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.