Here, My Lord. Tell me when it is two day-tenths.”
“Coming up on it now.”
“Hey, guys!”
Thorkil du Libre Dragonwatcher—Danny Gavin, Jerry reminded himself—came running across the parking lot with a backpack slung over one shoulder and bouncing against his hip.