The Angel Islington was dreaming A dark and rushing dream.
    Huge waves were rising and crashing over the city; the night sky was rent with forks of white lightning from horizon to horizon; the rain fell in sheets, the city trembled; fires started near the great amphitheater and spread, quickly, through the city, defying the storm. Islington was looking down on everything from far above, hovering in the air, as one hovers in dreams, as it had hovered in those long-ago times. There were buildings in that city that were many hundreds of feet high, but they were dwarfed by the gray-green Atlantic waves. And then it heard the people scream. There were four million people in Atlantis, and, in its dream, Islington heard each and every one of their voices, clearly and distinctly, as, one by one, they screamed, and choked, and burned, and drowned, and died. The waves swallowed the city, and, at length, the storm subsided.
    When dawn broke, there was nothing to indicate there had ever been a city there at all, let alone an island twice the size of Greece. Nothing of Atlantis remained but the water-bloated bodies of children, of women and of men, floating on the cold morning waves; bodies the seagulls, gray and white, were already beginning to pick with their cruel beaks.
    And Islington woke. It was standing in the octagon of iron pillars, beside the great black door, made of flint and tarnished silver. It touched the cold smoothness of the flint, the chill of the metal. It touched the table. It ran its finger lightly along the walls. Then it walked through chambers of its hall, one after another, touching things, as if to reassure itself of their existence, to convince itself it was here, and now. It followed patterns, as it walked, smooth channels its bare feet had worn, over the centuries, in the rock. It stopped when it reached the rock-pool, kneeling down and letting its fingers touch the cold water.
    There was a ripple in the water, which began with its fingertips and echoed out to the edges. The reflections in the pool, of the angel itself and the candle flames that framed it, shimmered and transformed. It was looking into a cellar. The angel concentrated for a moment; it could hear a telephone ring, somewhere in the distance.
    Mr. Croup walked over to the telephone and picked up the receiver. He looked rather pleased with himself. "Croup and Vandemar," he barked. "Eyes gouged, noses twisted, tongues pierced, chins cleft, throats slit."
    "Mister Croup," said the angel. "They now have the key. I want the girl called Door kept safe on her journey back to me."
    "Safe," repeated Mr. Croup, unimpressed. "Right. We'll keep her safe. What a marvelous idea--such originality. Positively astounding. Most people would be content with hiring assassins for executions, sly killings, vile murders even. Only you, sir, would hire the two finest cutthroats in the whole of space and time, and then ask them to ensure a little girl remains unharmed."
    "See that she is, Mister Croup. Nothing is to hurt her. Permit her to be harmed in any way and you will displease me deeply. Do you understand?"
    "Yes." Croup shifted uncomfortably.
    "Is there anything else?" asked Islington.
    "Yes, sir." Croup coughed into his hand. "Do you remember the marquis de Carabas?"
    "Of course."
    "I take it that there is no such similar prohibition on extirpating the marquis . . . ?"
    "Not any longer," said the angel. "Just protect the girl."
    It removed its hand from the water. The reflection was now merely candle flames and an angel of astonishing, perfectly androgynous, beauty. The Angel Islington stood up and returned to its inner chambers to await its eventual visitors.

    "What did he say?" asked Mr. Vandemar.
    "He said, Mister Vandemar, that we should feel free to do whatsoever we wished to the marquis."
    Vandemar nodded. "Did that include killing him painfully?" he asked, a little pedantically.
    "Yes, Mister Vandemar, I would say, on reflection, it did."
    "That's good, Mister Croup. Wouldn't like another telling-off." He looked up at the bloody thing hanging above them. "Better get rid of the body, then."

    One of the front wheels on the supermarket shopping cart squeaked, and it had a pronounced tendency to pull to the left. Mr. Vandemar had found the metal cart on a grassed-in traffic island, near the hospital. It was, he had realized on seeing it, just the right size for moving a body. He could have carried the body, of course; but then it could have bled on him, or dripped other fluids. And he only had the one suit. So he pushed the shopping cart with the body of the marquis de Carabas in it through the storm drain, and the cart went _squee, squee_ and pulled to the left. He wished that Mr. Croup would push the shopping cart, for a change. But Mr. Croup was talking. "You know, Mister Vandemar," he was saying, "I am currently too overjoyed, too delighted, not to mention too utterly and illimitably ecstatic, to grouse, gripe or grumble--having finally been permitted to do what we do best--'"
    Mr. Vandemar negotiated a particularly awkward corner. "Kill someone, you mean?" he asked.
    Mr. Croup beamed. "Kill someone I mean indeed, Mister Vandemar, brave soul, glittering, noble fellow. However, by now you must have sensed a lurking 'but' skulking beneath my happy, blithe, and chipper exterior. A minuscule vexation, like the teeniest lump of raw liver sticking to the inside of my boot. You must, I have no doubt, be saying to yourself, 'All is not well in Mister Croup's breast. I shall induce him to unburden himself to me.' "
    Mr. Vandemar pondered this while he forced open the round iron door between the storm drain and the sewer and clambered through. Then he manhandled the wire cart with the marquis de Carabas's body through the doorway. And then, more or less certain that he had been thinking nothing of the sort, he said, "No."
    Mr. Croup ignored this, and continued, " . . . And, were I then, in response to your pleadings, to divulge to you what vexes me, I would confess that my soul is irked by the necessity to hide our light under a bushel. We should be hanging the former marquis's sad remains from the highest gibbet in London Below. Not tossing it away, like a used . . . " He paused, searching for the exact simile.
    "Rat?" suggested Mr. Vandemar. "Thumbscrew? Spleen?" _Squee, squee_ went the wheels of the shopping cart.
    "Ah well," said Mr. Croup. In front of them was a deep channel of brown water. Drifting on the water's surface were off-white suds of foam, used condoms, and occasional fragments of toilet paper. Mr. Vandemar stopped the shopping cart. Mr. Croup leaned down and picked up the marquis's head by the hair, hissing into its dead ear, "The sooner this business is over and done with, the happier I'll be. There's other times and other places that would properly appreciate two pair of dab hands with the garrotting wire and the boning knife."
    Then he stood up. "Goodnight, good marquis. Don't forget to write."
    Mr. Vandemar tipped over the cart, and the marquis's corpse tumbled out and splashed into the brown water below them. And then, because he had come to dislike it intensely, Mr. Vandemar pushed the shopping cart into the sewer as well, and watched the current carry it away.
    Then Mr. Croup held his lamp up high, and he stared out at the place in which they stood. "It is saddening to reflect," said Mr. Croup, "that there are folk walking the streets above who will never know the beauty of these sewers, Mister Vandemar. These red-brick cathedrals beneath their feet."
    "Craftsmanship," agreed Mr. Vandemar.
    They turned their backs on the brown water and made their way back into the tunnels. "With cities, as with people, Mister Vandemar," said Mr. Croup, fastidiously, "the condition of the bowels is all-important."

    Door tied the key around her neck with a piece of string that she found in one of the pockets of her leather jacket. "That's not going to be safe," said Richard. The girl made a face at him. "Well," he said. "It's not."
    She shrugged. "Okay," she said. "I'll get a chain for it when we get to the market." They were walking through a maze of caves, deep tunnels hacked from the limestone that seemed almost prehistoric.
    Richard chuckled. "What's so funny?" Door asked.
    He grinned. "I was just thinking of the expression on the marquis's face when we tell him we got the key from the friars without his help."
    "I'm sure he'll have something sardonic to say about it," she said. "And then, back to the angel. By the 'long and dangerous way.' Whatever that is."
    Richard admired the paintings on the cave walls. Russets and ochres and siennas outlined charging boars and fleeing gazelles, woolly mastodons and giant sloths: he imagined that the paintings had to be thousands of years old, but then they turned a corner, and he noticed that, in the same style, there were lorries, house cats, cars, and--markedly inferior to the other images, as if only glimpsed infrequently, and from a long way away--airplanes.
    None of the paintings were very high off the ground. He wondered if the painters were a race of subterranean Neanderthal pygmies. It was as likely as anything else in this strange world. "So where is the next market?" he asked.
    "No idea," said Door. "Hunter?"
    Hunter slipped out of the shadows. "I don't know."
    A small figure dashed past them, going back the way they had come. A few moments later another couple of tiny figures came toward them in fell pursuit. Hunter whipped out a hand as they passed, snagging a small boy by the ear. "Ow," he said, in the manner of small boys. "Let me go! She stole my paintbrush."
    "That's right," said a piping voice from further down the corridor. "She did."
    "I didn't," came an even higher and more piping voice, from even further down the corridor.
    Hunter pointed to the paintings on the cave wall. "You did these?" she asked.
    The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys. "Yeah," he said, truculently. "Some of them."
    "Not bad," said Hunter. The boy glared at her.
    "Where's the next Floating Market?" asked Door.
    "Belfast," said the boy. "Tonight."
    "Thanks," said Door. "Hope you get your paintbrush back. Let him go, Hunter."
    Hunter let go of the boy's ear. He did not move. He looked her up and down, then made a face, to indicate that he was, without any question at all, unimpressed. "_You're_ Hunter?" he asked. She smiled down at him, modestly. He sniffed. "_You're_ the best bodyguard in the Underside?"
    "So they tell me."
    The boy reached one hand back and forward again, in one smooth movement. He stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm. Then he looked up at Hunter, confused. Hunter opened her hand to............