Tight, he thought. This is so very tight.
And the fear rose in him again, but he swallowed it down, thinking, You are the Great Savano. Darkness is a magician’s friend.
This notion was helpful, and soon Riley heard a squelch as his feet touched the sewer floor.
Don’t think about that noise, he told himself. Or the ungodly stench. Just remember that Chevie needs you to be brave.
It wasn’t really fair to take issue with the smell. After all, he had climbed of his own volition into a sewer tunnel and that was where the smell belonged. He was the interloper here.
He sensed the space opening up around him, and heard the gurgle stretch out, an invisible ribbon in the darkness.
I still draw breath, he thought. Though I would prefer not to.
Malarkey made a big job of his climb. Grunting and cursing the ladder for a useless stretch of iron, fit only for children and dwarfs. Riley could feel the heat of him filling the chamber, and he stepped aside just as King Otto thumped down beside him.
“I ain’t missed this one jot,” he said, fumbling in his haversack for a lantern and matches. “A person ain’t human down here, or perhaps human is all he is. Ain’t no room for put-ons or graces down in the pit.”
Malarkey struck up the lamp, casting a cone of sickly light ahead of them down the sewer tunnel. Dark furred things squeaked their alarm and skittered from the light. They seemed to Riley too big to be rats.
“What moves, King Otto?” he asked. “What squeaks?”
Otto laughed. “They is rats, right enough, but they seem bigger. You is suffering from what they calls tunnel vision. Everything nasty seems enlarged to gargantuan proportions.” Otto squinted ahead into the darkness. “Except that one. He is indeed a giant.”
Riley gazed down the tunnel with its weeping walls and dripping stalactites. A monster rat sat on his hind paws bang in the center of the sewage stream, his teeth like candle flames.
He will move, thought Riley. Surely he will quit his post.
But no, King Rat stood his ground, whiskers twitching in the lamplight.
“That one’s a sentry,” whispered Otto. “He’s giving us fair warning.”
Riley whispered back. “Ain’t he afraid?”
“What? Of the likes of you and me? Ask yerself: which of us is more suited to this environment? Which of us can summon a million of his pals with a couple of squeaks?”
“So, what do we do? Quit altogether?”
Malarkey pushed Riley ahead of him. “No, we walks slowly by and don’t look him in his milky beadies, and hopefully Mr. Rat will grant us safe passage. And anyway, it ain’t the rats you got to fret about in the stinkpipe.”
Riley decided he would circle around to that last statement shortly, but for now his mind was bent to the task of not doing the Hoxton Shuffle, so named for the involuntary gesticulations of one particularly energetic inmate of Hoxton House lunatic asylum.
Stay calm, he told himself. You are on a mission. You have seen worse things than an oversized rat.
This was true, but thinking on those worse things made Riley believe that they might be concealed in the shadows, shifting themselves to avoid the lantern beam.
They went to both sides of the rat, following the path of the sewage that parted at his paws, with the exception of the solids that lumped and piled around his midriff in an eerie facsimile of a sentry’s box. The rat twitched a mite at their passage but otherwise paid them no mind.
“What ho,” breathed Malarkey. “King Rat does not sniff a threat.”
The sewer tunnel curved gently, and the pale light picked out edges and grooves in the stonework. Several areas of the ceiling had collapsed inward, exposing dark earth above that writhed with roots and worms. In some places blessed light penetrated from above, and Riley welcomed its warmth on his face even though its presence meant the tunnel was not sound.
“Onward, boy,” Otto urged him when he dawdled. “Ain’t no time now for moon-facing. We got destruction to wreak.”
Earlier, in the house on Grosvenor Square, it had seemed so sensible to formulate a plan. To map out their movements in a logical way so that their actions would have predictable outcomes. But now, buried in this tunnel of horrors, it seemed impossible that any plan could bend this grimness to their own design.
Malarkey turned the light on Riley’s face. “You’ve caught yerself a dose of the morbs. Feels like the tunnel is closing in, don’t it? Feels like nothing is going to work out?”
Riley nodded. He didn’t want to look a total weeping willow before his king, so it was better to nod than speak.
“Yep, the morbs,” said Otto. “Barnabus used to get ’em something awful down here. Big fellow like him afraid of a few rats. He said it weren’t the darkness what did him in, it was the no light.” Malarkey shrugged. “Never understood that myself.”
Riley remembered something that he considered urgent enough for immediate speech. “Your Highness, you said it weren’t the rats I had to fret about in the stinkpipe. What, then? What should I fret about?”
“Why, everything, Ramlet,” cried the king jovially. “Every-blooming-thing conspires against a man in this unnatural excavation. The sludge beneath your boots is teeming with cholera. The bricks have got edges what will flay you quicker than a meat-man’s hatchet, and if you don’t bleed to death, then a speck of diseased mortar in the bloodstream will see you bottle-green by day’s end. There are invisible devils in the tunnels, too. If we happens across a cloud of chokey gas, then king and subject will be for the big sleep together. And of course there’s the pump house.”
Riley felt so sick with fear at this point that he decided he might as well hear about the pump house. “The pump house?”
“Well, say Her Majesty’s engineers sign off on a flush while we are sub-terra. There won’t be no warning, as we ain’t supposed to be down here.”
“But that’s the whole point of our plan, ain’t it, Your Majesty? We passed chink to the pump-house Johnny? No flush till you say so.”
“We passed chink to one of the pump-house Johnnies,” said Malarkey. “But I find that any plan which involves a combination of public servants, timing, and machinery has a top-notch chance of spectacular failure.”
Riley reckoned that if he hadn’t had a case of the morbs previously, then he definitely had one now.
On they walked, squelching and splashing, hearing their own footsteps echo down the tunnel as though ghosts walked ahead of them. The sewer floor was mostly curved at a uniform sweep, except where it buckled like a giant serpent or split to allow nature through in the form of earth humps or tree roots. Malarkey’s lamp splashed pale light on the bricks so that they seemed yellow and ocher, and not the burnt orange that they probably were. Some stretches seemed more ill-used than others, with collapsed walls and brick-melt left in the aftermath of a great acidic deluge from the evening “rush hour” or a good post-Christmas flushing.
“Oh,” said Malarkey brightly. “I clean forgot to mention the creepy-crawlies what seem to flourish in this sepulchral stinkhole.”
Riley felt the morbs settle on his brow. “Please, Your Majesty. I got enough on my plate.”
“Well, you won’t want nuffink on your plate when you gets an earhole full of these nasties.”
Riley did not object further, as it was obvious the particulars of these creatures were coming his way.
“Of course you’ve got your regular insectoids, only magnified by a nourishing diet of dung, which is like caviar and champagne to cock-a-roaches and beetles. I seen a beetle down here one time take on a rat, and the rat would’ve bested a dog.”
This was so ridiculous that Riley relaxed a little.
“That’s awful,” said Riley, but he must have somehow, in a slump of his shoulders perhaps, revealed a slight lessening in anxiety, which spurred His Majesty to descr
ibe greater horrors.
“And you may perhaps notice a glow betimes in a dark corner.”
“Please, King Otto, tell me not.”
“Scorpions,” continued Malarkey, relishing the word. “Luminous scorpions. They got acid in their sting. Melt a man down in a minute or three. I seen a cow once done in by sewer scorpions. Nothing left but horns and a tail.”
Riley swallowed. Surely that was the worst of it. Surely.
“But the absolute worst is the…” Malarkey said sotto voce, “…crigs.”
“Crigs!” exclaimed Riley, earning himself a cuff around the ear from his regent.
“Never say it aloud….Crigs…is like the devil. Speaking their name aloud summons ’em.”
Riley mouthed the cursed creatures’ moniker, followed by: “What are they?”
Malarkey took great delight in telling him. “They is a godless creature, half crab, half pig.”
Ten feet up, Riley would have slapped his knee and scoffed. Crab-pigs? That ain’t even bordering on possible.
But down here.
In a tunnel.
Riley had seen strange things in a tunnel, things that would make these crigs seem like the very epitome of everyday.
There was an important question that needed asking. “These…creatures. Are they pig size or crab size?”