by Tim Akers
"Perhaps. But I'd rather find out for myself."
Wilson sighed, but still seemed pretty anxious to cut someone. We got to the house and snuck into the kitchens. The ovens were cold, and there was no one around.
"Not too typical," I said. "Unless the Tombs are having the sort of staffing problems the Burns are having."
"Tomb always managed the descent better than you lot," Wilson said. "Always managed to keep up appearances. Then again, they've managed to keep their place on the Council, too."
"We haven't lost our seat," I said. "Just no one around to sit it, right now."
"Sure. Right now."
We stopped talking and listened, because we both heard it. Hurried footsteps, and the rushing of the wind. I got behind a cabinet. Wilson just disappeared into the drafty beams of the ceiling.
A serving girl rushed into the room. She had both hands wrapped around a kitchen knife, and her face was as white as a sheet. She slid on the tiled floor and fell behind a counter, and the knife went clattering away. She crawled toward it until the wind got much closer. Terrified, she froze, her hand halfway to the knife.
A great darkness filled the doorway. It slithered past at tremendous speed, a shadow of glossy black feathers and iron-hard beaks, eyes that stared like beads of oil and claws that were red with fresh blood. The sound was incredible, a thousand wings, beating the air. It sounded like the shuffling of velvet cards, amplified a hundred times over. Deafening and soft, thunder wrapped in soft leather. The rushing darkness passed and passed, a seemingly endless parade of wings and beaks that flowed like a skyborne river of ink. Distant yelling, the thudding of doors, then a sharp splintering sound and they were away. The hallway was silent.
The girl was panting in terror. Slowly she stood, hands on knees, until she was straight. She stared out at the empty hallway, the fluttering ghost of a feather all that remained of the thunderous visitor.
"Now, love," Wilson said as he lowered himself from the ceiling on his spider arms. "I want you to not shout at all."
She shouted a great deal, mostly in terror. She backed away from him, until she bumped into me. I took her by the arms and spun her around.
"It's okay, alright? Everything's fine. We just..."
She fainted. I sighed and let her fold onto the floor gently.
"That was well done. When are you going to get it?" I asked. "Look at you. People are terrified of you, Wilson. Especially when you drop from the ceiling like that."
"Not my problem," he said, picking up the girl's kitchen knife and stowing it into his vest of blades. "Those were crows."
"Yes, they were."
"Meaning he's still here."
"Meaning his pets are still here," I said. "And maybe him. That's what I'm hoping."
"Yes," Wilson said, grinning his thousand-tooth grin. "Hoping."
"Don't kill him outright," I begged. "Just this once, don't kill him outright. There are probably some questions we should ask."
"Probably. But let's find him first. Crane and his little army of crows."
We put the kitchen girl into a cabinet and hoped that wasn't some kind of death sentence. That makes two unconscious girls I've left in certain danger in the last eight hours. Just like a hero.
It was pretty clear why those two house guards had gone over the wall at their first chance. There were dead housies scattered throughout the living quarters, and a whole pile of them in the dining room. I wondered if Angela had even made it to the Council session, but saw no evidence of any family members. Just guards and servants. Most of them looked to be resting peacefully, only the group in the dining room showing wounds. Those guys died violently. Everyone else might have just lain down, with their eyes open and looks of terror on their faces, and just stopped moving.
"Our friend Crane, he likes to find a variety of ways to kill," Wilson said. We were standing at the foot of the grand stairwell. This would get us to the fourth floor. We'd have to look around for the tower stairs from there. Wilson bent to examine the body of a manservant draped at the bottom of the stairs. He had taken a tumble, but nothing that looked fatal. "Interesting."
"Too many things in this venture can be described as 'interesting,'" I said. "I don't like it."
"Perhaps you should hang out with people who are interested in less morbid things," Wilson said. He produced a pair of long tweezers and used them to fish around in the servant's gaping mouth. With a tug that pulled at something deep in the servant's chest, Wilson held up the tweezers. They were grasping a twig. "You can't tell me this isn't interesting."
"I can, and I will," I said, sweating nervously. "About as interesting as getting fatally shot, at the moment."
"Mm. Yes." Wilson dropped the twig into a specimen tube and tucked it happily into his vest. "Alrighty, then. Shall we continue?"
"Cheerfully."
The rest of the main house seemed deserted. The higher we got, the more nervous I got. The stranger our surroundings got, too. The carpets were so plush under our feet they seemed rotten, like swollen sponges. Several of the household plants that the Tombs kept carefully manicured in various sidehalls had grown fetid, spilling out from their containers and crawling up the walls. One midget oak had burst its blue and white ceramic vase with an exuberance of root growth, and the branches scratched at the ceiling and walls with their dry leaves.
"It's a lively place," Wilson said.
"Clever. This isn't natural, is it?" I asked.
"Oh, definitely not natural." Wilson paused to examine the oak, brushing the enormous leaves with the back of his hand. "Perhaps Mr. Crane is some sort of nature enthusiast?"
"He didn't seem the type," I said. "And again, this isn't natural."
I pointed out a clock that hung from the wall of the hallway. The cogs had sprung free and unraveled into looping cords of ivy. As we watched, the pendulum burst like a seed pod, a thin fuzz littering the escapement as it collapsed.
"I'm getting nervous about breathing this in," I said.
"Don't be," Wilson answered cheerfully. "We've been breathing it in for most of the last half hour. If it's going to kill us, the damage is already done."
"Couldn't you lie or something? Pretend that it's perfectly safe?"
"You know better than that, Jacob. Come on."
We continued to the top floor of the main house. Since the decline of their fortune, many families had shut up unused areas of their vast manors, and Tomb was no exception. The last two levels of the house were sealed off. Stiff tarp covered the archways off the stairwell that would usually lead to those halls. I was tempted to cut them open and see what might be hidden beyond, what fecund growths had taken root among the linens and the dust. My urgency to get to Crane and end this kept my curiosity in check.
The fact that everything was closed up made finding the path to Crane's tower simple enough. His was the only hallway that was open, and his was the only door that hadn't been sealed. Odd that they would put him way up here, so far from his supposed charge. Then again, if a man like Ezekiel Crane was in my house, I would want as much distance between us as possible. Distance and padlocks.
There was no way we were going to be able to sneak up on him. The staircase was a tightly coiled stone spiral, the steps worn by years of use. One of the original structures of the manor, I suspected, from back when the estates of the Founding Families were by necessity armed fortresses, rather than luxurious manors. Our feet were loud on the steps, and there was no other sound to mask them. Wilson led the way, walking carefully, his spider talons touching the walls on either side of the passage. Our hope was that he would be able to react more quickly to an ambush or sudden encounter. We needn't have worried about it.
Crane's room was empty. The walls were lined in empty cages and bird shit. The center of the room was occupied by a narrow bed, pushed up next to a desk. Books and papers were strewn across the desk, held in place by dripping candles and empty bottles of wine. It was a familiar scene. This time I was able to get a g
ood look at the contents of the desk. I didn't understand them, other than to be sickened.
"Anatomical drawings, diagrams. Something that looks very much like a template for cogwork of some nature," Wilson said, flipping through the papers. "A genus of flora, overlaid with the typical mortal tree. Unusual stuff. Doesn't explain the ivy clock, or his dead friends in the river."
"Is there anything we can use? Any clue as to what he might be after?"
Wilson shook his head grimly. "Hard to say. Maybe if I had a week, or a month, I might be able to glean something from all this. This is not anything I'm familiar with. Not a traditionally taught science, whatever it is that he's practicing."
"Take what you can. What you think looks promising." I glanced at the stairway we had just left. This was the only way out. "He's downstairs somewhere. I don't really care why he's doing what he's doing. I just want to stop him. Maybe if we..."
I drifted off. A very old piece of paper hung, framed, above the door. I reached up and took it down, laying it on the desk.
"Lettering's faded. This thing is old." Wilson picked it up. No dust on the frame, or on the glass. He squinted at the paper. "Like, 'historical document' old. And the language is hard to make out."
"Is it Celestean?" I asked, averting my eyes.
"No, no. Nothing that exotic. Just old. Letters change, over time. Descenders shorten, people get lazy with..."
"What does it say, Wilson?"
He spun it around to face me.
"You're an adult. You can read."
It took me a second to adjust to the lettering, like he said. It was some sort of official document. There was a crumbling seal at the bottom, and many signatures in florid hands. But I picked out the words I needed.
"It's a Right of Name. These are supposed to be engraved in stone, or steel. I've never seen one on paper."
"Perhaps the original was destroyed. And the name, Maker. I've never heard of them."
"That's not possible. Every Founder's history is preserved by the Council. This must be some kind of forgery."
"Or," Wilson said, "the original was destroyed."
Things fell into place.
"There aren't many families left from that time," Wilson said. "But two of them -"
"- are Burn and Tomb," I finished for him, then ran to the door. The Tombs weren't just left from that time. Patron Tomb was still alive back then. Back before he took on his cloak of mausoleum, before his family came to depend on him staying alive to keep their seat. He was the last living link to that time. He might know who this guy was, who the Makers were, and why they were purged.
And unless I missed my guess, the Patron was alone right now, in the care of the last remaining scion of the Maker line.
Chapter Thirteen
His Son, His Revolver
I HAD ONLY been to the Patron's chamber once before, and that was in the middle of an emergency. I remembered a secret door, and a stone corridor that snaked between the walls, but very little about the exact route. It took a while before I realized that the dining room where all those house guard had died was the room I was looking for. It took a fair amount of banging on walls before we found the false panel, and then some violence to get it open. While we were tearing the plaster from its moorings, a distant siren started up, cutting through the quiet air that hung over the city. Wilson and I exchanged a look. He rushed to the window.
"Someone else's problem," I said, getting back to the door. "We have enough on our plate."
"There's smoke in the air. Black column rolling straight up into the sky," he said.
"I don't care, Wilson. We need to get downstairs."
"Jacob." Something in his voice. "It's coming from the direction of the Burn estate."
That stopped me. I went to the window, numbly. Sure enough, there was a single column of smoke, black as night, about where the Manor Burn should be. Where home should be. Even against the dark clouds of the storm, it stood out like an inky tornado.
"Someone else's problem," I said again, more quietly. "Let's get downstairs."
The last of the panel came away, revealing the stone corridor I remembered from two years ago. Angela and I had fled down here when the Manor Tomb had been attacked. That time it was because some rogue agent in the Council had wrested control of the Badge and was using it to lay siege to the Tombs. I had been the ultimate target of that attack. Angela shot me, to keep them from catching me.
I realized I was lost in memory, just standing dumbly in the mouth of the corridor. "Come on," I said, and rushed forward. But it was dark, and after about twenty feet we had to turn back and scrounge up a frictionlamp to see where we were going. Not a good start to our heroic charge into the depths of the Manor Tomb.
The corridor was much as I remembered. Narrow and dusty, with smaller branches that snaked between the walls of the house. There were listening posts, places where a dozen vents brought voices from different rooms to a single location. We went by several of these, each one haunted by the chaotic activity apparently still going on in the Manor Tomb. There were sounds of fighting, of terror, of screaming and the multitudinous flapping of wings. The Manor was under attack, it seemed, although Wilson and I had seen no one on our flight from the tower to here. Maybe these were the ghosts of disasters past, trapped between the walls and echoing only in these secret paths. Either that, or things were getting violent fast.
We finally came to the stairs down. These I remembered. They were just as narrow as the rest of the corridor, but much older. I suspect that, like the tower we had just left, this part of the house went back to the days of the founding of Veridon. I wondered if this had once been a mausoleum of sorts, apart from the main house. There were stories of the origin of the Tomb name, but I always assumed they were just stories.
I led Wilson down the stairs. Just as I remembered, there was a wide door at the bottom, but this door was different, a new door. Two years ago a mad angel had pursued me here. When I escaped, he was beating a hole through the original door. This one was iron, bound in arms of slithering cogwork.
"Now that's a complicated lock," Wilson said, admiringly.
"Fall in love later. Just open it."
"Oh, there's no chance of that." He placed a hand against the iron door and whistled. "These bands here, they're unformed foetal metal. They haven't been given a complete pattern. They'll only open for someone who has the completed pattern. They probably have to remake them every time they open this door. Nasty."
"Which means they haven't been opened since they were remade," I said. "Meaning he's not down here."
"I guess not," Wilson backed away from the door, sticking his hands into his pockets. "At least the Patron is safe, right?"
"Small comfort," I said. "So what now?"
"Now you will go inside, Jacob." We whirled to face the voice behind us. It was Crane. He stood on the stairs, his shoulders swarming with crows. He held a shotgun in his long, thin hands. "And we will have a little talk with the Patron."
"I have trouble believing that Angela gave you a key to this room," I snarled. I thought for a second about going for the revolver at my hip, but his finger was on the trigger of his shotgun.
"She didn't have to. I made the lock." He smiled and touched a broach at his throat. A single beetle rose from his chest and flew above us, smacking loudly into the door. Its chitinous shell dissolved and melted into the bands of foetal metal. The whole door sagged, then settled into its tracks. "Give it a push, will you, son?"
Wilson turned and gave the door a shove. It slid smoothly into the wall. The room beyond was dark, except for a single light that hung over the Patron. I remembered the room being bowl shaped, like an auditorium. The Patron sat at the bottom of the bowl, his body preserved inside a living coffin, shaped like a giant head looking up at the ceiling. The light hung just over the metal forehead, and rows of glittering lines ran all around the bowl, like concentric bands of jewels set into the sides. I raised the frictionlamp and stepped in
side.
The dead Fehn, their faces white, their black eyes shimmering in the light, turned to face me. Hundreds of them. They stood shoulder to shoulder, back to chest, like a silent congregation. Their eyes looked past me to Crane, and there was a flash of hatred, then passivity. They turned back to the Patron.
"So, you see, I no longer really need this," Crane said, swinging the shotgun like a child's bat. He tapped me on the shoulder with the barrel. "If you'll go on down, please. Time to say 'hi' to our friend the Patron Tomb."
The dead parted for us, without word or signal. I wondered what sort of control Crane had over them. How he maintained it. He seemed cheerful enough, not under any sort of strain. There was a tightness in the air, like static. I wondered if the storm outside was getting serious, or if something else was causing that. I glanced at Wilson and saw that his shoulders were hunched tightly beneath his coat. He looked terribly uncomfortable, like something was scratching at his nerves. A flash of his face in the blue-tinged light from the friction, and I realized that he looked sick.
"Everything okay?" I whispered.
"We're buried in a room under the Manor Tomb, surrounded by the recently dead. Also, this guy has a shotgun, but he doesn't seem to feel like he needs it. So I imagine we're in some serious shit. Other than that? Yeah, everything's great."
"Oh, well. Okay then. Long as you're feeling okay."
"You two," Crane said. "Like old lovers. Come, come, gather close."
Crane led us to the Patron's final home. It was as I remembered, although a great number of the tubes that once led from under the head had been replaced with clear glass pipes. They were flowing with something that looked like storm clouds. Pure foetal metal. I had seen something like this once before, under the Church of the Algorithm, feeding a partially dissected angel.
"So, Patron," Crane chirped. "How are we feeling?"
The Patron was enclosed in a giant head, iron and cold. It rested against the floor of the bowl, splintered wood around the edge like it had been dropped from some height. The eyes were half-open, their lids hanging over glass panes that revealed the central tank of the Patron's prison. The liquid there, once bright and green, was murky and clouded with sediment. I caught a glimpse of the body, pale and bloated in the suspension. Dark veins stood out on the flesh, like black veins in snow. The Patron did not answer Crane's question. For all I knew he was already dead.