Tomb of Ancients

by Madeleine Roux

  Baki shrugged and patted his stomach. “You and me, we catch up while these others pay their respects to Faraday, eh? Maybe you still have some supper on the stove . . .”

  The old woman’s eyes narrowed, and she turned a vicious sneer on us. “The master? Oh no. Oh no, no, no. You will not be seeing him. Not tonight. He is in a foul mood and is as likely to throw you from the roof as he is to serve you tea. He has not been the same since returning from the salt.”

  “Please, mistress,” Henry pleaded, turning on the charm. He leaned languidly against the doorframe, giving her his most boyish grin, flipping the dark hair out of his eyes before lowering his cowl so she could see him completely. “We’ve traveled such a very long way. It would be a damn shame if it was all for naught.”

  He looked beyond her and into the hovel. The candle she carried illuminated a series of strange markings on the plaster walls. I was not meant to know them, but they turned my stomach to behold. All of them, strange stars and crude characters, were drawn in blood.

  “I do not fear what lies within,” Henry assured her. “And we will not be a bother to your master. We merely wish to ask a few questions.”

  The White Keeper stared at him for a long time, then shifted her gaze to me and finally to Ara, who fidgeted and muttered with boredom while the decision was made. Then the Keeper flicked her head once, and Baki held the fabric cover aside while we ducked inside.

  The hovel smelled overwhelmingly of incense, a wild, purple smell that could have only one purpose: concealing the true stench of the place, the reek of old bones and human decay. The blood on the walls was fresh, though dried markings lurked below, the newer signs having been applied recently. They glittered in the candlelight, releasing a wet-coin smell that tightened the knot in my guts.

  I confess, I wanted to flee. Henry followed the old woman with a bounce in his step, but I could not match his enthusiasm. Something was very wrong with this place, I felt it deeply, and it was not just my Upworlder aversion to the ways of Henry’s people.

  This was a place of evil.

  There was almost nothing in the hovel, just a single spit for cooking and a few lumpy cushions. The floor was dusty with sand and dried flecks of blood, and all of us had to duck our heads to avoid the ceiling. The White Keeper led us down a passageway at the back of the house, clay stairs built into the ground, perhaps predating this neighborhood or even the city itself. The air ought to have grown colder as we went, but instead I found myself tugging at my cowl, fighting off the feverish heat that became almost intolerable as we descended.

  “Why is it so bloody hot?” I muttered.

  It was then that I noticed that Baki had stayed behind. At his height, he might not have even fit in the passage. Yet his absence filled me with unease. He knew these people better than we did. Why had he remained outside?

  At last, the White Keeper stopped. The wide arch of a doorway lay ahead, carved into the pale rock below the city, a flimsy curtain swaying back and forth in front of it. The light of a hundred or more candles blazed on the other side. Something soft tickled against my toes, falling onto my sandal. I picked it up and turned it in front of the glowing curtain. A feather, long, brown, and sharply pointed.

  “How peculiar,” I whispered.

  “The master is within,” the White Keeper rasped at us. “Do not test his patience.”

  Then she was gone, leaving us in the stench and heat of that unholy den. I looked to Henry, but his eyes were wide with childlike pleasure, and he drifted toward the curtain. Had I wanted to, I could not have stopped him from gently pulling the fabric aside. Even Ara seemed fascinated, sidling up next to him, her breath coming short. Inside Henry’s pack, the pup gave a low, sad howl.

  That howl startled the creature. It had made a kind of small citadel for itself, a dark church of candles and straw. The floor was littered with feathers like the one I had found. The creature had great, tawny wings with hooked talons at the points. And it was a man of sorts, narrow of frame and muscular, wearing the torn and bloodstained tunic of a much larger adversary. Thick strands of black beads hung from around his neck, and his skin shone with fissures, haphazard cracks in the flesh, red-gold light blazing from within.

  It hurt to look at him, and my stomach roared with pain.

  “Šulmu, Gallû,” Henry said, taking a step into the creature’s lair and bowing. Greetings, Demon. He sounded positively cheery. “Faraday, I presume? Although by the looks of it, that isn’t quite right, is it? More likely Faraz’ai, the name lost to time. Or Furcalor or Focalor . . . Let us settle upon that name. Focalor, Great Duke, the Abandoner, Leader of the Thirty Legions, and most importantly dead, last I heard anything of it. How did you come to be here, and what do you know of the books, of the binding?”

  Faraday—or Focalor, as Henry had called him—swiveled to face us completely. His face might have been unbelievably handsome were it not for the cracks of light splitting it into strange shapes. He spread his gryphon wings wide and held out his hands to us, tears rolling down his cheeks. His right hand was missing two fingers; his other had lost the pinkie.

  Focalor’s voice was like pipe smoke, rich and intoxicating, a young singer’s voice, but sad, a voice made only for dirges.

  “Oh, yes, Dark One, I have gone to the white plains. I have gone to the salt to meet a Binder, and the journey took everything from me.”

  Four and then five days lurched by with no word from the owl, Wings. There were precious few distractions in the Deptford safe house, and we were left to do nothing but lick our wounds and wait. Niles had decided to join us, seeing as he was without employment now that Cadwallader’s had burned down, and we agreed to take him with us to Coldthistle House. From there, he would continue on to Derridon to reunite with his brother.

  Under ordinary circumstances, a delay of this length would not be troubling, but Dalton had assured us that the owl should have returned with word by now, if indeed there was word to send.

  “Ach, Louisa, but something is mightily wrong.”

  Mary and I were allegedly playing whist, but in truth her full attention was in taking the carved wooden fish from Chijioke out of her pocket and fussing with it, thinking I did not know what she was doing underneath the table. The tension inside the cellar was suffocating. Fathom was worried we would be followed and found again, and so we were staying belowground as much as possible.

  “Do you think they could be ignoring us on purpose?” I asked Mary. “Maybe they’re cross with us for leaving.”

  I had won the last trick and it was Mary’s turn, but she failed to notice. She shook her head, looking through her cards listlessly. “Chijioke wrote me all summer long. I would know if he was angry.”

  “What do you think we will find there?” I asked. I had told her little of Dalton’s diary. What I had read so far seemed somewhat promising. Maybe Mr. Morningside had found his own way of summoning Binders, working from Focalor’s experiences. They had been following Mr. Morningside’s fancy and chasing down the origin of the strange books, and now that I had met a Binder, I knew well they had great power, power enough even to remove Father from my spirit without killing me.

  “It pains me to speculate,” she murmured. “My heart aches whenever I allow myself to imagine . . .”

  I watched her match a suit, and then I reached for a card on the stockpile, inhaling through my teeth when the edge of the card scraped the raw marking on my palm. Mary had taken me through exactly what had happened from her perspective during the ritual. In her eyes, I had gone nowhere, simply kneeling on the carpets with the stranger. Then, abruptly, I had started screaming, throwing myself on the ground and rolling, thrashing my arms. She hadn’t understood why I’d had such a bizarre reaction to a bit of sage being burned. And I was speaking a horrid language, she said, hardly even sounding like myself, screaming things that made no sense to her or anyone in the room. They were black, evil words, she told me—there was no mistaking that.

  It had grown
worse when the stranger took my palm and began tapping ink into it with the bone needle. The stranger had spoken the same frightening tongue, and her eyes had rolled back in her head, the white flickering as she blindly scored the ink into my skin.

  I flipped over my hand and regarded the inky lettering that remained there. It seemed to change each time I beheld it. A black and evil language. Even though I knew from the Binder that the marking meant “willing,” it looked awfully sinister.

  “Does it still pain you?” Mary asked gently. “I can fetch more balm.”

  “The ache is fading,” I said. “Now if only the mark would fade, too.”

  “At least it worked. Though I have no idea what to think of Mother.”

  I shared her bafflement. Fathom and Dalton had scrounged up more mundane clothing for her as a disguise, and they’d given her a widow’s black veil to hide her unusual hair, skin, and eyes when we were not concealed in the safe house. She kept largely to herself, reading voraciously, studying all the trinkets she could find here and spending long hours regarding us, as if trying to memorize our every gesture. All the stray insects that infiltrated the cellar flocked to her, buzzing at her feet like ready little servants.

  “Louisa . . .”

  Mary was watching me with her lip pulled between her teeth, her cheeks dyed dark pink.

  “Yes?”

  “Louisa, I think we should go to Coldthistle House as quickly as possible. I know the attack on Cadwallader’s shook you, and I know you fear a trap, but I don’t think we should wait any longer. This waiting is driving me mad,” she said, scattering her cards to the table.

  “I agree,” I replied, to her surprise. And frustration.

  “Really? Then why tarry? We should find a proper carriage straightaway—”

  “We haven’t gone because I’m afraid,” I told her, interrupting her excited planning. “I know what it’s like to meet a Binder now, and I’m not sure I can survive it again. It was awful enough lifting a curse from someone else, I can only imagine it will be much harder to undo magic done to me. I’m afraid of what it will cost. I’m afraid I won’t be strong enough to endure it next time.”

  She frowned and nodded, then put her hand over mine, the uninjured one, and gave it a gentle pat. “I have seen you accomplish remarkable things, Louisa, and you are not alone. There’s a reason I stayed with you instead of going back to Yorkshire already. You need my help, and Khent’s, too. We are all so much stronger together, Louisa, and weakened when alone.”

  I tried to smile, but my doubts lingered. She didn’t know what it was like to live this way. She didn’t know how it was to be afraid of your own mind. Mary might have witnessed the ritual from afar, but she hadn’t seen the Binder face-to-face and withstood its test.

  “We will find a way to fix this, I promise you that, and our chances will only get better if we have Chijioke on our side, too. And Poppy!” She gave a short laugh. “And though you do not trust them, I believe in my heart Mr. Morningside and Mrs. Haylam will help you if they can. Maybe with their help it will not be so bad this time.”

  I sighed, putting down my cards. “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps the not knowing is a prison rather than a shield.”

  It was decided. I only needed to convince Dalton, though that proved harder than I expected. He was reluctant to go without knowing the state of things at Coldthistle House, but we had waited long enough, and I appealed to his tenderness for Henry, which was deeper than I had assumed. In this regard, the diary proved a cunning tool.

  “Why did you give me this?” I asked him as he took tea that same afternoon alone. Holding up the diary, I—perhaps childishly—waved it in his face. “What is the point of it all if you do not let Mr. Morningside help me? If Mother had done nothing, I might have torn those people in the shop limb from limb. The time for waiting is over.”

  He regarded me over the rim of his teacup for a long spell, then he glanced at my healing hand and closed his eyes, pursing his lips. “I know,” he said. “Only I’m afraid.”

  “I’m afraid, too,” I confessed. “But that’s not enough anymore.”

  Fathom took charge of organizing our escape from London, though she was wary of leaving the safe house even to arrange the carriages. We decided to leave that evening, using the cover of dark to ride to St. Albans and then exchange carriages, riding northeast toward Malton. Dalton assured us he could acquire faster transport in St. Albans, shortening the normally lengthy trip to North Yorkshire with a bit of help from a holy man and his even holier stock of horses.

  This was all explained to Mother, who absorbed the information silently, nodding, that permanent beatific smile growing a little upon realizing we were indeed going to Coldthistle House.

  “Good,” she replied. “I should like to see where Father was defeated.”

  I said nothing but turned away to hide my frustrations. He certainly did not feel defeated.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I dreamt of a black-and-silver hall, a corridor of stars that went on into eternity. A ram the size of a mountain reared onto its hind legs, towering above me and made of dazzling white globes in little clusters, while a serpent as long as the Thames uncoiled and showed its star-bright fangs in warning. It happened slowly, the clash of these two impossible animals unfolding over hours, and I had almost enough time to count the stars that made up their forms.

  When fang touched muzzle, the star creatures came crashing down, falling at my feet and toppling me to the glassy ground. The ram and serpent shattered, broken apart, their radiance scattering around me, like a spilling of jewels or a fallen chandelier, crystals sharp and spinning. I lifted my arms, and they were stars, too, and soon I was floating, lifted, hovering high above it all, something beautifully remade. Something new.

  “How can you sleep so much? Those horses and the rocking—so much commotion! Nhugh.”

  Yawning awake, I found myself staring at a cross seatmate. As planned, we had changed horses at St. Albans, a kindly man of middle age lending us two teams of sleek mares, their coats and tails yellow as buttercups. They pulled us across England at alarming speed, and Khent was not wrong about the considerable clatter and crash of their hooves as they churned the roads beneath us. Even the mud seemed not to bother them, and the bad storms had driven most travelers off the paths, allowing us to make each stop well ahead of schedule.

  Khent was bundled under a thick plaid blanket, never one for the damp and cold.

  “I’m simply exhausted,” I told him. Mary shared that feeling, apparently, dozing next to me, curled up on her side. Mother might have been asleep behind her dark veil, but it was difficult to say. Fathom drove our team of horses, while Dalton and Niles took turns driving a smaller, lighter carriage that we struggled to keep pace with.

  “How is your hand?” he asked. “Do you need more of the draft?”

  I showed him my palm, now almost completely healed, a few curls of dry black skin flaking off and falling to the floor. At the safe house, he had mixed me a concoction I had sampled before, when Giles St. Giles and Mary had tried to calm me after I’d been attacked on the road to Derridon. It was a magical tea, deliciously sweet, and it soothed the mind and encouraged healing.

  “It only itches now,” I told him. As it had before, the illegible markings on my hand seemed to shift. “What does it look like to you?”

  The more he practiced his English, the more he used it with me, though frequently he slipped in and out of languages, often reverting to his native tongue when he was at a loss for the word in English. “Eyou-ra.”

  The language of hounds.

  “But I know that is not possible,” Khent added with a twist of a smirk. “There is no written way to communicate such things.”

  “So . . . like a howl? It looks like a howl to you?” I asked, matching his smile.

  His lavender eyes, however, lost a bit of their sparkle. “Not . . . No. No, it looks like the sound of a wounded animal.”

  “Fitting,
” I muttered. “It looks like gibberish to me.”

  “You will forgive me for saying so, eyteht, but it unnerves me to see it. I wish I could forget the words you screamed that day, and the helplessness I felt while that woman poked and prodded you. Well I know that sting, but I asked for it—you did not.” Then he gasped and covered his mouth with both hands, snorting. “Oh. But that pet name is irksome. I’ll do better.”

  Sleepy, I leaned my head against my arm and the window, watching the rain-soaked countryside fly by. “Maybe it’s growing on me.”

  His thick brows lifted at that, his head tilting in an indelibly hound-like manner. It was a question and a look of interest in one.

  “When this is all over, I will take you to a party. A real party. With scorpions and music that does not put you to sleep. Just the two of us, mm?”

  “No, Khent. My heart is as fractured as my mind. Who would want that?” I sighed.

  He shrugged, apparently unoffended, snuggling down into his plaid woolens. “Someone who sees that even scars can be beautiful.”

  “Aren’t we just maudlin,” I teased, bracing as the carriage rocked sharply, something going hard under the wheel. No, not something on the road, the road itself. It was shaking. “What on earth . . .”

  We had escaped London by night, unseen, and we had made four stops on the journey without event. But the thunder shaking the ground was nothing natural; it had the rhythmic, four-part cadence of a beast running at a gallop. The carriage jerked hard to the left, waking Mary, who tumbled against me with a shriek.

  “What the hell is that!?” I heard Fathom scream through the window.

  Khent reacted the quickest, shooting out of his seat and slamming down the window. Sticking his head outside, he twisted, then pulled himself back inside. Mother lifted her veil, her eight eyes blinking rapidly with sleep, before she peered outside, mildly, as if this were no surprise at all. Her lips tightened with disdain, the first time I had seen her look anything but contented.