The Deavys (25 page)

She smiled up at him, then over at her sisters. “Don't worry. Just watch me.” She turned back to the squatting, sputtering hoofin. “I'm going to targle the hell out of it.”

An approaching Ord would have been spotted and bathed in total, mind-numbing horror long before it could have been able to reach the hoofin. But N/Ice was no Ord. Furthermore, she was exceptionally quick, a quality Simwan attributed to all the upside-down running around she did with her sisters on the ceiling of their room (that and soccer practice). When it finally did catch sight of the onrushing Deavy sister, the hoofin reacted with a mixture of surprise and outrage. So startled was the nightmare that it pulled itself out of the opening as it turned to confront her charge.

The path to the Way In was clear. If N/Ice could distract the hoofin for just a couple of moments or two, Simwan saw that there was a good chance he and Pithfwid and his other two sisters could duck inside. Beyond appraising the possibility, he never gave it serious consideration. Deavys stayed
together
, no matter how critical the quest, no matter how grave the danger.

Heedless of anyone or any thing that might be near enough to overhear, Rose and Amber were suddenly out in the open, wildly cheering on their sister.

“Go get it, N/Ice!” Amber yelled.

“Targle its ears off!” Rose bellowed as forcefully as she could.

Simwan added nothing. He couldn't. He was too concerned with what might happen to his sister if she failed. A hoofin was no childhood bad dream. It was a mature, developed, full-formed nightmare that, once it got a hold on you, would never let go. The third volume of the
Field Guide to Dreams
described it as a kind of mental malaria: leaving for a while only to return later again and again at full strength to torment the sleep of the afflicted. So while Amber and Rose formed a passionate cheering section of their own, urging on their sister's efforts, Simwan found he could only watch and worry.

As for Pithfwid, he sat motionless, staring as only a cat can stare, utterly intent and unblinking. Cats did not cheer—at least, not out loud. But there was no question that he was as concerned for N/Ice's safety as were her human siblings.

The hoofin was no slouch (a slouch being only a One-G nightmare), but speed and quickness were not its forte. It was charged with staying in one place, guarding an entrance, and making sure only authorized visitors were granted admittance. With the speed and unexpectedness of her attack, N/Ice had already accomplished the task of getting its butt removed from the Way In. That wouldn't matter if she failed to finish the job, Simwan knew. In that event, the hoofin would simply resume its stance as guardian of the Way In. Or rather, resume its seat.

The ugly trunk straightened and tried to curl around her neck. Demonstrating the agility of a legendary female samurai (and the lessons she had learned in ballet class), N/Ice spun clear of the thrust. Rising into the air, she stabbed one hand, fingers extended, in the hoofin's direction. A burst of white lightning (the non-imbibable kind) shot from her fingers to strike the nightmare square between its middle eye and its trunk. Stunned, the hoofin staggered backward, but quickly recovered. Letting out a moan terrifying enough to stun the soul of the most resistant Ord, it reached for her with long, flexible arms that ended in powerful grasping fingers. In an instant of no significant moment, Simwan noted that the nightmare had dirty fingernails.

Flipping parallel to the ground, N/Ice spun clear of the clutching hands. This time she delivered a double burst of energy straight to the center of the hoofin's body. Shocked, it started to tremble, then to shake violently. Eyes wide with realization, Simwan shouted a warning as he dropped flat onto the dry, pebbly creek bed.

“Look out! It's gonna blow!”

A second (or maybe three) later, there was a bright, silent explosion as the nightmare blew apart. Bits and pieces of fear flew in all directions. As he covered his head with his hands, one of them struck Simwan on the right shoulder. It was a small fear, but quite intense. It caused him to whimper loudly for a moment or two before it dissipated.

As the rest of the flying fear faded, he scrambled to his feet and ran forward. The hoofin had been well and truly targled, all right, but—there was no sign of his sister.

“N/Ice! N/Ice, where are you? Are you okay?” As Amber and Rose closed the distance behind him, a small black-and-gold streak shot past them all: a linear feline.

Pithfwid found her lying on her back at the first bend in the creek bed. She was sitting up slowly, one hand resting against her forehead. Her anxious siblings crowded around her, eager to offer their support.

“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
any
body, 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
that
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.”