“Assuming we survive this little adventure,” Hexe said solemnly. “I’m not going to lie, Tate. What we’re setting out to do is incredibly dangerous. You should go back to the gallery, apologize to Templeton, and try to salvage what’s left of your career.”
“Maybe I should try and get back with Roger, while I’m at it?” I chided. “C’mon, you know me better than that, Hexe.”
“I wouldn’t go
that
far,” he laughed. “I thought Dori was bad, but that guy is a real asshole.”
“Yeah, there’s a reason he’s an ‘ex,’”I snorted. “But if you think you can talk me into going back to the gallery, forget it. I’m not going to stand by and let that kid get hurt again; not if there’s something I can possibly do to prevent it.”
Hexe stopped and turned around to face me. The space in the tunnel was cramped, pressing us in so that our bodies touched. His face was close to mine, his breath against my ear. Even engulfed by the stifling heat from the steam pipes, I felt a chill of anticipation as he took my hand.
“You’re a good friend, Tate—and an amazing woman,” he said. “I saw that in you the moment we first met. If we get out of this ...”
“
When
we get out this,” I corrected gently.
“You’re right.” He smiled. “
When
we get out of this, I wonder if you would do me the great honor of accompanying me on a date?”
“Only if you promise to take me somewhere besides the Two-Headed Calf,” I replied.
“It’s a deal.”
“We’re close to a warren,” Hexe said, holding up the scrying egg. The faint light had grown in its intensity, until the entire crystal was filled with its unearthly glow.
We had been trudging for several blocks, taking a series of increasingly claustrophobic service tunnels. I had no idea which direction we were headed, or whether or not we were still under the streets of Chelsea.
“There has to be an entrance around here somewhere,” he muttered.
“I don’t see anything,” I said, looking about the cramped passageway.
“You wouldn’t,” he replied. “The entrances to dwarf warrens are camouflaged using magic.” His eyebrows suddenly lifted. “Aha! There it is!” He pointed to the large circuit box opposite us.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked, eyeing the numerous DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE! Signs.
Hexe did not answer, instead holding the scrying egg so I could look through it with my right eye. To my surprise, the circuit box disappeared and was replaced by a thick wooden door with hand-forged iron hinges and a door handle. The frame was carved into an arbor, with faces of gnomes and goblins peeking from the leaves, mischievous smiles on their faces.
“Well, now that we’ve found it, how do we get in? Do we knock or what?”
Hexe cleared his throat, stepped back, and made a noise that sounded like someone strangling a Dutchman. There was a deep rumbling noise, and the wooden door swung inward, revealing a lighted corridor.
“My grandfather taught me a little of the dwarves’ language,” Hexe explained. “I took a wild guess at what the password might be. I was right.”
“What was it?”
“ ‘I am a dwarf.’ ”
“Do you think it’s safe to enter?” I asked warily.
“There’s no reason to worry,” Hexe replied confidently. “Dwarves like to keep to themselves, but they’re not hostile.”
“Okay, I’ll take your word for it. But if we end up beaten to death with pickaxes and shovels, I’m never going to talk to you again.”
Gathering up my courage, I stepped out of the utility tunnel into a long corridor, the floors and walls of which were paved with polished stone. Instead of guttering braziers, every twenty-five feet there were burnished metal electric wall sconces. The only indication that we hadn’t accidentally wandered into the lower levels of a luxury department store was that, despite the twenty-foot-wide hallway, the ceiling was barely a foot above my head. Hexe sighed in relief and drew the witchfire back into his body.
Fifty feet later we reached the end of the corridor and stepped out onto a walkway that overlooked a huge atrium that plunged twenty stories down into the earth. As I peered below me, I saw numerous levels interconnected by escalators, elevators, and elevated catwalks. I had expected the dwarves’ underground city to look like a cross between a coal mine and a catacomb, but with its wide corridors and art deco touches, it bore a closer resemblance to the Concourse at Rockefeller Center.
Everywhere I looked, dwarves of every age and gender were busily going about their day, no differently than any other New Yorker. They were of stocky build, male and female alike, with thick features and strong, hairy-knuckled hands. All the males had beards, but only the older ones wore them long enough to tuck inside their belts. The females tended toward busty and full figured, with a penchant for peasant skirts and Birkenstocks, and wore their hair in coronet braids. Outside of these general similarities, the individual dwarves were as varied in their personal appearance as any other Americans.
Hexe and I were on the highest level of the warren, which was virtually deserted, so we took an escalator to one of the lower levels, where there was far more foot traffic. As we stepped off the moving staircase, the statues trailing behind us like clockwork ducklings, the nearest dwarves stopped to stare at us. When we came to a standstill, the sculptures followed suit, reverting to their “natural” state.
A dwarf mother the size of a nine-year-old grabbed her baby-sized child and hid it behind her skirts, while a young dwarf couple pointed at us and talked behind their hands to each other. I nervously scanned the crowd for pickaxes and shovels.
Hexe stepped forward and addressed himself to an elderly dwarf woman, dressed in a shawl and a babushka, who looked like a doll carved from a withered apple.
“We beg your pardon, Grandmother,” Hexe said politely. “Which warren is this?”
The old woman shook her head and said something in the phlegmy language of her people, then scurried off as fast as her stumpy legs could take her.
“What’d she say?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.” He frowned. “She either told me to touch my nose to my shoe or she said she has no ears. My dwarvish isn’t that good.”
A deep bass voice suddenly spoke up from the crowd. “She told you she doesn’t understand topsider language.”
Hexe and I turned to find an older dwarf standing behind us, his long beard liberally shot with gray. To my alarm, I saw he was carrying a pickax over one shoulder, as were the two younger, shorter-bearded dwarves who flanked him. He also wore a Taser in a holster on his hip and a shiny badge pinned on the breast pocket of his Dickies work shirt. Compared to his fellow dwarves, he was a veritable giant, towering just over five feet tall.
“As for where you are, this is Conegar,” he said stonily. “Keep your hands where I can’t see ’em, Kymeran. Try pointing any fingers at me and I’ll Taser your ass faster than you can make a fist. Now, what are you doing in my warren?”
“Please forgive our trespassing, Officer,” Hexe said humbly, placing his hands in the small of his back, “but we need to get to Golgotham as fast as possible. It’s a matter of life or death.”
“It’s Chief Constable, if you please,” the dwarf said pointedly. “And who are
you
, Kymeran?”
“My name is Hexe, son of Syra, grandson of Eben.”
“You’re Lord Eben’s grandson, eh?” The chief constable stroked his beard with his free hand. “I knew him, in his day. He did the dwarf folk fair.” He took the pickax off his shoulder and nodded for his deputies to follow suit. I heaved a small sigh of relief. “The name’s Brock Fardigger,” the dwarf lawman said, offering Hexe a broad, hairy hand. “How can I be of service?”
“We need to use the Sub-Rosa to get to Golgotham, Chief Constable,” Hexe explained. “As I said, our friend’s life hangs in the balance.”
“Are these your creations?” Fardigger asked Hexe, eyeing the metallic figures grouped behind us.
“No, I made them,” I replied.
Fardigger raised a bushy eyebrow in surprise. “Nice metalwork, girl,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the Cyber-Panther’s steel hide. “Impressive. Nowhere near dwarf quality, of course, but
very
good for a human.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, blushing at the compliment. Dwarves are famous for their metallurgical skills, so the chief constable’s comment was high praise, indeed. Since I was sure to be savaged by the critics after tonight’s “walk out,” it was probably the last compliment my art would ever receive.
The Sub-Rosa Subway Station was located on one of the deeper levels of the warren, and it was accessible only through a pair of heavy metal doors just slightly taller than Hexe and me. Through them we passed into a short tunnel, which divided into two branches. We followed the chief constable down the right-hand tunnel, which led to an elegant Edwardian-style saloon, more than a hundred feet long and fourteen feet wide. The floor was covered with Persian carpets, and the walls were hung with pictures of what I assumed were famous dwarves, with an expensive-looking ornate clock in the center. At the far end of the salon were two doors. Hexe and I had to duck to keep from becoming ensnared in the elaborate crystal chandeliers that huge from the low-slung ceiling. Several dwarves sat on upholstered settees, smoking pipes and reading newspapers as they awaited the arrival of the next car. It looked more like the lobby of a posh fin de siècle hotel than a subway platform.
“This is the waiting room for the downtown tube,” Chief Constable Fardigger explained. “There’s an identical room on the other side for the uptown tube. Your ride should be here any second.”
As if on cue, there was a loud chiming sound and the left-hand door at the far end of the salon opened, and several dozen dwarves in heavily soiled work clothes, filed into the waiting room. They were wearing hard hats and clutching metal lunch pails. The dwarves who had been sitting on the sofas quickly gathered up their things and made for the right-hand door. Hexe and I, accompanied by the chief constable, fell into line behind them.
Descending a half-dozen steps, we found ourselves upon the railway platform, near the portal of the tunnel, and in full view of the vast machinery used to propel the passenger cars. The pneumatic “blower” resembled a cross between a giant blacksmith’s bellows and a river paddleboat, and it sounded like the world’s largest asthmatic. The tunnel was round and six feet in diameter; the top was surmounted by a keystone of pressed brick, over which was carved a series of runes in the dwarf language. At either side of the tunnel, set atop twin pedestals, were bronze figures of scantily clad dwarf women holding aloft gaslight torches.
From where I stood on the platform, I looked into the tunnel and could see that it curved slightly before straightening back out. The walls were lined with a network of gracefully curved iron ribs, while the track was secured by bracings of hardwood and fastened crosswise at intervals by flat girders of cast iron.
The passenger car was itself circular in shape and made of wood, and ran on wheels provided with separate axles and springs. A dwarf dressed in an old-fashioned conductor’s uniform stood at the entrance of the car, collecting fares from the passengers.
“Here you go,” Fardigger said. “All you have to do is ride it to the end of the line. You’ll come up near the Fly Market.”
“We appreciate your help, Chief Constable.” Hexe smiled.
“No problem—just don’t do it again, okay?” the dwarf said with a gruff chuckle. “Oh—and good luck with your friend!”
“Tickets, please,” the conductor said, holding out his hand.
I reached inside my purse. “You take U.S. dollars?”
“Of course we do,” the conductor replied, rolling his eyes. “We’re in America, ain’t we?”
“Yeah, of course,” I replied, handing him a five-dollar bill. “Give me two tickets to the end of the line.”
“Doncha mean
seven
, Long Tall Sally?”
“Where’d you get that number from?” I frowned.
“They’re with you, ain’t they?” the conductor asked, pointing at the statues standing patiently in line behind me.
“Yeah, but they’re not really
alive
. . . ” I protested.
“They got keisters on ’em, don’t they? If they can sit down and take up a seat, they gotta have a ticket. Them’s the rules, lady. But seeing how I’m such a swell guy, I’m gonna let the cat ride for free.”
The interior of the passenger car was relatively cramped, by human standards. Hexe and I had to hunch down to keep from bashing our skulls on the ceiling. The statues, however, didn’t seem to mind whacking their metal noggins against the various overhangs, causing them to ring like gongs.
Once we had taken our seats on the long, upholstered benches that ran the length of the passenger car, the conductor closed the door and threw a switch mounted on the wall, triggering the release of air into the tunnel. The passenger car shot forward, carried along like a sail-boat on the wind.
“Are you okay?” Hexe asked.
“I just feel like I’m trying to deposit loose change at the drive-up teller, that’s all,” I said, glancing nervously at the statues, unsure how the change in air pressure might affect their welds. Ariadne was seated beside me, as serene as she was beautiful, the Cyber-Panther curled at her feet like an adoring house cat. If her seams and joins were giving her any problems, she kept it to herself.
True to the chief constable’s word, we emerged from the Sub-Rosa Subway’s final stop at the corner of Perdition and Water streets, about four blocks up from the Fly Market. I automatically heaved a sigh of relief upon seeing a satyr trotting down a side street, pulling a rickshaw full of drunken leprechauns.
Where the appearance of six animated metal sculptures on the streets of West Chelsea had triggered screams and cars plowing into buildings, in Golgotham we barely rated a second look.