Or it could be something even more horrific than the hybrid.
I blink hard and swallow over my suddenly dry throat.
Something is definitely going on because the moss has split in two and is now creeping across the floor toward me.
Wode pengyou, a little voice whispers.
Friend? I think. And then I remember. Cave sprites. They helped us before, when the Grue nearly killed Bayne in the old Archive. Apparently, they’ve been here watching all along.
Last time, they made me promise that I would someday repay them the favor. But it seems I am about to be in their debt again, and I whisper as much.
“It doesn’t seem I can repay my debt to you, my friends. What would you have me do?”
“Rid us of these vermin,” one says. And then the chorus is taken up in whispers of “hao” all throughout the cavern.
“This is our home,” one said. “We cannot leave it. Darkness is natural. But evil is not. Unkindness is not. We cannot harm our brethren, but they must go elsewhere.”
I sigh. I suppose at least they didn’t ask me for the moon, but this seems nearly as impossible. Ximu is making an army, after all.
“Well, get me down, will you please? And then we’ll see.”
The little ones scurry along the wall and ceiling, and soon I can feel them gnawing at the cords.
When the last tether snaps, I land like a sack of rice on the floor. They gnaw away the silk until my arms and legs are free. I ache all over, especially in the neck.
“Xiexie. I don’t suppose you can get me some trousers?” I whisper to the nearest sprite. I chafe at my arms and legs.
His lantern-eyes shut as he solemnly shakes his head.
“Ah, well.” Nothing the xiren probably haven’t seen before.
“Can you free them?” I ask. I nod toward the others and immediately wish I hadn’t.
“Some are too far gone,” one sprite says.
I understand what the rendered fat odor means, and I vomit.
Everywhere.
Then I hear a noise. Gen.
His eyes glow like fell moons. “Syrus—”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You must understand, boy . . .”
“I understand that you are not of my clan.” I stand to my full height and spit on the ground between us, the symbol of breaking bonds. “You are no longer my uncle. Do not speak to me as if you are.”
“You’re hurt, I understand that—”
The anger pulls me inside out. In houndshape I barrel out past him before he or any of the other monsters can stop me.
I nearly leap straight off the ledge that spirals around the pit, but only manage to turn in time. As I run, I hear a high clicking noise behind me that reverberates throughout the pit—a signal to the hybrids, I’d guess. Their eyes gleam at me as they emerge. There are dozens of caves like the one I was in; are they all filled with prisoners? How long have the xiren been secretly stashing their prey right under our noses?
Farther ahead I see a great contingent of the hybrids as they disappear to the upper level. Some of the rear guard, hearing the alert, turn in my direction.
I take the nearest open side corridor. There are more prisoners here, most of them suspended from the ceiling like I was. I see a few faces, many of them Tinker faces, and the sight enrages me further. I had thought they were all dead. That seemed the worst possible fate. But this and Uncle Gen’s betrayal are far worse than death. I want to stop and free them, but I know if I do, I have no way of getting them out. If I can escape, the best thing will be to warn the Empress and return with whatever forces we can muster.
Which will be difficult considering how easily Olivia’s guard was slain.
I put my head down and run until I am racing down one of the old Museum corridors, smelling the must of abandoned storerooms, the broken glass of everlanterns cutting my paws.
I’m creeping upstairs, my sides heaving with the effort of having run so much, when I hear the laughter.
It’s a laugh I was glad to think I’d never hear again. That harsh music of a well-bred lady, that laugh that cuts you down even as you long to keep listening.
And against my better judgment, I go toward it. Because there are no reasons in this world why I would hear that laugh. I need to know why Lucy Virulen is here.
As silently as possible, I creep into the old observatory. I can just make out two figures kneeling and Ximu bending over them with her jaws wide.
I see her face and I understand. My cramping belly wants to turn my bowels to water at that moment, but I manage to control myself. Just as Charles allowed the Grue to inhabit him, Lucy has bonded with Ximu. For what reason, to what purpose, I have no idea.
And the two kneeling before her are none other than Vespa and Bayne. The fools.
I can’t help but shake my head. Witch and warlock they may be, but they’re none too bright. Surely they couldn’t imagine that they could rescue me any better than I could rescue myself? I’m a Tinker. I know how to make anything and survive on nothing. Their magic wears out, but my skills never do.
Unless someone were to cut off my hand. And then, well . . . that might not work out so well.
Besides, all I have to do is get clear of this building. In houndshape not even the swiftest xiren can catch me.
The only reason they caught me before was because they had the element of surprise.
I creep closer, keeping to the alcoves and broken archways. There are eyes watching from above. Something hangs near Ximu, a silken sack of what I’m guessing was once a faun, by the looks and smell of it. I’m guessing it’s the one Olivia sent. Maybe now she’ll listen to me, if I ever get to speak to my Empress again.
Ximu lowers her voice, whispering now. Venom drips from her jaws.
“You think you’re so smart, waltzing in here under a glamour, thinking no one would be the wiser, eh?” she says. “You have no idea what I can do.”
“I have no idea what you are,” Bayne says. Ever the hozide pigu, that one.
I’m not glad that she cuffs him across the face. Because I’m guessing that hurts even more than when the minion thing below hit me with its metal leg.
She nearly knocks him down.
“You will be silent, bigamist.”
“He is not a bigamist, Lucy,” Vespa says while Bayne rights himself, cradling his jaw in one hand. “Your marriage was annulled properly when it was believed that you were dead and he was stripped of all his titles by his family. And, as for the two of us, we are business associates only.”
I don’t quite follow what either of them is saying, but Lucy/Ximu seems enraged by this.
“How dare you? Witch you may be, but I am a Queen. I am Ximu, and Ximu is me. We are one being now, as that bastard Charles is with the Grue. You are alive now only because it amuses me for you to be so. The moment you displease me enough, you are spiderling fodder. Do you understand?”
Vespa ignores all her blustering. She looks the Shadowspider Queen in the face and says, “What happened to you, Lucy? Why are you doing this?”
The gentleness in her voice gives Lucy pause. Then I notice that Vespa’s fingers are glowing ever so faintly. She’s trying to cast some kind of spell.
Lucy draws back, and the scarlet fangs that had been protruding from her horribly stretched mouth retract.
When she speaks, sobs catch on her words. “He let go of my hand,” she says. “He promised to take me to Old London, where I would be loved and adored. He promised me power beyond imagining. And then . . . he let go of my hand.”
There is a terrible silence. We are all imagining the same thing. Caught up in the whirlwind of the Waste and the pull of the open portal, who knows where a person might end up if she wasn’t ripped apart altogether. I know that’s what Bayne and Vespa assumed. They had been sure that the force of so much wild, deadly magic had either ripped Lucy and Charles apart or sent them hurtling into Old London, never to be seen again. They’d discusse
d it many times, mostly, I think, to reassure themselves that all was well and that the battle was over.
Then Lucy smiles. “But the power he promised came. Not in the way I’d imagined but perhaps even better. Ximu and I are one now. And I will take back what was lost to both of us, you may be sure of it. And then I shall have my revenge on him for his lies and his inconstancy.”
What she says freezes me to the bone. She is sure that Charles is still alive. She keeps speaking of him as if he’s alive somewhere, somewhere close by. How can that be? We all saw the portal swallow them and snap shut. I fight the urge to shout at her or at Vespa. Ask her! Find out what she knows!
For all the good it will do. We are in the black pits of the tenth level of the Hell That Eats People Alive and Spits Them Out in a Million Pieces, as Nainai would say. And there is no Heart of All Matter or Heavenly Dragon to save us this time.
“Lucy . . . ,” Vespa begins.
“Silence! That name no longer has any meaning for me. You will address me properly as Queen or not at all.”
“What does Your Majesty want, then?” Bayne asks. “You have us now and may do what you please. Surely that is enough?”
Bait her. Get the answers.
“First, I am going to finish taking New London. Shouldn’t be hard now that your Empress has succumbed to my little poison gift, should it? I will collect her next. And then I will march north to the ancestral home of the xiren, Scientia.”
I bristle at the mention of the poison gift and think again about Olivia. Was she hurt? Has she not recovered?
The last bit of news startles Bayne enough that Ximu laughs.
“You didn’t know that, eh? We were driven out by the Tinker King, but the palace your family usurped centuries later was mine, built for me. Now I will go and take back what is mine. And I have you to thank for that.”
“What do you mean?” Vespa says. She’s still not being properly respectful, so I’m not surprised when Ximu cuffs her. It’s almost a light, playful blow, but it sends her to the floor.
“Obstinate and uppity as ever, aren’t you?” the Queen asks, bending closer to her. “ ‘Twas your little trick that allowed me to escape. The Heart didn’t just free Tianlong. It freed all of us.”
Vespa straightens slowly but keeps her head bowed.
I’ve snuck steadily closer, and now I can see Bayne’s face. It’s drained of all color. “What do you mean all, Majesty?”
“I mean every Elemental who had been trapped or exiled in the last Great War, Architect. Are you so ignorant of the history of this world that you know nothing of what I speak?”
“Apparently I am, Majesty. Pray enlighten me,” Bayne says through gritted teeth.
“Very well. But I should think that the Architects would have schooled you better. Unless they too were ignorant, which would not surprise me.”
She settles in for the tale before them, like nothing so much as a mother gathering her children to her at bedtime. A giant, hairy mother with poison fangs.
“Once we all lived here together in great chaos. There was constant fighting. Empires rose and fell with regularity. Alliances were forged, betrayed, broken. But eventually it seemed that most Elementals aligned either with the darkness—the Umbrals, they were called—or with light and air—the Empyreans. It was decided that for the good of our world, we would all agree to the Great Law, which said that Elemental must not kill Elemental. We agreed in good faith. But it was not enough for the Empyreans. They were ever looking for a way to subdue and trap us Umbrals.
“When humans came, they provided the perfect opportunity. They were not necessarily bound by the Law, and they were malleable. Both sides manipulated them ruthlessly.
“I built my palace in the far north from the bones of a Titan I had slain before I bound myself by the Law. I lived there quite contentedly until the Tinker King came with his tinkering and his magic and drove me out with the help of the Empyreans. He made an army of automatons that could not be swayed by my poison, and when we fled across the sea, he set wards along all the cliffs and shores to keep me and mine from returning to our home. Then he took our palace for himself.”
Her voice is harsh and deep with the anger of centuries. I don’t wonder that she is so gleeful now to be free.
“But he also fell, and his people were scattered all over in little, sad pockets, their magic used and abused by those who settled here after them. And so I have risen, and I will restore my realm in the north despite the Tinker King’s deception.”
I think again of Nainai’s tales of the old kingdom in the north. I knew better than to question her outright, but sometimes on bitterly cold nights, I wondered if such stories were true. Were they just supposed to make us feel better, to make us feel that we had once been more than a people who pieced a life together out of broken things?
And now the greatest enemy of our people, who I had also come to believe was nothing more than a shadow, is before me, telling those stories as truth. What will she do with all my people that she has stored in this cavern? What are the plans that Gen keeps alluding to? I half wish I would have listened.
All I know is that we have gone from frying pan to fire.
Ximu leans over Vespa and Bayne. “And now you understand. Your Empress is but a minor encumbrance. It is the north and Scientia that I go to claim. And I have you to thank for all that. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Empress Olivia is perfectly willing to allow you to live here, you know,” Bayne says. “She has no use for this part of the City anymore. She will happily cede it to you in exchange for peace. And your fealty, naturally.”
Ximu chuckles. She pokes at the remains of the poor faun envoy with a foreleg, so that the scarlet sack swings back and forth like a pendulum. “I have heard this offer somewhere before.” She leans so close that she could easily bite the head off either of them. “And the answer is still NO.”
Neither Vespa nor Bayne speaks.
She withdraws a bit, contemplating. Even though I never liked her, it is still hard to see Lucy’s face erupting from the body of a spider, horribly stretched and warped by the foul magic joining the two of them.
“I should very much like to eat you now, but I do not forget those who have served me, even if inadvertently. I should offer you something for your service,” Ximu says. The wicked tone of her voice suggests she is about to do the exact opposite. “That little Tinker we caught was to be my Prognosticator, but I’m sure I can find better uses for him. How would one of you like to be my Prognosticator and Court Magician? The other can be Captain of my xiren. It would amuse me greatly and make use of all your talents. What do you say?”
She is not really giving them a choice. I can see Vespa’s shoulders tensing, readying herself for a fight. She is not very good at all with offensive magic; I nearly choked on my own laughter when Bayne tried to teach her one day and she missed every target. But the field here is pretty wide. All she’d really have to do is set fire to that web under Ximu, and Ximu would take a nasty plunge down into the pit.
Just then something large—a bat, a bird, a pixie?—dances in front of my muzzle and zigzags around, blinding me with golden glitter and squeaks of joy. I stumble backward, pawing and snapping, falling on my side while Piskel covers my eyes and cheeks with brilliant kisses and warbles ecstatically that he’s found me.
I melt back into human form, naked on freezing stone.
“Piskel!” I hiss.
But it’s no use. I can hear the xiren above me come to attention. I hear Ximu screaming. Feet come toward me, and at first I’m sure I’m doomed, that the horrible hybrids will have me in their metal pincers soon enough.
But they’re human feet.
I’m trying to wipe Piskel from my face and stand, when Vespa and Bayne are both suddenly there. Vespa barely has time to say my name before she and Bayne get hold of me.
“Will it work?” Vespa asks.
“We can only try,” Bayne says.
The magic s
tretches and tears me from this place into another.
Ximu’s laughter follows us through the void.
CHAPTER 12
Well, you do know how to make an entrance,” Olivia said from Vespa’s narrow bed. She was propped against the pillows, almost as pale as the sheets. Her hair streamed across her shoulders in waterfalls of gold. Her eyes widened as her gaze fell on Syrus, and Vespa followed it to realize that Syrus was still quite naked.
“Here,” Vespa said, grabbing an old opera cape from a chair and throwing it around his shoulders. She tried not to see the horrible wounds at his throat and the thread marks still imprinted across his ribs before the cape covered them.
Syrus turned red as fire as he clasped the fabric around him.
Olivia inclined her head, wincing a bit. “Pedants, Artificer. I am glad to see you safe.”
“Majesty, we have grave news,” Bayne said.
“I reckoned as much. Especially since some of you came sans clothes.” She smiled, but it was a faltering one. “Tell me.”
Bayne told her of Ximu, of the strange melding of Lucy Virulen and the Shadowspider Queen. He explained how the Heart had freed all the magic in the world, both dark and light. And how Ximu had sworn to retake Scientia.
“But not before she takes you, Your Majesty. She expects to come collect you soon and overrun New London on her way north.”
“She does, does she?” Olivia said. “What of our envoy? Does she not also wish for peace? Surely she will see reason. Surely there is still some humanity left in her.”
“Majesty,” Bayne began. His voice was very tired. Olivia frowned at him. “Your envoy is dead. Ximu does not wish to have peace with you. You are but a small obstacle in her plans to take Scientia.”
Syrus added, “She has my people, Majesty. She is turning them into xiren. My uncle is the one who captured us, and he is helping her do all this. I’ve seen the caverns where she keeps her prisoners trussed up like sacks of meat. There is no humanity in that.”
Olivia lowered her eyes for a moment, and her hands moved restlessly on Vespa’s worn quilt.
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