The Brink of Darkness (The Edge of Everything)

by Jeff Giles

  Here, it seemed to Zoe, the weight of the story began to show on Dervish’s face.

  “As I trod back to our door,” he went on, “I saw Pleasant standing in a window on the second floor. He was shirtless, and holding a sword that used to decorate my study. He had been waiting for me. He took the sword out of its scabbard. I knew what he meant to do. I dropped the painting. I lifted my hands, begging him to be still until I could get into the house and up the stairs. Instead, he turned the sword on himself.” Dervish paused. “He opened his OWN throat, he hated me so much.” He stopped again. “Later, the doctor chastised me for not reaching Pleasant in time. He said he might have lived. I told him—well, first I refused to pay him—and then I said the coldest thing I could think of, which was, ‘The damned boy has ruined the rug!’ After that, I did not allow a single thing on earth into my heart. I committed all manner of crimes and abominations, and have never regretted it.”

  Even after everything Dervish had done to X and to her family, Zoe felt an urge to say she was sorry about his son. He must have seen the pity in her eyes. In an instant, he returned to his old, inhuman self, as if his reflective mood were a coat he had tried on and not liked.

  A few of the guards had fallen asleep, and lay snoring.

  “Rise, IMBECILES!” said Dervish.

  The men woke, grunted, grabbed their weapons. Dervish gathered them around. He told them that according to his spies, X and Regent were on the way to a place called Where the Rivers End in the hopes of finding X’s mother. Dervish said that a “serving wench” named Maudlin was with them—she had a cat, which Zoe found hard to process—as well as a Russian guard. Here, Tree interrupted Dervish to say that the guard was technically from Ukraine. The lord gave him a scalding stare.

  Dervish informed the squad that they would reach Where the Rivers End before X and the others—and ambush and savage them. The way Dervish beamed in anticipation of the bloodshed (just moments after telling her the story about his son, no less) convinced Zoe, more than anything else she had witnessed, that he was a psychopath.

  Dervish finished his speech by crowing that X was looking in the wrong place for his mother, though he wasn’t far off. The lord looked forward to telling him how “EXCRUCIATINGLY CLOSE” he had come to finding her. Dervish seemed not to care that Zoe was listening. He appeared to relish it, in fact. He was taunting her.

  As the guards lined up two by two, Dervish gave Zoe one of his revolting, lipless smiles.

  “You must wonder why I have not ALREADY sent you back to your world,” he said. “It is because you are my greatest weapon. When X sees you, he will be shocked. Unable to believe his eyes. Rooted to the spot. Do you follow, little girl? It shall make his capture and torture SO MUCH easier. It will not even occur to him to do the sane thing and run.”

  Dervish banished Tree to the back of the squad, and pushed Zoe to the front where he could watch her. She managed to get a glimpse of Tree every so often as they made their way down the tunnel. His right hand was pressed against the violent welt on his face. The halo of his hair glowed every time they passed a torch.

  Zoe tried to dream up a plan as they marched. Her father—she couldn’t believe she was about to have a positive thought about him, but apparently she was—had always been an inspired improviser when he was caving or hiking. He carried the bare minimum of equipment, and made every decision half a second before he had to. He fed on the uncertainty. It scared Zoe when she was young. By the time she was Jonah’s age, she and her dad had run out of gas three times in the middle of the wilderness. (Three times that she could remember.) Zoe would beg her dad to tell her what was going to happen next, and he’d smile wide, and say, “I have no idea! How freakin’ cool is that?” As they continued to escape these situations with their lives, Zoe settled into the not-knowing. She learned to improvise, too.

  Still, what could she do in the face of the Lowlands? X and the others would be taken by surprise. They’d be outnumbered five to one. Only Regent would have powers. Only the Ukrainian guard would even have a weapon, probably. What was the “wench” with the cat going to do? What was Zoe herself going to do? She’d defended herself before, she’d defended her friends, but she had never once hit somebody in anger. It wasn’t how she was raised. Her mother had five playlists of Buddhist chanting on Spotify.

  Zoe couldn’t stop picturing X, and how shocked he’d be when he saw her. His first instinct would be to protect her—but he was powerless here, just a pale young man who grew up without enough to eat. He’d get mauled just like Dervish said he would. Zoe realized now that Dervish had made her march in front of the men partly so she’d feel ashamed: X and his friends were going to be decimated, and she herself was leading the army.

  The tunnel squeezed tighter until the rock all but scraped Zoe’s arms. The torches on the walls grew rarer, like a species of flowers dying off. Soon, they walked in near darkness. After what Zoe guessed was half an hour, the passageway arrived at the top of a stone staircase. It was impossible to tell how far down the steps went. Zoe put a foot on the first one, but was too tired to continue.

  Dervish pushed past her and flew—literally flew—down the staircase. The end of his robe shot out behind him, then disappeared, like the tongue of a snake.

  “They are only STAIRS, Zoe Bissell,” he shouted from the bottom. “Shall I explain how they work?”

  Zoe breathed in heavily. The oxygen had evaporated, or done whatever it was that oxygen did, as the tunnel grew tighter.

  An idea came to her.

  It came to her because she was so exhausted, because she couldn’t take another step. It was a small idea, but it might help X and his friends in the fight. She felt sure Dervish wouldn’t have thought of it.

  There was a torch in a sconce on the wall. The light fell on the first handful of stairs. Zoe nodded to herself, and descended.

  One hundred and twenty-two stairs spiraled down like a corkscrew. By the time Zoe reached the bottom, her shins were prickly with the pain, but her mind was alive.

  “Let’s keep moving,” she told Dervish. “Unless you’re tired.”

  A door cut into the rock led Zoe and the others onto the ground floor of a massive stadium of cells. Level after level stretched so high above her that they blurred. The vastness of the space was shocking, especially after the narrow artery of the tunnel.

  In front of Zoe, a dozen rivers cut across the rocky ground, as evenly as the lines on a clock, then spilled into a circular cavern in the center. From the cavern itself rose the most arresting sight of all: a stone statue of a face screaming in agony. The head, a man’s, was bald and colossal. It was tilted back, its mouth opened hideously wide. Zoe could see the teeth, the tongue, the roof of the mouth. Cracks in the gray stone ran down the face and neck like scars. The statue didn’t look like art—it looked like a cry of pain. When Zoe stared up at the cells again, she imagined someone howling inside every one.

  The cells were worse than anything X had ever described. They were essentially black-iron caskets standing in rows. There were no bars to let in light, just small oval openings at eye level. Here and there, prisoners dangled their fingers out of the eyeholes to feel the air. Or maybe they thought they could somehow pull the light in themselves.

  Hundreds, probably thousands, of souls noticed Dervish and the guards’ arrival. They began pounding on the inside of their doors, as if to say … As if to say what? Zoe wasn’t sure. Maybe just, We exist! It occurred to her that the name of the place, Where the Rivers End, was an understatement. This looked like a place everything ended. It was her first true glimpse of the Lowlands—the scale of them, the cruelty.

  “How come there’s nobody but prisoners here?” she asked Dervish.

  She was thinking of the model of the Lowlands that X had once made in the snow. He’d used Jonah’s orc figurines to represent the guards in the hive where he himself lived, T. rexes for the lords.

  “Oh, there’s no need for peacekeepers here,” said Der
vish. “We never let these souls out of their boxes. Some have been standing for two thousand years.” When Zoe blanched, he added: “You think us cruel, do you?” He gestured to the horrible Screaming Man, and smiled. “But we gave them a statue!”

  A guard who hadn’t been with Dervish’s squad rushed through the door now. He was portly—his stomach swayed in front of him as he ran—but he had such a disproportionately small head that Zoe wondered for a second if it’d been shrunk by a witch. For a weapon, he carried a broken lamp.

  He approached Dervish obsequiously.

  “Guvnor, if I may?” he said. “Regardin’ X and Regent and the others, if I may? They’re comin’, sir. They’ll be enterin’ frew that tunnel over there was I ta guess”—he pointed with his lamp toward a curved archway—“and I ’aven’t been wrong about a single fing yet, ’ave I?”

  The guard waited, obedient as a dog, for his reward. His face crumpled when Dervish turned away without thanking him.

  “It is time to assemble our mousetrap!” Dervish told Zoe. “The moment has come! Oh, do not scowl, little girl, you shall have the PRINCIPAL role—you shall play the cheese!”

  He ordered five guards to stand on the walkway above the arch so they could rain down on X and the others when they entered the stadium. He split the rest of the squad in half, telling the men to crouch in the nearest rivers. These guards would rush “the enemy” from either side and crush them in a kind of vise.

  Adrenaline shot into Zoe’s blood. She knew she should try to reason with Dervish, but also knew it was useless. All she could come up with was, “You don’t have to hurt them.”

  “And YOU need not have come to the Lowlands to watch me do it,” said Dervish.

  He prodded Zoe toward the center of the arena. She understood: he wanted her to be the first thing X saw when he entered the stadium. When Zoe tripped, Dervish grabbed her up, and shoved her onward.

  “I warned you that love always ends in tragedy, did I not?” he said. “That is the wisdom of a lifetime, and I bestowed it gratis! All that our hearts shall ever do is wound us when we’re young—and kill us when we’re old.”

  They neared the immense circular canyon with the Screaming Man. The rivers crashed down into it.

  “Do you want to know the true—the ONLY—difference between Regent and myself?” said Dervish. “When Regent witnessed the death of all love and hope, he was devastated. When I myself did, it liberated me forever.”

  Zoe felt Dervish’s hand on the small of her back, as he pushed her toward her place in the trap.

  “I wonder,” he said, “which it shall do to you.”

  twenty-one

  Halfway to the center of the stadium, Dervish stopped and turned Zoe so that she faced the archway. He slid a hand around her neck. Zoe found that she couldn’t make a sound now, not even a gasp. Dervish didn’t want her warning X about the ambush.

  He was beaming.

  She was bait.

  The guards in the rivers crouched so low that Zoe could only see a row of hats and helmets, like vegetables just starting to grow. Up on the walkway above the arch, the rest of the squad killed time by trading weapons—a wrench for a whip, a hammer for a bowling pin. Tree, who was one of them, looked afraid. The others all whispered giddily, thrilled about the coming fight.

  It was going to be a massacre.

  The plan that had come to Zoe in the tunnel started to seem very small and insufficient. She didn’t know if she’d get close enough to Regent to whisper it, or even if he would agree to it. Zoe watched the archway for X. She was scared, exhausted, overwhelmed, but she pushed past all that to access her fury—at Dervish, at the guards, at the inhuman cells spiraling up and up. Anger was what she needed now. It was energy. She could work with it.

  Suddenly, there was a torch in the tunnel. And two voices.

  Neither was X’s. Judging from the accents, it had to be the servant and the Ukrainian guard.

  Dervish signaled the men above the arch. They lifted their weapons, and jostled for position. Zoe knew they’d beat X first and worst, just to impress Dervish. Even Tree would be forced to join in.

  Zoe struggled in Dervish’s grip, and felt his skeletal fingers tighten around her neck.

  She saw the Ukrainian and Maudlin emerge from the tunnel. The guard wore a red Adidas tracksuit. The servant held her cat against her shoulder.

  “Want to know true fact?” the Ukrainian was saying. “All cats would rather be dogs. Do not dispute, you will only sound silly.”

  Maudlin laughed.

  “Vesuvius and I are ignoring you,” she said.

  They stared at the ground as they walked out of the tunnel. It was agony waiting for them to look up.

  And then they looked up.

  They froze. If Zoe could have screamed, she would have screamed, Run! But Dervish wouldn’t let her so much as turn her head. His men waited for his signal.

  Maudlin darted back the way they’d come—to get Regent and X, Zoe guessed.

  The Ukrainian stood his ground. He spread his feet and glared at Dervish, like he was trying to intimidate him.

  “What a delusional little person,” said Dervish.

  Regent rushed up from behind and entered the stadium. He saw Zoe and stopped dead.

  Dervish was clearly waiting for X to show himself. The men on the ledge leaned forward hungrily.

  At last, X came out of the tunnel, with Maudlin close behind. Zoe saw him shade his eyes at the sudden light. She saw him take in the massive tower of cells. She saw him recognize Dervish.

  She saw his eyes fall on her.

  He stepped back in shock.

  Then he moved toward Zoe—warily at first, as if he still disbelieved what he saw. Regent reached out to stop him, but X brushed him away.

  “Dervish, what have you done?” said X.

  “I did nothing—she followed ME!” said Dervish.

  “Liar!” said X.

  His voice was weaker than Zoe had ever heard it, and his face was covered with bruises she didn’t remember. She had never seen X when he was … human. No stronger than anyone else. Ordinary.

  “A liar?” said Dervish. “Me? Now you’re being hurtful!”

  X took off his coat, and let it fall as he came closer. Had his shirt always been so filthy and torn? Had he always winced as he walked? Zoe feared for him in a way she never had.

  “Tell me it isn’t you?” he called to her. “Tell me this is some mad game of Dervish’s?”

  Dervish gripped Zoe’s throat tighter.

  She tried to warn X with her eyes, but discovered that she couldn’t even move them from side to side. All she could communicate was, It’s me. I’m sorry. It’s me.

  She was ashamed, but even as X came forward, she could see him forgive her. It took half a second. Maybe less. His expression just changed. Softened. She loved him for it. He was so much kinder than she was. Had he always looked so tired? Had his face always been so thin?

  Regent and the others followed X protectively. Zoe was moved by their loyalty. Maudlin and the Ukrainian could have just run.

  “NOW!” shouted Dervish.

  His men jumped from the archway, like animals leaping out of trees. They landed loudly, grunting on impact.

  X and his friends whirled around.

  The rest of Dervish’s men charged out of the rivers. The squad swarmed at X and the others from three sides, every man shouting some sort of war cry. A thousand prisoners pounded on their doors. The thuds made Zoe’s bones vibrate.

  Though X had no powers, Zoe could tell that he knew how to fight. She watched as he head-butted a guard and took his club. But half a dozen men were on him instantly. He was the one they were after. The prize.

  Even while he was under siege, X’s eyes kept returning to Zoe.

  She heard him shout to Regent: “I cannot reach her.”

  She heard Regent shout back: “I can.”

  The lord left the melee, and moved toward Dervish and Zoe. When one of Dervi
sh’s men tried to block him, Regent stiffened his arm and swung it at his throat. The guard flew backward, spitting blood.

  Zoe felt a flash of hope as Regent approached: he was going to beat the shit out of Dervish. He actually pushed up his sleeves to fight, which she’d only ever seen in a movie.

  Maybe they wouldn’t even need Zoe’s plan.

  But without Regent to worry about, Dervish’s men attacked more viciously. A guard swung an ax handle at Maudlin’s face. She dodged it, took the blow on her shoulder, then fell. Three others pulled X down, and took the club back. Only Tree refused to fight. Maudlin had shooed her cat to safety, and Tree stood beside the animal now, ready to defend it.

  Zoe looked for the Ukrainian.

  At least he would have a weapon.

  But no: one of Dervish’s men had wrenched the baseball bat away from the guard, and jammed the handle into his mouth. The Ukrainian crumpled to the ground, howling and clutching a silver necklace he wore.

  X fought his way out of the knot of bodies, and ran to help him. Zoe remembered him talking about a Russian guard. This had to be the same man. She remembered X saying that he was ridiculous sometimes, but that he was a friend—that he was funny and never cruel, that he’d worn tracksuits in several different colors, that he’d had a crush on Ripper that had lasted decades.

  Zoe approved of anybody who had a crush on Ripper.

  Before X could get to his friend, Dervish’s guard dragged the Ukrainian to the river by his necklace, and threw him in. The water rocketed him toward the canyon’s edge. Dervish laughed approvingly and, with a snap of his fingers, set the river on fire.

  Flames shot up like fountains.

  Zoe could hear X’s friend scream in his native tongue as the current pulled him away.

  At last, Dervish released Zoe, and pushed her forward with a boot.