His mind bifurcated: A small part of it berated him for his inattention and his foolishness. Knibbs had told him, by the Temple and the Arch; he just had not listened to her. But even as he raged at his own foolishness, the rest of his mind took over, forced a smile, and said, “Why, this is indeed an honor. You really didn’t have to arrange to meet me like this. Why, the merest inkling that your prominence might have had even the teeniest desire to see me would have—”
“Sent you scurrying off in the other direction as fast as your spindly little legs could carry you,” said the person with the teak-colored legs. He reached over with his trunk, which was long and flexible, and a greenish-blue color, and which hung to his ankles, and he pushed the Marquis onto his back.
The Marquis began rubbing his bound wrists slowly against the concrete beneath them, while he said, “Not at all. Quite the opposite. Words cannot actually describe how much pleasure I take in your pachydermic presence. Might I suggest that you untie me, and allow me to greet you, man to—man to elephant?”
“I don’t think so, given all the trouble I’ve been through to make this happen,” said the other. He had the head of a greenish-gray elephant. His tusks were sharp and stained reddish brown at the tips. “You know, I swore when I found out what you had done that I would make you scream and beg for mercy. And I swore I’d say no, to giving you mercy, when you begged for it.”
“You could say yes, instead,” said the Marquis.
“I couldn’t say yes. Hospitality abused,” said the Elephant. “I never forget.”
The Marquis had been commissioned to bring Victoria the Elephant’s diary, when he and the world had been much younger. The Elephant ran his fiefdom arrogantly, sometimes viciously and with no tenderness or humor, and the Marquis had thought that the Elephant was stupid. He had even believed that there was no way that the Elephant would correctly identify his role in the disappearance of the diary. It had been a long time ago, though, when the Marquis was young and foolish.
“This whole spending years training up a guide to betray me just on the off chance I’d come along and hire her,” said the Marquis. “Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction?”
“Not if you know me,” said the Elephant. “If you know me, it’s pretty mild. I did lots of other things to find you too.”
The Marquis tried to sit up. The Elephant pushed him back to the floor, with one bare foot. “Beg for mercy,” said the Elephant.
That one was easy. “Mercy!” said the Marquis. “I beg! I plead! Show me mercy—the finest of all gifts. It befits you, mighty Elephant, as lord of your own demesne, to be merciful to one who is not even fit to wipe the dust from your excellent toes . . .”
“Did you know,” said the Elephant, “that everything you say sounds sarcastic?”
“I didn’t. I apologize. I meant every single word of it.”
“Scream,” said the Elephant.
The Marquis de Carabas screamed very loudly and very long. It is hard to scream when your throat has been recently cut, but he screamed as hard and piteously as he could.
“You even scream sarcastically,” said the Elephant.
There was a large black cast-iron pipe jutting out from the wall. A wheel in the side of the pipe allowed whatever came out of the pipe to be turned on and turned off. The Elephant hauled on it with powerful arms, and a trickle of dark sludge came out, followed by a spurt of water.
“Drainage overflow,” said the Elephant. “Now. Thing is, I do my homework. You keep your life well hidden, de Carabas. You have done all these years, since you and I first crossed paths. No point in even trying anything as long as you had your life elsewhere. I’ve had people all over London Below—people you’ve eaten with, people you’ve slept with or laughed with or wound up naked in the clock tower of Big Ben with—but there was never any point in taking it further, not as long as your life was still carefully tucked out of harm’s way. Until last week, when the word under the street was that your life was out of its box. And that was when I put the word out, that I’d give the freedom of the Castle to the first person to let me see—”
“See me scream for mercy,” said de Carabas. “You said.”
“You interrupted me,” said the Elephant, mildly. “I was going to say, I was going to give the freedom of the Castle to the first person to let me see your dead body.”
He pulled the wheel the rest of the way and the spurt of water became a gush.
“I ought to warn you. There is,” said de Carabas, “a curse on the hand of anyone who kills me.”
“I’ll take the curse,” said the Elephant. “Although you’re probably making it up. You’ll like the next bit. The room fills with water, and then you drown. Then I let the water out, and I come in, and I laugh a lot.” He made a trumpeting noise that might, de Carabas reflected, have been a laugh, if you were an elephant.
The Elephant stepped out of de Carabas’s line of sight.
The Marquis heard a door bang. He was lying in a puddle. He writhed and wriggled, then got to his feet. He looked down: there was a metal cuff around his ankle, which was chained to a metal pole in the center of the room.
He wished he were wearing his coat: there were blades in his coat; there were picklocks; there were buttons that were nowhere nearly as innocent and buttonlike as they appeared to be. He rubbed the rope that bound his wrists against the metal pole, hoping to make it fray, feeling the skin of his wrists and palms rubbing
