darker the deeper down I went. The sunlight from the doorway above me dissipated in the murk. After a moment Thornton began his descent, closing the door above him and casting us in complete darkness. With no way to see how far down the ladder went, I couldn’t tell where I was on the rungs. I felt like I was floating in outer space. By the time I reached the bottom, I figured we had to be a good forty or fifty feet down. I expected to step off the ladder into a knee-deep river of sewage. The idea of walking through human excrement wasn’t the most enticing prospect, but walking through New York City’s seemed exponentially worse somehow. I was happily surprised when my boots hit dry metal instead. In the darkness I heard Bethany digging around in her vest. She mumbled a creepy incantation, and a moment later there was light, emanating from the same round, mirrored charm I’d seen at the warehouse. She held it in front of her like a flashlight to illuminate the cement tunnel around us.
I wiped the grime from the ladder off my hands. “You can’t seriously tell me there’s a dragon living under New York City.”
“Is it really so hard to believe?” she asked. “You’ve probably heard him moving underground at night, or seen the smoke of his breath coming up through manholes all over the city.”
“I thought that was just the subway, and steam,” I said.
“Sometimes. Other times it’s Gregor, out looking for more treasure to hoard.”
Treasure? My mind swelled with images of a room full of gold, and chests overflowing with silver and jewels. It made my fingers tingle. I could buy my freedom from Underwood with that kind of money. Grease enough palms to get the answers I needed. How much would it take? I wondered. How much could I carry?
Once Thornton reached the bottom of the ladder, he held onto the rungs an extra moment for balance. He didn’t make eye contact with either of us. Bethany shone the light one way, then the other. The tunnel extended deep into the distance on either side. The walls and ceiling were curved to form an almost perfectly round tube, arcing down to meet the flat metal platform of the floor.
“Which way?” she asked.
Thornton didn’t reply. He just started walking, following the thick iron pipes that snaked along the ceiling.
“I guess we’re going this way,” Bethany said. We started walking after him.
“There’s something I don’t get,” I said. “There must be sewer workers down here all the time, Con Ed guys fixing the underground transformers, phone company workers checking the lines. You’re telling me in all this time no one has noticed a dragon living down here?”
“Maybe they just don’t know where to look,” she said. “Gregor has lived down here a long time. My guess is, he knows how to stay out of sight.”
“How long is a long time?”
She shrugged. “Who can say? Gregor is an Ancient, one of the first creatures to walk the Earth. Before civilization, before recorded history, before there was anyone or anything else here, this world belonged to them.”
“You’re fucking with me,” I said, but her expression was serious. “That would make him
“Plenty of time to learn how not to get caught,” she said.
“How can anything live that long?”
“If I knew the answer to that,” she said, “I’d be a very rich woman.”
The air grew more humid the farther we went. I heard the faint trickling of water up ahead. The tunnel opened out onto another that ran perpendicular to it, an older tunnel whose walls and ceiling were fashioned from stone bricks instead of cement. A stream of something pungent ran through a narrow trench at the center of the floor. Suddenly I envied Thornton the loss of his sense of smell.
The farther we walked the more I sensed we were descending deeper beneath the city. I heard the flow of water through tunnels above us, the distant sound of subway wheels far overhead, and wondered just how deep we were. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been walking, and after turning down numerous branching tunnels I was pretty sure I was lost. Thornton knew where he was going, but if something happened to him, or if his amulet ran out of juice before we got back to the surface, we were screwed. There was no way we’d find our way out again.
Thornton stopped halfway down a tunnel and ran his hands over the bricks in the wall. “There’s a door here. It’ll open if you push.”
I inspected the wall. It looked solid, without any seams to indicate where a door might be hidden. “Are you sure this is the right spot?” Thornton gave me an impatient look. “Okay, I believe you, I just don’t see any door.”
“Just push,” Thornton insisted.
I braced my legs and pushed against the wall. The bricks were slick with condensation, which made it hard to grip, but surprisingly, they gave a little under my weight. I pushed harder, and a large, square slab of the wall slid inward. After a moment a hidden mechanism took over, and the slab withdrew on its own, pulling in and sliding aside until there was an enormous opening in the tunnel wall. Big enough, I noticed, for something much, much larger than us to pass through.
Beyond the doorway was another tunnel, this one illuminated by burning torches set in iron sconces along the walls. Bethany extinguished the glowing charm with another muttered incantation, and put it away in her vest. We stepped through the doorway and started walking. The wall slid back into place behind us.
I watched the flames gutter on the torches. Torches didn’t just light themselves, which meant
This tunnel was much taller and wider than the others. The walls were hewn from a peculiar reddish-brown rock that had been worn smooth over time, as though it had been eroded by an underground river that long since dried up. Every inch of the walls and ceiling was decorated with carved symbols—pictographs, sigils, emblems, and figures, all flickering in the guttering torchlight. Whatever they were, they looked old. Really old. How long had this tunnel been hidden down here?
Abruptly, the tunnel came to a dead end where a massive, round stone slab had been set into the center of the wall. It was carved in bas-relief with eight human-shaped figures, as featureless as silhouettes, except for the chiseled auroras of light around each of them and the strange symbols etched on their torsos.
“What is it?” I asked.
Thornton studied the figures. “A puzzle. We can’t go any farther until we solve it.”
“You’ve been down here before, you must know the answer,” Bethany said.
“It’s different each time,” he said. “That’s how Gregor keeps everyone out. Especially thieves.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” I asked. “It doesn’t even look like a puzzle.”
“I think we’re supposed to choose one of these eight figures,” he said. “But what’s the criteria here? Why select one over the others? Who are they supposed to be?”
“It must have something to do with those symbols,” Bethany said. “If we can decipher what they are, maybe we can figure out the rest.”
Thornton moved closer to study the designs etched onto the figures. “They’re not symbols,” he said. “They’re pictograms. Runes. It’s Ehrlendarr, the language of the Ancients.”
“Can you read it?” I asked.
Thornton sighed. “Gregor taught me to how to speak it a little, but reading it was never my forte. This first one looks like it means breath. Wind? Damn, I’m just not sure.”
I examined the figures. Other than the different runes on each one, they were identical. I didn’t see any other clues as to who they might represent. I reached out to touch one of them, but Thornton batted my hand away. It felt like being hit with a slab of cold meat.
“Don’t,” he snapped. “Not until we’re sure. If you choose the wrong one, valves open in the walls and this whole chamber gets flooded with fire.”
I pulled my hand back. Apparently Gregor took his security seriously. Anyone who made the wrong choice was toast. Literally.
I studied the figures again, making sure to keep a safe distance. “If the first word is breath, or wind, maybe they’re not people. What else comes in groups of eight?”
Thornton hung his head and chuckled to himself. “I’m an idiot. I was so focused on the runes it didn’t even
