by Dave Butler
Behind the man came a tall woman wearing a similar bag over her head and also carrying a club. Not a human woman, Charlie realized, when he saw the long cow’s tail bouncing out behind her.
“What?” Heinrich Zahnkrieger tugged at his collar. “Nonsense!”
The tall man clubbed Heinrich several times in the chest. “It ain’t nonsense; it’s a raid!”
“We’re freeing your prisoners!” the hulder woman shouted. She kicked the kobold into the corner.
“Herr Doktor!” Wijmoor cried. The red-haired kobold threw himself to his knees in front of the tall man and pleaded. “Please! Spare us all, but especially spare my poor student Heinrich! He has been badly treated!”
“Ain’t no one getting hurt,” the big man growled. “We’re liberating you! In the name of the Anti-Human League!”
“I am so confused now!” Wijmoor raised a crooked finger up as if trying to pull understanding down from the sky.
And then Charlie recognized the voices of the two attackers. The woman was Ingrid, who had once—or maybe twice—nearly married Grim. The man was Sal, who ran a kind of business called a dairy, where trolls drank milk until it put them into a stupor. He and Grim had butted heads—not literally, because that would have killed Sal—over Sal’s business and over Ingrid. Charlie had met them both in Sal’s dairy, and later Ingrid had rescued Grim from the Iron Cog by bringing the hulder hue and cry to a gunfight beneath Waterloo Station.
Charlie looked to Grim and found Grim looking back at him.
The troll winked.
“Don’t ask too many questions, Meneer Doktor!” Charlie shouted. “We’re liberated—that’s what counts!”
Ingrid beckoned to Charlie to come with her down a new passageway, and he raced to follow her.
“And stay down!” Sal shouted, smacking Grim once more in the head with his club.
Behind Charlie came Thomas and Gnat in quick succession, and he heard Sal booting and dragging Jan Wijmoor along at the rear.
Grim Grumblesson and Heinrich Zahnkrieger stayed behind, both lying on the ground.
Ingrid quickly led them all to a sewer tunnel, which branched into multiple side passages and slimy brick crossroads. She turned, turned, and turned again, and then threw herself against a wall, breathing hard.
She took off her mask. “We’re not supposed to be members of the Anti-Human League, Sal. We’re supposed to be rescuing these people from the Anti-Human League.”
Sal yanked off his mask. He still had the ugly snarl Charlie remembered, the short queue of hair tied behind his neck, and the oversized muttonchop side-whiskers. “Yeah, only I figured at the last minute, why not create a little confusion?”
“Maybe leave the last-minute thinking to other people,” Ingrid suggested.
“Like your man Grim?” Sal asked.
“You only had to hit him once,” she said. “And he’s not my man. And before you get any ideas, neither are you.”
“He wouldn’t go down.” Sal shrugged. “If he’d dropped at once like he was supposed to, I wouldn’t have had to smack him again. Had to make it look realistic, didn’t I?”
Ingrid sighed. “I suppose.”
“Thank you,” Charlie said.
“Am I to understand,” Jan Wijmoor said slowly, “that you two are in league—so to speak—with that troll?”
“Grim Grumblesson,” Charlie clarified.
“Now he gets it,” Sal said.
“I think I understand why Grim is working for the committee,” Charlie said. “But if you’re mad at him for doing that…why are you helping him now?”
“Am I helping Grim?” Ingrid asked. “Or am I helping you?”
“You’re helping me. Thank you,” Charlie said.
“But I’m not angry with Grim,” Ingrid went on. “I…don’t understand his need for crusades, is all. I don’t think I can be with someone who always has to have a cause. I want his cause to be us, not saving London’s elder folk or putting the dairies out of business. Maybe I’m just looking for a farmer after all.”
Sal snorted. “I know I could never be with someone whose cause was to put the dairies out of business.”
“Shut up, Sal,” Ingrid sighed, “or I’ll hit you in the head. To make it look realistic.”
“You freed us,” Wijmoor said, “so that the troll could look innocent.”
“I freed you because this Anti-Human League stuff is rot!” Sal snarled. “It’s all been cooked up so that pixies and trolls and so on will look like they’re out to overthrow the government, see? So the government can send those new tin soldiers it has after the pixies and trolls, and get rid of them once and for all.”
“I’m a little surprised to see you so concerned about that,” Charlie said. “You seemed quite happy to have as many hulders as possible sitting around in a daze in your dairy, slobbering and dreaming.”
“Don’t you see, Charlie?” Gnat asked. “Sal isn’t worried about trolls out of the goodness of his heart. He’s worried because if the trolls are killed, or flee London, he won’t have any customers. I don’t think he’s worried about pixies at all.”
Sal shrugged. “I got nothing to sell to a pixie.”
“I will take any ally I can get, in these straits,” Gnat said. “I am Lady de Minimis, Baroness of Underthames.”
“Oh yeah? Ingrid here didn’t mention you were nobility.”
“I didn’t know,” Ingrid said.
“Where are you supposed to take us?” Gnat said to Ingrid. “We could return to Underthames and my warrior throng.”
“Grim wanted us to take you somewhere to meet him.” Sal smacked his stick into his palm for emphasis, and for the first time Charlie noticed that it was the same heavy cane he’d seen in the man’s hands back at the dairy.
“Pondicherry’s shop,” Ingrid said.
“Lead the way, sweets.” Sal hit his palm again.
“Don’t call me that,” Ingrid said, “or Odin’s missing eye, I’ll break your nose.” She stepped away from the brick wall and looked both directions. “Only…I think I’ve taken a wrong turn.”
Sal laughed. “Oh, this is too good!”
Charlie turned to Gnat. “Are there pixie signs here that would show us the way?”
Gnat shook her head. “But the sewers are large. Surely, all we need to do is find an exit, any exit, and then aboveground we can find our way to where we need to go.”
They set out.
“Am I hearing something?” Charlie asked.
“Dripping water?” Thomas said.
“The satisfying rumble of distant machinery?” Wijmoor asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Charlie said thoughtfully. “It’s something closer, and more animal.”
“Yeah,” Sal agreed. “I think I hear it too.”
“What is it?” Wijmoor asked. “Birds? An owl or a dove, lost and trapped down here in all the filth?”
“It’s ghouls,” Gnat whispered. “Which direction is it coming from?”
“I can’t tell,” Charlie said.
“Can we go back the way we came?” Thomas asked.
“Not if we want to protect Grim and escape at the same time,” Charlie pointed out. “This way,” he suggested, pointing to a low arch beyond which he saw a broad room that seemed to be full of light. The light struck him as hopeful. “I’ll go first.”
Charlie walked under the arch. The chamber beyond was long and tall, and its ceiling was an iron grate—above, Charlie saw yellow gaslight, and feet treading back and forth across the iron. That was a city street, tantalizingly only a few feet over his head.
Could he jump and reach it?
Perhaps. And Thomas could join him, but then how would the others get out?
He heard the hooting again, nearer, and picked up his pace.
Then he heard another sound, one he’d heard more recently than the hooting of ghouls.
Chittering.
The incessant, mad chittering of London’s giant rats.
Charlie took another step forward and then stopped. Through the arch on the far side of the chamber shuffled a single ghoul. In the light from the street overhead, Charlie could clearly see its almost noseless, chimpanzee-like face; its long teeth; its hairless, clammy body.
The ghoul hooted again and again, changing pitch as it did so.
To his surprise, Charlie felt the Babel Card within him slide to work. The ghoul’s hoots weren’t mere noise; they weren’t just the incoherent grunting of an animal….The Babel Card was at least trying to interpret the hoots as speech.
“Charlie,” Sal said. “Step back.” Charlie heard the smack of Sal testing his cane club in the palm of his hand.
“Wait.” Charlie raised a cautioning finger.
“Strangers!” the ghoul wailed. “They look dangerous! Hide the nestlings and protect the nest!”
“Wait!” Charlie called. “We’re friends! We mean your nestlings no harm!”
“Charlie!” Natalie de Minimis cried. “Are you hooting, lad?”
Meneer Doktor Jan Wijmoor snapped his fingers. Charlie turned to see the kobold pointing at the ceiling in glee. “It’s the Babel Card, isn’t it, Charlie? You’re speaking to it!”
“Him,” Charlie said. “I’m trying to speak to him.”
Two more ghouls popped through the far arch and stood shoulder to shoulder with the first.
The chittering got louder.
“We just want to pass through,” Charlie said.
The ghouls glowered at him.
The chittering got louder still.
More ghouls flooded in under the arch.
“Please,” Charlie said.
From the arch behind his friends, rats poured into the room.
“We’re with you!” Charlie hooted to the ghouls.
Thomas joined him. “We’re your friends!” Charlie was glad he wasn’t the only one with a Babel Card installed.
The wave of ghouls from one end of the hall and the wave of rats from the other rose at the same moment and surged forward.
Charlie turned and charged the rats. “Pondicherry’s of Whitechapel!”
Thomas picked up this cry and repeated it.
“De Minimis and Underthames!”
Ingrid and Sal waded into the fight with no battle cry, and Jan Wijmoor pressed himself flat against the wall to avoid the fray completely.
Was this a good idea? Charlie hadn’t a clue, but he thought he had just learned, contrary to what he had always believed, that ghouls were a folk. They were a people and had language; they could be talked to.
Surely that meant they could be befriended.
Rats could obviously make friends as well, but Charlie had seen enough treason, trickery, and murder at the hands of the rats to want to avoid getting any closer to them.
The rats’ chittering, too, was taking shape as language. Mostly the Babel Card interpreted it as “Kill! Kill! Eat!” But from the back of the swarm of dog-sized rodents rose Scabies, the scarred gray rat. He held a twisted metal fork, as long as he himself was tall, with visibly sharpened tines, and he squealed and chittered and pointed at Charlie.
“Kill that one!” Scabies howled.
The rats rushed at Charlie.
So there it was: his decision was made for him.
Ingrid moved in front of him, swinging her club. She threw back her head and let loose a sound like the moo of a cow, if a cow could sound angry and threatening. She knelt in front of Charlie and turned at the waist, lashing left and right with her weapon, and whenever she hit a rat, she knocked it through the air and it struck a wall, to lie still.
She wasn’t nearly Grim’s size, but she seemed just as strong.
“We’re on your side!” Charlie continued to hoot.
“We do not wish your nestlings harm!” Thomas added.
Sal was dainty by comparison with Ingrid. He chose his targets, usually rats who were distracted or attacking someone else, and he dispatched them with simple bonks to the skull from his cane. He didn’t cut the swath Ingrid did, but he knocked down a lot of rats.
Gnat worked with sober efficiency, skewering rats like pigeons for a roasting spit.
But more rats swarmed in, and the wall of rats in front of Ingrid and Sal grew higher, swayed, and leaned forward as if about to collapse, spilling rats all over them.
Then the ghouls attacked.
The first ghoul actually used Charlie as a springboard, leaping up onto his shoulders from behind and hurling itself out over the foremost rats to land in the rear ranks and attack. It was followed by several more, and by ghouls who leaped from Thomas and even Ingrid.
When a ghoul leaped onto Sal’s shoulders to springboard from him, the big man twisted to shake it off, and they both fell to the ground.
Chittering in rage, half of the first rank of rats turned to attack the ghouls that were suddenly behind their lines. Then the next wave of ghouls attacked. These fighters stayed low to the ground and moved on all fours, which made them appear to gallop more than to run. The ghouls tore into the rats with rage, yanking rat limbs from rat bodies, twisting off rat heads, and tearing out rat throats with ghoul teeth.
“By the Wheel!” Jan Wijmoor whimpered.
Scabies wasn’t deterred. He charged through his warriors toward Charlie, sharpened fork tucked under his armpit and clutched in both paws, like a lance. Charlie waited, hands ready.
Scabies stabbed Charlie with his fork. The tines sank into Charlie’s flesh, and it hurt, but it would have hurt a great deal more if Charlie had been flesh and blood. Charlie grabbed Scabies by the neck and muzzle and lifted the rat leader off his feet. With the rat’s paws scratching at him, Charlie spun around twice and threw him.
Scabies struck the brick wall above the arch through which he’d entered, then fell to the ground in a heap. Picking himself with chattering teeth and an angry sneer on his muzzle, Scabies turned and ran.
At that sight, the rats fled. Their shrieks of thwarted rage and pain echoed through the sewer’s passages, along with the joyous hoots of the ghouls who pursued them.
Charlie pulled the fork out and dropped it to the ground.
Ingrid and Sal stood, shaking themselves. Jan Wijmoor and Thomas stood close to Charlie.
Pursuing ghouls returned, dragging dead rats behind them by the tails.
With a slow tapping sound, a ghoul leaning on a cane approached Charlie. White hair sprouted from her head and back, and a few long strands from her slit nostrils, too. Her eyes were dark yellow with age, and she approached Charlie with a single finger raised in question.
“You are no ghoul, are you?” she asked.
Charlie shook his head, but then he thought that might not be a gesture the ghouls would understand. “No,” he added.
She poked him experimentally in the chest until she found one of the holes left by Scabies’s fork, and she twisted a rubbery finger inside that hole.
“You’re the human who cannot be hurt,” she said. “Like the Long Walk Woman.”
“I don’t know about the Long Walk Woman.” That sounded like a story. The ghoul was wrong about Charlie on both counts, but it probably wasn’t worth trying to explain that just now. “I can be hurt.”
“My people know you,” the ghoul crone said. “A moon ago, you were beneath the place the humans call Waterloo Station, and my people met you.”
Her people had tried to eat Charlie was what she really meant. And had failed, after gnawing on him at length. And then Charlie had driven them away with rocks.
“Yes,” Charlie agreed. “That was me.”
“The boy who cannot be ea
ten.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. That seemed like a good title to have among ghouls, and then he realized that the pattern of hoots the old ghoul used made it more than just words.
It was Charlie’s new name.
“The Boy Who Cannot Be Eaten,” Thomas said.
“Charlie,” Ingrid asked in a pleasant, relaxed voice. “What’s going on?”
“We’re talking,” he told her.
“The Boy Who Cannot Be Eaten!” the ghouls all hooted.
“That’s a lot of noise for just talking,” Sal muttered.
“You travel with a pixie,” the ghoul observed.
“Not just any pixie,” Charlie said. “She’s the Baroness de Minimis of Underthames.”
“The fairies are our enemies, but for the Boy Who Cannot Be Eaten, and for her own valor in battle, we will spare her life.”
“Thank you,” Charlie said.
“And have you come only to aid us in our never-ending war against the rats?”
“I am happy I could help you in your fight today,” Charlie said. “But actually, my friends and I are trying to find our way out of the sewers. To someplace safe.”
“Safe…for your kind,” the ghoul crone mused.
“Yes.” Was there any such place? Since he’d left Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention & Repair, Charlie hadn’t seen a place that was safe for his kind. Maybe that was the nature of life. “A place where humans aren’t fighting, at least.”
The crone bobbed her shoulders up and down, a gesture that looked like a rough nod. “My people will take you to such a place. Eats Too Much! Leaps Higher Backward! One Extra Claw!”
The ghouls shuffled forward, hooting wordlessly. They looked nervous to be in Charlie’s presence, and they repeatedly bowed in his direction.
“Take the Boy Who Cannot Be Eaten to the Place of Guarded Meat,” the crone directed the three younger ghouls. “Keep him safe, and eat none of his party. On pain of death, mind you.”
The ghouls all bobbed their shoulders, hooting. “Yes, Cunning Woman.”
