Extraordinaires 1 by Michael Pryor

rock. He restrained himself.
    â€˜Found you.’ Evadne Stephens was wearing a brass headpiece with telescopic arrangements and goggles that made her visage insect-like. ‘And none too soon, from the looks of you.’ She tapped her chin. ‘As a project, you’re more complicated than I thought you’d be.’

    Kingsley’s sense of surprise had taken so many buffets that he didn’t express any incredulity when Evadne followed a large rat into a maze of underground tunnels and byways. Trailing behind her, bare-footed and wincing, he wondered if the rat weren’t familiar, but not being an aficionado of rats, one tended to look much like another. Given, it was the size of a terrier, but he assumed one terrier-sized rat was much like another terrier-sized rat. Given, it had three eyes, but three-eyed rats might be commonplace in this neck of the woods. So to speak. Kingsley’s weariness made the fact that Evadne talked to the rat – conferring when facing a choice of ways to go – merely an item of vague interest, to be considered later when he was able to muster enough energy.
    As they went, Evadne produced a slim electric light, the size and shape of a pencil. She chatted mildly about how she and Kipling had separated after the uproar at the police station and how difficult it had been to find Kingsley and how curious she was about his ending up in the Demimonde. She told him about how he’d ended up in one of the older sections of the Fleet River, one of London’s mostly forgotten subterranean waterways.
    Kingsley shrugged at this, too weary and too overwhelmed to be amazed. He tried to offer responses that made sense, but her questions grew fewer and her glances at him more concerned until she patted him on the arm and told him not to worry.
    Which was useful advice, for Kingsley took the opportunity to fall asleep while he walked. He lapsed into one of those wonderful dreams where one knows one is dreaming, but is able simply to enjoy the experience. At least, that was the only explanation he could think of, drowsily, when Evadne and her rat helped him into a little boat the shape of a pea pod. Evadne crowded in beside him, delightfully, and a tiny man stood in the bow behind them. He was made mostly of angles and had the most enormous eyes Kingsley had ever seen, either in a dream or waking, and he poled the boat along while humming a tune that echoed from the corbels, cornerstones and colonnades of the subterranean watercourse he navigated.
    Evadne herded him through a series of doors to her refuge, the locks of which he would normally have been fascinated by. In his state, however, they were a blur. Inside, Evadne steered him to a room and ordered him to take a bath.
    Some time later, and somewhere closer to human, Kingsley relaxed and let the water come up to his chin. The bathroom in Evadne’s retreat was white-tiled from floor to ceiling. At the moment it was totally filled with steam and Kingsley’s gratitude.
    He tried to remember the last time he’d had a bath and, with a start, realised it was only a day ago, the morning of his disastrous debut. Idly, while he sought for the soap that was somewhere in the water, he wondered what Mr Bernadetti was doing. Hiring some more dog acts, most likely, to fill the gaps that Evadne and Kingsley had left.
    A stab of guilt took him. How could he be worrying about his stage career with all that had happened? His foster father’s abduction, in particular, and Mr Kipling’s hints about shadowy events and nearing doom. The world had become altogether darker and more complicated than it had been a day ago.
    The nature of his abductors, too, had shaken Kingsley. He flinched when he recalled their touch. Their skin was doughy, but their grip was steely. On top of that, the shock of what happened to them, the way they’d been dispatched by the brutish woman who had then advanced on him, had been enough to