De Carabas looked about the circular chamber. All he had to do was free himself from the bonds that tied his wrists—obviously by loosening the pole to which he was bound—and then he would open the cuff around his ankle, turn off the water, get out of the room, avoid a revenge-driven Elephant and any of his assorted thugs, and get away.
He tugged on the pole. It didn’t move. He tugged on it harder. It didn’t move some more.
He slumped against the pole, and he thought about death, a true, final death, and he thought about his coat.
A voice whispered in his ear. It said, “Quiet!”
Something tugged at his wrists, and his bonds fell away. It was only as life came back into his wrists that he realized how tightly he had been bound. He turned around.
He said, “What?”
The face that met his was as familiar as his own. The smile was devastating, the eyes were guileless and adventuresome.
“Ankle,” said the man, with a new smile that was even more devastating than the previous one.
The Marquis de Carabas was not devastated. He raised his leg, and the man reached down, did something with a piece of wire, and removed the leg cuff.
“I heard you were having a spot of bother,” said the man. His skin was as dark as the Marquis’s own. He was less than an inch taller than de Carabas, but he held himself as if he were easily taller than anyone he was ever likely to meet.
“No. No bother. I’m fine,” said the Marquis. “You aren’t. I just rescued you.”
De Carabas ignored this. “Where’s the Elephant?”
“On the other side of that door, with a number of the people working for him. The doors lock automatically when the hall is filled with water. He needed to be certain that he wouldn’t be trapped in here with you. It was what I was counting on.”
“Counting on?”
“Of course. I’d been following them for several hours. Ever since I heard that you’d gone off with one of the Elephant’s plants. I thought, Bad move, I thought. He’ll be needing a hand with that.”
“You heard . . . ?”
“Look,” said the man, who looked a little like the Marquis de Carabas, only he was taller, and perhaps some people—not the Marquis, obviously—might have thought him just a hair more attractive, “you don’t think I was going to let anything happen to my little brother, did you?”
They were up to their waists in water. “I was fine,” said de Carabas. “I had it all under control.”
The man walked over to the far end of the room. He knelt down, fumbled in the water, then, from his backpack, he produced something that looked like a short crowbar. He pushed one end of it beneath the surface of the water. “Get ready,” he said. “I think this should be our quickest way out of here.”
The Marquis was still flexing his pins-and-needles cramping fingers, trying to rub life back into them. “What is it?” he said, trying to sound unimpressed.
The man said, “There we go,” and pulled up a large square of metal. “It’s the drain.” De Carabas did not have a chance to protest, as his brother picked him up and dropped him down a hole in the floor.
Probably, thought de Carabas, there are rides like this at funfairs. He could imagine them. Upworlders might pay good money to take this ride, if they were certain they would survive it.
He crashed through pipes, swept along by the flow of water, always heading down and deeper. He was not certain he was going to survive the ride, and he was not having fun.
The Marquis’s body was bruised and battered as he rode the water down the pipe. He tumbled out, facedown, onto a large metal grate, which seemed scarcely able to hold his weight. He crawled off the grate onto the rock floor beside it, and he shivered.
There was an unlikely sort of a noise, and it was immediately followed by his brother, who shot out of the pipe and landed on his feet, as if he’d been practicing. He smiled. “Fun, eh?”
“Not really,” said the Marquis de Carabas. And then he had to ask. “Were you just going ‘Whee!’?”
“Of course! Weren’t you?” asked his brother.
De Carabas got to his feet, unsteadily. He said only, “What are you calling yourself these days?”
“Still the same. I don’t change.”
“It’s not your real name, Peregrine,” said de Carabas.
“It’ll do. It marks my territory and my intentions. You’re still calling yourself a Marquis, then?” said Peregrine.
“I am, because I say I am,” said the Marquis. He looked, he was sure, like a drowned thing, and sounded, he was certain, unconvincing. He felt small and foolish.
“Your choice. Anyway, I’m off. You don’t need me anymore. Stay out of trouble. You don’t actually have to thank me.” His brother meant it, of course. That was what stung the hardest.
The Marquis de Carabas hated himself. He hadn’t wanted to say it, but now it had to be said. “Thank you, Peregrine.”
“Oh!” said Peregrine. “Your coat. Word on the street is, it wound up in Shepherd’s Bush. That’s all I know. So. Advice. Mean this most sincerely. I know you don’t like advice. But, the coat? Let it go. Forget about it. Just get a new coat. Honest.”
“Well then,” said the Marquis.
“Well,” said Peregrine, and he grinned, and shook himself like a dog, spraying water everywhere, before he slipped into the shadows and was gone.
The Marquis de Carabas stood and dripped balefully.
He had a little time before the Elephant discovered the lack of water in the room, and the lack of a body, and came looking for him.
He checked his shirt pocket: the sandwich bag was there, and the envelope appeared safe and dry inside it.
He wondered, for a moment, about something that had bothered him since the Market. Why would the
