Malarkey steered them with the flow downstream, a mite from the great concrete abutment and into a bricked nook with a lower vaulted ceiling that brushed Riley’s crown as he followed Malarkey in. They huddled together inside the pitch-black corner, a whirlpool of filth swirling down a minor sinkhole between their feet.
Malarkey was forced to bend low so his door-knocker beard brushed Riley’s ear.
“I wants you to know, lad,” he whispered, “as you’ve been a decent cove to me recently, that there will be no surrendering should it come to it. Otto Malarkey ain’t fleeing tail out for the pleasure of a bullet to the brain pan. If we are rumbled, then I is going to bestow the Order of the Boot on these future coves, if that’s what they be. You blend in with the larger floaters and make yer way clear.”
Riley could not help but be a little indignant at the very notion that he could blend with the larger floaters.
“What?”
“Sorry,” said Malarkey contritely. “I meant to say, make your way clear. Don’t squeal to Figary.”
“But…”
“Shhh, now, lad. We are as the dead.”
Darkness hung over them like a blanket and in consequence, sounds appeared amplified. They heard with crystal clarity the gurgle and hiss of water flowing past their hiding place. They heard the occasional distant cluster of squeaks as a huddle of rats clicked past on their claws. And they heard the inexorable approach of trained men. There were no shouts or barging splashes, just slight rhythmic sluicing of the underground river of waste.
They are approaching from both ends of the tunnel, thought Riley. A pincer movement.
As they huddled in their corner, slowly the light revealed itself, brightening by a single shade the darkness upstream. Perhaps there was a breach in the arches, or perhaps a manhole had been left open. Either way, Riley was glad of the light, as it had come to symbolize life to him, even though he realized that they would be visible to their pursuers should they think to search the niche.
The waiting was almost unbearable. More than once the notion popped into Riley’s mind that it would be better to abandon all caution and run hell for leather to their manhole. At least then the cursed wait would be over.
I had thought that never again in this life would I be as afraid as I was with Garrick, but now that familiar dread has returned to my gut.
And then a peculiar thing happened in that dank hellhole: Riley’s fear evaporated.
I cannot possibly survive yet another brush with old Jack the Reaper, he realized. Soon I will be at the Pearlies, with my dear mum waiting there for me.
This notion made him smile, a smile he quickly extinguished in case his teeth might glow.
Just because a fellow doesn’t fear the big drop no more, doesn’t mean he welcomes it.
Now, instead of fear ruling his thoughts, Riley’s natural intelligence rose to the surface.
I will not be blending with the larger floaters, he thought. I will be fighting beside my king.
And these soldiers might be surprised at how well he could fight; after all, Riley had been trained in the martial arts by his erstwhile master: Albert Garrick.
Otto Malarkey will realize my worth before I go, he vowed silently.
The men drew nearer from both sides, until they congregated in a dark huddle directly in front of the niche. Malarkey and Riley held their breaths, tensing themselves for battle, but black as the tunnel was, their nook was blacker. Shadows upon shadows, folded in velvet layers. Even a bat would pass them by. They could not be seen from beyond spitting distance, and the first one to venture inside that radius would pay the price for it.
Or so a reasonable person would think.
Then came a familiar voice from the bunch.
“You there, crouching in your nook. We can see you clear as day.”
Farley. The murdering tattooist.
Bluff. It must be.
Malarkey’s fingers gripped Riley’s shoulder and it was clear he thought the same.
Bluff. They got nothing but front.
The voice spoke again, flat and mocking. “Yes, that’s right, Otto. You two boys hug each other tight, and perhaps we’ll just go away.”
Malarkey removed his hand, and Riley knew what was next. The king was a tosher, and he fancied his chances in a tunnel.
Farley’s voice floated from the shadows. “I see you, Malarkey, reaching into your pocket all sneaky. What have you got in there? A blade? Some old one-shot piece? Or even my gun, which is almost out of bullets?”
This was no bluff. The traitor could see their every move. “You two are literally up that creek everyone keeps talking about. Would you like to see how far up the creek you are?”
He snapped his fingers and all at once a dozen focused red beams sprang from the darkness.
The devil’s eyes, Malarkey had called them. Where they went, death followed.
The beams sought out the hiding pair and painted their faces and chests.
“You know what the lasers are, right, Otto?” called Farley. “You’ve seen one before, when I put down your animal of a brother. So come on out, and we’ll go talk to the Blessed Colonel. We only want to talk.”
The shadowy mass shuddered as the men laughed. No one believed this.
“Very well, that’s not the whole truth,” admitted Farley. “We only want to talk…first.”
Riley felt Otto squat low, and he knew this was not the bended knee of submission, but the crouch of a wild cat gathering itself to pounce.
Sorry, Your Majesty, thought Riley, reaching into his vest packets for some paper twists. This time I go first.
Riley stepped high onto Otto’s horizontal back, then threw himself up and out, directly into the path of a dozen crisscrossing laser beams.
The common wisdom is that a person traveling in time should not touch anything or interact with anyone, but what if someone touches and interacts with you?
—Professor Charles Smart
LONDON SEWERS, 1899
Lunka Witmeyer appeared one hundred percent ready for action as she stood beside Major Farley in the sewer water, but internally she was experiencing something of a professional crisis. There were several contributory factors, the main one being the time tunnel trip itself. This was a pretty beyond the call of duty kind of experience, and yet Clover Vallicose was acting as though they had done nothing more extraordinary than take the wrong exit from the highway. It was all very meant to be as far as Clover was concerned. Destiny sucked them back in time a century or so and dumped them in musty catacombs that were shrinking Witmeyer’s sinus cavities to pinholes and demoting her, as a woman, to a second-class citizen. Witmeyer did not like being a second-class citizen, and she was smart enough to see the irony in the fact that she was resenting the treatment that she herself had dished out to others for so long.
The tracker in Malarkey’s boot tells us he is in the adjacent sewers, which is too close for comfort. Do you think you can handle a local gangster? Box had asked her.
This was language Witmeyer could understand.
And a hundred more like him, she had said confidently.
No need for hyperbole, Sister Witmeyer. Answer plainly and there can be no misunderstandings. In my opinion, bluster and exaggeration lead to crossed wires, which is…
Let me guess, Witmeyer had thought. Inefficient.
Inefficient, Clayton Box had said.
And even worse than being lectured by Box was the fact that apparently Clover had become Box’s right-hand woman, while she herself was trolling the sewers, hunting for strays.
You go with Major Farley, Clover had told her (ordered her, in fact) thirty minutes ago. I can’t leave the Blessed Colonel at this delicate point in the operation.
The Blessed Colonel, indeed.
Box was like any other man. He liked having his ego st
roked, and as long as Clover kept filling his head with tales of how venerated he would be in the future, she would be guaranteed a place at the Blessed Colonel’s side.
And though Witmeyer was obeying Clover’s order, her heart wasn’t in the work; she was only doing it on the off chance that she would get to stamp on this Malarkey’s face and put the smile back on her own. But even this hope of a little lighthearted entertainment was snatched from her by Box’s addendum to Clover’s command: Oh, and Witmeyer, bring him back here alive, if possible. Otto Malarkey has been plotting against me, and I need to know what he has set in motion.
In her current mood, Lunka Witmeyer half felt like joining Malarkey in his plot, whatever that might prove to be. It was likely that there was in fact no mysterious plot, and this so-called King Otto was simply a common thug sniffing around the peripheries of the group he once controlled, searching for a way back in. This entire mission was a fool’s errand, and a Thundercat’s time should not be wasted on it.
I am not being appreciated, she realized now, up to her knees in human and animal slop. I might as well not even be here.
The resentment and bitterness choking Witmeyer’s heart were new emotions to her. In many ways Witmeyer’s social development had been drastically stunted by her career choice, in that her mode of interaction with others was usually violent and intimidating. In matters of the heart she was very much an adolescent. At this precise moment, more than a century outside her comfort zone, standing in a torrent of filth with people who openly despised her, Witmeyer was confused and lonely, which made her very receptive to the emotion that was about to break over her in a tidal wave of endorphins.
On both sides of her, the colonel’s soldiers were having a fine time watching Malarkey and his boy through their night vision goggles, and strobing them with their laser sights.
“You know what the lasers are, right, Otto?” called Farley. “You’ve seen one before, when I put down your animal of a brother. So come on out, and we’ll go talk to the Blessed Colonel. We only want to talk.”
The men laughed, and Witmeyer got the feeling they were laughing at her as well as Malarkey.
Paranoid. I’m getting paranoid.
“Very well, that’s not the whole truth,” said Farley. “We only want to talk…first.”
Lame, thought Witmeyer. All this stupid posturing.
I too used to love posturing, she realized. But the good has gone out of it without Clover by my side with her big serious face on.
Things happened quickly then, but later, when Witmeyer thought about it, she could pluck single frozen moments from that afternoon and study them for hours.
The boy leaped into the air. High, like an animal. A cat, maybe, or a bird, flinging his hands in front of him.
“Alley-oop,” said a soldier, drawing a mocking cheer from his mates, but the cheering turned to howls of shock and pain as light blossomed from the boy’s fingers. Two white fireballs filled the entire chamber, completely overloading the night vision goggles, momentarily blinding the soldiers—but not Witmeyer, whose helmet visor had thirty extra years of technology in it, including a flare-guard coating.
Ha, she thought. Clever child with his magician’s tricks. Not clever enough, boy.
Her finger was on the trigger when the man, Malarkey, rose from his hiding place, seeming to fill her entire field of vision. Up and up he went, until he seemed too large for the space.
Suddenly Witmeyer’s gun felt like deadweight in her hands.
How could her pathetic weapon have any effect on such a magnificent creature?
Magnificent?
Had she just thought that?
But this man was magnificent. There was no other word for him. Those shoulders like bridge bulwarks, a chest like a furnace door, a fan of hair that spread like a halo as he moved, and eyes that made Lunka feel transparent when they looked at her.
“Oh,” said Witmeyer, feeling awe in the face of another human being for the first time in her life.
This is a man, she thought. This is a specimen.
Time seemed to slow down as Malarkey launched himself from a crumbled plinth and sailed over her head into the jumble of blinded men. Down they went like toy soldiers, and Malarkey gleefully laid into them, wreaking havoc with his anvil fists, square teeth, and wide forehead, which broke Farley’s nose with a sickening crunch.
I should shoot him, Witmeyer realized. But the thought hung weightlessly in the maelstrom of her emotions and was swept away.
Malarkey made the most of his momentary advantage, then hightailed it after his young companion around the sweeping tunnel bend.
Witmeyer was instantly dismayed.
He is leaving. My magnificent man.
“After them, you idiots!” she ordered the moaning soldiers, throwing kicks left and right. “And remember your orders: take him alive. Take them both alive. But especially King Otto.”
King Otto.
Now there was a man worthy of the title.
Every culture has a raft of poets and playwrights who will declare in heartfelt and varied terms that everyone has a true love just waiting to be found. Several million verses have been written in many thousand languages to support this thesis. As is often the case, these romantic writers are all wrong. While most people do have many potential true loves, there are those individuals who are so unique that no one could reasonably be expected to love them. Just below that level of super-weirdness, there is a small group of extreme individuals who find it impossible to connect to anyone not on their wavelength. These individuals rarely meet and so generally live their lives alone, but occasionally these alphas do cross paths, and when that happens, the attraction is instant, mutual, and irresistible.
The Chinese have a saying: Love itself is calm; turbulence arrives from extraordinary individuals.
Turbulence is beyond true love.
Italians call this phenomenon catching the thunderbolt.
Almost incredibly, in the reeking depths of a London sewer, during the magnesium light of Riley’s flash bombs, both Witmeyer and Malarkey caught the thunderbolt right between the eyes.
Malarkey sloshed down the tunnel, feeling that he was running away from what he wanted to race toward.
That incredible woman.
Who was she?
Where had she come from?
In the second of magnesium flare, her image had been burned onto his retinas and remained there even now.
Those haughty eyes.
The high slashes of cheekbones.
How she held her weapon with easy comfort.
And her hair. Good God, the hair.
Malarkey was perfectly aware that his own hair was fabulous, due to his many and varied conditioning rituals, including sleeping in an inverted position and weekly snake venom soakings, but this girl’s hair made his seem like damp straw in comparison. Even in the bowels of a sewer, she boasted the dark flowing locks of a princess.
What is happening to me? Should I not be consumed with my desire for revenge? he wondered, even as his hands quested along the tunnel walls and his legs churned the water.
Could he be at last experiencing one of the gentler passions that for so long had been denied him?
She had something. A glimmer. A fire.
“Come on, sir,” Riley panted from half a dozen steps ahead. “We need to get to the ladder.”
The boy was right, the ladder was where they needed to be; but they needed to be there now. Anything post now was too late. That ladder was a thirty-rung hand-over-hand climb, and it would take a monkey ten seconds to scale it.
They didn’t have ten seconds and they were not monkeys, and Riley’s stunt with the flashers had bought them five seconds at most. Already the dreaded crimson beams were jittering on the walls.
“Halt, or I shoot,” came a call from behind.
/> “Damn you, Otto,” came another. Farley’s voice, but strained with pain.
Nothing from the girl. Malarkey had been perversely hoping that she would call his name before shooting.
Then it came, three sweet words from the darkness: “King Otto, please.”
King Otto. Please.
Malarkey smiled even as he labored forward. Strange how this brief phrase could delight him so, even in a time of such crisis.
The boy went under and Otto almost followed, but he righted himself by lurching into the wall and bearing the impact. He searched underwater with one hand until he located Riley’s collar and yanked him from the murky depths. Riley was snorting furiously from his nose as he broke the surface.
“Good lad,” said Malarkey. “Good.”
But the seconds this tumble had cost were seconds that they did not have, and now it was a certainty that they would not reach the ladder, not to mention actually scale the rungs.
“Rats,” said Riley, between snorts.
“You said it, Ramlet,” agreed Malarkey, hauling them both forward.
“Stop!” From behind. “Last warning!”
Malarkey saw red dots dancing a firefly jig on his arm. “Rats and curses and damnation,” he said with feeling, though was it possible that some small part of him wanted to be captured, just to see what would happen?
The same thing what happened to dear old Barnabus, his sensible side interjected.
“No,” said Riley, and he pointed toward the ladder. “Rats.”
Malarkey was a veteran member of the criminal fraternity and so had made a lifelong habit of working in the shadows. In consequence, his night vision was excellent, and he could see both Riley’s point and that which he pointed at.
“Aha,” he said with some satisfaction. Interesting. Time for some new combatants in this dark war.
Farley has his red-eyed demons and so too does Otto Malarkey.
“Come and get me, princess,” he called over his shoulder. “I will not bite you.”
He threw his head back and laughed.
It is all a game, he realized. And I am the master of this game.