“It’s just, he wants this to be hard for you,” I said. “He wants you to feel overwhelmed and frustrated and afraid.”
“Definitely getting there.”
“But he also wants you to succeed. The whole point of taking them was to draw us to him. He doesn’t want to give us a job that will take years to get through.”
Now the librarian was trotting toward us.
“Phineas!” She started speaking to him in the clipped, formal tones of my incantation language, which according to Phineas was the high-class dialect of phantasm-speak. Plus she was tall, thin, and pretty in addition to being classy. I wasn’t sure I liked her.
He interrupted her and pointed at me. “Natasha, I should introduce my friend Lydia. A human, you might have noticed.”
“Oh. Of course.” Natasha switched to perfect English without missing a beat. “But how did you get her here?” She looked at me suspiciously—I sensed our budding dislike was mutual. “You must be awfully strong, to come when it’s not a thin day.”
“She’s exceptionally strong,” said Phineas.
Natasha looked like she wanted to punch me, before smiling back at Phineas. “Well, as I was saying, I’m so sorry I missed you when you were here. I was on vacation, traveling, you know. But I was hoping you’d come back.”
Judging by the way she was looking at him, she was hoping it awfully hard. I ignored an unwelcome flare of jealousy that I had no right to. I was the one who’d canceled that kiss.
“I know what Henrietta was researching when she was here,” Natasha said.
Phineas’s eyes lit up. “Was it sanctuary spells? Or maybe imprisoning spells?”
“Not exactly, although it did have to do with vessels and netherworlds. You won’t believe me when I tell you.” She said something harsh-sounding in her own language.
Phineas gaped at her.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“What is it?” I asked.
Phineas glanced at me. “There’s not really a good translation. I guess… paradise enchantment?” He looked at Natasha, who nodded.
“That would be close enough,” she said.
“It’s a legend we have,” Phineas explained. “Like, you know how humans used to be obsessed with finding a way to transmute iron into gold?”
“I think it was lead, but yeah?”
“Well, we had an obsession like that, back when we first learned how to create netherworlds. The idea was to make one that internalized your will during its actual creation. So it was entirely of your making. It would always serve you completely. And unlike the ones we use for prisons, you could come and go as you please. Without a ritual or anchor or anything.”
“It’s a story we tell young children,” Natasha said. She smiled at me. “In your world, where almost nobody can do magic, fairy tales are easy. Here, where magic is commonplace, we have to come up with something bigger. Like your own private heaven.”
She looked back at Phineas. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Oh for fuck’s sake, lady, why not just strip down for him right here?
But if Phineas noticed the intent dripping from her question, he ignored it.
Yes, that’s because he has more important things to think about. As do you. You know, like the lives of a couple of loved ones hanging in the balance? But hey, never a bad time to be petty, huh Lydia?
“No,” Phineas said. “We’re in the middle of an important investigation actually, and I’ve got to get back to work. But thank you. You’ve helped a lot.”
The disappointment showed only briefly, before Natasha pasted her smile back on. “Well, just let me know if you have any other questions.”
Three other people had come into the aisle while we were talking to her, so Phineas pulled me closer to him, and half-whispered, “Do you get what this would mean? If Henrietta actually figured out how to do this? If Amias knew how?”
“If he could come and go freely, then that would be his new sanctuary,” I said.
Phineas shook his head. “That’s only half of it. And not the bad half. His will would be law there. Absolute law.”
He was a step ahead of me, but I got there quickly. “Then anyone else he brought there, their will couldn’t affect it. They would be completely at his mercy.”
“It wouldn’t be his own private heaven,” Phineas said. “It would be his own private hell.”
Fuck.
“But how likely is it that he could do this?” I asked. “I thought making a regular netherworld was supposed to be this closely guarded secret, let alone this paradise one that’s not even supposed to be real.”
“Honestly, I have no idea,” Phineas said. “But if this is what he was really after, he’s probably been chasing the legend for years. It’s probably why Mercy took the canteen, to study it.”
“So maybe Henrietta dropped in the last piece of the puzzle for him.”
“I think we have to proceed under the assumption that that, or something like it, is what happened,” Phineas said. “Hence the shift in his methods.”
Motherfucker.
For years Amias had been sending souls to Hell, to ingratiate himself to Satan. And ever since we found out about the birds and the mass murder we’d been asking ourselves: Why now? Why this change, and such a risky one at that, in how he operates?
“He doesn’t want to be a demon anymore,” I said. “He wants to be the devil himself.”
We went back to looking through the books, and I tried to keep my head together and concentrate. I told myself that this didn’t change anything: it was still unlikely that Amias would hurt Norbert or Gwen until he could torture us with their pain.
But I couldn’t help it, I was freaking out. He’d taken all those souls for himself. To rule over for eternity. What would that mean, for a sick fuck like that? What would he do with his playthings, given eternity, complete power, and no need to be careful of being caught?
What was he doing to them, while we were dicking around looking at page 4,396 all day?
Caught up in that very unpleasant reverie, I missed the book Phineas was handing back to me, and it fell on the floor. I picked it up and smoothed a bent page at the back.
“That’s odd,” I said. Unlike the rest of the book, the page was handwritten.
I flipped through and saw that the last half dozen pages were all the same: written by hand, organized like a list. And although I couldn’t read the phantasms’ language, I remembered from Amias’s note what their digits looked like. They were pretty distinguishable from their letters.
Each row had one or two words, followed by what seemed to be two numbers. It was a familiar pattern.
“What’s odd?” Phineas asked.
Instead of answering, I took another book from the shelf at random. Then another. They both had the same thing.
“Are these pages like the little cards in the backs of library books at home?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“So these would be dates. Dates taken out, dates returned.”
“Yes.”
“Some of them are four digits.”
“They could be anywhere from four to six. Our calendar works differently from yours.”
“That’s not the point. He gave you four numbers. What if 4396 is a date? Could it be?”
“But he talked specifically about reading, and pages. The Library says the answer is on page 4396. Why would he send us to the Library to give us a d— Shit!”
“What?”
“Remember I said the Library has some official functions?”
“Yeah, the Head Librarian presides over your Congress or something.”
“Sort of. One of the things they do is keep the official time. We set our clocks by the Library clock.”
“So the Library says could be referring to the fact that the calendar is defined by them. He could have wanted you to make a connection to time, not a book. Riddles always have a twist, don’t they?”
> “I guess so.” He looked unsure.
“Read backwards to find out what happens next,” I said. “We thought he meant history, and I’ll bet he did: all that personal history you were talking about before. He was just trying to wax poetic with his little book metaphor. Another connection to the Library.”
Phineas frowned down at the columns of dates I was still holding in front of him. “Like I said, it works differently. Every day doesn’t get a unique number. They come around again. There are probably ten or fifteen days in our lifetime that fall on 4396.”
“Well, think. Which ones have to do with your childhood, or family?”
Instead of answering, he grabbed me by the hand and led me outside.
“Where are we going?”
“You’re not going, you’re staying. But I need to be outside.” He led me over to a lamp post and glared at me, to emphasize that I was to obey whatever he said next. “You stay right here. I won’t be a couple of minutes. I’ve got to check something at home.”
He walked down the street and then, with the usual strange appearance of walking through an invisible curtain that then settled back over him, was gone.
I crossed my arms and hunched over—it had gotten windy—and tried to think of what I would say if anybody challenged my presence in their city. But nobody did, and Phineas, true to his word, was back before two minutes had gone by.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked, nodding at a shapeless, canvas-like sack over his shoulder.
“The things we need for the vessel ritual.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Bad news. I’m going to have to teleport with you again. It might not be as bad as last time, because it’s within the same world, but it won’t be good.”
“It gets easier every time,” I assured him. “It’ll be fine. Whatever you need to do.”
“I’ll explain when we get there. We’ll have a bit of a walk, after.”
It wasn’t easier. I threw up. Twice. On the bright side, I felt much better afterward.
When I got my bearings, I saw that we were in yet another forest, but this didn’t look like one of Phineas’s orchards. The trees were black and bare of leaves. The ground was packed gray dirt with nothing growing in it. But there were signs of life: flies, everywhere. Apparently flies didn’t differ much from plane to plane.
“What is this?” I asked.
Phineas took my elbow as we started to walk, apparently feeling that I still needed support. It wasn’t unwelcome. Despite my earlier assurances, traveling twice in one day (or at least, one of his days) seemed to be taking a toll. I felt weak and beat up, and wanted nothing more than to curl up and go to sleep. Which was a little concerning, considering I was pretty sure the worst was yet to come—a concern this creepy forest was doing nothing to ease.
“The walk won’t be long, but you can’t teleport into a graveyard,” Phineas said.
“So 4396 was…”
“The day of his father’s funeral. I had to find the little memorial stone of my mother’s and check.”
“Did you just say memorial stone?”
“Not like a grave marker. They’re these little round stones, small enough to close in your hand, and we carve— you don’t care.”
“I do care.”
“But not right now. The point is, we were seven years old. Amias was weird, but he got a lot weirder after his father died. He didn’t do well at the funeral. At least I can say I was actually nice to him, that day. I took care of him a little. He couldn’t really do anything for himself.”
“Which means it was probably the last time you were together as real family.”
“And he wants a reunion.”
“Well, let’s not disappoint him.”
Phineas nodded and said, “Whatever vessel he’s using for this, my guess would be it’s in his father’s tomb.”
The forest thinned until it was behind us entirely, and I saw that we were on a hill, overlooking what looked like a garden of towers. Or at least, they could be towers, if you were a gnome. None of them were much taller than Phineas.
“That’s a cemetery?” I asked.
Phineas nodded and started down the hill. “Sort of. We don’t bury them the way you do.”
It felt more like a graveyard once we were in the middle of it. The stone tower-tombs were etched and carved, some quite elaborately, much like our headstones. Angels and skulls were common themes, although there were no crosses or stars. Under other circumstances that might have launched me into a whole round of questions about how—and who—they worshiped here, but this didn’t seem like a good time to get distracted.
Phineas stopped beside a tower half covered in moss, starkly embellished with just one word in plain, block letters. I nodded at it and said, “I take it that’s his father’s name?”
“Ranulf,” Phineas said. “You’ll have to duck to get in, and the ceiling will be low inside, so watch your head.”
Amias’s father’s tomb was equally sparse on the inside. The cramped space—Phineas couldn’t even stand up straight—was just big enough to walk around the bronze coffin that sat on a stone slab in the center. One long, narrow window at the top provided what little light there was, and three hollowed-out rectangles in the walls served as crude shelves. A jar sat on one of these, and a statue of some animal I couldn’t identify on another. Both looked like they’d been carved from something like jade.
I nodded at the third shelf, which was empty. “Was something there at one time?”
“I don’t know,” Phineas said. “I haven’t been in here since the funeral.”
“Well, I suppose the jar is the obvious suspect.” I picked it up and took off the lid, then frowned into it. “It’s full.” I sniffed. “It might be salt?”
“It is salt. It’s an old superstition. Supposed to keep restless dead from coming back and haunting their tombs.”
I considered this, then nodded. “I can see how that might work, although I’d have put it in a border around the walls instead of in a jar, myself.” I set the jar back down. “But if it’s full it can’t be the vessel, can it?”
“No. We must have overlooked the vessel.” Phineas ran a hand across the bottom of the empty shelf, checking the back where it was too dark to see. “We’ve always used drinking vessels because they’re so portable and unobtrusive, but I don’t see why it would have to be something like that. As long as it was a container of some kind.”
I shook my head, wondering if we’d guessed the riddle wrong, after all. The only thing in that cold room that qualified as a container was…
You’re right, they are in the dark… It might be a grave.
“Holy shit,” I said. “It’s the coffin.”
The coffin was held closed with three big latches, almost like the ones on a suitcase, but it wasn’t locked in any way. Despite many years of hanging out with dead people, I flinched when Phineas opened it. Spirits were one thing. Decomposed bodies were quite another. The last skeleton I’d had occasion to touch was Roderick Turner’s, and that wasn’t exactly a pleasant memory to dredge up right before jumping into a netherworld for a showdown.
But Ranulf, thankfully, had been mummified. The body was wrapped in what looked like the same thick, canvas-style material that Phineas’s bag was made of. The cloth was yellowed with age, and looked like a few bugs had snacked on it (although how they’d gotten into a sealed bronze coffin was beyond me), but it was intact. I couldn’t see (or smell) any of the corpse beneath.
Phineas started to set up the ritual on the empty shelf, but I grabbed his elbow.
“Should we maybe talk a minute first?”
He flashed his lopsided smile. “What, you want to make sure you confess your undying love before you die?”
“More like I don’t want to die at all. I mean, I will if I have to, to save Norbert and your mom, but it would be better if I didn’t. And we don’t really believe Amias would let them go anyway, do we?”
“No. We’re going to have to bring
them out of there.”
“Great, we’re agreed. We all get out. So. How? We’ve come all this way with no plan whatsoever apart from finding and confronting him.”
“I’m not sure we can make a plan when we have no idea what to prepare for. This netherworld will be governed completely by his will.”
“Which makes beating him there pretty much hopeless. Did you bring any of your bows in that bag?”
Phineas shook his head. “I thought about it, but if he gets to make up the physics there, projectiles, arrows, bullets, that kind of thing might not be reliable. I figured we’d be better off with blades.” He pushed aside his jacket to expose a large knife attached to his belt. “Stabbing pretty much always works, right? You still have the dagger?”
“I don’t have a cool sheathe for it like that, but my coat pocket is holding it well enough. And yes, in my experience, stabbing works great in a netherworld.”
He shrugged. “Apart from arming ourselves, and steeling ourselves for anything, I don’t know what else we can do.”
I didn’t like the idea of having no plan, but then, my plans were almost always shitty anyway. So I guessed I wasn’t much worse off than usual. “Okay, carry on, then.”
“You want to do the ritual honors?” Phineas handed me a gold coin to use as his remnant. It showed a moon on one side, and a sun on the other.
“What’s this?”
“My grandmother gave it to me when I was born. It’s supposed to be lucky.”
“We’ll take all the luck we can get. Listen, have you ever been in one of your vessels before?”
“No.”
“Well, if this one is anything like the last one I was in, your first priority when you get there is to find this and put it back in your pocket. And if my locket happens to fall on your head before I arrive, grab that too. Netherworlds seem to like to collect this stuff, and we need them to get back out. Assuming it works the same.”
“We can’t assume anything, but it’s still a good tip.”
I hadn’t done this particular ritual since Phineas had smashed my canteen. But I’d done it enough times, and from a young enough age, that I was pretty sure I’d never forget it, even when I was too old to remember my own name. I sent Phineas through and followed, both without incident.
Crook of the Dead (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 3) Page 18
