The Sunken City Trilogy

by Phil Williams

  Using the light of his phone, he searched for something to use as a lever. Roads and tunnels had iron bars and that crap sticking through them, didn’t they? You always saw shards like that in the rubble. Not here, it seemed. He had to get his hands underneath the concrete block instead, and put his back into heaving upwards, knowing this stupid movement was going to haunt him for life. It didn’t matter, though, just another pain to add to the collection. He groaned and tugged and shifted the weight just enough to wriggle out. He gave the busted ankle the briefest look. It was limp and thick with blood. Examining the damage wasn’t going to help.

  Barton clambered up, falling against the wall and taking his weight on his other foot. He shone his phone torch up the tunnel. The lights were working up ahead, that was something. He took out his hip flask and swigged what was left of the glo. Barely a mouthful. It would do, though, for a short while. He let the flask drop with a clatter. Dead weight.

  He waited a minute, while his head partially cleared and his eyes started to refocus.

  The trails began to appear in the air before him. The colours of the myriad beasts, hanging like slug paths. So many of them. He took a few limping steps along the wall and peered ahead, to where a thick purple line led up to a doorway. A tuckle had come through here. Tried to smash through the door.

  As the glo took control, he saw the rest, too. Hounds and sickles. A turnbold in the mix, with its multiple skeletal faces. A horde of creatures. And at its centre, the minotaur.

  Pax was desperately trying to recall the floorplans of the Sunken City from Apothel’s book, but even the sections she could picture seemed, in her recollection, to be random lines. Uneven, probably not to scale and completely useless. There were names of entrances, but it was no help to know that one of the tunnels came out near the Morricone Theatre. That might be a two-mile walk away, it might be five miles. And it might be in any direction.

  She had given Grace her coat, which the teenager draped over her shoulders after a hug of gratitude. Pax let her believe it was a gift of kindness, not just because the murderous grapple with the sickle had unbearably raised her body temperature. Grace was still soldiering on barefoot, though, which worried Pax. How far could they go before she collapsed?

  The noises were behind them but getting no further away. Occasional new chirps and clicks kept startling them. Whatever was out there, of which there seemed to be an awful lot, was still following them. Equally daunting was the fact that after the very first tunnel they had lost Holly’s scratches on the walls. Maybe she hadn’t made them clear enough, maybe she had simply given up on the idea, maybe something worse. Yet Pax told Grace they were going the right way, with nothing whatsoever to base that on, and the girl seemed to believe her.

  Eventually the tunnels got wider and more complex. One or two expanded to the width of a narrow street, with platforms at the edges, like walkways. Some resembled railway tunnels in size and shape, though without any of the fixtures to suggest rails had ever been laid there. It was remarkable, and Pax started to get an idea of the magnitude of this place – and how much vaster and more incredible it would seem to the Fae. These tunnels led to even wider rooms, with one large enough to house a truck, its ceiling over twenty feet high. It had four exits, one on each wall. They chose one that was up a small flight of steps. The lights were less reliable in these greater expanses. Some of the rooms were too large for the small lights to reach their corners; others, including whole corridors, did not have their lights activated. Pax assured Grace that there was nothing in the shadows, well aware it was nonsense.

  When it was starting to seem like they would never encounter another living being in this nightmare maze, and would be doomed to walk its halls forever, a movement cut across the tunnel ahead. Another human. Pax and Grace stopped dead.

  “Mum?” Grace asked hopefully.

  Am I a bad mother? Am I a bad wife?

  The two questions kept circling around Holly’s mind as she picked her way through the tunnels. She had left what she thought was an admirable trail of scratches along the wall, but she was grimly aware that she had also left her only daughter behind her with a miscreant poker player, in an underground system teeming with monsters. She was also grimly aware that her husband had been dealing with all this for many years and had never once thought she could handle the truth of it.

  Am I that hard to talk to that he couldn’t trust me with this?

  She had travelled through what seemed like a dozen narrow tunnels without getting anywhere, finding two doors that were locked and one set of stairs that led up to what seemed to be an exit, but turned out to be an impassable brick wall. She could swear that she had walked down some of these tunnels before, but her scratches were not on the walls. Whoever built the place must have produced an awful lot of identical mundane passages.

  At least the sounds of the creatures were dying down. The birdlike noises and the caustic barks had been starting to grate on her. She kept calm by convincing herself that even here there must be some pathetic little man at the top of it all who could be told off. That would make her feel better when she got out. Locate the fool in charge and watch him shrivel up in the knowledge of his ineptitude.

  If she could escape.

  She turned a corner and finally saw a break in the monotony. The walls, for so long, had been nothing but tired concrete and brick; now, there was another texture, bumps in the shadows. Roots. Plant life. Something was growing out of the corner of a wall at the far end of the long corridor. It gave her hope. She hurried towards it, finding renewed energy to pick up her speed.

  It was about the height and thickness of a sunflower, with large green roots tangling around its base and snaking up one wall.

  As she got closer, she slowed down. Something about the plant wasn’t right. There was a strange smell in the air, something she couldn’t quite place but that made her nostrils wrinkle. A few more steps and it became too noxious for her to continue, a vile smell. She covered her nose and mouth and studied the plant. It was moving. The head on its thick green stalk swayed from side to side, while its centre, a broad brown circle, bubbled with a gooey liquid. Around its roots she noticed more liquid. The thing was secreting slime. One bubble expanded and then popped; with it came a rush of gas. Holly gagged and covered her face. She quickly backtracked, disgusted.

  Reaching a corner, looking back down a tunnel she knew she recognised, Holly froze. The wall was bare. She looked closer, ran a hand over the brickwork. Her scratch had gone.

  “Oh no,” Holly gasped. “Why...”

  She scanned the walls, searching for any blue patches. There was nothing there, but she knew in her gut what had happened. She ran back down the tunnel, tracing her fingers along the wall, searching for her markings.

  They were all gone.

  She took the lockpick and hurriedly carved into the wall: Why?

  She stood back and waited, looking up and down.

  It appeared, rising from the floor, the flat shape of a blue screen. The blue rectangle moved over her words and rested there. The brick distorted, the indentations turning in on themselves, healing before her eyes.

  A moment of inactivity, then new letters formed, carving themselves into the brick.

  Ugly.

  Holly stared at the letters, shocked. She put her full indignation into a one-word response. “Wow.”

  The word slowly faded again.

  She thought for a moment, then scraped into the blue rectangle: Way out?

  Her words faded and new letters appeared.

  Myriads coming.

  She put her hands on her hips and relented at the useless nature of this communication. How had Barton let whoever was hiding behind these flat squares tell him what to do for so long? She listened, though, and the sounds of the creatures were indeed getting nearer. There was another groan, like the movements of a pipe they had heard when they first came down here. Making a quick decision, she turned away from the antagonistic blue thing an
d took an alternative route into the next tunnel, away from the flower.

  Pax and Grace hurried after the shape, turning a corner and seeing whoever it was disappear into another doorway. Grace shouted, “Mum! It’s us! Wait!”

  Pax grabbed Grace’s arm and pulled her back. Grace tried to break free but Pax held her fast. “I don’t think it’s your mum.”

  “Who else would be down here?” Grace replied hotly.

  “Grace, wait,” Pax said forcibly, pulling her still. “That might not even be a person.”

  “Get off me! You’re not helping!” Grace shoved Pax and turned towards the shape. She shouted again, running down the tunnel. “Mum!”

  Pax watched her, thinking of the unthinkable act she had already done in protecting this girl from that dog demon. She could leave her, save herself. Grace was stumbling like a drunk goat, her feet barely functioning. She was so skinny and clueless, she wouldn’t stand a chance against anything down there. Pax’s mind ran back to her diminutive fairy friend, her ability to let all this go. Friend. That was rich. She was better than Letty, she’d already made that decision. Given the choice, she had to do the right thing. She charged after Grace. It took no time to catch up.

  Pax skipped ahead of the hobbling girl and checked through the doorway into a cavernous expanse. As Grace drew up next to Pax, they both came to the same conclusion. There was no way Holly would have run into a room like that.

  “The other way,” Pax said gently, nodding back up the tunnel. “Whatever it was, we have to get away from it.”

  As she spoke, a light crept into the vast room, capturing their attention. On the far wall, a high-up doorway glowed faint blue. The light grew stronger, flowing like water, its source slowly moving into the room. Its growing flicker revealed a cathedral-like expanse with a domed ceiling. The pair were halfway up in their entrance, on the edge of a ring walkway that ran around an open centre, a drop of ten feet or so to the ground.

  Pax had no name for the spectre they had followed, but she realised its purpose. It was designed to lead them to this place, and the thing that was entering it. A sound like a thunder crack came from the far tunnel.

  “That way.” Pax turned out of the room, but far down the corridor a shape had already appeared. Another canine centaur, its claws stretched ahead of it. It was searching the air, unaware that they were up ahead. Pax spun in the other direction. A dog was sniffing at the opposite end of the tunnel. Its flesh was smoking.

  “Shit,” Pax uttered under her breath. Grace moved close to her, more terrified than ever. They both looked back into the vast room, the brilliant blue growing ever brighter. Shards of electricity licked into the room from the distant doorway, like lizards’ tongues. The room was otherwise empty, though, and there were at least two other doorways. Dark voids, but possibilities nonetheless.

  They had been running from it since their arrival, but somehow they had arrived at the heart of their pursuer’s domain. The myriad creatures surrounded it, but did not come close to it. Their best hope, Pax saw, was to get close. To go through the middle. No one understood it, after all. The Fae said they hated it but they hadn’t gone through with stopping it. The Ministry wanted to protect it. There was a chance. The slightest chance that they might be able to brave it.

  She took Grace’s hand and looked her in the eye.

  “I need you to trust me,” she said, and pulled the teenager into the room.

  22

  Descending into the Sunken City, Casaria searched the walls with torchlight for any more fairy welcome presents. Down the steps and to the right, the lights were on. Letty was left watching from outside. Casaria turned back and said, half serious, “Not coming?”

  “I got you in,” Letty replied. “You get them out.”

  He nodded, creeping further into the tunnel. Unarmed. The fairy clearly had no idea that this was not what he usually did, but he felt naked without so much as a gun or a knife. All he had was the Fae device, which clearly had no fuel.

  “Don’t worry,” Letty said. “I’ll keep watch. In case my boys come back.”

  Casaria hummed. That wouldn’t be much help if he ran into a griffix, would it?

  He kept moving, into the featureless abyss of one of the Sunken City’s anonymous tunnels. He took a breath. The Ministry would soon catch up to them with real weapons, but he’d be kept out. Likely as not, they’d have Sam Ward along, saying he was unfit for a sensitive rescue operation. But it had to be him down there, getting Pax out. Not them, not those glorified crossing guards.

  Why? Why did it matter? He gave one final look back up to Letty. She was floating around at head-height, arms folded. He knew. It was the same reason that this ridiculous little creature had come to help.

  Pax did not deserve to be down there, and for it all he could not bring himself to stop caring.

  He pocketed his torch and waved the fairy off. “Just keep this door safe.”

  The pain in his ankle had all but subsided as Barton pressed on through the tunnels. He didn’t think about the damage he might be doing to himself; the important thing was that he couldn’t feel it. He picked up speed as the trail became clearer, the walls covered in claw marks. He was getting closer, but the horde was still moving, otherwise he would have caught up to it already. That was a good thing. If it was moving this quickly, it had to be still giving chase.

  There were too many colours of creatures in the air for him to discern what he was going to come across first. Glogockles, turnbolds, sickles and perhaps another tuckle. They would be moving separately, different spokes of the minotaur’s wheel, but they were close enough together that he might see one or all of them at any time.

  It didn’t matter.

  Nothing mattered, he kept telling himself, other than getting Grace to safety.

  The glo had given him strength. Bring on the beasts.

  Pax and Grace sprinted through the domed room, in a low defensive crouch, for all the help it would afford them, as the electric arms of the berserker lashed into the room, lighting their way in a dazzling blue. The thing was moving into the open like a collection of lightning whips, swinging in and out through the doorway as the central body, still approaching, got brighter and brighter. The pair followed a slope down, below the tunnel that the thing was coming through, and they bolted for an arched opening on the opposite side, tucked under a concrete walkway.

  As they reached the exit, one of the flashing limbs of the berserker crashed through the walkway, its tremendous power shattering the concrete. The pair staggered with a shared scream as the destructive limb rested there, pressing against the wall ahead. As it touched the bricks, sparking offshoots dug into the bricks like clawing fingers.

  Pax pulled Grace towards the next doorway, glancing back at the tunnel. The monster was emerging, finally, its long electric limbs pulling the rest of it in like a kraken. Pax held up her hands to shield her eyes from it, the flash blinding as it came into view. As it revealed itself, though, the light faded, diluted by the size of the room. Grace was stone still, mouth wide open, and Pax had to shake her by the shoulders to get her moving.

  “Look at it!” Grace gasped, but Pax was more interested in surviving. She shoved Grace ahead, towards the next opening. Grace tripped, distracted, and Pax heaved her back up. She pushed the girl into the tunnel, just as another electric limb cracked into the floor. A shockwave jolted through the ground and the walls, throwing Pax off balance. She fell into Grace and they tumbled down together, half-turning back. Multiple electric limbs were striking the floor behind them, pounding it like a stamping spider.

  “There!” Grace pointed into their new tunnel. She scrambled out from under Pax and ran. Beyond the entrance Grace was going for, there was another small shape ahead, a low, sniffing creature. Two of them. Small smoking dogs. They looked up and bared their teeth. Twenty metres ahead, perhaps, beyond Grace’s target door.

  Pax jumped up and sprinted as Grace charged at the door fearlessly, seeming to not ev
en see the dogs. The dogs started barking and Grace shrieked. That made them run; two hounds pounding towards her. Grace slammed into the door and rolled through, but the dogs were close, about to leap as Pax got there. They stopped, skidding to a halt with a whine just before her. Pax froze too. The dogs backed off, growling and snapping, puffs of smoke coming out of their mouths, and other orifices, and hovering over their fur. Pax turned a slow look over her shoulder. One of the electric limbs was snaking into the tunnel, still coming after them. Pax jumped through the doorway and slammed it shut, as the dogs ran yelping in the other direction.

  There was no light, but she could hear Grace nearby, panting and slapping the bricks, feeling for a way forward. She cried, “There’s no exit! We’re trapped!”

  Pax turned back to the closed door. The light from the searching limb came through the edges of the door, giving the room a dull, eerie glow. Grace was right: it was an alcove with no exit, a tiny circular room built of brick, with a domed ceiling and no breaks in the walls. Pax leant against the door, out of options. She thought of Holly, somewhere out there, perhaps their only hope, and chose to deal with her distress through indignation.

  “Why the hell did anyone even build this room?”

  Barton was closing in on the sounds; he recognised the probing click of a sickle. Another twenty-metre tunnel and he was sure he would get to them. The clicking became frantic, though, and suddenly drew nearer. It was on the move. The pad of its claws across the floor was rapid, a pursuit he knew all too well. It had found a target. Had it somehow sensed him? He braced himself, spreading his arms, waiting for its approach.