Neverwhere

Mr. Croup ignored this, and continued, " . . . And, were I then, in response to your pleadings, to divulge to you what vexes me, I would confess that my soul is irked by the necessity to hide our light under a bushel. We should be hanging the former marquis's sad remains from the highest gibbet in London Below. Not tossing it away, like a used . . . " He paused, searching for the exact simile.

"Rat?" suggested Mr. Vandemar. "Thumbscrew? Spleen?" Squee, squee went the wheels of the shopping cart.

"Ah well," said Mr. Croup. In front of them was a deep cha

Then he stood up. "Goodnight, good marquis. Don't forget to write."

Mr. Vandemar tipped over the cart, and the marquis's corpse tumbled out and splashed into the brown water below them. And then, because he had come to dislike it intensely, Mr. Vandemar pushed the shopping cart into the sewer as well, and watched the current carry it away.

Then Mr. Croup held his lamp up high, and he stared out at the place in which they stood. "It is saddening to reflect," said Mr. Croup, "that there are folk walking the streets above who will never know the beauty of these sewers, Mister Vandemar. These red-brick cathedrals beneath their feet."

"Craftsmanship," agreed Mr. Vandemar.

They turned their backs on the brown water and made their way back into the tu

Door tied the key around her neck with a piece of string that she found in one of the pockets of her leather jacket. "That's not going to be safe," said Richard. The girl made a face at him. "Well," he said. "It's not."

She shrugged. "Okay," she said. "I'll get a chain for it when we get to the market." They were walking through a maze of caves, deep tu

Richard chuckled. "What's so fu

He gri

"I'm sure he'll have something sardonic to say about it," she said. "And then, back to the angel. By the 'long and dangerous way.' Whatever that is."

Richard admired the paintings on the cave walls. Russets and ochres and sie

None of the paintings were very high off the ground. He wondered if the painters were a race of subterranean Neanderthal pygmies. It was as likely as anything else in this strange world. "So where is the next market?" he asked.

"No idea," said Door. "Hunter?"

Hunter slipped out of the shadows. "I don't know."

A small figure dashed past them, going back the way they had come. A few moments later another couple of tiny figures came toward them in fell pursuit. Hunter whipped out a hand as they passed, snagging a small boy by the ear. "Ow," he said, in the ma

"That's right," said a piping voice from further down the corridor. "She did."

"I didn't," came an even higher and more piping voice, from even further down the corridor.

Hunter pointed to the paintings on the cave wall. "You did these?" she asked.

The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys. "Yeah," he said, truculently. "Some of them."

"Not bad," said Hunter. The boy glared at her.

"Where's the next Floating Market?" asked Door.

"Belfast," said the boy. "Tonight."

"Thanks," said Door. "Hope you get your paintbrush back. Let him go, Hunter."

Hunter let go of the boy's ear. He did not move. He looked her up and down, then made a face, to indicate that he was, without any question at all, unimpressed. "You're Hunter?" he asked. She smiled down at him, modestly. He sniffed. "You're the best bodyguard in the Underside?"

"So they tell me."

The boy reached one hand back and forward again, in one smooth movement. He stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm. Then he looked up at Hunter, confused. Hunter opened her hand to reveal a small switchblade with a wicked edge. She held it up, out of the boy's reach. He wrinkled his nose. "How'd you do that?"

"Scram," said Hunter. She closed the knife and tossed it back to the boy, who took off down the corridor without a backward glance, in pursuit of his paintbrush.

The body of the marquis de Carabas drifted east, through the deep sewer, face down.

London's sewers had begun their lives as rivers and streams, flowing north to south (and, south of the Thames, south to north) carrying garbage, animal carcasses, and the contents of chamber pots into the Thames, which would, for the most part, carry the offending substances out to sea. This system had more or less worked for many years, until, in 1858, the enormous volume of effluent produced by the people and industries of London, combined with a rather hot summer, produced a phenomenon known at the time as the Great Stink: the Thames itself had become an open sewer. People who could leave London, left it; the ones who stayed wrapped cloths doused in carbolic around their faces and tried not to breathe through their noses. Parliament was forced to recess early in 1858, arid the following year it ordered that a programme of sewer-building begin. The thousands of miles of sewers that were built were constructed with a gentle slope from the west to the east, and, somewhere beyond Greenwich, they were pumped into the Thames Estuary, and the sewage was swept off into the North Sea. It was this journey that the body of the late marquis de Carabas was making, traveling west to east, toward the sunrise and the sewage works.

Rats on a high brick ledge, doing the things that rats do when no people are watching, saw the body go by. The largest of them, a big black male, chittered. A smaller brown female chittered back, then she leapt down from the ledge onto the marquis's back and rode it down the sewer a little way, sniffing at the hair and the coat, tasting the blood, and then, precariously, leaning over, and scrutinizing what could be seen of the face.

She hopped off the head into the filthy water and swam industriously to the side, where she clambered up the slippery brickwork. She hurried back a long a beam, and rejoined her companions.

"Belfast?" asked Richard.

Door smiled, impishly, and would say nothing more than, "You'll see," when he pressed her about it.

He changed his tack. "How do you know that kid was telling you the truth about the market?" he asked.

"It's not something anyone down here ever lies about. I . . . don't think we can lie about it." She paused. "The market's special."

"How did that kid know where it was?"

"Someone told him," said Hunter.

Richard brooded on this for a moment. "How did they know?"

"Someone told them," explained Door.

"But . . . " He wondered who chose the locations in the first place, how the knowledge was spread, trying to frame the question in such a way that he did not sound stupid.