“Seriously, Lee. I have go down and deal with the gnomes. They have something I need back.”
“And you think that I have an answer. Man, they‘re fatae — you should have a better grasp of them than I ever could.”
I shrugged, craning my neck to look up at him. I’m not short, but Lee was one damn long drink of water. “They don’t much like the flesh-folk.”
He winced. “They’re not really made of metal. You know that, right?”
“We know that. I’m not sure they do.”
“Yeah.” He leaned against the wall and thought. I let him.
“All right. There’s one tribe, I’ve done some trading with them.”
“Hah!” I crowed, making a subtle fist-pump gesture. “I knew it.”
“Shut up. I’ve done some trading with them, I said. Not enough to figure out how their brains work and I’d sure as hell never use current on them; it would be bad manners, and I’d never get supplies from them again, anyway.”
“So you can tell me who to talk to?”
“No. But I can talk to them for you.”
Oh hell. “Your wife is going to kill me.”
Lee just laughed. I think he’s used to that reaction.
oOo
The metal tunnels were actually long, large metal pipes that had been fitted in shafts decades ago, for some MTA project or another, and then abandoned. No wonder we always ran a deficit, the way they lost materials. You went in through the waterways, everyone knew that, if they knew about gnomes at all, but that’s where things got hazy. For me, anyway. Lee sloshed along in his galoshes like he was going to market. I guess for him, he was.
“Who is that?” The voice came out of the gloom without warning, cranky and suspicious
“Who the hell do you think it is?” Lee held up a hand, and sparks flickered at his fingertips, illuminating the small circle in front of him. A gnome sat on a metal shelf that had been grafted into the tunnel, blinking in the current-light. “Who else has to bend over double in these damn tunnels, and sounds like a fucking moose slogging through this damned sewage?”
It took a minute and then my brain kicked back in. Lee, calm-tempered, soft-spoken Lee, was in trading mode. Was that how gnomes spoke to each other, or how they expected humans to speak, overall?
“Ah. You. Wasn’t expecting you.” The gnome was about knee-high to me, which meant that Lee could have stepped on him and barely noticed.
“Well, I’m here. You have any redweight?”
“You want redweight, you gotta call ahead. Not grow on trees down here.” The gnome giggled like it had said something unbearably witty.
My eyes had adjusted enough to take in details: I’d known that gnomes were small, but I hadn’t realized how much they looked like Beaux Arts fairies. Pretty little bastards. No wonder they were able to enrapt stupid Null children into following them underground into the sewers.
“How about black ash?” Lee asked.
“Maaaaaaaaybe. What you got in trade?”
Lee reached into his pocket and pulled something out. I craned my neck to see what gnomes considered fair trade for their handiwork, but his hand was tilted so I couldn’t see into his palm. Secret of the trade, I guess. Talent were just as secretive in their way as the fatae.
“Too much,” the gnome said in alarm. “Too much for black ash.”
“Hrm. So it is.” Lee started to put whatever it was back in his pocket, and then stopped. “But maybe we could deal, anyway. You answer a question, a small question, and I call it fair trade.”
“Hrmmmm. Small question? And black ash?”
“I call it fair.”
“Then not small question.”
“Small question, important answer. If not truth, then all deals end.”
Oh, the gnome did not like that, not at all. It hopped from one foot to the other, tilting its head as though it was listening to something far away. Maybe it was: I bet these tunnels carried sound unspeakably well, and I doubted there was only one guard along this stretch of sewer.
“Ask,” the gnome said, finally.
“Did you dust a young human girl, near-grown, a blonde, in the past sevenday? Is she here?”
“That two question.” But it considered again, and this time I was damn sure I heard the high-pitched echo of other voices, up and down the metal tunnel.
“Blond girl come freely,” it said finally, and with finality. “Honored guest.”
I snorted at that. For honored guest read ‘slave.’ The fatae liked to have someone else to do the housework. I didn’t think they’d hurt her, but there were other things living in the underground city, and gnomes were notoriously careless of their guests. Metals, they protected. Humans—disposable.
“Give. We bring you black ash. Now go.”
Lee made the exchange, and they shook hands on it, the gnome’s hand absurdly lost in his.
“Come on. Let’s go,” Lee said to me.
Waitaminute. “I need to—”
“We need to go. Now. “ Lee looked over his shoulder, clearly worried.
I’d asked him for help because he knew the underground kingdom. We went.
oOo
“You can’t go back there.”
“I have to.”
“Danny. Daniel.”
Nobody calls me Daniel, not even my Mom. Only my old lieutenant ever called me that, and only when he was about to ream me out something spectacular, so I’d know to loosen up my sphincter.
“I have to go back,” I told him, against his disapproving look. “The girl is down there.”
Lee sighed. “Of her own free will. Mostly.”
Yeah. The “mostly” was the kicker. She had chosen to leave home and go live in the underground kingdom; gnomes didn’t have glamour, not really, just a lot of exotic allure and pretty skin. On the “however” side, she was a legal minor, and no human should spend any length of time down there, not unless they were fixing to come down with asthma and Vitamin D deficiency. And her parents had paid me to get her back.
Humans didn’t belong down there.
Lee paced back and forth in his studio, five paces in either direction, turn-and-glare. “You’re going back down there no matter what I say, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. But you’re not going back with me,” I told him. “It could get ugly and that’s not your thing.”
Lee looked mulish, but didn’t argue. He was much more of a ‘make art not war’ sort, and he was okay with that. No heroics in that boy.
“If caught, I’ll swear I tortured you to hand over the map.”
He scowled at me. “Very funny. They won’t torture you, anyway, they’ll just eat you. Goat’s a rarity down there, and you’ve put on a nice layer of fat since you left the force.”
“The hell I have.” I’d noted the surprisingly sharp teeth on that gnome, but not thought to wonder about it. “And they don’t eat people.” I’d never heard that they did, anyway…
Lee gave up trying to scare me. “If they did, they’d have been burned out of there by now. No. Just rats and stray pets. Look…if you insist on this, there’s not a damn thing I can do against them. My magic doesn’t work that way. But I might be able to help you find the girl, once you‘re down there...”
oOo
Twenty-four hours later I was back in the tunnel, carrying a small metal sphere in the cup of my left hand and a rubber-tipped metal wand in the other. I felt like a proper idiot, and was prepared at any second to drop the damn wand in order to grab for my gun. Some kinds of cold steel made me feel more secure than others.
The wand carried a current-charge that would stun anything that came out at me, although I wasn‘t sure if it would be a fatal shock or a jump-back-Jack. Lee’d handed it to me without comment, and I‘d taken it instinctively, the cool metal fitting perfectly into my grip. “I thought you said you didn’t have anything that would work against gnomes?”
“This isn’t for gnomes. It’s for the ROUS.”
It to
ok me a minute, then I got the joke. “Very funny.”
“Danny, I’ve been down there more than you have. I’m not kidding. Bullets won’t do the job. If you see anything with a tail, shock it and apologize later.”
Comforting. So I was moving through the tunnel, my gun holstered and my wand at the ready, keeping one eye on the shadows shifting against the walls and the other on the globe in my palm. That was the important bit of magic: it would lead me in the direction of my girl. Or a girl, anyway. A human. Lee had spelled it to seek out an upright bipedal without the metallic-gritty blood of a gnome. So, assuming they didn’t have half a dozen captive or pet humans down here….
Something moved, off to my left. I stopped, my heart racing a little more than I enjoyed, and waited. A skittering noise, and the swish of what might have been a long tail attached to a giant rat-ass. Or it could have been my over-pumped imagination. I took a better hold on the wand, and started forward again.
The quality of light was starting to increase, which means I was entering the gnomes’ domain. Joy. On the plus side, whatever had been skittering in my shadow decided to stay back. I guess the gnomes had rat-proofed or something. Or it didn’t like the taste of their flesh. Either way, it was a good thing. But I kept the wand out, anyway. I really didn’t want to have to shoot anyone. Even down here, there would be paperwork.
“You. Lost?”
I swear, the gnome hadn‘t been there half a second ago. But it was now, a foot high and all of it filled with the finest street corner ‘tude you could muster. Dress it in colors and it’d pass for a gangbanger.
“Nope. Visiting. Here to see a shut-in friend”
I can’t blame my genetic donor for my smart mouth—that came down straight from the maternal line.
The gnome didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. But he didn’t call for backup, either. Just stared at me with those oversized eyes, the ones that you just know can find you in the middle of the night in a pitch-black room, and nodded, then let me pass by.
That creeped me out, way more than anything else had. Why wasn’t he worried? What where the little metal-skins planning?
“Huuuuman.” A taunting whisper, a mocking call, the tingle of fairy-dust on my skin, like a shiver in the middle of the night, coming from ahead of me.
“Huuuuuman.”
That one came from somewhere off to my left. The shiver became an itch, the urge to follow, to find the treasure such a creature undoubtedly hid here, below ground, in its mines.
“I don’t think so, boys.” I was a little old and jaded to be dusted that easily. I had no desire to be found, seven years from now, starved to death in a metal hole.
“And don’t bother with the rats, either,” I said, more loudly. “I’ll just turn them into stew.”
Bravado–if they actually did have rodents of unusual size down here, there’s no way I’d be able to hold off more than one, two max. But the whispering faded away, and they let me continue on unmolested.
No idea how much longer I walked, waiting any moment for giant teeth to dig into my arm or leg, getting more and more unnerved each moment, when I came to a four-pronged branch in the tunnels. One way was the correct choice, the others would leave me stranded somewhere I didn’t want to be. Maybe with rats. That’s why the little bastard wasn’t worried; it knew odds were good I’d end up lost.
“All right, Lee, now’d be a good time for your toy to work.”
As though it were listening, the globe in my hand flashed red when I moved it past the leftmost option, so I turned that way.
In the distance now I could hear noises, the rumble of machinery and voices blending into grey noise. A while in, and doorways broke the smooth walls, the sheet-steel doors boasting tiny latches just perfect for gnome hands. There weren’t any markings on the doors that I could see, but remembering the bush-baby peepers on that gnome, I didn’t assume that meant there wasn’t huge signs everywhere my crap day-timer sight was missing.
Another multi-pronged split in the hallway, and I waved the globe back and forth slowly, letting it tell me where to go. If I hadn’t had the globe, I’d have been lost ten ways from Monday. Hopefully it would work on the way out, too, or my bones would wash out into the East river’s low tide seven days from now, gnawed bare.
“Stop freaking yourself out, Hendrickson.”
This time the globe suggested the right side, and about five doors down that hallway, it flared so bright I almost dropped it.
“Here, then?”
The sphere declined to answer. Either it was worn out, or it didn’t feel my stupid-ass question deserved an answer.
I tried the door handle but, as expected, couldn’t quite get my hand to work the latch properly. Thinking quick, I took the wand and bent the non-grounded end slightly. The metal was soft enough to do it without much effort, although I hated to ruin the thing. Not just because I didn’t know what effect it might have on it as a weapon but because it was a beautiful piece. Lee couldn’t make anything simply utilitarian. It wasn’t his nature.
The bend slid under the handle, and I could apply the right pressure to make the lock click open. Go me! I pushed gently, and the door swung open. Alert to anything from screams to gunshots to a vase coming down on my head, I stepped inside.
The room was about as far from the bleak exterior hallway as you could get. The walls were gray rock, framed at ceiling and floor with a dark, patinaed metal, and the floor was mostly covered in a thick fleecy rug, white and soft to the touch. There wasn’t any art on the wall, but the bed had a bright blue coverlet, and there were pillows that looked comfortable. A white wood vanity with a mirror above it, and enough gewgaws scattered around to make any 14-year-old girl happy, I guessed.
No photos of her loving parents, I noted. No photos at all. No artwork, nothing representational. The fatae loved beauty, but mostly their own. Not so much about looking at pretties someone else made. That seemed to be a human thing…something Miss Susan was already losing.
“Who are you?”
I had been so busy looking around, I hadn’t secured all the entrances. I turned slowly to face the girl who’d come in through a side door, cursing myself upside and down. Thankfully, she was carrying a towel, not something that could be thrown or otherwise used as a weapon, and seemed disinclined to scream.
“Hello, Susan. I’m Danny. Your folks asked me to stop by and check on you. They’ve been worried, you know.”
Susan didn’t even blink, although she did shrug. Draping the towel across her neck, she walked into the room and sat down at the vanity, peering into the mirror as though checking for wrinkles. Her posture and pose was that of a mature woman, but her body was still skinny-gawky teenager, and her pose was just that —a pose.
“You should at least have left them a note, told them that you were all right.”
“They’ll forget about me, get a new kid,” she said, oh so casually. “That’s how it works, right?”
Oh we were going to play that game, were we?
“Sometimes. But mostly, no. Mostly the parents worry and stress and hire people to go looking, and sometimes they even risk their own lives—their souls—to bring back their loved one.”
I wasn’t getting through; I’d known I wouldn’t the moment I saw her. She was completely dusted. To her, this wasn’t a dreary hole in a dreary tunnel: it was fairyland, and she was the shiny new queen. Why did nobody read Thomas the Rhymer any more?
“You’re here to try and talk me back into going Above. I’m not interested. Tell my parents I’m fine.”
“You really think they’re going to believe that? Come tell them yourself.”
“No. If I leave, I’ll never find my way back. Ageo told me so. I’m not going to risk all this just to reassure them.”
Well, she had the Snow Queen cold down already. I very much did not like Miss Susan at all.
“Look.” She stopped and looked at me. She had her father’s eyes, and her mother’s mouth. Nowhere
near as pretty as she wanted to be, but not bad, overall. Give her another ten years and she might even break a few hearts. But not if she stayed down here.
“You have no right to tell me what to do.”
“True. I don’t.” And telling her anything would be useless, even if she hadn’t been dusted—she was a teenager. Short of dragging her out of there by her hair, there wasn’t much I could do.
The hair thing was tempting. But I had one card I hadn’t played. I hadn’t even thought to, honest, but seeing her sitting there trying so desperately to be what she thought was adult and sophisticated and … fatae-acceptable…. .
She had been missing for six days now. One day left, before she was lost to the above world forever.
I made my decision before I let myself think about it. If I thought about it, we’d lose her.
Miss Susan thought I was human. Most people do. I think human, I live human, I pass for human even among people who are looking for non-human; at least until the NYPD decided to change unofficial policy and I had to get out or be asked some uncomfortable questions at my next physical.
But I’m not human. Not entirely.
I ran my hands through my hair, intentionally flattening the brown curls so that my horns showed through, impossible even for a Null to overlook. They’re not elegant or impressive or even any use as a weapon, but they’re there, if I choose to shown them: short, curved nubs rising out of my scalp like…okay, like a baby goat’s, yeah. I could have taken my boots off to show the hoof-like growth that protects my toes, but it was too damn much effort to pull off cowboy boots, and I didn’t need it anyway. The horns would catch her attention, and then my genetics—and her brain chemistry—would handle the rest.
“Susan.”
She had gone back to the mirror, painting up her eyes to look wider, more helpless…more gnome-like. What a waste. Although I suppose she should be thankful the angeli didn’t catch her eye. Those sadistic bastards would encourage her to do body mods, just for their own entertainment.
Laura Anne Gilman - Tales of the Cosa Nostradamus Page 10