Horrabin’s stilts and shoving.
With a shrill, fearful cry the clown lurched forward, tried to get his stilts back under himself, failed, and crashed to the floor as Jacky crossed the last few yards at a sprint; the clown rolled over on his back, his head strained back with yellow teeth showing in a grimace of agony, and Jacky sprang onto the arched-up stomach and drove the dagger down at the proffered white-painted throat.
The blade snapped off as if she’d tried to stab one of the paving stones; and as it clanged away across the floor the red-veined eyes rolled down to look at her over the white point of the chin, and though the bared teeth were flecked with blood, and blood was running out of the painted ears, the mouth curled up in what was, unmistakably, a smile.
“Whatcha got in yer ‘and, yer Worship?” Horrabin whispered. Jacky felt something scrabbling strongly in her still poised right fist, and she convulsively flung away what should have been the bladeless dagger hilt, but was a handful of big black bees, as dark and fat as plums. One stung her hand before she could flick it off, and the others swarmed buzzing and clicking around her head as she rolled off the clown and scrambled away across the floor. Tay was standing in the archway that led to the dock, still holding the torch. “All we can do is run!” he shouted to Jacky. “Come on, before he can get up!”
As Jacky hurried to the arch, pursued by the bees, and joined Tay in a scramble to the end of the dock, they heard Horrabin cry from behind them, “I’ll have you back. Father!
And I’ll make you into something that has to live in a tank!”
The two fugitives had found a raft, crawled onto it, and cast loose. “What happened to the mud on the blade?” Tay asked, in a tone of only mild interest.
“I had to stab one of the creatures down here,” gasped Jacky, slapping a persistent bee into a pasty mess against the wood of the raft. “It seemed to have cold water for blood. I guess it washed the mud off.”
“Ah, well. Good try, anyway.” The dwarf opened a pouch at his belt and took out a pill, which he swallowed. He shuddered, then offered another of the pills to Jacky.
“What is it?”
“Poison,” said Tay. “Take it—a much easier death than what he’ll give you if he catches you alive.”
Jacky. was shocked. “No! And you shouldn’t have taken one! My God, perhaps you can vomit it up. I think —”
“No, no.” Tay wedged the torch between two of the raft timbers and lay down across the rough surface, staring at the passing ceiling. “I decided to die this morning. He told me to get ready for a full-dress performance tonight—skirt, wig, nail polish—and I just decided… no. I couldn’t do it one more time. I decided to try to kill him, so I’d have died either way, you see; four years ago he set up—what did he call it?—a one-way sustenance link. Magical talk. Means when he dies, I do too. He thought that made him safe from me. It might have, if he hadn’t made me do those goddamn song and dance numbers all the time. God, I’m sleepy.” He smiled peacefully. “And I can’t think of a… nicer way to spend my last few minutes than on a boat ride with a young lady.”
Jacky blinked. “You… know?”
“Ah, I’ve known all along, lass. You’re that Jacky, too. With the false moustache. Oh yes.” He closed his eyes.
Jacky stared at the silent dwarf, horrified and fascinated. The raft turned and bumped down the canal. When she judged he was dead, she said softly, “Are you really his father?”
She was startled when he answered. “Yes, lass,” he said weakly. “And I can’t really blame him for the way he’s treated me. I deserved no better. Any man that would… alter his own son, just to make the lad a more efficient beggar… ah, I had it all coming to me, certainly.” A faint smile touched Tay’s lips. “Oh, and did that boy repay it in full! He took over my beggar army … and then put me through the hospital in the basement … many, many times… yes, I was tall once… ” He sighed, and his left heel thumped a few times on the wood. Jacky had now seen two people die.
Remembering Tay’s prediction that men would be sent ahead to descend into the sewers to intercept them, Jacky didn’t wait to arrive at one of the docks further down, but lowered herself into the water. It was cold, but as the subterranean river had slowed and diminished in width since her dip in it Saturday night, it had also lost its sharp chill. For a moment she clung to the raft.
“Rest in peace, Teobaldo,” she said, and then pushed off. Once she’d shucked the sodden Ahmed robe she had no difficulty in swimming against the current, and soon she had left the raft—and the torch—behind, and was swimming upstream in darkness. It wasn’t a threatening darkness, though, and Jacky knew instinctively that the deeper river, the one on which she’d “seen” the boat, had no connection with this channel—perhaps not even with the Thames.
Voices were echoing down the watercourse—”Who the hell did he say it was?”
“Old Dungy and that Hindoo.”
“Well, Pete’s lads will stop ‘em at the dock below Covent Garden.”—and yellow light glinted on the water and the wet walls and ceiling ahead of her. Then she rounded a curve, dog paddling silently, and could see, far ahead, the dock from which they’d embarked. There were several men on it, all carrying torches, though Horrabin didn’t seem to be present.
“They must be crazy,” commented one, his voice carrying clearly down the tunnel. “Or maybe they thought the Hindoo had better magic. It’ll be interesting to hear them—ow! Damn it, how did a bee get down here?”
“Jesus, there’s another one! Come on, there’s nothing to be done here. Let’s go upstairs and watch when they bring them in. It ought to be good—the clown ordered the hospital opened.”
The men hurried away, and the tunnel went dark; for a moment the archway glowed orange, and then as the torches were carried away up the hall it too faded into the uniform darkness. Jacky paddled steadily toward the after image in her eyes, being careful not to turn her head, even when she felt the false beard peel off and slide past her shoulder. After a few minutes she banged a hand against the timbers of the dock. She pulled herself up onto it and sat there, panting. She was naked except for a pair of shorts, and reaching up to brush her hair back she noticed that her moustache had pulled away with the beard.
This wasn’t, she reflected, the sort of costume in which she could slip unnoticed out of Rat’s Castle.
She padded timidly through the arch, wishing she still had the dagger. In the silence she could hear a bee buzzing somewhere. The long hallway was evidently empty, and she picked her way down it, pausing frequently to listen for pursuit from either direction, but especially from behind.
She climbed a set of stone steps to a wide landing, and in groping to find the next set of steps she brushed the wooden surface of a door. There was no faintest sliver of light visible around the frame or between the boards, so either the room beyond was as dark as the stairs or this was an unreasonably solid door.
She pressed the latch—it wasn’t locked!—and inched the door open. No light spilled out on the stairs, so she hurried inside and closed the door behind her.
She had no way to strike a light even if she’d dared to, so she reconnoitered the room by feel, following the wall around all four sides of the little room back to the door again, and then making a cautious diagonal across the middle of the floor. There was a narrow bed, neatly made, a dresser with a couple of books on it, a table on which Jacky’s gently groping hands felt a bottle and a cup—she sniffed the cup: sharp gin—and, in the corner, a chair on which were draped—and Jacky thanked God as she fumblingly identified the objects—a short dress, a wig, a make- up kit, and an ancient pair of ladies’ leather slippers.
It’s an absolute miracle that these clothes should be laid in my path, she thought. Then she remembered that old Teobaldo had said he’d been ordered to do a full-dress performance tonight—this must be his room, and he must have laid the costume out before, as he’d put it, deciding to die. Though she couldn’t see, she glanced curiously around the room, and wished she could know what the books on the dresser were.
* * *
Len Carrington sat down right in the front room and had a long sip from his pocket flask, not caring who might see him. Why was it, he’d have liked to know, that he was suddenly appointed the clown’s second in command, and simultaneously expected to mollify the angry Doctor Romany, evaluate the unsatisfactory reports being run back every few minutes from the team that was trying to catch the two fugitives, and assure the raging Horrabin—who was moaning in a hammock, evidently with bad burns all over himself—that every step was being
