Neverwhere (10 page)

They were standing face to face, in the middle of a cleared circle of spectators and other bodyguards and sightseers. Neither man moved a muscle. The Fop was a good head taller than Ruislip. On the other hand, Ruislip looked as if he weighed as much as four fops, each of them carrying a large leather suitcase entirely filled with lard. They stared at each other, without breaking eye contact.

The marquis de Carabas tapped Door on the shoulder and pointed. Something was about to happen.

One moment there were two men standing impassively, just looking at each other, then the Fop’s head rocked back, as if he’d just been hit in the face. A small, reddish purple bruise appeared on his cheek. He pursed his lips and fluttered his eyelashes. “La,” he said, then stretched his rouged lips wide, in a ghastly parody of a smile.

The Fop gestured. Ruislip staggered, and clutched his stomach.

The Fop With No Name smirked outrageously, waggled his fingers, and blew kisses to several spectators. Ruislip stared angrily at the Fop, redoubling his mental assault. Blood began to drip from the Fop’s lips. His left eye started to swell. He staggered. The audience muttered appreciatively.

“It’s not as impressive as it looks,” whispered the marquis to Door.

The Fop With No Name stumbled, suddenly, going onto his knees, as if someone were forcing him down, and fell, awkwardly, to the floor. Then he jerked, as if someone had just kicked him, hard, in the stomach. Ruislip looked triumphant. The spectators clapped, politely. The Fop writhed and spat blood onto the sawdust on the floor of Harrods’ Fish and Meat Hall. He was dragged off into the corner by some friends, and was violently sick.

“Next,” said the marquis.

The next would-be bodyguard was again thinner than Ruislip (being about the size of two and a half fops, carrying but a single suitcase filled with lard between them). He was covered in tattoos and dressed in clothes that looked like they had been stitched together from old car seats and rubber mats. He was shaven-headed, and he sneered at the world through rotten teeth. “I’m Varney,” he said, and he hawked, and spat green on the sawdust. He walked into the ring.

“When you’re ready, gentlemen,” said the marquis.

Ruislip stamped his bare feet on the floor, sumolike, one-two, one-two, and commenced to stare hard at Varney. A small cut opened on Varney’s forehead, and blood began to drip from it into one eye. Varney ignored it; and instead appeared to be concentrating on his right arm. He pulled his arm up slowly, like a man fighting a great deal of pressure. Then he slammed his fist into Ruislip’s nose, which began to spurt blood. Ruislip drew one long, horrible breath, and hit the ground with the sound of half a ton of wet liver being dropped into a bathtub. Varney giggled.

Ruislip slowly pulled himself back to his feet, blood from his nose soaking his mouth and chest, dripping onto the sawdust. Varney wiped the blood from his forehead and bared his ruined mouth at the world in an appalling grin. “Come on,” he said. “Fat bastard. Hit me again.”

“That one’s promising,” muttered the marquis.

Door raised an eyebrow. “He doesn’t look very nice.”

“
Nice
in a bodyguard,” lectured the marquis, “is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters. He looks
dangerous
.” There was a murmur of appreciation, then, as Var-ney did something rather fast and painful to Ruislip, something that involved the sudden connection of Varney’s leather-bound foot and Ruislip’s testicles. The murmur was the kind of restrained and deeply unenthusiastic applause one normally only hears in England on sleepy sunny Sunday afternoons, at village cricket matches. The marquis clapped politely with the rest of them. “Very good, sir,” he said.

Varney looked at Door, and he winked at her, almost proprietorially, before he returned his attention to Ruislip. Door shivered.

Richard heard the clapping and walked toward it.

Five almost identically dressed, pale young women walked past him. They wore long dresses made of velvet, each dress as dark as night, one each of dark green, dark chocolate, royal blue, dark blood, and pure black. Each woman had black hair and wore silver jewelry; each was perfectly coiffed, perfectly made up. They moved silently: Richard was aware only of a swish of heavy velvet as they went past, a swish that sounded almost like a sigh. The last of the women, the one dressed in utter black, the palest and the most beautiful, smiled at Richard. He smiled back at her, warily. Then he walked on toward the audition.

It was being held in the Fish and Meat Hall, on the open area of floor beneath Harrods’ fish sculpture. The audience had their back to him, were standing two or three people deep. Richard wondered if he would easily be able to find Door and the marquis: and then the crowd parted, and he saw them both, sitting on the glass top of the smoked-salmon counter. He opened his mouth to shout out Door’s name; and as he did so, he realized why the crowd had parted, as an enormous dreadlocked man, naked but for a green, yellow, and red cloth wrapped like a diaper around his middle, came catapulting through the crowd, as if tossed by a giant, landing squarely on top of him.

“Richard?” she said.

He opened his eyes. The face swam in and out of focus. Fire opal-colored eyes, peering into his, from a pale, elfin face.

“Door?” he said.

She looked furious; she looked beyond fury. “Temple and Arch, Richard. I don’t be
lieve
it. What are you doing here?”

“It’s nice to see you, too,” said Richard, weakly. He sat up and wondered if he was suffering from a concussion. He wondered how he’d know if he was, and he wondered why he had ever thought that Door would have been pleased to see him. She stared intently at her nails, nostrils flaring, as if she did not trust herself to say anything else.

The big man with the very bad teeth, the man who had knocked Richard over on the bridge, was fighting with a dwarf. They were fighting with crowbars, and the fight was not as unequal as one might have imagined. The dwarf was preternaturally fast: he rolled, he struck, he bounced, he dove; his every movement made Varney appear lumbering and awkward by comparison.

Richard turned to the marquis, who was watching the fight intently. “What is happening?” he asked.

The marquis spared him a glance, and then returned his gaze to the action in front of them. “
You
,” he said, “are out of your league, in deep shit, and, I would imagine, a few hours away from an untimely and undoubtedly messy end.
We
, on the other hand, are auditioning bodyguards.” Varney connected his crowbar with the dwarf, who instantly stopped bouncing and darting, and instantly began lying insensible. “I think we’ve seen enough,” said the marquis, loudly. “Thank you all. Mister Varney, if you could wait behind?”

“Why did you have to come here?” Door said to Richard, frostily.

“I didn’t really have much choice,” said Richard.

She sighed. The marquis was walking around the perimeter, dismissing the various bodyguards who had already auditioned, distributing a few words of praise here, of advice there. Varney waited patiently, off to one side. Richard essayed a smile at Door. It was ignored. “How did you get to the market?” she asked.

“There are these rat people—” Richard began.

“Rat-speakers,” she said.

“And you see, the rat who brought us the marquis’s message—”

“Master Longtail,” she said.

“Well, he told them they had to get me here.”

She raised an eyebrow, cocked her head slightly on one side. “A rat-speaker brought you here?”

He nodded. “Most of the way. Her name was Anaesthesia. She . . . well, something happened to her. On the bridge. This other lady brought me the rest of the way here. I think she was a . . . you know.” He hesitated, then said it. “Hooker.”

The marquis had returned. He stood in front of Varney, who looked obscenely pleased with himself. “Weapons expertise?” asked the marquis.

“Whew,” said Varney. “Put it like this. If you can cut someone with it, blow someone’s head off with it, break a bone with it, or make a nasty hole in someone with it, then Varney’s the master of it.”

“Previous satisfied employers include?”

“Olympia, the Shepherd Queen, the Crouch Enders. I done security for the May Fair for a bit, as well.”

“Well,” said the marquis de Carabas. “We’re all very impressed with your skill.”

“I had heard,” said a female voice, “that you had put out a call for bodyguards. Not for enthusiastic amateurs.” Her skin was the color of burnt caramel, and her smile would have stopped a revolution. She was dressed entirely in soft mottled gray and brown leathers. Richard recognized her immediately.

“That’s her,” Richard whispered to Door. “The hooker.”

“Varney,” said Varney, affronted, “is the best guard and bravo in the Underside. Everyone knows that.”

The woman looked at the marquis. “You’ve finished the trials?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Varney.

“Not necessarily,” said the marquis.

“Then,” she told him. “I would like to audition.”

There was a beat before the marquis de Carabas said, “Very well,” and stepped backward.

Varney was undoubtedly dangerous, not to mention a bully, a sadist, and actively harmful to the physical health of those around him. What he was not, though, was particularly quick on the uptake. He stared at the marquis as the penny dropped, and dropped, and kept on dropping. Finally, in disbelief, he asked, “I have to fight
her?
”

“Yes,” said the leather woman. “Unless you’d like a little nap, first.” Varney began to laugh: a manic giggle. He stopped laughing a moment later, when the woman kicked him, hard, in the solar plexus, and he toppled like a tree.

Near his hand, on the floor, was the crowbar he had used in the fight with the dwarf. He grabbed it, slammed it into the woman’s face—or would have, had she not ducked out of the way. She clapped her open hands onto his ears, very fast. The crowbar went flying across the room. Still reeling from the pain in his ears, Varney pulled a knife from his boot. He was not entirely sure what happened after that: only that the world swung out from under him, and then he was lying, face down, on the ground, with blood coming from his ears, and his own knife at his throat, while the marquis de Carabas was saying,

“Enough!”

The woman looked up, still holding Varney’s knife to his throat. “Well?” she said.

“Very impressive,” said the marquis. Door nodded.

Richard was thunderstruck: it had been like watching Emma Peel, Bruce Lee, and a particularly vicious tornado, all rolled into one and sprinkled with a generous helping of a mongoose killing a king cobra. That was how she had moved. That was how she had fought.

Richard normally found displays of real violence unnerving. But he found watching this woman in action exhilarating, as if she were finding a part of him he had not known existed. It seemed utterly right, in this unreal mirror of the London he had known, that she should be here and that she should be fighting so dangerously and so well.

She was part of London Below. He understood that now. And as he thought that, he thought about London Above, and a world in which no one fought like this—no one needed to fight like this—a world of safety and of sanity and, for a moment, the homesickness engulfed him like a fever.

The woman looked down at Varney. “Thank you, Mister Varney,” she said, politely. “I’m afraid we won’t be needing your services after all.” She got off him, and put his knife away in her belt.

“And you are called?” asked the marquis.

“I’m called Hunter,” she said.

Nobody said anything. Then Door spoke, hesitantly, “
The
Hunter?”

“That’s right,” said Hunter, and she brushed the dust of the floor from her leather leggings. “I’m back.”

From somewhere a bell sounded, twice, a deep bonging noise that made Richard’s teeth vibrate. “Five minutes,” muttered the marquis. Then he said, to the remains of the crowd, “I think we’ve found our bodyguard. Thank you all very much. Nothing more to see.”

Hunter walked over to Door, and looked her up and down. “Can you stop people from killing me?” asked Door. Hunter inclined her head toward Richard. “I saved
his
life three times today, crossing the bridge, coming to the market.”

Varney, who had stumbled to his feet, picked up the crowbar with his mind. The marquis watched him do it; he said nothing.

The ghost of a smile hovered about Door’s lips. “That’s funny,” she said. “Richard thought you were a—”

Hunter never found out what Richard thought she was. The bar came hurtling toward her head. She simply reached out a hand and caught it: it
thwapped
, satisfyingly, into the palm of her hand.

She walked over to Varney. “Is this yours?” she asked. He bared his teeth at her, yellow and black and brown. “Right now,” said Hunter, “we’re under Market Truce. But if you try something like that again, I’ll waive the truce, and I’ll break off both your arms and make you carry them home in your teeth. Now,” she continued, bending his wrist behind his back, “say sorry, nicely.”

“Ow,” said Varney.

“Yes?” she said, encouragingly.

He spat it out as if it were choking him. “I’m sorry.” She let him go. Varney backed away to a safe distance, plainly scared and furious, watching Hunter. When he reached the door to the Food Halls, he hesitated, and shouted, “You’re dead. You’re fucking dead, you are!” in a voice that hovered on the edge of tears, and then he turned, and he ran from the room.

“Amateurs,” sighed Hunter.

They walked back through the store the way that Richard had come. The bell he had heard was now tolling deeply and continually. When they came upon it, he saw that it was a huge brass bell, suspended on a wooden frame, with a rope suspended from the clapper. It was being tolled by a large black man, wearing the black robes of a Dominican monk, and it had been set up next to Harrods’ gourmet jelly bean stand.

Impressive as the market had been to watch, Richard found the speed at which it was being dismantled, broken down, and put away even more impressive. All evidence that it had ever been there was vanishing: stalls were being taken apart, loaded onto people’s backs, hauled off into the streets. Richard noticed Old Bailey, his arms filled with his crude signs and with bird cages, stumbling out of the store. The old man waved happily at Richard and vanished off into the night.