Vanished g-4

by Kat Richardson

  “Integrity?”

  “What’s that matter to a dead woman? Which is what you had best be if this goes wrong.”

  “It seems to matter to some of them. And who says I’m going to die?”

  “If you misplay Alice, if you don’t win, you’ll have given them what they’re after—a chance to shape you how the Pharaohn wants. You’d be better off down that hole in the Hardy tree or splattered across the landscape like your dad.”

  “You don’t know what’s best for me, Marsden. Even if we foul it up and he does make me the Greywalker he’s after, tools don’t always work they way you think they will. You can use a knife for a screwdriver, but that doesn’t mean it can’t cut you.”

  He chuckled and said nothing, continuing west and south until we came to the turning of Penton Rise away from Pentonville Road. I looked around, seeing the mismatched buildings from a century of construction and renewal; the neon sign of a Travelodge hotel poked out above a lion-guarded Victorian facade in one direction and a steel-fronted car repair shop lurked in the other. The road was loud with traffic and filthy even in the middle of the day.

  “Can y’feel the river yet?” he asked. “Under all this muck and steel?”

  “No. Which river are we after again?”

  “The Fleet. What was the grandest tributary of London before the Great Stink. Still comes to the Thames under Blackfriars Bridge, but we daren’t start there. Stretch for it. We can’t just guess at this.”

  “What about you?”

  “Two heads are better than one, they say. ”

  Putting our two heads together and quartering the area like hunting dogs on a scent, we finally found the cold, blue trace of the Fleet River buried beneath the streets and buildings south of King’s Cross, just a few blocks south and west of where we’d started.

  We walked south, sunk in the Grey, along the onetime banks of the Fleet until we reached Holborn Bridge, coming perilously close to the memory of the priory of St. John as it stood across the phantom stream, solitary stone among a scatter of wood-and-plaster buildings in a rolling meadow. Beyond the bridge, the river vanished in a haze of broken Grey and a sharp wall of shattered temporaclines. Reluctant to step into the normal in such a place, we retraced our steps until we could come back to the modern surface safely.

  We slipped out of the Grey and stood on the street, looking around for our bearings and the nearest sewer cover. A large building rose behind a brick wall topped with razor wire just across the road from us. The other buildings nearby were a mix of very old and very new housing.

  “This should be close enough for Michael’s motorbikes. Are y’certain y’know how—”

  “For the last time, yes!” I snapped. They were Michael’s bikes, yet he had been less worried about possible wrecks than Marsden, but then, he would be carrying his brother and didn’t have much anxiety to spare for anything else. Marsden would be stuck with me and my riding skills, of which he was obviously in doubt.

  Now we only needed to know where we were, and it would be up to Michael to bring the bikes to the right place. I walked up the road a bit, noting the utility access cover in the road near the intersection, until I found a sign screwed to the brick wall. It read PHOENIX PLACE. Another beside it identified the building as the Royal Mail sorting facility of Mount Pleasant. We were in luck; I couldn’t imagine a better place to keep monsters at bay than the staid and secure environs of the Royal Mail.

  I pulled my map book out of my bag and found the location and nearest major streets. So long as Michael didn’t get picked up for loitering, it would be a pretty good spot. I called him and left the information on his voice mail—he didn’t answer and I figured he was too busy with his own arrangements to bother with the phone. I didn’t mind. He seemed to be holding up, and so long as he didn’t stop to think too hard about what we were doing, he would be fine.

  Marsden and I retraced the route of the river Fleet upstream through the Grey, passing through the chilly film-flicker of its submerged history until we found a place we both recognized. We were back at St. Pancras Old Church, but this time it stood on a rise above the banks.

  “Blast,” he muttered. “The stream’s subsided more than I remembered.” He didn’t turn his head to look at me. “I suppose you could make a boat. ”

  “What? I don’t know a thing about boats and we don’t have time—”

  “I meant a boat like Norrin’s knife—a Grey construct.”

  “No.”

  “That’s bald of you.”

  “That’s not how I work. I can’t make anything. I’m only any good at tearing things apart, and even if I had the ability, we don’t have the time for me to learn. Nor would it be wise to make our approach through the Grey,” I added.

  “Oh, yeah?” he challenged me, turning toward me at last.

  I noticed the gouging in his flesh then. Deep in the Grey as we were, the damage he’d taken from Norrin was plain. He stood more stooped than usual, hunching over the place he’d been stabbed in the gut, and the marks around his eyes seeped glimmering tears of uncanny blood. I knew he didn’t want sympathy, so I didn’t offer any, or any indication that I saw anything amiss. My objection would have been the same regardless.

  “It’s too exhausting. If we want to get in through the rivers that exist now, we need to start in them. And we’ll need everything we’ve got to fight through to Will and get out again. Pushing through the Grey the whole way and hoping the river hasn’t changed course from the temporacline we picked is too risky.”

  He grunted grudging assent.

  A waft of blinking energy fragments drifted through us with a touch of frost and reminded me by my discomfort that I wanted out of the Grey as soon as possible. I climbed the hill toward the stubby square tower of St. Pancras Old Church as it had been when it was the only St. Pancras church. Assuming that Marsden would follow me into the ghost-thick graveyard, I shifted back to the normal. I looked back down the now-smaller hill as Marsden showed up beside me, scanning the road for another manhole cover.

  “Then we’ll have to take the boat in the same way we mean to get out—through the holes in the street. At least we shan’t have to carry the boat far,” Marsden said, “once we find one slim enough to fit through one o’ them holes.”

  We found the right sewer cover in the bend below the church where the train station loomed up to arch over the street. It was only a few blocks from where we’d originally found Morning Glory. We walked into the street to get a general idea of how large the hole would be, and then headed off in search of a small boat for our journey along the bricked-over remains of the river Fleet.

  CHAPTER 46

  It was already six o’clock by the time we returned with a two-man plastic canoe we’d bought from a boathouse near Regent’s Park Zoo. I only wished we’d been able to find one sooner, as we now had just over two hours before sunset and our plan only worked if we could reach Will before then.

  I’d left my bag at the Morning Glory and now packed the contents of my pockets into a couple of zip-top plastic bags. Then I helped Marsden open the sewer access and slip the boat in. Once we had the skinny vessel down the manhole, I was glad we’d gone for the tippy little boat and its stumpy paddles: the headroom in the brick vault of the lost river was too low for the long pole of a kayak paddle to have fit. The rain had stopped, but the river was halfway up the curving sides.

  “Water’s a bit swifter than what I’d expected, but we’ll do well enough. At least we shan’t be wadin’ in muck all the way to Clerkenwell.”

  “Wonderful,” I muttered, hoping we’d get downstream before the vampires woke up. The rain had another compensation, though: The freshwater from the north was diluting the glutinous sludge the City of London poured into its ancient sewer, and the smell, while unpleasant, wasn’t overwhelming.

  As I scrambled around, getting into the canoe without ending up in the water, Marsden lashed a waterproof flashlight to the front post through the mooring rin
g. It wasn’t much light, but it would have to do.

  “Why do I have the feeling you’ve done this before?” I asked in a whisper as we paddled along the dark waters of the hidden Fleet.

  “How’d y’think I ended up in the House of Detention, girl?” Marsden muttered back.

  “You said the Pharaohn set you up.”

  “Fer the nick, not fer the thievin’. Not like I’d never done it afore; I’d just not been caught. If you were desperate enough, you could go right up the drains in some o’ the fine houses, skinny as I am. And I were bloody desperate. I suppose I could have got a regular job as a flusher—that’s them as clears the sewers—but I was already half-mad by then and even the Board of Works wouldn’t take on a fella who sees haunts and monsters.”

  “You told me you were a mole catcher.”

  “So I was, but I’ve done whatever would turn a coin at times and not all of it’s been clean nor kind.”

  My stomach rolled a little with the stink of the stream and at the ideas that rose with his words, so I didn’t notice the rocking of our little boat or the odd ripples on the black water until something exploded from the river.

  Pale webbed hands with long, spatulate fingers sporting black spinelike claws grabbed at me as a gurgling scream of rage echoed through the tunnel: “Die!”

  I slapped at the hands with my paddle, but they only moved to clutch the side of the boat and jerk downward. Then they shoved upward, spilling us out of the canoe and into the rank waters of the Fleet.

  I couldn’t see in the churned-up water and I kept my mouth and eyes shut tight against the filth, thrashing to keep my head above the chest-high surface of the moving water and gasp for air. I broke the surface for a moment and, in the bobbling illumination from the canoe’s makeshift headlight, I spotted a steel ladder rung in the wall. I struggled toward it.

  Marsden had climbed onto the overturned canoe, clutching his paddle. “What the hell—?”

  “Don’t know,” I gasped, grabbing for the rung.

  Sharp points dug into my leg and something tried to drag me below the water again. I caught a flash of needle teeth and luminous eyes as wide as saucers below the surface. I swore and kicked off the bottom harder, snatching at the rung in desperation.

  “Jakob!” I shouted. A thread of horror spawned in the back of my mind: Jakob wouldn’t be on the loose in the sewer unless Purcell was truly dead. I felt a sting of remorse for the vampire who’d sacrificed himself.

  “River spawn. Bloody hell!” Marsden swore, smacking at a pair of hands on impossibly long, spindly arms that reached for him from below the canoe.

  There were only two of them and smaller than us, to boot, but they were quick as fish in the water and we’d only been lucky to get to the surface again at all. I didn’t doubt that they’d pull us down and hold us till we drowned in the sewage if they got a good hold of either of us. I shoved my left arm through the rung and bent my elbow to hang on. I kicked viciously into the place I’d seen the eyes while hoping to find a purchase on a submerged rung for my feet. I’d lost my paddle when the boat turned turtle, so I had no tools but a bagged cell phone and my father’s puzzle; it was a fine lock pick for Grey doors, but I doubted that was going to help this time.

  Marsden was still battling the reaching hands from the back of the canoe, but he called out, “They’re fast, but they’re fragile as eggshells—go for the gills if you can or break their nasty arms, and they’ll give up soon enough! And they don’t care for light or cats!”

  “I don’t see any cats down here!” I shouted back.

  Jakob lunged out of the water, hissing, and slashed at my eyes. I jerked back, pulling up one foot to boot him in the face. He twitched aside and my waterlogged shoe connected with the side of his head. By blind luck, my water-heavy foot slid down his slimy skin and jammed against the gill slits beneath his jaw. The feeling of my toe sinking into the delicate structure was sickening. Repelled, I whipped away and felt the tissues rip apart like wet cardboard.

  Jakob let out a terrible gurgle and blood gushed from the hole in his neck. He made one more swipe at me, his glowing eyes glaring malice, and fell back into the water, bubbling and thrashing. He was drowning and I stared in horror as he writhed.

  In the bobbing, shivering light from the flashlight, I saw the other river spawn leave off snatching at Marsden to dart through the water to Jakob. But it didn’t try to help him; it sank its claws into the injured monster and held the struggling creature fast while it bit into the bleeding flesh of its neck.

  In my Grey core I could feel echoes of his distress and pain. Feel the life rushing out of his body on the tide of his blood. I had never been so close to something living as it died before. Just the shock in a shadow of someone’s death hurt, but this. I gagged and flung myself away from the sight, falling into the stream of filthy water as I tried not to vomit. Marsden grabbed my arm and hauled me toward the canoe.

  Chest deep in the sewage and ice water of the Fleet, he flipped the canoe right way up and heaved me into it. Then he flung his paddle and himself back in and pushed us away from the bubbling, thrashing sounds of Jakob’s death. I hung my head over the side and threw up, heaving until my gut ached.

  My gods, I’d killed something. A living thing—not a ghost or a zombie, not a thing already dead and needing to be let go—but a living, thinking creature. The shock of death was bad enough, but I had never killed anything before, never ended its existence like pinching out a candle—nothing alive, at least—and I hadn’t thought I ever would. Ghosts and vampires were different—they weren’t really alive and they didn’t send out the wrenching shock of death. Jakob hadn’t been a human, but. he had been alive. He hated me and wanted me dead—it was self-defense! — but I couldn’t stop retching, knowing I’d killed him.

  In a few minutes I noticed we were no longer moving. I raised my head and saw Marsden squatting on a narrow ledge nearby, holding the canoe’s mooring lines.

  “Done?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I choked, my throat raw from heaving up the contents of my stomach. I wanted to rinse my mouth but there was no clean water and I didn’t dare to even wipe my lips on my sleeve, soaked as it was in the disease-infested tide of Fleet Ditch.

  “Y’mustn’t take it on yourself like that. He’d have done you worse, if he had the chance.”

  I croaked and spat.

  “Horrible as it was,” Marsden continued, his voice low and vehement, “the other one did him a favor. Killed him quick. I should have remembered as they were cannibal. If they’d got you, they’d have ripped into you as you drowned and taken pleasure in your bubbling screams. They’d have plucked out your eyes and saved ’em as treasures. Unpleasant, grudge-carrying fiends, the river spawn. Legend says they’re the bastard get of sirens and fae lords, cast out for their ugliness and hateful toward the whole world because of it. The stories say they devour children and drown sailors in the Thames for the shiny baubles they make of their bones. Right lucky you were.”

  I didn’t feel lucky; I felt wretched and damned and sickened. It wasn’t logical or reasonable, but the feel of something. dying by my hand, not just falling apart, disturbed me deeply.

  Marsden turned his head back and forth, as if listening for something I was missing.

  “They’re gone. The other one must’ve swum away—we’re no business of his. We’d best get on. Before the vampires wake and decide to torture your friend a bit.”

  For a moment I didn’t move, and Marsden growled in his throat. “C’mon, girl! You’ve more bottle than this! Get up!” He kicked my leg ungently.

  “Bastard,” I muttered.

  “Bloody well right. Off your jacksy, girl.”

  “What?” I questioned, sitting up, stung, annoyed, and generally pissed off now. Have I mentioned that I don’t do self-pity as well as I do anger?

  “I said get off your arse and do the job. You want that young man back, you’ll have to go fetch ’im and time is short.”
<
br />   CHAPTER 47

  I did not know where we were going. Marsden had been there with Michael while I was getting captured by Alice, and the last bend of the river into an even older bit of waterway was unknown to me. The walls of the watercourse were white here—or once had been—rather than the red brick and Portland cement of the Victorian sewers we had just left. The lichen-pocked stone glowed with some odd luminescence and the tunnel widened into a reservoir with a spiraling staircase built into its wall.

  Marsden paddled us to the stair and tied off the canoe to a rusted iron ring that I suspected was meant for just that purpose. As we started up the stairs, we passed dozens of pairs of eyes that gleamed in the darkness.

  “What are those?” I whispered, unable to see more than a humped shape, even in the Grey.

  “Cats. Vampires don’t care for ’em much more than river spawn, but they know it keeps the fish men away. Shows we’ve found their back door.”

  “Why aren’t they doing anything? We must smell just like the river spawn by now.”

  “Not to the cats. We’re warm-blooded. We’ve got to move, though. It’s coming on for sunset.”

  Marsden pocketed the flashlight and we crept up the stairs in the dark, relying on our senses in the Grey and the dim limning of stones by the weirdly glowing lichen to see us up the steps.

  At the top a spiderweb of arched corridors stretched into the darkness below Clerkenwell. Marsden led me along one of the tunnels and I could hear the water of the Fleet gurgling in the distance. Now I knew that was the sound I’d heard when I followed the kreanou to meet Glick.

  We went through a door into what turned out to be a storeroom. Marsden huffed in annoyance and started out again immediately, but I stopped when I spotted a pile of water containers in the far corner. It appeared that someone had stocked the area as a shelter sometime in the past, and it seemed likely, given the disarray of the boxes and cans, that the vampires used the goods as food and supplies for prisoners and henchmen and anyone else they needed to hide from the daylight world.