* * *
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It turned out not to be so scary after all.
In fact, not nearly as scary as upside had been lately.
Down there, in the dreary, dirty sewers beneath the city, I realized how drastically my world had changed, and in such a small amount of time.
How could a beady-eyed, twitchy-nosed rat—or even a few hundred—compare to the Gray Man? What consequence raw sewage and stench next to one's likely fate at the hands of the Many-Mouthed-Thing? What significance ruined shoes or nails torn scrabbling over rocks in collapsing parts of the city's underbelly, when measured against the brazen theft I was about to commit? Against a man who'd taken out twenty-seven people in a single night just because they were in the way of his bright and shining future, no less.
We turned one way, then the next, through empty tunnels with unobstructed walkways, into ones fouled by slow-moving sludge. We sloped down deeper into the earth, veered up, and descended again.
"What is that?" I pointed to a wide stream of fast-moving water, visible beyond an iron grill mounted in the wall. We'd passed many such grills, though smaller and set lower into the walls. Most were affixed in sunken spots, with large pools of black water collected around them, but I'd seen nothing like this. This looked like a river.
It was. "The River Poddle," Barrons said. "It runs underground. You can see where it meets the River Liffey through another such grill at the Millennium Bridge. In the late eighteenth century, two rebel leaders escaped Dublin castle by following the sewer system to it. One can navigate the city fairly well, if one knows where things connect."
"And you do," I said.
"I do," he agreed.
"Is there anything you don't know?" Ancient artifacts, how to freeze obscenely large bank accounts, the seedy subculture of the city, not to mention the exact layout of its dark, dirty underbelly.
"Not much." I could discern no arrogance in his reply; it was simply fact.
"How did you learn it all?"
"When did you become such a chatterbox, Ms. Lane
?"
I shut up. I told you pride is my special little challenge. He didn't want to hear me? Fine, I didn't want to waste my breath on him, anyway. "Where were you born?" I asked.
Barrons stopped short, turned around and looked at me, as if bewildered by my sudden spate of talkativeness.
I raised my hands, bewildered too. "I don't know why I asked that. I had every intention of shutting up but then I started thinking about how I know nothing about you. I don't know where you were born, whether you have parents, siblings, a wife, children, or even exactly what it is you do."
"You know all you need to know about me, Ms. Lane
. As I do about you. Now move. We've precious little time."
A dozen yards later, he motioned me up the rungs of a steel ladder bolted into the wall and, at the top of it, I became instantly, deeply nauseated.
There was one extremely potent OOP—dead ahead.