the angel islington was dreaming a dark and rushing dream.
huge waves were rising and crashing over the city; the night sky was rent with forks of white lightning from horizon to horizon; the rain fell in sheets, the city trembled; fires started near the great amphitheater and spread, quickly, through the city, defying the storm. islington was looking down on everything from far above, hovering in the air, as one hovers in dreams, as it had hovered in those long-ago times. there were buildings in that city that were many hundreds of feet high, but they were dwarfed by the gray-green atlantic waves. and then it heard the people scream. there were four million people in atlantis, and, in its dream, islington heard each and every one of their voices, clearly and distinctly, as, one by one, they screamed, and choked, and burned, and drowned, and died. the waves swallowed the city, and, at length, the storm subsided.
when dawn broke, there was nothing to indicate there had ever been a city there at all, let alone an island twice the size of greece. nothing of atlantis remained but the water-bloated bodies of children, of women and of men, floating on the cold morning waves; bodies the seagulls, gray and white, were already beginning to pick with their cruel beaks.
and islington woke. it was standing in the octagon of iron pillars, beside the great black door, made of flint and tarnished silver. it touched the cold smoothness of the flint, the chill of the metal. it touched the table. it ran its finger lightly along the walls. then it walked through chambers of its hall, one after another, touching things, as if to reassure itself of their existence, to convince itself it was here, and now. it followed patterns, as it walked, smooth channels its bare feet had worn, over the centuries, in the rock. it stopped when it reached the rock-pool, kneeling down and letting its fingers touch the cold water.
there was a ripple in the water, which began with its fingertips and echoed out to the edges. the reflections in the pool, of the angel itself and the candle flames that framed it, shimmered and transformed. it was looking into a cellar. the angel concentrated for a moment; it could hear a telephone ring, somewhere in the distance.
mr. croup walked over to the telephone and picked up the receiver. he looked rather pleased with himself. "croup and vandemar," he barked. "eyes gouged, noses twisted, tongues pierced, chins cleft, throats slit."
"mister croup," said the angel. "they now have the key. i want the girl called door kept safe on her journey back to me."
"safe," repeated mr. croup, unimpressed. "right. we'll keep her safe. what a marvelous idea--such originality. positively astounding. most people would be content with hiring assassins for executions, sly killings, vile murders even. only you, sir, would hire the two finest cutthroats in the whole of space and time, and then ask them to ensure a little girl remains unharmed."
"see that she is, mister croup. nothing is to hurt her. permit her to be harmed in any way and you will displease me deeply. do you understand?"
"yes." croup shifted uncomfortably.
"is there anything else?" asked islington.
"yes, sir." croup coughed into his hand. "do you remember the marquis de carabas?"
"of course."
"i take it that there is no such similar prohibition on extirpating the marquis . . . ?"
"not any longer," said the angel. "just protect the girl."
it removed its hand from the water. the reflection was now merely candle flames and an angel of astonishing, perfectly androgynous, beauty. the angel islington stood up and returned to its inner chambers to await its eventual visitors.
"what did he say?" asked mr. vandemar.
"he said, mister vandemar, that we should feel free to do whatsoever we wished to the marquis."
vandemar nodded. "did that include killing him painfully?" he asked, a little pedantically.
"yes, mister vandemar, i would say, on reflection, it did."
"that's good, mister croup. wouldn't like another telling-off." he looked up at the bloody thing hanging above them. "better get rid of the body, then."
one of the front wheels on the supermarket shopping cart squeaked, and it had a pronounced tendency to pull to the left. mr. vandemar had found the metal cart on a grassed-in traffic island, near the hospital. it was, he had realized on seeing it, just the right size for moving a body. he could have carried the body, of course; but then it could have bled on him, or dripped other fluids. and he only had the one suit. so he pushed the shopping cart with the body of the marquis de carabas in it through the storm drain, and the cart went _squee, squee_ and pulled to the left. he wished that mr. croup would push the shopping cart, for a change. but mr. croup was talking. "you know, mister vandemar," he was saying, "i am currently too overjoyed, too delighted, not to mention too utterly and illimitably ecstatic, to grouse, gripe or grumble--having finally been permitted to do what we do best--'"
mr. vandemar negotiated a particularly awkward corner. "kill someone, you mean?" he asked.
mr. croup beamed. "kill someone i mean indeed, mister vandemar, brave soul, glittering, noble fellow. however, by now you must have sensed a lurking 'but' skulking beneath my happy, blithe, and chipper exterior. a minuscule vexation, like the teeniest lump of raw liver sticking to the inside of my boot. you must, i have no doubt, be saying to yourself, 'all is not well in mister croup's breast. i shall induce him to unburden himself to me.' "
mr. vandemar pondered this while he forced open the round iron door between the storm drain and the sewer and clambered through. then he manhandled the wire cart with the marquis de carabas's body through the doorway. and then, more or less certain that he had been thinking nothing of the sort, he said, "no."
mr. croup ignored this, and continued, " . . . and, were i then, in response to your pleadings, to divulge to you what vexes me, i would confess that my soul is irked by the necessity to hide our light under a bushel. we should be hanging the former marquis's sad remains from the highest gibbet in london below. not tossing it away, like a used . . . " he paused, searching for the exact simile.
"rat?" suggested mr. vandemar. "thumbscrew? spleen?" _squee, squee_ went the wheels of the shopping cart.
"ah well," said mr. croup. in front of them was a deep channel of brown water. drifting on the water's surface were off-white suds of foam, used condoms, and occasional fragments of toilet paper. mr. vandemar stopped the shopping cart. mr. croup leaned down and picked up the marquis's head by the hair, hissing into its dead ear, "the sooner this business is over and done with, the happier i'll be. there's other times and other places that would properly appreciate two pair of dab hands with the garrotting wire and the boning knife."
then he stood up. "goodnight, good marquis. don't forget to write."
mr. vandemar tipped over the cart, and the marquis's corpse tumbled out and splashed into the brown water below them. and then, because he had come to dislike it intensely, mr. vandemar pushed the shopping cart into the sewer as well, and watched the current carry it away.
then mr. croup held his lamp up high, and he stared out at the place in which they stood. "it is saddening to reflect," said mr. croup, "that there are folk walking the streets above who will never know the beauty of these sewers, mister vandemar. these red-brick cathedrals beneath their feet."
"craftsmanship," agreed mr. vandemar.
they turned their backs on the brown water and made their way back into the tunnels. "with cities, as with people, mister vandemar," said mr. croup, fastidiously, "the condition of the bowels is all-important."
door tied the key around her neck with a piece of string that she found in one of the pockets of her leather jacket. "that's not going to be safe," said richard. the girl made a face at him. "well," he said. "it's not."
she shrugged. "okay," she said. "i'll get a chain for it when we get to the market." they were walking through a maze of caves, deep tunnels hacked from the limestone that seemed almost prehistoric.
richard chuckled. "what's so funny?" door asked.
he grinned. "i was just thinking of the expression on the marquis's face when we tell him we got the key from the friars without his help."
"i'm sure he'll have something sardonic to say about it," she said. "and then, back to the angel. by the 'long and dangerous way.' whatever that is."
richard admired the paintings on the cave walls. russets and ochres and siennas outlined charging boars and fleeing gazelles, woolly mastodons and giant sloths: he imagined that the paintings had to be thousands of years old, but then they turned a corner, and he noticed that, in the same style, there were lorries, house cats, cars, and--markedly inferior to the other images, as if only glimpsed infrequently, and from a long way away--airplanes.
none of the paintings were very high off the ground. he wondered if the painters were a race of subterranean neanderthal pygmies. it was as likely as anything else in this strange world. "so where is the next market?" he asked.
"no idea," said door. "hunter?"
hunter slipped out of the shadows. "i don't know."
a small figure dashed past them, going back the way they had come. a few moments later another couple of tiny figures came toward them in fell pursuit. hunter whipped out a hand as they passed, snagging a small boy by the ear. "ow," he said, in the manner of small boys. "let me go! she stole my paintbrush."
"that's right," said a piping voice from further down the corridor. "she did."
"i didn't," came an even higher and more piping voice, from even further down the corridor.
hunter pointed to the paintings on the cave wall. "you did these?" she asked.
the boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys. "yeah," he said, truculently. "some of them."
"not bad," said hunter. the boy glared at her.
"where's the next floating market?" asked door.
"belfast," said the boy. "tonight."
"thanks," said door. "hope you get your paintbrush back. let him go, hunter."
hunter let go of the boy's ear. he did not move. he looked her up and down, then made a face, to indicate that he was, without any question at all, unimpressed. "_you're_ hunter?" he asked. she smiled down at him, modestly. he sniffed. "_you're_ the best bodyguard in the underside?"
"so they tell me."
the boy reached one hand back and forward again, in one smooth movement. he stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm. then he looked up at hunter, confused. hunter opened her hand to reveal a small switchblade with a wicked edge. she held it up, out of the boy's reach. he wrinkled his nose. "how'd you do that?"
"scram," said hunter. she closed the knife and tossed it back to the boy, who took off down the corridor without a backward glance, in pursuit of his paintbrush.
the body of the marquis de carabas drifted east, through the deep sewer, face down.
london's sewers had begun their lives as rivers and streams, flowing north to south (and, south of the thames, south to north) carrying garbage, animal carcasses, and the contents of chamber pots into the thames, which would, for the most part, carry the offending substances out to sea. this system had more or less worked for many years, until, in 1858, the enormous volume of effluent produced by the people and industries of london, combined with a rather hot summer, produced a phenomenon known at the time as the great stink: the thames itself had become an open sewer. people who could leave london, left it; the ones who stayed wrapped cloths doused in carbolic around their faces and tried not to breathe through their noses. parliament was forced to recess early in 1858, arid the following year it ordered that a programme of sewer-building begin. the thousands of miles of sewers that were built were constructed with a gentle slope from the west to the east, and, somewhere beyond greenwich, they were pumped into the thames estuary, and the sewage was swept off into the north sea. it was this journey that the body of the late marquis de carabas was making, traveling west to east, toward the sunrise and the sewage works.
rats on a high brick ledge, doing the things that rats do when no people are watching, saw the body go by. the largest of them, a big black male, chittered. a smaller brown female chittered back, then she leapt down from the ledge onto the marquis's back and rode it down the sewer a little way, sniffing at the hair and the coat, tasting the blood, and then, precariously, leaning over, and scrutinizing what could be seen of the face.
she hopped off the head into the filthy water and swam industriously to the side, where she clambered up the slippery brickwork. she hurried back a long a beam, and rejoined her companions.
"belfast?" asked richard.
door smiled, impishly, and would say nothing more than, "you'll see," when he pressed her about it.
he changed his tack. "how do you know that kid was telling you the truth about the market?" he asked.
"it's not something anyone down here ever lies about. i . . . don't think we _can_ lie about it." she paused. "the market's special."
"how did that kid know where it was?"
"someone told him," said hunter.
richard brooded on this for a moment. "how did they know?"
"someone told them," explained door.
"but . . . " he wondered who chose the locations in the first place, how the knowledge was spread, trying to frame the question in such a way that he did not sound stupid.
a rich female voice asked from the darkness, "hss. any idea when the next market is?"
she stepped into the light. she wore silver jewelry, and her dark hair was perfectly coifed. she was very pale, and her long dress was jet black velvet. richard knew immediately that he had seen her before, but it took him a few moments to place her: the first floating market, that was it--in harrods. she had smiled at him.
"tonight," said hunter. "belfast."
"thank you," said the woman. she had the most amazing eyes, thought richard. they were the color of foxgloves.
"i'll see you there," she said, and she looked at richard as she said it. then she looked away, a little shyly; she stepped into the shadows, and she was gone.
"who was that?" asked richard.
"they call themselves velvets," said door. "they sleep down here during the day, and walk the up-world at night."
"are they dangerous?" asked richard.
"everybody's dangerous," said hunter.
"look," said richard. "going back to the market. who decides where it gets held, and when? and how do the first people find out where it's being held?" hunter shrugged. "door?" he asked.
"i've never thought about it." they turned a corner. door held up her lamp. "not bad at all," said door.
"and fast, too," said hunter. she touched the painting on the rock wall with her fingertip. the paint was still wet. it was a painting of hunter and door and richard. it was not flattering.
the black rat entered the lair of the golden deferentially, his head lowered, ears back. he crawled forward, squeeing and chittering.
the golden had made their lair in a pile of bones. this pile of bones had once belonged to a woolly mammoth, back in the cold times when the great hairy beasts walked across the snowy tundra of the south of england as if, in the opinion of the golden, they owned the place. this particular mammoth, at least, had been disabused of that idea rather thoroughly and quite terminally by the golden.
the black rat made its obeisance at the base of the bone pile. then he lay on his back with his throat exposed, closed his eyes, and waited. after a while a chittering from above told him that he could roll over.
one of the golden crawled out of the mammoth skull, on top of the heap of bones. it crawled along the old ivory tusk, a golden-furred rat with copper-colored eyes, the size of a large house cat.
the black rat spoke. the golden thought, briefly, and chattered an order. the black rat rolled on his back, exposing his throat again, for a moment. then a twist and a wriggle, and he was on his way.
there had been sewer folk before the great stink, of course, living in the elizabethan sewers, or the restoration sewers, or the regency sewers, as more and more of london's waterways were forced into pipes and covered passages, as the expanding population produced more filth, more rubbish, more effluent; but after the great stink, after the great plan of victorian sewer-building, that was when the sewer folk came into their own. they could be found anywhere in the length and breadth of the sewers, but they made their permanent homes in some of the churchlike red-brick vaults toward the east, at the confluence of many of the churning foamy waters. there they would sit, rods and nets and improvised hooks beside them, and watch the surface of the brown water.
they wore clothes--brown and green clothes, covered in a thick layer of something that might have been mold and might have been a petrochemical ooze, and might, conceivably, have been something much worse. they wore their hair long and matted. they smelled more or less as one would imagine. old storm lanterns were hung about the tunnel. nobody knew what the sewer folk used for fuel, but their lanterns burned with a rather noxious blue-and-green flame.
it was not known how the sewer folk communicated among themselves. in their few dealings with the outside world, they used a kind of sign language. they lived in a world of gurgles and drips, the men, the women, and the silent little sewer children.
dunnikin spotted something in the water. he was the chief of the sewer folk, the wisest and the oldest. he knew the sewers better than their original builders did. dunnikin reached for a long shrimping net; one practiced hand movement and he was fishing out a rather bedraggled mobile telephone from the water. he walked over to a small heap of rubbish in the corner and put the telephone down with the rest of their haul. the day's catch so far consisted of two odd gloves, a shoe, a cat skull, a sodden packet of cigarettes, an artificial leg, a dead cocker spaniel, a pair of antlers (mounted), and the bottom half of a baby carriage.
it had not been a good day. and tonight was a market night, in the open air. so dunnikin kept his eyes on the water. you never knew what would turn up.
old bailey was hanging his wash out to dry. blankets and sheets fluttered and blew in the wind on the top of centre point, the ugly and distinctive sixties skyscraper that marks the eastern end of oxford street, far above tottenham court road station. old bailey did not care very much for centre point itself, but, as he'd often tell the birds, the view from the top was without compare, and, furthermore, the top of centre point was one of the few places in the west end of london where you did not have to look at centre point itself.
the wind ripped feathers from old bailey's coat and blew them away, off over london. he did not mind. as he also often told his birds, there were more where those came from.
a large black rat crawled out through a ripped air-vent cover, looked around, then came over to old bailey's bird-spattered tent. it ran up the side of the tent, then along the top of old bailey's washing line. it squealed at him, urgently.
"slower, slower," said old bailey. the rat repeated itself, at a lower pitch, but just as urgently. "bless me," said old bailey. he ran into his tent and returned with weapons--his toasting fork and a coal shovel. then he hurried back into the tent again and came out with some bargaining tools. and then he walked back into the tent for the last time, and opened his wooden chest, and pocketed the silver box. "i really don't have time for this tomfoolery," he told the rat, on his final exit from the tent. "i'm a very busy man. birds don't catch themselves, y'know."
the rat squeaked at him. old bailey was unfastening the coil of rope around his middle. "well," he told the rat, "there's others could get the body. i'm not as young as i was. i don't like the under-places. i'm a roof-man, i am, born and bred."
the rat made a rude noise.
"more haste, less speed," replied old bailey. "i'm goin'. young whippersnapper. i knew your great-great-grandfather, young feller-me-rat, so don't you try putting on airs . . . now, where's the market going to be?" the rat told him. then old bailey put the rat in his pocket and climbed over the side of the building.
sitting on the ledge beside the sewer, in his plastic lawn chair, dunnikin was overcome by a presentiment of wealth and prosperity. he could feel it drifting from west to east, toward them.
he clapped his hands, loudly. other men ran to him, and the women, and the children, seizing hooks and nets and lines as they did so. they assembled along the slippery sewer ledge, in the sputtering green light of their lanterns. dunnikin pointed, and they waited, in silence, which is how the sewer folk wait.
the body of the marquis de carabas came floating facedown along the sewer, the current carrying him as slow and stately as a funeral barge. they pulled it in with their hooks and their nets, in silence, and soon had it up on the ledge. they removed the coat, the boots, the gold pocket-watch, and the contents of the coat pockets, although they left the rest of the clothes on the corpse.
dunnikin beamed at the loot. he clapped again, and the sewer folk began to ready themselves for the market. now they truly had something of value to sell.
"are you sure the marquis will be at the market?" richard asked door, as the path began, slowly, to climb.
"he won't let us down," she said, as confidently as she could. "i'm sure he'll be there."
