Chapter 1.3 - In which Percy bathes in the canal

Percy

Month 9, Day 27, Sunday 1:05 p.m.

“She probably didn’t have a license to set up a street stall here,” Percy muttered, gazing after her and the pursuing coppers.

Contrasting her appearance, which suggested an old woman, the hag was surprisingly spry. She ducked and weaved through the congested traffic near blocked off canal bridge with such alacrity that he doubted the coppers would be able to catch her.

Percy looked down at the talisman in his hands, regret overwhelming him. He’d lost an entire gold and hadn’t even gotten directions. He considered chasing after the hag to demand the two silver she owed him, but knew it wasn’t worth it. With another deep breath in through his nose and out through his mouth—which only reminded him of the poop on his shoe—Percy pushed up his glasses and looked around for someone else to give him directions. Even if he could only deliver half of the undamaged pastries promised, that was still better than just giving up altogether.

Nearby, a woman talking to one of the coppers pointed his way very obviously. She was certainly revealing his encounter with that rude fleeing woman.

A tall, dark-skinned copper with a confident stride came toward him, not even needing to bother looking both ways before crossing the street because no one would dare run into him.

Percy wanted to groan at the inevitable delay, but perked up. “I can ask him for directions!” he realized. Only, somehow Percy had lost the little note where the address was written. And of course he couldn’t remember whether it was north or south Cedarwood Street, nor the exact house number.

Percy was still looking around for the scrap of paper when the copper stopped beside him. “Have you seen a suspicious woman? Likely fleeing, maybe holding a book,” the man asked, his voice deep and rich and definitely not in danger of the squeaks that sometimes cracked Percy’s own words in two.

Percy explained that he had, pointed in the direction the rude woman had left, and then added, “Say, do you happen to know how to get to Cedarwood Street from here?”

The copper seemed irked at the question, but still gave a perfunctory answer before moving on after the criminal’s trail.

Percy needed to reach the next closest bridge, a few blocks to the north, and cross the canal to his left. With a clenched jaw and a wary eye, he firmed his grip around the pastry container with both arms, then pushed his way into the crowed congested around the intersection ahead.

Once he’d made it past them, narrowly avoiding two elbows to the head and one rather large horse patty recently dropped and still steaming atop the cobblestones, Percy turned left into the nearest alley. He would walk along the street bordering the canal until he reached the next bridge.

But before he even made it out of the alley, that same rude woman from earlier popped out from the cover of some wooden pallets just behind him, her face twisted in a grimace of anger that he caught out of the corner of his eye.

Percy screamed, his voice breaking and turning the sound into an embarrassingly high pitched squeal. He simultaneously tried to spin to face her and run away, and only ended up getting his legs twisted around each other. No matter how often he was surprised, Percy had never managed to train his involuntary startle reaction into something more useful.

Internally, his mind spun with horror and confusion. When escaping, she had turned right. He had turned left at an entirely different alley. So how was she here? Surely he wasn’t so directionally-challenged that he had mixed up right and left?

The woman thrust her palm into his face and shoved, sending a burst of pain through his nose and shoving his glasses up and to the side. The force of it was enough to send Percy stumbling into a backpedal to save his spine. But he was off-balance and discombobulated, and once he started, he couldn’t catch himself.

Thankfully, his hapless entrance onto the street didn’t result in immediately trampling by a horse, carriage, or other vehicle.

The woman rushed past him in a blur, and another blur was approaching from the north, on track to crash into him. Probably. He couldn’t see to tell for sure, because his glasses were stuck somewhere on his forehead.

Percy threw himself toward the sidewalk edging the canal, but tripped on an unseen, jutting cobblestone. As he fell, he lifted his arms in a last-ditch effort to save the pastries, but instead they went flying at the human-shaped blur that he was pretty sure was the woman, hitting her in the back of the head as she sprinted toward the blocked canal bridge.

It was the last thing he saw before his torso and jaw impacted the ground, hard enough to leave him dizzy. He groaned and crawled to his hands and knees, fumbling to right his glasses, which had gotten tangled in the fuzzy curl of his hair and thus stayed attached to his head. This was good, because corrective eyeglasses were expensive, and he dreaded to tell his mother that he had lost or broken yet another pair.

The woman was crawling to her own feet a few meters in front of him. She sent him a baleful glare.

Percy flinched back, raising his hands as if to shield against an attack.

She apparently—and rightly—concluded that he wasn’t worth it, and turned back around to continue fleeing, only to fall to the ground again in an awkward slide.

But, as a purple projectile shot over her head, Percy realized this had been purposeful.

Whatever she had ducked was headed straight toward him. He tried to throw himself out of the way too, but the projectile—a spell!—still caught his left calf. It splashed upward in a roil of very tangible tentacles, which coiled around Percy’s leg tight enough to strangle.

As Percy was flailing futilely, another man in a copper uniform hurried up behind him, having come from the north. The man stooped to help free him, prying the tentacles away from Percy’s leg with the leverage of his baton. “Get out of here, kid!” the man said. “It’s dangerous!”

Percy was happy to comply, crawling once more to his feet and hiding behind the larger copper’s back while he looked for a safe escape route.

Up ahead, the woman was hiding behind some of the construction sandbags placed around the mouth of the bridge. They acted as a shield wall against more spells that the coppers to the south were firing over the heads of the panicking crowd between them. It was a recipe with all the perfect ingredients for some unfortunate schmuck to get badly trampled, and Percy did not want that person to be him.

Then, the woman rose from her crouch, an open sandbag heaved up in her arms, and somehow caused a gust of wind that blew the sand in the bag outward. As she turned, the miniature sandstorm passed in a wide arc over the people and the coppers beyond them, only adding to the panic and confusion.

Knowing what was coming next, Percy crouched down and covered his eyes with his hands, smashing his glasses to his face as he pressed his nose and mouth into his knees.

The sand passed over him with a thousand different abrasive scratches, and he had no doubt he would be struggling to clean remnant particles from his hair for the next week, but he was fine. Tentatively, Percy moved his hands and opened his eyes. The faint smell of spice hung in the air, with a bit of heat on his skin where it had touched. Had she added something extra to the sand?

The copper standing above him hadn’t managed to protect his face as well as Percy, and was snorting and wiping at one of his eyes with the desperation of someone who felt something under his eyelids that shouldn’t be there. Perhaps because of this, he didn’t notice the woman tossing aside the now empty bag of sand—which had a spell array drawn on the front of the canvas—and sprinting directly toward them.

Percy tried to drag the copper out of the way, partly for the man’s safety, and partly to keep a competent adult between himself and danger—a human shield.

The man opened his watering eyes in time to see the woman, and immediately added his own efforts to the attempt to get out of the way. Unfortunately, he slipped on the angled, packed snow at the side of the sidewalk.

It was so easy to do, if you weren’t careful.

And, like had happened to Percy many times, the results were disastrous.

The woman gave the off-balance copper a shove for good measure as she raced by, and as the man hit the low railing between the sidewalk and the canal, he began to tip over it.

The only thing he could grab for balance was Percy.

The tilting world seemed to slow as Percy’s panic rose, and he watched the approach of the dirty, brownish-green water with no way to save himself. He had never been a strong swimmer, and several harrowing experiences with water deeper than his head had left a scar in his heart.

As they plunged beneath the frigid surface, Percy flailed, opening and then closing his eyes again as the realization that people pooped and peed in this water hit him. He grasped for anything that might save him, and one hand found what what probably the copper’s leg, while the other clamped down on something squishy and horribly familiar.

With an involuntary gasp of horror that had Percy immediately choking on water, he released the copper’s testicles.