by Jeff Seymour
I keep looking at it, wondering what it is, and then something moves at the bottom. Slowly, a shadow unfurls, and I see a very familiar pattern of glowing dots.
You ever see something so completely out of place, so totally unexpected, that your head says, No, that can’t possibly be right, look again. But you keep looking and it’s still definitely that thing, and for a few seconds your brain and eyes argue until one of them wins?
Seeing those dots is like that.
I crutch closer while my eyes and my brain are fighting, and the closer I get, the more my eyes have the advantage, until eventually my brain gives up and admits that those glowing dots definitely, undeniably, one hundred percent totally belong to the gormling.
I touch its tank. “Why are you here?” I whisper. “How did Silvermask get you?”
The gormling turns its head toward me sadly. I can’t see its eyes in the shadows, just those glowing dots and the rainbow scales. Slowly, as though it’s sick, it floats up until our heads are level. It looks like somebody splashed a bucket of ink over it. Most of the places it was light before are dark, either glowing sickly purple or jet-black. It turns so I can see its eyes, and I find shadow there, thick as molasses, just like in the eye of the leviathan I saw before we got to Far Agondy.
My conversation with Lord Salawag flashes back through my mind. He didn’t seem comfortable here, took a little ill, so I had him brought to my home.
My heart turns to ice, falls into my legs, and shatters on the floor. “Oh no,” I whisper, crutching away from the tank. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”
“Oh yes,” says a voice from the shadows, and I turn around and there’s Alan Salawag, walking toward me from the line of beds, grinning like a spider that just caught its dinner.
CHAPTER 22
IN WHICH EVERYTHING GOES TO PIECES.
My heart drums like an army full of ants on tambourines. My mouth tastes like sour candy and bitter bread. Alan Salawag walks toward me gleefully, his cape trailing behind him.
“Oh, Nadya,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it when you walked into my office and proposed to actually come here yourself.” He laughs. “The luck of it! Here I’ve been trying to get my hands on you ever since you came to town—I freed the pirates from the Orion so I could question them, sent my Shadowmen to the ship, boxed you up with Gossner, chased you down on the streets. Every time you eluded me. And then you waltzed through my door and asked for my help tracking down Silvermask.” He laughs again. His eyes still look friendly, like it’s all a big joke, and that makes me so cold I shiver.
“You wanted to find him? Well . . .” He stops halfway between the beds and the gormling tank and reaches into his pocket. Slowly, like he’s loving every second of it, he pulls out a glittering silver mask with a terrifying, sharp-toothed face carved on it, then puts it over his head.
“Here I am!” he shouts. The light shimmers over that silver mask, running up and down it with a life of its own. The rest of him seems dimmer, as though his whole body’s wrapped in the shadows of his mansion.
My hands feel weak. “I . . . you . . . But you used to be on the Orion,” I croak. “You used to crew for Nic.”
He snorts. “You crew for him now, and you don’t understand? He’s a weak-willed, spineless old goat. No ambition. No respect for the gifted. Always rattling on about his mission this, help the downtrodden that. The strong make the world go round, Nadya. Everyone else is just a bloodsucking insect.”
I think over everything he said and everything he did, trying to spot the clues I missed and understand how I didn’t see who he was. He didn’t come back from the Roof of the World untouched after all. He came back as a servant of the Malumbra.
“Oh, don’t ask so much of yourself,” he says. He tilts his head to the side, and the mask glitters. “You’re just a child still. Maybe you could’ve been one of the strong one day, but you crossed the Malumbra. Now it wants you. And what the Malumbra wants, I deliver.”
That jolts me into action. It doesn’t matter whether I could’ve spotted him before. It doesn’t matter that this is the worst screwup of my whole life, that I’m in danger and Tam and Pep are in danger and Silvermask was right in front of me and I never saw him.
All that matters is that he’s ten feet away, and if I don’t get out of here I’m doomed, and Aaron is doomed, and Raj is doomed, and everybody else is probably doomed too.
I’ve still got Alé’s rod tucked inside my jacket. He won’t know about it. He’ll think I’m beaten and broken, just a kid on crutches, separated from her friends, terrified and alone. I am all those things. But I’m not just those things. I’m Nadya Skylung, and I beat the Malumbra on the pirate ship Remora, and I’ll beat it here too, somehow.
I cook up a plan. I’ll wait for Silvermask to come close to me. He’s gotta touch me to get the Malumbra’s shadow into my head, since I’m not on the Panpathia and I’m sure not gonna get on it with him right in front of me. When he’s close enough, I’ll jab him in the crotch with a crutch, then get out Alé’s rod and whack him in the leg, and then I’ll crutch for the door as fast as I can while he’s down, find Tam and Pepper, and we’ll get outta here.
I watch him. I tense my leg. I wait.
Silvermask crooks his head to the other side. “You have a plan, don’t you?” His voice is muffled through the mask, but it doesn’t sound like it did on the Panpathia. I wonder if that nails-on-a-saw screech is just the way he wishes his voice sounded, a reflection of who he’d like to be. He snorts. “Of course you do. Nadya Skylung always has a plan, doesn’t she?”
My guts freeze. I don’t like the sound of that. “Maybe,” I say. “You should probably let me go, just in case.”
“Oh goodness,” he says with a laugh. “You really think highly of yourself, don’t you?” He pulls up the mask and smirks at me. “Well. I’m not sure I want to get whacked in the leg or whatever you’ve got in mind, so I think I’ll show you just how far out of your league you are.”
My stomach sinks, because clearly my plan wasn’t as clever as I thought and I don’t really have another one. He puts the mask back down, and for a few seconds nothing happens. Then the Panpathia shifts. It feels like standing on a sand dune as it gives way. Things are changing beneath me, falling, sliding.
Don’t you want to see what’s here? Silvermask says over the Panpathia, his voice the old screeching metal wail. Don’t you want to know what’s coming?
I crutch toward the door I came in through as fast as I can. If he’s distracted doing something on the Panpathia, maybe he won’t notice. And this is definitely a trick. He wants me to go onto the Panpathia so he can get me easier, and I’m not gonna do it, no way.
Ah, he says with a sigh. You disappoint me, Nadya. The Malumbra is truly something to behold up close. It’s eaten dozens of worlds, you know. Worlds of ice, worlds of jungle, worlds of sand, worlds of sea. But you’ll see it soon, I promise. Can’t you feel it?
A shiver runs down my spine. That feeling of sand giving way gets as icy cold as the metal on the Orion’s rails in the dead of winter. I feel something enormous lurching up from beneath me like a leviathan, jaws open.
Its senses don’t work very well in our world. It was born in the freezing darkness of the space between, and it needs a guide to glimpse more than hazy silhouettes here. That’s me. Can you imagine it, Nadya? All that power at my fingertips, following my every direction, bearing down wherever I say.
My heart pounds. I keep crutching as hard as I can. I don’t want to be here when the Malumbra shows up. I really, really don’t.
If you won’t come to the Panpathia to see what you’re up against, I suppose I’ll have to bring it to you, Silvermask says. The space between is always close by, like the open sky around a cloudship. And with enough willpower, sometimes you can just punch—he grunts as he says it—right on through.
I’m halfway across t
he room now. Silvermask’s far behind me. I can see the door. Maybe there’s safety outside it, maybe not, but I still want to get far, far from here as fast as possible, because that feeling of cold is getting worse, like I’m not just touching the Orion’s rails but I’ve gone outside on the coldest, windiest night of the year, soaking wet, wearing a thin shirt and shorts.
The shadows move in front of me, swimming like oil slicks on top of those faded wooden squares. I don’t like that. For a few more feet I dodge between them, but then two shadows close up and there’s a pool of darkness between me and the door. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t want to touch it.
Oh, come on, Nadya, Silvermask urges behind me. Don’t be shy. The darkness feels fine. Your friend is here already, waiting. Turn around and look, why don’t you?
This is probably a trick too. My scalp’s crawling, but I can’t help it. I look back, and there’s Aaron, standing with his head down right next to Silvermask, his feet in one of those pools of shadow.
My heart just about snaps in two. I was supposed to protect him. He was counting on me to help him find his sister.
My crutch starts to feel real cold, and I whip around and see the shadow at my feet licking the bottom of it. I jump back, but I slip as I land and lose the crutch. As I fall, the shadow touches the other one and races up it, and I kick the crutch away so it won’t get to me.
The shadows keep coming. I scoot away from them, but there’s more behind me too, and to the side. They move in from all directions, building, not just oil slicks but waves, not just waves but towers. They look like teeth, and I realize this whole room is a trap. Out between the worlds, the Malumbra must have its mouth around this space. Somehow Silvermask is letting it in, and now its mouth is closing.
It’s here, Silvermask breathes. It wants you. And the Malumbra always gets what it wants.
My heart pounds. My gills burn. There’s nowhere to go, no way to run. All that’s left is to jump on the Panpathia and try to fight somehow. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and get ready . . .
My pocket chirps.
I open my eyes again. Tam’s standing in the door, holding the locator in one hand and a giant length of carpet from somewhere in the mansion in the other. Pepper’s right behind him, eyes closed, mumbling to herself.
“No!” I shout. “Just run! He’s here and it’s a trap—”
They don’t listen. Tam drops the carpet at his feet, then kicks the bundle, and it rolls toward me. The shadows pool around it, then start to build on top of it.
Pepper opens her eyes. They glow bright orange, like they do when she’s calling fire.
She kneels and touches the top of the carpet, and flame spreads along it, blue at first, then violet and orange and bright, shining yellow. The shadows shrink back from the light and the heat—Thom said the only thing the Malumbra hates is fire—and suddenly there’s an open path between me and the door.
The only problem is, it’s in flames.
But that doesn’t seem to bother Tam. He takes off over the flaming carpet, sprinting like a beetle running from a bird. The flames lick the bottoms of his shoes and his pants, but they don’t catch. Maybe Pep figured out how to keep the fire spirits from burning us.
Tam reaches me quick. He scoops me up and starts running again, and then we’re both passing through the flames. They feel strangely cool, and a second later we’ve reached Pep on the other side of the shadows. Tam keeps running and Pep turns to go with him, and I think for one wonderful second that we’re actually going to make it.
The door slams in front of us. A bar thunks down on the other side to lock it.
Silvermask laughs, so loud it hurts my ears and so long it echoes. “Did you think I’d just let you get away? Really? You kids . . . Oh, you have no idea who you’re dealing with. Before I met Nic, I outsmarted a hundred like you to earn a spot in school in Deepwater. After I left the Orion, I outsmarted a hundred more kids to get into the civil service academy, then a hundred adults to become the undersecretary of the old Lord Secretary. Then I set him up to take the fall for embezzling money and assumed his position. In another six months I could’ve been mayor, but it got so boring tricking people in Far Agondy. I wanted more, and the Malumbra gave it to me.”
My throat dries up. The flames on the carpet start to die as whatever fire creature Pepper summoned works its way through the fuel. Once those flames die, the shadows are going to move back in on us, I’m sure of it.
“More?” I ask. “You call this more?”
Silvermask stops laughing. I swear he’s glaring at me under that mask. I shiver, but I keep talking. I want to distract him, and I think I’m starting to get what drives him. “I mean, we’re just kids. How much glory is there in outsmarting us?”
“None,” Silvermask growls. “But in outsmarting your parents, your guardians, the whole adult world of the Cloud Sea? In stealing their children out from under their noses, in opening the way for the Malumbra by getting everyone in the world to turn against one another? That’s a puzzle worthy of my time.”
I don’t get what he means, but I don’t think we have time to figure it out, either. “The fire’s dying,” Pepper says behind me.
I swallow. “Any other ideas?” The shadows are starting to stack and look like teeth again. The Malumbra’s mouth must be closing.
“Um,” Tam says. “That was kinda it. The locator wasn’t working right and it took us forever to find you. We didn’t have much time to plan.” He’s looking around at the walls and the door, but he doesn’t seem very hopeful.
The shadow teeth keep growing. The light from the burning carpet’s almost gone now. The fire spirit must be about to head back to the World Beyond. “Can you burn the walls or the door or something?” I ask.
Pep puts her hand on the door. “I could try. But I think the spirit would probably break its contract. It might burn the whole house down. I don’t think we’d make it out. Those kids in the beds sure wouldn’t.”
I gulp, trying to think of something else to do.
Then one of the windows shatters.
I flinch. There’s flying glass and suddenly one of the curtains is on fire and snaking toward us over the shadows. A tall, skinny man crouches on the sill of the broken window. Calmly, he touches the curtain on his other side, speaking to himself in a low, rumbling voice. The curtain catches fire, and the man whips it toward Silvermask.
It’s Thom. Somehow, he followed us here.
“Over the fire!” he shouts, stepping into the room and snapping the flaming curtain toward Silvermask. “Hurry!”
The first curtain he lit lies in front of us in an S-shape, curving through the shadows. It’s a long jump to the edge of it, too far for me to hop on one leg. Tam takes a deep breath, then scoops me up again.
“Tam, you can’t,” I say. “It’s too far.”
“I can,” he says. “I gotta.”
“No,” Pep says. “I’ll go first, then you hand her to me.”
“Just go, you guys!” I shout. “I’ll find another way!” Thom’s still snapping the curtain at Silvermask, but Silvermask’s snarling and shouting and I can hear the Shadowmen hurrying to unlatch the door behind us. “There isn’t time for this!”
Pep jumps from the guttering edge of the flaming carpet to the brightly lit end of the curtain, and then Tam hands me to her. For a second I’m suspended over a pool of shadow. One of those teeth starts to form under me, but Pep throws me over her shoulder and starts moving. Tam jumps over the shadows behind us, and then we’re all running through the flames and I’m bouncing along on Pep’s shoulder.
Silvermask shouts, “Really, Thom? Fire spirits? How predictable. How utterly uninspired! You always were an unimaginative slug!”
If Thom’s surprised to recognize Silvermask’s voice as Alan Salawag’s, he doesn’t show it. He whips his flaming curtain forward ag
ain, but Silvermask, already running toward him, catches it and yanks. Thom has to let go, and when he does, Silvermask tosses down the curtain. Before the rest of us can get there, Silvermask tackles Thom.
Thom and Silvermask wrestle on the floor under the window, and Thom’s head gets closer and closer to the Malumbra’s teeth. “Ready, Thom?” Silvermask shouts. “Ready to face what Brick did?”
We hit the end of the flaming curtain where there’s a little bit of open space, but another shadow forms in front of us, cutting us off. Thom chokes and sputters angrily. Pepper screams. Tam shouts, “No!”
“Wait!” I yell.
Silvermask, still pushing Thom toward the shadows, looks up at me.
“You wanted a challenge?” I ask, my mind racing. “I’ve got one for you. You and me, on the Panpathia. Shadow versus light, right where the Malumbra can see us.”
“What?” Tam sputters.
“What?” Pep echoes.
Silvermask just stares. The door we came in through opens up. A crowd of Shadowmen pours in and charges around the shadowy teeth, surrounding us. Silvermask takes long, heavy breaths. I can almost feel him thinking.
The Shadowmen pounce on Thom, and Silvermask lets him go and stands up. “I accept,” he says. “You versus me, Nadya Skylung. On the Panpathia.” He takes off his mask and shakes his hair out. Two Shadowmen come up behind us and grab Pep and Tam.
“Shadow, as you say”—Silvermask grins—“versus light.”
CHAPTER 23
IN WHICH NADYA FACES SILVERMASK.
A few minutes later I’m holding Tam’s shoulder for balance, staring hard at Silvermask and trying to remember everything Aaron taught me.
“Nadya,” Thom murmurs behind me. The Shadowmen have stood him up, but they still have his arms pinned behind his back. “I’ve got another plan. Just let me know when he’s distracted, okay?”
