The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) (23 page)

“Open sesame,” Karya said. “It’s time to get underground.”

A hush hung over the empty pews, the kind that made you want to tiptoe around. The only light was that which filtered through the stained glass, painting the vaults and stonework in a galaxy of colours. Dust motes rolled softly through the air like restless spirits. It was lovely and cool in here.

Robin had always loved the smell of churches. That odd mixture of candlewax, flowers, incense and furniture polish. At the far end of the roomy, deserted space, the entire altar was draped from ceiling to floor with a vast opaque sheet of white plastic. It looked surreal amongst the ancient stones.

“No grimm-grimms,” Woad sniffed, twitching his nose. “Not now anyway, but they have been here, not long ago. I can smell their shadows.”

“Their shadows?” Henry raised an eyebrow, as the four of them made their way slowly and cautiously along the central aisle of pews.

“He means their familiars, their Totems,” Karya muttered, running a finger along a dusty bench as they passed. All of their voices were hushed.

“What do they smell like?” Robin wondered.

Woad seemed to consider this for a second. “Sadness and spite,” he decided. “And burnt matchsticks. Although one of these Grimms also smells like liquorice.”

“Penny,” Robin said. “I mean, Peryl,” he corrected himself. “How did she get here so fast?”

“Somewhere around here is the entrance to the undercroft,” Karya mused, as they approached the shrouded altar. The huge plastic sheeting rustled and billowed slightly before them in quite a spooky way.

“What is an undercroft anyway?” Robin wanted to know. He was starting to regret bringing along the book on the Fae Guard. He didn’t have a backpack and it was cumbersome to carry. His Phorbas dagger clinked against his hip as they pushed their way through the rustling sheeting to the altar beyond.

“The city is riddled with them,” Karya explained, examining the old stone walls beyond with interest, stained glass light splodged on her face. “Lots of tunnels, they go on for miles. Pitch black, of course. A lot of them are flooded. Some of it was planned to be an underground canal that never got finished; some of it is old air-raid shelters from the war the humans had a while ago. There are plague pits down there too, where they stashed all the dead bodies during the Black Death. Piled them up floor to ceiling in stony rooms, like fish-fingers.”

“Sounds absolutely charming,” Henry muttered.

“Also where the Fae Guard used to meet,” Woad piped up. “Secret war councils, a way station from the Netherworlde to here, it’s not all bad stuff.”

Robin wondered how many of the Fae had escaped the war this way, fleeing persecution from Eris’ reign and escaping to live out their days in relative safety and secret in the human world, just like the sirens. Passing in secret through the hidden Janus station, like some underground railroad.

“Here!” Karya cried excitedly. She had dropped to her knees by the altar itself. “Look!” They gathered around. Carved into the stone, no bigger than her thumb, was a small glyph. A stylised eye.

“That’s the symbol for a glamour,” Robin said. He had seen one similar on the Isle of Winds. “We need glam roots to break a glamour, I remember that. We had some jam last time.”

“It had strawberries in it,” Woad nodded. “I got a pip in my eye.”

Karya sighed heavily. “Amateurs,” she muttered. Reaching into the depths of her bulky coat, she withdrew a small vial and unscrewed it. The lid had a pipet attached. “Glam-tincture,” she explained. “A drop in each eye please. No preserved fruits involved, I promise.”

They passed the clear liquid around, each dropping a smidgen of the mixture into their eyes.

Robin blinked rapidly as his vision blurred. When he could see again, there was a square hole in the stone just behind the altar, as though someone had lifted one of the floor slabs away. A rusty metal ladder, brown and flaky with age, led down into the utter blackness beyond. The hole at their feet was small and pitch black. It didn’t look inviting.

“Guess we found the entrance then,” Robin said. He passed the tiny bottle to Henry, who muttered but followed suit, flinching with each drop.

“Bloody hell,” Henry said, peering down with interest and a small frown on his slightly sunburned face. “Down, down to goblin-town we go, my lad.”

* * *

The ladder went down for a long while. Robin was surprised how cold it was. The subterranean air was chilly down here, like stepping into a freezer. He had insisted on going first, the others following, so his feet were the first to hit what felt like packed earth. He stumbled away blindly in the blackness, until his hands met cool dark stone, listening to the scuffling sound of his companions’ feet on the ladder as they followed him down one by one. The light from the church was nothing but a distant milky square, far above them now, and he rubbed his hands together, dislodging flakes of rusted powdery metal from the old ladder. It smelled down here. Dust and dead air. Possibly rats.

“Woad,” Karya said when they were all at the bottom. “A little light please.”

“I’m just a torch to you, eh Boss?” Woad muttered quietly in the suffocating blackness. There was a small flicker of pale light, as the floating orb appeared in the boy’s hand.

“Willo-light is my favourite cantrip,” the faun shared.

They stood in a long low tunnel of arched, plain stone with a floor of packed earth, a little like a dry sewer. It stretched away in either direction endlessly into the blackness. Oblongs of deeper shadow punctuated the walls, showing other passageways which branched off the main corridor.

“This place is supposed to be a bit of a warren,” Karya told them. “So stick together. We don’t want anyone getting lost down here, you might never find your way back up to the surface.”

Woad picked up a scent and led them on, pattering through the still and silent blackness, taking turns left and right as he led them deeper into the undercroft. Their footsteps echoed in the darkness as they walked. Robin couldn’t help but think of the famous catacombs of Rome, or the burial tunnels which ran under Paris, only here there were no bones or piled skulls. In fact, as they walked on, from passageway to dark passageway, sometimes descending, sometimes dog-legging through crumbling archways, there were stranger oddities to see than bones. They passed several shop mannequins, bald and pale, lying discarded and forlorn on the floor, most of them missing arms and legs. They looked macabre to him. He wondered why on earth anyone had brought them down here.

“People have been exploring the undercroft for years, according to my reading,” Karya told them in hushed tones, as Woad and his small glimmering light led them around yet another bend in the blackness and beneath a low lintel, which Henry almost brained himself on, into a squat, square room. “Some people say that homeless people live down here, that they came down generations ago and never came back up again. Living on rats.” She sounded quite interested.

“What people?” Henry asked dubiously. “What people say that? You don’t even know any people.”

“Just people,” Karya shrugged, a little defensively. “There are also supposed to be rats as big as dogs down here too.”

“Is this supposed to be making us feel any better?” Robin muttered. He had drawn Phorbas and held the knife gripped in his hand. He doubted it would do any good, but it was comforting to hold in the sepulchre-like space anyway. He made a point of not jabbing any of his friends with it.

Several of the tunnels they explored had collapsed altogether. Others led to dead ends, where Woad sniffed around for a while before doubling back. Occasionally they came to steps, sometimes metal, sometimes stone, always downward. Deeper beneath the city. And always leading them colder and darker, and into more silence. Woad’s flickering willo-light made their shadows leap silently on the walls as they walked.

At one point they passed through a room which was hung on one wall with a grubby, ornate and smashed mirror. Candle stubs and empty beer bottles surrounded it like some kind of odd shrine. They passed on wordlessly. In another dark corner, they found an ancient looking porcelain doll, its face cracked and chipped, the many petticoats of its dress grey and tattered, like cobwebs.

“Well,” Henry observed lightly, after they had all stared at if for a while. “That’s not the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen, honest.”

“Could be creepier,” Robin reasoned. “Could be a clown doll.”

They all muttered and nodded in unanimous agreement, and moved on, shivering.

More than once, as the companions moved stealthily through the undercroft, they heard movement. Scuttling in the darkness. Unseen rats, they hoped.

“This tunnel is flooded,” Woad said, after a while, when the narrow, claustrophobic passageway they were currently creeping along ended in steps descending into dark water. They peered down at the surface. There was a discarded gas mask floating just below the surface, looking like the severed head of some insect alien. It shimmered in Woad’s flickering light. “We should have taken that last left, I knew it.”

“We’ve been down here for hours,” Henry said, shivering slightly. It was cold as the grave, and his breath was visible in the ghostly light. “Wandering around like lost spirits. Are we even sure if we can find out way back?”

“We’re not going back,” Karya said. “And Woad knows what he’s doing. He can track a Grimm if he has their scent.”

Woad nodded, looking at Robin. “She’s here,” he said, his yellow eyes glittering. “I can smell her, your mental moth-girl.”

“She’s not
my
moth girl,” Robin replied.

“And one other.” Woad sniffed. “Dark and dangerous. Strong. He smells of cruel. They are close, very close. We need to be quiet as trilobites.”

“We’re kind of announcing ourselves with the light anyway though, aren’t we?” Henry reasoned in a whisper as they backed up and Woad led them down a different side tunnel. “Won’t we see the Grimms’ lights too?”

“The Grimms don’t need light to see,” Karya said, as though this were the most obvious thing in the world. “We could put out our light if you wished, and feel our way, but it will put us at a disadvantage. They can see just fine in the blackest of darkness. Mr Nyx saw to that.”

“Nyx?” Robin asked.

“Hmm,” Karya murmured. “Eldest of the Grimms. But that’s another story.”

Robin was already feeling uncomfortable enough prowling through these endless creepy tunnels filled with macabre and disturbing oddities and with the ever increasing weight of the far off city above them, pressing down. The thought of doing so in pitch blackness, hands scrabbling along walls, feet shuffling uncertainly on uneven ground while in the darkness behind them, a white faced ghoul like the grinning Mr Strife might be creeping up on them silently, breathing down their necks like a wide eyed grim reaper? It didn’t appeal in the least.

“Let’s keep the light,” he said decisively. “It might help us find—”

“—this?” Karya said, stopping in her tracks so suddenly that Henry and Robin both bumped into her.

Woad had reached the end of a colonnade of stone pillars. He stood, his wavering ghost-light floating above his head, before a large door set in the stone wall. It was unlike anything they had seen so far in the undercroft: a circular slab of stone, carved with intricate whorls and designs.

“What is that?” Robin asked, coming forward.

Karya was frowning at the door with interest. “That … is a redcap door,” she said with wonder.

“Redcaps? Here in the human world?” Robin was confused.

“Redcaps get everywhere,” the girl explained, lightly tracing the whorls with her fingertips. “Everywhere blood has been shed. Everywhere there has been misery. They burrow under it. Look at this lettering.”

“That’s the high tongue,” Woad announced. There was a circle of glyphs in the centre of the swirling stone. He glanced at Robin and Henry. “I don’t read it, but I know the shapes.”

“What does it say?” Henry asked.

“Squiggle dash, sharp pointy one, another squiggle, one that’s a bit snaky, pitchfork one—”

“What does it say,
Karya
,” Henry clarified loudly, talking over Woad.

“It’s the Sidhe-Nobilitas,” she said. “They must have used redcaps to make the sanctuary. Clever.”

Robin’s eyebrows raised. He’d met redcaps before. They hadn’t seemed like the most obliging of creatures.

“I’ve told you before, Scion,” Karya explained. “The Fae ruled the Netherworlde. And I mean really ruled it. In the old fashioned sense of having total dominion over all other creatures. The redcaps served the Fae.” She sighed a little. “Everyone served the Fae.”

“Except the Panthea, eventually,” Henry pointed out.

“The Panthea were not always in the Netherworlde,” the girl said. “Woad, bring the light down to me here.”

“Where did they come from then?”

She shrugged. “Don’t ask me, I’m not one of them.” Henry and Robin looked expectantly to Woad, who returned their expression blankly.

“Don’t ask me either,” he said. “I came from the Sodden Fens, that’s all I know. And I was glad to see the back of it, and the whole silly tribe. I might be Panthea, but so are around a million other Netherworlde beings. I don’t remember ever
not
being here.”