The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5 by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald Page B

with relief—and let Blossom steer them both toward the back of the shop.
    “They’ll have the alley covered,” she said. “But maybe … come on!”
    They were in the kitchen now, and she was pushing a button underneath the counter. The stove swung aside, and Faral saw that there was a trapdoor set into the tiles beneath. Blossom grabbed the recessed handle and pulled the door upward, revealing a circular, brick-lined shaft. A vertical ladder of rusty iron extended downward into darkness along one side of the tunnel.
    “Get inside,” said Blossom. “Go.”
    From the front room the blaster sounded again—a group of two shots, then a burst of three. Blossom grabbed a hand torch from its charging bracket on the kitchen wall and started down the ladder herself without bothering to wait.
    Faral went in after her, with Jens so close behind him that his cousin’s boot soles were on the rung above his head. As soon as Jens’s head was below the level of the kitchen floor, the trap fell. Except for the glow of Blossom’s hand torch, down in the shaft below them, they were wrapped in darkness.
    The ladder ended in a horizontal passage. A stream of water ran through the tunnel ankle-deep, and the air was thick and foul. Based on the smell, Faral was glad that in the limited light he couldn’t see what the water looked like.
    “Come on,” said Blossom, stepping down into the malodorous stream. She began moving away from them, her feet splashing in the foul water as she went, and he had no choice but to follow her. “There’s a chance they won’t figure out right away where we’re heading.”
    They waded on in silence for a while. The way was slippery underfoot, with half the stone covered by flowing water and the rest of it coated with mud and slime. When Faral put a hand on the tunnel wall to steady himself, his palm came away smeared with something viscous and unnameable. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his right boot had a leak in it—his sock was beginning to squish. The thought failed to cheer him.
    He drew a deep breath—regretted it when the thick miasma in the tunnel made him cough and wheeze—and said, “Who exactly is ‘they’?”
    “The people who were shooting at you, of course.”
    “Ah.” That was Jens, bringing up the rear. From the sound of his voice, he didn’t like the stink of the tunnel either. “ Those people. Tell me, Gentlelady Blossom, if you possibly can—what in the name of hell is going on?”
    “Bindweed and I object in principle to customers getting killed in our shop,” she said. “It’s bad for business.”

IV. Ophel
     
    I N THE back room at Huool Galleries, Miza watched the info-glyphs on her desktop shift and transform themselves as the situation changed. Bidding intensity at the Atelier Provéc had plummeted; at the same time, a disconcerting ripple of excitement and anxiety had begun to manifest itself nearby. She waited long enough to make sure that the ripple was genuine and not an artifact of the graphing process, then tapped the comm link to the outer office.
    “Gentlesir Huool, I think you ought to see this.”
     
    Most people, Faral suspected, would have lost track by now of how long and how far they had been slogging through the tunnels of Sombrelír’s waste-disposal system. Most people, on the other hand, hadn’t been brought up in the unmarked forests of Maraghai. For his own part, he had a good idea of both the time and the distance—he could retrace the route later at street level if he had to—but he didn’t think the knowledge was going to prove useful anytime soon.
    Blossom halted, finally, at the point where another iron ladder, identical to the one in the kitchen of the tea shop, led up toward the arched ceiling of the tunnel. She directed the beam of light from her hand torch upward at what looked to Faral like the bottom side of a trapdoor.
    “There,” she said. “We should be safe now.”
    *Such an air of confidence,* Jens muttered