Pay the Piper (5 page)

“I care,” Alabas retorted. “You do
not
understand.”

“Try me. My God, Alabas, after all this time, at least
try
me.”

There was a deep intake of breath, then Alabas said, “He must send silver or gold or souls Under the Hill. Human souls. To pay off a blood guilt, a teind. And if he does not, he will grow old as any who walks upon the earth instead of living long Under the Hill. He will grow old and then die himself. Do you believe Gringras would let such a thing happen?”

“Hey—we all die. In time.”

Alabas laughed. It was not an easy laugh and there was no humor in it.

At that Scott was silent. A deep, long silence.

Callie had no way of knowing if he was silent because he knew that what Alabas was saying was crazy, or if he was just about to laugh at the joke, or … Because nothing Alabas had just said made any sense.

Callie turned over the words in her mind: Silver. Gold. Human souls. Blood guilt.

What is Alabas talking about?

And where is Under the Hill?

Then all of a sudden it made a kind of bizarre sense, ugly and scary. Like a horror movie the moment after you get the plot.

Only,
Callie told herself,
this is real life in Northampton, Massachusetts, not some mad Hollywood concoction. Not one of Granny Kirkpatrick's fairy tales which used to scare me out of sleeping. Not watching some dumb TV show while Mars made spooky commentaries.

Yet somehow Callie believed Alabas. Believed what he was saying. Believed him down in the urpy part of her stomach. And afraid she was going to be sick, she slipped away and ran out the nearest door marked EXIT.

*   *   *

SHE FOUND HERSELF IN A
small, dark alley behind the theater. An over-full Dumpster seemed to be vomiting up beer cans and Coke bottles and paper trash. The place smelled strange, old, damp, unhealthy.

Hearing the sound of a flute, she looked up.

Gringras was sitting on the fire escape above her, his legs dangling down. He was playing a sort of doleful version of “Ratter.” Down below him some movement drew her eye.

Three brown rats were standing on their hind legs and dancing in a circle, paw-to-paw-to-paw, chittering.

Callie gasped, and turned to go back inside the theater, but the door had shut silently behind her and there was no handle on the outside.

Gringras must have heard her gasp, for he took the flute from his lips and started to laugh, a hollow sound not unlike Alabas' laugh, and it sent a cold chill down her spine.

The rats dropped paws, went down on all fours, and scattered, their little claws making a
scritching
sound as they fled.

For a long moment Callie couldn't move. It was as if she had lead weights on her arms and legs. As if she were encased in a cement body suit. And then, suddenly, she was released and she ran straight past the fire escape and Gringras' awful laughter, into a side street that led around to the front of the theater.

There she saw her parents.

“Mom!” she cried. “Dad!”

They gathered her up in comforting arms. “Got the rest of the story?” they asked in one voice, as they often did.

She didn't even have the strength to nod.

10 · Souls

The rats scattered, the girl gone, Gringras' laughter died in his throat. He put his flute to his lips and blew one high, petulant note.

But for men like Garner …
he began but let the thought die unfinished. Time to get to work. For a tithe of this scope, there were preparations to be made. And only a night and a day to make ready.

Gringras sighed and got to his feet. He gazed down the alley where the girl had disappeared.
No need to chase her,
he thought,
she will be gathered up with the rest of the children soon enough.

“Silver, gold, or souls,” his father, the king, had cursed him so many years ago. And all to be earned by the sweat of his brow—a cruel joke that. His father had never considered whether that was going to be enough for him to earn the exorbitant cost of the teind every seven years in the human world. Gringras stuck out his lower lip, turning his handsome face into a mask. He knew he had a small talent for music. And he was clever. He still had some of the powers of an exiled prince of Faerie. But those hadn't been enough. Not even at the beginning. By the end of the first six years of exile, he had found himself broke.

For the first time.

And not the last.

He remembered that awful year,
A.D.
1212 by mortal count. He had been living in Germany with Alabas, for Alabas had refused to let him go into the human world alone.

“I am yours, my prince,” Alabas had said, kneeling and taking the blood oath to bind them, and doing so in front of the king.

Gringras remembered laughing. He had been so confident then. “Then you will sweat along with me, my best of friends?”

Alabas had smiled.

Predictably, the king had been furious, but the oath was already sworn. And the curse. He could undo neither. That was the trouble with oaths and curses. Each had to run its course.

Gringras and Alabas went into exile, though nobody really wished it, and all of Faerie mourned.

However, the “sweat of his brow” had barely been enough to earn them food and lodgings. When that first seventh year was fast approaching, they were making music and a meager living in Germany. Looking into their pockets, they realized with horror that they had not enough silver. Not enough gold. It was time then to look into the third option.

Souls.

The souls had to be alive, not dead, of course. Dead they went elsewhere, where even Gringras could not follow. No, the souls they collected had to be alive and kept happy all the way down the long, twisting trail, across the river of blood, and into Faerie where they would live forever, dancing attendance on the king.

That first attempt was a huge failure. It seemed that adults were resistant to the lure of faerie music … and they were generally armed as well. The men Gringras and Alabas tried to enchant for the long walk into Faerie had turned on them with knives and pitchforks, cudgels and stakes. Despite the popular belief of the day, cold iron didn't kill his kind, but it certainly left Alabas half-dead, and Gringras incapacitated for some time.

And time was another thing they had very little of.

Gringras knew that if he missed the teind—so his father's curse went—he would never be allowed back into Faerie and would eventually die the true death in the human world. As would Alabas, his sworn blood brother.

“
We must leave Germany and try France,” Gringras had told Alabas, thinking:
The French are great music lovers. We will find the souls we need there.
They stumbled away from the field where the Germans had left them to die.

Gringras remembered walking the road, Alabas at his side, the two of them hungry and thirsty—and quarreling. Under the Hill they had never quarreled. But on the roads of earth, Alabas had learned regret early—and spite.

Near Marseilles, they met towheaded Nicolas of Germany and pockmarked Stephen of France, two boys with a grand plan. They were leading a ragtag band of children to the Holy Land.

“The Children's Crusade,” Stephen called it, his voice high as a girl's for it had not broken yet.

“These will do,” Alabas had said under his breath.

“Not children,” Gringras answered him plaintively, though he knew they were his only hope. “Not children.” Regret first. Spite came after.

With the help of Gringras' pipe and Alabas' hand drum—and not a few spells spoken in the guise of Christian prayers—the small band of children grew to thousands. And if some number of the children disappeared with Gringras and Alabas before ever reaching Jerusalem, well, they were probably better off then those who took Hugh the Iron's offer of transportation.

Hugh sold those poor, deluded children into slavery.

Death in life.

Whereas the children Under the Hill were still alive centuries later.

Life in death.

11 · Homework

Callie barely slept that night, but in her dreams she danced Ratter up one alley and down the next followed by a group of kids dressed in leather and calling themselves Brown Norways.

Getting up early, she determined to go right to school. There was a lot of research that still needed doing before she could get her story down. Since her parents had child protection wards on their computer, that ruled out a lot of the really helpful sites. Rock and roll was not for babies!

She was still going to write that article for the school paper, all right. But not the one everyone was expecting. Not a puff piece about the great band, or whether Gringras had a wife or not.

This one was going to be about rats—the real biting kind.

It was going to be about mirk, mire, gyres, and blood guilt.

It was going to be about Under the Hill, wherever that was.

And the teind, whatever that was.

It was going to rock her school and, possibly, win her an award. And all this was good—if only she could forget the rats.

Callie raced downstairs and was just gulping down a glass of milk and snarfing down a Pop-Tart when Nick came into the kitchen.

“That was brill, last night, didn't you think so, Cal?” His eyes were wide open, though the left still had a bit of sleep sand there and he rubbed at it with his fist.

“It was …
something
all right,” she mumbled, grabbing up her backpack and heading for the door. Shouting over her shoulder, she said, “Let Mom know I've gone to school already. That should surprise her.”

Nick stood in the doorway in his Batman jammies, waving. He seemed small, vulnerable, unprotected from the wind. Callie looked at him with affection. She always liked him a lot better when she got away from his side. For a moment she wondered if Mars had felt the same about her.

School was strangely silent because only a few homeroom teachers and the janitor—a surly man named Jamsie—were there so early. Callie smiled. Who would have believed it? Without the buzz, the bells, the yells, the clanging of locker doors, school was actually a place where a person could think.

Heading toward the journalism room, she thought about where she would start working on her article. The word
teind
was unfamiliar to her. Perhaps that was what she needed to know first.

But how to spell it?

Signing in on the computer's dictionary, she brought up
tined
and
tinned.
She tried
tiend,
but there was nothing between Tien Shan—which was a mountain range in Central Asia—and tiepin.

Biting her lip, she went on to Google.

Even Google was puzzled.

Finally she stood up and walked over to the bookshelf where the dictionaries stood stiffly like unhappy siblings in a row on the top.

The American dictionaries said nothing helpful, but when she took out the
Oxford English Dictionary
—what her journalism teacher liked to call “the last port in a storm”—she found by accident that the word was spelled
teind.

“That just plain looks wrong!” she said aloud, mouthing
I before e except after c.…

It seemed that
teind
meant a “tithe,” which was something they did in Callie's church, so at least she knew the meaning without having to look that up as well. In church
to tithe
meant “to give a part of one's income, a kind of tax, for good causes.” She remembered how Alabas had said something about paying a blood guilt. So maybe they were talking about some kind of payment that involved guilt. Blood guilt. That seemed to fit. She still didn't like the way the word looked, though:
e before i.
Shrugging, she closed the dictionary and turned back to the computer.

“What looks wrong?” It was Josee, hand twisting her hair, a black curl around a finger looking like a dark ring. “And why are
you
here so early? Nobody in their right mind gets here this early, middle of the night, before dawn's early light.”

“You're here and I bet you're in your right mind,” Callie retorted. “As for me, I'm left-brained and writing that article about the concert.”

“Mom had to go to work early and dropped me.” Josee's mother was a nurse. “Last time she had an early shift, I slept through the alarm. She said it wasn't going to happen again. Therefore, I am zonked, out of it, in the zzzz place, without a top floor. Like I said, nobody in their right mind…” She slung her backpack on top of Callie's. “So what looks wrong?”

“This word.” Callie typed it onto the computer.

“I before e except after c,”
Josee recited. “An eternal truth, according to V. Louise.” Their English teacher.

“I know, I know. But that's how it's spelled.”

“What's it mean when it's home on its own? Give me something, Callifunny.”

Callie made a face. “A tithe, a payment of some sort.”

“A payment? For what?” Josee leaned over, her nose almost touching the monitor. She was tremendously nearsighted and hated to wear her glasses. Her mother had vetoed lenses till she was sixteen. And pierced ears. Both of which Josee felt were tremendously unfair.

“For blood guilt, is what I heard.”

Josee laughed. “And what's
that
mean, Calli-bean?”

“What's
what
mean?” It was Alison. She was usually the first of them at school, catching up on homework she forgot to do the night before, so neither of them were surprised to see her.