No, I had to remain with them. Whatever that required of me.
Rita and I sent our bags sliding down the pipe, then followed them. It was a tight fit. The inside of the pipe was covered in slime, and while the lubrication was helpful, it was also unspeakably gross. Slime-slicked, we slid down the steeply angled pipe with no visibility and no control. I wondered if I was going to hit something hard at the bottom, and break both my legs. Or maybe splash down in some reeking, garbage-filled dumpster, like in Star Wars.
The answer, as it turned out, was neither. One minute I was whizzing down the pipe, and the next I was flying through open air, and then: thwump! I landed on a thick pile of mattresses. Fortunately I managed to draw up my left leg just before landing so that my injured ankle wouldn’t have to absorb the shock. I landed hard on my butt and tiny winged creatures flitted off in all directions, chittering as they flew off into the darkness. Probably complaining about how I had messed up their nice home.
When all three of us were safely down the chute, Isaac produced a small blue lamp from his pocket, so that we could finally see our surroundings. I could spend a week with a thesaurus and still not find the words needed to capture how filthy, wet, and disgusting that place was. But at least there were no guards here, ready to capture us.
I fell in behind Isaac as he led us through the putrid labyrinth. He salvaged a broken pole from a heap of garbage for me to use as a walking stick, which helped take some of the weight off my wounded ankle. But there was a hot pain spreading across my belly now, where the finials from the fence had scraped me, and I was afraid to lift my shirt and look at it. If I had any kind of an open wound I’d need to clean and bandage it immediately, lest it get infected in this dismal place. But that would require a delay, which meant Devon might not be warned in time, which meant the raid might catch him. What was I supposed to do? With pain lancing through my leg at every step I couldn’t think clearly enough to weigh the options, so I just stumbled behind Isaac, focusing on keeping my footing.
After awhile we climbed a ladder that brought us to cleaner tunnels, and soon after that we came across one of the residents. The little girl started to run away as soon as she saw us—hardly a wonder, with us looking more like swamp monsters than people—but Isaac got her to stand still long enough for him to warn her about the coming raid. I watched as the color drained from her face, and before he could ask her to help tell the others she bolted off into the darkness. So much for that plan.
Isaac did seem unusually calm, through all this. On some level of my pain-hazed brain, I recognized that was odd. But maybe he figured that his aristo background would protect him. He wasn’t one of the common sewer rats that the raid was meant to eradicate. He mattered.
Soon, we came to an area that looked familiar, though that was due more to a nebulous sense of déjà vu than any concrete recognition of detail. We started passing the tiny lamps that the denizens of the Warrens kept burning to drive back the darkness in the outer tunnels, then the larger lamps that were used in the Warrens proper. When there was finally enough light to see by, Isaac put his own lamp away. I hadn’t paid attention to it before, but as he shut it off and put it in his pocket I saw that it was simply a large glass marble, with no visible markings. A fetter? Since I knew that he came from an aristo family it shouldn’t have surprised me that he possessed something like that, but for some reason it did. I guess I’d pictured him running away from home with nothing but the shirt on his back, as he left behind all the trappings of his former life. It was, in hindsight, a foolish vision. One could be rebellious without being stupid.
As soon as we reached the magpie room, the children there realized that something was wrong; they gathered closely about us, anxious to hear the news. I was distantly aware of Isaac’s filling them in, but I was no longer listening to him. My attention was wholly fixed on seeking Devon in the shadows.
He wasn’t there.
Once the children understood the Warrens were about to be raided, they began to scatter. I still had no clue where Devon was, and in a few seconds there would be no one left to ask. I caught sight of a young boy I’d been introduced to the night before and called out his name. He ignored me. I called to him more loudly, and when he tried to run past me without acknowledging my existence I grabbed his arm and jerked him to a stop, forcing him to turn and look at me.
“Where’s Devon?” I demanded.
“Dunno,” he said, and there was panic in his eyes as tried to break loose from my grip. But I was damned if I was letting him go before he gave me an answer.
Finally he said, “In the gallery. Maybe.”
I let go. A moment later he was gone, swallowed by the shadows of the underworld.
I turned to Isaac, but before I could speak I was interrupted by a sudden metallic clanging. It took me a second to realize that someone must be banging on the pipes elsewhere in the Warrens, and the sound was resonating throughout the underground sanctuary.
“It’s started,” Isaac whispered. I could hear a note of fear in his voice now. Maybe he’d counted on getting out of the Warrens before the raid began in earnest.
Too late now.
“We need to find Devon,” I said. “Where’s the gallery?”
“This way,” Isaac said, pointing to a tunnel opening across from us.
We followed him into the depths of the labyrinth. The clanging had ceased now, leaving the abandoned halls tomb-like and silent. When we passed the last of the guide lamps he took out his glowing blue sphere again. By its light we finally reached a chamber where a series of rectangular items had once been attached to the wall. They were gone now, but they’d left behind ghosts outlined in grime, as neatly ordered as the paintings in an art museum.
Devon wasn’t there, so we called out his name, though not so loudly that distant raiders would hear us. For one terrifying moment it seemed that he wasn’t going to answer. But then he stepped around a corner, and if I’d been standing closer to him I would have hugged him. “Thank God,” I whispered. “Thank God.” He had his backpack with him, I noticed. Even in this refuge he had never felt confident enough to leave it behind. Yet another thing to give thanks for.
He opened his mouth to speak—and then the screaming started. It was impossible to tell how far from us the source was, as the stark tunnels echoed and amplified every cry. There were at least three different voices, however, and they all sounded young.
And then suddenly they fell silent, which was even more terrifying.
“We need to get far away from here,” Isaac muttered, and none of us felt like arguing with him.
I won’t catalog all the twists and turns we took, trying to find a way out of that deathtrap. The rusted pipes we squeezed through, the rotting ladders that shattered beneath our feet, the abandoned corridors that led nowhere. My ankle was getting worse and worse, and pain shot through my leg every time I put pressure on it. But whenever we stopped to listen, the noise of the raid was still too close. The screaming had begun again and it seemed to be coming from all sides. One time we emerged from a narrow crawl space to see a half-dozen lanterns coming toward us, and we barely got out of their way in time.
But eventually we reached a place where there was relative silence. We paused in a narrow tunnel to catch our breath, though it was not a comfortable respite. Ankle-deep water rushed past our feet, heading from nowhere to nowhere, and when we started moving again the current was so strong that it nearly knocked me down. Rita grabbed me and kept me from falling, then let me rest an arm across her shoulders for support, like Isaac had done earlier. But it was hard to maneuver through the narrow tunnels in such a posture, and soon I had to go back to stumbling along by myself, terrified that a fall would land me face down in that lightless soup.
“Do you know where we are?” Rita asked Isaac at one point.
His grim silence was an eloquent response.
“Great,” she muttered. “Just great.”
“So how are we going to get ou
t of here?” I asked him. I was starting to feel feverish, and I hoped that was a consequence of fear and exhaustion, and not something more ominous. “We’ll have to do that eventually.”
No one said anything for a moment. A long moment.
“We have compasses,” Rita offered.
“That’ll tell us direction,” Isaac said. “Not which way is out.”
“No,” Devon said, “but the water will do that.”
I looked at him. In the bluish light of Isaac’s glow lamp Devon’s dark skin glistened eerily, like some fearsome obsidian statue. Since my expression could not possibly capture the full extent of my confusion, I offered, “Huh?”
He pointed to the water coursing about our feet. “It’s moving.” A rotting bit of something that might once have been food floated into our field of light, and we watched as it made its way past us, moving down the tunnel until it was swallowed by darkness again on the other side. “It’s heading toward some kind of exit.”
“Or some kind of underground cesspool,” Rita muttered.
Devon shook his head. “Luray flanks the river. I’ll bet you ten to one that this system empties into it. And where the water exits, we may be able to.”
“Shades of Harrison Ford,” Rita muttered.
“Well, we’re not nearly that high above water level, and we’ll probably be wading in raw sewage by the time we get there … but otherwise, yeah, something like that.”
It sounded like a respectable plan, so we let him lead the way, following the flow of the water. Honestly, it could have been a bad plan, and we would have still followed it. When given a choice between, “I have a plan” and “I will sit in the darkness waiting to starve to death” there’s not much to think about.
Soon we started hearing noises again, like someone was headed our way. I felt my stomach tighten in dread. If the raiders had thought to block off access to the river, there would be no way out … but we couldn’t know if that was the case until we got there, so onward we trekked. Other tunnels and pipes emptied into the one we were following, and the water level began to rise around us. It was a good sign, but it made walking difficult. I was starting to get dizzy, and there were moments when I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet.
Then Devon turned back and gestured to Isaac. “Turn off the lamp,” he whispered.
Isaac did whatever you do to turn a fetter lamp off.
For a moment we were plunged into total darkness. In my exhausted state I was acutely aware of the tons of rock over our heads, and a combination of panic and nausea threatened to overwhelm me. But then I realized that it wasn’t as dark as I’d thought. Indeed, as our eyes slowly adjusted, we could see there was something ahead of us.
Light. Very faint, very distant, but unmistakable.
Isaac turned his lamp back on, and we began to move forward as fast as the slippery tunnel would allow. Just let us make it to the river, I prayed. Then I can collapse. The ambient light grew brighter and brighter, and soon we got to the point where Isaac’s lamp was no longer needed. That was a great moment, when he finally stuck the fetter back in his pocket. Our horrific journey was almost over.
Finally we reached the place where the storm system dumped its waste water into the river. We could see that beyond the large circular opening was clear sky above and free-flowing water below, with tree-covered mountains in the distance. The river was only a few yards beneath us: an easy drop.
All that stood between us and freedom was an iron grate with inch-thick bars, secured by a padlock as big as my fist.
“Shit,” Rita muttered.
I leaned against the slimy wall in sheer exhaustion, fighting the urge to cry. Black water rushed around my knees, threatening to drag me under. Don’t give up, I told myself. Not yet. We’ll find a way out. Hang in there.
Isaac grabbed hold of the grate and shook it, testing its strength. After a moment Devon joined him. Together they banged on it and pushed it and pulled it and shook it, trying everything they could think of to force it to give way. But it didn’t budge. Rita then offered to try to pick the lock, but the mechanism was so clogged with rust and filth that the tools she pulled out weren’t strong enough for the job. When one of them finally snapped in her hand she, too, sagged against the wall, too frustrated even to curse.
For a moment all of us were silent, wondering what on earth we should do next. That’s when we heard a rhythmic splashing that could only mean one thing: someone was coming toward us. It wasn’t a distant sound, subtly alerting us to the fact that enemies were somewhere on the same level, but intimately close, disconcertingly clear. Maybe only a tunnel or two away. And coming toward us quickly.
There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. We didn’t even have darkness for cover any more. Is this how I’m going to die? I thought feverishly. Despair welled up in my gut, not only for myself but for all the people who depended on me. Tommy, I’m sorry, I failed you … .
Suddenly we heard new footsteps, out of sync with the splashing. Someone was coming toward us from another direction, where the water wasn’t as deep. I braced my back against the wall for support—my legs were so weak they could barely support me anymore—and wished I believed in the kind of God who saved people from being attacked in the sewers. Maybe I should have gone to church more often.
The man who finally came into view wasn’t dressed like a tunnel raider, which was marginally reassuring. He was an older man, with gleaming white hair pulled back into a short ponytail and a close-clipped beard to match. His face was weathered and fine lines fanned out from his mouth and his eyes. The latter were a piercing blue, and his gaze as he studied us was intense. Overall he wasn’t large, but he bore himself in a way that implied confidence and strength—a stark contrast to how we all were feeling. His long brown leather duster reminded me of an Australian trench coat, and it had small metal ornaments arranged haphazardly down one side. My vision was too blurry for me to make out any more detail than that. In fact, everything was getting a bit blurry. I shook my head to try to clear it.
“You are the visitors?” he asked.
We all just stared at him. No one knew what to say.
“From Terra Colonna?” he pressed.
I nodded to him. To both of him. Or maybe there was only one of him, but it had four eyes. I suddenly wasn’t sure.
Dimly I realized that I was becoming delirious.
“Yeah,” Devon croaked. “That’s us.”
The man was about to say something more when the splashing sounds suddenly grew louder; the raiders must have turned a corner nearby. “Come!” he whispered, and he gestured for us to gather by his side. We figured he was going to lead us away or something, so we all obeyed. I think deep inside we were all glad to have someone tell us what to do. I wasn’t quite strong enough to make it across the current to get to him, but when I fell he stepped forward and caught me under the arms, before I hit the water. He was surprisingly strong.
And then we all were there, standing next to him, ready for him to lead us … nowhere. Seriously. He didn’t move. We just all stood there in a huddle, our backs pressed against the wall of the tunnel, while the ominous splashing footsteps came closer and closer. Totally exposed.
If there was a Guinness Book of World Records award for hiding badly, this would have nailed it.
“But—” Rita began.
“Shhh!” he whispered fiercely. “Stay close to me. Don’t move. Don’t say anything!”
Before any of us had a chance to respond, four men turned the corner. They were classic goons, exactly the type you’d hire to crawl around in sewers beating up small children. I trembled as they approached the grate.
“Looks like we missed ’em,” one of them said. He was a stocky man with the face of a bulldog.
One of the others stepped forward. He stared at the grate for a moment, then reached out and shook it, to see if it was solid. Then he grabbed the lock and tugged it a few times to see if it would come loose. When it didn’t, he
grunted. “They’ll be back. That or topside. There’s no other way out.”
He looked down at the water flowing around his feet. “Not gonna find a trail in this place.” He looked up at his men. “Fall back. Give ’em room to think they’re safe. If we can corner them in here they’ll have nowhere to run.”
Then they turned to leave.
Seriously. They all turned to leave. As if we weren’t there, right in front of them.
Maybe that was a delusion, too.
The bulldog man turned back for one last look. I stiffened as his eyes scanned the water, the grating, the mildew-covered walls, bracing myself for what would happen when he finally saw us. But he never did. It wasn’t like we were invisible or anything, more like he looked around us.
Then, with a final dog-like grunt, he followed his fellow goons into the shadows.
“What the hell—?” Rita began to whisper, but the man with the white ponytail clamped a hand over her mouth to shut her up. Normally I’d have expected her to bite the hand of anyone who tried that—especially a stranger—but I guess she figured he’d earned the right.
We waited in silence, listening to the splashing of the goons slowly fade away. Only when we could no longer hear them did the man in the leather coat release Rita and wade back to the grate.
“Damn,” Devon muttered shaking his head. “What was that all about? Some kind of cloak of invisibility?”
“Nothing so simple,” the man responded. “And it’s very costly. So don’t count on my using it again.”
He took out a ring of heavy brass keys from his pocket, chose one, and inserted it into the lock. “Used to come this way,” he said. He strained to turn the key, but it didn’t budge. “Long time ago,” he muttered.
Then, with a sudden snap, the key moved. He pulled the lock open and swung the grate back a bit, just far enough for us to get past it. There was a low creaking sound as it moved, and we all flinched, worried that our enemies were listening.