by Anne Nesbet
“It’s happening again,” Valko said. “Right? I can tell.”
Maya forcibly restrained the part of herself that wanted to shriek or roll her eyes or both and nodded instead. He has to state the obvious, she reminded herself. Valko had to state the obvious for the simple reason that none of this, even after all this time, was all that obvious to him.
But there, the quality of the sound around them was already shifting again. Something new joined the rumbling, quake-like roar of change: a clattering sound, as if the universe had decided to roll a hundred thousand dice, just to see what numbers might come up.
“What’s that?” she said. “Pauline?”
Pauline was playing and smiling, smiling and playing. Her smile was quite visible through the mist and the gloom.
“Pauline?” said Maya.
“I think it works!” cried the indeed quite scary, wildly smiling Pauline, while her gloved fingers flew up and down the neck of her instrument and her bow scraped tunelessly away. “Aha! Look: do you see? It’s my grand début!”
The dice, or whatever they were, rattled. Valko made a distressed sound in the back of his throat. Up until now, Maya realized, he had been doing all right because the town of overgrown tombs had been, until this minute, so much like a town that the whole purpose of a cemetery had probably slipped to the side of his mind.
But here’s the thing: a cemetery is a place full of people who once were alive, and now are not. There’s another word for most of them, and that word is bones.
Suddenly they were gathering all around, the bones, gathering in little clattery heaps. They were swaying a little, those heaps, in rhythm with Pauline’s vigorous, out-of-tune violin. You could hear them, in the dark and the gloom, more than you could see them, but you could tell they were there. And that was enough. That was enough to make even Maya feel colder than cold.
Until that moment, it had been dark, but not exceedingly so, because when mist settles in a place, the last of the daylight wanders around in the fog for a while and gets itself lost, and that makes everything dim without being pitch-black. A misty night is not dark the way a moonless night can be.
But true darkness was beginning to come seeping into the mist. It puddled at the feet of nearby monuments and thickened menacingly in the middle of those twitching, dancing bones. The little hairs on the back of Maya’s neck told her first, and then her ears, picking up a still-faint leafy rustle, confirmed it.
“Quick,” said Maya to Valko. “Back behind that tomb. We don’t want him to know you’re here.”
Valko hesitated, but Maya was ready to be tough.
“Go, go, go!”
She gave him an urgent little push, just to get him moving.
“And you have to yank Pauline out of sight, as soon as the shadow’s really here. Valko, go! You can’t leap out and tackle him, can you, if he already knows you’re here.”
Even if he had thrown the gargoyles’ egg away, Valko was still one of the people in the world Maya most wanted kept safe. Oh, that was still true.
The cemetery felt larger and darker and colder, once Valko had crept back to the hiding spot behind Fourcroy’s odd telephone booth of a tomb. The twitchy, clattering bones seemed to have found the pulse of the music now; they had leaped into the air; they were truly dancing. Pauline and her wild smile were obscured a little by the dancing bones, as if she’d been hidden in a cloud of chattering, clattering bees.
The air was full of the roar of the world being twisted, warped, remade, undone. And the roar wouldn’t go away. It just got louder and deeper and more terrifying. Something very bad was happening down the slope from Fourcroy’s tomb: there was an awful cracking, slurping sound, as if the earth had started swallowing up whole trees. And the ground was shaking under Maya’s feet, shaking harder and harder and harder.
Something was coming, and as it came, the world fell into chaos all around it. Valko said something, but his voice was very, very far away.
Yes, there it was: shade and leaf meal picking its way up the hill. A more human shape to the shadow now, and two gleams of purple where his eyes should have been.
In fact, it could almost be said to be walking, that shadow. It was striding along the little path that wandered up from Chopin’s weeping muse, and its footsteps were jerking along almost in rhythm, Maya noticed now, with the violin’s untamed, rough-edged dance.
But with every step it took, the path behind it fell into darkness that was darker than any night had any right to be. And the earth around it bubbled and boiled, tombstones and all. Churned and boiled and gave itself over to darkness.
It was maybe the end of the world. That was one thing that Maya was thinking, as she stood tall (in the face of all that boiling, heaving dark) to meet the shadow approaching. The other thought, however, was It actually worked!
They had really managed to lure him here, to the family tomb of the Fourcroys. It had really, truly worked.
And then the shadow opened its own mouth, a small puddle of darker darkness in its shadowy face, and it said, in a raspy, shadowy, triumphant sort of voice, “W e l l d o n e.”
20
STONE AND LETTER
Maya was standing at the little break in the fence around the plot of the Fourcroys, the half-smiling bust of the original Fourcroy looking out over her shoulder from its marble telephone booth of a monument, and it was almost (she thought for a moment) like one of those sappy old movies her grandmother had used to watch all the time, where someone waits at the gate to welcome the tired soldier home. Only instead of a tired soldier, of course, it was a ghostly swirl of shadow and dust coming up the path toward her now, the echo of a person. That echo kept evolving, too—holding on to its human form for a second or two, and then, as a breath of air met it, losing its edges, rippling, fading, until it could pull itself together again, back into something resembling the shape of a man, striding proudly up the slope, while all around it trees and stones and earth were being unmade, melted, ruined. And that terrible roaring tearing sound everywhere, the sound of the world having been bent too far—the sound of the real world finally breaking.
“Maya,” said the man made of shadow. “Maya. Apprentice. Well done.”
The music had stopped: Valko must have remembered to drag Pauline back into safety with him. Good. Maya took a breath of cold, steadying air and tried not to be worried about the tremors rippling through the ground under her feet, the soft whoosh whoosh of trees losing their last hold on treeness and melting away into nothing, into nonsense.
I am a descendant of the Lavirottes, Maya told herself firmly. And we walk in magic.
She pulled herself as tall as she could manage.
“You have to stop this,” said Maya. “You are ruining everything. Can’t you see? Your loophole is eating up the world.”
The shadowy figure shivered, became vague for a moment, shook itself back into focus.
“You are Maya,” it said. “The one I bound. You will make me whole. You have brought it all with you. The—the—things.”
“Yes,” said Maya. “I have. It’s all here.”
The shadowy Fourcroy shuddered again and stepped nearer, while the earth writhed and darkened behind it.
“Stone-Paper-Maya-Life—”
Maya bit her lip to keep herself steady. When a shadow lurches toward you, its arms shimmering with greed, it is very hard not to turn and run away, or at least to take a hasty step back.
“Life—,” it said, its dark arms reaching forward. “From the heart of something—life, from the heart of a, of a—”
“From the heart of a zmey,” said Maya. “But the thing is, actually I am not a dragon.”
The shadow became disorganized, remade itself, came so close that its shadowy violet eyes were looking directly into Maya’s face: at her and through her at the same time.
“So what that means is, you can’t have my heart,” said Maya. Somewhere behind her back, Valko gave a faint whoop of approval. That gave her cour
age. “And it wouldn’t do you any good, anyway.”
The thing hissed in her face, a cold breath that smelled faintly of ashes.
“Bound to make me whole,” it said again. “Maya. Maya. Now!”
And it reached out with one shadowy arm and actually wrapped something like fingers—icy, insubstantial wisps of fingers—around Maya’s wrist. It was chanting something to itself now, as if the chant had been some way of holding on to what the shadow needed to know, all these weeks since it had stored its mind in the embassy wall and had had so few words of its own left: “Stone-Paper-Maya-Zmey: Stone and letter, mind and body—life from the heart of the zmey.”
Maya pulled back her hand, but the shadow’s fingers, wispy though they were, could not be shaken off. The cold in them sent little rootlets of ice into her skin and into her arm.
“Give me my mind back,” said the shadow. It looked larger and darker now, and where its eyes should have been were two whirlpools of violet that looked, though that made no sense, even darker than the dark.
“You put it in the stone,” said Maya. Her teeth stumbled a little over the words. The cold had run up her arm and into her shoulder now. She had never in her whole life been this cold. “Let go.”
“Give me my mind back now,” it said. “My mind and my body. Stone and letter. Or I swallow you.”
That was what it was doing, she suddenly understood, with its icy hand on her wrist: it was swallowing her. There was something she had to do. Oh, Maya was trying to think, but the cold running through her made thinking very hard. The hum of magic, the distant clattering of little bones, the more human rustling and whispering going on somewhere behind her—all of that seemed very far away. The cold was climbing up her neck; the cold was already fingering her brain. You go very still when a shadow is swallowing you.
A number of things happened then, all at once:
“Hey!” shouted someone, infinitely far away. “I got it!”
A light was shining, she noticed. Where had the light come from? It came up from her nearly frozen wrist; it seemed almost like part of herself, that light. It was bright, like a star.
The shadow made a strange sound, the ghost of a sob. The icy pressure on her wrist let up just a little. She was about to be able to think again—it was like a mist pulling back from her, pushed away, perhaps, by that inexplicable star.
An arm that was no shadow went around her shoulders, interrupting her not-quite-thoughts. Why was Valko there? He was holding something out in his other hand; he was saying something, but not to her.
What he was saying was this: “Here it is—your stupid memory stone. I found it. Let her go, and you can have it. But I’ll smash it to bits if you don’t let her go. And by the way, she never even touched the letter with the bloodstain on it, so you lose.”
And there in his hand was the gargoyles’ egg.
“No!” said Maya, though she was still so cold that no sound came out of her mouth when she said it. She put her other hand out, the unfrozen hand, to touch it. The gargoyles’ egg. She had promised to keep it safe.
The starlight was very bright now; it spilled and splintered across the surface of the egg, sending the pictures dancing. The field, the trees, the face that looked like Maya’s own. The images brightened and grew and fell apart. Oh, it was the egg itself that was changing, that was trembling under her hand.
“Mine,” said the shadow.
“Let her go,” said Valko.
I promised, I promised, to keep it safe, thought Maya.
And the egg shook itself into a million million pieces of light.
It was broken, broken—no, not broken. Changed. Utterly changed!
The gargoyles’ egg had finally done what eggs are meant to do, that’s all: it had hatched.
A spray of stone was organizing itself now, in the confused starlit air. An immense whiplash of a body, with the most enormous wings.
Craaack!
The stone tail collided with the bust of the old Fourcroy, and sent a fountain of sparks spinning into the air.
“But what is that?” cried Pauline from not very far away. “What is THAT?”
To tell the truth, Maya had completely forgotten, back when the cold was still swallowing her, about Pauline Vian.
Now she shouted back, pleased to have a voice again for shouting with, “A gargoyle!”
But as soon as she said it, she knew she was wrong.
This creature twisting itself into being in the air looked nothing like Beak-Face or Bonnet-Head, with their solid, funny stone faces: it was really almost more like fireworks than stone, and the shape was so familiar, somehow, the wings and the long, long tail. . . .
Maya caught her breath with a quick, cold gasp.
No, this was no gargoyle—it was a dragon. An amazingly salamander-like dragon. An amphibious dragon. A dragon that could live in many more worlds than one.
The dragon opened its long, miraculous jaw and let out a great and ancient cry, the sort of thing that must have made people stumble out of their caves, millennia ago, and look up, astonished, into the sky.
The shadowy Fourcroy let go of Maya’s wrist entirely. Those violet whirlpools-for-eyes turned toward the creature that had emerged from the gargoyles’ egg.
“Zmey!”
That was what the shadow said, as it staggered forward toward the creature circling there in the air.
“Wow,” said Valko, still right at Maya’s side. “Wow, look at that! Is that really a zmey? How could two gargoyles have a baby dragon? Is that even possible, genetically speaking?”
But he was laughing an amazed sort of laugh as he said it.
Not far in front of them, the shadow of Fourcroy was reaching up for the salamander-dragon, which danced in tight circles in the air, tumbling end over end, stretching its surprising and brand-new wings, crying out with the sheer pleasure of no longer being merely an egg. The shadow leaped up; the dragon darted away; the shadow made a swipe with one of its icy arms, and the dragon slithered around Fourcroy’s back and climbed another foot into the air.
“Watch out!” Maya called to the dragon, but it showed no sign of hearing her. Why didn’t it fly itself farther away from the shadow? It spun around and around the darkness—so close to the shadow that it seemed unbelievable that that ghost of Fourcroy had not grabbed it yet.
“It’s like it can’t quite get away from him,” said Valko, not laughing anymore.
“See how they dance!” cried Pauline Vian from farther away.
She was right, thought Maya. That was what they were doing: dancing. And the circles of the dance were growing tighter and tighter, the shadow’s fingers brushing now against the dragon’s tail. In a moment the beautiful, bright, stone-and-fire zmey would be caught for real. Swallowed up by the cold of the shadow, just as Maya had almost been swallowed up. But the zmey was too lovely; it didn’t deserve to be lost in the dark and the cold.
She heard herself shouting something, but didn’t know what it was. There was a flicker in that deadly dance, the briefest of pauses, and she felt the eyes turned toward her for a moment, the dark-violet eyes of the shadow and the glittering stone-and-fire eyes of the zmey. They looked at her and considered something.
“Maya,” said the shadow; her name was one of the few words it had left.
The zmey looked deep into her eyes and also knew who she was. A flash of images went splashing across the glittering fiery lacework of its belly—forest, rocks, a field in summer.
“Oh, watch out,” said Maya to the dragon. “He wants to swallow you—”
And at that very instant, the shadow of Fourcroy reached out with one of its terrible arms and grabbed the dragon just like that—thwap!—around its bright and narrow throat.
The dragon screamed.
A ripple went through both of them, the lacy stone of the zmey and the shadow-man, and the shadow became one jot denser and deeper, just like that. It turned its head back to Maya, and the eyes were brighter now. Brighter and cl
earer. It was beginning to remember bits of itself, with its hand clamped to old Fourcroy’s memory stone (now become this oh-so-improbable dragon).
“Maya!” it said. The voice was already about three awful steps closer to being human. It was smoother, somehow. More certain of itself.
Maya shuddered. She was caught in the echo of the poor dragon’s scream; she saw the spreading ice crackling up and down its throat, radiating outward from the shadow’s cruel hand, and in her own bones she felt the cold spreading and the horror of it.
“Quick,” said the shadowy Fourcroy, more confident now. “It is time. What a mess you seem to have made of the world! Well, never mind. Now we will mend me.”
For a moment Maya was flabbergasted, and then she was pretty much spitting mad.
“Me making a mess! That’s your own selfish loophole ruining everything.”
The shadow made the strangest noise: it scoffed.
“You blind, blind child!” it hissed at her. “Haven’t you learned a thing about anything, all this time? It’s you it feeds off of. It’s your own magic, your own power, that’s undoing the world. Have you really not noticed that?”
It was a shock running through her: the tingle in her fingers flared up, subsided, flared up again. She had pointed at the Tower, yes, the night it changed. The magic had started undoing the world when she first touched the stone of the wall—the alarm had gone off—the countdown had started. Something had been triggered in her at that moment. Why? Was it because she was getting older? Was that what happened to Lavirottes at some point, as they grew into their magic? But it was terrible what had been started then: the universe had begun to bend.
“Liar,” said Valko, with total conviction.
And every time the strangeness had come back, the way she had felt it so strongly, like an electric shock to the gut—feeding off her? Feeding off her? Could it be? But that meant she was not keeping anyone safe, she was not saving anybody, she was not making anything right.
She, Maya, was what was wrong with the world.