We reached the pipe, where a trickle of grayish water splattered to the boggy ground. The mare sneezed against her metal muzzle, adding bloody foam to the sludge. Vale edged the horse closer to an old log, and without being told, I leaped off her back and landed heavily on what felt like permanently bowed legs. Vale dropped beside me, steadying me with a firm hand as the log wobbled. He slapped the mare’s rump, and she took off with a splash, her hoofbeats merging with the near-constant thunder overhead.
“Won’t she run away?”
He smirked and stared after her high-flung tail. “We plant a carcass nearby to draw the bludmares and leave a young lad to catch and picket them. Hungry predators aren’t so smart when it comes to half a bloody pig on the moor.”
It was my turn to smirk with a flash of fang. “Funny, I’m pretty good at resisting bloody pigs.”
“One point to the mademoiselle.” Vale tipped an imaginary hat; I pictured a fedora and couldn’t stop myself from giggling.
Surefooted as a fussy cat, he leaped onto the lip of the pipe and straddled the slushy water. I followed him into the darkness, my skin prickling as I left the weak light of a cloudy day for the sucking shadows of the cylinder. Just before the pipe’s curve shifted to aged stone, the light gave out. Vale pulled a heavy pendant from the neck of his shirt and twisted its base, and a gentle green glow filled the space, showing a long tunnel of orderly bricks and stones. Perfectly set in patterned niches were artful groupings of smooth white bones and polished skulls. Sluggish, lumpy water flowed down a channel set in the middle, just wide enough to straddle. Each side had just enough space for a slender person to walk without turning sideways. Vale’s shoulders were almost too broad and occasionally bumped the wall as he led me down a ladder and deeper into the catacombs. I threw out my senses, hoping for any sign of Cherie.
“My father’s band is ahead of us somewhere. The slavers never return by the same route, and there are endless tunnels and ladders and stairs and secret niches set into the maze of underground crypts. The good news is that I haven’t seen blood or signs of combat yet, but the bad news is that if they reach their destination in the city and get topside before the brigands find them, we will have no idea where your friend was taken.”
“Then what?” My boots rasped on the stone, and the smell shifted from death and decay to something slightly more tolerable, a mineral smell tinged with iron.
“Then whatever the lady wishes. I can return you to Callais, take you back to our camp, or deliver you to your new life in Paris.”
“Dropped on the front step of a cabaret like a baby in a basket,” I muttered.
He turned to give me a horrified look. “I do believe they call that murder in the city. The bludrats of Paris are monsters. And so are some of the men who frequent the cabarets.”
The American teenager in me peered down into the water with a frown. “Speaking of which, anything nasty live in the catacombs?”
Vale chuckled and kept walking by the light of his pendant. A flash to the side caught my eye, and I watched him twirl a wicked-looking blade. “That depends on your definition of nasty.”
“Dude, don’t try to scare and impress me. I seriously want to know.”
We passed an open tunnel, and I heard faraway shouting and felt a damp breeze. When I paused, he gently grabbed my wrist to pull me along. “Paris looks ordinary topside, all orderly rows and squares. But down here, in the old city, things are twisted and strange. There is no complete map, no limit to how wide or low the tunnels can go. Men have gotten lost and never come back. Or they’ve come back changed. Some say that even deeper than the tunnels, there are caverns filled with glowing crystals and albino bats. Sometimes bludrats find their way down here and go blind and bald. Sometimes feral dogs find a cavern and live like wild, half-mad creatures.” He trailed off, his footsteps the only sound. But I smelled a lie.
“There’s something you’re not telling me, Vale.”
He exhaled, shaking his head sadly. “Sometimes we find daimons down here. Ruined. Walking corpses. Mostly women.”
“And you don’t know what happened to them?”
“Not a clue. The best we can figure is that they got lost and went mad with it. No emotions to feed on, no clean water, no light. After a few weeks of wandering around down here with nothing but the sewage and pitch-black darkness, it makes sense.” He stopped and spun, blocking my path. The green light lit him from below, a fiendish ghoul, all sharp edges and shadows. “I see that you wish to ask, so I will tell you. We kill them. Quickly and as kindly as possible. If you bring them topside, they scream and panic. Father brought one back to camp once, and she killed a child.”