Neverwhere

The marquis gestured for Hunter to stop. He moistened his lips, and said, "This gate marks the end of Down Street, and the beginning of the labyrinth. And beyond the labyrinth waits the Angel Islington. And in the labyrinth is the Beast."

"I still don't understand," said Richard. "Islington. I actually met him. It. Him. He's an angel. I mean, a real angel."

The marquis smiled, without humor. "When angels go bad, Richard, they go worse than anyone. Remember, Lucifer used to be an angel."

Hunter watched Richard with nut brown eyes. "The place you visited is Islington's citadel, and also its prison," she said. It was the first thing she had said in hours. "It cannot leave."

The marquis addressed her directly. "I assume that the labyrinth and the Beast are there to discourage visitors."

She inclined her head. "So I would assume also."

Richard turned on the marquis, all his anger and impotence and frustration spewing out of him in one angry blast. "Why are you even talking to her? Why is she still with us? She was a traitor—she tried to make us think that you were the traitor."

"And I saved your life, Richard Mayhew," said Hunter, quietly. "Many times. On the bridge. At the gap. On the board up there." She looked into his eyes, and it was Richard who looked away.

Something echoed through the tunnels: a bellow, or a roar. The hairs on the back of Richard's neck prickled. It was far away, but that was the only thing about it in which he could take any comfort. He knew that sound: he had heard it in his dreams, but now it sounded neither like a bull nor like a boar; it sounded like a lion; it sounded like a dragon.

"The labyrinth is one of the oldest places in London Below," said the marquis. "Before King Lud founded the village on the Thames marshes, there was a labyrinth here."

"No Beast, though," said Richard.

"Not then."

Richard hesitated. The distant roaring began again. "I . . . I think I've had dreams about the Beast," he said.

The marquis raised an eyebrow. "What kind of dreams?"

"Bad ones," said Richard.

The marquis thought about this, eyes flickering. And then he said, "Look, Richard. I'm taking Hunter. But if you want to wait here, well, no one could accuse you of cowardice."

Richard shook his head. Sometimes there is nothing you can do. "I'm not turning back. Not now. They've got Door."

"Right," said the marquis. "Well then. Shall we go?"

Hunter's perfect caramel lips twisted into a sneer. "You'd have to be mad to go in there," she said. "Without the angel's token you could never find your way. Never get past the boar."

The marquis reached his hand under his poncho blanket and produced the little obsidian statue he had taken from Door's father's study. "One of these, you mean?" he asked. The marquis felt, then, that much of what he had gone through in the previous week was made up for by the expression on Hunter's face. They went through the gate, into the labyrinth.

Door's arms were bound behind her back, and Mr. Vandemar walked behind her, one huge beringed hand resting on her shoulder, pushing her along. Mr. Croup scuttled on ahead of them, holding the talisman he had taken from her on high, and peering edgily from side to side, like a particularly pompous weasel on its way to raid the henhouse.

The labyrinth itself was a place of pure madness. It was built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over the millennia, and entered the world of the lost and the forgotten. The two men and the girl walked over cobbles, and through mud, and through dung of various kinds, and over rotting wooden boards. They walked through daylight and night, through gaslit streets, and sodium-lit streets, and streets lit with burning rushes and links. It was an ever-changing place: and each path divided and circled and doubled back on itself.

Mr. Croup felt the tug of the talisman, and let it take him where it wanted to go. They walked down a tiny alleyway, which had once been part of a Victorian "rookery"—a slum comprised in equal parts of theft and penny gin, of twopenny-halfpenny squalor and threepenny sex—and they heard it, snuffling and snorting somewhere nearby. And then it bellowed, deep and dark. Mr. Croup hesitated, before hurrying forward, up a short wooden staircase; and then, at the end of the alley, he stopped, squinting about him, before he led them down some steps into a long stone tunnel that had once run across the Fleet Marshes, in the Templars' time. Door said, "You're afraid, aren't you?" Croup glared at her. "Hush your tongue." She smiled, although she did not feel like smiling. "You're scared that your safe-conduct token won't get you past the Beast. What are you planning now? To kidnap Islington? Sell both of us to the highest bidder?"

"Quiet," said Mr. Vandemar. But Mr. Croup simply chuckled; and Door knew then that the Angel Islington was not her friend.