“Not much longer.” His words thrummed against my chest before the wind snatched them away from my ears. “Are you perhaps scared of dark, dangerous places full of bones?”
“Not if Cherie is waiting on the other side.”
Thunder vibrated the clouds, and the mare tossed her head and screamed a dare at the sky. It was darker over Paris, and a bolt of blue-white lightning arced from the gray thunderheads to the Tower and briefly lit the stark black skeleton of iron beams like a neon sign. A fat raindrop plunked on my cheek, and I burrowed further against Vale’s back, glad for my hat’s wide brim and annoyed with all the layers of my Pinky costume, which would soon be soaked and weighing me down when I wished to be fast and unencumbered.
The road turned from hard-packed dirt to a slick slurry that slid beneath the mare’s hooves. When Vale turned her off the road and into the waist-high grass, I was glad to be on more solid ground. The wall was finally in view, but we were galloping swiftly away from the grand iron gates. Vale angled the mare toward a dark, boggy area surrounded by cattails. An enormous pipe jutted from the earth like a fallen Tower of Pisa, broken and overgrown with moss and filth. I smelled it then—deep, old death soaking up through the ground. Even closer, jagged tombstones poked up from the sludge like black pegs of rotten teeth. No one but the richest families in Sang buried bodies anymore, thanks to the lack of land within the cities and the possibility of a funeral party being eaten by a troop of bludsquirrels. Cremation and pretty urns were the fashion. Not surprisingly, the graveyard was long abandoned, untended, and falling back into the earth.
So this was the door to the famous catacombs, the portal into the decaying underbelly of Franchia’s greatest city. The stories were true.
“Are you sure this is the path you wish to follow?” Vale asked, slowing the horse to a trot.
My teeth clacked as I jounced behind him, wrapping my aching thighs more tightly around the mare’s barrel belly and against the backs of his legs. I dashed away old tears and ran fingers under my eyes, hoping to clean up the kohl I’d smeared all over his back.
“Looks like fun. I’ve been needing a vacation.” In my mind, it sounded jaunty and brave, but it came out with a hitch that I couldn’t hold in. Poor Cherie. She had to be terrified, if she was in there. She hated being dirty.
The bludmare picked her way through bunches of cattails, sometimes plunging into a boggy bit as we aimed for the yawning mouth of the pipe.
“Oddly enough, it’s not so bad once you’re inside. The rain and sewage collect and pool out here over the graves, but underground it’s channeled through rock. The threat of horror keeps most people out, though. Not to mention the blud creatures. Just remember not to touch any of the bones. They’re cursed.”
“You actually believe that?”
He chuckled. “Let us consider. Touch moldy bones and see if I’m cursed forever, or keep my hands to myself? Not a difficult decision.”
We reached the pipe, where a trickle of grayish water splattered to the boggy ground. The mare sneezed against her metal muzzle, adding bloody foam to the sludge. Vale edged the horse closer to an old log, and without being told, I leaped off her back and landed heavily on what felt like permanently bowed legs. Vale dropped beside me, steadying me with a firm hand as the log wobbled. He slapped the mare’s rump, and she took off with a splash, her hoofbeats merging with the near-constant thunder overhead.
“Won’t she run away?”
He smirked and stared after her high-flung tail. “We plant a carcass nearby to draw the bludmares and leave a young lad to catch and picket them. Hungry predators aren’t so smart when it comes to half a bloody pig on the moor.”
It was my turn to smirk with a flash of fang. “Funny, I’m pretty good at resisting bloody pigs.”
“One point to the mademoiselle.” Vale tipped an imaginary hat; I pictured a fedora and couldn’t stop myself from giggling.
Surefooted as a fussy cat, he leaped onto the lip of the pipe and straddled the slushy water. I followed him into the darkness, my skin prickling as I left the weak light of a cloudy day for the sucking shadows of the cylinder. Just before the pipe’s curve shifted to aged stone, the light gave out. Vale pulled a heavy pendant from the neck of his shirt and twisted its base, and a gentle green glow filled the space, showing a long tunnel of orderly bricks and stones. Perfectly set in patterned niches were artful groupings of smooth white bones and polished skulls. Sluggish, lumpy water flowed down a channel set in the middle, just wide enough to straddle. Each side had just enough space for a slender person to walk without turning sideways. Vale’s shoulders were almost too broad and occasionally bumped the wall as he led me down a ladder and deeper into the catacombs. I threw out my senses, hoping for any sign of Cherie.
“My father’s band is ahead of us somewhere. The slavers never return by the same route, and there are endless tunnels and ladders and stairs and secret niches set into the maze of underground crypts. The good news is that I haven’t seen blood or signs of combat yet, but the bad news is that if they reach their destination in the city and get topside before the brigands find them, we will have no idea where your friend was taken.”
“Then what?” My boots rasped on the stone, and the smell shifted from death and decay to something slightly more tolerable, a mineral smell tinged with iron.
“Then whatever the lady wishes. I can return you to Callais, take you back to our camp, or deliver you to your new life in Paris.”
“Dropped on the front step of a cabaret like a baby in a basket,” I muttered.
He turned to give me a horrified look. “I do believe they call that murder in the city. The bludrats of Paris are monsters. And so are some of the men who frequent the cabarets.”
The American teenager in me peered down into the water with a frown. “Speaking of which, anything nasty live in the catacombs?”
Vale chuckled and kept walking by the light of his pendant. A flash to the side caught my eye, and I watched him twirl a wicked-looking blade. “That depends on your definition of nasty.”
“Dude, don’t try to scare and impress me. I seriously want to know.”
We passed an open tunnel, and I heard faraway shouting and felt a damp breeze. When I paused, he gently grabbed my wrist to pull me along. “Paris looks ordinary topside, all orderly rows and squares. But down here, in the old city, things are twisted and strange. There is no complete map, no limit to how wide or low the tunnels can go. Men have gotten lost and never come back. Or they’ve come back changed. Some say that even deeper than the tunnels, there are caverns filled with glowing crystals and albino bats. Sometimes bludrats find their way down here and go blind and bald. Sometimes feral dogs find a cavern and live like wild, half-mad creatures.” He trailed off, his footsteps the only sound. But I smelled a lie.
“There’s something you’re not telling me, Vale.”
He exhaled, shaking his head sadly. “Sometimes we find daimons down here. Ruined. Walking corpses. Mostly women.”
“And you don’t know what happened to them?”
“Not a clue. The best we can figure is that they got lost and went mad with it. No emotions to feed on, no clean water, no light. After a few weeks of wandering around down here with nothing but the sewage and pitch-black darkness, it makes sense.” He stopped and spun, blocking my path. The green light lit him from below, a fiendish ghoul, all sharp edges and shadows. “I see that you wish to ask, so I will tell you. We kill them. Quickly and as kindly as possible. If you bring them topside, they scream and panic. Father brought one back to camp once, and she killed a child.”