“None taken,” said Mister Smith, in Kingdom. “But until our insult has been balanced, we may not accept the hospitality of your House.”
“They are coming,” said Liam, wet lips a tight line across his pale face. “They are coming.”
“And we stand ready,” grumbled Mister Smith. “Ready to fight. Ready to die.” He puffed up and out, claws slipping out of sheaths, eyes narrowing, muscles tightening and bulking.
I bit back stammering noises. Liam shrugged. “If you live, you will be told tomorrow when and where to meet.”
“See to your own life,” said Mister Smith. “We shall see to ours.”
Liam gave me a long look out of those dead eyes. I tried to look confident and tough and wound up sneezing.
He left, noiseless as a shadow. The door shut and Mister Smith deflated and I mopped sweat off my brow.
Mister Smith grumbled something short and loud. Misters Jones and Chin growled back.
“We go,” he said to me.
“Go where?” I asked.
“Underneath. Below. To the tunnels that wind beneath your streets.”
“Not the sewers.” Please, not the sewers.
“The sewers,” he said, barking again at his friends. “Quickly.”
My speech about how Liam was right and how we couldn’t hold off a Night People offensive in my shabby ten-by-ten office and how we had to hide was hastily rewriting itself to exclude Rannit’s sewer system as the hiding place. “What about ‘we fight, we die?’” I asked. “What happened to bravery and heroism?”
Mister Smith rolled his eyes. “Load of crap,” he said. “Time to fight, we fight. Time to run, we run. Now is time to run. With haste.”
And so we went, with haste. The Trolls glided, noiseless as clouds. I trotted, feet thumping, pockets jingling until I tossed a handful of jerks out in the gutter. We charged all the way down Cambrit and turned the corner at Artifice and then darted into the foul-smelling alley by Barlett’s Butcher Shop.
Halfway down the moonlit alley, Mister Chin halted, stooped, rose and vanished. Mister Jones trotted to the same spot and dropped out of sight as well. Mister Smith put a sausage-sized finger in my back and gave me a friendly nudge. “We prepared several egresses some days ago,” he said. “You have but to step into the hole and drop. The Misters will catch you safe.”
I did not then pause to reflect on the wisdom of stepping into an abyss on the hope I would be caught at the bottom by Trolls. Something in Mister Smith’s tone brooked no argument. Troll ears are better than mine; maybe he heard the telltale flapping of exquisitely tailored cloaks.
I stepped off into the dark, and fell.
And fell. About the time I decided the Misters had missed, four bony Troll paws caught me and gave way enough to break my fall and not my back. My breath went out of me and I was tossed over a furry shoulder and we were charging through the dark before I could do more than gasp and wiggle.
“Put me down,” I said at last. “I can run now.”
Mister Chin obliged, slowing down to a trot and plunking me down like a child. He kept hold of my hand. “Follow,” he said, his translator’s voice higher in tone than Mister Smith’s. “Keep hold.”
And we were off. I held on and bounced off walls and tripped on gods-know-what and got soaked to my waist, but I kept the Misters in sight. Along the way I tried to memorize turnings and windings but finally had to just give it up-if I got out before daylight it would be with the Trolls or not at all.
So I gave up plotting our course and decided to ruminate on other matters instead. First and foremost, my talking Trolls.
Translator spells-or spells of any kind, shape, intent or fashion-had always been anathema to Trolls. Perversions, they called magics. Betrayals of the land-spirits, or something. Trolls used no magic during the War, and it cost them dear all along, right up until they lost.
Our wand-wavers never quite came to grips with that. They were always expecting some last-minute barrage of deadly Troll magics, a barrage that never came because of some ancient philosophical taboo no Troll ever broke.
Until now. Here were three Walking Stones with translators. I was beginning to suspect they weren’t human-made translators, mainly because they worked too well. And though I’m no expert on Troll optometry I was beginning to suspect the Misters had some night vision spells going, too-we were charging headlong and Troll-quick through sewers blacker and darker than the Regent’s shriveled heart and the Misters never missed a step.
Trolls with magic. Magic-and the half-dead-gave us the slightest of edges in the War. A dozen Troll sorcerers could have easily tipped the scales the other way.
I picked up the pace. Half the time my feet were off the ground anyway. It’s hard to keep up with a Troll in a hurry.
It’s even harder to beat them back.
“Here,” said Mister Smith. Our charge slowed and halted. We all stood panting, though where we stood was a mystery to me.
“Hold out your hand,” said Mister Smith. I did.
A short, gnarled stick was put in my palm.
The sun rose in the sewers. It wasn’t much of a sun-dim, green, and it flickered like a candle in a breezy window-but it let me see.
I’d had night-eyes cast on me during my Army days. This was nothing like it.
Troll magic. I shivered.
“Do you see, my brother?” asked Mister Smith.
“I see,” I said. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
It wasn’t, really. We stood at the dead-end of a tunnel maybe ten feet high and twelve across. The stones were wet and covered with nine hundred years of foul on foul on foul. Bones lay strewn all down the length of the tunnel; all had been cracked open for the marrow, and though most were canine or feline, the big one by my right foot looked like it might once have been part of somebody’s favorite leg.
The smell? Take three hot and sweaty Trolls and run them through an aging urban sewer. Toss in a few thousand decaying rodent bodies for spice. Add another millennia of mold and human waste.
I didn’t retch, but it did cross my mind.
“So what now?” I asked. “We do what?”
“We stand,” said Mister Smith. “We wait.”
I shivered again. “If the half-dead follow us down here-”
“They will,” said Mister Chin. “They shall follow, and they shall seek, but they shall not find.”
“You hope,” I said.
“I know,” he replied. He lifted his hand.
His four-fingered hand began to glow. A dozen fist-sized globs of shimmering goo, like luminescent soap bubbles but thicker, formed and made tight orbits around his claws and then shot off down the tunnel, out of sight.
I gawked. “Behold,” said the Troll. “Confusion. Wrong scents. Wrong sounds. Wrong movements in the dark. They will see what is not there, not see what is before them. They will see Markhats in the shadows, Trolls faces in the waters, hear footfalls, always out of sight.”
Mister Chin was a wand-waver. A Troll wand-waver, casting Troll spells.
“And if the half-dead do stumble upon us,” said Mister Smith, “they will die. Here, they cannot fly. They cannot surround and strike our backs. They cannot ring us round and tear our flanks. Here, they must face us, claw-to-claw.”
I was still staring at Mister Chin’s Troll hand.
“You did magic,” I said at last. “Magic.”
Mister Smith grinned. Trolls shouldn’t grin at people they like. “Yes,” he said. “Magic.”
“Isn’t that a no-no?”
“It was,” he said. “Then. But no longer. Nor ever again.”
I gulped. “You would have won.”
“Yes.”
“You could win now.”
“We are not at war,” he said. “Nor do we wish to be.”
Down the tunnel rang a crack of distant baby thunder. Mister Chin guffawed.
“Booby traps?” I asked. Mister Smith nodded.
“One of many,” he said. “Laid days ago, waiting, watching, gathering strength. My Clan knows the ways of the caves, of the winding dark places, of the hidden things that crave blood. It shall be, as you say, a long night. For some. Shall we sit?”