“I’ve actually been thinking that we needed to talk about all of this for quite a while now,” she said. “My only regret is that it had to happen under such unpleasant circumstances. Perhaps next time you’re in Vanaheim we can continue this discussion in a more amiable manner. And I’ll just hold on to your finger until then.”
My feet were free, and I fell to the floor.
“Anyway, you should probably go now. Freysgo∂ is undoubtedly close to finished with your father, and I’m sure you’ll want to be gone before he gets here. I’m afraid he won’t be very pleased with me when he finds out that I’ve let you leave, of course, but then you don’t need to worry about his moods anymore, do you? Although I suppose he might send the Refurserkir after you… So, on second thought, perhaps you do need to worry about just this one mood. But don’t fret; I’ll do my best to dissuade him.”
I didn’t say anything coherent—just staring down at the blurry hem of her robe, holding my left hand in my right—but she stood there, still for a moment in front of me, before moving toward the table to pick up the candle tray.
“Well, all right, then,” she said. “It’s been nice talking to you.”
And then she blew out the watery candlelight and was gone.
After a short while, I was able to stand, and I stumbled toward the wall that had been to my left. Toward where I recalled the wall having been, though I underestimated by a couple of feet—tripped before slamming my right hand against a pipe. The metal was hot, and I pulled immediately away.
I wasn’t sure which direction Gerd had gone, or I would have taken the opposite. In my ignorance, I just settled on the direction that had originally been in front of me; I figured that there had to be an exit either way. I felt much more comfortable after I took a moment to squat. I walked quickly, then, and I tried not to touch the walls; my hands hurt enough already as it was.
I tried not to think about what Prescott was almost finished doing to my father.
On an average walk down New Crúiskeen streets, steam seemed to rise from the sidewalk just about every twenty feet. I was now in the place that the steam came from; this should have meant grates somewhere nearby for me to find… Light leaking in. Ladders leading upward. But after a minute or more of walking straight I still didn’t see a thing. I did hear something, though, suddenly behind me, and—pivoting on one heel—I screamed something back.
A voice whispered my name. A male voice, familiar, and it sounded about ten feet away.
“Prescott?” I called, tentatively.
“No. It’s Nathan,” the voice stage-whispered back. “I met you earlier, remember? You don’t happen to have a light, do you?”
“Nathan! God, you scared the—” I let out the deep breath I’d taken, but it didn’t really relieve my frustration.
“Sorry,” he answered, still quiet, coming closer. “You don’t happen to know the way out of here, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I have no light. I don’t know the way out.”
“Just checking.”
I could almost make out the shape of him, standing there, holding his own shoulder. A solid silhouette against the otherwise nebulous black.
“What are you doing down here, anyway?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“I was looking for you, actually.”
“And you knew I’d be down here?”
“Well, it’s kind of a long story. And I think we should probably try to be quiet until we know that we’re safe.” He lowered his voice back to a whisper. “For now why don’t we just concentrate on finding our way back to the surface?”
This made sense, I supposed. Just in case the Refurserkir really were after us.
“Okay,” I said. “Except for the fact that neither one of us has any idea which way the surface is.”
“Sure we do,” he replied. “Up.”
CHAPTER THREE
Nathan’s response wasn’t quite as inane as it sounded. What I’d failed to notice in my attempts to avoid touching the pipelined wall was that side passages occasionally branched off at inclines and declines from the tunnel that we were in. Nathan had joined my passage from one of the declines, though he’d gone up and down a few times before reaching me and wasn’t certain which level he’d started on. Taking inclines whenever we could, though—over the next several minutes—we managed to make our way to a tunnel with grates letting out directly onto the world above. What I assumed were streetlamps filtered down through them, and I could make Nathan out a little more clearly. Enough to know that it was really him. Still holding his shoulder.
“I could give you a boost,” he said. “Maybe we can reach one of those grates.”
“It’s too high,” I answered. “Let’s just see if we can find a grate with a ladder.” I started off in a direction at random and he trotted after me.
“What are these tunnels here for, anyway?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, exactly. But I know the campus heating system is connected to them, somehow.”
“Well, do you have any idea how far they extend horizontally? I mean, since they have something to do with the campus heating system, can we at least assume that we’re beneath the campus?”
“I really have no idea,” I said. “The power plant that provides the steam in the first place is kind of on the edge of town, so the tunnels are probably pretty extensive. I think the tunnels might have been here before the steam pipes, actually, though I don’t really know the history that well.”
The throb in my finger was getting worse, and I wanted to get out of there before the Refurserkir arrived. The throb where my finger had been. God. I was starting to feel a little lightheaded, too. Probably just the drugs and alcohol kicking back in, the ormolu wearing off. But what if I was losing too much blood? We had to get out of here.
“You know,” I said suddenly, “I’ve heard legends about these tunnels—about kids getting disintegrated in bursts of steam… And I don’t bring that up to scare you, but because I just recalled that all those legends mention ladders. Like a lot of ladders. It’s supposed to be really easy to get out of here—in case an accident actually does happen—but in the stories the students are always just about to escape when the steam melts the flesh from their bones, and then some tunnel worker finds the skeletal remains still clinging to the ladder’s top rung three days later.”
“Okay, so?”
“Well, where do all the ladders start?”
He stopped walking. “Huh. I don’t know. That’s a good question. But I guess they must be around here somewhere, right? Unless you think the Refurserkir got rid of—”
“Just a second,” I interrupted. “Be quiet… Did you hear something?”
He cocked his head to listen.
“Hear something like what?” he whispered back. “Not like a pipe bursting, right?”
“No, I—” I stopped mid-sentence to peer into the darkness behind us and listen a bit more closely.
“I don’t hear anything,” Nathan whispered after a few seconds.
“Precisely. It’s too quiet. Like the sound that the Refurserkir don’t make. We’d better keep moving.” I started back down the tunnel. “So how long have you been down here?” I asked.
Nathan didn’t answer. Nor did I hear his footsteps. I stopped, but I didn’t turn around.
“Nathan?” I said.
“So, are you too pusillanimous, then, to face me to my face?” came the response.
“Freysgo∂,” I pronounced, still refusing to turn. “I can’t believe this.”
“With certainty, it is I, though I do comprehend your incapacity to believe. You are indubitably perplexed by the modishness of my elocution. And yet that is only the inception of the variances that you will discern in me. Oh yes. A plethora has changed since I departed from you.”