“I want you to be able to find it. In case anything happens to me. Now come.”
He led Neil to the end of the hallway, through a door and down a set of metal stairs. They came out into a large room, as large as a warehouse, that was empty but for two enormous cells. One was empty. The other held a drake.
The creature was beautiful, in a way that Neil knew would horrify most of humanity. It was sleek and serpentine, with bronze scales and a long, narrow head and large dark eyes. It had no legs, only great wings, feathered in fiery orange and shining gold and folded back along the length of its body. Matching feathers grew from the back of its skull, forming a sort of spiked headdress. It was curled up, as if to keep warm, at the corner of the cell, but from the moment they entered, it watched them.
“She has been here for weeks,” said March. “And she refuses to help us.”
“What do you want her to do?”
“To tell me where the other drakes are, the ones that are hidden. And to tell me how to close off the void once and for all.”
“Did my brothers catch her?”
“Yes, but I told them not to hurt her. She’s old, and I wish to know what she knows.”
“And when I refuse to tell you,” the drake said, “you punish me with continued captivity. It is torture.”
“If you will not help me willingly, I will seek to understand how you think. How all of your kind think. I am studying you. Hunting you one by one is one solution. But understanding your kind deeply will allow me to anticipate their actions. I seek to understand.”
“You and your damned brethren are incapable of true understanding. If you think that by keeping me here, you will reveal my true self, you are mistaken.”
“Is that so?” said March, approaching the bars of the cage. The drake reared up but kept her lower body coiled. It was not a hostile movement, one of preparation to strike, but was done to put her face on the same level as March’s. “You remain silent for so long, and now that I bring my friend with me, you decide to speak. You can say whatever you like in front of him. I simply want to understand what you are, to know your heart as I understand the hearts of men.”
“To know your enemy,” she said. “I understand. I know men like you. Beings like you. You think that by harming, by keeping a thing like me in a cage, that you will know us. Do you think I will become more myself somehow? A mask will fall away and the true thing I am will be revealed?”
Her tone changed, and Neil knew she was not solely speaking to March.
“All wild things react the same way to a cage,” she said. “They try to escape, and they suffer. All things react the same way to torture. They cry out, they recoil in pain, they try to escape. All free things need to be in the cool air or deep in the sea or running over the open land. When tortured by captivity, we do not reveal anything unique. We reveal one thing. We reveal our commonality with all other living things. Our pain at being caged. Isn’t that right, golem?”
She turned her head to fix him with her deep, black eyes.
“You understand a cage,” she said. “You were made to be a slave.”
“I am not a slave,” he said, but knew the moment it was out of his mouth that it was untrue. March could compel him to do whatever he pleased. Neil obeyed, but only because disobedience was not an option.
“As you say, golem. But think upon this. Your master, like all torturers, seeks a level of understanding, an unveiling, but he forces the creature to expose its most base needs, not its higher ones. Not its unique ones. When any creature is tortured, its pain and suffering reveal the same things. That is true of you and me. That also is true of the torturer, though he is rarely so self-aware as to understand this. Your master is one such being. He thinks he can unlock understanding. He thinks he will meet the true drake. But that is like raping a woman and thinking you meet the true woman. You are merely harming. That is easy and simple. How much harder to truly know something.”
“And will you tell me what you are?” said Neil. “If I wanted to know you?”
She regarded him. “You do not tear apart the rosebud to get it to bloom.”
“We do not want our world to be destroyed. March might free you if you helped. The holes in the worlds are causing harm.”
“That depends upon your definition of harm,” she said. “And you parrot your master’s words. You are wondering something. Something deeper.”
He was. He wondered about her and her kind, about what they could do and what they were. About all the worlds and why they could not exist peacefully, side by side. He wanted to know more about the drake, her life and experiences. But how much of that was his natural curiosity, his affinity for beauty, the inquisitive nature that March himself had built into him? How much was his own? How much of him was like this drake? A thing unable to be what it was meant to be because it was caged?
“Why don’t you make a Door out?” he asked the drake.
“The cage walls are special,” said March. “They prevent it. If you were to walk to one and push through it, like she can, she would find herself right back where she started. I created the cage myself. It took a great deal of effort. Aside from that, she receives a chemical mixture in her water that inhibits her ability to make Doors. Otherwise she could make a Door in the floor or around herself.”
“Has she tried not to drink?”
“Of course. But the need to survive is too strong.”
“If I ever get free, I will kill you,” she said to March. Neil studied her, surprised at her tone. She said it softly, without malice or passion, simply stating a fact. Something about it touched him. He did not relish harming living things, though it was so often a necessity, and he did not like a cage.
An earthquake shook the room, causing the overhead lights to sway crazily.
“Those are the birth pains,” she said. “A new thing is being born.”
“What is it?” asked Neil.
“A new world.”
Chapter 33
“Astrid left these for you,” said the small Indian boy who had stepped through a Door onto the deck of Skidbladnir. He handed Elliot a closed box.
“What do you mean, ‘left them’? Where is she now?” asked Elliot.
The boy sighed. Sister had ordered the ship to drop anchor near Santa Maria Island, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. After Sister had taken on their next shipment from a pair of elderly twin men who did not trust ordinary shipping methods with their fine perfumes, the monkey crew had been allowed a day of shore leave.
“She’s alive,” said the boy, “but she went to the afterlife this morning. To death. She was trying to save that drake she visits. The Seelie forced her to send him to the afterlife, and she went after him. I’m sorry.”
“You guys are going to go get her, right?”
“We can’t. It’s death.”
“But Astrid must have thought she could come back.”
“That was her intention. Bring back the drake, find out why the dead are coming through into our world more often and figure out why she thought she had been a psychopomp all this time when we just met her.”
“She remembered things differently.”
“Right. Look, I need to go.”
The boy looked miserable, but Elliot knew from Astrid that this boy was a grown man. What Elliot was viewing was only his psychopomp aspect.
“Wait, I—”
“I have a job. Someone died just now. There are only two of us doing the job of five, and we’re busy.”
And with that, he made a Door and was gone. Elliot turned to find Sister right behind him.
“Did you hear?” he asked.
She nodded and took the box, pulling it open. Inside was a stack of drawings, and on top of it all, Astrid’s phone.
“We should look at these below deck,” said Elliot. “The wind is too strong up here.”
They went to their shared quarters and pulled the drawings out one by one, setting them on the desk. There were separate drawings of a Latina woman with a determined expression, a tall, thin white man with wild black hair, a young Asian woman, a raven and a white cat.
“That one,” he said, as Sister pulled out a picture of an ordinary-looking man in a long black duster. “I’ve seen him.”
“He was a fighter,” she signed. “Astrid told me about each of these people, their names and everything.”
She took out the next drawing, this one of a group of people. On the left was a heavyset bespectacled white man with a close-trimmed white beard. He stood beside a black woman, an older Asian woman, another white man with orange and gray hair and slanted green eyes and a gray-haired woman of indeterminate race.
“A few of the Twelve,” signed Sister. “Julius, September Wilde, June Yee, Augustus and Red Fawn.”
Last, she drew out a picture of a freckled woman with a long brown braid.
“That’s Hazel,” signed Sister.
“Get Mr. Escobar,” said Elliot, forgetting that he was no longer captain. Still, Sister hurried up the stairs and came back with the first mate.
“Do you remember this woman?” Elliot asked, showing him the picture of Hazel.
“I do not.”
“Nothing? No dreams about her or anything?”
Escobar said he did not. Sister turned on Astrid’s phone and thumbed through the display. “Astrid left us a recording.”
They played it. The video was shaky, but her voice was clear. She told them that she would come back, that the cracks where the dead were coming through were real and that she was trying to find out what caused them so she could fix them.
“I hope to find out why the world changed,” she said. “The drawings are to help you remember. I love you both.”
Then she was gone. Astrid, who had never had the dreams that Sister and he had, was once again lost in another world, one where he could not help her. Sister set down the phone, and Mr. Escobar studied the other drawings.
“You think Astrid was crazy,” said Elliot to the monkey.
He looked up. “Yes.”
“And me.”
“Yes. But Sister is not.”
Thunder rumbled, and Sister stiffened in alarm.
“I wish it would rain,” said Mr. Escobar as they returned to the deck of the ship. “It just keeps on like this with the clouds and the humidity with no rain. It feels like it’s waiting.”
Lightning flashed, and Elliot saw the sky split open about a half a mile away. The rip started small, with flashing light behind it, then grew longer, like a zipper opening. Long, thin shapes, like wisps of smoke, came through the hole, some of them forming into something resembling human forms. He grabbed Sister and shoved her behind him as the shapes swooped low, then tore off toward land.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“Spirits. Souls.”
The tear was dark with souls crowding through, and then he saw another tear, far in the distance and high up in the sky. He couldn’t make out any geists, but something dark was pouring from it, splitting into long, thin streaks as it separated.
“They’re everywhere,” he said. “They’re coming through. Astrid failed.”
“It is nothing, Elliot,” said Mr. Escobar. “You are having another of your episodes. There are no spirits.”
More rips tore open the sky, now behind them, now to starboard. More shapes poured out, and now he heard them, the low howl, like the wind. Thunder crashed, immediately followed by lightning. But still no rain fell.
“They’re coming,” said Elliot. “The souls of the dead. Coming through the cracks.”
“Do you think it is a vision?” Sister signed to Mr. Escobar. “Astrid said that he could feel it when time slipped.”
“I think he is a madman. Try to get him to lie down.”
Sister took his arm and guided him down to the captain’s quarters.
“Lie down awhile,” she said.
“You can’t hear them, can you?”
“I only hear the thunder and the wind.”
“There are just so many. So many souls.”
Chapter 34
Astrid flew closer to the gate at the top of the mountain path, examined it and landed on one of the curling metal flourishes on top. She knew there was more to it than decoration, and a person on foot could scale it with a little effort, so it was hardly functional as a barrier. That meant it had significance. It was important in some other way.
The moment she leaned forward to take off she felt it, the thing holding her back. It was not unlike the sensation of cold iron nearby, a sickening feeling, a painful one, but this was different. It wasn’t simply that she was repelled by it, but that she could not physically move farther, even by force.
She was alive, and this place was death, so it was possible that only the dead could pass through the gate. True or not, it would pose no problem for her. She made a Door that opened just above the gate and let her out a few yards away on the other side. Simple.
She paused to rest, landing atop a scraggly bush. The trail on this side of the gate looked more worn, which was odd. It had to mean that people arrived here and then turned back, or the trail on the other side of the gate would look the same. The path on this side twisted down the mountain and then off over a hill. She could not see what was beyond. The sides of the path were lined with tall grass, and a cold wind made the blades whisper together.
“Hush.”
She thought she heard something, but the wind gusted harder and grass hissed.
“You hush.”
She heard the words clearly now. Had she been human, she would have missed them. They were coming from off in the grass across the path.
“It’s one of them. Hold still.”
“You hold still. It can’t see us.”
“It can hear us, and that’s just as bad.”
It sounded like three separate people, but it was difficult to tell.
“It’s no danger. What can it do to us?”
“It can eat us.”
“No it can’t.”
“Chickens eat bits of stone. So do toads. This is an owl. She’s ten times as bad.”
“They don’t eat bark or plants.”
“They can claw. Look at those talons.”
“Oh, it can’t eat us, you beef-witted buffoon.”
“Hush now. Look at it. It hears you.”
Astrid blinked slowly and turned her head to look into the distance. The whispering voices went silent for a while, and fearing they would slip away, she decided to speak.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said.
“Lying,” whispered one.
“It’s just a bird. We’re not mice.”
“It’ll eat us, sure as we sit here.”
“Both of you quit your twattling and get back to work.”
“What work?”
“I can’t remember. But find something useful to do.”
Astrid flew over, hovering over the spot where she thought the voices came from. Sitting below in the grass, staring up at her in horror were three small figures, no larger than loaves of bread. They were stout and short-limbed, like babies, with wizened little faces. One was made of brown bark, another of green moss and the third of pale mottled stone.
“Helping me would be a useful thing to do,” she said and landed in the grass.
The bark and moss creatures held each other while the stone one stood in front of them.
“Off you go then,” it said, making a shooing motion. “Nothing for you here.”
“I don’t eat stone. Or bark or moss. I’m looking for someone.”
She jumped up and took a perch on top of a little stone house, its roof so low and rounded that it blended perfectly into the land.
“We haven’t seen no owls come past,” said the bark creature.
“She doesn’t mean an owl,” said the stone one to the moss one. “But someone else with a proper body.”
The three creatures exchanged a glance, then huddled together in a knot.
“Too many if you ask me.”
“More will come, just watch.”
“A regular highway for them.”
“Ten years for the one, but less for the other.”
“I figured it out. I know what it is.”
“And what would you know? How long you been watching this gate?”
“Same amount of time as you, you old slubberdegullion.”
“There were a few, but it has been so long —”
“It’s listening!”
They all turned to her, but she couldn’t disguise that she had been paying close attention.
“Where did they send the one with a body who came through recently?” she asked. “Where is he?”
“We know what you are. You’re a Door!” cried the moss creature, pointing at her with a small, thick finger.
“I am. And I’m looking for a dragon, a drake. Have you seen one?”
They glanced at each other.
“He could be anywhere,” said the stone one.
“This place is large,” said the moss one. “You’d know that if you were here longer.”
“I’ve only just arrived,” said Astrid. “That’s why I need your help.”
“Don’t answer it. It’ll eat us,” said the bark one.
“Oh, by the River, do stop going on about it eating us,” said the stone one. “It won’t.”
“Stop!” said Astrid, and the creatures looked up at her.
The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series) Page 134