I walked out of the alley and around to Pioneer Squares chilly wooden benches in front of the Underground Tour and the neighboring bars. We were passed by a flock of tour guests following Rick, the guide, out to the totem pole. Zip was chatting and smoking with Blue Jay and they waved to us, listing from a few early beers.
I sat on a bench and tried to think. It was easier with Lass being stubbornly silent, but the stinging pressure of his presence made my thoughts shatter and fall away. I tried thinking aloud.
“The bricks. It wouldn’t be the First Avenue side—that lets out the whole three blocks there. There’s no access to the underground at the park end except through the arcade, and that’s public and well-locked at night. Not Oxy Park, then.”
“Two blocks left.”
“Lass said… he threw the leash away after what happened to Jenny. We found Lass in the segment under the Cadillac Hotel block when we found Tall Grass down there a couple of days ago. That’s when Lass sent us to Sistu’s lair under… here. It’s the same place we met Grass and Jenny and the place where Lass had a run-in with Tanker and Bella. He said he lived there…”
“What if it’s the other block?”
“Burn that bridge when we come to it.”
We stood up and headed for the bricks, my knees stiff from the cold and a sudden tremor from Lass. He hadn’t thrashed when I’d gone down to the mouth of Sisiutl’s cave, but now he was flipping out. His anxiety was like a dowsing rod.
I hoped I could use that to my advantage while I searched the bricks. The time of day might make it difficult to get in and out and I dreaded the sensations that might come in such a haunted place with my uncanny passenger, but I wanted this over with, and waiting would make it worse, not better.
As we walked—I shuffled, really—it seemed the area was less trafficked than usual. The homeless and undergrounders were fewer—attending the vigil, I supposed—in spite of the warming weather. Neither had the regular pedestrians yet returned like swallows, still driven off by the chill of the salt-laden wind that came up the streets from Elliot Bay. Yet as we went along, a small group of Indians—normal and Grey—and the shadows of animals began to follow us, emerging from the underground, from alleys and doorways, the animals morphing from trees and cloud shadow. A few real birds joined the flight above us and a stray dog trailed well behind, curious but wary.
Grandpa Dan was at the head of this bizarre procession, seeming to draw them forth—real and spirit—dancing and making curious, graceful motions with his old, gnarled hands. He’d said they’d come if there was a need, and I guessed there must have been one. Whatever brought the Indians and their spirit companions, I was glad to have them nearby.
The Klondike Gold Rush parks doors were closed, though a sign said they were open for business. The cold kept the rangers and their visitors inside, and we had no difficulty in slipping down into the bricks, leaving our odd entourage behind.
Down below the sidewalk, pain blossomed; in the sea of ghosts, Lass seemed to expand inside me, pressing unbearably on every joint and organ. I gulped air, swallowing the silvered mist of the Grey and sweating in the cold.
I let myself drop deep into the Grey, to the point of the grid. Searing lines shot off in hard geometric shapes and sudden baroque curlicues that flung energy through the invisible world like catapults. Quinton grabbed my hand; his grip felt remote and thready like a handful of empty plush, but it seemed to hold me in my own shape, rather than spinning out into the blackness of the grid in a million burning strands. He turned on his pocket flashlight whose beam looked like smoke on water. We went forward by inches as I looked for something that didn’t belong—a line too hot, disconnected, wild among the busy conduits of the Grey’s power lines. Lass kicked and writhed, making me jerk in Quinton’s grasp.
We rounded the first corner, coming to the alley colonnade. I turned into it.
Lass settled and sighed. I turned back out, toward the distant corner where we’d first seen Tall Grass and Jenny Nin sitting in the light of a small fire with Grandpa Dan and his shadowy wings. Lass moaned and twisted, clawing at my back, trying to escape. I shuddered and took another step and another. Each footstep was a struggle against the unwilling ghost.
Progress slowed more the farther we all moved into the darkness under the street and Lass became increasingly hysterical, shrieking and throwing himself against me. I stumbled over nothing time and again, forced to stop and hold on to a bit of wall in order to look around, searching for the leash, feeling ice-cold stone I couldn’t see beneath my hands.
Down the farthest corridor—where Lass had hidden while Grass tried to give me the hat that had belonged first to Bear and then to Jenny—I saw a gleam as richly colored as pure emeralds and scintillant with old magic that smelled of water lilies and smoke. I crept closer against the thrust and panic of the ghost, who screamed, “No, no, no, no!” and slashed at me with bitter cold and the barbed edge of terror.
I gritted my teeth against the spurt of agony and felt hard, crumbling stone beneath my knees and hands. Quinton’s thin, warm touch moved up onto my back as I crawled toward the green line that grew thicker as I neared. Its length coiled away into the distance, as thick as my thumb, impossibly cutting through walls and looping over the vibrant lines of the grid like a mad vine over a trellis. I could hear it singing in a hundred languages. I reached for it and my incorporeal prisoner shrieked, gibbered, and lashed me blind. I shut my eyes, gasping and shaking my hanging head, my hand falling short of my goal. Tears gushed over my lashes and ran blood-hot down my face.
Quinton’s touch drew away and I felt a twist of my own fear tightening the grip of Lass’s terror on my body. I moaned as Lass howled in despair and sank into a dull blankness in my head. I blinked my vision clear and rolled back to sit against the nearest wall, trying to focus again on the normal.
Quinton was looking at something in his hand under the beam of his light. He held it up and I could see its true shape as a green shadow around its thin and ragged manifestation outside the Grey.
“Its just a bit of string. But it feels heavy.”
The long green tail of it snaked away into the mist of the Grey, shivering like a live thing. I put up my hand.
“Give it to me, please.”
He handed it over and I felt the weight of something far at the invisible end. I tugged it. The green line went taut, singing. I pushed myself back up onto my feet but kept my back to the wall for support.
The wall across from me rippled and the rings of disturbance spread outward through the Grey until they vanished in the edges of vision. The singing blended to a roar and Sisiutl swam through the wall on a slice of time, shouting in a dozen languages, drowning Lass’s horrified keening. The snakelike heads snapped and hissed, and the whole monstrous serpent rolled to bring its screaming center face to glare at me, gnashing its teeth and bringing its other heads close to strike.
I knew it understood at least some English—it had listened to Lass and had called me a thief—so as it raged and menaced us, I grabbed the feather from my bag and yanked once more on the leash. It reared up and I poked the central face with the long plume of the feather.
Sisiutl recoiled and snorted, its appearance rippling as the wall and the Grey had done before. I gave one more sharp jerk on the string and, thinking of Tanker’s commands to Bella, ordered, “Peace, Sisiutl. Be quiet.”
The monster seemed surprised, blinking all its eyes. Then it made two coils of its snake ends and raised the central head to my own height, staring with yellow eyes from the nearly human face. Meeting that gaze was like looking into a restless kaleidoscope. I had to shake myself and cling to the sobering pangs of Lass’s pressure in my head to keep from falling into that stare.