Neverwhere

SIXTEEN

They walked for hours in silence, following the winding stone road downwards. Richard was still in pain; he was limping, and experiencing a strange mental and physical turmoil: feelings of defeat and betrayal roiled within him, which, combined with the near loss of his life to Lamia, the damage inflicted by Mr. Vandemar, and his experiences on the plank far above, left him utterly wrecked. Yet, he was certain that his experiences of the last day paled into something small and insignificant when placed beside whatever the marquis had experienced. So he said nothing.

The marquis kept silent, as every word he uttered hurt his throat. He was content to let it heal, and to concentrate on Hunter. He knew that, should he let his attention flag for even a moment, she would know it, and she would be away, or she would turn on them. So he said nothing.

Hunter walked a little ahead of them. She, also, said nothing.

After some hours, they reached the bottom of Down Street. The street ended in a vast Cyclopean gateway-built of enormous rough stone blocks. Giants built that gate, thought Richard, half-remembered tales of long-dead kings of mythical London churning in his head, tales of King Bran and of the giants Gog and Magog, with hands the size of oak trees, and severed heads as big as hills. The portal itself had long since rusted and crumbled away. Fragments of it could be seen in the mud beneath their feet, dangling uselessly from a rusted hinge on the side of the gate. The hinge was taller than Richard.

The marquis gestured for Hunter to stop. He moistened his lips, and said, "This gate marks the end of Down Street, and the beginning of the labyrinth. And beyond the labyrinth waits the Angel Islington. And in the labyrinth is the Beast."

"I still don't understand," said Richard. "Islington. I actually met him. It. Him. He's an angel. I mean, a real angel."

The marquis smiled, without humor. "When angels go bad, Richard, they go worse than anyone. Remember, Lucifer used to be an angel."

Hunter watched Richard with nut brown eyes. "The place you visited is Islington's citadel, and also its prison," she said. It was the first thing she had said in hours. "It cannot leave."

The marquis addressed her directly. "I assume that the labyrinth and the Beast are there to discourage visitors."

She inclined her head. "So I would assume also."

Richard turned on the marquis, all his anger and impotence and frustration spewing out of him in one angry blast. "Why are you even talking to her? Why is she still with us? She was a traitor-she tried to make us think that you were the traitor."

"And I saved your life, Richard Mayhew," said Hunter, quietly. "Many times. On the bridge. At the gap. On the board up there." She looked into his eyes, and it was Richard who looked away.

Something echoed through the tunnels: a bellow, or a roar. The hairs on the back of Richard's neck prickled. It was far away, but that was the only thing about it in which he could take any comfort. He knew that sound: he had heard it in his dreams, but now it sounded neither like a bull nor like a boar; it sounded like a lion; it sounded like a dragon.

"The labyrinth is one of the oldest places in London Below," said the marquis. "Before King Lud founded the village on the Thames marshes, there was a labyrinth here."

"No Beast, though," said Richard.

"Not then."

Richard hesitated. The distant roaring began again. "I… I think I've had dreams about the Beast," he said.

The marquis raised an eyebrow. "What kind of dreams?"

"Bad ones," said Richard.

The marquis thought about this, eyes flickering. And then he said, "Look, Richard. I'm taking Hunter. But if you want to wait here, well, no one could accuse you of cowardice."

Richard shook his head. Sometimes there is nothing you can do. "I'm not turning back. Not now. They've got Door."

"Right," said the marquis. "Well then. Shall we go?"

Hunter's perfect caramel lips twisted into a sneer. "You'd have to be mad to go in there," she said. "Without the angel's token you could never find your way. Never get past the boar."

The marquis reached his hand under his poncho blanket and produced the little obsidian statue he had taken from Door's father's study. "One of these, you mean?" he asked. The marquis felt, then, that much of what he had gone through in the previous week was made up for by the expression on Hunter's face. They went through the gate, into the labyrinth.

Door's arms were bound behind her back, and Mr. Vandemar walked behind her, one huge beringed hand resting on her shoulder, pushing her along. Mr. Croup scuttled on ahead of them, holding the talisman he had taken from her on high, and peering edgily from side to side, like a particularly pompous weasel on its way to raid the henhouse.

The labyrinth itself was a place of pure madness. It was built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over the millennia, and entered the world of the lost and the forgotten. The two men and the girl walked over cobbles, and through mud, and through dung of various kinds, and over rotting wooden boards. They walked through daylight and night, through gaslit streets, and sodium-lit streets, and streets lit with burning rushes and links. It was an ever-changing place: and each path divided and circled and doubled back on itself.

Mr. Croup felt the tug of the talisman, and let it take him where it wanted to go. They walked down a tiny alleyway, which had once been part of a Victorian "rookery"-a slum comprised in equal parts of theft and penny gin, of twopenny-halfpenny squalor and threepenny sex-and they heard it, snuffling and snorting somewhere nearby. And then it bellowed, deep and dark. Mr. Croup hesitated, before hurrying forward, up a short wooden staircase; and then, at the end of the alley, he stopped, squinting about him, before he led them down some steps into a long stone tunnel that had once run across the Fleet Marshes, in the Templars' time. Door said, "You're afraid, aren't you?" Croup glared at her. "Hush your tongue." She smiled, although she did not feel like smiling. "You're scared that your safe-conduct token won't get you past the Beast. What are you planning now? To kidnap Islington? Sell both of us to the highest bidder?"

"Quiet," said Mr. Vandemar. But Mr. Croup simply chuckled; and Door knew then that the Angel Islington was not her friend.

She began to shout. "Hey! Beast! Here!" Mr. Vandemar cuffed her head and knocked her against the wall. "Said to be quiet," he told her, calmly. She tasted blood in her mouth and spat scarlet on the mud. Then she parted her lips to begin shouting once more. Mr. Vandemar, anticipating this, had taken a handkerchief from his pocket, and he forced it into her mouth. She tried to bite his thumb as he did so, but it made no appreciable impression on him.

"Now you'll be quiet," he told her. Mr. Vandemar was very proud of his handkerchief, which was spattered with green and brown and black and had originally belonged to an overweight snuff dealer in the 1820s, who had died of apoplexy and been buried with his handkerchief in his pocket. Mr. Vandemar still occasionally found fragments of snuff merchant in it, but it was, he felt, a fine handkerchief for all that. They continued in silence.

Richard made another entry in his mental diary. Today, he thought, I've survived walking the plank, the kiss of death, and a lecture on inflicting pain. Right now, I'm on my way through a labyrinth with a mad bastard who came back from the dead and a bodyguard who turned out to be a… whatever the opposite of a bodyguard is. I am so far out of my depth that… Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

They were wading through a narrow passage of wet, marshy ground, between dark stone walls. The marquis held both the token and the crossbow, and he took care to walk, at all times, about ten feet behind Hunter. Richard, in the lead, was carrying Hunter's Beast spear and a yellow flare the marquis had produced from beneath his blanket, which illuminated the stone walls and the mud, and he walked well in front of Hunter. The marshland stank, and huge mosquitoes had begun to settle upon Richard's arms and legs and face, biting him painfully and raising huge, itching welts. Neither Hunter nor the marquis so much as mentioned the mosquitoes.

Richard was beginning to suspect that they were quite lost. It did not help his mood any that there were a large number of dead people in the marsh: leathery preserved bodies, discolored skeletal bones, and pallid, water-swollen corpses. He wondered how long the corpses had been there, and whether they had been killed by the Beast or by the mosquitoes. He said nothing as they walked on for another five minutes and eleven mosquito bites, and then he called out, "I think we're lost. We've been through this way before."

The marquis held up the token. "No. We're fine," he said. "The token is leading us straight. Clever little thing."

"Yeah," said Richard, who was not impressed. "Very clever."

It was then that the marquis stepped, barefoot, on the shattered rib cage of a half-buried corpse, puncturing his heel, and causing him to stumble. The little black statue went flying through the air and tumbled into the black marsh with the satisfied plop of a leaping fish returning to the water. The marquis righted himself and pointed the crossbow at Hunter's back.

"Richard," he called. "I dropped it. Can you come back here?" Richard walked back, holding the flare high, hoping for the glint of flame on obsidian, seeing nothing but wet mud. "Get down into the mud and look," said the marquis.

Richard groaned.

"You've dreamed of the Beast, Richard," said the marquis. "Do you really want to encounter it?"

Richard thought about this for not very long, then he pushed the haft of the bronze spear into the surface of the marsh and stood the flare up into the mud beside it, illuminating the surface of the marsh with a fitful amber light. He got down on his hands and knees in the bog, searching for the statue. He ran his hands over the surface of the marsh, hoping not to encounter any dead faces or hands. "It's hopeless. It could be anywhere."

"Keep looking," said the marquis.

Richard tried to remember how he usually found things. First he let his mind go as blank as he could, then he let his gaze wander over the surface of the marsh, purposelessly, idly. Something glittered on the boggy surface, five feet to his left. It was the Beast statue. "I can see it," called Richard.

He floundered toward it through the mud. The little glassy beast was head-down in a puddle of dark water. Perhaps the mud was disturbed by Richard's approach; more likely, as Richard was convinced forever after, it was just the sheer cussedness of the material world. Whatever the cause, he was almost next to the little statue when the marsh made a noise that sounded like a giant stomach rumbling, and a large bubble of gas floated up and popped noxiously and obscenely beside the talisman, which vanished beneath the water.

Richard reached the place where the talisman had been and pushed his arms deep into the mud, searching for it wildly, not caring what else his fingers might encounter. It was no use. It was gone forever. "What do we do now?" asked Richard.

The marquis sighed. "Get back over here, and we'll figure out something."

Richard said, quietly, "Too late."

It was coming toward them so slowly, so ponderously that he thought for a fragment of a second that it was old, sick, even dying. That was his first thought. And then he realized how much ground it was covering as it approached, mud and foul water splashing up from its hooves as it ran, and he realized how wrong he had been in thinking it slow. Thirty feet away from them the Beast slowed, and stopped, with a grunt. Its flanks were steaming. It bellowed, in triumph, and in challenge. There were broken spears, and shattered swords, and rusted knives, bristling from its sides and back. The yellow flare light glinted in its red eyes, and on its tusks, and its hooves.

It lowered its massive head. It was some kind of boar, thought Richard, and then realized that that had to be nonsense: no boar could be so huge. It was the size of an ox, of a bull elephant, of a lifetime. It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heartbeats.

Hunter knelt, in one fluid motion, and pulled up the spear from the Fleet Marsh, which released it with a sucking noise. And, in a voice that was pure joy, she said, "Yes. At last."

She had forgotten them all; forgotten Richard down in the mud, and the marquis and his foolish crossbow, and the world. She was delighted and transported, in a perfect place, the world she lived for. Her world contained two things: Hunter, and the Beast. The Beast knew that too. It was the perfect match, the hunter and the hunted. And who was who, and which was which, only time would reveal; time and the dance.

The Beast charged.

Hunter waited until she could see the white spittle dripping from its mouth, and as it lowered its head she stabbed up with the spear; but, as she tried to sink the spear into its side, she understood that she had moved just a fraction of a second too late, and the spear went tumbling out of her numbed hands, and a tusk sharper than the sharpest razor blade opened her side. And as she fell beneath its monstrous weight, she felt its sharp hooves crushing down on her arm, and her hip, and her ribs. And then it was gone, vanished back into the darkness, and the dance was done.

Mr. Croup was more relieved than he would have admitted to be through the labyrinth. But he and Mr. Vandemar were through it, unharmed, as was their prey. There was a rock face in front of them, an oaken double door set in the rock face, and an oval mirror set in the right-hand door.

Mr. Croup touched the mirror with one grimy hand. The surface of the mirror clouded at his touch, seethed for a moment, bubbling and roiling like a vat of boiling quicksilver, and then was still. The Angel Islington looked out at them. Mr. Croup cleared his throat. "Good morning, sir. It is us, and we have the young lady you sent us to fetch for you."

"And the key?" The angel's gentle voice seemed to come from all around them.

"Hanging around her swanlike neck," said Mr. Croup, a little more anxiously than he intended to.

"Then enter," said the angel. The oak doors swung open at his words, and they went in.

It had all happened so fast. The Beast had come out of the darkness, Hunter had snatched the spear, and it had charged her and disappeared back into the darkness.

Richard strained to hear the Beast. He could hear nothing but, somewhere close to him, the slow drip, drip of water, and the high, maddening whine of mosquitoes. Hunter lay on her back in the mud. One arm was twisted at a peculiar angle. He crawled toward her, through the mire. "Hunter?" he whispered. "Can you hear me?"

There was a pause. And then, a whisper so faint he thought for a moment he had imagined it, "Yes."

The marquis was still some yards away, standing stock-still beside a wall. Now he called out, "Richard-stay where you are. The creature's just biding its time. It'll be back."

Richard ignored him. He spoke to Hunter. "Are you… " he paused. It seemed such a stupid thing to say. He said it anyway. "Are you going to be all right?" She laughed, then, with blood-flecked lips, and shook her head. "Are there any medical people down here?" he asked the marquis.

"Not in the sense you're thinking of. We have some healers, a handful of leeches and chirurgeons… "

Hunter coughed, then, and winced. Bright red, arterial blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. The marquis edged a little closer. "Do you keep your life hidden anywhere, Hunter?" he asked.

"I'm a hunter," she whispered, disdainfully. "We don't go in for that kind of thing… " She pulled air into her lungs with an effort, then exhaled, as if the simple effort of breathing were becoming too much for her. "Richard, have you ever used a spear?"

"No."

"Take it," she whispered.

"But… "

"Do it." Her voice was low and urgent. "Pick it up. Hold it at the blunt end."

Richard picked up the fallen spear. He held it at the blunt end. "I knew that part," he told her.

A glimmer of a smile breathed across her face. "I know."

"Look," said Richard, feeling, not for the first time, like the only sane person in a madhouse. "Why don't we just stay very quiet. Maybe it'll go away. We'll try to get you some help." And, not for the first time, the person he was talking to ignored him utterly.

"I did a bad thing, Richard Mayhew," she whispered, sadly. "I did a very bad thing. Because I wanted to be the one to kill the Beast. Because I needed the spear." And then, impossibly, she began to haul herself to her feet. Richard had not realized how badly she had been injured; nor could he now imagine what pain she must be in: he could see her right arm hanging uselessly, a white shard of bone protruding horribly from the skin. Blood ran from a cut in her side. Her rib cage looked wrong.

"Stop it," he hissed, futilely. "Get down."

With her left hand she pulled a knife from her belt, put it into her right hand, closed the nerveless fingers around the hilt. "I did a bad thing," she repeated. "And now I make amends."

She began humming, then. Humming high and humming low, until she found the note that made the walls and the pipes and the room reverberate, and she hummed that note until it felt like the entire labyrinth must be echoing to her hum. And then, sucking the air into her shattered rib cage, she shouted, "Hey. Big boy? Where are you?" There came no reply. No noise but the low drip of water. Even the mosquitoes were quiet.

"Maybe it's… gone away," said Richard, gripping the spear so tightly that it hurt his hands.

"I doubt it," muttered the marquis.

"Come on, you bastard," Hunter screamed. "Are you scared?"

There was a deep bellow from off front of them, and the Beast came out of the dark, and it charged once more. This time there could be no room for mistakes. "The dance," whispered Hunter. "The dance is not yet over."

As the Beast came toward her, its horns lowered, she shouted, "Now-Richard. Strike! Under and up! Now!" before the Beast hit her and her words turned into a wordless scream.

Richard saw the Beast come out from the darkness, into the light of the flare. It all happened very slowly. It was like a dream. It was like all his dreams. The Beast was so close he could smell the shit-and-blood animal stench of it, so close he could feel its warmth. And Richard stabbed with the spear, as hard as he could, pushing up into its side and letting it sink in.

A bellow, then, or a roar, of anguish, and hatred, and pain. And then silence.

He could hear his heart, thudding in his ears, and he could hear water dripping. The mosquitoes began to whine once more. He realized he was still holding tight to the haft of the spear, although the blade of it was buried deep within the body of the immobile Beast. He let go of it, and staggered around the beast, looking for Hunter. She was trapped beneath the Beast. It occurred to him that if he moved her, pulling her out from under it, he might cause her death, so instead he pushed, as hard as he could, against the warm dead flanks of the Beast, trying to move it. It was like trying to push-start a Sherman tank, but eventually, awkwardly, he tumbled it half-off her.

Hunter lay on her back, staring up at the darkness above them. Her eyes were open, and unfocussed, and Richard knew, somehow, that they saw nothing at all. "Hunter?" he said.

"I'm still here, Richard Mayhew." Her voice sounded almost detached. She made no effort to find him with her eyes, no effort to focus. "Is it dead?"

"I think so. It's not moving."

And then she laughed; it was a strange sort of laugh, as if she had just heard the funniest joke that ever the world told a hunter. And, between her spasms of laughter, and the wet, racking coughs that interrupted them, she shared the joke with him. "You killed the Beast," she said. "So now you're the greatest hunter in London Below. The Warrior… " And then she stopped laughing. "I can't feel my hands. Take my right hand." Richard fumbled under the Beast's body, and wrapped his hand around Hunter's chill fingers. They felt so small, suddenly. "Is there still a knife in my hand?" she whispered.

"Yes." He could feel it, cold and sticky.

"Take the knife. She's yours."

"I don't want your… "

"Take her." He pried the knife free from her fingers. "She's yours now," whispered Hunter. Nothing was moving, save her lips; and her eyes were clouding. "She's always looked after me. Clean my blood off her, though… mustn't rust the blade… a hunter always looks after her weapons." She gulped air. "Now… touch the Beast's blood… to your eyes and tongue… "

Richard was not sure that he had heard her correctly, nor that he believed what he had heard. "What?"

Richard had not noticed the marquis approach, but now he spoke intently into Richard's ear. "Do it, Richard. She's right. It'll get you through the labyrinth. Do it."

Richard put his hand down to the spear, ran it up the haft until he felt the Beast's hide and the warm stickiness of the Beast's blood. Feeling slightly foolish, he touched his hand to his tongue, tasting the salt of the creature's blood: it did not, to his surprise, revolt him. It tasted utterly natural, like tasting an ocean. He touched his bloody fingers to his eyes, where the blood stung like sweat.

Then, "I did it," he told her.

"That's good," whispered Hunter. She said nothing more.

The marquis de Carabas reached out his hand and closed her eyes. Richard wiped Hunter's knife on his shirt. It was what she had told him to do. It saved having to think.

"Better get a move on," said the marquis, standing up.

"We can't just leave her here."

"We can. We can come back for the body later."

Richard polished the blade as hard as he could on his shirt. He was crying, now, but he had not noticed. "And if there isn't any later?"

"Then we'll just have to hope that someone disposes of all our remains. Including the Lady Door's. And she must be getting tired of waiting for us." Richard looked down. He wiped the last of Hunter's blood off her knife, and put it through his belt. Then he nodded. "You go," said de Carabas. "I'll follow as fast as I can."

Richard hesitated; and then, as best he could, he ran.

Perhaps it was the Beast's blood that did it; he certainly had no other explanation. Whatever the reason, he ran straight and true through the labyrinth, which no longer held any mysteries for him. He felt that he knew every twist, every path, every alley and lane and runnel of it. He ran, stumbling and falling, and still running, exhausted, through the labyrinth, his blood pounding in his temples. A rhyme coursed through his head, as he ran, pounding and echoing to the rhythm of his feet. It was something he had heard as a child. This aye night, this aye night Every night and all Fire and fleet and candlelight And Christ receive thy soul.

The words went around and around, dirgelike, in his head. Fire and fleet and candlelight…

At the end of the labyrinth was a sheer granite cliff, and set in the cliff were high wooden double doors. There was an oval mirror hanging on one of the doors. The doors were closed. He touched the wood, and the door opened, silently, to his touch.

Richard went inside.