“Then we go the other way.”
Avery had another notion, but he didn’t say so. Holding his breath, he swung down the ladder, screwing his face up in disgust at the stench of feces, urine and general decay. Layanna and Hildra followed. Janx came last, replacing the manhole cover overhead, sealing them in darkness.
“This way,” Hildra said, reaching the bottom and flicking on a flashlight. Avery flicked on his, too, newly liberated from a nearby shop that had already been looted almost to extinction, and the beams played over ancient stone tunnels built thousands of years ago.
“This must be one of the sections built by L’oh,” he said. “Back when they ruled here. The Ysstrals razed most of the city aboveground, but they kept large sections of the sewers. And there are even older, pre-human sections, built before L’oh conquered Maztril.”
“Fascinating,” said Hildra.
“You sure you know where you’re going?”
“More or less.”
“More or less?”
She didn’t answer. Foul fluid gurgled down a channel under the arched roof. Moss-grown pipes clunked overhead. Somewhere bats chittered. Something plopped in the river, and Avery trained his light on it. Nothing. It plopped again, and his light showed some sort of whiskered albino eel. His mind spun to think of an actual ecology existing down here, a whole cycle of life revolving around waste and mutation.
They passed beneath arches, pillars, down high halls and squat ones. Locks led down into deeper levels, and Avery’s stomach churned at the stench. Small tributaries met large rivers, and rivers led into vast, foul cisterns. Avery’s light couldn’t illuminate much of these rooms, just flickered off the black sludge rolling back and forth between distant shores, the ceilings so far above his light couldn’t prick them. Bats chittered loudly, and at one point some flittered low over the group, attracted by the lights.
One of the fliers flapped right toward Avery’s face. His light picked out a wide slug-like body, sucker-like mouth and dripping, membranous wings. He ducked, gasping. The thing swept over his head and vanished into the gloom.
Janx chuckled. “Don’t like flails, Doc?”
Avery sucked in a breath and steadied himself. The creatures weren’t bats at all but the horrible winged slug-like things called flails, all mucus and slime.
“Actually, no.”
He could hear the flails’ noises above: hooting and squelching as they called to each other in the darkness. They nested in dripping, mucus-y dwellings built against walls and ceilings. Avery hoped they all caught fire in some sewer-gas conflagration.
The group moved on. Surrounded by the smell, nausea overcame Avery at last, and he doubled over and vomited. Janx spat often, as if in prelude to retching, but he never did, though Hildra succumbed. Layanna, though she wore a pained expression, didn’t so much as complain. From time to time dripping mucus from a passing flail would spatter them. Whole murders of flails could be seen higher up the wall, fastened to it, their sucker mouths eating up slime mold. Avery shivered. He would be glad to get out of this place.
The attack came out of nowhere. The four were passing through tight, twisting halls, leading—Hildra insisted, though Avery was beginning to suspect she was lost—to one of the large rivers that would take them a good a ways in their desired direction, when all of a sudden figures sprang out at them from around a bend.
“Stop right there!” a voice called.
Janx rested a hand on the butt of his pistol. “Come and get us.”
“Who is it?” Hildra said.
Avery’s light sparked off raised knives, a pistol. The light picked out moist flesh—mottled, crested, gilled, scabrous, and striated. Glistening like fish’s. Mutants, of course. He reached out and clapped a hand on Janx’s, stopping him from pulling the gun, and Janx nodded.
“Should I—?” Layanna said.
“Not yet,” Hildra said.
Noises from behind. Avery whirled to see another tattered group emerge from an alcove. They’d been hiding, waiting for the band to pass. His light gleamed on a rusty chain being spun, on a spiked pair of brass knuckles. Fishy eyes glinted.
“Hand your wallets over and there won’t be any trouble.” This came from a bulbous fellow, squat and toad-like. His voice came out watery.
Suddenly Hildra stepped forward, toward the infected men. Avery watched her in alarm. What did she think she was doing?
“Pete!” she said. “It’s me, you bastard.”
It took the toad fellow a moment, but then his eyes widened and he laughed. “Hildra! Is that you?””
“As ever was.”
They embraced heartily. The other ruffians relaxed and put away their weapons. Some laughed. Some gazed on Hildra with awe. “It’s her,” Avery heard. “Look at ‘er!” “In the flesh!” “Never thought she’d have the balls!”
Arm and arm with Pete, Hildra turned to Avery and the others. “Janx, Doc, Lay—meet Pete. Pete, group.”
Pete smiled a wide-mouthed, toad-like smile. “Ain’t this somethin’? Hildra the Shadow back in the Underground.”
“Ain’t been that long.”
“Been a while since you been through this neck o’ the Stink.”
“Yeah, well, that trouble with Horath—anyway. We good?”
“We’re good,” Pete said.
Layanna relaxed. Avery had hardly been aware of the shimmer in the air around her, but he noticed when it vanished. He realized something else then, too. What he’d said earlier was more than a little true. He was afraid of Layanna. He loved her, but he feared her. They—the infected—they were all food to her. They’d been infected to become food. At the same moment, something occurred to him, and though he tried to push it away it just bounced back: he didn’t fear Sheridan. She could have shot him in the Dome and achieved her objective, but she hadn’t. She had actually failed in order to save him.
“What you doin’ down here?” Pete was saying.
“Goin’ to Muscud,” Hildra said.
“We were just on our way there to report to the Boss. Why don’t we take you?”
Avery heard the noise before anything else: the slap of water, the creak of wood, laughter and music. He, Janx and the others had been moving down dark hall after dark hall, stumbling and irritable. Somewhere flails squelched and fluttered, spraying sewage and mucus with every flap of their membranous wings. Avery walked through the black sewers, his flashlight flickering, sick with the stink, tired and dismal. Then, suddenly, he heard the noises, the creaking of wood and jounce of music, echoing down the tunnels.
He lifted his head. “What’s that?”
“You’ll see,” said Janx, and there was a knowing quality in his voice.
Avery saw the lights reflected off the walls, growing stronger as the group made turns until at last the tunnels were bathed in light: red, green, white, neon blue. Despite himself, he felt a flush of excitement.
Finally the group shambled out into one of the vast cisterns—a great lake farther than the eye could see, with a ceiling so lofty the numerous lights barely hinted at it. Upon this lake bobbed a city. Built of houseboats and shacks, planks and bridges, wooden houses on stilts, all of it roped and lashed together, buildings heaping from decks, towers rising and battling for supremacy. Lights blazed from the buildings of the city on the water, sparkling on the fetid lake. Something large moved in the brackish fluid, then submerged with a flurry of bubbles. Flails wheeled and spun. Foul fog drifted over the lake, surrounding the city in ghostly haze, suffusing the light and glowing from the inside in a myriad of colors so that the fantastic city seemed to drift in a dream. Avery stared, mouth agape.
“Welcome to Muscud,” Hildra said.
Pete or one of the others encouraged Avery along, down the walkway. One of the outlaws found a boat tied to a jetty, then another. Avery and the others in his party climbed into the boats and the ruffians piled in behind. Then, singing some throaty song about mermaid toads in dark rivers, the gang of criminals rowed their guests toward the town. Sound echoed and faded, lost in mist and distance, then rebounded off walls they hadn’t hit before. Coils of fog trailed around the boat, gleaming and ghostly. Large, pale things stirred in the water beside them, and at one point a rower had to beat one of the things away with his oar.
“I never knew,” Avery breathed.
Buildings loomed in the fog. Structures rising from nests of lashed-together tires bobbed and creaked. Some of the structures stood on long, moss-covered stilts that looked like they could snap at any moment.
They entered the city through canals that ran between listing buildings. Lights burned. Music roared. Alchemical lanterns strung from shanty to shanty, and Avery was relieved that they had been engineered to eliminate much of the stench, replacing it with a pleasant musky odor. All around him, mutants thronged. They cavorted in sagging structures, sang on rickety bartops, danced amid halls of ancient houseboats and gambled in smoky dens. It was a city of mutants. A city of mutants living in the sewers. It was true. He’d heard the stories, but he had dismissed them like anyone with any sense as fancy, as urban myth.
