“No, I don’t image the Yellow Sign will be enough to confine you,” Yael confirmed, allowing the remainder of the papers to scatter as she approached Elijah. His shadow had retreated completely, looming massively above Yael on the wall behind him, a black wave contemplating the shore. “It should be enough to impede, however. Go ahead, Professor.”
“Right,” he said, producing a bottle of starting fluid and spraying it liberally on the collected etches. “Sorry about this, Elijah, but you’ve left us no other option.”
“No!” Elijah’s voice seemed to come from everywhere, while he fell to his knees, trembling as if in terrible pain. “Stop that this instant!”
His shadow threaded a careful path between the pages Yael scattered on the street, moving with tremendous speed, screaming toward Dawes like a heat-seeking missile. There was a barb forming at the business end of the shadow, glistening wetly from a thousand different impossible facets.
Sumire stepped confidentially into the shadow’s path, driving her mechanical arm into the asphalt up to the wrist. The Dhole bone fingers gleamed and the polished metal wiring sang with heat and pressure. Elijah’s shadow cried out and recoiled like a child burning their hand on the oven.
“Not bad,” Sumire said, admiring her artificial limb. “Fight fire with fire, right?”
“Sumire’s arm is also an artifact of the Outer Dark, now, Elijah,” Yael reminded him, collecting a handful of forged spikes from the satchel on her belt. “That’s something you did.”
Professor Dawes took a book of matches from his bag. I shielded them from the drizzle, because it’s embarrassing just to stand around while everyone is saving the day.
“I really hate to do this,” he muttered, struggling to get one to strike. “Barbaric thing, burning art.”
“Not this art,” I said, trying not to look at the grotesque etchings. “Trust me.”
Elijah cried out again, and the moon seemed to groan in sympathy. His shadow was as dark as ink on a white page, and it roared across the ground, swallowing Yael’s wards like candy, looming above Sumire, ominous as a thunderhead. She laughed and launched herself at the shadow like a Hollywood boxer, throwing haymakers with no regard for form or personal safety.
The darkness obscured Sumire from my view. I heard the sound of metal under tremendous strain, and smelled volatized motor oil. The opposite of lightening; a brief and energetic darkness, which unsettled the night and shredded the sky.
The shadow broke like the skin of a pricked balloon. Elijah wailed pitifully. Yael leapt on his shadow as it retreated, driving a metal spike into one corner of the shadow. The darkness rippled around the spike like impaled cloth.
Professor Dawes finally got a match to light, and after a final moment of hesitation, tossed it on the pile of etchings, which immediately burst into flame. Elijah writhed and struggled, while Yael sprinted around, driving in a second spike into the periphery of his shadow.
The shadow raged and tore at its restraints, but Sumire drove it back at every turn. I sprayed extra fluid on the small bonfire as the etching blackened. It took Yael three more spikes to finish the job.
We gathered around what used to be Elijah.
The Pallid Mask offered us a ghastly smile from a puddle of shadow, roughly the shape of Elijah Pickman, pinned to the ground like a butterfly on display.
“Is this how it was supposed to work? I don’t remember this in the plan. Is this the plan?”
“Quiet down, Preston,” Sumire advised, rubbing my shoulders supportively. “You seem cooler when you don’t talk.”
Point taken.
The cats emerged cautiously from the shadow, scouts first. Snowball followed shortly, escorted by a larger guard than usual. The cats seemed worked up, hackles raised and teeth bared.
Snowball approached Yael, stopping just short and making a show of yawning.
“Will you be able to hold the line while we are inside, Lord Snowball?” Yael crouched in front of the great mangy white cat, a hand on his front paw. “We will need to leave in a hurry, if all of this works…”
Snowball surveyed the scene with evident boredom, and then gave Yael a curt nod.
I swear it happened.
Yael offered a prim curtsey, bobbing her masked head in gratitude.
“Thank you, Lord of Ulthar. I owe you another a favor.”
The cat accepted her gratitude solemnly. Everyone seemed to be taking this quite seriously.
“Okay.” Yael offered a quick nod. “Anyone up for a rescue?”
I bit my tongue. We picked our way through the scorched ruins of Madeleine Diem’s home, aiming for the entrance to the Tidal Chamber.
“Turn back!”
The Pallid Mask called out to us, still using the shape of Elijah Pickman’s face, despite the fact that it was little more than a shadow pinned to the ground, fluttering like newspaper in the wind.
“Holly Diem and April Ersten’s fates are sealed,” Elijah asserted. “There is no reason for the rest of you to suffer any further.”
“Now you care about my suffering,” Sumire said, tapping her arm and looking as if she was seriously considering punching him. “Little late.”
Yael made an exasperated noise and pushed past Sumire.
“There is no point to this conversation,” Yael said shortly. “You aren’t Elijah Pickman. Not anymore.”
The impaled shadow objected, but no one stayed to listen. We regarded the stone piled atop the door to the Tidal Chamber.
“Sumire,” Yael said, inclining her head at the mound of rubble. “Would you do something about that?”
“With pleasure.”
Sumire made a show of rolling up her sleeves on the way. Her first punch split a boulder in half, and sent up a rain of dust and gravel. We took cover while she went to work. Several tons of rock lasted maybe three minutes against the girl with the mechanical arm, who whooped and hollered as she demolished everything in front of her.
“Okay!” Sumire cried out from the dust. “All clear.”
The heavy wooden door was reduced to splinters. Sumire cheerfully kicked the last of the rubble aside.
“You stay, Professor,” Yael said gently, stopping Dawes at the door. “If we don’t return by morning, I need you to deliver a message.”
The Professor objected, but we talked him out of it. I wasn’t sure about the legitimacy of Yael’s message, but I shared her unspoken concern about the mild-mannered ghoul going any further into the domain of the dormant Drowned Empress. He eventually allowed himself to be persuaded, and received a scribbled note and whispered instructions from Yael. He gave me plaintive look and a clasp on the shoulder when I passed him on the way down.
Yael led the way down the broad stair, picking a path between fallen stones with the aid of a powerful LED light and Dunwich’s guidance, Sumire following close behind. I brought up the rear, naturally, using the bulky plastic flashlight from beneath my kitchen sink to work around the scattered debris and fallen stones.
It wasn’t a good feeling, descending those stairs again. If the first visit had been tempting fate, then making a return bordered on lunacy. The coral was cracked and leaked seawater on our heads in an indoor imitation of rain. The darkness in the stairwell was pungent and greasy, the air tainted with solvents.
We passed the first door, and behind it, we encountered the humidity I remembered from our previous visit, dense and reeking of fermenting seaweed. Water dripped from the rocks overhead and coated the stairwell, running in rivulets and making the footing treacherous. Sulfurous crystal extruded from granite walls, threatening to snag an unwary hand. I could feel the weight of the ocean above us, seeping through the walls of the stairwell.
The door halfway down the stair was missing, only the twisted hinges remaining. I glanced at the puddles of blood and fish oil, and wondered about Fenrir.
The sealed door waited at the base of the stair, composed of waterlogged timbers and a set of rusted iron bands. Wet sounds snuck beneath th
e door and through the cracks in crumbling stone. Yael took out her lock pick roll, but Sumire eased her aside with a grin. She cracked mechanical knuckles and examined the door. Took a stance. Wound up.
She reduced the door to splinters. Sumire patted her new arm like a mother proud of her honor student.
Yael smiled at Sumire’s enthusiasm, and then slipped through the broken doorframe. Sumire and I followed at her heels.
I didn’t notice the water until I was splashing about in it. The Tidal Chamber was decorated with driftwood and sea glass, strung with garlands of decomposing seaweed that emitted swarms of black flies when approached. The water was kiddie-pool warm and ankle-deep, lapping at the walls in gentle swells with no obvious source. The wall we emerged from was massive, unbroken save the door we had emerged from, crude blocks of stone piled till they touched the distant cave roof and extending out to either side as far as the luminescent moss would allow me to see. In front of us, the stone floor sloped gradually away, toward the darkness from which the water emerged.
It was low tide, as Professor Dawes promised.
Two lines of gas torches fixed on poles marked a short path among the tide pools. At the end of the path, a few meters into the water, a massive rock was situated above the spray, covered by gas lamps on stakes. Beside a slender chair on a dais composed of the enameled bones of an undersea monster, Madeline Diem stood; artificial legs in the water, tiara polished, smiling immaculately. The dress she wore was the same tropical blue as her eyes. Splayed across the stairs leading to the dais, April and Holly lay with their hands and ankles shackled, gagged with silk handkerchiefs and apparently unconscious.
“Preston! You made it!” Madeleine opened her arms wide, as if to embrace me from across the room. “I was beginning to doubt you.”
***
“Doubt?” Yael’s voice was cool, and packed with weary judgement. “How many deals did you cut, Preston?”
“This is a misunderstanding,” I suggested hopefully. “I never actually told you that I would do anything for you, Madeleine.”
“Well, yes,” she said, with an uncertain nod. “I just assumed.”
“Why?”
“You are a cad, Preston,” Madeleine explained flatly, looking about the room for understanding. “Motivated by base and perverse desires. I specialize in working with exactly your type. You clearly lust after my elder sister, putting me in a unique position to fulfil your doubtless vile fantasies. I thought all of this was understood?”
Everyone seemed to think it over.
“She’s got you there,” Sumire said, with a cheerful shrug. “Preston, you perv!”
“Hold on,” I said, glaring at anyone who would meet my eyes. “This is slander. I’m not selling anyone out, Madeleine.”
“Aren’t you?” Her doll eyes blinked in an excessive display of surprise. “Then why did you bring Yael Kaufman with you?”
“We are here to stop you. Together.” I cast about for allies. “Tell her, Yael.”
“It’s true.” Yael hesitated more than I would have preferred. “At least, I think it’s true.”
“Hmm.” Madeleine put one of Sumire’s fingers to her lips. “Aha! I have it! As your desire for my sister is legendary…”
“It is?”
“It is.” Madeleine nodded solemnly. “You can have her, for a little while anyway, in exchange for Yael.”
“That’s…terrible. On so many levels.”
“I agree, but that’s just the sort of person you are.”
“It is not.” I put my foot down and grimaced, so everyone would know I was serious. “Listen, Madeleine – I want April back, right now. Holly too, I guess. No deals. Do you understand?”
She sighed, and then stood, rolling April neatly out of the way.
“I suppose.” She pulled the throne to the side, the legs scraping across stone with an awful shriek. “Are you certain? This isn’t in your best interest, Preston. The Institute will find you – they will find her. You know it. Even now, they are so close.” She licked bitten lips, painted the color of a fresh bruise. “Can you feel them, Preston? Watching you from satellites and dreams?”
“Enough,” I growled, splashing into the pool. “I’m taking April back.”
Madeleine removed a coral key from her modest décolletage, gave me a smile some men would kill for, and then inserted it in a lock inset in the side of the dais, just above the water level. As I waded forward, Sumire splashing along behind me, Madeleine pulled open a heavy wooden trap door with difficulty. Judging by the struggle, it had been a long time since that door last opened.
It was immediately obvious as to why. That wasn’t a trap door; it was the lid on a well of monsters.
Servants of the Deep spilled out like an unruly geyser, sporting their unfortunate fusion of gills, and fins with the normal human furniture. Hunched and scaled, bone protruding from dorsal growths of varying sizes, accretions of what looked like coral attached to their faces and bodies. Mandibles stocked with rows of hypodermic teeth. They wore robes, or minimal leather garments, or nothing. Many wielded brass staves and instruments, or wore golden headgear and jewelry inscribed with letters from the city beneath the sea.
Madeleine cheerfully kicked the nonresponsive April aside, and then very deliberately took a seat on her bound sister’s back. She offered me a jaunty little wave as the fish-people advanced.
“Yael? Little help?”
Yael stood back at the edge of the pool, not far from the door, along with the wet and agitated Dunwich, watching the mob grow.
“Hey, Yael? How do we get past all those fish-people?”
Her mouth formed a firm, sour line.
“Are you volunteering to be a distraction?”
“Not in particular.” The fish-people erupted out of the trap door like the world’s foulest smelling volcano, to the evident delight of Madeleine Diem. “So we’re gonna die, then.”
“Not necessarily,” Sumire said, casting aside her jacket and walking to the center of the pool, thigh deep in the water. “I’m invulnerable, remember?”
“Oh, right. Then just the rest of us will die.”
“Shut up, Preston.” Sumire beckoned to the advancing horde of fish-people. “Watch me work.”
I had no objections. Neither did the Servants of the Deep, apparently, because they clambered over one another to get at Sumire. She waited for them in a slack and blissful southpaw stance; a knee bent, one hand open like an invitation, the other closed in a fist.
The first of the Servants tried to charge through Sumire. She impeded its progress only slightly, a quick trip tangling its legs and sending it tumbling into the tide. The next fish-person attempted to strike at her with the spines extending from its forearm like a bee’s stinger, but Sumire sidestepped, seizing the Servant and tossing it into the oncoming crowd. She felled an adjoining fish-person with an uppercut from her flesh and bone arm, and then leveled a half-dozen of them with a swing of her mechanical arm. The charge was confused, the first wave of Servants tumbling over or stumbling back into their comrades, while those in the back attempted to fight their way to the front.
Sumire hit the advancing front like a bowling ball, scattering fish-people with every blow. She turned their reinforcements back, as new arrivals from the trap door were forced back down the well by the confusion.
“Okay.” Yael dashed past me in her mask, kicking up water as she went. “Make yourself useful.”
Yael clambered up a rock sticking out of the water, and then used it to vault over a line of Servants. She hit a sandbar in a crouch, Dunwich landing gracefully beside her. They sprinted away before the fish-people could react.
Sumire lunged for the trap door, bringing her mechanical arm down like a hammer. Fish-people were bowled over, and left to splash about haplessly.
“You took my arm,” Sumire shouted at Madeleine, laying out a fish-person with a tremendous lariat. “That was mean!”
“In an indirect manner,” she admitt
ed, examining Sumire’s nails with an indifferent nod. “Did it hurt?”
Yael and Dunwich eluded their pursuit, clambering up one of the larger rocks protruding from the sandy bottom of the Tidal Chamber. The masked girl contemplated the scene beneath her briefly, drawing the attention of the fish-people below. Yael nodded to her cat, and then hurled a canister into the crowd. It burst into a cloud of green powder, scattering the majority of the Servants. Girl and cat fearlessly launched themselves at those foolish enough to remain.
“Yeah,” Sumire admitted, clobbering a Servant over the head two handed, and then lifting and tossing it into the crowd. She advanced another couple meters. “I got this sweet new robot arm, though, so that kinda makes up for it.”
My feet sunk deep into the sand, and my sneakers nearly tore free with each step. The Servants of the Deep squeaked and squelched behind me. I lost track of Yael, so I just had to hope that this was all working the way we planned it.
Of course, the plan hadn’t factored in hundreds of fish-people, so I wasn’t confident.
“Life is full of surprises,” Madeleine advised. “Make the best of it.”
“I am.” Sumire used one of the Servants as a battering ram, bashing aside the last few opponents separating her from the trap door – and Madeleine. “Believe me.”
“I do, my dear. I do.”
Madeleine snapped her fingers, and a group of Toads detached themselves from the roof, dropping into the shallow water around Sumire like congealed blobs of snot. Sumire cried out in frustration as the surge pushed her away from the trap door, struggling with pseudopods, as fresh waves of fish-people poured into the Tidal Chamber.
The tide of the battle turned. Dunwich and Yael were separated and harried, as Sumire disappeared beneath a combined mass of Toads and fish-people, battling furiously.
I stepped quietly around the slender throne, and put the business end of the scalpel to Madeleine elegant throat. I could tell that she smiled by the way the muscles in her neck tensed.
“Is that you, Preston?”
“It’s me, Maddy. I guess everyone lost track of me in the confusion.” Not true. A couple fish-people paid attention, which had slowed me down. “Wanna make a deal?”
The Mysteries of Holly Diem (Unknown Kadath Estates Book 2) Page 27