I tried to move slowly, to float rather than sink, and eventually I pulled myself into the relatively solid mud, shaking uncontrollably.
“There, now.” He crouched beside me as I spat marsh water. I took the opportunity to look him in the eye, still hardly able to believe that out of all the souls roaming the Deadlands, I’d encountered him. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“You and I have very different ideas about ‘not so bad,’ ” I told him.
Tesla cracked a thin smile. “And I meant what I said before. I see a lot of Walkers, but you’re not one of them. You’re not just passing through; you’re going somewhere.”
“To see the king,” I agreed. His expression told me everything I needed to know about that idea. I tried to put on a brave face nonetheless.
“Then you’re going somewhere, but somewhere you’ll never return from.”
“I have”—I took a deep breath and decided to just come out with it—“I have so much I need to ask you, Mr. Tesla.”
He helped me to my feet and gave a wan smile as he regarded my soaked frame. “Please. Call me Nikola.”
Before I could tell him that I wasn’t sure I could do that, not until I processed that I’d actually met a great man such as him, albeit after death, he started walking, leaving me to follow.
We reached some rocks on the far side of the marsh. A line of blue sunlight had started at the horizon. “The nights are short here,” I said, and then wanted to bang my head against the same rocks for saying something so inane to Tesla himself.
“Nothing makes sense here,” said Tesla. “You’ll find that out if you stay much longer.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m just here for one thing.”
“No,” Tesla said. “You may have come here initially for selfish reasons, but now that the Yellow King knows of your existence, you are here at his pleasure. He will never allow you to find what you seek.”
I took in a shaky breath. I couldn’t seem to get rid of the bone-deep cold the marsh had put in me. “I just want to get my friend back. And I found him, so if the king is out to stop me, he’s slow.”
“I’m not talking about Dean Harrison,” Tesla said. “I’m talking about the real reason you’re here, Aoife. The Old Ones.”
I stopped walking at that, and folded my arms. “How do you know so much if you’re just a spirit?”
Tesla shrugged. “I was an inventor in life, and in death I have found ways to harness the energies of this bleak place. They feed me information, fluctuations in the fields.” He scraped a hand across his eyes. “Time was, I knew everything. Now it seems as if bits and pieces fall away as quickly as the bones that the souls grind on Ossuary Road.
“Stopping the Old Ones is something you will never accomplish,” Tesla said. “Imagine my horror when I found, through my Gates, that they were the spark, the source of magic and wonder in the universe. Something so horrible giving life to such brilliance, all across the Land.”
“I really just want Dean,” I lied, but Tesla shook his head.
“The king, the Old Ones—they are all threads binding the universe,” he said. “And I have not as yet figured out how the knot is tied, but I do know that if you pull one string, it will all unravel.”
I stared at Tesla and tried to look stony. “I have to try.”
“And once you steal from the king, and upset the plans of the Old Ones, what is your plan?” Tesla snapped. “You will be a marked woman.”
“I’m a living soul,” I said. “Somebody in the Iron Land is waiting for me.”
“And they found a way to come here and return to the living?” Tesla shook his head. “You know, I’d read theories. I even tried to construct a prototype once, but it failed miserably. Whoever sent you over is a genius.”
“He’s a drunk,” I said. “He doesn’t even know we’re using his device.”
Tesla barked a laugh. “I know how that feels. How you create something and can’t see that it could be used for evil.” His face drew down. “Can’t see what you’ve done until it’s too late.”
“You couldn’t possibly know what the Gates would do,” I told him, picking up on his discomfort. “You couldn’t know what was beyond them.”
“I had hopes,” Tesla said. “To see worlds beyond my own. Everyone in the scientific community laughed at me, but there were a few men, men who were not of science but of the otherworld, who didn’t think what I’d said was at all laughable.”
He went to the edge of the rock and stood silhouetted against the rising sun. “The Fae had been using their hexenrings to visit the Iron Land since time immemorial, taking our children, playing with humans as if we were pets. We just wanted a way to strike back. I wanted to help. I had no idea that us constructing our own Gate, sending the flow the other way, would fracture the barriers between all the worlds, allow things to come from anywhere and everywhere.” He rubbed his forehead. “Yes, things like you and I and full-blooded Fae need to use a Gate, but I always knew that the endgame would be the barriers fraying, time and space crashing into each other, and the destruction of the universe. Only the Old Ones will survive, and that’s the way they like it. They’re probably laughing at us right now.”
“They’re doing a lot more than that,” I said softly. I thought I’d feel shame, but it felt almost good to finally tell someone the truth. “I almost destroyed the Iron Land, and I bargained with them to set things right. All I really got was my mother back, though. They didn’t fix the destruction, and now they’re returning to the Lands because of what I did.”
Tesla shut his eyes. “You found my last Gate. The one to the dreamland, to that awful man in black.”
“Crow’s not awful,” I said, thinking of the sad, pale man who lived alone in the land that controlled the dreams of all the others. “He tried to stop me. But I didn’t listen. And I didn’t listen to anyone else, so now I’m here trying to save my friend who died because I couldn’t live with what I’d done.”
I didn’t have to breathe in the Deadlands, but it appeared that I could cry. Tears slipped down my cheeks, colder than my frozen skin.
“Listen to me,” Tesla said. He came back to me and took me by the shoulders. “Why you came here isn’t important. You were probably doomed from the moment you went under. The Old Ones are the most powerful things in the universe, yes, but the worst one is Nylarthotep.”
Tesla was solid, if gray, as if he were a piece of lantern reel in the world of color. I looked down at his hands. “What happened to you? You’re not like the other Walkers.”
He gave a dry laugh. “I’m what happens after you’ve been a Walker for a few hundred years. Eventually I’ll dry up and blow away. But not today.”
“The Great Old Ones grew terrified of the power Nylarthotep commanded,” he said, “so they dumped him here, cut off from everything, with only the dead for company. Here he’s the Yellow King.”
I shifted my feet. If the Faceless knew I was gone, then all this trying to get them to lead me to the Yellow King would be for nothing. “I should get back to the camp.”
“No!” For the first time, Tesla’s face hardened, and he grabbed me by the wrist when I tried to walk away. I struggled, panicked, but for a dead man he was strong.
“I must have an audience with him,” I said. “It’s the only way to get Dean out of here.”
“And I’m telling you that there’s no hope of that,” Tesla said. “That Fae nonsense about everyone having a thread of life and only when it’s cut by fate do you descend into the Deadlands? That’s bunk. You die, you’re dead, and the spheres keep turning without you.”
“No …” I shook my head and tried to struggle, but there was no undoing his grasp. “No, I heard if it wasn’t your time …”
“You were marked the moment you came to the Deadlands,” Tesla told me. “The Yellow King knows someone with your gifts is his only hope of getting free, of returning to the power he once commanded. The Old Ones might destroy us, or they mig
ht usher in a new age of science and prosperity, but if Nylarthotep is freed it will be the end of everything—for the Fae, for the Iron Land, for everything.”
“You can’t know that,” I told him. I didn’t want to believe anything he was saying, but I had a horrible, sinking feeling in my guts that it was true.
“I can,” Tesla said. “Because when I died and came here, he tried to do the same thing with me.”
A wan smile lit his face, and in the growing light I could see the hollow pain in his eyes, the look of permanent loss, of things he could never get back, only remember. My mother had had the same look, for as long as I’d known her.
“He took me from the Catacombs, when my soul had barely realized it was dead,” Tesla continued, “and he asked me to open a Gate. I was dead, so I could no longer use any of my Weird, but he didn’t believe there wasn’t something I could do for him.”
Tesla released me, but he didn’t need to keep me close. I wasn’t going anywhere now. I had to hear the end of his story.
“He tortured me for months—maybe years,” Tesla said. “Time flows differently here, I’m sure you can feel. He tormented me, kept me as his special amusement. And you’re walking into his trap. He’ll string you along, promising to release your friend’s soul back into the world, and then he’ll cut you a deal—your friend’s new life for his own freedom.”
Tesla shut his eyes and sucked in a breath. “And you’ll take it. Because if I had had the power, at the end of my time under him, I would have done anything he asked just to make it stop.”
“I—” I started, but he cut me off.
“You’ll sacrifice what’s left of the Lands for your friend, because that’s what he wants. Nothing but death and destruction. An age under the Yellow Sign, and even the Old Ones won’t be able to stop him if he escapes.”
I tried to stand, but my knees went weak. I’d been tunnel-visioned for so long, focusing only on Dean, that everyone telling me that what I wanted was impossible had flown in one ear and out the other.
“It can’t be true,” I whispered, but even to my ears my voice was thready and unconvincing. More important, I wasn’t convinced anymore.
Where had I gotten the information from? My mother, who was unreliable under the best of circumstances and given to spinning outright fantasies at the worst.
And ever since I’d come here, Ian and Spider and everyone else had told me it was impossible.
“I’ll just …” I swallowed hard. Letting Dean go felt as if I’d reached into my chest and torn out my own heart, as if I grasped it bloody and warm and still beating in my fist, squeezing the last of the life from it.
“Just wake up?” Tesla snorted. “No. Your body is alive but your soul is here, and now that Nylarthotep knows about you, only he can allow you to leave. And he won’t do that unless you bargain with him.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” I screamed. A flight of birds lifted from the marsh at the sound, disappearing into the sky.
Tesla shook his head. “He only let me go because I was useless to him. I hope you’re smarter than I am, Aoife. I really do.”
He started to say more, but his head jerked up at a whisper of sound from behind us, and all at once I was surrounded by the Faceless. Tesla had vanished surely as a vapor.
What do you think you’re doing? one of them hissed at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting the appropriate amount of quaver in my voice. It wasn’t hard. “I followed one of those blue lights … I …”
The leader of the Faceless grabbed me by the arm. “Stupid girl,” he growled, dragging me back to the road.
“We reach the place today,” he said. “No more time for you wandering off.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, but they’d circled me already and didn’t reply.
We walked, but I barely paid attention to my surroundings. My mind was full of what Tesla had told me, and boiled over when I added to the mix the fact that I was never going to get Dean back.
Had never been going to.
Had let myself be blinded by hope and grief.
Was this what had happened to Tesla, after he caused the Storm? Had he become so numb that he simply faded away?
And what waited for me with the Yellow King? According to Tesla, he was the worst thing in the universe. The root of all evil, really.
Waiting for me. Waiting for me to free him, which was something I was almost sure I couldn’t do here, in the Deadlands.
As if losing Dean wasn’t bad enough, a splitting pain ripped through my skull, stopping me in my tracks.
I moaned and lost my footing, going to ground on the gritty roadbed.
The Faceless surrounded me, whispering among themselves, but I couldn’t focus on anything except the pain. It felt like when I’d first tried to make a Gate without any sort of apparatus to support my Weird. Like I was being torn in half and sent to opposite ends of the universe.
Cal and Conrad must be trying to wake me up, I realized through the pain and my own screaming. I writhed in the dust, stinging crystals coating my throat.
But it was as Tesla had said—nothing happened, and after a moment the pain ceased and I was left shaking and nauseated on the road.
“What happened?” one of the Faceless asked their leader.
“I don’t understand humans,” the leader said. “Get her up. Keep walking. The king is expecting us.”
If I hadn’t been sure that Nylarthotep was expecting me before, that this was all part of his plan, I was now.
I was going into the lair of the one all the spirits had warned me about, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to protect myself.
13
The One Who Waits
AS WE WALKED, I detected a subtle change in the landscape around us. The Deadlands were varied and terrifying in every aspect, but now I sensed a shift in the very fabric of reality itself. My Weird made me sensitive to such things. The trees turned in odd directions, the branches curling into spirals. The ground appeared to shimmer and reappear, first as sand, then water, then back to sand.
I sensed the insidious influence of something, someone, on the landscape, on the very physics that made up this twisted mockery of reality that was the Deadlands.
Tesla had been right. Nylarthotep, if this was him, was powerful beyond anyone I had encountered.
I tried not to let that sink me into a panic as we walked on, the landscape shimmering more and more at the edges.
“So when do we get to the palace?” I asked, more to distract myself than to make conversation. The Faceless wouldn’t answer me anyway.
“There is no palace,” the leader said, surprising me. “There is only the view of the Yellow King, or his absence.”
“All right, then,” I muttered. I thought the Fae had loved to be cryptic, to muck around with people’s heads, but they had nothing on the Faceless. Tremaine could take lessons from them.
“If I’m to have an audience with him,” I said loudly, “I am going to have to actually see him.”
“You’re awfully eager for a mortal,” said the Faceless. “To look upon his visage is to endure madness and pain beyond anything you can imagine.”
I stopped, stared into the black hole beneath the creature’s cowl. “You have no idea what I can imagine. Or endure.”
He wheezed something in a language made of whispers and wind. I think he might have been cursing my stubborn refusal to be scared.
“Come,” he said. “We draw near.”
We walked on until the road disappeared, shimmering into a thousand gently glowing lines that contained stars, supernovas, suns—shreds of the universe peeking through tears in reality.
I winced, and forced myself not to put my hands to my temples. Each of the tears felt like a Gate, and my Weird ached to explore them, control them, bend and shape them until they’d take me anywhere I wished to go.
“This is as far as we go,” the Faceless said. “We are creatures of the dead, and w
hat lies beyond …”
A slight wind came from the rifts, ruffling the capes of the Faceless. It almost appeared that they were scared themselves.
I knew I was.
“What lies beyond is not,” I said. “I get it.”
“I don’t understand the living,” the Faceless said. “Why you would voluntarily subject yourself to such a thing?”
“Because sometimes there are things more important than living,” I said.
I stepped forward, away from the creatures, and knew I was no longer speaking solely about Dean. Tesla had shown me that my coming here was never really about Dean, and Chang before him had made it clear too. It was about my inexorable destiny, both as the bringer of destruction and the only one who could reconstruct reality. Because of my Weird, and my position as Gateminder, that would always be my destiny.
I had made a bad bargain once. I had bargained selfishly—the Old Ones’ return for my mother. I’d been selfish here, too, but there was still time to fix it.
All I had to do was strike a good bargain with the worst creature in all the Lands, and I’d be home free.
“No pressure, Aoife,” I muttered to myself as I took another step forward.
The rifts hummed all around me. There was no sound in space, but the sheer power of the cosmos, the background music of the stars and planets, sang to my Weird, urging me to merge with the universe, become stardust.
I ignored it as best I could.
Nylarthotep had to be somewhere beyond these tears in reality. His power was distorting the Deadlands, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t still standing on solid ground. Controlling reality was a Fae trick—keep your enemy off-balance, keep control of their reactions. It hadn’t worked when I’d been in the Thorn Land, and it wasn’t going to work now.
As I moved between the star roads, I became aware of a faint sound, of black smoke and dust rising all around me.
“Is it her?”
Her.
Her.
The Gateminder.
The destroyer.
The one who walks between worlds.
I flinched. I hated that name, the name the rebel factions in Lovecraft had coined for me after I blew the Engine trying to make a bad deal with Tremaine.
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