The ghouls spoke rapidly to one another. “I think you are wrong,” Kree-akh said after a moment. “I think it is very important. Mewleep, take her and Akha and the young one, get them safely away, and tell Dr. Helsing what you have seen. We—the rest of us—will hold Lord Ruthven’s house.”
Greta wanted to ask questions, a lot of them, but she could not seem to organize the words into coherent sentences; her mind felt like a cauldron full of poisoned soup, chunks of thought swirling and bobbing chaotically in an unpleasant murk. She was still trying to figure out what she wanted to ask first when Mewleep, now accompanied by the ghoullet and his mother, took her wrist in a clawed hand and led her around the bulk of Ruthven’s furnace to the low, dark mouth of a tunnel. He fished out a piece of what looked like rotting wood from a pouch hanging on his belt. It glowed a thoroughly unearthly green, giving off enough light to show her the tunnel’s walls. Blocks of stone and bricks had been set in neat piles around the opening. It had clearly been carefully bricked up, and only recently reopened.
The last thing she saw, looking over her shoulder, was the pitifully small band of ghouls starting up the cellar steps to whatever awaited them beyond.
Greta had to walk bent over, shuffling along under the low tunnel roof. It was completely black except for the green ghost-light and the dim red pinpoints of the ghouls’ eyes. She followed Mewleep in silence, still dazed by the shock of the fire and the way Halethorpe had seemed to be able to see again, sit up on his own, as if the strength of the dying had come back to him all at once; the force of his words, as if a whole lifetime of effort were behind each one.
He’s dead, she thought. He’s almost certainly dead.
And, after a moment, It’s better this way.
His injuries and infections had been so massive, so comprehensive, that she knew even with the best of care he would not have had much time, and the questions that would have been raised at the hospital were questions that inevitably led to discoveries better left undiscovered. And she thought perhaps it was better for him, that he should go out this way, facing the people he had once fought alongside, rather than sinking slowly little by little.
He should have had the consolation of the last rites, should have had that reassurance, before he went, but maybe that didn’t matter; maybe he would not need to be given absolution after all, maybe he had bought and paid for it himself in the end. Greta would have cried for him, if she had been able to form tears. They seemed to have gone dry.
The tunnel opened out into a larger passageway, the roof only just high enough for Greta to walk upright. As the immediate urgency of escape faded, sour, spent adrenaline throbbed in her head, and she couldn’t help thinking of Ruthven’s lovely house burning to the ground with Halethorpe inside it, and wondered where the others were. And what they would think if—no, when, damn it—when they made their way back up to the surface to find the house a smoking ruin containing a human skeleton. Ruthven had left her in charge, entrusted it to her, and hadn’t she done just a bang-up job of protecting his possessions?
Anna was badly hurt because of me, she thought again. She could have been killed, and Ruthven’s house is dying.
The haze of misery blotted out constructive thought. It was only when Mewleep paused to let the other ghoul, Akha, catch up, the pallid glow of foxfire catching the planes and angles of his face, that she remembered Kree-akh standing in Ruthven’s cellar talking to him. Tell Dr. Helsing what you have seen.
That thought helped. Greta’s vague and unhelpful mental processes seemed finally to cohere into something approaching constructive reasoning. “Mewleep,” she said. “What did you mean, blue fire?”
CHAPTER 14
Mewleep’s English was significantly less fluent than his father’s, but nonetheless Greta could piece it together without much difficulty, standing in the darkness and listening to the story he told.
The ghouls knew almost every corner of the undercity, from the sewers to the subway to the old Pneumatic Dispatch conduits to the miles and miles of 150-year-old utility tunnels that crisscrossed the metropolis. They were very, very good at practicing the art of not being seen by the humans who regularly visited these underground spaces. They had to be. And they had very sharp ears and eyes.
He had been hunting for fresh rat for Akha’s baby—ghouls didn’t like fresh meat, exactly, preferring it to have gone a little runny first, but at least a live healthy rat was less likely to contain poison than a dead one—in the Northern tube line near Belsize Park station, and had heard men’s voices coming not from the station platform itself but under it. Voices filtering up through the ground.
Mewleep had known there were some deeper tunnels dug beneath the Underground here and there, but they were mostly shut up very firmly, bricked up sometimes, and there was too much man-smelling stuff in there—and not enough rats—for the deep tunnels to be considered as potential haunts. This one had people in it, however, and he was curious. He had made his way down through a tangle of ventilation ducts until he could see into the old shut-up, rusty-walled tunnel below.
He had never seen the lights on in one of these places before. Ghouls could see in the dark very well indeed, but the humans went blind almost immediately without these bright stinging lights. There were two humans in there, talking to each other, but what Mewleep saw beyond them was much more interesting.
“Blue fire,” he told Greta. “Blue fire in a … flask? A bottle. Lectristy.”
Beside him Akha hunched her shoulders and held the baby closer. She was shivering. “Lectristy,” she repeated in a hiss, emphasis on the first syllable, as if it were the name of some terrible enemy or a deadly disease.
“Fire in a bottle,” Greta said, intensely focused. “In a bottle about so high, with legs sticking off the bottom of it?”
Mewleep nodded. “We see it before,” he said. “Blue fire underground, lectristy, we see it before, all my father’s tribe, it kills two of us when they touch a thing in a tunnel that they should not touch, blue fire leaps at them and they dance and they are burned and they are dead.”
“Fear it,” Akha rasped. “Ware it.”
“But here the fire is caught in a bottle,” Mewleep said. “In a bottle, and it does not leap at the humans, and they do not ware it, like there is nothing to fear. It is sorcery.”
“It’s electromagnetism,” said Greta, feeling dizzy, thinking of Fastitocalon explaining parallels. “That … thing you saw. It’s not the only one under the city. There is at least one other, and that one is sorcery, all right, it’s … what’s behind everything, all the murders, all the raids on your people. That’s where Ruthven and the others have gone. To break it. To end it.”
Akha was shaking her head, holding the baby tighter; he began to cry softly. “No,” she said, and then went into a rapid-fire crackle and hack of ghoulish. Mewleep listened.