Transmuted (8 page)

“And if not?” Hawke asked. A blunt enough question.

“Then I have no doubt that someone there will know more,” I replied. “The originator of the demand may not be in residence, but a man intending to facilitate the transaction might. Regardless, someone there will know something.”

Hawke did not argue this for the same reason that Zylphia nodded in simple acceptance. For the right price, near anything could be acquired through the Underground.

“If we’re not dealing with a toff,” I added, bracing against the back of the empty sofa, “and I have some suspicion as to that—”

“Because the Underground strings them up right good,” Zylphia interjected, with slightly more relish than perhaps the subject deserved.

I waved it away with a rueful smile. “You’ve been spending too much time with Maddie Ruth.”

She didn’t deny it.

“However,” I said with care, “although the Underground typically loathe when toffs muck about in their business, they do make quite a lot of money from them wealthy enough to send agents to do their dickering for them. That means we can’t discount a well-heeled thumb upon the problem.”

“Wise,” Ashmore said. “’Tis likely we shall find an informant who can at least point us in the right direction.”

“We will need trade for it,” Hawke said flatly. “Pound for pound, flesh or coin.”

“Or even favor,” Ashmore added.

“We will be forced to negotiate, ’tis true,” I said. “But we won’t know for what until we know what exactly we’re looking for. A diamond is one matter, the thief another, and the motive a third. Each might very well lead us in a different direction. So let’s start by finding a guide, shall we?”

Hawke studied me over the rim of his snifter. “And the dogs?”

There was a challenge if I’d ever heard one.

I straightened. “Of course, we believe the Ferrymen dogs have gone Underground.”

“That alone makes this endeavor a dangerous one,” Zylphia pointed out.

“Not alone,” Ashmore corrected.

“Near enough as to make no difference,” she sniffed. “The Underground’s got fists and shanks, but the dogs have tooth and claw and a madness runs deep. Don’t count on people around to save you from one if they get your scent.”

Of course, we didn’t expect the dogs to know we were coming. As a rule, the gangs stayed out of the Underground—nasty as the Ferrymen were, even without the serum that had twisted them, there were them Underground what made a gang’s shankers look like children playing with sticks.

I nodded solemnly. “And that’s something to consider,” I said. Ashmore’s gaze sharpened on me. “If the gangs usually stay out of the Underground, then who among them is sheltering the Ferrymen? Are they hoping none will take note?”

“A good question,” Hawke acknowledged. Damn my internals for shivering all delighted at what I heard as a compliment.

“What’s to keep them from turning against you?” Zylphia asked.

I assumed she meant the general populace of the Underground. “Ashmore will have to refrain from his ever so educated dialect,” I replied, smiling when his gaze turned to the ceiling in a display of exasperation. “But all in all, collectors come and go when they’ve guides and reason.” I patted my hands together, as though I’d done a job well. True enough that I had, even though it were done in years past. “I’ve never been accosted once, coming or going. If we obey the parlance of the Underground, little should change.”

“Nevertheless,” Hawke cut in, “we’ll go prepared for a fight.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “How else does one enter the Underground?”

“Dead,” Zylphia volunteered.

A muscle jumped in Hawke’s jaw; surprising me, for I’d done nothing to get his goat this time.

“Or snatched,” Ashmore added.

Hawke drained the last of his glass. “Or lured to a trap,” he finished, a harsh rasp. Well. Not even I could argue with that.

Chapter Eight

The entrance to the Thames Tunnel was a dual arch carved into a leveled facing, with stairs leading down to the shafts. According to the schedule, the Wapping train had already left for Rotherhithe. We would be free to traverse the tunnel for some time.

Come evening, the trains ferrying passengers rather than stock slowed. It was as good a time to brave the tunnel as any.

So it was that four souls stole into the Thames Tunnel, not much more to make of us than a hunched guide with a blackened smile, two taller blokes of confident stride and the shorter urchin that was all I passed for. While there was no real reason for Ashmore and Hawke to hide their features, we all agreed to go with as little overt distinction as possible.

I’d once more taken my hair black with a thick coating of soot from the fireplace, and pinned it into a crown I could fit under my street boy’s cap. My togs were plain and patchy, and the bit of chill to the spring night seemed oddly heavy when caught by the fog that swirled around us.

Strapped to my thighs, out in the open where any might see, I carried two blades. Ashmore was not quite so obvious, but I knew his coat masked a brace of pistols.

If Hawke carried any weapons, he did not share that knowledge with me.

Given the strength with which I had seen him act, I doubted that he would need any. Still, the fine tenets of control he exerted over the thing within him could not possibly respond well to violence. A weapon—a pistol, perhaps—might be better for him than any acts of physical prowess.

It was too late to consider this now.

Our guide went by the name of Saltlick Sims—a moniker earned whilst manning a sailing ship in his youth. He’d developed a habit of licking blocks of the stuff, as though it were sugar.

Of my three guides, he was the only who still lingered about. As I’d expected, one of my past guides had gone toes-up. The other had not been at her usuals.

He strode into the yawning mouth of the Thames River Tunnel without halt or hitch. He was a hunched figure of a man, with stringy black hair gone gray from age or coating of heavens knew what, and eyes so pale as to look nearly diamond white in the dark.

When he laughed—and he laughed often—it was as dull knives scraped over rusted iron.

He chuckled now as the coal-black smoke pouring out of the tunnel swallowed him. The sound carried back in muffled echoes.

Sweat dampened my face. No doubt it turned the skin along my forehead and cheeks into a blackened smear. I had not developed the resistance to the fog that them what had been born and bred within it had, and so I often struggled not to clear my throat. Such a sound was as like as declaring one’s self ripe for plucking.

What I felt at that moment was similar to that of an urge to flee, but worse. Harsher. I couldn’t breathe but for the overwhelming memory of the place.

I had traversed this very tunnel more than once, but the most recent adventures left my palms stinging with remembered fear.

Before my time, the tunnel had been used primarily for pedestrians. Cobbles had smoothed the floor, and railings guided them what wanted to stroll from one side of the Thames to the other.

It had, in the end, fallen into disuse, and then disrepair. What had once been the very gem of engineering—a feat that bore a tunnel below the river without need of bridge or sky ferry— became instead the common haunt of prostitutes, tunnel-thieves and vermin.

The Metropolitan District Railways now maintained the tunnel only inasmuch as necessary for the trains to pass through on laid track. Lanterns affixed to the wall provided lights to see by at regular, if long, intervals.

What authorities didn’t know was how the tunnel’s most common—and most secretive— residents preferred the dark.

My own father had built his laboratory within; a secret I had not been aware of until lured there. I still remembered the path. Opium muddled so much of my past, but this lingered.

And while much of the terror I’d experienced in that time was softened by the same muddling glow of opium’s caress, even facing the spewing black smoke from the outside of the tunnel was enough to dry my throat, twitch my fingers.

I could not breathe. It hurt, like a pounding force within my head, numbing my limbs until they felt as lead.

I wanted that opium again; it was, my senses assured me, the only way that I would emerge unscathed from that what I attempted now.

Just a bit of the draught, so bitter that even cinnamon wouldn’t soften the sting. Or perhaps a nibble of the tar, sharp and acrid upon the tongue.

Anything would do.

I did not know how near I was to folding until a large hand clamped over my eyes. A breath, a shuddered reflex, and that strength my knees lost was suddenly replaced by the bracing prop of a man’s body behind me.

“Move,” Hawke ordered, a hard sound in my ear. His breath stirred the fine hairs at my temple; it was warm, almost uncomfortably so. His temperature blazed against my skin, even those parts of me covered.

In the wake of such warmth—neither gentle nor forgiving, but the sort that blistered—my fear dwindled. And with it, the helplessness that had taken the strength from my legs.

The rational part of my mind understood that among Hawke’s gifts, the art of effortless authority—the will to simply order away one’s demons—counted as his most powerful. A ringmaster did not achieve such agency without the confidence required to ensure it.

But the part of me that responded to him with such visceral honesty always hoped that it was I and I alone that suffered such sensitivity to his presence.

Of course, therein was the issue, wasn’t it? I had never been the only fool to fall for the Devil’s tricks.

“Hurry,” Ashmore called ahead of us. “Our guide won’t wait.”

A dry, somewhat manic laugh dotted this assertion.

Hawke said nothing else. He simply uncovered my eyes, stripping away the intimacy achieved by dint of his palm, his breath—his presence.

Either I would walk the next step under my own power, or I would not.

My jaw set.

I took the step that brought me closer to that tunnel. Gooseflesh rippled down my arms.

Another step, and then another, and soon I was swallowed by that yawning mouth. Although my senses could not paint for me a picture of that time before, the smell that assaulted me reeked of familiarity—and of awful things within. Coal mixed with the humid wash of steam, and the hair-curling stench of sewage, many times stronger than the fragrance attached to the notice I carried.

The lingering miasma of putrefaction filled the nose, gathered on the tongue and huddled there; a foul rock that could neither be broken nor swallowed.

Saltlick Sims had produced from somewhere about his shabby person a lantern, and this provided somewhat more guide than the trace of light from lamps lit sporadically between girders.

That feeling of walking through a dungeon lingered. It was dank and all too humid, and I knew that Ashmore felt it, for he wiped at his forehead with his sleeve often.

By the time we achieved our end, we’d all but drowned in the muck of sweat and coalsmoke caught on damp heat.

Hawke stayed close behind me, Ashmore in front. I didn’t need to ask to know they’d done it a’purpose. If ought came at us—footpad or thief, beastman or worse—it would come from before us or behind us.

The air congealed in my throat. When the cravings I had never truly lost became a pain in my head, echoed in the trudge of my feet, I simply lowered my sight to the broken cobbles and laid track, concentrated on breathing, and walked.

Remnants of the tunnel’s history lingered. Little had changed since my last excursion. Rubbish discarded along the track line, rotting cloth and the unsightly remains of things I dared not look too closely at. The tunnel had been cleared for the trains over twenty years ago, but that sort of business never stopped the brave, the terminally unintelligent, or the desperate from meandering through.

Nor did it keep the Underground from utilizing it as a thoroughfare.

Sims croaked a sound that might have been another one of his odd chuckles merged with the need to clear one’s throat. Even them used to the fog’s sting might find the smoke caught within here all too thick.

When he stopped, Ashmore did the same.

Sims loosed a long, near-skeletal hand from his rags to beckon. It flashed like a ghost’s in the flickering light.

Both Ashmore and I took a step forward. Hawke caught me by the arm.

I shot him an impatient frown. “One of us will have to see to this.”

“Let
him
.” His features were near impossible to read in most circumstances. The shadows concealing them now gave him a torturous cast, drawing his strong nose and the harsh planes of his jaw into a caricature of a mask.

I shook off Hawke’s grasp. “Enough,” I said sharply, seizing the back of Ashmore’s coat. His step halted. “I refuse to sit back and play beauty to your
Le roi Charmant
.”

No sooner had I snapped the rebuke than my tutor cast me a startled look over his shoulder.

The amusement that flickered to life behind a mask of soot and sweat surprised me.

While Ashmore was the more approachable of my escorts, with the breeding of a gentleman and the manners of one many more times patient than I, laughter came hard to him. The sound of his chuckles, rare as they ever were, seemed slightly off-balance, as though he was unused to it.

When he did succumb, often caught by surprise, I did so enjoy it.

This time, however, we had not the luxury. Farther down the way, Sims watched in puzzlement as my tutor bent over, hands braced upon his knees, and laughed.

Hawke glowered. “Stuff your mouth, Ashmore. You’ll summon flies.”

Still chortling, Ashmore straightened. He wiped his sleeve over his eyes. “A beauty, a King Charming, and a Beast.” He sighed, apparently much taken with the idea. “That’s a rich tale for the telling.”

Eccentric bits of humor appealed to the man; those matters wrapped in eclectic bits from literature and lore, those things that turned we human creatures in a cast of caricatures. My use of French literature to paint either escort as a King Charming prepared to save the poor little girl from her circumstances proved too much for Ashmore to swallow.

That he called Hawke the Beast in the tale was too apt.

Never mind that all of us looked the part of the poor wretch covered in soot. Not a one of us was fit for a ball now.

I glared at them both. “My point stands. I’m not a damsel, if you please.”

I could all but hear the ferocity with which Hawke ground his teeth. Whether it was for Ashmore’s amusement or what he’d term my stubbornness, I didn’t know.

If he remained true to form, he would either forbid me outright from taking any initiative or graciously cede me his permission.

I stepped away before he could do either. This was my initiative, not his.“I’ll go first.”

In my wake, I heard Hawke growl something low and unintelligible.

Ashmore sobered. “You think so?”

Whatever Hawke replied, I could not hear it.

Let them sort it out.

Sims slanted me a pale stare from under a heavy brow. “Got it?”

“More than I’d like,” I muttered. At his blank stare, I sighed, fishing in my pocket for the glass chit. “Here. Will this one allow all of us to enter?”

Sims shrugged. “Mebbe.” He barked out a throttled gasp, then turned and spit something foul to the ground beside his feet. “Mebbe so. See who’s up.”

“Up?”

“Up,” Sims repeated, then laughed alarmingly quick; a sharp scrape and then silence. He reached up to the flickering light of a lantern bolted to the wall. When he grasped it, I thought I knew his intent.

It would dip, on a swivel of some kind, and a door should open.

Or perhaps, I thought on reflection, that would be too easy for the Underground.

With remarkable strength and wiry ability, Sims pulled himself full off the floor. Bits of black crumbled off his clothing, and ends unraveling flapped every which way. I half expected his clothing to knock the lantern askew.

The glass surrounding the flame seemed sturdier than that. A small relief. I wasn’t certain what I would do if my guide to the Underground caught fire.

The shadows cast from Sims’ agile climb cavorted in demonic fury. Whatever he did above that lantern, lost in the darkness that did not ease, it resulted in a series of groans and creaks. The mechanisms by which the Underground entries were concealed were always secret, but this particular mechanism was new enough that I’d not seen it done before.

Had they minds of engineering skill with which to manufacture such secrets? They must have. Or perhaps the means to employ such skill.

As our guide fell back to the broken cobble beside me, a crack formed in the wall. It widened in increments. I suspected there were wheels cranked by a series of pulleys, each triggered by whatever lever my guide had pulled.

Although each of the three Underground guides I had known had been unusual types— even fundamentally flawed as a member of the species—I had never made the mistake of underestimating them. To guard the Underground’s secrets was no small thing.

That was why we paid Saltlick Sims well for his time.

Also, that he did not insist I go first into that black hole so formed in the otherwise filthy stone wall was a mark in his favor.

He held up a long-nailed finger by his face, so close to his own eye that I worried such filth might congeal in the sensitive organ. “Keep th’chit ready,” he ordered, grinning his blackened grin. “Foll’it.”

That meant follow. Or near enough to it that it would suffice.

I looked back at Hawke and Ashmore, giving them my best stern stare. “Behave,” I said flatly.

A useless command, really. The set nature of Ashmore’s expression assured me that when it came to it, he would be no problem. Hawke, always ruthless in approach, might be rather more ready than the lot of us.

Though I ducked low and entered the door first, both men remained close to my heels.

I had been through such passages before, though only ever in pursuit of a bounty. When a collector—who did not fear the underground, anyway—had need to enter in such a fashion, the notice torn from the wall served in place of a chit. That generally allowed collectors enough time in the vast Underground to achieve their goals.