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Authors: Michael Pryor

Tags: #TEEN FICTION

Extraordinaires 1 (8 page)

BOOK: Extraordinaires 1
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B
illingsgate fish market. Damona wore a wide-brimmed hat and overcoat. Protection, disguise. Rain clearing, she leaned against a lamp post, gazing at the swarming Invaders. She was contemptuous and pitying. Pale, soft creatures. How did they ever become so dominant? Looking harder, she saw their activity, their energy, their enterprise. A hint?

She grunted. Where were the Spalnitz brothers? She'd bought copper from them in the past, needed plenty now. Slippery, like most Invaders, but the Spalnitzes were greedy enough to sell to the True People. Damona could work with that.

Olaf sidled up to her. Large hat, tattered velvet coat. A good scout, Olaf was often abroad in the overworld. He was shorter than most of the True People, smaller. Wrapped in his rags he caused no comment. A beggar, one of many.

Damona admired his fortitude.

Olaf squatted next to her. ‘The boy you're after. The Spawn have him. Here.'

Damona bared her teeth. Finding the boy was good. She could use him to put pressure on Dr Ward. But the Spawn? She spat on the cobbles. They were a problem.

Damona hated the Spawn even more than she hated their Immortal masters. Spawn turned her stomach. She gave Olaf a coin. In case anyone was wondering why she was talking to a beggar. ‘Where?'

He pointed, a barest twitch of a finger. She tossed him another coin, set off in the direction he indicated. Around her the business of the fish market swirled and roared. She ignored it.

The Invaders had a Golden Rule. Damona had heard of it. Treat others as one would wish to be treated. Stupid. Unworkable.

The True People had a Golden Rule: always repay. Good or bad, always repay. Debts were honoured. Revenge was taken. It was natural.

She was sure that the Golden Rule of the True People was observed more wholly than the Golden Rule of the Invaders. Theirs was too complicated. An Invader had to imagine himself as someone else, for a start. Much too hard for most Invaders, from what she'd seen.

The code of the True People was simpler. It took a natural impulse, made it part of their culture. In the past, when the Invaders burned a village of the True People, the survivors sought revenge. Every time.

It was simple. It was clear. It was inborn. It was satisfying.

Damona had had a long life to consider such things. In her heart, she knew that this custom had helped destroy her people. True People sought revenge even when badly placed, outnumbered, hurt, lost. Each defeat had diminished her people. Hot-blooded revenge could be a disaster. Cold, thoughtful revenge, though. That was different. The Immortals were a different case from the Invaders. More dangerous, less predictable. Damona didn't care what their motives were. She just knew that the self-proclaimed sorcerers were enemies.

It happened many, many years ago, when she was young. A small clan of True People wanted to start their own stronghold. The plan had caused much heartache, families divided, arguing, friend against friend. In the end the self-determination of the True People prevailed.

A year passed with no news. Then a sole survivor of the clan dragged herself back to London. She brought news that the clan had been abducted by the Immortals, and died.

The outrage created anger that had not been seen for an age. Damona was in the troop that went to rescue the missing clan. They found only bones, so their mission became one of revenge. They destroyed scores of the Spawn but weren't able to find the Immortals themselves.

The Immortals disappeared soon after this disaster. Vanished. No word of them in the Demimonde.

Then news came of them from India. They were ensconced in the shadow world there, breeding horrors.

Damona had spent time learning about the Immortals. Many whispers, few facts. Everyone she spoke to agreed that they were magicians. This meant little to Damona. The Demimonde was full of those who called themselves heirs to Pharaohs, Speakers to the Dead and travellers from other worlds. Claims were easy to make in the Demimonde and hard to disprove.

The Immortals were like a squeaky gear to Damona. Hard to ignore, but not that important. They were in India, the True People were under London.

A smile spread on her broad face. Taking the boy would be of benefit to the True People. It would also upset the Immortals. Two good outcomes, one action. Efficient and pleasing.

Damona went to the rear of the warehouse. Crates stacked high, smelling of fish. She pushed her way through them. Cats scattered, glared at her.

An iron ladder led to the roof. Skylight, easy entrance. A catwalk and she was in a loft with a fine view below.

She peered down. Smiled.

Cobwebs, dust, broken crates. Two Spawn were dressed as police constables. Damona sniffed. No mistaking their smell. Not alive, not dead. Stronger than they looked, she knew.

They were tying the hands of their victim. The boy was tall, well built, curly haired, unhappy. He kicked, struggled. Uselessly. The Spawn had already thrown back a steel hatch in the floor. A Demimonde entrance.

Damona could move quietly when she chose, like all True People. Her bulk was deceptive. She ignored the ache in her hip. Crept along the catwalk to the other end of the warehouse. She found a ladder. It creaked under her weight. Her heart caught a beat until it steadied. Then she was on the cobbled floor.

Damona smiled again. A few steps, a slide around a pillar, and she'd be on them.

She paused for a moment. Hesitated. Was she too old for such nonsense?

Of course I am. But it's not going to stop me
.

She roared and charged straight at them. Stiff-armed the Spawn on the right. He flew backward, squawking. The one on the left stopped blindfolding the lad. Damona swung a fist. He didn't have time to move. His head snapped back. His police helmet flew off. He toppled, senseless.

Damona pushed the Invader lad aside. She crouched to meet the first Spawn. He hissed, launched himself at her, eyes mad.

She drew her head in to protect her throat. She clasped both hands together, brought them up with all her True People strength. She caught him right under his chin. His jaw crunched. His eyes rolled up. He collapsed at her feet.

Damona bent. She grasped her knees and panted. She
definitely
wasn't as young as she once was.

The boy. She lifted her head, found him on the floor, bound and angry.

He growled at her from behind his gag.

She almost laughed, then she saw his eyes. Wild eyes. The eyes of a hunter. She backed away a step or two. The boy had no restraint left in him. He was about to attack.

‘Don't,' she said. She kept her voice calm, her movements slow. She reached across the body of the Spawn, grasped a steel rung. She grunted, wrenched it from its mountings. She swung it in front of her. Two feet of solid metal whistled, slicing through the air. ‘I'll hurt you,' she said to the wild boy.

He swarmed up and out of the ropes. She gaped.
How did he do that?
He leaned one way, then the other, looking for the range of the metal bar. He didn't back away.

Damona kept up a soft chant: ‘Easy now. Easy now.'

He stripped off his gag. Bared his teeth. Growled a challenge from deep in his chest. His eyes darted to the dark hole in the floor. Before Damona could move he took a few steps and dived down it.

Damona sat back on her haunches. She took a deep breath, thinking. She tossed the metal bar away. It rang on the concrete like a bell.

She glanced at the bodies of the Spawn. ‘What were you two doing with him?' She shuffled over and sifted their pockets, found nothing.

Why would they want a wild boy?

She sighed, climbed to her feet. ‘They can't have him. I want him.'

K
ingsley ran with the single-mindedness of the jungle animals among which he'd been raised. His one impulse was to put distance between him and that creature, the one like the trolls who'd murdered Mrs Walters.

At the bottom of the ladder, he was faced with a red-brick tunnel, large enough that he only had to stoop slightly. One way – to judge from the smell – led to the river. Hardly thinking, acting instinctively, he set off along the other. Twenty yards of scrambling and he came to a hole in a brick wall. He tumbled down a fall of loose masonry and timber. Unnerved by the closeness in which he'd found himself – the opposite of the freedom he'd been seeking – he jogged through another brick arched tunnel, darker than the first, panting heavily until he came to a spiral staircase leading down.

He paused, one hand on the iron railing, his heart battering his ribs, then looked back along the tunnel.

Echoes. Footsteps, slow but dogged.

It was enough. He took to the stairs and, despite an animalistic recoiling from the prospect of close confines, hammered downward into the darkness, eager to flee.

The time that passed was not measured in minutes and seconds, those arbitrary markers made by humanity. A distant, civilised part of Kingsley grasped for them but they slipped by, caught up as he was in the need to escape.
Run, run!
was a drumbeat behind his forehead as he took turns quickly, chose options after a quick sniff and listen, scrambled down shafts as they presented themselves.

Run, make distance, then hide. Run, make distance, then hide.

A long time later, Kingsley came to himself again. He was backed into a gap in a stone wall, a ragged hole that smelled of damp. It was large enough for him and no-one else.

It was a bolthole.

Through dim, strained light – grates? Drain holes? – he was looking out over a stretch of water that was undecided about which way it was moving. A shore of stones separated him from the ill-favoured water by a few yards, and on the other side another few yards of shingle ran up to the stone wall that curved up and over the water. He heard rumbling, the omnipresent noise of the city, but it didn't sound as if were coming from his left or his right. Overhead?

Kingsley shivered. He dropped his chin and realised, glumly, that he was a horrid mess. His trousers were spattered with mud. He'd lost his shoes. His jacket and tie were gone. One sleeve of his shirt flapped uselessly, his cuff link having torn away. He rolled it up over his elbow while he wondered what to do. He'd walked away from his job, his foster father was missing – possibly abducted – his housekeeper had been murdered and he was a fugitive.

In some ways, he'd accomplished a great deal. The sad fact was that little of it was good.

The scene in front of him was tranquil, but hardly welcoming. Drops fell into the water erratically, as if reluctant to join what he now knew – from the evidence of his sense of smell – to be little more than a drain.

He was hungry.

A rat the size of a small terrier poked its head into the hole. Kingsley reared back in alarm. He cried out not just at its size, but because of its three eyes. Two black and blinking eyes and one round, in the middle of its head above the other two.

The rat wasn't upset by his performance. It merely rocked its head to one side and scurried off.

Kingsley passed a hand over his face. His trembling definitely wasn't because of lack of food or cold. Strangeness was assaulting him on every side and it was testing his mettle.

He clenched his teeth, hard. He clenched his hands into fists until his fingers hurt, then he relaxed. He took a deep breath, then another, until the trembling stopped, putting himself in the calm frame of mind he would if he were about to perform a dangerous escape.

It helped.

Kingsley had been sitting with his knees drawn up and his arms around them. He let go and swivelled his neck, stretching. He gazed out of his hole. He'd been in worse situations. The time when his foster father's valet had reluctantly thrown the chained trunk into the canal, for instance, had been sheer terror where seconds stretched out in the rubbery way that crisis time had. Seconds moved like monoliths when one's life was in the balance.

Now,
that
had been a difficult situation. No matter how he'd practised, no matter how well he knew the theory, working on the chains and locks in the dark, while the water sluiced in through the cracks – cold and smelling of refuse – was a test of his skill and his bravery. Panic would have been the worst thing, for trembling and doubt would have been fatal.

That time, he'd emerged, draped in slime, much to Brown's relief. He'd proved to himself that he could escape from death's clutches.

He shook his head. He mightn't be in death's clutches right now, but he had no idea where he was. He was still shivering and uncertain, lost and hunted. He had enemies all around. He was being chased by a troll and by loathsome creatures impersonating policemen. He was suspected of murder. He was in danger and he was further away from finding his foster father than ever.

He ran a hand over his face and shivered. Go and confront those creatures to see what connection they had with his foster father's disappearance? Find a genuine law enforcement official? He shook his head. Who could he trust?

Kingsley froze.
That
noise wasn't natural. He groped for a weapon. He had lock picks still in his collar, and a thin length of metal sewn into the back of his shirt could be used as a slashing tool if he had the chance to retrieve it, but he scrabbled for a hand-sized rock as a better, more solid alternative. If he could get in a good blow, he might have a chance to scuttle out of his bolthole and escape.

A face appeared just as Kingsley's fingers found a rock. He restrained himself.

‘Found you.' Evadne Stephens was wearing a brass headpiece with telescopic arrangements and goggles that made her visage insect-like. ‘And none too soon, from the looks of you.' She tapped her chin. ‘As a project, you're more complicated than I thought you'd be.'

Kingsley's sense of surprise had taken so many buffets that he didn't express any incredulity when Evadne followed a large rat into a maze of underground tunnels and byways. Trailing behind her, bare-footed and wincing, he wondered if the rat weren't familiar, but not being an aficionado of rats, one tended to look much like another. Given, it was the size of a terrier, but he assumed one terrier-sized rat was much like another terrier-sized rat. Given, it had three eyes, but three-eyed rats might be commonplace in this neck of the woods. So to speak. Kingsley's weariness made the fact that Evadne talked to the rat – conferring when facing a choice of ways to go – merely an item of vague interest, to be considered later when he was able to muster enough energy.

As they went, Evadne produced a slim electric light, the size and shape of a pencil. She chatted mildly about how she and Kipling had separated after the uproar at the police station and how difficult it had been to find Kingsley and how curious she was about his ending up in the Demimonde. She told him about how he'd ended up in one of the older sections of the Fleet River, one of London's mostly forgotten subterranean waterways.

Kingsley shrugged at this, too weary and too overwhelmed to be amazed. He tried to offer responses that made sense, but her questions grew fewer and her glances at him more concerned until she patted him on the arm and told him not to worry.

Which was useful advice, for Kingsley took the opportunity to fall asleep while he walked. He lapsed into one of those wonderful dreams where one knows one is dreaming, but is able simply to enjoy the experience. At least, that was the only explanation he could think of, drowsily, when Evadne and her rat helped him into a little boat the shape of a pea pod. Evadne crowded in beside him, delightfully, and a tiny man stood in the bow behind them. He was made mostly of angles and had the most enormous eyes Kingsley had ever seen, either in a dream or waking, and he poled the boat along while humming a tune that echoed from the corbels, cornerstones and colonnades of the subterranean watercourse he navigated.

Evadne herded him through a series of doors to her refuge, the locks of which he would normally have been fascinated by. In his state, however, they were a blur. Inside, Evadne steered him to a room and ordered him to take a bath.

Some time later, and somewhere closer to human, Kingsley relaxed and let the water come up to his chin. The bathroom in Evadne's retreat was white-tiled from floor to ceiling. At the moment it was totally filled with steam and Kingsley's gratitude.

He tried to remember the last time he'd had a bath and, with a start, realised it was only a day ago, the morning of his disastrous debut. Idly, while he sought for the soap that was somewhere in the water, he wondered what Mr Bernadetti was doing. Hiring some more dog acts, most likely, to fill the gaps that Evadne and Kingsley had left.

A stab of guilt took him. How could he be worrying about his stage career with all that had happened? His foster father's abduction, in particular, and Mr Kipling's hints about shadowy events and nearing doom. The world had become altogether darker and more complicated than it had been a day ago.

The nature of his abductors, too, had shaken Kingsley. He flinched when he recalled their touch. Their skin was doughy, but their grip was steely. On top of that, the shock of what happened to them, the way they'd been dispatched by the brutish woman who had then advanced on him, had been enough to shake his wild self free.

He was angry with himself. Twice in a single day his control had slipped and his wild side had run amok. In doing so, he'd forgotten all about his missing foster father and was no doubt still sought for the murder of poor Mrs Walters.

Kingsley found the soap. He grimaced at its lavender fragrance, but stoically lathered up a wash cloth. He set to work on the sweat and grime of the most outrageous twenty-four hours in his life.

BOOK: Extraordinaires 1
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