by Dante King
Leah licked her lips and blew me a small kiss.
“This is going to be a goddamn shitshow, isn’t it?” I said, my stomach squirming with excitement.
“This,” Leah said, “is going to be fun.”
Chapter 10
We stood in the middle of a fetid and reeking alleyway, flanked by crumbling buildings. Garbage was strewn about the place, accompanied by an overwhelming stink of brussels sprouts about two decades past their prime.
“This is nice,” I said drily.
After wending our way like a couple of crawling bugs into the darker, poorer outer crust of Manafell, Leah had brought us here.
In the alleyway was the entrance to a tavern where having some sort of rare respiratory illness or venereal disease was a prerequisite for entering. It was at the base of one of the long hills that ran up to the Castle of Ascendance, though you could not see it from here. The peeling sign over the double doors read, YE OLDE SHITE PIPE.
Leah patted me on the back. “Don’t worry,” she said to me, “it’s not the sort of place you think it is.”
There was a man lounging against the double doors and eyeing us with a yellow and infinitely patient eye. I say a man, but while he was humanoid in shape, with a man’s arms and legs and torso, his head belonged to a Nile crocodile and a large crocodile’s tail poked out of his pinstripe trousers. His chest was bare, except for an aquamarine waistcoat. On his long, scaled head he had balanced a tophat, which contrasted nicely with the flip-flops he was wearing on his feet.
“Good look,” I said, not meaning to be sarcastic at all. It was a good look. I’d never seen anything quite like it.
Leah walked toward the lounging figure, who straightened a little as we approached.
“Roger,” Leah said, “what a lovely treat to see you again.”
The crocodile-man, Roger, blinked a couple of times and grinned. At least, it looked like he was grinning. I imagined it was pretty hard to do anything but grin with a mouth that big and an assortment of teeth like that.
“Good day, Miss Chaosbane,” he said, in an accent that could have come straight out of Peaky Blinders, “I do declare, but I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me for a second! Fancy seein’ you here again, eh?”
“You’re still up to… this, then?” Leah asked.
Roger made a deprecatory noise in his huge throat. “My parents always said I’d go far. ‘Course, I think they rather hoped I’d stay there too. Miserable gits.”
“I know that feeling,” Leah said. “It’s more often than not that a Chaosbane gets treated like a walking menstrual cramp when they enter a room.”
“Or an alleyway,” Roger pointed out.
“Or an alleyway,” Leah agreed.
Roger’s yellow eyes slid in my direction. They regarded me, as if weighing up whether I’d be worth grabbing by the neck and drowning in the nearest river. “And you brought a little friend. How nice.”
Leah lit one of her black cigarettes. I was almost tempted to ask her for one. The smell of cloves under my nose would have been far preferable to the overwhelming fug of antique cabbage and forgotten gym bags.
“Yes, yes, we’re here to take a trip into the Underbelly, my friend and I,” Leah said cordially, while Roger managed to watch us both simultaneously from his eerie crocodile eyes.
“And what’s your name, sonny jim?” Roger asked me.
“Who wants to know?” I asked in return.
“The guy who decides whether this even is an entrance to the Underbelly,” Roger said through his mouthful of cruel teeth. “The guy who decides whether or not the Underbelly even exists.”
“Justin,” I said. “Justin Mauler.”
“There, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?” Roger said. He turned back to Leah. “All I need now is the password, love.”
Leah reached into the back pocket of her pants and pulled out a small pouch of coins. She tossed it to the crocodile-man who caught it with deft fingers.
“That’s the password?” I asked.
Roger grinned wider at me and picked nonchalantly at his teeth. “Only password that matters when it comes to a place like the Underbelly, bucko.” He stepped aside and pushed the door of the tavern open. “Have a nice trip.”
As I walked past the strange figure, I said, “I’m digging the tophat, buddy. It’s a refined look.”
Roger leered at me, swept off the hat, and revealed a dagger buried in the top of his head. It was stuck about two inches into the thick bone of his crocodile’s skull. Looked like it had been stuck there a good while.
“Thanks kindly, chum,” he said. “It’s a bit less intrusive than the alternative, ain’t it?”
“Hell of an ice-breaker though,” I said, trying not to stare too much at the knife in the dude’s dome.
“Not in the Underbelly, bucko,” the crocodile-man said. “It’s worth remembering that beauty might be only skin deep, but ugliness goes all the way clean down to the bone.”
He put on his hat again and waved cheerfully at us as we walked into the dark beneath the door.
There was no tavern inside those double doors of Ye Olde Shite Pipe. The doors opened into a large tunnel that stretched away into blackness. The murk was not total. It was punctuated and dimly lit by green lanterns that grew smaller and smaller as they receded down the tunnel. The smell was truly awful, pungent to the point of being able to taste distinct flavors on the air. They were not good flavors either. After a few minutes though, my nose simply gave up, battened down the hatches, and waited patiently for fresh air.
“This way,” Leah said, and we set off.
The tunnel looked like it delved straight on into the hill at first, but it was not long before the floor gradually rose, sloping upward. We followed it for maybe a mile or more when I heard the sounds of people up ahead. Many people.
The light broadened. The noise grew. It sounded like there was a city square, or the subterranean equivalent, lying just around the next bend in the gradually lightening tunnel.
We emerged out into the light, and my face split into a wide grin.
“Holy shit,” I said, “it’s the fucking Wild West.”
“This isn’t west,” Leah said. “We’re facing north. I think.”
“No, I mean… Never mind.” It was not important. What was important was that we had emerged into a massive underground cavity; a natural cavern in the hill on top of which part of Manafell was built.
Hundreds and hundreds of glowing lanterns illuminated the space. They floated and burned like occult versions of those paper lanterns that get released in Chiang Mai, Thailand whenever it’s a full moon.
My eyes moved upward, and I saw the mouths of several enormous pipes set into the upper reaches of the cavern. A few gushed out brown, turgid water which fell like waterfalls down the side of the subterranean cavern and flowed away like rivers of foul gravy. Others spurted out cleaner-looking water, while one of them was releasing nothing at all.
The Underbelly reminded me a lot of Powder Lane—the magical street which could be accessed through an opening at the back of a specific tavern in Nevermoor. Powder Lane was a haven for students and locals alike, who wished to buy or partake in illegal substances without the Queen’s Law breathing down their necks.
The Underbelly was obviously a place forged in the same mold, though this place was far less refined than Powder Lane. The buildings were all constructed out of repurposed and recycled materials; wood, stone, and metal that might have floated or washed down the sewer pipes.
The main street reminded me vividly of those street towns in Western movies, except here there was a distinct vibe of illegal magic being used and sold.
“Stolen vectors, bootlegged spells, illegal hybrid creature breeders, and smuggling,” Leah said, in answer to my starry-eyed look that I shot at her. “All of these things abound in the Underbelly.”
“How does us being here get us into the castle?” I asked Leah.
“Smuggling,�
� she replied.
“Smuggling? Smuggling what?”
“Smuggling us, sweet-pea,” Leah said. “If you slip a coin or two into the right hand you can get smuggled right into the bowels of the Castle of Ascendance from the Underbelly.”
Leah and I meandered our way through the crowds of swearing, spitting people, as they tried to hawk all sorts of illegal, stolen, or forged goods. She pointed toward the end of the long street, at the single sewer pipe that was not ejaculating any sort of liquid. I squinted and saw a rope ladder dangling about one-hundred feet down from the lip of the pipe.
Just before we reached the end of the main thoroughfare, we were forced to slip down a sidestreet by a sudden cry of, “Manananggal stand-off!”
Two vampire-looking creatures walked out into the street, which rapidly emptied around them; bare-chested, pale, and with leathery wings in their backs, they looked pissed about something.
Leah dragged me around the corner of an adjoining alleyway just as the first creature let loose a shrill screech and raised its hand at the other. Purple splinters of light flashed from its fingertips, punching into the ground where the other figure had been only a second before. Dirt and rock exploded from where the shards of light hit, sending splinters of stone flying in all directions, shattering shop windows and knocking people off their feet.
“What the hell are manananggal?” I asked Leah. I peered around the corner and watched as the other bat-winged creature let fly with a volley of neon blue needles that chewed up the ground near the other manananggal like fifty-caliber machine gun fire.
“Cave dwellers,” Leah said, leaning against the clapboard side of the building we were sheltering behind. “Grumpy folk who can’t hold their drink too well. There’s a manananggal stand-off at least three times a week down here.”
A burst of purple magic hit the second manananggal in the chest like a hammer-blow. The figure flew across the road and smashed through the front of an alehouse, disappearing inside in a shower of glass and brittle wood. I grinned. It was a pleasing reversal of stereotypes: this was the first time I had ever seen someone get thrown into a saloon window and not out of it.
Leah led us on, through the twisting streets, until we must have only been a few minutes away from the pipe she had indicated earlier.
The muggers over the Underbelly were obviously skilled. I didn’t hear a thing until two of them stepped nonchalantly out into the skinny street in front of Leah and me. A soft scuffling noise behind us told me that a couple more had closed off the only route of escape.
A thrill of anticipation went through me, as it always did when I smelled a fight on the horizon.
“Can we help you, boys?” I asked pleasantly, taking a couple of steps so that I was in front of Leah.
One of the slinking figures moved toward me. He was a bent-backed nymph with hair like seaweed, cut short. He smelled like brine and blood. His hand dipped into the pocket of his ragged coat and reappeared holding a clasp knife. He pulled it open and pointed it at my face.
“You’ll poke an eye out if you wave your knife around like that,” I advised him.
“More than your fucking eye, pal,” the Sea Nymph said. “Coin purse out. Now!”
“Bit forward of you,” I said.
The dull light of the lanterns overhead turned the blade of the knife orange as the Sea Nymph turned it. Orange to gray to orange.
“Do it,” my twitchy mugger hissed.
“Can’t do it, lads,” I said, raising my voice so the Sea Nymph’s accomplices would be able to hear me. “No cash will be forthcoming. But I will give you a couple of words of advice that will be worth more to you than all the gold in the Castle of Ascendance.”
“I’m all fucking ears, fancy-pants,” sneered the Sea Nymph.
He wasn’t for long.
My arm shot out to grab his wrist in my hand and wrenched it upward and away from me. He could have dropped the knife, of course, but it must have been a cherished possession or something because he clung onto it even as I swept his hand past his own face and nicked off his left ear.
The Sea Nymph let go of the knife then.
He screamed, though I didn’t give him long to show his vocal range. You can’t just have some guy wailing away in a back alley. That sort of thing draws all sorts of attention—you’ll end up with unwanted company faster than you can say assault with intent to injure.
I brought my hand down in an overhead knife hand strike with all the force at my disposal, landing the Sea Nymph a banger of a blow on the carotid artery. He dropped to his knees—unconscious or merely stunned, I couldn’t say—and I brought my knee up and cracked him hard in the face.
Then all hell broke loose with the sort of alacrity that is normally reserved for a drunken brawl inside a subway car.
I had not enjoyed a bit of good old-fashioned fist fighting like that since I’d been involved in an altercation at a fraternity party in college. It felt—though I’m sure polite society would frown on me for voicing it—rather fucking good.
There was a sharp silver flash from behind me, which I caught out of the corner of my eye, and I knew that Leah had engaged with the two muggers behind us.
The elation I felt at knocking out someone with my bare hands caused me to momentarily forget about the other guy in front of me.
I came back to my senses just in time to have this second shady figure crash into me. He bore back toward the stone wall of a building behind us. My assailant had his shoulder in my chest, his arms locked around my waist.
“You fucker!” he grunted in a cracked and broken voice as he drove me backward.
He was a short guy with a mop of tangled golden hair and spare tire around his gut. I guessed he was of the dwarf persuasion, though it was impossible to tell with him grabbing me like he was. He had a bit of weight behind him so, instead of trying to tussle it out with him like a couple of bar-room lemons, I grabbed his belt and back-pedaled with him.
My intent was to plow his head into the stonework behind me, but he pivoted and changed his direction at the last minute. I stepped to the side, and he crashed ribs-first into the rough stone, making a noise like a broken accordion.
Before he could recover, I summoned my black crystal staff to my hand, pressed it to his sternum, and hit him with a Paralyzing Zap.
I might, in retrospect, have overdone the spell a little, but it was hard to be sorry about that.
The dwarf went rigid as the Storm Magic filled him. He was blasted backward through the stone and into the brothel on the other side of it in a shower of dust and falling mortar.
I turned, intending to help Leah with the remaining pair of muggers. To my astonishment, Leah had what looked like a glowing silver dart of some kind embedded in her shoulder. Blood had spread in a small patch from the wound, soaking the light blue wool of her sweater.
One of the two remaining assailants was running down the alleyway toward her, while the other was peppering Leah with more of the little silver spell darts. I conjured up a Flame Barrier to protect Leah from the spell darts, which thudded into its incandescent surface and sizzled into greasy, gray arcane mist. Then I used my Telekinesis spell to dislodge a rickety red brick chimney and send it crashing down on top of him, effectively negating his ability to cause further trouble by breaking every bone in his body.
My attention flicked back to Leah just in time to see the perforated Chaos Mage dodge a big clobbering haymaker from the mugger who had closed with her. The mugger also held an effective-looking knuckleduster in his closed fist, giving his punch a little more weight. It might have stoved Leah’s head in had she been looking the other way. And drunk.
As it was, she had her face turned in the correct direction and was, as far as I was aware, as sober as a judge. She blocked the punch with an elbow, and then hammered the mugger twice in the armpit. He yelped like she’d stuck him with something sharp. As he staggered back, Leah raised her knee and stomped her foot into the side of the mugger’s kneecap
. There was a juicy crunching pop, and her enemy went over like a tree, squealing.
Raising her hands, Leah hit her enemy with a scintillating blast of pearlescent pink Chaos Magic. It sent the mugger tumbling and skidding across the rough ground of the alley before slamming him into a far wall and sticking him there in a lollipop pink pat of…
“Bubblegum?” I asked, puffing out a breath and dusting off my hands. Nearby, the sylph owner of the brothel that I had just accidentally caved in was kicking at the prostrate figure of the dwarf and swearing at him in a continuous stream.
“Yes, bubblegum,” Leah said. “It was the first thing that came to mind.”
“How’s your shoulder?” I asked.
Leah frowned at me and looked over her shoulder at where I was pointing.
The silver dart had dissipated back into the ether, but the hole in her sweater and the patch of wet blood remained.
“Dang it,” Leah said. “I’m always letting the odd one sneak through.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Leah grinned at me; that strange half eccentric and half dazed smile. She pressed on the wound, and pink magic enveloped it. When she took her hand away, it was healed, but the skin was scarred where the dart had hit.
“Another scar,” she said. “Another story, eh, honeybunny? Let’s go.”
Chapter 11
Leah and I made it to the bottom of the cliff and scaled the rope ladder leading up to the pipe opening above us.
I had never been great with heights. My fears were soothed since I could easily save myself with magic if I fell. I considered using my Greater Flame Flight spell to carry Leah and me up, but figured I’d conserve my mana, in case I needed it later.
At the top of the ladder a crooked old witch with stereotypical green skin and a warty complexion greeted us.
“Two to the Castle of Ascendancy, basement level, please, you sweet little haggard crone you,” Leah said.