“Why did you have to come here?” Door said to Richard, frostily.
“I didn’t really have much choice,” said Richard.
She sighed. The marquis was walking around the perimeter, dismissing the various bodyguards who had already auditioned, distributing a few words of praise here, of advice there. Varney waited patiently, off to one side. Richard essayed a smile at Door. It was ignored. “How did you get to the market?” she asked.
“There are these rat people—” Richard began.
“Rat-speakers,” she said.
“And you see, the rat who brought us the marquis’s message—“
“Master Longtail,” she said.
“Well, he told them they had to get me here.”
She raised an eyebrow, cocked her head slightly on one side. “A rat-speaker brought you here?”
He nodded. “Most of the way. Her name was Anaesthesia. She . . . well, something happened to her. On the bridge. This other lady brought me the rest of the way here. I think she was a . . . you know.” He hesitated, then said it. “Hooker.”
The marquis had returned. He stood in front of Varney, who looked obscenely pleased with himself. “Weapons expertise?” asked the marquis.
“Whew,” said Varney. “Put it like this. If you can cut someone with it, blow someone’s head off with it, break a bone with it, or make a nasty hole in someone with it, then Varney’s the master of it.”
“Previous satisfied employers include?”
“Olympia, the Shepherd Queen, the Crouch Enders. I done security for the May Fair for a bit, as well.”
“Well,” said the marquis de Carabas. “We’re all very impressed with your skill.”
“I had heard,” said a female voice, “that you had put out a call for bodyguards. Not for enthusiastic amateurs.” Her skin was the color of burnt caramel, and her smile would have stopped a revolution. She was dressed entirely in soft mottled gray and brown leathers. Richard recognized her immediately.
“That’s her,” Richard whispered to Door. “The hooker.”
“Varney,” said Varney, affronted, “is the best guard and bravo in the Underside. Everyone knows that.”
The woman looked at the marquis. “You’ve finished the trials?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Varney.
“Not necessarily,” said the marquis.
“Then,” she told him. “I would like to audition.” There was a beat before the marquis de Carabas said, “Very well,” and stepped backward.
Varney was undoubtedly dangerous, not to mention a bully, a sadist, and actively harmful to the physical health of those around him. What he was not, though, was particularly quick on the uptake. He stared at the marquis as the penny dropped, and dropped, and kept on dropping. Finally, in disbelief, he asked, “I have to fight her?”
“Yes,” said the leather woman. “Unless you’d like a little nap, first.” Varney began to laugh: a manic giggle. He stopped laughing a moment later, when the woman kicked him, hard, in the solar plexus, and he toppled like a tree.
Near his hand, on the floor, was the crowbar he had used in the fight with the dwarf. He grabbed it, slammed it into the woman’s face—or would have, had she not ducked out of the way. She clapped her open hands onto his ears, very fast. The crowbar went flying across the room. Still reeling from the pain in his ears, Varney pulled a knife from his boot. He was not entirely sure what happened after that: only that the world swung out from under him, and then he was lying, face down, on the ground, with blood coming from his ears, and his own knife at his throat, while the marquis de Carabas was saying, “Enough!”
The woman looked up, still holding Varney’s knife to his throat. “Well?” she said.
“Very impressive,” said the marquis. Door nodded.
Richard was thunderstruck: it had been like watching Emma Peel, Bruce Lee, and a particularly vicious tornado, all rolled into one and sprinkled with a generous helping of a mongoose killing a king cobra. That was how she had moved. That was how she had fought.
Richard normally found displays of real violence unnerving. But he found watching this woman in action exhilarating, as if she were finding a part of him he had not known existed. It seemed utterly right, in this unreal mirror of the London he had known, that she should be here and that she should be fighting so dangerously and so well.
She was part of London Below. He understood that now. And as he thought that, he thought about London Above, and a world in which no one fought like this—no one needed to fight like this—a world of safety and of sanity and, for a moment, the homesickness engulfed him like a fever.