Vault of Shadows

by Jonathan Maberry

  “You can be my enemy, Milo Silk,” she said, “and suffer every hurt and indignity that I can devise—and my imagination runs so deep, Milo. Cruelty is an art, and no one can claim to have a more skilled hand than Mab, Queen of the Aes Sídhe. Not even my champion, and he is a master of the art of pain.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Shhh, listen now. You can oppose me, or”—her voice became silky—“you can serve me. You can earn my gratitude and my favor, Milo. I reward my friends, and as cruel as I am, I can be even more generous. So much more generous. Would you like to know what I would give to you if you were to do a little favor for me?”

  Milo tensed, hating himself for wanting to hear what she offered. But fearing the offer too.

  “I can restore your father to you. And not as the misshapen thing you saw. I can restore him, healthy and whole, to you. Your mother, too. I can reunite you with your loving family and then offer you protection so that no harm will ever come to you.”

  Milo slowly raised his head. “You’re pathetic and you’re a liar. The Huntsman tried the same trick. He said he’d give me whatever I wanted if I gave him the Heart of Darkness. Now you’re telling the same lies. I hate you.”

  Queen Mab seemed to grow in size, and the crackling electricity that ran up and down her body intensified, forming arcs with the shimmering wall around her. The tiny faerie warriors cowered back and fled into the earth at her feet. “Do you dare to call me a liar?” she said in a voice like thunder.

  “Yeah, I do. You’re all liars. You and your boyfriend and the whole Swarm.”

  The queen glared at him for five long seconds; then her anger changed into something else and her scowl of rage was replaced by a mask of cold dignity. “Know this, Milo Silk: I may be many things, and most of them are unpleasant to one such as you, but never in fifty thousand years have I told a lie. The very powerful do not need to hide behind lies. When I say that I will restore your family and keep you safe, it is truth and I will give a blood oath on it. There is no more powerful bond in this or any universe than the blood oath of a faerie queen.”

  Milo stared at her. His face was as hot as a burning match and his fists hurt from pounding the floor.

  “Milo!” came the call of a voice that seemed strangely far away. Evangelyne. Desperate and frightened.

  He tried to speak, to answer, but he couldn’t. All that he could manage was to kneel there and look at the smiling face of the faerie queen while her words echoed in his head.

  I will restore your family and keep you safe.

  Milo’s mind was filled with ten thousand memories of his parents. From before the war, from the first years after, and in the things he’d seen in those twisted visions. He missed them so badly he wanted to scream. He wanted the world to reset and go back to the way it was and to be the way it should have been.

  “Be quick, Milo Silk,” purred the queen. “Serve me now and have my gratitude forever.”

  He raised his eyes to meet hers. They burned with green fire.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  Chapter 53

  Her smile was as cold as ice and as merciless as death.

  “All you need do is gift me two little gifts. One is in your pocket. I can hear it buzzing like a locust. Lay the crystal egg of the hive queen on the edge of my faerie ring. Do that and I will save your father from a life of torment.”

  “What about my mom?”

  “Mothers are so important, aren’t they? And yours is so fierce and strong. A warrior and a hero. Many would sacrifice their lives for her.” The queen ran her fingers along the shimmering wall and suddenly an image of his mother appeared. She was in uniform, hunkered down behind the stump of a shattered tree, rifle in hand, a smear of fresh blood across one dirty cheek. Behind the tree was a Stinger and it was coming toward her. His mother tensed, fitting the stock of her rifle to her shoulder as she prepared to fight the horrible creature. Then the queen snapped her fingers and the image winked out.

  “No!” cried Milo.

  “Is that the past and did she die? Or is it the future and may she yet be saved? Or . . . is this happening right now and only my champion, the Huntsman, can call off his hounds?”

  “Do something. Save her!”

  “Only you can do that, my child. Only you have that power.” She leaned toward the wall. “Go find the little werewolf girl; shoot her with your slingshot. When she falls and becomes human, take the Heart of Darkness from the pouch at her waist. No, don’t look so surprised. Do you think such things could be hidden from a queen of faeries? Go and do this now. Lay the Heart of Darkness beside the crystal egg. Do that and everything your heart desires will come to pass. You have my word.”

  “He won’t let you,” said Milo. “The Huntsman won’t let you help me. He won’t let you save them. He’ll make you into a liar. He’ll kill everyone.”

  The queen laughed. There was no trace of doubt in her eyes or in that mad laugh.

  “You think my champion will oppose me? You have so much to learn about the universe. Now,” she said, her laughter over and her smile fading, “do as you are told.”

  The yells of Evangelyne and the others faded and went away. There was no sound at all from the library.

  “Your friends have abandoned you,” said the queen. “While mine are bound by oath and love to me.” The little faerie warriors had crept from their holes and were standing in glittering ranks around her. “And my champion is coming. He knows what is needed to bring me into this world. You saw part of it when you arrived, did you not? My champion sacrificed a woodland faerie to try to break the spell, but alas it was not pure enough to shatter the last lock. His firedirk will drink the life from your fat friend or perhaps the werewolf. They are young and pure and full of energy. Their lives will finally free me from my exile. And then I will repair the Heart of Darkness. I know spells that can bind even a ghost like the Heir, and I will force him to do what needs to be done. Oh yes, little Daylighter, everything is flowing forward as I have foreseen it. Everything is as I will it. Now . . . earn your place in the court of Queen Mab by doing as I have asked. It is a little thing but the rewards are great. So great.”

  Milo stood up very slowly. It felt like there was a ton of weight pressing down on him, but he managed to get to his feet, and he stood swaying. Weak inside and out. He dug one hand slowly into his pants pocket and removed the crystal egg; then he held his hand out toward her, careful not to touch the shimmering wall.

  “You’d give me my dad back for this?”

  “So I promised.”

  Milo closed his eyes, and in that brief personal darkness he saw himself with Mom and Dad. Together. Alive. Happy.

  Safe.

  It would be so easy to give her what she wanted. He had the tullinium alloy ball bearings. One of them would be enough to take down the werewolf. She was, after all, only flesh and blood.

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Yes!” she cried in delight. “You have made the wisest choice. You are—”

  “Okay,” he repeated, “I’m only going to say this once.”

  Her flow of words stopped and she half-recoiled from him.

  “First,” said Milo, “bite me.”

  The queen went pale with rage.

  “Second, Your Majesty, I hope you stay locked in your faerie world for about a million years. I hope you rot in there. You and all your little jerk warriors. I hope you get some horrible disease that makes your face fall off. If I had any way to do it I’d toss a couple of grenades in with you, ’cause you deserve to get blown to pieces. You’re no different from the Huntsman. I didn’t think I could ever hate anyone as much as I hate him, but congratulations. You’re just as much of a parasite as he is.”

  With that he returned the crystal egg to his pocket and very slowly, very deliberately turned his back on her.

  He did not see her face, but her screams of rage filled his ears and the threats she made—or per
haps they were promises—struck his back like a rain of arrows. Milo fled the alcove and went searching for his friends.

  His heart was breaking and he had never in his life felt more wretched. The images Queen Mab had showed him of Mom and Dad were like nails driven into his heart. Had he just condemned them to horrible deaths? Had he done that?

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” he said as he broke into a run. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  He ran as hard as he could through the winding aisles of the Impossible Library. All the time, he wondered where the Heir of Gadfellyn Hall was and if he knew what was happening.

  And if he cared at all.

  Chapter 54

  Milo rounded a corner and skidded to a stop, understanding all at once why his friends hadn’t managed to find him.

  Something else had found them.

  The queen of the Aes Sídhe had not lied or even exaggerated. She’d said that her champion was coming for her.

  And here he was, in all his hideous reality.

  The Huntsman.

  The door to the library hung open and shattered, dangling from one twisted hinge. The Huntsman stood just inside the room, filling it with an overwhelming presence. The others stared in shock.

  “Give me what you stole,” said the monster.

  Mook roared like a stone lion and swept Shark and Evangelyne out of the way as he stepped forward to put himself between them and death. The Huntsman did not retreat from the stone boy. Instead he smiled.

  “Ah,” said the Huntsman with a trace of amusement, “how gallant. The Colossus of Louisiana.” He ran his fingers over the steel augmentation that had been surgically attached to him to repair the damage from Mook’s fist. “I have you to thank for this,” he said to Mook. “And make no mistake, I will crush you to sand, and fire you into space.” He smiled. “Oh yes, I know what would happen to a rock elemental if you were unable to build a new body from the stones of this Earth. You’d die out there, and your debris would float forever in the vast nothingness of space.”

  He laughed, and it was the coldest, cruelest sound Milo had ever heard. It rumbled through the air, colliding with the rows of books, making the dust on the floor twitch and dance. It hurt Milo’s ears to hear it, and to know that this was a cruel promise and not simply an empty threat. Mook and Oakenayl could make an infinite number of new bodies as long as some part of them was able to touch the Earth. That was why Milo had thought them so brave to accompany him when he’d snuck aboard the Huntsman’s red ship.

  Mook, for his part, did not waver. He was as steadfast as the rock that made up his body. He slammed his fists together so hard that jagged splinters of stone flew through the air.

  “Mook!” he bellowed.

  “Whatever,” said the Huntsman, unimpressed. “Give me what you stole and you may live past this hour. Refuse me and I will drag you into space, you pile of useless rock, and cast you adrift far, far from this Earth.”

  “Yeah?” growled Shark. “Well, eat this!”

  He snapped off three quick shots with his pulse pistol, filling the aisle with intense azure light. The Huntsman must have guessed this attack was coming, because before Shark had finished raising his gun, the monster had whipped something from a hidden sheath and held it before him. The blasts from the pulse pistol hit what looked like a spike of white-hot fire, and the blue force bolts exploded, showering the books on either side of the Huntsman. The books immediately caught fire.

  The Huntsman laughed.

  He stood there holding a flaming dagger with a long, narrow blade. It was not a steel blade covered in something flammable, but a blade of living fire. The glow of it gave the Huntsman a strange blue-white radiance.

  “Oh, great,” muttered Shark, backing up, “he has a freaking light saber.”

  But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t anything from old books or movies from before the invasion. No, Milo knew exactly what this was. It was the thing that the Huntsman had used to steal the life force from Lizabeth.

  It was a firedirk.

  “Necromancer,” snarled Evangelyne, and she loaded that one word with bottomless hatred and contempt. “Defiler! Despoiler. Slayer of the innocent.”

  The Huntsman laughed aloud and even offered her a mocking half-bow.

  “All of those things, little girl, and so much more. It is nice to be recognized for one’s accomplishments.”

  “You killed my friend,” said Milo in a voice he barely recognized as his own. “You killed Lizabeth.”

  “Killed her? Of course I killed her.” The Huntsman shrugged. “Who cares? What is she to me but a means to an end? She was a worthless and unimportant nothing, and only in the act of dying did her life have any meaning.”

  “You murdered her.”

  He nodded. “As I will murder each one of you. Surely you understand that it must happen that way. You stole something from me and you stole something from the Swarm. Those are unforgivable crimes. I can’t even consider mercy because you’re young and stupid and don’t understand what you’ve done. And do you know why? Because I’ve been inside your mind, as you were in mine. I know that you are capable of grasping the enormity of your sins.”

  “Sins?” snapped Evangelyne. “You dare speak of sins to us?”

  He straightened and sneered. “And why should I not, you filthy little mongrel? What are you? Nothing. What am I?” He took a heavy, threatening step toward them, while on either side of him precious books withered and died inside their wreaths of flame. “I am a god!”

  The heat from the burning books washed down the aisle toward Milo. The flames were spreading, killing more of the books and sending dense smoke up to the ceiling. In his mind Milo heard voices crying out in fear and pain, as if the characters in all those books were caught in the flame. Burning and dying.

  The Huntsman had used the word “sins,” and in truth Milo had never much considered what that meant. He believed in God and prayed every night that the Swarm would leave and the world would be saved, but it didn’t go much deeper than that for him. Concepts like sin never much mattered except on a general scale. Some of the adults in his camp talked about the sins of the Dissosterin, but it had always seemed like another word for crime or wrong or evil.

  Now, in a fragment of a second as the Huntsman’s proclamation echoed through the smoke and dust in this impossible place, the word “sin” took on a new meaning for Milo.

  He understood what it was, what it meant. It was not exactly a religious understanding for him. It was more a glimpse into the sheer depth of the importance of things. The Swarm had wanted to conquer the world and exploit it for any resources they could steal. They were not evil, just as a disease, however destructive, was not evil. Milo understood that. The Huntsman, he knew, was evil. He reveled in destruction and he fed on pain. Before, when they’d fought him on the hive ship, Milo had thought he understood the full scope of that evil.

  He was wrong.

  There were depths and dimensions to it he hadn’t understood before. Or maybe it was that he hadn’t been able to grasp it before. Not before Lizzie.

  Evil went so much deeper and was so much darker than Milo had ever understood. Evil wasn’t just about destroying things. No, it was about having them. Owning them. Controlling and using them.

  The Huntsman had craved magical power, but the path he’d chosen was the most vile imaginable. Necromancy. Magic and knowledge that were only possible through the pain and death of innocents. Could there be a worse crime? A worse sin?

  No.

  Milo had no intention of charging at the Huntsman. It was the furthest thing from his mind. It was a stupid and suicidal thing to do.

  But it was what he did.

  He ran straight at him, his slingshot empty, his eyes half blind with red rage, murder in his heart. He gathered every ounce of strength he possessed and swung a punch at the monster before him.

  And the Huntsman swatted him away as if he were nothing.

  There was a burst of blinding pain and then
Milo felt himself flying. He slammed into the wall of burning books. It felt exactly like what it was. Intense heat, choking clouds of smoke, fiery ash, and the humiliation of being discarded like a piece of trash. Milo dropped to his knees.

  Then he realized that his clothes were on fire.

  So was his hair.

  He screamed in pain and rolled away from the Huntsman, trying to snuff out the flames on the carpet. Then something landed heavily on him. He felt slick, scaly skin and sharp little claws, and all at once the intensity of the burn was gone.

  “Iskiel!” gasped Milo as the fire salamander drank in the flames and even the burning heat from Milo’s skin. Then the creature turned and belched it out again, shooting it like a stream of napalm at the Huntsman.

  This time the monster did not laugh or deflect the attack with the firedirk. The flames engulfed him and drove him back, and a terrible roar of agony tore itself from the Huntsman’s throat. The firedirk fell from his hands as the Huntsman beat at flames that caught on his insect armor and the patches of human hair that still clung to his misshapen head.

  “At him!” yelled Evangelyne, and instantly the wolf was racing forward, snarling, white teeth flashing. Shark tried for a shot, but the wolf was in the way. So he and Mook ran after her.

  The Huntsman reeled away from them, and between his howls of pain he cried out in the clicking, inhuman language of the Swarm. There was an instant response from across the library, and the doorway blew inward off its hinges. Milo looked up, and watched in horror as a squad of shocktroopers poured in through the smoke.

  Chapter 55

  “Watch out!” screamed Milo, but everyone already saw that things had gone from bad to much, much worse.

  Shark flung himself behind a couch, snapping off wild shots with his pulse pistol. There were so many of the ’troopers that it was impossible to miss. Three of them went flying backward, their chests exploding, lifelights instantly going from a bright green to fragments of lightless black.

  Their corpses knocked down several of the alien warriors, but other ’troopers returned fire and soon the library was filled with blue lightning. Chairs and paintings exploded in clouds of splinters. Rich tapestries on the walls turned into sheets of flame.