SKULKING

“These tunnels are such a convenience,” Rain said as we crouched through one last tight passage and entered a sub-street corridor of some kind, high enough to let us walk upright at last. “I have often wished that I could thank your city planners for sparing us both the trouble of constructing them ourselves and the risk of discovery that doing so would have created.”

Piper crawled through behind me in the gallows-bound silence she had hardly broken since being summoned to our interrogation chamber, apparently by means of Rain’s crushed marble. We had hurried back down to the basement of their strange building and entered the city’s labyrinth of maintenance and utility tunnels through yet another doorway I’d been unable to detect before it was opened. From the few terse comments Rain had offered us since then, it seemed we were here to find some safe hole for Piper and me to hide in while he went off to discuss our situation with The Lady. Piper clearly dreaded the outcome of that conversation.

The cable-encrusted passage we walked through now was lit only by pools of red light from caged bulbs set at stingy intervals. I could hear and feel the rumble of passing traffic above us, suggesting some fairly busy artery there. Then, all at once, the darkness I’d grown used to was pierced by a shaft of blue-white brilliance. Squinting up at a grate in the ceiling, I saw foreshortened pedestrians walking above us, and felt a sudden lunatic urge to shout, Hey, clueless humans! Try looking down sometime! There’s aliens passing right beneath your feet! I ignored the impulse, of course. It wasn’t as if some rescue awaited me up there either. I belonged in no one’s world now. It seemed important to remember that.

Not much later, Rain and Piper both stopped so suddenly that I nearly ran into them. Rain held up a hand for silence, then grabbed me by the arm, holding a finger to his lips, and pulled me back the way we’d come as quickly as stealth allowed. We soon reached an alcove housing several meter boxes and a rivulet of corrugated metal cables, which he shoved me into as Piper squeezed herself beside me. He backed in against us both, pressing Piper and me uncomfortably against the cluttered wall. Then we waited—for what, I had no clue.

A minute later, peering past Rain’s arm, I saw a short, dark figure walk cautiously into view. The dim red light made it hard to see, but it seemed to be a lean teenage boy with dark, short-cropped hair. He wore a black leather jacket and tight leather pants, all adorned with rows of metal studs, as were his steel-toed boots and a wide leather bracelet on his left arm. As he came abreast of our alcove, he slowed and stopped, gazing curiously around him. At one point, he looked straight at where we were, but didn’t seem to see us. After my stint as a tree in Piper’s safe-house, this, at least, made sense to me. He was startlingly handsome, but there was something unnervingly feral in his expression, and the red-lit shadows made his eyes seem much too deep and dark. He gazed around again, then looked back toward us, more suspiciously.

Suddenly, a clatter of running footfalls sounded farther up the tunnel. The boy’s head swung toward them, and he was gone without a sound, as if his feet were made of smoke. Neither Rain nor Piper moved for several moments, so I followed suit. When Rain finally turned to face me, he held a finger to his lips again, then grabbed me by the waist and threw me over his shoulder as if I were, well, no bigger than a child, which would surely have startled quite an exclamation from me if I’d not been warned to silence. He and Piper ran in our original direction, carrying me along, their feet drawing no more sound from the pavement than had the feral boy’s.

We raced further down the tunnel, then right, and right again through two progressively smaller passages before coming to a metal door marked only by a number stenciled in black paint. Rain set me down, as if I still weighed nothing, and took hold of the door’s handle. When it refused to turn, he closed his eyes and waited. I heard the quiet sound of tumblers falling, and a second later, Rain turned the knob and waved Piper and me into a small room filled with tools and equipment. He followed us inside and closed the door, plunging us all briefly into total darkness. Then a small, round, blue light appeared, rising ghostly through the air before flaring bright enough for me to see Rain set it on a shelf among some boxes. It appeared to be another of his magic marbles, only glowing now. By its light, I watched Rain turn to press both hands against the door and wait, as if listening for something.

“That should conceal you from anyone who comes after I’ve gone,” he said, turning back to face us. “But if either of you steps outside this room before I return, I may just march you both to Anselm myself, and have it done with. Is that clear, Ashta?”

Piper nodded glumly.

“Who was that boy?” I asked.

“That was no boy,” Rain said. He glanced at Piper. “And clearly down here hunting no one of our kind. I can only hope that’s coincidence…” He looked unhappily back at me. “If Piper was seen this morning, it seems unlikely you weren’t too. If they’re looking for you even down here already, then I fear we have precisely the kind of problem I was hoping to avoid.”

Piper looked down as if ashamed.

“How can you know who he was looking for?” I asked.

“We only managed to sidestep his probe in time because it was so clumsy,” Rain replied. “He would not have been so careless coming after his own kind. Nor, I think, would he have taken the bait I sent him so swiftly if he’d suspected his quarry was anything but Andinol. If it was not you he sought, it was another of your kind.”

“Which is not impossible,” Piper murmured.

“True,” Rain conceded, still looking pointedly at me. “We can hope he merely sought to prey upon some unfortunate vagrant camping in the sewers, but we would be fools to count on that.” He turned, reaching for the door handle. “Until I return with the Lady’s instructions, you are well warded here. Do not touch this door.” Then he slipped through it and was gone.

“How long do you think he’ll be?” I asked after a few moments of silence, not relishing the thought of hours stuck in this gloomy little closet, with who-knew-what stalking us outside.

“I would get as comfortable as possible,” she answered, sitting on the floor with her back against one of the shelves. “My mother’s seat is nowhere close.”

“Great,” I sighed, sitting down as well. “How long will that little light last?”

“More than long enough.”

A much lengthier silence stretched between us then.

“Why does he call you Ashta?” I asked at last. “Is that your real name?”

“Of course not,” she said absently. “It’s just a title.”

“You have a title?” I asked, mildly amused.

“This would be a very poor time to make yourself annoying,” she replied, a bit less absently, which just provoked me to press on. It was a puzzle, after all. Had she not urged me to practice solving puzzles?

“You have a title, and your mother has a title…and a chancellor too. What does that make her then, queen of the fairies?” I’d meant it for a joke, but Piper’s silence and the look she gave me all but screamed bull’s-eye. “You’re not serious.” More silence and a self-conscious scowl. “You’re fairies?” I blurted, caught between astonishment and laughter.

“Not the way you mean it,” she replied.

I shook my head in disbelief. “So, what then; your mother’s like Titania, or something?”

“Our kind are the basis for your silly tales!” she snapped. “But we are not, and have never been, the tales themselves!” She looked angrily away. “I cannot believe you’ve waited ’til we’re trapped for hours inside this tiny room to start mocking me.”

“I’m not mocking you! I’m just astonished. Is that so hard to imagine?” I looked around as if someone else there might agree with me. “I mean, come on! You’re telling me I actually saved the daughter of the Queen of Fairies? … From a troll? … Seriously? … In this century?”

She leaned back and rubbed her eyes. “You’re right,” she said. “This whole thing…is so absurd. I’m sorry, but no answers I can give you will help. You’ll just keep sifting everything I say through old fantasies you’ve heard, and none of it is anything like you must suppose.”

I wondered what she thought I would ‘suppose’—about fairies. I couldn’t recall ever giving them any thought at all. I’d heard fairytales, of course, as a child—and dismissed them even then as ridiculous. Pumpkins to carriages? Mice to coachmen? …And then I thought about the room that morning. Watching it change. …Ippity bippity boo.

That I was not still speechless with astonishment at what she’d done—at the mere fact that it could be done, by anyone—was striking evidence of how quickly I was growing used to miracles. “Why did you bother doing all that this morning—to the room?” I asked her.

“What, changing it?” she asked. “Isn’t that obvious? You were never supposed to see that place. It’s hidden for good reasons.”

“Yeah, I get that. But like Rain said; what was a change of wallpaper supposed to accomplish? And, come to think of it, why that wallpaper? If you’re so repelled by our fairytales, why make that astonishing room look just like some fairyland gift shop?”

She looked up at me almost sadly. “For the same reason we ever don such costumes: to render the encounter unbelievable. If you were ever fool enough to speak of this morning with others, not even one of my kind would think twice about believing your description of that ‘gift shop’—as you so aptly describe it.”

“But…that room’s real appearance was way more unbelievable! Architecturally impossible, as far as I could tell. Who would believe that either?”

“Look,” she sighed, “suppose you woke one night to find a stranger in your room. If they looked like I do now, you’d call the police, right?”

“You guys are in our rooms at night?” I thought with sudden disquiet of the tooth fairy.

“Stop it. Just answer my question.”

“Okay, yes. I’d probably call the police.”

“But if that stranger were dressed in outlandish robes, half transparent, glowing blue, with a set of horns and hovering two feet off the ground, would you still call the police?”

“Well…uh…”

“You’d just think it had to be a dream, roll over and go back to sleep, or, if you were the superstitious sort, that you were seeing a ghost or an alien. But people aren’t as likely to call the police about things like that—unless they’re really crazy, and then we’re even safer.”

“Safer from what?”

“Detection!” she said impatiently. “Have you heard nothing I’ve said all morning? Nearly everything we do is designed to minimize any risk of existing in your world!”

“But why? I still don’t get it! With such powers, you guys could easily rule us. What are you so afraid of?”

She laughed, not happily. “Can you hear yourself? …Rule! That’s precisely what you would do with our abilities, isn’t it? Who among your kind would imagine any other outcome—or believe us capable of any other desire? And what do your kind do to those who threaten to rule them, Matthew?”

“Okay, but too bad for us then, right? Like we could stop you?”

“Yes,” she said. “You could. You have before. Many times.”

I stared at her. “Since when? No one I know’s ever heard about it.”

“No?” she asked. “You’ve never heard of the Salem witch trials? The inquisitions? The Crusades? The Roman invasions of northern Europe—to slaughter the ‘Picts’ and clear their forests?” She stared at me in the blue-lit darkness. “Do you know why there are so few forests left in Europe, Matthew?”

“They were all used to build things?” I ventured uncomfortably.

“They were wicked,” she answered. “Wild nature, red in tooth and claw, dark and ungovernable, ‘unsanctified’ by your ‘God.’ Your kind couldn’t live ‘safely’ in their shadow, so they were beaten back, and back, until nothing remained but a few manageable parks. And do you know what really made those woods so dangerous?”

I shook my head, unable to believe what she was saying, but reluctant to say so.

“We lived there,” Piper said.

“This is…not what I’ve been told,” I could not help saying. “I’m not sure—”

“As I said this morning, you’ve been given many other explanations. Centuries of calming, innocuous cover stories or justifications. But read back far enough in what remains of even your own kind’s early literature, and it’s all there. All those hunts depicted in your ancient tapestries weren’t just for boars and unicorns and sword-wielding rabbits, Matthew. Look at those tapestries more carefully sometime, at the embroidered demons hidden in those trees. That’s how your kind saw us—back when we dared exist in your world. Do you get it now? The fairytales you know today were never meant to depict us as we are. They were meant to make us seem safer to you: too outlandish, too ridiculous to fear as deeply as you would if you knew how real, how close, how like you, we can be.”

“Okay…” It still wasn’t adding up for me. “But if we feared you so much, why would we create stories to make you seem ridiculous and safe? Wouldn’t our stories be designed to make our children frightened of you?”

“They were,” she said. “Once. It took us a lot of time to fix that. Your kind are not the only ones who have replaced the truth with less frightening substitutes. At least we didn’t do it to deceive ourselves.”

I spent a while chewing on this. But if my kind could reinvent history, then why couldn’t hers? “Even if all that’s true,” I said at last, “why didn’t you guys just…win? How did we beat you? What did we ever have to equal what you can do? Even now, if you showed yourselves, I still can’t see what we could do about it?”

“You’ve never heard of Nagasaki either then?” she asked sardonically.

“If we’ve managed not to nuke the Russians, I don’t see why we’d go there for you guys in our own cities. And besides, couldn’t you just…I don’t know, make the missiles disappear of veer of course or something?”

She shook her head and sighed. “Few of us can do what you’ve seen done today, Matthew. My mother is queen here for a reason. I am her daughter, sired by another of the most powerful left among us, and rigorously trained from birth. Rain is not Chancellor without cause either. We are a true meritocracy. Only the strongest and most able rule, until they are replaced by those who can surpass them. But even our most potent abilities are very limited and very local. We can do virtually nothing at any distance from ourselves, and only so much even closer by. Most of our kind have little anymore but small illusions, minor talents. Yes, the best of us are still more than ample match for any one of you, but not for all of you. We are few, and fewer all the time, while you are many and always increasing, always making more and more brainless machines immune to our illusions—machines that consume the very earth. If the earth itself cannot withstand you in your masses, what chance would we have in the end?” She shook her head again. “The same we’ve ever had.”

“So, you’re saying that people who can do everything I’ve seen you do today could not invent and wield weapons just as terrible as ours, or worse?”

“Some of us want to,” she said softly. “Some of us try, from time to time. But most of us would simply never do the things required to beat your kind in all-out war. We see things—experience the very world—too differently from you to make that thinkable. And we’ve never had the least desire to rule you anyway. Not most of us, at least.” She fell silent for a while. “We’re not wolves at all. Just titmice trembling in our burrows, spinning hidden dreams to live in while your kind destroys the world we used to share. That’s the sorry truth of it. We’ll hide in our cocoon of pretty shadows until the end arrives—for both our kinds perhaps.”

“No,” I said. “I think you’re wrong. No mice made that room I saw this morning. Anyone with such impossible skill and beauty to offer would be celebrated by us, not vilified. Lead with that, and your kind would be in far too much demand to make harming you even thinkable. We’re not medieval churchmen anymore. Most of us aren’t religious at all these days. If anything, we’re a little too ready for something new. Play nice, and we’d soon see you as the source of all good things.”

“We tried that too,” she said bitterly. “Guess who helped usher in your Renaissance. Yet it had barely gotten started before your kind was burning us in public squares, and leveling our forests again. Even those of you who might want what we could offer would still feel driven to use us in ways that left them assured of control. Control is all your kind has ever really worshiped. Once your kind realized that they can’t just learn to do what we do, envy and resentment would eclipse celebration in a heartbeat, even if fear didn’t.”

I recalled Rain’s earlier reproach for whining about my ‘inconvenient miracle.’ It seemed that minimizing upsides and maximizing downsides was one trait our kinds shared. There was clearly nothing I could say to make her understand my kind any better than I understood hers. …If she’s the one who misunderstands us, whispered some small mental voice. Move along…

“So, you said that some of you do want to hurt us. That would be this Anselm guy, I assume?”

“Among others. There are plenty among us who would see your kind overthrown.” She stood, and stretched, and began to walk around the little space. “None of them has ever been successful—for long, anyway—at anything but bringing you all down on us again. That’s why people like Anselm must be stopped. Most of us see that. He will be. In time.”

“Rain said he was exploiting us—the Andinols, I mean.”

“Andinalloi,” she corrected me. “Andinol is singular.”

“Whatever. Exploiting us how?”

She fell quiet, then shook her head. “It’s too complicated to explain.”

“We seem to have an awful lot of time to kill. Is he murdering us in our bedrooms at night, or what?”

“No, just stealing from you.”

“Really! Stealing what?”

“Your souls.”

I stared at her. “Is that another metaphor?”

“Yes,” she said wearily. “And no.”

“Oh, come on!” I groaned. “Just—”

We were interrupted by a quiet clatter at the door as Rain reentered in a rush.

Piper turned in obvious alarm.

“Change of plans,” he said. “I have to take young No Name with me now. The tunnels are swarming with Anselm’s creatures, which answers our previous question, I fear. They’d not be down here unless they’ve guessed not only that he matters, but where you were running to this morning, and how we’d try to get him out again.” He turned to me. “What, exactly, were you shouting in that alleyway when Piper found you?”

“I…I don’t remember,” I stammered. “I wanted her to change me back—Piper’s—The Lady, I mean. I was angry that she’d done this without even warning me it was possible… I thought maybe she lived up in the building and would hear me.”

“Did you say her name?” he asked urgently.

“I didn’t even know her name.”

“How specific were you about what she’d done?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I said anything…except that I knew it had been a stupid wish. … I don’t think I ever said what I had wished for.”

“Well,” he sighed. “Then we may hope they don’t know why you matter yet. I dare not leave you here another minute, though. Not with such a sweep in force. After the trick I played on that last fool, they may start looking carefully enough to find this door despite my concealments.” He beckoned me forward. “I’ll need to carry you.” He turned around, stretching his arms back to grab my legs. “Climb up.”

I wasn’t that small. “Piper says it’s a long way. Won’t I get heavy?”

He turned back around to look at me. “We need to move more quickly and quietly than you’re able to, and I’ll have to wrap a kind of screen around us, so that we can pass undetected within inches of people who know what to look for and how to look for it. That would be hard enough out in the open; it will be far harder in the tunnels. To do it, I’ll need precise knowledge and control of your location, and there’s no way to have that without you on my back.” He turned around and held his arms out again. I grabbed his shoulders and hoisted myself awkwardly up as he wrapped his arms underneath my knees, and turned to Piper. “Conceal yourself, and wait here until we’re well ahead. If we’re caught, I don’t want you implicated. Give us twenty minutes, if you can, then get to your mother’s seat as fast as safely possible. If all goes right, we’ll already be there—in her private chambers, I assume.”

“I won’t let you risk the blame for what I’ve done,” Piper protested.

“The Lady may choose other gifted chancellors,” Rain replied. “It seems unlikely she will bear another heir. Your protection is at the very heart of my commission, Ashta, so please just do as I request.”

She nodded reluctantly.

“Good.” Over his shoulder, he said to me, “If you’ve any need to scratch, sneeze, cough, hiccup, fart, or belch, do it now. Once we’re through this door, you must be absolutely silent and as still as possible, no matter what that costs you.”

“I’m as ready as I can be,” I assured him.

“All right then. We should go. Take care, Ashta,” he told Piper as she came to get the door.