“Are you all right?” Rose fretted as she put a comforting arm around N/Ice’s back to help support her.
“Did it hurt you anywhere?” Even as she posed the question, Amber was examining her sister from head to toe, searching for indications of any injury.
“Here,” Simwan said simply as he extended a hand.
Taking it and partaking of her brother’s strength, N/Ice was able to stand. Unsteadily at first, but stability returned as swiftly as her poise. One hand still felt of her head.
“Wow. I wasn’t expecting quite so explosive an outcome.” She winced, then blinked several times. “Part of it went right through me.”
“How was it?” Amber asked anxiously.
N/Ice regarded her sister. “It burned.” She touched one hand to her left temple. “Up here. Like when you’re having a really bad dream and you realize it’s a dream and you want more than anything, anything else, to wake up but you can’t. Then it was gone.”
“Well, you sure as heck targled it good,” was Rose’s admiring compliment.
“Targled it right out of existence,” Amber observed. When nothing was immediately forthcoming from their brother, the two sisters eyed him reprovingly.
“Uh, seriously good work there, N/Ice,” Simwan hastened to add. All eyes promptly shifted to the one member of their group who had yet to comment.
Pithfwid sat cleaning his eyes with a moistened paw. “Spiffy,” he declared with finality. “Now let’s get a move on before something worse than a hoofin shows up to investigate.”
With the Way In now unguarded and unblocked, they had no difficulty entering, though they had to bend low to do so. “Descend” had been the directive from the dragon Slythroat, and descend they did. The angle of descent was constant but not steep, and the way ahead lit by the limited but intense light from the tiny button flashlights each Deavy carried attached to their keychains. Additionally, an intermittent, eerie green glow emanated from phosphorescent moss and fungi growing on the walls. The color of this natural eldritch light would have immediately spooked an Ord. It only reminded the Deavy sisters of different shades of holiday lipstick. When things grew unbearably dark, they formed a single line and just followed N/Ice.
At first Simwan thought they had entered an abandoned service tunnel of some sort. As they descended deeper, he saw that they were not in a tunnel proper but a large-diameter tube of some kind. A huge pipe, or conduit. It was the smell that finally identified their noxious surroundings.
They were in the sewer. Not a sewer, but the sewer. The sewer system of New York City, perhaps the most extensive and elaborate in the modern world. For the next half hour, their greatest danger lay not in encountering hoofins, or dragons, or anything else magically monstrous and malevolent, but in slipping on the damp, sucky surface underfoot. And in throwing up. A good thing, he thought as they continued to make their way downward, that they were all wearing sturdy walking shoes. Trying to descend the greasy, stinking conduit in sneakers or sandals would have been like trying to skip down Mount Everest on greased skis. They would have slipped and slid downward, right into—who knew what.
He had no doubt but that they were about to find out.
Though there was constant dripping from the slime growing on the ceiling and sides of the pipe, and a steady trickle underfoot, the dirty water never rose more than halfway up the sides of their shoes. Designed to carry away heavy downpours and fast-running snowmelt, Central Park’s industrial-strength sewerage and drainage system was not strained by the day’s drizzle and mist.
Long before they had hiked a respectable distance and descended to a considerable depth, they encountered various forms of sewer-dwelling life. Mostly insects, though the outlines of larger shapes could be seen moving about in the darkness. These vanished as soon as the Deavys approached. It was left to a fairly large rat to halt, stand up on its hind legs, and challenge them.
“Sayyy … who are you lot, and what are you doing down here?” Using one paw, the husky rodent gestured behind him. “This is restricted territory down here.”
“We work for the Department of Water and Powers,” Simwan improvised with commendable speed. “We’re just in the middle of finishing up an inspection.”
Cocking its hairy head slightly to one side, the rat squinted past him. “Since when does W&P run four people on a pipe inspection?” Rodent eyes narrowed suspiciously. “And you look awfully young to be carrying out inspections for anybody, much less a city department.”
“You know humans.” Rose mustered a smile. “It’s hard to tell anything about us in the darkness.”
“I can tell that you’re younger than any human sewer workers I’ve ever encountered. Besides, this part of the system never gets inspected. It’s why the Master chose it for—” The rat suddenly broke off, as if aware that he might have said too much. “Anyway, every W&P worker I ever saw was an ordinary, and you bunch are surely anything but Ords. Proof of it is that we’re having this conversation.”
“We’re just being polite.” Amber mimicked her sister’s smile. “We mean no harm.”
“Uh-huh,” the rat muttered. “And I’m secretly a mink in drag.” Dropping back to all fours, it started to back away. “You know what I think? I think you don’t belong here. I think you come with spiteful intentions. I think—I’d better warn the Master.” When Simwan took a step forward, the talkative rodent scampered back well out of reach. Now it was its turn to smile, unpleasantly.
“Don’t think you can catch me. You can’t even stand up straight in here. Better you turn around and hightail the tails you haven’t got back the way you came. Because if you’re still here when the Master hears of it, there’ll be—”
An incredibly swift, agile shape currently colored dark green with a black ruff around its neck suddenly burst from behind Simwan’s legs. Catching sight of it, the eyes of the hitherto self-assured rat threatened to pop out of its head.
“Mother of muck—there’s a cat down here!” It whirled to flee.
Then Pithfwid was on top of it, and its eyes did pop out of its head. With Pithfwid’s assistance, of course. Without the use of any magic that might give their presence away, employing those means and methods familiar to every feline since the beginning of time, the dark green streak utilized teeth and claws to tear the noisy, meddlesome rat into long, bloody strips. Soon silence reigned once more in the depths of the tunnel.
As the Deavys filed past the shredded corpse, Rose looked down and wrinkled up her nose. “It’s good that you killed it before it could give warning, but do you have to eat the filthy thing?”
From where he was crouched on all fours and feeding energetically, a bloody-muzzled Pithfwid paused to look back up at her. “I’m hungry. Just a quick snack. You like your chocolate and your pretzels and your cookies. I happen to like rat. So do some humans, I might point out.” Turning his head to one side, he spat out a small, bloody bone. “I believe in this very city they are referred to by the famished as ‘roof rabbits.’ The great empire of the Incas subsisted largely on guinea pigs, which they raised—”
“Sorry I asked.” One hand covering her mouth, Rose picked up her pace.
They bumped into only one other querulous subterranean sentry, who was likewise dispatched—though not consumed—by the efficient Pithfwid. Shortly after this second encounter, the pipe that had been serving as their thoroughfare merged with another into a third, much larger underground channel. The ceiling of the old stone conduit—nineteenth century, Simwan estimated—was as flat as the floor, and high enough to allow them to continue onward without having to walk hunched over.
“How much farther, do you think?” N/Ice whispered aloud. “I don’t feel like walking to Westchester.”
Rose leaned close and kept her voice down as she responded. “Don’t be silly. We know the lair is somewhere here in the north end of the park, and the park isn’t t
hat big. The entrance we found was pretty much in the middle. So we ought to be getting pretty close.”
“Close to what?” Amber kept shining her tiny but bright light into dark corners and recesses. The beam picked out crawly things she chose not to try and identify further. “How do you suppose this Crub lives? There are no little houses down here, no hollow walls.”
“The Crub’s a rat,” Simwan reminded her. “It’ll live like a rat.”
Pithfwid had taken the lead. Now he stopped and raised a warning paw. “Hush! I hear noises, and ratversation. A lot of it.” The paw made repeated gestures floorward. “You are all of you great bipedal ape-things entirely too visible. I think from this point on it would be better if you belly-crawled.”
The girls immediately objected. But Pithfwid was insistent, and eventually they gave in to his reasoning. They absolutely refused to belly-crawl, however. A compromise was reached, which resulted in them proceeding forward on hands and knees.
“Ew—” Rose began, but this time Pithfwid cut her off sharply.
“And no ewws, ” the cat advised her. “From here on, we hold to silence unless it is wrested from us forcibly.”
Several times they clicked off their lights and froze in place as more rats scampered past. Simwan thought sure the patrolling rodents would smell the intruders, until it occurred to him that in this underground world of enormous stinks, even a perceptive rat would have trouble separating one smell from another.
Having already passed a wide assortment of rubbish that had been washed down into the drains, they were not surprised to find the way ahead nearly blocked by a pile of garbage that reached almost to the ceiling.
“Wait here.” While his humans remained behind, Pithfwid darted through the gap between the conduit wall and the towering trash pile. He was back in less than a minute. “Come quickly: I’ve found it.”
“The way onward?” Simwan made no attempt to hide the concern in his voice. They had been traveling underground for nearly an hour. His feet were tired, his eyes were tired, his lungs burned every time he inhaled a mouthful of the torpid, malodorous air, and unlike the cat, he could not find energizing sustenance in the rodents who occasionally raced past them. He yearned for a cold drink, a hot late-night meal, and a warm bed. Though he did not ask, he knew that his sisters were just as drained.
Just as drained. Sometimes he wished he could just turn off the tap to his thoughts.
“No, not the way forward,” Pithfwid replied calmly. “Something else. Something better. The Truth. Or,” he added in a slightly more subdued tone, “at least maybe the place where it has been dumped.”
“Dumped?” Simwan eyed the cat, who had gone pink with green squiggly lines running all through his fur.
“That’s what I think I’m seeing. That’s why places like this are called dumps.”
It was then that a suddenly hopeful, excited Simwan found himself studying the trash heap that nearly blocked their way in an entirely new light.
XXII
When the last Deavy had squeezed through the opening between the towering garbage pile and the wall and all four of them had trained the beams of their compact flashlights onto it, the reality of what Pithfwid had spoken became immediately clear.
They had emerged into a huge square room whose aged, moss-coated, masonry walls rose nearly three stories high. Some sort of drainage collection point, or overflow chamber, Simwan decided. In addition to the pipe from which they had exited, three other conduits emptied into the large chamber. Like the one that they had just exited, two more were drain tunnels. Entering the dark depths at a sharper angle than the other three, the fourth doubtless led still deeper into the city’s sewer system as it carried the collected flow of the first three onward to the complex that treated sewage before it reached the sea.
High up on the walls, parallel streaks left by ancient water lines indicated the heights to which especially heavy flows had risen. Superseded by newer, better-designed drains, it was clear that the sewage and water levels in this old collection area had not filled to such depths in a very, very long time. Any water and debris that still came in was funneled out very quickly. There were even a few dry places on the stone floor, further testament to how little wastewater actually reached it.
One such dry area, elevated slightly above the rest of the floor, was occupied by the ”dump” that had attracted Pithfwid’s attention. That the pile reached almost to the chamber’s ceiling was a tribute to the cooperative efforts of untold thousands of rats slaving down through the decades to accumulate one of every imaginable kind and shape of object they thought might be of interest to their master. There was no rhyme or reason, no direction or apparent purpose, to the contents of the collection. Empty tin cans lay stacked alongside pilfered handbags stamped with names like Gucci and Hermès. Watches seemed to be a particular favorite of the legions of rodential thieves, perhaps because they could be easily carried between thick incisors. There were wind-ups and digitals, cheap knock-offs and elaborate fakes, Japanese and Swiss and American makes. A genuine Patek Philippe glittered next to a Rulex, the latter a specialty of Chinese counterfeiters.
Confirming the intelligence and dedication, if not the taste, of those who had accumulated it, there was not a single duplicate item in the pile. No two watches were alike. No two plastic bags. No two tin cans. Each and every component of the enormous mass was unique and distinct from the piece of junk, or small treasure, lying next to it.
“It’s clear this Crub has no taste,” Rose commented succinctly as she joined her sisters in beginning an intensive search of the dumbfounding pile.
Picking up and discarding a small bottle that turned out to be half full of the cheapest perfume imaginable, Amber could only shake her head in agreement. “How are we ever going to find the Truth in all this junk?”
“Well for one thing,” Pithfwid observed as he clambered over the lower slopes of the pile, occasionally sticking his nose in where he wanted it to belong, “the Truth is a fairly recent addition. So if it’s here, it should be somewhere on the outside of the hoard, or at least pretty close to the surface. Pity there’s only one of me. I can usually smell the Truth from a good distance away.”
“Oh, so you think you’re the only one?” Leaning toward the conical mass, N/Ice proceeded to commence her own olfactory inspection of the accumulated refuse. Given some of the smells that were emanating from the festering mound, she would have preferred to hold her nose while doing so—but that, of course, would have effectively negated her efforts.
As for Simwan, while his sisters sniffed and searched and Pithfwid probed deeper and deeper into the pile, he kept casting worried glances in the direction of the other three dark, gaping tunnels. Noticing that his human’s attention was being repeatedly diverted, Pithfwid let out a soft yowl. “What are you looking for so anxiously, boy?” He indicated the trash mountain. “I know this doesn’t look like much fun—and it isn’t—but come and help us search anyway.”
“I’m looking for guards.” Despite Pithfwid’s entreaty, Simwan’s gaze remained focused on the other openings. “If this is the Crub’s personal stash, I’d expect there to be some guards around. Or at least a lookout or two.”
“Why?” Pithfwid was honestly puzzled. “As at least one recently demised, and moderately tasty, rat told us, no humans come this way. And what rat or vole, mouse or troll, would dare risk incurring the wrath of its master, the Crub? His reputation is sentinel enough to deter any would-be thieves from thinking of thieving his thievery.”
That did make sense, Simwan decided. Maybe he was obsessing over nothing. Turning away from the looming mouth of the nearest conduit, he dove wholeheartedly (though not literally) into the knoll of plunder, using both hands to inspect and then cast aside item after grimy item.
Their task was made easier by the fact that they knew exactly what they were looking for, and that its appeara
nce was sufficiently distinctive to distinguish it from the bulk of the accumulated rubbish. The small bottle of pale blue Roman glass would stand out in sharp contrast to bolder modern relatives designed to contain the spirits of such as Jack Daniels and Hiram Walker.
Still, the search was proving to be a difficult one indeed. For one thing, they had to be careful when moving an item not to dislodge the mass of packed junk lying immediately above it. Despite their caution, after imprudently pulling out one long-necked wine bottle, Rose found herself buried up to the thighs by a small avalanche of stuff. She could feel her face burning as her sisters enjoyed a laugh at her expense. Unfortunately, her embarrassment caused the rest of her to generate similar heat, to the point where Simwan had to remind her to calm down lest she set alight the flammable portions of the booty piled before them.
He checked his watch. Appropriately enough, they were coming up on midnight. The witching hour. Wiping sweat from his brow with the back of one hand, Simwan reflected that all he wanted at that magical time of day was to espy a certain small bottle. Flying horses and philosopher’s stones and the lamps of imprisoned djinn he would look for another time. Besides, nothing, no matter how seemingly important or valuable, was worth much without the Truth to back it up.
It was when he was on the verge of compiling a modified drink spell with Amber’s assistance in order to call up a six-pack of cold root beer instead of a flagon of mead that Rose let out a whoop of triumph and raised one sweaty, grime-stained arm. In her fingers was clutched the precious, long-sought-after bottle. Caught in the combined light of their tiny flashlights, it cast an unmistakable radiance of its own: the light of Truth.
“Got it!” she exclaimed triumphantly.
“About time.” Grumbling, Pithfwid began carefully picking his way down from the crest of the rubbish mountain.
Relieved and relaxed for the first time since they had plunged into the under-underwater entrance to the sewer system, Simwan grinned teasingly at the cat. “What’s the matter? Irritated that you didn’t find it first?”