* * *
“I don’t like this,” Avery said. Gazing out over the lights on the water, he sipped a thick, strangely flavored liqueur. “I don’t trust Vassas.”
“No reason you should,” said Janx, sprawled out on a nearby couch; Vassas had given them a room on the second floor, and from nearby came the sounds of lovemaking, if it could be called that. “He’s not trustworthy.”
“He’s a fuckwad,” Hildra said.
“How do you know him, anyway?” Avery said.
She shrugged. “I was a burglar. He knew lots of places to be burgaled. Plus, he served as fence. We made a good team, for awhile. Till a few deals went wrong. He blamed me. I blamed him. Neither trusted the other after that. If he hadn’t known Janx was lookin’ out for me, I don’t know what would have happened.”
“I do,” Janx said. “Trust me. He says he wouldn’t hit a woman, but that ain’t the truth. Not by a long shot.”
“I didn’t know you knew Vassas, too,” Avery said. “I was surprised when he knew your name.”
“Janx knows everyone,” Hildra said, not without a touch of pride.
“Don’t worry,” the big man said. “Vassas is a rotter, but he’s loyal, and he likes the idea of both me and Hildy owin’ him a favor.”
“Will he be able to find Jeffers?”
“He should. The Prime Hubbie said Gwen tracked him to Muscud, and this is Vassas’s town. If he’s here, Vassas will find him.”
“Are you certain about this?” Layanna asked Avery.
“It’s the only way. The other Collossum apparently lives down here, and Haggarty, it seems, is about to turn the country over to it. If we can find it and kill it first, Haggarty won’t be able to.”
“I won’t be able to go with you,” she warned. “The Collossum would sense me coming and be on guard. And since he, to pick a pronoun, is here alone it’s almost certain that he’s more powerful than I am, anyway.”
Avery let out a breath. “I know.” He patted the pocket where he kept the god-killing knife. Bleakly, he said, “I might finally get a chance to use this.”
Someone knocked on the door, and Pete stuck his head in. “We found that boatman at a nearby whorehouse.”
“Figures,” Hildra said.
“When he’s done, we’ll send him to you.”
Pete withdrew, and Avery returned his attention to the window. Lights of small boats bobbed on the water, mist curling around them. “It’s kind of beautiful here,” he said. “Strange, but I think I like it.”
“Yeah,” Janx said. “Mu took me here a few times.”
“There’s other cities, too, scattered about,” said Hildra.
“Really?” Avery lifted his eyebrows. The idea was evocative. “Are they all independent, I wonder? Or are they all like city-states?”
“Oh, there’s a common lord and master, all right,” Janx said.
“I had no idea.”
“Would I lie about the Sewer King?”
Avery almost smiled. So did Layanna, sitting across from him.
A sly gleam entered Janx’s eyes. “Y’know, one time me and Mu were in Doxer, that’s another city down here, an’ we met the King his own self. That’s right. Me and Mu were brought to his palace.”
“Palace, you say?” Avery kept his face straight.
“Well, so we were brought before the Sewer King, an’ he says to us, he says, I hear you’re some capable boys. I need you to do a job for me. See, my daughter’s been kidnapped by the White-Fash—that was the boogeyman of the town, said to be hundreds of years old, he lived in the tunnels no one went to—and so the King, he says, I need for you boys to get her back. Well, that started one of the weirdest adventures of me life ...”
The group listened amiably, throwing in a question here and there and laughing occasionally, and Janx hadn’t finished his story long when the door cracked open and an old man stuck his head in.
“I’m Jeffers. Wanted to see me?”
They beckoned him in, and the wizened mutant, who had suckered tentacles for arms, three on his right, one on his left, entered cautiously, looking about him as if this might be a trap of some sort. Avery understood that he made his living ferrying messages and deliveries from one isolated township to another, traveling the eerie labyrinths of the sewers; he probably wasn’t used to the company of people, especially strangers from topside.
“How c’n I help you?” he said, pulling up a chair. He had a tangled beard with what looked like barnacles poking through on one side, and one of his eyes bulged like a fish’s.
“We understand you’re the one who found the bodies,” Layanna said. “The ones that were dismembered, some burned by acid.”
“That’s right. A terrible thing it was.”
“Can you tell us more about what you saw?”
Jeffers rubbed a tentacle across his forehead. “What exactly is it you wanna know?”
