by James Fahy
“Where are we going?” Robin asked to Karya’s back.
“Outside,” she replied. “I’m not sure I can tear us any great distance across the Netherworlde from within Erlking’s walls. There’s too much residual mana in the air. I need the sky above me and soil beneath my feet, or we’re never going to get anywhere.” She pointed ahead. “There, see, there’s a break in the wall where it’s crumbled away. We can get out, I think.”
There was indeed a gap, where much of the great arching wall had collapsed in a slurry of toppled stones. The moonlight was brighter here, and a sweet, unearthly smell floated enticingly in toward them. It was fresh grass with an undercurrent of cloves, and something rich and spicy. It made Robin breathe deeply and hungrily. The scents of the night-time Netherworlde.
“We could try it from here,” Henry reasoned. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Karya glanced back at him. “Well, the physics of me tearing not just myself, but three others, back and forth not only between the two worlds, but also covering space and distance as well at the same time, with this much background interference? You could end up with one less leg, my eye in your elbow or Woad’s tail growing out of your chest, but if you’d like to try it…”
“Outside is fine,” Henry replied, hurrying to keep up. “What did your tutor give you?” he asked Robin, pacing at his side.
Robin opened his hand. Two stones, grey-blue and smooth as river pebbles. They looked like marbles. “I have no idea,” he said. “She called them Neriedboons. You know how vague she is. Something to help. They could be bath bombs for all I know.” He slipped them into his jeans pocket nonetheless, scrambling out through the broken wall into the starry night beyond.
Karya led them down the great hill on which Erlking stood, through tall wild grass, silver in the moonlight. It swayed around them in soft ripples. Henry walked the entire way down the hill backward, staring up open-mouthed at the vast broken tooth of Netherworlde’s impressive Erlking. The shadowy ruins loomed above them, dominating the landscape. A motionless sentinel. Beyond its great and jagged shadow, the sky was blazing with stars, across which scudded thin bruised clouds. It was cooler here than in the human world, Robin thought. The aromatic breeze was welcome and refreshing on his face. It was odd, but he felt lighter here than back home. More himself.
“Here should do it,” Karya announced, when they had put a significant distance between themselves and the imposing shell of the old Fae palace. They were almost at the base of the great hill. The dark and tangled Barrowood loomed at the edge of the silver grass, a mass of shadowy trees.
She had them form a circle, holding hands. Woad was practically bobbing up and down on his bare feet with excitement, sending up small clouds of pollen.
“Are we having a séance?” Henry asked, bemused.
“Just hold on tight,” Karya quipped. “We’re going to do this quickly, tear after tear, in fast succession. It has to be that way, if we want to get there before I run out of juice, so it’s going to be a bit…”
“Discombobulating!” Woad grinned.
Henry and Woad peered at him. His eyes flashed in the darkness. “You’re going to throw up.” He giggled with undisguised glee.
“Just … don’t let go,” Karya said sternly. “If you get left behind, I won’t know where, or how to come back to you.”
Robin nodded. The idea of being stranded alone in the middle of nowhere, in either world, was not an attractive one. He gripped Woad and Henry’s hands a little tighter.
“Let’s do it.”.
Henry looked around the circle. “Any words of advice? Should we bend our knees, close our eyes…?”
Karya smiled at him with narrowed golden eyes. “Just don’t throw up on me, human.”
Her amber bracelet flashed brightly, and the floor fell away from beneath them as howling darkness rushed up.
What followed was a series of nauseating lurches and a feeling of dizzying disorientation. Robin’s legs flailed beneath him as his stomach rolled inside, like the drop of a great dark rollercoaster, then suddenly there was brightness everywhere, and ground hit the base of his feet, making his knees jar. Blazing mid-day sunshine surrounded them. Grass, fields, a blue sky above, and hot sun on his face. They were somewhere in the human world. Blinking and bewildered, he just had time to take in his surroundings, and notice a small steeple behind a hedgerow, and then the world fell away again, plunging him back into weightless chaos, and a speeding sensation as they hurtled across distance in the space between the worlds.
Seconds later, another rush of air and a pop, and the four of them were standing, swaying unsteadily, but still gripping each other’s hands, in a deep, rocky gully of sharp stone. A black sky overhead and moonlit moss creeping over the jagged rocks. The Netherworlde then. Somewhere remote and silent. Henry made a quiet gagging noise, and Woad giggled, and they were gone again.
Several minutes passed in this way, as with each flash of Karya’s bracelet, they passed from world to world, hopscotching across reality and time. Each plunge into howling roaring darkness punctuated by a brief and nauseous break of alternating scenery. A sunny country lane, blackness. A twisted midnight forest, blackness again. A side street in some nameless mid-day suburbia, where a dog barked once before they were gone; a dark and wind ravaged moor, where it was raining heavily, icy in the night. A bowling green, a pebbled highway, some urban waste ground, a shadowy cliff, a sunny basketball court, an abandoned rail track. Each tear, each flash of Karya’s mana stone ping-ponging them between the Netherworlde and the human, until Robin lost track of which world was which, blinded by the flashes from the small girl’s bracelet and the speed with which they travelled, the constant sickening plummet into nothingness. Henry was making a rather un-manly high-pitched whine, which seemed faint and far off. His hand gripped Robin’s like a sweaty vice. Woad was laughing like a maniac, and Karya, when he briefly glimpsed her face, lit alternately as they flipped through the worlds, had her eyes firmly closed, frowning deeply in concentration and sweat beading on her brow.
The flashes were faster still, light and dark, almost a strobe as the worlds flipped by like a pack of shuffled cards – until at last, finally they stopped. The circle of companions found themselves abruptly standing, rather unsteadily, in a paved alleyway in bright sunlight. Karya broke the circle, staggering backward slightly. Quickly, she regained her balance, as though defiant to show any weakness. She was pale and drained, her mana stone bracelet dark and smoky.
Woad released Robin’s hand, tottering around on the cobbles a little, before falling over, laughing hysterically to himself. Happy tears were streaming down his face. Robin himself sat down hard on the floor, waiting for his head to stop spinning as he blinked in the light.
He was dimly aware of Henry leaning over a bin in the alleyway, heaving.
“Told you,” Woad cackled. “Vom!”
“Bloody … hell.” Robin said eventually, getting to his feet on watery legs and looking around. They were in the city, just off a large pedestrian square. He could see shops. Perfectly normal shops selling mobile phone upgrades, and made-to-measure suits. There was a large bookstore and a coffee-house, and everywhere people shopping and going about their business in the bright daylight as though four children had not just popped into existence next to them.
“I think…” Karya said, a little shakily, “ … that went … rather well.”
Henry wobbled back to the others, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his school shirt and looking green in the face. “Never … doing that … again,” he said queasily. “Did it work? Are we here?”
“Well, it’s not the Netherworlde,” Robin said. “Look, there’s Starbucks.”
Henry shook his head like a wet dog. Trying to get rid of the dizziness. “Doesn’t mean anything that. Starbucks get everywhere. There’s probably one on the moon.”
“This is the city of Manchester,” Karya assured them, nodding out of the alley in the direction
of the shopping square. “And if my calculations are correct, which they always are, that is St Anne’s Square.”
“The centre of the city.” Woad sprung to his feet. He seemed to have enjoyed the whole thing. “I’ve never been in a human city before. It smells terrible. Are there Grimms about?”
Robin walked to the end of the alleyway and looked out into the square. There were a few red-jacketed charity workers armed with clipboards and pamphlets. A busker played a violin quite merrily, and a group of tourists were being led across the square by a tour guide with a large blue umbrella. He didn’t see any white-faced monsters though. “No Grimms, but look.”
There at the end of the square, across a small cobbled road, stood the church from the picture Karya had shown them in the book. Large and reddish-brown, behind a bronze statue on a plinth, presumably someone of importance. St Anne’s church dominated one end of the city square, between a bank and an old fashioned jeweller’s. It looked almost exactly as it had in the book, except that there was a large advertising banner currently affixed to its side, promoting some rather arty ballet currently on show.
“Beneath St Anne’s holy feet,” Karya said with a hint of pride. “Wow, sometimes I’m so good, I impress even myself.” She stumbled a little, grey-faced.
“I think you need to lie down for a bit,” Henry told her. “You’ve got about as much mana left as me, I think.”
Karya shooed him away. “I’m fine,” she insisted. “Let’s just get to the church, and be on the lookout for anyone who looks odd.”
Robin smiled at her. “A boy with a haunted knife, a schoolboy who looks like he’s going to throw up again any second, a girl wearing a bearskin, and a blue maniac with a tail.” He observed. “Odd like us, you mean?”
“Precisely.”
But they needn’t have worried how they were going to get Woad across the square without drawing too much attention. As it turned out, nobody batted an eyelid. Robin remembered shopping a lot with Gran in the city. There was always some gold-painted human statue or stilt-walking performance artist around. It was that kind of city. People clearly just assumed the same of Woad as they threaded their way through the crowds across the square toward the church. The violin busker seemed to be the only one who noticed them, and amused himself by speeding up his merry tune as they hurried by.
They reached the church without incident and regrouped behind a florist stall on the corner.
“Look! Here it is!” Henry exclaimed, rubbing his hand against the golden stone of the church wall. It almost glowed in the sunshine. “The mark from the scroll. The Undine’s puzzle.”
Carved into a cornerstone at hip height by the doors, the same symbol from the Undine’s tube sat innocently.
“Told you it was a masonry mark, didn’t I?” Henry waggled his eyebrows at them.
“At the centre of things,” Karya said. “We are at the centre of the city here, just as the scroll said.”
“Let’s go in,” Robin said, turning to the doors. He stopped in his tracks. “Oh. That’s not good.” There was a sign on the door. “'St Anne’s is currently closed for essential maintenance work while we restore the altar-piece. Services suspended until October'.” He deflated slightly.
“You’re right,” Karya said at his side. “That’s not good. That’s perfect.”
“Perfect?” Robin looked at her sidelong. “It’s closed up. Not open to the public.”
“Then we won’t be disturbed, will we?” the girl replied. “And anyway. I’m not the public.” She laid her hands on the ancient wooden doors. With some effort, Robin saw her push the last of her mana into them. They creaked and buckled a little, the wood warping just enough to pop the locks. Robin heard them clatter to the floor within the old building.
“Open sesame,” Karya said. “It’s time to get underground.”
A hush hung over the empty pews, the kind that made you want to tiptoe around. The only light was that which filtered through the stained glass, painting the vaults and stonework in a galaxy of colours. Dust motes rolled softly through the air like restless spirits. It was lovely and cool in here.
Robin had always loved the smell of churches. That odd mixture of candlewax, flowers, incense and furniture polish. At the far end of the roomy, deserted space, the entire altar was draped from ceiling to floor with a vast opaque sheet of white plastic. It looked surreal amongst the ancient stones.
“No grimm-grimms,” Woad sniffed, twitching his nose. “Not now anyway, but they have been here, not long ago. I can smell their shadows.”
“Their shadows?” Henry raised an eyebrow, as the four of them made their way slowly and cautiously along the central aisle of pews.
“He means their familiars, their Totems,” Karya muttered, running a finger along a dusty bench as they passed. All of their voices were hushed.
“What do they smell like?” Robin wondered.
Woad seemed to consider this for a second. “Sadness and spite,” he decided. “And burnt matchsticks. Although one of these Grimms also smells like liquorice.”
“Penny,” Robin said. “I mean, Peryl,” he corrected himself. “How did she get here so fast?”
“Somewhere around here is the entrance to the undercroft,” Karya mused, as they approached the shrouded altar. The huge plastic sheeting rustled and billowed slightly before them in quite a spooky way.
“What is an undercroft anyway?” Robin wanted to know. He was starting to regret bringing along the book on the Fae Guard. He didn’t have a backpack and it was cumbersome to carry. His Phorbas dagger clinked against his hip as they pushed their way through the rustling sheeting to the altar beyond.
“The city is riddled with them,” Karya explained, examining the old stone walls beyond with interest, stained glass light splodged on her face. “Lots of tunnels, they go on for miles. Pitch black, of course. A lot of them are flooded. Some of it was planned to be an underground canal that never got finished; some of it is old air-raid shelters from the war the humans had a while ago. There are plague pits down there too, where they stashed all the dead bodies during the Black Death. Piled them up floor to ceiling in stony rooms, like fish-fingers.”
“Sounds absolutely charming,” Henry muttered.
“Also where the Fae Guard used to meet,” Woad piped up. “Secret war councils, a way station from the Netherworlde to here, it’s not all bad stuff.”
Robin wondered how many of the Fae had escaped the war this way, fleeing persecution from Eris’ reign and escaping to live out their days in relative safety and secret in the human world, just like the sirens. Passing in secret through the hidden Janus station, like some underground railroad.
“Here!” Karya cried excitedly. She had dropped to her knees by the altar itself. “Look!” They gathered around. Carved into the stone, no bigger than her thumb, was a small glyph. A stylised eye.
“That’s the symbol for a glamour,” Robin said. He had seen one similar on the Isle of Winds. “We need glam roots to break a glamour, I remember that. We had some jam last time.”
“It had strawberries in it,” Woad nodded. “I got a pip in my eye.”
Karya sighed heavily. “Amateurs,” she muttered. Reaching into the depths of her bulky coat, she withdrew a small vial and unscrewed it. The lid had a pipet attached. “Glam-tincture,” she explained. “A drop in each eye please. No preserved fruits involved, I promise.”
They passed the clear liquid around, each dropping a smidgen of the mixture into their eyes.
Robin blinked rapidly as his vision blurred. When he could see again, there was a square hole in the stone just behind the altar, as though someone had lifted one of the floor slabs away. A rusty metal ladder, brown and flaky with age, led down into the utter blackness beyond. The hole at their feet was small and pitch black. It didn’t look inviting.
“Guess we found the entrance then,” Robin said. He passed the tiny bottle to Henry, who muttered but followed suit, flinching with each drop.
“Bloody hell,” Henry said, peering down with interest and a small frown on his slightly sunburned face. “Down, down to goblin-town we go, my lad.”
* * *
The ladder went down for a long while. Robin was surprised how cold it was. The subterranean air was chilly down here, like stepping into a freezer. He had insisted on going first, the others following, so his feet were the first to hit what felt like packed earth. He stumbled away blindly in the blackness, until his hands met cool dark stone, listening to the scuffling sound of his companions’ feet on the ladder as they followed him down one by one. The light from the church was nothing but a distant milky square, far above them now, and he rubbed his hands together, dislodging flakes of rusted powdery metal from the old ladder. It smelled down here. Dust and dead air. Possibly rats.
“Woad,” Karya said when they were all at the bottom. “A little light please.”
“I’m just a torch to you, eh Boss?” Woad muttered quietly in the suffocating blackness. There was a small flicker of pale light, as the floating orb appeared in the boy’s hand.
“Willo-light is my favourite cantrip,” the faun shared.
They stood in a long low tunnel of arched, plain stone with a floor of packed earth, a little like a dry sewer. It stretched away in either direction endlessly into the blackness. Oblongs of deeper shadow punctuated the walls, showing other passageways which branched off the main corridor.
“This place is supposed to be a bit of a warren,” Karya told them. “So stick together. We don’t want anyone getting lost down here, you might never find your way back up to the surface.”
Woad picked up a scent and led them on, pattering through the still and silent blackness, taking turns left and right as he led them deeper into the undercroft. Their footsteps echoed in the darkness as they walked. Robin couldn’t help but think of the famous catacombs of Rome, or the burial tunnels which ran under Paris, only here there were no bones or piled skulls. In fact, as they walked on, from passageway to dark passageway, sometimes descending, sometimes dog-legging through crumbling archways, there were stranger oddities to see than bones. They passed several shop mannequins, bald and pale, lying discarded and forlorn on the floor, most of them missing arms and legs. They looked macabre to him. He wondered why on earth anyone had brought them down here.