The Drowned Vault

by N. D. Wilson

  Tattooed men were dragging four of the unconscious jumpsuited bodies into the room from the hallway. Each was laid beside a pool, with one hand flung over the edge and into the water. Only Oliver did not receive one.

  One Hand hobbled from pool to pool, prodding the convicts’ submerged hands with his cane.

  “Pythia!” he shouted, pausing beside one. “Oracle! Is he like enough? Is he a killer?”

  Dixie looked at the mass of hair in the corner. The hair didn’t move, but a single leaf fluttered up into the air. Dixie saw a symbol burning on the leaf before it turned to ash and dusted out of the air.

  The smell of the fiery leaf made her think of fall, of her father’s old burn barrel, of watching football with him on the back porch and yelling at the men in the wrong-color shirts on some faraway field, picture flickering on their little screen.

  One Hand nodded, and a tattooed man stepped forward. He took the convict’s wet hand and laid it on top of the floating hand of the broken body in the pool. Then he stepped away.

  One Hand began to speak words that Dixie couldn’t understand. These were not whispers. They grew louder and louder, and as they did, he opened the silver head of his bamboo cane, revealing a sharp black point. He turned the cane around like it was a spear.

  “Come on, Roger!” one of the tattooed men shouted from the side.

  With a quick thrust and a sharp word, One Hand speared the two hands together. Blood leaked through the pool as the watchers fell silent.

  The big jumpsuited body jolted, and the body in the pool stretched slowly. Joints straightened as the watchers burst into cheers. One Hand withdrew his spear, and the man called Roger rose from the water. His symmetrical veins ballooned. The gills on the side of his neck fluttered. He nodded at One Hand and then joined his fellows, clasping his bloody hand with theirs.

  Dixie couldn’t help watching the next three. Two of them rose just like Roger had, to the excitement of his comrades. Only one remained broken and motionless. When the cane spear was withdrawn, he and the convict were both dead.

  Finally, only Oliver remained. One Hand turned and smiled at Dixie. Men approached her chair, and in a flood she realized what was happening.

  She was for Oliver. Her hand would be pierced to his.

  When she began to scream, a rag was shoved into her mouth. The men unstrapped one of her arms and carried her whole chair to the pool, where they tipped it onto its back. A hand closed around her wrist and forced it into the pool.

  She stared at the ceiling and the giant lightbulbs her father had so carefully collected, the wiring he had so carefully run through the rafters. At a burning leaf floating through the air. And then another. And then a whole flock. Ash snowed down on her, and she closed her eyes.

  “I don’t believe you!” One Hand was saying. “Child for child, innocent for innocent. You’re telling lies, sweet Pythia. If only you hadn’t been raised in a cave, you would know that lies are unacceptable.”

  “Never,” a girl’s voice said. “Lie.”

  “Ah,” said One Hand. “The savage little oracle can speak after all.” One Hand loomed above Dixie, massaging his bamboo cane, his eyes on Pythia in the corner. “As you’re now consulting more thoroughly, I should explain that this is only the first phase for this particular boy. He is meant to die three times tonight, and in the third resurrection, his flesh shall become mine.” He paused. “Is that why you lie? Is that what you hope to prevent?”

  A leaf floated by.

  “No leaves!” One Hand screamed. “No more! Shape your oracle with a tongue!”

  Dixie’s heartbeat was pounding in her head, but she could still hear the girl’s quiet, simple voice as it grew to fill the room.

  “Pierce her, pierce him. Soul with soul, they bird away, smoke float, river rush, twain flee forever. Truth escapes. The boy is no innocent.”

  One Hand raised his cane to his lips, then looked down at Dixie. His wet hair bent around his eyes and clung to his jaw and his thin, stretched neck.

  In his eyes, Dixie saw death.

  He turned away. “Find me the youngest convict!” he yelled. “Not a killer. A thief, perhaps.”

  The tattooed man holding Dixie’s wrist in the water restrapped her arm to her chair, lifted her up, and carried her back to the wall, where she was set down out of the way.

  • • •

  Phoenix slid the cane’s silver cap over the tooth and kissed it. He looked at his remaining men. Three more cycles before the task was complete. The thought poured exhaustion into his bones. He was cracking, flying apart with the strain. Without the coat, the forces flowing through him, through the tooth, would have splattered his ash all over the walls.

  His mind … only the ancient charms in the white weave were keeping him clever now. The time would soon come when he must shed the coat. And then … would the beast do what he commanded? Would it complete the task ungoverned? Or would he be completely mad? He shut his eyes and doused the tiny flame of fear that had sparked within him. There had always been risk, and it had always been worth taking.

  He looked at his new regiment of sons. Thirty new lives in thirty new bodies, with hearts that would never explode … unless he spoke the word. And when he’d managed to collect enough transmortals, the greatest among his sons would be rewarded further, with unending life in his service.

  Two more cycles of his men, and then one or two from the freezers before his final work on Oliver. That’s all the strength he could risk before the struggle with the transmortals. His unchanged men would die when the transmortals came. Enkidu would bring them after midnight, as he and Phoenix had agreed. The trap would be sprung, Enkidu would have his payment, and Phoenix would have the first of many pet dragons.

  There wasn’t much time, but there was enough. His new crop would rest and be prepared. By midnight, the snares would be set.

  Unless the transmortals found him sooner. Even a few hours early, and … Phoenix shook his head, shedding the thought. No. They wouldn’t. If another of the transmortals had tracked him, the dragons would have descended on him already. Ponce had no summoning magic, and the other transmortals he’d captured were all dead and at the bottom of the river from his testing with the tooth. He looked at Pythia, once again hair-shrouded in the corner. What could she do besides conjure leaves and write in flame? She could see the future, but she could not summon. Could she? Even if so, she had never been allied to the Great Dracul.

  “Pythia! Oracle! When will the dragons come? No leaves. Speech.”

  Pythia’s hair stirred and slithered as the girl stood. Her eyes were fierce, her voice stone.

  “Seventy weeks. Dragons will fear the one called Desolation.”

  Phoenix laughed as four more of his men lay down in the pools around Oliver. There were fear and resolution in their blinking eyes. They were prepared to die and rise again.

  “Seventy weeks is rather generous,” Phoenix said. “And Desolation is rather harsh. If I destroy, it is as a farmer tills a field. I sow men and reap gods.”

  Phoenix pointed his cane at one of the floating men and shook his head. Surprised, the man jumped up, dripping. Phoenix pointed at the freezers.

  “It is time for a specialty,” he said. He ground his cane into his itching stump. “Bring me the Smith.”

  nineteen

  DRACUL

  ANTIGONE’S SHOULDERS WERE KILLING HER. Once again, she tried to shift her weight, bending her legs as far as her straps would allow and then straightening them again. She slid her arms against the leather at her wrists over and over and then exhaled frustration.

  Rupert was asleep, his head hanging. Mentor had disappeared, she had seen nothing of Gil and the transmortals, and her mind wouldn’t stop running laps. Were the transmortals really off chasing Cyrus? He wouldn’t lead them to Phoenix. He couldn’t. No one had a clue where Phoenix was. What was Cyrus planning? Knowing her brother, something crazy and borderline stupid. She hoped the older people were keeping him sane
. And safe. They had to be. That had been her job for the last three years, and she wasn’t there to do it. Cyrus had better realize that Gil would never honor the trade. Of course, whatever his plan was, Cyrus would be welching, too. And that meant that Gil would come back angry.…

  At least Cyrus was alive. For now. But how long would she be?

  Up in the pillared room, quiet light flickered. Antigone groaned. She was hungry. She was exhausted and in pain and she needed to go to the bathroom.

  “Rupe?” Antigone said. “Rupe!”

  Rupert opened his eyes and looked at her. Despite all the blood soaked into his shirt, the patch with the flying chess knight shone perfectly silver on his shoulder.

  Antigone squirmed, scraping her back against the bricks. “We can’t be here. When Gil gets back, I don’t think we’ll be alive for long.”

  Rupert’s bloody lips smiled slightly. “I do not think today is our day to die. You saw Arachne in the Quick Water. Our friends and your brothers are out there. And now they have seen us. They know we are alive.”

  An orange flame billowed slowly from the side of the pillar room. Antigone and Rupert looked up at the crawling flash.

  “What’s he doing?” Antigone asked.

  “The same thing we are,” Rupert said. He jerked his arms hard against the straps. “Straining at his bonds. And like us, he will need help if he’s going to break free.”

  The flame died and pigeons slowly resettled in their roosts. Coming from high in the rafters, Antigone heard the call of a red-winged blackbird. She squinted up at the distant windows.

  “Down here!” she yelled. Before the echo died, a shape was fluttering through a slice of window light. When the bird landed on top of the nearest bookshelf, Antigone could finally see the red feathers on her wings.

  Antigone laughed as the bird belted a triumphant call. She hopped off the shelf and glided to Antigone’s shoulder. Singing angry threats to unseen enemies, the bird hopped down Antigone’s arm and pecked at the leather strap on her wrist.

  Rupert watched with his brows down. “How much have you thought about that bird?”

  “What do you mean?” Antigone asked.

  “You know what I mean,” said Rupert. His voice was low. “You and Cyrus must have talked about it. You call it ‘she’ when the plumage is male. You’ve never trained it, and yet it’s always around one of the two of you. Was it ever at the motel?”

  Antigone shook her head. She licked her dry lips. She and Cyrus hadn’t talked about it. Not much, at least. Some. A little. Enough. But when Arachne had knocked them out back in Skelton’s rooms, and they had both heard their mother’s voice, and she had talked about watching them …

  “You’d be crazy not to wonder,” Rupert said. He watched the worried bird flutter to Antigone’s other arm and squawk irritation at the toughness of the leather. “When did she show up at Ashtown?”

  Antigone didn’t want to talk about it. Not that part.

  Rupert’s voice lowered. “Before or after Phoenix?”

  “At the same time,” Antigone said quietly. “Well, maybe. Cyrus saw a red-winged blackbird in a cage in Phoenix’s plane with Mom and Dan after the crash in the lake. But it might not have been this one.”

  “Really?” asked Rupert. “And after that night …”

  “… the bird has always been around,” Antigone finished. The bird hopped up onto her head and then flew back to its shelf perch. It turned in place, surveying the room. “Can we not talk about it?” she asked. “Sometimes it’s nice and I like to think that she really is watching, that she really sees how hard I’ve studied and how fast Cyrus runs, and sometimes it just makes me want to cry, and sometimes it makes me think I’m all the way crazy. I don’t like thinking that she’s—that my mom … that Phoenix might have …”

  Rupert’s eyes were on the blackbird, but she fluttered away.

  “Tell me a story,” Antigone said. She twisted as far toward Rupert as she could. “Please. Tell me one about my dad.”

  Rupert laughed. “A father story? Now?”

  “Do you have something better to do?” Antigone asked. “We could be killed any time, and I have to go to the bathroom, and I feel like I’m going to start crying and I’m not going to be able to stop. Unless you’re planning our escape, I think you can tell me a story. If you don’t, you’re just going to fall back to sleep and leave me here worrying about absolutely everything all by myself.”

  Rupert leaned his head back against the brick wall and looked up at the distant ceiling. “A Lawrence Smith story … and one that makes him out to be the soundest of role models for his daughter.” He smiled. “And with a little bird that might be listening in, too. Not the easiest task, Antigone Smith.”

  “Oh, come on. Tell me about how he met my mom. You’ve told us a little bit about that already.”

  “Lovely,” Rupert said. “A mother story now as well? Fine. Brilliant. It’s as good a tale as any, though I shouldn’t be the one to tell it.”

  “Tough,” said Antigone. “They can’t, so you will.”

  Rupert cleared his throat. “The last trek of Lawrence Smith, it is. Right. Picture your father, but younger. In fact, picture Cyrus, only a little taller, blond, and heftier in the shoulders and chest.”

  “Dan looks more like Dad than Cy does.”

  Rupert tried to shrug. “Sure. But your father’s aura, his attitude, his mouthiness, his stubbornness—that’s all Cyrus.” He smiled. “And you too. But you control it better than either of them.

  “The two of us set out for northern Brazil because those jungles had swallowed more of the Order’s bodies than any other. And because winter was settling in at Ashtown and other members were scattering for distant homes to pass the holidays. We had no family but each other, and no desire to share dry turkey in the dining hall.

  “Lawrence had read stories about a network of valleys tangled through the jungle mountains. We tracked down an old Keeper in Africa—Alan Livingstone’s father, an even bigger elephant than he, called Sir Curtis by everyone who knew him. He had been in the region as a lad, and he told us all the drunken campfire tales he’d heard from natives and traders alike. Hidden villages were said to be built into the cliffs of those jungle valleys, and in the central valley there was supposed to be a city like those long ago destroyed in Peru and still hidden in parts of Mexico. The rumors were not especially unique—the valleys were charmed, the city was cursed, no one who entered was ever seen again, untold wealth, impossible danger—the kind of stories men tell themselves both to frighten and entice the minds of young explorers. Alan Livingstone wanted to join us, but his father had other plans for him. It was years before I saw him again.

  “Your father and I packed one heavy backpack each, chartered a nearly broken-down plane, and parachuted into the deepest valley we could spot from the air, not too far north of the Brazilian border.” Rupert looked at Antigone. “Still awake? Still interested?”

  Antigone laughed. “No … not at all. Please stop. I’ve only tried to get you to tell this story for a whole year.”

  “Well, the next part is long and boring. That’s why I asked. It was the rainy season, and we walked through that jungle for six weeks, tromping beside every flooded stream and river and valley and gulch we could find. It was horrible and long, but all I really remember is the hunger. We ate bark and birds, and every beetle we could find. Fruit was hard to come by, which surprised us both. Finally, we even ate a half dozen fat newts we caught in fast rapids, praying that they weren’t as toxic as most of their kind, hoping we would wake up alive in the morning. We did wake up, but deathly ill. Would you like to know how ill?”

  “Not really,” Antigone said. “Skipping, skipping, skipping—you threw up, you felt better, and then …”

  “We didn’t feel better,” Rupert said. “We just didn’t want to die there. We made an embarrassingly terrible raft—shameful construction—and we pushed out onto the fast river, curious if we would die at the fi
rst waterfall.

  “We shot rapid after rapid and lost a little of our raft each time. And then we hit the real waterfall. It hurled us over a cliff, but we only fell part of the way. We landed in a churning, cauldronlike pool high on the cliff face. Both of us managed to clutch onto rocks. The raft shattered and scattered.

  “The water spilled out again and dropped out of sight—down and down and down. Later, when we were at the distant bottom, we actually stood directly beneath that torrent and it was like standing in a quiet rain. The water fell so far that most of it vaporized in the drop and wafted through that broad lush valley, painting even the cliff walls green with moss.”

  “But what happened at the top?” Antigone asked. “In the cauldron? How did you get down?”

  Rupert laughed. “In the cauldron we were attacked by dragonflies. Huge dragonflies, and not just in the air. We were in their breeding pool. While mothers with heads as big as grapefruit slashed at us, ripping at our faces and shoulders and scalps, dragonfly nymphs the size of footballs attacked our legs beneath the water’s surface. They had jaws like bulldogs.”

  He stopped and shut his eyes.

  “And …,” Antigone said. “This is no place to stop talking. Come on, Rupe. How’d you get down?”

  “We were lowered,” Rupert said. “Believe it or not, we had stumbled upon the legendary valley and had ridden our raft right over the waterfall into its well-defended gate. Tall brown men with shorn heads and bronze weapons appeared on the cliffs around the fall and snared us in nets. A few of them laughed, but most acted as if they were sorting rubbish. They hauled us out of that cauldron like fish.

  “They lowered us all the way to the valley floor, where more of their people waited for us. An older woman pressed a small green viper against my neck. The bite felt like fire, and within seconds, I was asleep. Your father fought and managed to cut himself out of the net. I don’t know how long he lasted.”

  Someone coughed in Antigone’s ear. She whirled in surprise. Mentor was standing on her other side. He winked and clicked his tongue.