“Hah!” I crowed, making a subtle fist-pump gesture. “I knew it.”
“Shut up. I’ve done some trading with them, I said. Not enough to figure out how their brains work and I’d sure as hell never use current on them; it would be bad manners, and I’d never get supplies from them again, anyway.”
“So you can tell me who to talk to?”
“No. But I can talk to them for you.”
Oh hell. “Your wife is going to kill me.”
Lee just laughed. I think he’s used to that reaction.
The metal tunnels were actually long, large metal pipes that had been fitted in shafts decades ago, for some MTA project or another, and then abandoned. No wonder we always ran a deficit, the way they lost materials. You went in through the waterways, everyone knew that, if they knew about gnomes at all, but that’s where things got hazy. For me, anyway. Lee sloshed along in his galoshes like he was going to market. I guess for him, he was.
“Who is that?” The voice came out of the gloom without warning, cranky and suspicious.
“Who the hell do you think it is? Lee held up a hand, and sparks flickered at his fingertips, illuminating the small circle in front of him. A gnome sat on a metal shelf that had been grafted into the tunnel, blinking in the current-light. “Who else has to bend over double in these damn tunnels, and sounds like a fucking moose slogging through this damned sewage?”
It took a minute and then my brain kicked back in. Lee, calm-tempered, soft-spoken Lee, was in trading mode. Was that how gnomes spoke to each other, or how they expected humans to speak, overall?
“Ah. You. Wasn’t expecting you.” The gnome was about knee-high to me, which meant that Lee could have stepped on him and barely noticed.
“Well, I’m here. You have any redweight?”
“You want redweight, you gotta call ahead. Not grow on trees down here.” The gnome giggled like it had said something unbearably witty. My eyes had adjusted enough to take in details: I’d known that gnomes were small, but I hadn’t realized how much they looked like Beaux Arts fairies. Pretty little bastards. No wonder they were able to enrapt stupid Null children into following them underground into the sewers.
“How about black ash?” Lee asked.
“Maaaaaaaaybe. What you got in trade?”
Lee reached into his pocket and pulled something out. I craned my neck to see what gnomes considered fair trade for their handiwork, but his hand was tilted so I couldn’t see into his palm. Secret of the trade, I guess. Talent were just as secretive in their way as the fatae.
“Too much,” the gnome said in alarm. “Too much for black ash.”
“Hrm. So it is.” Lee started to put whatever it was back in his pocket, and then stopped. “But maybe we could deal, anyway. You answer a question, a small question, and I call it fair trade.”
“Hrmmmm. Small question. And black ash?”
“I call it fair.”
“Then not small question.”
“Small question, important answer. If not truth, then all deals end.”
Oh, the gnome did not like that, not at all. It hopped from one foot to the other, tilting its head as though it was listening to something far away. Maybe it was: I bet these tunnels carried sound unspeakably well, and I doubted there was only one guard along this stretch of sewer.
“Ask,” the gnome said, finally.
“Did you dust a young human girl, near-grown, blonde, in the past sevenday. Is she here?”
“That two question.” But it considered again, and this time I was damn sure I heard the high-pitched echo of other voices, up and down the metal tunnel.
“Blonde girl come freely,” it said finally, and with finality. “Honored guest.”
I snorted at that. For honored guest read ‘slave’… The fatae liked to have someone else to do the housework. I didn’t think they’d hurt her, but there were other things living in the underground city, and gnomes were notoriously careless of their guests. Metals, they protected. Humans — disposable.
“Give. We bring you black ash. Now go.”
Lee made the exchange, and they shook hands on it, the gnome’s hand absurdly lost in his.
“Come on. Let’s go.” Lee said to me.
Waitaminute. “I need to—”
“We need to go. Now. Lee looked over his shoulder, clearly worried.
I’d asked him for help because he knew the underground kingdom. We went.
“You can’t go back there.”
“I have to.”
“Danny. Daniel.”
Nobody calls me Daniel, not even my Mom. Only my old lieutenant ever called me that, and only when he was about to ream me out something spectacular, so I’d know to loosen up my sphincter.
“I have to go back,” I told him, against his disapproving look. “The girl is down there.”
Lee sighed. “Of her own free will. Mostly.”
Yeah. The “mostly” was the kicker. She had chosen to leave home and go live in the underground kingdom; gnomes didn’t have glamour, not really, just a lot of exotic allure and pretty skin. On the “however” side, she was a legal minor, and no human should spend any length of time down there, not unless they were fixing to come down with asthma and Vitamin D deficiency. And her parents had paid me to get her back.
Humans didn’t belong down there.
Lee paced back and forth in his studio, five paces in either direction, turn-and-glare. “You’re going back down there no matter what I say, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. But you’re not going back with me,” I told him. “It could get ugly and that’s not your thing.”
Lee looked mulish, but didn’t argue. He was much more of a ‘make art not war’ sort, and he was okay with that. No heroics in that boy.
“If caught, I’ll swear I tortured you to hand over the map.”
He scowled at me. “Very funny. They won’t torture you, anyway, they’ll just eat you. Goat’s a rarity down there, and you’ve put on a nice layer of fat since you left the force.”
“The hell I have.” I’d noted the surprisingly sharp teeth on that gnome, but not thought to wonder about it. “And they don’t eat people.” I’d never heard that they did, anyway…
Lee gave up trying to scare me. “If they did, they’d have been burned out of there by now. No. Just rats and stray pets. Look, if you insist on this, there’s not a damn thing I can do against them. My magic doesn’t work that way. But I might be able to help you find the girl, once you‘re down there…”
Twenty-four hours later I was back in the tunnel, carrying a small metal sphere in the cup of my left hand and a rubber-tipped metal wand in the other. I felt like a proper idiot, and was prepared at any second to drop the damn wand in order to grab for my gun. Some kinds of cold steel made me feel more secure than others.
The wand carried a current-charge that would stun anything that came out at me, although I wasn‘t sure if it would be a fatal shock or a jump-back-Jack. Lee’d handed it to me without comment, and I‘d taken it instinctively, the cool metal fitting perfectly into my grip. “I thought you said you didn’t have anything that would work against gnomes?”
“This isn’t for gnomes. It’s for the ROUS.”
It took me a minute, then I got the joke. “Very funny.”
“Danny, I’ve been down there more than you have. I’m not kidding. Bullets won’t do the job. If you see anything with a tail, shock it and apologize later.”
Comforting. So I was moving through the tunnel, my gun holstered and my wand at the ready, keeping one eye on the shadows shifting against the walls and the other on the globe in my palm. That was the important bit of magic: it would lead me in the direction of my girl. Or a girl, anyway. A human. Lee had spelled it to seek out an upright bipedal without the metallic-gritty blood of a gnome. So, assuming they didn’t have half a dozen captive or pet humans down here…
Something moved, off to my left. I stopped, my heart racing a little more than I enjoyed, and waited. A skittering noise, and the swish of what might have been a long tail attached to a giant rat-ass. Or it could have been my over-pumped imagination. I took a better hold on the wand, and started forward again.