He took my face in his hands. They were warm, surprisingly so, and they stilled the horrible emptiness inside me, filled me with something that wasn’t hope, but wasn’t the sucking hopelessness of a moment ago, either. I felt myself stop shaking for the first time.
“Now do what you have to do for the legacy in your blood. For the world, and for everyone in it,” Crow whispered.
I shut my eyes, feeling a tear freeze on my face, and when I opened them I was back in the awful hallway, lying on my side with tears still wetting my cheeks.
Nylarthotep sat a few feet away, watching me intently. “So how did you enjoy my test?” he asked, that pure white-bone smile slicing from under his cowl.
“I’ve had better days,” I said, pulling myself to my feet.
“Don’t be snippy,” he said. “And don’t pretend you wouldn’t give it all up for even ten more seconds with that Dean boy.”
Here it was. I’d ask for Dean back. He’d threaten me. And I’d … what?
Dutifully, I said, “I did what you asked. Let Dean and me go.”
Nylarthotep laughed, and he kept laughing. “My, you humans are simple creatures. Every time I think evolution might have finally made a jump, you do something that convinces me all over again just how wide-eyed and stupid you all are.”
I tried to put a convincing tremble in my voice, at the same time praying he wouldn’t see I’d known this was coming. “But you promised …”
Nylarthotep stood to his full height, looming above me. I didn’t have to fake the trembles then. “Little girl, I made this world. What makes you think my promises need have any weight? I’m in control. Of you, of Dean’s soul, of every ounce of this place.”
“Yes,” I whispered, not able to look into the terrible blackness beyond his cowl. “You’re in control.”
“And I’ve been watching you, and I know that you’re weak. So you’re going to find me a way out of here, and I’m going back to a world of smoke and bone and blood, a world I can taste and touch. And if you do this, I might spare your life and Dean’s soul. Do you doubt me?”
I forced myself to look up, to face him. “No,” I said. My voice was small and raspy, like I’d been inhaling toxic smoke. “No, I believe you.”
“Good,” Nylarthotep said. He held out his hand, and I took it. The shock was like that of touching something long dead that had lingered underwater, grown spongy and rotten. Something that would corrupt you through your skin.
I drew back, wrapping my arms around myself. “I told you, I can’t go back to the Iron Land on my own. My soul is alive, sure, but I can’t put it back in my body like some stage-magic trick. The only way is if they wake me up.”
“Hmm.” Nylarthotep paced in a slow circle and then faced me. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to talk to them, won’t we?”
The thought of him getting his hooks into Conrad or Cal spurred me. “Show me that Dean will be safe,” I said, “and I’ll do it.”
Nylarthotep cocked his head. “But you just said you couldn’t.”
“I’m a liar too,” I said. There was no untruth in that. I was an excellent liar, better than anyone in my family, besides my father, could ever hope to be. “I’ve had a way out of here since I came to you.”
In my waistband, Crow’s paper crackled. It warmed to the same temperature as my skin, and I showed no reaction. It was my only weapon against Nylarthotep.
“Clever little thing,” Nylarthotep said. “I knew you’d been holding out on me.”
“I’ll release you from the Old Ones’ hold,” I said. “But you’re going to give me Dean.” I straightened my spine and put force behind my next words. “Or you might as well kill me right here.”
Nylarthotep stared at me for a moment and then shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe my audaciousness. “Very well. Take the boy’s soul, take his body as it was when he lived. What lies in his grave will be returned to wherever his soul ends up, and it will be restored. Just take it all and bring it back to the living world. His remaining thread is yours.” His teeth showed. “There will be many more where he came from when I slip these bonds.”
“I’ll need space to work,” I said. “Constructing a Gate here is very complicated. I’ll need real materials.”
Nylarthotep caused another one of the iron doors to open, and inside I saw a complete inventor’s workshop, the best any engineer could ever hope for. “Take anything I can create for you, little girl. I look forward to our partnership.”
“There’s one more thing,” I said as he started to sweep away. I had to seem defiant and angry, as if I were doing this under duress.
“What?” Nylarthotep demanded. “What is it now?”
“My name,” I said, glaring at him. “It’s not ‘little girl.’ It’s Aoife.”
15
The Elder Sign
AS SOON AS Nylarthotep left, I pulled out the paper and unfolded it. The paper was stained with rust-colored marks that I suspected were blood. There was a single word on it, and I felt as if it might have originally been in a language I couldn’t read, but the ink shifted under my eyes, a small enchantment I’d seen before. My father used it to encrypt his diaries. He’d been going to teach me someday.
The ink spelled out a single word.
BLEED
There was a small symbol below the word that looked like an ampersand turned on its side. With every blink of my eyes it twisted into something new.
“Oh yes, Crow,” I muttered. “You’re so helpful and direct. Never cryptic. Everything’s spelled right out.”
I looked around the workshop, though I knew there was nothing useful there. That had been pure distraction for the Yellow King so it would seem like I was puzzling over the most difficult sort of problem, one that required solitude and concentration. Either he’d believe me and leave me alone, or he’d figure out what I was really doing and he’d kill me.
Then I’d be trapped here forever. Perhaps I’d even be turned into one of the Faceless.
That alone was enough to keep me staring at the page until pinpoints of light swam in front of my eyes.
Bleed. Hadn’t I done nothing but bleed ever since I’d come here? Bleed from the wound Dean had left in my soul, bleed for all the sleepless nights without him? How could I possibly bleed more?
I considered, watching that symbol turn and turn under the enchanted ink, until I knew I was out of time. After a number of minutes, a pattern began to emerge. It was of five symbols relentlessly flashing under my eyes.
Was the Elder Sign one of them? None of them? Some kind of optical illusion or trick?
I swatted the paper aside and then threw the rest of the materials on the table at the wall for good measure. A glass beaker shattered in my grasp and the shards went deep into my palm. I cursed and wrapped my hand in the hem of my shirt, but the blood was flowing freely.
Everywhere it hit the ground, I saw the image of the room Nylarthotep had constructed begin to melt away, like someone had applied heat to the celluloid film wound in a lantern reel.
Bleed. It was so simple I hardly believed it possible, but the evidence was before me.
I picked up the paper again and folded it so the enchanted images were superimposed over one another. They made a pleasing pattern, and I wondered if the mad scholar hadn’t been trying to tell whoever found his diary something, without being too obvious about it.
Crow had trusted me to do this. He’d trusted me to be smart enough to figure it out. I couldn’t let him down.
I put the paper down and brushed my fingers along the broken glass. I was going to need a lot more blood.
It could have been minutes or hours until Nylarthotep came back—the time passed in a blur, and I finished dizzy and cold, sitting in the middle of the floor.
He regarded me and finally laid aside his cowl. His face was narrow and white, like a skull with a hide stretched over it rather than the face of a living thing. His skin, if you could call it that, was white, and long wh
ite hair trailed from the back of his head, gathered into a braid at the nape of his neck. His mouth was full of terrible, sharp teeth, and I saw stars and planets and galaxies whirling behind his black eyes, as if Nylarthotep had created worlds even within himself.
“What do you have for me?” he asked.
I’d cobbled together an utterly fake frame of pipes and wood, and pointed at it. “I need a … matrix for the Gate to work within,” I said. “We should be all set.”
Nylarthotep approached, and before he could realize the trickery I’d wrought, I shut the door of the workshop behind him and moved away from the fake Gate, where my feet had been covering the blood symbols.
Nylarthotep reacted as if I’d thrown boiling water on him. He whipped back and actually hissed, like a cat who’d seen a wild animal.
“You think this will stop me?” he howled. “You think you can stop me?”
I felt my Weird unfold and I pushed it into the symbols, allowing the ancient power to flow through them. They began to glow and rise from the floor, and then to combine, to vibrate before my eyes with the power of the cosmos.
“No!” Nylarthotep raged. He turned on me as the symbols began to engulf him, wrap around him, the blood they were made of running over his face, his bare skull, those terrifying eyes.
“Do you really think you’ve fixed anything?” Nylarthotep smiled. “Do you really think you’ve stopped anything set in motion by me aeons before you were born?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Nylarthotep’s images began to burn away all around us as the Elder Sign covered more and more of him. “But I do know that everyone dies eventually.” I took another step. “Even you.”
When I turned to run, I didn’t look back. The Deadlands were burning around me and I knew I didn’t have much time.
As I fled, the chaos caused by my proximity to Nylarthotep lessened, and I had another bout of vertigo and pain. Who knew how long Conrad and Cal had been trying to wake me up?
I had only a little time to do what I had in mind before they yanked me back into the land of the living, and so I ran faster.
The first thing I saw was the great plain of the screaming sands again, rippling and rushing along the road of bones, snaking back and forth, seeking prey.
I saw the bodies, too, black robes and skulls emblazoned with the Yellow Sign. The Faceless hadn’t lasted long once their master wasn’t around to protect them.
The road stretched just as long as before, and I wanted to let out a howl of hopelessness. I didn’t have that kind of time, not to mention a way to get back to the Catacombs, where Dean’s soul resided. Nor any way to stop the encroachment of the Old Ones. I was right back where I’d started.
I sank to my knees on the bones of those who had come before me, and I wept. The Klaxons still wailed in the city, in a metallic imitation of my own sobbing, and on the horizon I saw a line of smoke billowing into the sky, which was now the color of a days-old bruise, yellow and green and sickly.
I saw the Moaning Marsh to my left, the mud bubbling and steaming. In daytime the lost souls were sad scraps of things, and they clustered at the edge of the marsh, staring at me.
“Don’t cry.” A pair of pointed men’s shoes, covered in the dust of the bone road, came into my field of view. I couldn’t see clearly at first through the blur of tears, but I swiped at my eyes and regarded Tesla for the second time.
“And why not?” I demanded. “Now seems as good a time as any.”
“You did something I could never do,” Tesla said. “You kept this place alive, and you kept the Yellow King at bay.”
“But this place is his creation,” I said, trying not to start sobbing again. “I’ve doomed all of you.”
“No,” Tesla said softly, placing his hand on the top of my head. “No. As long as he’s trapped here, he won’t destroy this place. If he does, he’ll be floating in a void with nothing. And he’s too vain to be alone.”
“But what about Dean? What about all the other souls who’ll still be trapped here?” I said. I sucked in air for the first time since I’d landed in the Deadlands. It hit my empty lungs like a hammer, and I tried not to flinch.
“I have a feeling that with his power so diminished, this place won’t be the torment it was,” Tesla said. He gestured toward the city, where the green smog was starting to blow away in long wisps, like streaks of gangrene in the sky. “It might even be the sort of place one would want to visit after death. But as for Dean … you’d better take him and go,” Tesla said, looking truly grim for the first time. “Go right now, while Nylarthotep is still battered and confused, because that’s going to be your only chance to escape.” Tesla gripped my arms and stared into my eyes. His were pale and set far apart, but they were among the most intense I’d ever seen. Whatever life lent us the Weird, it burned behind his eyes like a living fire.
“Run for your life,” Tesla stated. “And forget this place. Never come back until the day you die.”
I looked toward the columns of smoke and wanted to sob all over again. “It’s too far.…”
Tesla shook his head and stepped away from me, into the center of the road. “Stand back,” he warned. “It’s been a while since I’ve done this.”
I watched in a mixture of wonder and horror as the air shimmered around us. White bone dust, fine and sparkling, rose in a whirlwind around Tesla’s body, and then pain spiked through my head as a clap of displaced air rolled across the landscape, and a black, swirling void in the landscape, surrounded by a mist of dust and cosmic flotsam, stood before us. I couldn’t see what was on the other side, could only hear the scream of air as the portal sucked it in.
“I may be dead and without my Weird,” Tesla said, “but I still have my skills.” He stepped aside and gestured me in. “This Gate will take you where you need to go, but you need to go quickly. Take Dean, take your reprieve, and go back to the land of the living.”
I started to step through the Gate, feeling its power pulse against my Weird, then stopped and turned back to Tesla. I wanted to look at him once more, and there was a question I needed to ask—really, the only question I’d wanted an answer to since the moment I’d discovered I could manipulate the Gates. The moment I’d discovered that Tremaine betrayed me, and the moment I’d discovered that to save my family, I might have doomed the world.
The question that lurked beneath the iron madness and the nightmares and the bad memories.
“How did you live with it?” I asked him. “Starting the Storm? Changing the world forever? How did you ever close your eyes again?”
Tesla gave me a sad smile, his fingers brushing my temple as our hair whipped around our faces in the wind. “I didn’t,” he said. “It haunted me for the rest of my life, Aoife. You don’t ever stop wondering if things could have been different if you’d just turned your face away from the shadows, away from the unseen, and pretended the world is just as it appears in daylight.”
I caught his hand, feeling the pull of the Gate but needing a few moments longer. “And what did you do instead?” I whispered, somehow knowing he could hear me even over the roar of the space-bending Gate.
Tesla stared into the heart of the Gate for a moment, before he switched his gaze back to me. “I found a way to endure,” he said. “I got up and I tried to fight against the evil I had unknowingly wrought. I made it my mission to protect my world from those who would seek to destroy it, and to help my world find those who would better it and bring it forward into a new age of the supernatural being entirely normal.”
He gave me a gentle push toward the Gate, and I was powerless to resist any longer. “Endure, Aoife,” he said. “Keep your head up, even when it feels like you can’t. You survive because you must. Because your gift can break the world, but it can also save it.”
Traveling through the Gate was merely a blink of an eye, but in that blink I could feel myself spread across a vast distance, every atom of me separate and distinct. Then, just as quickly, I was gasping on
the wet floor of the Catacombs as the roof shook above and the restless spirits drifted around me, mouths wide open and screaming.
Tesla had said it would pass. That Nylarthotep could never be alone, would never destroy his world. I thought he was probably right—the Yellow King reveled far too much in his subjects’ misery to ever destroy this place.
Still, it wasn’t right, or natural. The dead didn’t belong to Nylarthotep. They didn’t belong to anyone. Someday, when I was stronger, when I was the Gateminder I was meant to be, I’d disregard Tesla’s advice and I’d come back here and make sure the Deadlands were as they should be—different for each soul, none in torment except those who brought it on themselves.
I knew it for a certainty as I made my way to Dean’s cell and shoved the bolt back on the door. “Dean?”
He came toward me at once, and wrapped his arms around me. “You can’t be here,” he said. “You have to leave, now.”
“You’re coming with me,” I said.
“No,” Dean murmured against my hair. He drew back and looked me in the eye. This was Dean, really him, and seeing his face I realized how pale the imitation that Nylarthotep had cooked up had been.
“There’s no arguing,” I said. “I came here to get you, more than anything, and I’m at least going to do that.”
“No,” Dean insisted. “I have to stay here, Aoife, and you have to get back.”
The Catacombs vibrated around us again, and a rush of souls flowed past the door like a flash flood.
“It’s not your choice,” I told Dean, and gripped his hands. I felt my Weird tug at me and realized that the shaking was not Nylarthotep but the thin tether that held me to the living world via the séance machine. Chang had said spending too much time in the Deadlands would make me harder to bring back, decay my living soul until it died, and I could feel it happening even as I wrapped my arms around Dean, even as he struggled, protested, tried to save me.
“It’s not your turn to save me!” I shouted as the cell collapsed around us with a great roar and blinding white light seared my vision into nothingness. “I have to save you!”
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