“Ugh,” Carson groaned as he stepped into it.
“Could be worse,” I said.
“Probably will be,” Heidi added. “I remember reading that the station was partitioned when it was converted into an air raid shelter. Some areas are lower than others. They’ll have collected more water than this.”
“Do we have to go this way? Couldn’t we just find some other gateway to wherever it is this cutlass thing is?”
“Maybe. But I don’t have a lifetime to mess around and search for it. As it stands, this is our way through.”
“There must be other connection points, though …”
“It’s just a little water,” Heidi grumbled. “You weren’t complaining back in the cave.”
“I was stepping around it. And it’s … it’s different here anyway. This stuff is, like … stagnant World War II water or something. I don’t like it.”
“If there are other options, I don’t know what they are,” I told Carson. “So we’re using the station.” Swinging around as a boundary flicked up on the compass’s face, I tried to dissolve it for a moment before giving up; neither were what I wanted anyway.
“This is the problem with Seekers,” I continued. “There aren’t a whole lot of us. So there aren’t a whole lot of maps to places like the one we’re going, especially not when things like this—” I knocked a fist on the station wall “—make them even more difficult to access. Only option then is to go blind, just exploring and exploring forever—”
“Which is a nice quick way of getting yourself killed by a barbed shambler,” Heidi finished.
“B-barbed—” Carson cleared his throat. “What’s, err …”
“You don’t want to know.”
For a moment, that confident little spark he’d shown in my hideaway seemed to ignite behind his eyes. But it dimmed just a moment later; he’d decided that no, he really didn’t want to know after all.
“Or you could disappear in a border you didn’t know was there,” I said, taking a little joy in his plain discomfort.
“The compass is a nice touch,” Heidi said with clear admiration. “Family heirloom?”
“Yes,” I said coolly.
“So how did you find this place?” Carson asked, reinserting himself into our conversation.
“Research. Read it in a book somewhere.” One of my parents’, although I kept that to myself.
“Sites of Ancient Iniquity?” Heidi asked. “I read that one … although I don’t think I remember it mentioning anything about Feruiduin’s Cutlass …”
“Something like that.”
I paused, frowning at the compass. I leaned forward just an inch—
“Here.”
Both Heidi and Carson joined my side, peering down.
“Right on the borderline,” Heidi murmured.
Sure enough, if I tilted just a couple of inches to the left, the compass face flashed with white and blue: a wide expanse of snow, a mountain very faintly visible in the distance with a bright cap. But to the right—
A temple, all sharp-edged stone, under an angry red sky.
“That’s it,” I said.
“I don’t like the look of that,” Carson mumbled.
“It’s right in the corner,” I said, pointing.
“I’ll cut us through,” Heidi offered, stepping up. “You need precision, and I’ve got smaller hands.”
“Right.”
She selected a spot, right up at the very edge of the room. It was so close to the adjoining wall that we’d need to turn side-on to pass through; the gateway would never open wide enough, especially not for Carson’s larger frame and that manbag clutched at his side like a leather growth.
Heidi slipped her bracelet down so she could grip it between her fingers. She exchanged a look with me—I nodded back—and then sliced her hand down.
Somehow, her gateway seemed more perfect than any of mine. My edges always had a slight sway, like my hand was not quite steady when I made the motion. Hers was smooth. The light did not shimmer so much either, just glowed, an ethereal halo widening around a churning spiral of color.
“Ladies first,” Heidi offered, waving me forward.
If that was the rule, I was pretty certain it meant Carson should go through the maw before I did.
I stepped forward, taking in a breath.
So, so close now.
I stepped into the light, carried forward as the disused platform left me behind and I moved through spirals, combining and exploding and fragmenting in a kaleidoscope—
Then I was thrust out into empty air—and darkness.
21
I frittered with my flashlight. Somehow passing through the gateway had stopped it from working—that or its dousing in water earlier had just now caught up with it. I flicked the switch back to the off position, then on again. It did nothing.
Heidi was through second.
“Whoa,” she muttered, voice low. “Mira, you there?”
“I’m here,” I said. “Just trying to get my flashlight—aha!” After a thump, it flickered back into life, soft yellow beam shining right into my face. Nothing like a bit of percussive maintenance.
“Carson coming?” I asked, hoping that he’d had a change of heart and decided to figure out a way back onto London’s streets.
But my hopes were dashed: on cue, he fell out of the gateway midway up the wall, and gasped, landing ungracefully.
“Where are we now?”
“Right where I want to be,” I said quietly. “Now would you just keep your voice down when we drop in anywhere? My compass doesn’t exactly show a live feed of what’s on the other side. I’d rather not you alert anything with that foghorn voice of yours.”
“Sorry.”
I pivoted, shining the flashlight around us.
Although the compass had professed otherwise, we hadn’t landed outside of the blocky structure, but within it; probably a side-effect of just how close to the boundary we were when we went through. Being inside did make our lives easier—but only by a touch. We might be right next door to Feruiduin’s Cutlass … or miles and miles of labyrinthine corridors away.
This temple was nothing like the one from which I’d made off with Decidian’s Spear. The hard-edged square aesthetic from the outside was carried over to the interior, too. The corridor we were in was constructed from huge stone bricks, each as tall as my knee. They were not exactly even, so some stuck out by a half-inch, while others were recessed. Looking close, I couldn’t see anything remotely resembling cement sandwiched between them, which meant either that they were held in place by rods, magic or, more unnervingly, the structure supported itself.
I had an uncomfortable feeling that it supported itself.
Faint script was inscribed halfway up the walls, weaving from brick to brick. At first I thought the extravagantly calligraphic text had been carved in while these blocks set. But they did not appear to be concrete of any sort; no, I was fairly certain that every single one of these bricks had been hewn from solid rock.
I listened. Heavy breathing from Carson, as was par for the course. I couldn’t detect anything else, though.
“I think we’re clear,” I said quietly. “But let’s keep our voices down and our steps quiet as we go, shall we?”
My research hadn’t told me exactly which direction to take once we arrived, and in any case how useful would a direction have been without any reference points? So I flipped an imaginary coin and set us off toward the left, flashlight penetrating the darkness.
“Weird,” I muttered as we went.
“What?”
“The needle shows us traveling on a perfect easterly vector.” I showed Heidi the compass. “Not even a couple of degrees in it.”
“Precisely engineered,” she said.
“Hm.” I eyeballed the uneven bricks in the walls, protruding or pushed inward just slightly with no real rhyme or reason, at least as far as I could make out. It didn’t make me think of precision engineer
ing.
Carson brought up the rear, manbag held close in front of the wide gaping hole in his avocado sweater. “This place seems alien.”
“That’s because it is.”
“It is?”
“We’re in another world,” Heidi told him. “Counts as pretty alien to me.”
“Elves built this place,” I said. I pointed at the script flowing alongside us, tempted to run my fingertip across its soft grooves, and equally worried I might bring the place down on us. “Whether or not they’re still here, of course, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Elves are real?”
“A whole lot of things from ancient myths are real,” I retorted. “Like orcs, remember?”
“Right, right. So orcs are real—and elves are real. What about dwarfs?”
“There are dwarfs in our world.”
“What? No, no, not little people—”
“Dwarfs.”
“—I mean like little guys with battleaxes and Viking helmets and big bushy beards.”
“Pickaxes too?” Heidi put in sarcastically.
“Yeah!”
“Keep your voice down,” I hissed.
Carson’s cheeks colored. “Sorry, Mira.”
I bit my tongue to keep it from going off. I’d heard that about forty times from him so far, and he still hadn’t learned. I wished I’d acquired a muzzle before leaving London, or at least a roll of duct tape to close his bloody mouth with.
Thirty seconds of blissful silence later, he spoke up again.
“So, if all this stuff is real, are you sure that Harry Potter—”
Heidi burst out with an incredulous laugh.
I glared at her.
She slapped her hand in front of her mouth. “Whoops.”
To Carson: “Harry Potter is not real. Now can you stop asking?”
“I was just wondering—”
“Yeah, I heard, last time you asked me.” I shook my head and massaged the corners of my eyes with thumb and forefinger. “I don’t understand why I need to have the same conversation with you more than once for things to actually take root in whatever you have in there that passes for a brain.” A peanut, possibly. Although some birds had brains the size of a peanut, so maybe even that was too generous.
Blissful silence, for almost a full minute this time, before …
“You know,” said Carson, “when we spilled out of the Embankment station, from the toilets, it was kind of like a reverse version of that part in The Deathly Hallows where—”
“Read another effing book,” I told him.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with Harry Potter,” Heidi said. Still, she folded her arms and turned away from him; a begrudging sort of defense.
When I was finally about to ask just how long we’d been walking in a straight line with no deviation and no forks, we were presented with a wider room. Cubic and just as square as the tunnel, with the same calligraphic script on those uneven blocks comprising the walls, it splintered with three doorways: one straight ahead, and two to either side. The left and right passages were open, ready to pass through.
The center passage, though, was closed off by a door. Solid stone, its surface was unbroken and perfect.
On the floor before each of the passages, new script flowed.
I squinted at it. “Can you read that?”
“Um … no?” Carson wittered.
“Me, genius,” Heidi grunted. She knelt beside me, tracing fingers over the text. “This one—” the left “—says something like cantonment, or barracks, I think. And on the right, we go to, um … let me think. This one means … ah, it’s cache, I think. So storage of some kind.” She glanced up at me. “You reckon that’s where Feruiduin’s Cutlass is?”
I shook my head. “Too easy. What’s the middle one?”
Heidi ran her fingers across it.
“Atrium,” she said immediately.
Hmm. “I wonder …”
Heidi asked, “What?”
“Step back a second.”
She reversed. I handed her the flashlight as she went.
Reaching for my belt, I unclipped the umbrella, springing it open—
It grew to full length, glamour dissipating before our eyes, so once again I held Decidian’s Spear.
Although Heidi had seen me swing for the Order of Apdau with it in Russell Square, she hadn’t exactly had much time to admire the thing. Now she did, loosing an amazed coo. She stepped forward, eyes fiery with reflected light as they swept its sleek body and traced the tip. A trace of orc blood remained, but it was faint. Self-cleaning, possibly—or maybe just the short stint in the water world had been enough to dislodge most of the acrid purple ooze.
“Decidian’s Spear,” she marveled. “Named for the monk Decidian, and lost in the Crusades.” Her gaze joined mine. “You really found it.”
“Why do you need it here?” Carson asked.
“These temples,” I said. “They’re … I don’t know, exactly. They’re in different worlds, but the objects inside them are … connected, I guess. I don’t really understand it myself.” My eyebrows knitted. “Anyway, it’s like, each relic is part of a key—like just one of the teeth, or something. The first one is necessary to get the second, and both of them are required to get the Chalice Gloria.”
“The Cup of Glory,” Heidi whispered. Her disbelief on the Underground had been—not totally expunged. But it was getting there; a daring sort of fire burned in her eyes.
“Decidian’s Spear is the first relic. Feruiduin’s Cutlass is number two. And if I’m right about this … the only way we get to the cutlass is with the spear—through here.”
And with all of my might, I thrust the spear at the partition blocking the passage ahead—
The air suddenly turned elastic. The spear pressed, fighting tension—
Then a rocky noise filled the air, like stones being dragged. And before our very eyes, a hole carved itself in the rock, maybe two inches tall, growing wider and wider, until it took the shape of a letterbox. Only it was not perfect, not like the edges of the bricks making up this strange place; it took on an irregular, starfish-like shape, but thinner on the legs, with a bulbous round center—
“The umbrella,” Carson whispered. We both turned to look at him with wide eyes. “I—I think it wants the spear as—as the umbrella.”
I nodded, letting Decidian’s Spear regain its glamoured form. Then I stepped forward—electricity seemed to crackle in the air around me, ready to arc at a moment’s notice—and slotted the umbrella into the hole.
Perfect fit.
A soft green glow ignited around it.
“I think you’re meant to take it now,” Carson whispered. His voice had taken on a strangled quality.
I retrieved the umbrella from the slot, stepped back—
The rock leading down the central passage split in two, perfectly down the middle, along an invisible seam. It creaked as it pulled away, the rumble of stone on stone so loud that I honestly thought for a moment that the place was going to come down on us—
Then it silenced. The door’s segments now flush with the wall, the passage to the atrium loomed beyond. And from far up its length came a low red light—like the angry sky I’d seen in the face of the compass.
22
We all stared in open-mouthed wonder.
It worked. It really worked.
“Let’s go,” I said, jerking into motion.
Heidi swept along behind me. Even Carson seemed to gain his footing and keep pace.
This new tunnel was tighter than the others. We could barely stand all three in a line, and were he another couple of inches taller, Carson would have needed to duck to avoid clonking his head on the ceiling. Heidi aimed the flashlight straight ahead, but it was not necessary: the glow of angry sky painted the entire thing in a deep, hellish red. Every stone brick that seemed to be out of place, jutting toward us, threw long dark shadows behind it. Even the script, so beautiful from the way we’d come, had taken
on a deranged sort of look, like the scrawl ripped from a nightmare.
The corridor was short.
As we came closer to the end, I broke into a jog. Up ahead—
“Oh, geeeeez,” Carson moaned.
The “atrium,” as the elves had termed it, was a grotesquely huge cube. Not unlike the resting place of Decidian’s Spear, we came out probably halfway up. But this was so much larger: two hundred meters were clear below us, leading to swirling, misty darkness. The sky frothed and heaved, lightning drawing great flashing arcs overhead, casting searing white forks amidst a sea of blood red on black.
A long, perilous walkway connected our ledge to the central platform. Joined by two others to either side, and I presumed another directly opposite, they were two feet wide, no more. Enough to walk across—but one wrong move and it was goodnight, Vienna.
The central platform was larger. I craned sideways to check it was indeed mounted on a spire of rock, and not simply connected to these pencil-thin bridges. Open at the edges, stone pillars were constructed just off from each of the corners, holding up an angular roof twisted forty-five degrees off-center.
“Is—the cutlass—” Carson sounded as though he could barely breathe, let alone force the words out. He tried again—”Is that—” and was cut off by a deafening boom of thunder, a flash of orange lightning streaking across the red sky. He squeaked, noise lost amidst the thunderclap.
Just this one time, neither I nor Heidi admonished him. Both of us let out yelps too.
“We’re not seriously going across that,” Heidi said shakily when the boom had subsided.
“Yes, we are.”
She closed her eyes, wincing. “You know, maybe the other way, with the storage …?”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s here. I can feel it.”
I could—and it was nothing to do with the buzzing static in the air from the storm surging over our heads.
I eyed the bridge, biting my lip.
Two feet wide. Not like I was walking a tightrope or anything.
I took a step out—
“Mira!” Carson squeaked. He almost grabbed me to pull me back, but thought better of it. My heart still pulsed with fear, though. It would be just like him to set me off-balance and send me to my grave.
The World Beneath (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 1) Page 14
