“Sent you scurrying off in the other direction as fast as your spindly little legs could carry you,” said the person with the teak-colored legs. He reached over with his trunk, which was long and flexible, and a greenish blue color, and which hung to his ankles, and he pushed the Marquis onto his back.
The Marquis began rubbing his bound wrists slowly against the concrete beneath them while he said, “Not at all. Quite the opposite. Words cannot actually describe how much pleasure I take in your pachydermic presence. Might I suggest that you untie me and allow me to greet you, man to … man to elephant?”
“I don’t think so, given all the trouble I’ve been through to make this happen,” said the other. He had the head of a greenish grey elephant. His tusks were sharp and stained reddish brown at the tips. “You know, I swore when I found out what you had done that I would make you scream and beg for mercy. And I swore I’d say no, to giving you mercy, when you begged for it.”
“You could say yes, instead,” said the Marquis.
“I couldn’t say yes. Hospitality abused,” said the Elephant. “I never forget.”
The Marquis had been commissioned to bring Victoria the Elephant’s diary, when he and the world had been much younger. The Elephant ran his fiefdom arrogantly, sometimes viciously and with no tenderness or humor, and the Marquis had thought that the Elephant was stupid. He had even believed that there was no way that the Elephant would correctly identify his role in the disappearance of the diary. It had been a long time ago, though, when the Marquis was young and foolish.
“This whole spending years training up a guide to betray me just on the off chance I’d come along and hire her,” said the Marquis. “Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction?”
“Not if you know me,” said the Elephant. “If you know me, it’s pretty mild. I did lots of other things to find you too.”
The Marquis tried to sit up. The Elephant pushed him back to the floor with one bare foot. “Beg for mercy,” said the Elephant.
That one was easy. “Mercy!” said the Marquis. “I beg! I plead! Show me mercy—the finest of all gifts. It befits you, mighty Elephant, as lord of your own demesne, to be merciful to one who is not even fit to wipe the dust from your excellent toes …”
“Did you know,” said the Elephant, “that everything you say sounds sarcastic?”
“I didn’t. I apologize. I meant every single word of it.”
“Scream,” said the Elephant.
The Marquis de Carabas screamed very loudly and very long. It is hard to scream when your throat has been recently cut, but he screamed as hard and piteously as he could.
“You even scream sarcastically,” said the Elephant.
There was a large black cast-iron pipe jutting out from the wall. A wheel in the side of the pipe allowed whatever came out of the pipe to be turned on and turned off. The Elephant hauled on it with powerful arms, and a trickle of dark sludge came out, followed by a spurt of water.
“Drainage overflow,” said the Elephant. “Now. Thing is, I do my homework. You keep your life well hidden, de Carabas. You have done all these years, since you and I first crossed paths. No point in even trying anything as long as you had your life elsewhere. I’ve had people all over London Below: people you’ve eaten with, people you’ve slept with or laughed with or wound up naked in the clock tower of Big Ben with, but there was never any point in taking it further, not as long as your life was still carefully tucked out of harm’s way. Until last week, when the word under the street was that your life was out of its box. And that was when I put the word out, that I’d give the freedom of the Castle to the first person to let me see …”
“… See me scream for mercy,” said de Carabas. “You said.”
“You interrupted me,” said the Elephant mildly. “I was going to say, I was going to give the freedom of the Castle to the first person to let me see your dead body.”
He pulled the wheel the rest of the way and the spurt of water became a gush.
“I ought to warn you. There is,” said de Carabas, “a curse on the hand of anyone who kills me.”
“I’ll take the curse,” said the Elephant. “Although you’re probably making it up. You’ll like the next bit. The room fills with water, and then you drown. Then I let the water out, and I come in, and I laugh a lot.” He made a trumpeting noise that might, de Carabas reflected, have been a laugh, if you were an elephant.
The Elephant stepped out of de Carabas’s line of sight.
The Marquis heard a door bang. He was lying in a puddle. He writhed and wriggled, then got to his feet. He looked down: there was a metal cuff around his ankle, which was chained to a metal pole in the center of the room.
He wished he were wearing his coat: there were blades in his coat; there were picklocks; there were buttons that were nowhere nearly as innocent and buttonlike as they appeared to be. He rubbed the rope that bound his wrists against the metal pole, hoping to make it fray, feeling the skin of his wrists and palms rubbing off even as the rope absorbed the water and tightened about him. The water level continued to rise: already it was up to his waist.
De Carabas looked about the circular chamber. All he had to do was free himself from the bonds that tied his wrists—obviously by loosening the pole to which he was bound—and then he would open the cuff around his ankle, turn off the water, get out of the room, avoid a revenge-driven Elephant and any of his assorted thugs, and get away.
He tugged on the pole. It didn’t move. He tugged on it harder. It didn’t move some more.
He slumped against the pole, and he thought about death, a true, final death, and he thought about his coat.
A voice whispered in his ear. It said, “Quiet!”
Something tugged at his wrists, and his bonds fell away. It was only as life came back into his wrists that he realized how tightly he had been bound. He turned around.
He said, “What?”
The face that met his was as familiar as his own. The smile was devastating, the eyes were guileless and adventuresome.
“Ankle,” said the man, with a new smile that was even more devastating than the previous one.
The Marquis de Carabas was not devastated. He raised his leg, and the man reached down, did something with a piece of wire, and removed the leg cuff.
“I heard you were having a spot of bother,” said the man. His skin was as dark as the Marquis’ own. He was less than an inch taller than de Carabas, but he held himself as if he were easily taller than anyone he was ever likely to meet.
“No. No bother. I’m fine,” said the Marquis.
“You aren’t. I just rescued you.”
De Carabas ignored this. “Where’s the Elephant?”
“On the other side of that door, with a number of the people working for him. The doors lock automatically when the hall is filled with water. He needed to be certain that he wouldn’t be trapped in here with you. It was what I was counting on.”
“Counting on?”
“Of course. I’d been following them for several hours. Ever since I heard that you’d gone off with one of the Elephant’s plants. I thought, bad move, I thought. He’ll be needing a hand with that.”
“You heard …?”
“Look,” said the man who looked a little like the Marquis de Carabas, only he was taller, and perhaps some people—not the Marquis, obviously—might have thought him just a hair better-looking, “you don’t think I was going to let anything happen to my little brother, did you?”
They were up to their waists in water. “I was fine,” said de Carabas. “I had it all under control.”
The man walked over to the far end of the room. He knelt down, fumbled in the water, then, from his backpack, he produced something that looked like a short crowbar. He pushed one end of it beneath the surface of the water. “Get ready,” he said. “I think this should be our quickest way out of here.”