"Really? Why do they hate water?"

"It's opposite them—water and air, earth and fire. One cancels the other. The dragon septs each claim an ele-ment," Jim called back to me.

"Fascinating. I can't believe I'm doing this," I grum-bled as I turned a corner, glancing behind me as I did so. At the far end of the tunnel one of Fiat's men appeared, spotted me, and yelled something over his shoulders.

"What the heck?" I stopped as I turned around. The antechamber we were in held huge black wooden balls … and I do mean huge. One of them was seated up against the opening of a tunnel, the ball almost com-pletely filling it. Other balls of lessening sizes were chained to the walls, the smallest probably about four feet high, the biggest about sixteen.

"Come on, we don't have time to admire the sewer's balls," Jim snapped as it took off down another round passage.

"What are they?" I yelled, one hand clutching at the stitch in my side.

As I passed a narrow opening in the side of the tunnel, something jerked me sideways. "They clean the sewer of debris. If you want me to play tour guide, I can," Jim said as it spat out the hem of my dress it had used to pull me after it. "Or we can escape the blue dragons. Choice is yours."

"Escape," I said. We ran. And ran. And ran. It felt like we ran down miles and miles of sewer, passed open wa-terfalls of sewer water pouring into another channel, past numerous huge pieces of machinery used to keep the sewers clear, down narrow stone paths littered with dead leaves and empty plastic bottles that had been caught in the sewers screens.

We came to another juncture. Jim leaped over a metal railing intended to keep people out of a tunnel. I lurched (less gracefully) after the demon, almost falling with sur-prise as I landed on a narrow stone ledge. Unlike the other tunnels open to the public, this one had no grating over the water mat rushed through it at a tremendous rate. Behind me, a man yelled.

"Faster!" Jim cried as it raced across a wooden plank about four inches wide that had been set across the open channel.

"You're kidding me! I'm not crossing that!" I came to a screeching halt at the flimsy bridge, glancing behind me. Renaldo might be bulky, but I'll give it to him—he had a sprinter's speed.

"Merde!"I yelled as I shuffled across it, my lower lip caught between my teeth in an effort to keep from screaming. Renaldo was almost upon me when I stepped off onto the other ledge. Jim was clawing at the plank even as I spun around to help it throw the bridge into the water. Renaldo screamed what sounded like an Italian ob-scenity as he lunged toward the plank.

He missed it by inches. I stood, panting, my back against the curved wall of the tunnel, staring across nine feet of open, torrential water to where Renaldo stood pac-ing back and forth, glaring at me. He wasn't even breath-ing hard, damn him!

"What's wrong, afraid you'll get wet?" I taunted him, feeling a little payback was in order.

Renaldo growled something and looked for all the world like he was going to try to vault over the open water, but each time he got near the edge, he'd back up again.

"Didn't your mother teach you anything?" Jim asked as he turned toward the far exit. "It's not smart to bait a dragon."

Renaldo kept pace with us as we ran down the tunnel, snarling and swearing threats at us when we dashed off into a side tunnel that he couldn't reach.

We ran down more tunnels, some open, some with grates, until I lost any and all sense of direction.

Not to mention ray breath.

"Jim, I have to stop," I gasped as we entered yet an-other junction that held machinery. Some sort of engine with big red gears sat atop what looked like a small railway handcar, behind which a sharp-sided black tender was attached. Both had metal wheels shaped to move along metal tracks.

"Can't stop unless you want them to get us," Jim said as it crawled underneath the coupling of the two cars. I sat on the coupling mechanism, swinging my exhausted legs over it, pausing for a moment to suck air into my lungs. "I don't care. They can have me. I just want to stop. My heart's going to burst."

"Just a little farther," Jim urged me as it scrambled over a railing marked with a red warning sign mat read:danger! interdit au PUBLFC. I didn't need to understand French to know what that meant.

Just as I opened my mouth, I heard two men calling to each other in the tunnel we had just come from. I slammed my mouth closed and hauled myself over the waist-high railing, stifling a scream of surprise as I fell about four feet. We were in a small well, evidently some sort of unused overflow valve if the red metal cap be-neath our feet was anything to go by.

I didn't need to be warned to be quiet as we crouched down, making ourselves as flat as possible. Because of the machine cars standing in front of us, unless Fiat's men were right next to us peering down into the well, they wouldn't see us. I sat with my arms around Jim, my mouth pressed up against its heavy coat to muffle the sound of my gasping wheeze for air. A moment later the men entered the tunnel

intersection, calling to Renaldo. I didn't risk standing up so I could peer out at them, but even though I didn't understand a word of what they were saying—the blue dragons seemed predominately Italian in origin—the angry tones of their voices left me in no doubt they were not happy campers. After a consultation lasting about a minute, they left, each taking a different tunnel out of the area.

"Think they'll come back?" I whispered into Jim's furry ear.

"Don't do that, it tickles," Jim complained, butting its head against me to rub its ear. I rubbed it, scratching be-hind the ears the way I knew it liked.

"We have to leave," I said softly, aware from the echoes of other tourists talking and calling to one another that sound in the nonwater tunnels traveled very well.

"No! 1 figured we'd stay here until they started calling you the' Phantom of the Sewers."

I socked Jim on the shoulder and hoisted myself out of the well with an audible grunt. "I'm too old for this. I want to go home. Let Drake have the Eye. Screw the world. I just want a hot bath and a nice comfy bed."

"Selfish, selfish, selfish," Jim said, jumping nimbly out of the well. "This way."

I turned around. "Oh, now you're an expert on the sewers? What makes you think you know the way out?"

Jim walked over to a corner and nodded toward a small blue sign that readavenue bosquet. A painted red arrow pointing up was nestled up against a line of metal grips set into the wall. "Oh. I suppose that leads to an exit?"