GHOST CROWN: THE TRACKS TRILOGY - Book Two

by J. Gabriel Gates

  “Yeah . . . it’s covered with hieroglyphs.”

  Look up. Can you see the ceiling?

  “No—I guess it’s too far up. What is this place?”

  The chamber was filled with hundreds of impossibly large gears—some of them had to be several stories tall and all were carved out of some kind of dark stone. They crowded the room from the floor to the ceiling—or until they were lost in the darkness above.

  She’d read a couple of steampunk books while she was in Montana, and that’s what this reminded her of—a crazy scene out of a steampunk story. But this was her story, she reminded herself, and she wasn’t in some outlandish fairytale place. This was Middleburg. Why in heaven’s name was something like this buried beneath their ordinary little town?

  Nothing about Middleburg is ordinary, Orias assured her.

  “So what is all this stuff?” she asked.

  Don’t you know?

  And then, she did. There was only one explanation for all the machinery. It had to be the mechanism that operated the Wheel of Illusion. The thought filled her with awe.

  That’s right, Orias said. The treasure is the wheel’s power source.

  “But if I take the Wheel’s power source, how can I use it to find my mom?”

  Don’t worry. It contains all the power of the Wheel, and then some. With the treasure, you can travel without the Wheel, anywhere in the universe, anywhere in the future, the present or the past. But you have to hurry!

  By then her eyes had adjusted and she moved away from the wall and walked forward, through the labyrinth of gears and switches, chains and pulleys.

  Remember, what you’re looking for is in the center of the chamber.

  “I know—I’m going there now,” she responded.

  Although the maze of stone gears looked ancient, there was not a speck of dust on them or a spider web anywhere. The longer she walked, gaping up at the gigantic mechanisms suspended overhead, the more she got the feeling she’d somehow been shrunken down to the size of a dust mite and had wandered inside somebody’s wristwatch. The whole idea gave her an odd, jittery sense of vertigo that made her pick up her pace. The place was also filled with a strange vibrating, pulsing energy she found unsettling. The silence was so thick she could almost swim through it—but it was more than silence. There was substance to it as well. And then she heard a single, barely audible note, singing out endlessly, until everything around her seemed to tremble with its resonance.

  She moved between the teeth of a massive gear, through a gap almost the size of a garage door, and that’s when she saw it:

  Formless, wrapped in seething shadow, its teeth like sabers and its eyes like burning coals, it was waiting for her. She had seen Tyler impaled on those teeth; now, it was her turn. The Middleburg monster opened its great mouth, reared up until its head was twenty feet above her, and hissed.

  Aimee, run! Orias shouted in her mind—but she was already moving.

  She backed out the doorway as the creature’s jaws snapped shut in front of her, then she turned and ran parallel to the huge gear she’d just passed through. On the other side of it, she could hear the legs of the beast scratching their way across the stone floor.

  You are not worthy of this great treasure, Aimee Banfield, it hissed in her mind.

  “Maybe not,” she shot back as she ran. “But I’m going to get it anyway and no crappy shadow creature is going to stop me! My mother is waiting for me!”

  She will be waiting forever, the monster whispered. Flee now, or we shall bleed you to a husk.

  Aimee, are you okay? What’s going on? Orias asked.

  “Not now!” she yelled. “I need to focus!”

  The edge of the gear she was running next to was just ahead, and as she approached, the creature swung around it with a blood-chilling roar.

  Aimee skidded to a halt. She turned to run back the other way and then stopped dead. There were two more red eyes, coming toward her. Another monster. There were two of them, and there was nowhere to run. Fighting panic, she looked around and spied a gold lever sticking out of the floor. Next to it, a massive chain with gigantic links ran from a hole in the floor upward, into the blackness above.

  She had no idea what the lever might do, but instinct and adrenaline told her to grab it and pull. Instantly, the entire room groaned around her and, with a shuddering rumble, the machinery began to move. The chain next to her started traveling upward, moving from its hole in the floor toward the ceiling. She grabbed it, passing her arm through one of the huge links. The chain jerked her upward and she looked down to see the two shadow-worm beasts almost collide with one another as they rushed to the chain and leaped upward, snapping at her toes as she rose out of their reach.

  She was suddenly thirty feet from the floor now, and rising fast. If she fell, she would die from the impact, even if the monsters didn’t get her. Carefully, she slipped her leg through the chain link directly below her, which made her feel a little safer. But where was the chain taking her, and how would she get off it?

  The massive clockwork clattered and clacked and whirred and groaned around her, and the clamor was deafening. Above, she spied what looked like a catwalk, and she was speeding toward it.

  Jump. Orias’s voice, inside her head. Don’t think about—just do it.

  And as she reached the catwalk, she did. It was almost a deadly decision. Her hands slipped off the top rail, and she barely managed to snag the lower one with one hand and the crook of her other elbow, leaving her legs dangling like bait for the giant snake-worm monsters below. Grunting with effort, she pulled herself up and clambered over the top rail. She landed on the catwalk on her hands and knees and paused a moment to catch her breath. Then she glanced up at the chain again. A few yards above the catwalk, it disappeared into a small hole in the ceiling. If she’d still been holding on to it, she’d have been knocked off—and down into one of the gaping mouths below.

  Shaking off the grisly thought, she rose to her feet and jogged down the catwalk. It was made of what appeared to be bronze, and it clanged with every step she took—but unfortunately, she saw, it wouldn’t take her where she needed to go. From up here, she could tell that the blue light that had illuminated her way was coming roughly from the chamber’s center, but the catwalk cut diagonally from one side of the cube to the other. It didn’t go anywhere near the center.

  How would she get down? There didn’t seem to be any ladders or stairs. And once she was down, how would she get to the center without becoming dinner for the shadow monsters?

  Slip to the center, Aimee. Orias again. Of course. The solution was absurdly simple. All she had to do was teleport.

  “Oh, yeah—right. Okay, here goes.”

  She stared toward the source of the light (she couldn’t see it directly; several churning gears blocked her view). She closed her eyes and slipped, and suddenly the light was before her, maybe a hundred yards away. It was small and round, suspended in mid-air like a captured star, and it glowed so brightly she couldn’t look directly at it.

  Aimee laughed, triumphant, and started toward it, but one of the monsters suddenly reared up in front of her with a vicious hiss, plunging her into shadow. Another one rose up on her right and another on her left. She glanced over her shoulder and—yep—there was one behind her, too. She was surrounded. They circled her, their hissing turning into eager roars, as if they were already savoring their victory.

  But this time, Aimee wasn’t scared. She assumed the kung fu ready position, as if she would fight all four of them at once. “All right, you wormy bastards,” she said. “Come and get me.” And she could have sworn she heard Orias chuckle.

  As the first one shot toward her, she slipped to another spot. “Hey, you looking for me?” she called. She was twenty yards away from the four beasts now, outside of their circle. They hissed furiously, all of them turning and lurch
ing toward her at once. She glanced to her left and saw two large gears whirring together near the floor. She slipped again—just a blink this time—and reached the grinding gears.

  “Here, wormy-wormy!” she called, and they turned again, all of them charging toward her. Closer . . . closer. . . so close she could smell them. They gave off the foul, musty odor of rot and decay. Closer now, their fangs bared, they shrieked in triumph. She let them get just a little closer before she slipped again.

  From a safe distance, she watched as the first and second monsters shot between the whirring teeth. She heard twin shrieks of pain as the gears ground them up like pieces of lumber hacked by a giant buzz saw. Flimsy tatters of shadowy, scaly skin fluttered into the air for a second or two before they disappeared completely. The other two monsters stopped short of self-destruction and turned back toward Aimee—but they were too late.

  It was so easy now—almost as easy as walking or breathing. She slipped from the ground up to the altar.

  The glowing blue object was suspended, and now it was directly above her—a spinning, glittering ball of blue-white radiance—and as it spun, it emitted one perfect note.

  Oooooooooooooooo…

  And she wanted with all her soul to open her mouth and sing with it, to be a part of it. But the worm thingies were coming fast, and she had to slip again, but just a fraction, to where that perfect, radiant ball of light hung. This time she popped out of the atmosphere at eye level with the shining blue light—and once she was close to it, she could see that its source was a perfect, blue-white circle, a ring, about a foot across. She was hanging in mid air, right in front of it and she knew she had to act fast, before she fell.

  For an instant, she believed it would burn if she touched it. Maybe it would even disintegrate her, turn her into ash or something—but she knew that this thing, whatever it was, was powerful enough to destroy her if that’s what it wanted.

  She reached out and grabbed it.

  It held her aloft, as if she were standing on a cloud of air. Then, it gently lowered her back to the altar. As her feet touched the stone, she studied the treasure. It was a ring, made of some sort of perfect, flawless crystal, and it still glowed so brightly Aimee could hardly look at it.

  The two remaining giant worms were coiling and uncoiling and she knew they were getting ready to charge her again but she was no longer afraid of them. The light from the ring was inside her now, inside her mind, filling her soul, her thoughts. It was a glorious illumination that would allow no fear.

  The monsters sped closer, and when they rose up before her, their fangs dripping thick, smelly venom, she looked at them and said one simple word.

  “No.”

  The single word reverberated through the entire chamber; even the massive clockwork seemed to slow down for a second. The crystal ring pulsed in her hands, the blue light cycling fast around its circumference. And then, before her astonished eyes, the shadow beasts exploded—both of them. But instead of blasting into fleshy bits and pieces, they exploded into nothingness. There was no debris, no fire, no heat. They simply ceased to exist.

  “Sweet,” Aimee said quietly.

  And Orias responded. And that, my darling, is how you conquer your demons. Now—bring it to me.

  As she stepped away from the altar, the huge gears around her all chugged to a halt, and she understood immediately that Orias was right; the beautiful object she was holding had to be their power source.

  But what was it, she wondered. And if it could run the Wheel of Illusion, what else could it do?

  

  Chin pulled his truck over to the shoulder of the road and slumped toward the steering wheel, panting.

  “Chin?” Anne asked. “Are you okay?”

  There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and his eyes were squeezed shut as if he was in pain. “The Wheel has stopped,” he whispered, his words barely audible.

  “What?” asked Maggie, who was sitting between Chin and the teacher, her backpack on her lap.

  Anne reached over and touched his arm.

  Chin straightened up and looked at Maggie. “I was wrong,” he muttered. “The girl in the tapestry—it’s not you. We’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  He hit the gas and cranked the steering wheel around. Kicking up a rooster-tail of snow, the old truck made a U turn and shot back up the road, toward town.

  

  Aimee reappeared on the summit of the tunnel mound, right in front of Orias. During her time in the chamber, the snow had started coming down more intensely. The sky was almost solid white with churning snowflakes. He took the crystal band from her and held it up triumphantly.

  “You did it!” he said, his pleasure unmistakable. “We’re almost there, Aimee. One more step and our task will be complete. I need you to slip again—to the bell tower of the Middleburg United church. You’ll find an altar with a circular indentation there. The ring fits perfectly, and that’s where you will place it.”

  “Not until you tell me what it is and what it’s for,” Aimee said.

  She saw a hard glint in his eyes—anger, maybe, or impatience—but it was gone in an instant, and he nodded.

  “Very well,” he agreed quietly, his gaze boring into hers. There was a strange, disquieting light in his eyes. “With the treasure, I can pierce the veil, which will throw open the door to the Dark Territory.”

  “Okay—and what will that do?” she persisted.

  Orias didn’t answer. There was a flash of lightning, and in its harsh glare, Aimee saw an army stretched out behind him. Each dark tree seemed to become a hideous soldier in a vast militia. Wearing heavy black armor, they brandished strange weapons and held their red banners aloft. Just as quickly as the flash came it was gone and the trees were merely trees again. But Aimee knew what she’d seen was real. And she remembered the half-buried tank in the horrible, barren desert Middleburg had become when she and . . . someone . . . had used the Wheel to go there. A wasted, war-torn, devastated Middleburg . . .

  “No,” Aimee whispered. “Orias—you can’t.”

  “I can and I will.”

  “But why?”

  “You haven’t figured it out yet? Middleburg is where it all began for me. Where I was conceived. Where my damnation was created and sealed for all time. So I will destroy it . . . I will bring it down and bury my father beneath this miserable place for all eternity. And I will have all his power, and I will reign over all his holdings.”

  “I won’t do it,” she said. “I won’t be part of it.”

  “Aimee—don’t you understand? The world will be ours. And if you choose me, you will rule beside me. And we will travel . . . oh, how we’ll travel . . . anywhere in the world—in the universe—that you want to go.”

  “I’m not choosing anyone,” she said, stepping away from him. “Not until I get my mom back—and I’m starting to think I could probably figure that out on my own. But this—what you’re planning. How do you know it will stop at Middleburg? How do you know it won’t destroy the world?”

  His laughter was bitter and full of contempt. “This world is already destroyed. Look at the pain, the misery, the injustice, the greed. It’s a world of bitter lessons, abandoned by the All. But you and I, we can make it a paradise again. And even if it were to be destroyed, with the ring, time is our playground. We’d have years—eons—to play and love and slip. Come with me, Aimee. Choose me. Do this one last thing for me, and I’ll make you a queen. The world will be yours.”

  “I don’t want the world,” she said. “I want—” but she stopped. She couldn’t name what she wanted. She couldn’t remember the name. “I want to help you, like I promised. You know—to find that loophole we were talking about. To save your soul.”

  The hand that gripped the ring fell to his side.

  “You would do that for me?” he asked, a heartbr
eaking vulnerability in his eyes. “You’ll stay with me until I find salvation?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But you can’t destroy Middleburg, Orias—or anything else. That will only make everything worse.”

  “So you’re choosing me, then?”

  She sighed. She didn’t know exactly what that meant, but if it would stop him from going through with his plan to destroy Middleburg, she would let him think so.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I am. I’m choosing you.”

  “Damn my mortal heart,” he whispered. He took a deep breath. “Come, then,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  He took her hand as if preparing to slip with her and then he stopped, lifting his face as if sniffing the air. He was looking down, in the direction of Middleburg but the blizzard obscured the view.

  “They’re coming,” he murmured. “Slaves of the Snake. Quickly, now—they want the treasure.” He took her hand and led her down the wooded hillside. “You’re mine now, Aimee,” he said. “And so is the ring, to use as I see fit. But I swear to you: as long as you stay with me, Middleburg—and the world—will be safe.”

  The crystal band pulsed again, as if sealing their union.

  

  Raphael stood perfectly still as Cle’von, Bran, and Rick attacked. Cle’von was so big, he crowded the other two out and Raph knew he would have to defend himself against Cle’von’s attack first.

  His mind took a backseat, merely watching as his body performed the necessary movements. First two blocks, then switching hands with a Chun Sau, now grabbing his forearm with a Lap Sau and pulling Cle’von forward, off balance. Now trap the arm, twist the hips and—snap—break the arm. With a cry of anguish Cle’von fell to his knees, clutching his elbow.

  When Bran saw that, he pulled up in fear, but Rick barreled forward.

  Raph blocked his punches, Pak Sau, Tan Sau and then slipped to the outside with a Lau Sau, peppering Rick with three quick punches before he could step out of range. Raph didn’t give him time to regroup. He shot forward, blocked Rick’s arm and cracked him right in the forehead with an elbow. Dazed, Rick fell on his back in the snow. Bran hesitated a second longer and then stampeded, but Raph was in his groove now. Bran leaned forward, overextending in his attack. Raph simply sidestepped and hit him with a palm-strike in the back of his head, causing him to slam into the snow with his arms spread out like a facedown snow angel. He didn’t move, and Raph knew he had to be knocked out.