The smell? Take three hot and sweaty Trolls and run them through an aging urban sewer. Toss in a few thousand decaying rodent bodies for spice. Add another millennia of mold and human waste.
I didn’t retch, but it did cross my mind.
“So what now?” I asked. “We do what?”
“We stand,” said Mister Smith. “We wait.”
I shivered again. “If the half-dead follow us down here-”
“They will,” said Mister Chin. “They shall follow, and they shall seek, but they shall not find.”
“You hope,” I said.
“I know,” he replied. He lifted his hand.
His four-fingered hand began to glow. A dozen fist-sized globs of shimmering goo, like luminescent soap bubbles but thicker, formed and made tight orbits around his claws and then shot off down the tunnel, out of sight.
I gawked. “Behold,” said the Troll. “Confusion. Wrong scents. Wrong sounds. Wrong movements in the dark. They will see what is not there, not see what is before them. They will see Markhats in the shadows, Trolls faces in the waters, hear footfalls, always out of sight.”
Mister Chin was a wand-waver. A Troll wand-waver, casting Troll spells.
“And if the half-dead do stumble upon us,” said Mister Smith, “they will die. Here, they cannot fly. They cannot surround and strike our backs. They cannot ring us round and tear our flanks. Here, they must face us, claw-to-claw.”
I was still staring at Mister Chin’s Troll hand.
“You did magic,” I said at last. “Magic.”
Mister Smith grinned. Trolls shouldn’t grin at people they like. “Yes,” he said. “Magic.”
“Isn’t that a no-no?”
“It was,” he said. “Then. But no longer. Nor ever again.”
I gulped. “You would have won.”
“Yes.”
“You could win now.”
“We are not at war,” he said. “Nor do we wish to be.”
Down the tunnel rang a crack of distant baby thunder. Mister Chin guffawed.
“Booby traps?” I asked. Mister Smith nodded.
“One of many,” he said. “Laid days ago, waiting, watching, gathering strength. My Clan knows the ways of the caves, of the winding dark places, of the hidden things that crave blood. It shall be, as you say, a long night. For some. Shall we sit?”
I kicked trash and bones out of the way and sat. The Misters folded their knees backwards and made themselves at home.
Hours passed. Bells rang. Distant shrieks echoed down the dark tunnels. Booms and bangs followed, now distant, now close. Once light flared, and Mister Chin loosed a volley of bubbles from his claw, and shortly thereafter dozens of voices cried out, whether in agony or fear I could not tell.
But the voices fell silent, and aside from the now-constant rumbles of echoed Troll blasts we were left alone.
Just after the fourth bell, we heard furtive footsteps, the telltale tinkle of metal on stone. The Misters rose, Mister Chin’s hands suddenly full of bubbling Troll magics.
A rat the size of a bullmastiff dog rounded the corner. The skeletal human arm it bore in its jaws still wore a dangling length of silver bracelet. Mister Jones growled. Rat feet made fast pitter-patters back into the dark.
The Watch sounded the fifth hour, and soon after that little slants of sunlight crept past trash-choked storm drain grates. Between Mister Chin’s night stick and the sun, the sewers grew bright, like some civil-minded giant had lifted the streets to air the place out.
The sixth bell sounded, and traffic noise began. The Curfew was lifted; the day had begun; the night people were yawning in their holes, too sleepy to hunt that crafty Markhat any more today.
“We made it,” I announced. “Hurray for us.” I rose. My knees and back popped so loud Mister Jones asked me if I were injured.
I offered Mister Chin the night stick. “Keep it,” he said. “We have another night to face.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. Our own wand-wavers were never so free with their treats. “Shall we go back to my office and see what’s left?”
Mister Smith rose. “We shall,” he said.
We went. Three mighty Trolls and one stiff, sleepy human, all bathed in sewer-stuff, a bevy of barking dogs trailing us just for the fun of it. It wasn’t quite an Armistice Day parade, but we had almost as many oglers.
We rounded the corner at Cambrit.
I’d had callers in the night. They’d ripped my door off its hinges, stepped right in and made a mess visible from nearly a block away. Watchmen buzzed in and out of the hole in the wall like fat blue bees. Mama Hog waddled around among them, waving her fingers in various faces and snatching pens and the like-my pens, mind you-out of pockets and paws.
Mama Hog spotted us. “Get over here,” she bellowed, “before they steal everything that ain’t broke.”
Heads turned my way. Mister Smith chose that moment to yawn.
Trolls yawn like tigers roar.
Only two Watchmen were there by the time the Misters and I strolled on down the street.
The oldest Watchman, a gray-headed sergeant named Fleetcab with a scar all down the left side of his face, stood in Mister Smith’s shadow and tried to pretend that he had dealings with Trolls every day. “Somebody tore your place up, Markhat,” he said. “Any idea who that was?”
“My maid gets these spells,” I said. “Last week she set fire to my favorite ottoman. I’ll have a talk with her, I promise.”
He grunted. His partner, a skinny kid of maybe twenty, stepped forward. “Could it have anything to do with your new associates, Mister Markhat?”
I was tired and wet and filthy. I’d spent the night in a sewer. Thirsty half-dead were sleeping with my picture under their pillows.
“My cousins?” I asked. “Now why would you say a thing like that?”
Mister Chin growled.
And that was that. No long hike downtown, no afternoon on the Square answering the same questions over and over in a ten-by-ten room decorated in Stifling Heat and Rank Body Odor. I scribbled my initials at the bottom of an incident report and waved the Watch goodbye.
Mama Hog was inside sweeping. Mister Chin was scooping out debris. Mister Jones was hammering together a new door out of two of Mama Hog’s old tables.
Me? I had plans to make, plots to hatch, baths to take-so naturally, I stripped, rolled up in an old green Army blanket and slept like the dead I was so very close to joining.
Chapter Three
I was dreaming. A tall, green-eyed blonde was stroking my hand and whispering my name. She had perfect elfin features and a mischievous wind threatened to remove her last few gauzy veils. I leaned a little closer, heard a noise, woke up-and was face-to-face with Mama Hog. I think I may have screamed.
Mama Hog was holding my left hand. And mumbling something under her breath. And she wasn’t a bit like the tall, elfin blonde in my dream.
I sat up. She hung on tight to my wrist and spat out a string of nonsense words.
“What the-”
“Shut up, boy,” she hissed. “You mess with the half-dead, you need this.”
I was wearing a bracelet or a wristlet or whatever you call a finger-width ring of tarnished brass chain a sham-artist soothsayer wraps around your wrist.
