Someone had removed the rocks that blocked entrance 9 to the Undercity. I remembered the day Father’s newspaper had headlined why the tunnel entrance was to be blockaded. It seemed strange, as most of the others were open. While they posed a threat, they also provided a service that Father hadn’t wanted to detail when I’d asked. But I remembered, he’d been sitting at his afternoon tea, the smell of cloves filled the room. A child had gone missing, he’d said. Drawn to the lights. They hadn’t even found the body.
That had been some years back, and since then, the tunnel’s entrance had been condemned.
There were, of course, other entrances, Father had said, all those years back. And other missing children? I remember I had asked.
“This was Lord Bailey’s third surviving child,” he’d said, rather matter-of-factly, with a wave of his hand, as if I’d asked a stupid question.
A rich man’s son. A nobleman’s son.
That had a different set of laws attached to it. As stupid as my question had been, I didn’t need to ask another to know where logic prevailed.
People were going to go missing all the time, especially children, Father had said.
The Undercity was vast and confusing. It was a set of tunnels and cavernous emptiness that was the original foundation of New Babylon, now that we’d built on top of it, again, and again. And the children of the impoverished were like rats, in and out of every tunnel they could find, always looking for a warm corner and a scrap of food. But the children of the wealthy? None of them went unaccounted for.
It seemed unfair, but so much of life was, wasn’t it? I’d seen enough of the Pall while skirting it, to not envy their apparent freedom at all. Mother and Father, for all their wealth, were dead, in the cold, miserable earth under the Old City Cemetery. Bronwyn was wheel-chair-locked, for… forever? And Bronwyn, well, Bronwyn… No. No, she didn’t deserve it, did she?
I swallowed down something like pain. Something that was a thick ball of slime in my gut, that kept trying to escape out my throat. It tasted sour. It tasted of Bronwyn’s betrayal. It tasted of the girls that came into my life and messed it all up, and-
I looked up into the darkness of the tunnel entrance. I had already begun my descent into the Undercity, without a thought, like an idiot. Because… Because of girls. Always because of girls.
Sir Liam’s lights surged in and out behind me, and with each bright expulsion, the tunnel was made visible – its pitted ceiling, hanging a mere two or so hand’s lengths above my head, making my chest constrict. And then a tunnel that veered sharply down a set of what used to be stairs in limestone, and were now the chipped edges of a slope. The blockade must have affected the stone steps. Was the ceiling sound anymore? Without its rocks and stones to keep it up?
I looked back as the light dimmed, to see the chapel just outside, strung with tiny, glowing lamps that shone golden. I could still go back, but…
I turned to stomp further into the tunnel, to affirm my mission with each step, but I stopped when the lights illuminated the path ahead, as dead as my parents’ heavy bodies in their coffins, weighing down the damp earth of Oldton.
Standing in front of me was a man. But he was as tall as the low ceiling of the tunnel. Taller even, his back bent like a sickle, and his head held up, swaying to one side and the other. He had long, black hair, black as the night, as the deepest shadows in this cavern, the things I couldn’t see. It flowed from his head and, stooped as he was, it almost touched the floor under our feet, brushing the tips of the stones that littered the ground. His eyes were pitted a dark colour, too dark for me to know for sure, and in their very centre, sat two, crimson seeds. His hands were outstretched to each side of the cavern, and they clawed into the walls. Blocks came loose behind him as he stepped forward, pulled out of the wall by the long, sharp nails.
“Uri,” a voice whispered as his lips moved. It was deep, and it touched my heart with a finger of ice. My blood froze over.
Then Sir Liam’s lights began their slow diminish, and I felt my hope slip away with their light as the room dimmed. My courage was the last thing to leave me.
A piercing shriek came out of me as the darkness swept up to swallow us both.
Something touched the back of my neck, the lights came back, and he was gone, but he wasn’t gone at all. At my neck, I felt a long-fingered hand. I felt pointed nails that scratched at my hair, and then there was breath on my neck. I turned my head to one side, and he whispered in my ear: “Ana sepiya.”
“Boy, get back!” shouted a voice in the sudden rise of panic that laid me to kicking and screaming.
I didn’t need to be told. I was, already, fighting for my freedom from the taloned hands, but it was a vain effort, as the arms that held me were tougher than anything I could have imagined. That didn’t stop me from trying. I bent and twisted as Father Michael had taught me, enough of me left to stop and think things through, rather than let the panic own me. But it was no use. The arms went with me, and I was wound up in them like a snake in stone.
There was a fizz of sound, and the cavern filled with white light from a crucifer’s flare. It hurt my eyes, and I shielded them by dipping my head down against the inside arm of the terror that had me. Sick triumph sat like rocks in my belly, as I realised that the thing would run now.
Any minute.
It ought to have fled from the light, but… It turned, holding me in an ever-increasing grip, and it looked at the small shape of a crucifer against the backdrop of the tunnels’ entrance, up the steps behind us.
He looked heroic, standing there with his greatcloak flapping behind him, his scarf pulled up about his face. The goggles on and the hat pulled low. But he’d drawn his sword, and I saw it shake with the same sick surprise I felt.
The thing didn’t care about the light.
It dropped me and began to lope to the tunnel’s entrance, towards the crucifer.
There was a sharp intake of breath, and I heard him say: “Sorry lad,” before I heard his boots hitting the stone.
