Wicked Throne, page 24
“Yes. Many times.”
Dark creeps into my vision. I grab the rail to keep from stumbling to my knees.
Oh my God.
Captain Eolith says, “Sir. You don’t remember. Trust me. You performed the reconnaissance here yourself.”
I didn’t. I’d never go into those tunnels. Not here, in Blue Mountain. Not if my life depended on it. That’s where I came from. I’m not going back.
“These tunnels are unoccupied,” says Captain Doomed. “You set seeing eye stones or glyphs or something. A month ago. We’ve been monitoring them ever since. No life sign. It’s where he’s stored the Ash Womb. It’s a vault. That crack we came through opened recently. Otherwise, this chamber’s guarded with all kinds of magic spells on the other side of a locked door.”
I hiss, “It’s not a treasure vault. It’s a honeycomb. We shouldn’t be here. Get us out.”
“Last month, Grastes and you—”
“I wasn’t in Eorha last month. I was in Almathea.”
“Sir—”
“Listen. I’ve never met Grastes before. Whoever you’ve been speaking to? Last month? It wasn’t me.”
“Think on what you’re—” he tries.
“I was in Almathea. Pretending to be Razanhi bel Magg. I built a glamour that looks like him. Nyrene knows. The . . . person you met—”
“It was you?” Captain Howlson pales.
“What was me?”
“The fraud in Almathea. You’d taken—” he hesitates. He scowls. “I told you to send an image of the real Razanhi to every newscast in Sangearth. Because you said you’d taken him prisoner. To prove the one in Almathea was a fake.”
They’ve been meeting with the spirit. Pieces jumble and dig for places to fit: the spirit wanted Grastes here. I told Grastes no—the real me, when they brought me to Eorha a few weeks ago. He wants to kill Grastes. Why?
I wanted to kill Grastes, up until I met him. Winter Folk are the enemy. Right? Only if you’re loyal to the Summer Empire. The spirit or the Shade killed Momaggos, too. Both Momaggos and Grastes? But not Nyrene? Not the elves? Not the goblins? Is someone, or isn’t someone, leading them to revolution? Me? Or the spirit wearing my face?
Grastes wouldn’t have known the difference between me and the spirit. Once his people dragged me from that dungeon, he and his court must have overlooked any warning signs that I wasn’t the same Ivar they’d met. Of course, I wasn’t, I’d been in a dungeon. Good fellow.
“The Shade’s allied himself with a shape-shifter,” I say. “I never would have gone into those tunnels. Trust me. This isn’t a treasure vault, it’s a hive. It’s a trap.”
Captain Howlson steps back. Trust my eyes, I beg. Trust my voice. Trust the tremors burning up and down my arms. What can he see, a stranger who claims to be the man he thought he met—and that the man he and his king have been conspiring with is an imposter who wants them dead? It’s a long shot. Even if he believes I’m the real Ivar, why should he trust my word over his supposed ally? Believe me. If I’ve ever been worth hearing, believe me.
The captain grits his teeth. He snaps around and bellows, “Take us up!”
The ship lurches to life. Her black wings expand, and titanic explosions shake the cavern above us. An elemental roar crashes down the rift. Fire, sparks, and table-size rocks blow over our ship. Alarms explode, and I whip my hands over my ears as the floor drops. We plow into the ground under a crushing avalanche.
Dust seethes in the fluttering bow lights. The mechanical shield creaks and moans. Commands flurry above the alarms: take readings, report damage. Captain Eolith’s vicious, “Take us up!” I fumble to drag my hands away from my ears, find the deck, push myself to my knees.
“Pilot!” The captain bounds across the deck to the helm. “Get us out!”
Dim, rusting, raw earthen-red light flickers on in the honeycomb tunnel far to our left. A wound in the dark. I clamp my hands over my ears.
“Blast them,” snarls the captain, muffled. More alarms screech. Another tunnel glows meat red. And another.
“Port guns!” says Eolith.
“Gone, sir!”
“Wellon, Pentocrast, Olot, get outside and clear debris!”
“Aye, sir!”
The lights flicker closer, stretching dead color over the stones. Water climbing over my ears. Glass cell. The ship’s alarms stretch, descend, grow murky so far under water.
Glass shatters. A warm body slams over me, holding my head down. Thumping above. More glass shatters.
The port window bursts. Cold, dead fingers bite my left shoulder. Captain Howlson’s an impression in the dark, yanking my right arm, wrenching me away, and hauling me up and through the shattered mechanical shield.
“This way!” he commands. The captain lurches forward into the dark catacombs, dragging me by the arm as his warriors fall into formation around us. Someone shakes on a light wand. Cold white splashes across the floor, the walls, glinting off ancient rotting shelves stacked with yellow skeletons.
Left. Right, into another hall. The night burns all around us with red glows. We charge around a bend into an arched corridor lined with femurs stacked in hedgerows and around dirty skulls poking from the brown stone walls. The warrior sweeps her light behind us, then to the right into the open hallways that loom past every dozen steps.
There. The beam flashes across lost faces, stolen skins, and gelatinous eyes shining in the dark, long, gumless yellow teeth. Meat-red spells sew hands and throats and faces together from dead tissue even as the weirghasts run.
On our right. Coming fast. Grastes’s war band opens fire. Plasma bolts bisect the dark, punching through wood and bone. The bolts burn through the ghast’s tissue layers, but the blood spirits keep coming. More ghasts echo behind us.
With solid rock on our left, we can only keep running and hope we reach a door before the swarm reaches us. The corridor flattens into a brick hall whose walls are stacked skulls and femurs, bisected with more catacombs. Papery horrors hang in alcoves on our left: skeletons dressed in rotted robes. My lungs heave. Captain Howlson’s grip digs into my wrist, jolting me onward with encouraging pain.
The corridor ends at a bald rock tunnel. We hurtle through, passing skulls wedged into the walls in two morbid lines. The tunnel winds right. The ghasts’ dead feet pat onto the stone behind us. A door cuts into the right wall. The light sweeps inside, and three shipmen race into the gap. Captain Howlson yanks me back. Inside, illuminated for half a second, is a pallet on the brick floor and a figure on its side wrapped in cloth.
“Dead end!” cries one of the warriors, but we’re already twenty feet down the tunnel. I twist around in the captain’s grip, craning to see whether the shipmen made it back. Absolute black papers my eyeballs.
Screams echo in the tunnel behind us. My throat closes. My legs pump faster.
The tunnel explodes into a dead end, too. My soul drops into my feet. An immense wall rises ahead, faceless white stone inlaid with two hundred femurs. A hundred filthy skulls rise up the wall’s center in three large metaphorical doors, each guarded by a skeleton in dusty brown robes. I spin around, hands twisting to form barricade spells. Warm air tickles my nose.
Wait.
The air smells fresher somewhere.
I drop back while the warriors spread into formation and the ship’s remaining crew stagger behind them palming small arms. Somewhere is a way out. My nose leads me to the skulls, and there, pressed almost face to bone, I sniff.
A thin trail. Coming from the right. I turn my head.
“Over here!” I command. The left and right skull stacks aren’t darker, they’re set back a few inches farther than the center stack. A narrow crevasse, little more than an oubliette, forms a hidden door between the left and center stacks leading into the wall. I inhale. “This way!”
Eolith snaps orders. We take the new fork at a flat run. The crevasse forces us to move in single file down a sharp wooden incline. Gray alder plank buck and pop underfoot. We hit a rocky floor and barrel ahead. New wood scaffolds support the ceiling above us, and modern witch lights float along the walls providing thin illumination. A side passage appears in the left wall, hewn into the rock. Magic prickles my senses. I grind to a halt.
“Here,” I say. “There’s a ward. If someone’s put up a ward, it’s a way out.” My hands shake through casting my spells, but there’s no need for finesse. The ward peels apart like an orange.
Like the death ward in Lotherak. I swallow ice.
Captain Eolith’s warriors funnel the ship’s crew into the passage, and we follow behind. Once everyone’s through, I recast the ward, adding an extra six charge points to the defenses because, good wow, the Shade—or the spirit—can’t make wards to save his life. Nab in a bucket.
The passage winds left and down. Modern steel scaffolding appears overhead, and dim electric lamps are strung along the walls. Two hundred feet farther, the tunnel exits into an underground forest.
Puffy clouds strain through the rocks high above and trickle through old, dusty evergreen trees. For a moment, my heart bursts yellow and I taste escape like a drug—but we’re underground. Blue Mountain’s a living wall, and we’re deep inside a horizontal fissure. The clouds slithered in from outside.
Red and brown moss dusts the stone ground like dead leaves. Thin sunlight blurs through the forest’s canopy in mummified stripes. Captain Howlson signals his band forward. The soldiers advance, scanning the trees around us, rifles at the ready, while the ship’s four remaining crew and I huddle together inside their defense.
The forest closes a fist around us. The dirty trunks smell like rot and ash, almost suffocating in the stagnant air. The warrior on point raises a halt. A moment later, we crowd along a rocky spine overlooking a short drop, my heart banging in my ears. Twenty feet ahead is a house.
Not a big house. White clapboard. Two stories. Three respectable foyer windows peep up the hill over a tidy grass yard fenced in by a cherrywood deck and a woodshed. An old-fashioned loft looms above the foyer, its single window a dark eye in the peeling paint.
Captain Howlson orders, “Padorson. Zollëson. Scan for life sign.”
The two scouts creep down the drop into the yard. She goes left while he circles right, around the woodshed, toward the brick chimney.
They’re going to meet the Shade. They’re going to walk right into his house. Of course, that’s his house. We all know that’s his house, right? Who else lives here? He’s going to blast them apart and come up the hill to slaughter us.
Any second, he’s going to come up the hill. My pulse skips around, ready to run.
A figure in a black cloak. I strain for the first sight so the moment he appears I can sprint into the trees.
Any second.
The scouts come back in an easy lope, still silent but having shouldered their rifles. “No one,” says the scout with ice-colored hair shorn to a lacy frost on her deep-blue scalp.
“We scanned the whole ravine,” says the other, who has smoke-quartz skin and golden eyes like the Snow King. “No living thing in two miles.”
“Ghasts won’t show up,” I say.
He chews his tongue and raises a black eyebrow.
“We’ll use this as a base,” says Captain Howlson. “Move in.”
The twelve of us trample up the cherrywood porch into the house. Pansies sit in a wood box by the front door, a riot of vibrant yellow and sultry purple. A paper tongue sticking from the damp black soil behind the colorful heads reads: “Cool Wave: sunshine and wine.” The male scout opens the door and the soldiers file in. The ship’s crew and I follow. Captain Howlson hangs back, accompanying me as a self-appointed personal guard.
His warriors spread out to secure our base. I hang back in the foyer with Captain Howlson. Someone lived here just days ago. The pansies, and the lack of dust, betray that whoever it was left in a hurry. There’s a bookcase across the foyer, near a couch and a rustic coffee table cluttered with breakfast dishes. Flies haven’t even had time to find the charcuterie. Morbid curiosity makes me pick up a fire poker and use the copper point to edge open the bookcase door, in case the contents belong to the Shade and he’s booby-trapped everything.
The bookcase does not belong to the Shade. Colorful fly-fishing manuals fill the shelves, along with a few plays and an adorably stupid wooden acorn. The books smell like glue and look clean. Someone just bought them. I pull out The Gentleman Fly-Fisher and page through bright illustrations. No one who owns a bookcase full of fishing texts can be a bad person. I shut the book and tuck it back on the shelf.
A hand closes on my shoulder. Zollëson, the golden-eyed scout, salutes. “Captain wants you, sir. We’ve found something in a washroom.”
Eolith’s gone.
My stomach drops. I follow the scout under the loft stairs, where six soldiers and the four crewmen crowd around a pale oak door. Eolith waves me inside, rugged face grim and gray. The shower door hangs ajar. One of his warriors stands inside the tub cutting down a corpse hanging from the showerhead.
The fisherman. Gooseflesh sweeps down my back.
He’s a goblin. Under the cramped yellowish shower bulb, he looks like my dam—the same ropy white forearms transitioning to pitch black wrists and hands, and strong, knobby tendons wrapped around his knuckles. Drying pink-gold blood drools from his slashed neck, staining the tub under his bag-covered head. Aside from that bag, he’s naked. Someone’s hacked his throat from ear to ear and belted his ankles to the pipe so he would bleed out.
If he bled out, why is the tub so clean?
“Few hours,” says Eolith, nodding at the fisherman’s corpse. He glances at me, and I read the same look I’m sure he sees huddled in my eyes. The murderer isn’t far.
The loft floor creaks above us.
Air sucks from the washroom. I raise my eyes to the sponge-print ceiling along with Captain Howlson.
Someone’s in the house with us.
Eolith signals his warriors up the stairs. They ready their rifles and unhook axes in case the spirit upstairs is a wizard. My pulse backpedals as I join them. We file into the hall and head up the steps, leaving the dead goblin who isn’t my dam. The crewmen shrink back.
Daylight tongues through four small oak-framed windows lighting the staircase, peppering the bark-brown carpet with milky flashes. I sneak soundlessly after Eolith, who sneaks soundlessly after two other warriors. The rest follow me. The carpet mutes our footsteps. We enter the loft in twos. I crane my neck to see filthy reddish walls above the railing, a twin bed yanked out onto the carpet, and a fly rod mounted above the window on a hand-carved rack. Honey-warm sunlight glazes the bed and the stately figure sitting in the middle of the carpet.
The spirit. His lavish robes look wobbly around the edge, like a glamour. His goblin-black hands look wobbly, too, and his stolen auburn hair. The plastine paintbrush he’s holding looks real enough, though, casting a faint shadow on the dripping bucket between his blurry knees. So is the pink-gold blood oozing down the bucket’s side.
My chest sucks into itself.
A serpentine painting covers the entire room. Long, cavernous jaws and eyeless sockets gaze out from the closest wall, dripping half-dried goblin blood on the baseboard. The painting’s skeletal ribs disappear behind the bed and fill the adjacent wall. Its legs scrabble over the ceiling. Its serrated whipcord tail coils across the carpet, pooling wet and sticky in the warm sunlight. The spirit dips his brush into the bucket and paints blood onto the wall, shaping two nostrils. Where the brush touches the wood bubbles and bulges outward.
A dragon’s picture is as good as a dragon itself. They watch from their pictures. They slip from world to world. They live in the white place between thought and reality. When they find a champion to give them flesh, they break the barrier between real and not-real. All you need is belief, an image, and a dark blood ritual.
The spirit dips his brush and paints another stroke. The bubbles on the wall crack, revealing translucent-white scales.
24
THE DRAGON UNFOLDS FROM its bloody image, squeezing into the world between wood planks that scrape goblin blood down its rotting skeletal flanks. Pink gold dribbles between eyes black as hell and runs off hooked yellow teeth. The winter faeries open fire. Captain Howlson screams, “Formation!” The dragon’s legs drop into the world ten feet above the carpet and smash the pine planks, shaking the house. The tail yawns through the floor into the room, and Howlson’s warriors dive sideways to avoid the hollow-tipped spines.
The spirit lurches upright like a man, still wearing my stupid face. Eolith shoots him through the forehead, and the spirit disappears into black smoke.
“Watch for the spirit!” Eolith snaps.
Small fires pock the walls and the dragon’s translucent hide. Purple veins ripple under its oily scales, but the plasma bolts don’t seem to hurt it. The nightmare’s black eyes recess in its bony face, seeming to drag the sunlight into an abyss with no end. The world disappears in those eyes. The shadows grow long. The dragon’s teeth glow with light’s opposite, a dead light, an inverse light, that sucks me down deep into blackness and Silence. Flames scream in those eyes. Bloody hands grab my ankles, pull me into the ashes within the blackness. The house in the cave tumbles into dust. Nyrene’s face blows apart on a dry wind.
Sharp pain slaps me from the abyss back into my body. I stagger. Captain Howlson grabs my arm. “You good?”
The fire’s gone. I’m standing on the carpet.
Plasma sprays past my ear. The dragon’s roar shakes the room, and I clap my hands over my ears. Its voice raises every hair on my head: agonized wails churned through fire and a deep, booming rumble. It smashes its tail into the warrior advancing on it with an axe. Its spikes punch out through her back, and red sprays from her mouth to join the pink gold covering its newborn flesh. The gunman blasts its eyes.
The dragon peels its hind legs from the wall—and surrounds us.
A lanky candle-white winter soldier swings his axe into the dragon’s thick, muscled neck. The blade chops in and sticks. The dragon snaps around, teeth wide. The winter faerie freezes under its gaze, mouth sagging open, eyes huge and young in an old man’s face. The dragon bites him in half. It crushes his chest under a clawed foot and bends to press its snout against his face. It draws a deep, rumbling breath.
