With Clare? I shook off the thought. A couple of steps more and I’d see more clearly – but then the figure gave another great start. It looked wildly down a narrow side-street to the right, then threw up its hands and waved me frantically back. I stopped, clutched at my sword and saw the figure whip this way and that like an animal caged within high walls. Then it whirled as if despairing and bolted towards the mouth of the side street. I called out. It glanced around, caught its foot on the curb and sprawled headlong – not exactly suspicious or threatening. I ran towards it as it picked itself painfully up, and for an instant I caught a glimpse of swinging hair, long hair. I couldn’t see the colour – but it was the length of Clare’s, at least. But with another panicky gesture whoever it was limped off into the shadowy street, and as I reached the corner I heard hobbling steps slapping away along the pavement.
Not being a total idiot, I didn’t rush in after it. Carefully I drew my sword, and stopped to let my eyes adjust. They did, and there was nobody lurking, nowhere for them to lurk against high concrete walls featureless as a jail. The road was uneven, puddled with glinting water, the long pavements were clear of everything except garbage – quite a lot of that – and those painful steps went on, with just a hint of gasping breath. I ran, leaping the puddles, skirting the softly-blowing shreds of paper and plastic, and in the gleam of a brighter lamp at streets’ end I glimpsed the figure again – slim, slight, limping desperately along with arms akimbo and hair flying. Not Clare; she was less delicate, more solidly built. But still that unnerving hint of the familiar, infuriating me, undermining all my cautious instincts with the desperate need to see. Where was the sun? We’d been all night on the river; surely it must be rising soon?
Left around corners limped my shadow-hare, left, left and right again. I darted after it, swinging round the lamp-posts like a child for speed. Then a new street opened onto a sudden brightness I found blinding; all I could make out at first were the rows of white lights that seemed to hang unsupported like stars in the hazy air, and among them, above a mass of glittering reflections, tall shafts of shimmering movement. My dazzled eyes rebelled at those dancing, glassy columns; the sound alone told me it was a fountain. Beyond it, beneath a shadowy row of arches, its reflections danced – and across them that shadow flickered, slipping from arch to arch. It was some kind of piazza, lined with shop windows dark and empty now; what shops I didn’t stay to see. My running footfalls rang echoes from the roof. We were in a city square, the hare and I, brightly lit by the white globes gleaming down from elegant wrought-iron lamp-holders on the high stone walls, from ornately fluted standards ringing the railings of the garden at its heart. And down its pathways, clipped and civic, the dark figure glided, beneath the hooves of a rearing statue and beyond, towards a white wall that towered over the far side of the square, higher than all the rest. Three sharp towers loomed out of the night, the middle one tallest – no, those were crosses on top. Three spires. It was some kind of church, or cathedral more likely; but odd, outlandish with its stacked columns and narrow-arched windows, and in the midst of them all a clock. Like places I’d seen in Spain or Italy, the kind they called romanesque – and come to think of it, the rest of the square had the same sort of look. We might have been somewhere in Spain – only not quite. So where the hell was I? Correction – plain where. They wouldn’t have cathedrals in hell.
Flagpoles stood stark and empty. Signs were too far for me to read without turning aside. And there in the gloom by the great barred door lurked my quarry, hesitant, fleeting, poised as if to dart inside – why? To seek sanctuary – from me?
I slowed down, walked evenly, lightly towards it, closer and closer. Till I might have lunged forward and grabbed it. But I stopped, hesitant; and the moment it saw that the figure gestured again, desperately, and backed away towards the shadowy mouth of the narrow street behind. I’d come close enough to catch a gleam of dark eyes, a flash of a parchment-colored cheek, no other detail. Who had I known with any such coloring? Except …
