Empire of Bones (Ashtown Burials #3)

by N. D. Wilson

  Cyrus licked his lips. The cook’s smile widened.

  “There’s some who might not trust old Ben,” Sterling said. “But you can, Cyrus Smith. You can trust me with your life. If I wanted harm done to you, it would have been done long ago when that scareder, younger you was tied up in my cellar and my poisoned sauce was dropping bodies all around Ashtown.”

  “How do you know about the plane?” Cyrus asked. “How did you know to find me down here?”

  “A cook rises early,” Sterling said. “I saw your plane. I saw Flint drop. I saw you blaze away across the lake.” He smiled. “And I know Rupert Greeves. I know him well. He wouldn’t set a clatter at the front door unless he was coming in the back.”

  “But the tunnels,” Cyrus said. “How did you know we’d come in here?”

  “How many unguarded doors into Ashtown do you think there are?” Sterling asked. “Not many. The Avengel would know them, and so does an old smuggler turned cook. I was creeping in and out of Ashtown when I was just a wee two-legged Acolyte, importing things that may not have been strictly permitted on the Estate. There are other routes, but you were coming from the water and Rupert Greeves wasn’t likely to risk the Crypto zoo.”

  “Phoenix’s men,” Cyrus said. “The Reborn. How did they get in?”

  Sterling’s eyes narrowed, and his smile disappeared. “They’re not that bold yet. They keep to the outskirts. Bellamy Cook and his regular old-fashioned human thugs are the worst you’ll find inside the walls. Those gillies will be waiting at your plane, as sure as sunshine, they will.” Sterling winked. “But Big Ben is here to warn you.”

  Cyrus’s mouth hung open. Sterling really didn’t know what had just happened? Hot anger surged up into Cyrus’s aching head. He tried to shout, and his voice rasped like it was passing through a saw in his throat.

  “Where do you think I was?” Cyrus yelled. “What do you think just happened? The alarm bells were ringing! Phoenix’s Reborn just firebombed a Brendanite chapel and murdered almost everybody. The Abbot is dead! Most of the monks are dead. Father Patrick the Cryptkeeper was there, but now he’s dead, too.”

  Sterling’s eyes narrowed in disbelief. “The gillies? Inside? Not Bellamy’s thugs? You’re sure?”

  Cyrus chewed back his anger, and his words came out hard, like stones. “Gills. Eyes like lizards. Bone tattoos. One had me by the throat. Yeah. I’m sure.”

  Sterling hissed through his teeth; then he looked up and down the narrow stone passage, his bells jingling against his beard as his head turned.

  “Rupert?” Sterling asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cyrus said. “But his body wasn’t there.” Cyrus moved to the tunnel mouth that led to the stairs, that he knew would take him down to the river. “I have to go. Rupe told me to get to the plane.”

  Sterling shook his head. “The harbor is swarming. I told you they found your plane. An ambush will be waiting. But if the Reborn are inside, you need to be outside these walls, lad, and that quicker than quick.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cyrus said. “I really can’t believe anything you say. For all I know, you brought the ‘gillies’ in yourself. Why are you even here?”

  Sterling grinned. “Why, Cyrus Smith, I thought you would have heard. I’m the cook.”

  Cyrus stared as the big man shifted his bulk on the two bent metal rods he used as legs. He was the cook? Again? Even after the poison? It didn’t make any sense. But at the same time, Cyrus’s mind drifted to the world’s most perfect biscuits. His stomach growled loudly.

  Sterling laughed. “I’ll take that as the greatest compliment a lad can give.”

  Cyrus moved into the tunnel mouth, feeling for the top of the stairs behind him with his toe. He couldn’t believe Sterling. He had to do what Rupert had told him to do. Rupert could be waiting for him right now. And if there was an ambush waiting instead, well, maybe Lilly the Bull would help out.

  “Don’t follow me,” Cyrus said. “I don’t want to kill you.”

  “You’re too kind,” Sterling said.

  Cyrus turned and took one step down the dark stairwell. Below him, he heard shouting. Men cursed. Wet feet slapped on stone.

  Sterling’s hand landed on Cyrus’s shoulder.

  “Douse the snake light and follow me,” Sterling whispered. “Now. I don’t want them killing you.”

  eleven

  PLUMM

  PLUMM, NEBRASKA, had been nothing but a railroad town. Some folks had worked on the farms that surrounded Plumm on every side, tilling and planting and cutting. Some folks had worked in town, trimming hair, scrambling eggs, making soap, plucking chickens, butchering beef, selling things like radios and milk shakes and couches to each other out of little brick storefronts with big windows and sideways signs that hung over the dusty sidewalks and had all been painted by the same old man who also welded the handrails for everyone’s front steps. A few more people worked in government, telling everyone else where they couldn’t park their cars or graze their horses, and what music was allowed at the one school dance that happened each year, and how long after dark people could stay in the tiny Founder’s Park with the cracked statue of bald old Edward Plumm.

  But most folks had worked in the rail yards and in the warehouses beside the rail yards. Big trains had rumbled through Plumm, trains heading all the way up to Chicago, trains miles and miles long, loaded with cattle and corn. When those trains left Plumm, they were loaded with even more corn, spouted down from the big gray silos at the edge of town, and with pallets and pallets of Holy Soaps, made in iron vats with real animal fat and secret ingredients guaranteed to increase holiness after ten uses, and scented with things like lavender and honey and vanilla.

  When Plumm was at its biggest, 251 people called the town home, and ten tons of Holy Soaps were loaded onto the trains every year. A woman named Sissy Plumm lived alone in a big brick house on top of the only hill. She owned Holy Soaps, designed fresh Holy Soaps, and invented new sins that Holy Soaps could cure. She never married and never had children, but one day a train brought her the pieces of a radio tower, and a pipe organ, and old silver microphones, and all put together, those were better than children. She started broadcasting the Holy Soap Soothing Lunchtime Purity Hour Radio Show from her living room, and everyone in Plumm, Nebraska, had to listen, and the mayor walked around at noon making sure that they did.

  But the trains stopped coming. Bigger silos were built in bigger towns, and they were filled with more corn. And people stopped listening and stopped cutting each other’s hair and selling each other milk shakes and making Sissy Plumm’s Holy Soaps. And no one cared what music was going to be played at the school dance or where their horses could graze and how late they could stay in the Founder’s Park. Because no one stayed in Plumm at all. Almost no one.

  Sissy Plumm stayed in her big brick house, and she played her organ and she disobeyed her own rules, but then she washed her hands with some of the thousands of pounds of Holy Soap that would never get loaded onto trains, and every day at noon she sang her songs and taught her lessons about the dangers of sneezes and walking too quickly on Sundays. Every day she shared her wisdom on the Holy Soap Soothing Lunchtime Purity Hour Radio Show.

  Until one day, she didn’t.

  The morning sun crept through tattered lacy curtains and found an old bed with four wooden posts carved with birds and flowers and rabbits, and on the bed, the sun found a boy with light skin and black hair. Oliver Laughlin was on his back and his eyes were open. But Oliver was new. He no longer looked out of his old eyes. He no longer thought with his old mind. A broken bamboo cane was in his hands, and the silver knob on the end was open, revealing a large tooth so dark it looked like a triangular hole in the sunlight, like a tiny door into some other reality, distant and cold. Phoenix pressed the tooth against his young new lips, savoring the cool electricity it sent into him. His new existence was more complicated than he would have liked, but there was such excitement in youth, such freshness in every nerve
ending. How his grandnephew could have been such a pasty, mopey boy, he couldn’t imagine. The lad had senses almost as sharp as some that Phoenix had designed himself, and that was even before Phoenix’s extensive renovations after moving in. Oliver’s mind had speed, too. Nothing like the speed of thought Phoenix had managed in his last body while wearing the Odyssean Cloak, but still, it had been a stronger starting point than he had expected.

  Phoenix had overhauled his pale grandnephew in a shallow pool, in an abandoned factory, pouring force into wires and needles, violently reweaving every joint and bone and muscle and organ, sharpening and grinding the mind, heightening senses well beyond human levels, beyond most bestial levels. Except for smell. Smells were intrusive. He didn’t want them, and he didn’t need them. He had people to smell for him.

  And then, when Oliver had lain in that pool, still and cold and broken, when his heart had stopped and his mind was void and his soul had fled, Phoenix had left behind his old ashen body, and he had entered his nephew.

  There had only been one oversight: allergies. Phoenix had never before known the itching, sneezing torture of hay fever, and so he hadn’t thought to search his grandnephew for that particular flaw. And so far, fixing the allergic glitch while living inside the Oliver body had been beyond him. After two months spent surrounded by fields, he hated hay fever almost more than he hated the Smiths.

  Phoenix rocked off of the bed and his young feet found the floor. He faced an antique dressing mirror with speckled flaws in the glass. A tall shirtless boy with pale skin and symmetrical veins on his arms stared back at him. It was strange, this Oliver self of his, being a boy. Having two arms again and a mind that tried to move in straight lines. He brushed back his thick black hair and stared into the dark owlish eyes he had molded for himself, eyes that could see bright color in the faintest moonlight. There was an extra membrane hidden beneath the lids, tucked away for when he needed it, a lens for use in water. He blinked it now and smiled at the ticklish sensation on his eyeballs. He had set Oliver’s gills low on the neck, just above his shoulders, in case he might ever need to hide them beneath a collar. He had decided against the photosynthetic skin for himself. The added energy gleaned from light was interesting, but not so enticing that he wanted to live his life tinted green.

  Phoenix contracted his chest and torso, his abs and shoulders and arms. His lean body knotted up and vibrated like a plucked string. His veins rippled like whips beneath his skin. Grinding his teeth, he forced the tightness even further, into pain, into agony. He felt the scream jump up inside his throat and he smiled it back down, relaxing. The young muscles were only just beginning to reach the potential Phoenix had planned for them. The old Phoenix had shed his white coat and become monstrous to achieve strength, but this young Phoenix, fast and slight and fresh, already had the strength of an ape in his grip.

  And of course, he’d narrowed Oliver’s nose a bit. He’d never liked that brat’s nose.

  Phoenix flipped the broken cane and caught it, smiling. It was good being young. It was something he could happily be forever. And he would have done just that, infusing Oliver with the transmortality of Gilgamesh or even that red pig Enkidu before taking the boy’s body for his own. But the Smiths had just managed to muck things up before he had been able to. No matter. Transmortality could wait. He couldn’t be killed while he held the tooth anyway. He would let his Oliver body grow another inch or two before he captured an appropriately strong transmortal and stole his life from him. But the Smiths’ meddling must be stopped now. Their role in Phoenix’s story needed a dark and painful close.

  First, they had taken the tooth from Skelton, along with everything else Skelton had hidden from Phoenix in those final years. They’d killed Maxi and burned the arm off the Old Phoenix when Ashtown was as good as his. They’d taken back their father’s body just two months ago. They’d helped destroy the Odyssean Cloak. They’d prevented Oliver’s transmortality. They’d taken his oracle, and they’d torched his cigar factory. He’d liked that factory. He’d expected to do a great deal of work there. Instead …

  Phoenix turned away from the mirror and jerked back the lacy curtains. He was looking down over the tiny, crumbling town of Plumm, Nebraska.

  Phoenix tapped the black tooth on the glass. Then he dragged it, watching glass powder rain from the sharp groove he was carving. The Smiths were meddlesome, and for that, he was grateful. They sparked a little extra desire deep inside him. It kept things personal.

  Let the transmortals tear cities down. Let Bellamy Cook kick every brick of Ashtown into the lake. Let Radu Bey gut the Avengel and feast on the Sages if he liked. Phoenix had promised himself the Smiths, and promises to himself were the only kind of promise he ever kept.

  The Smiths were out there. Somewhere. Following Skelton’s steps. Collecting tools and weapons and charms that the old thief had hidden from him.

  Phoenix had no plans to kill them. No. The Smiths deserved to experience many, many slow transformations before death could even be discussed.

  Oliver Laughlin’s lips tightened in sudden amusement. At some point, he would design a spouse for himself. He would use a girl as clay and mold her into the mother of a truly new race. Why not the Smith girl? The boy could be carved and hacked and modified into something barely breathing and barely human. But the girl, why not make her more than perfect? She could be his Eve.

  The door to the bedroom opened and a tall redhead in jeans and a white tank top stepped inside. He was one of the Reborn, greenish beneath freckles. His gills were high, just beneath his ears, and the bone tattoos on his arms were striped with precise symmetrical veins. His blinking blue eyes had the odd horizontal pupils of a goat.

  “I thought I should wake you, Father.”

  “A statement,” Phoenix drawled, “that implies I was asleep.”

  “I’m sorry. You have been sleeping more.…”

  “I’ve been growing. Boys of the age of the one I now inhabit tend to have growth spurts. Boys whom I have modified as extensively as this one can expect to have even more. Am I asleep now?”

  “Father—”

  “I am not asleep.” Phoenix turned. He was at least eight inches shorter than the man, but the redhead retreated a step.

  “Word from Ashtown,” the man said. “That’s all. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Indeed,” Phoenix said. He tucked the bamboo cane into his belt, slipped on a shirt, and began working on the buttons. “That’s very thoughtful of you. And what might that word from Ashtown be, or are you saving it for later?”

  “Six Cryptkeepers were with the monks like Bellamy said they would be. But not just them. Rupert Greeves was there. And the Smith boy. They smelled him.”

  Phoenix raised Oliver’s eyebrows and waited. “And?”

  “And six of ours went down.”

  “Six? Who cares about six? I can make six more of you between breakfast and brunch.”

  “My brothers killed five of the Cryptkeepers and all the monks they saw. Greeves made it out, but they’re tracking him.”

  “I’m sure they are,” said Phoenix.

  “They have his plane, but he never went back to it.”

  Phoenix nodded. Then he walked out the door and down a hall and into a living room with black-and-white portraits on the walls beside framed cross-stitched lists of rules, and filthy furniture, and a moldy rug, and boxes of soap stacked in towers. The redhead followed him along the dust-free path on the hardwood floor where Phoenix always walked, past silver microphones hanging from the ceiling, and a pipe organ, and the skeletal remains of a woman in a high-necked satin dress slumped onto the keys, buried in a shallow grave of dust.

  At the wide oak front door, Phoenix stepped into sandals and walked out of the big brick house and onto the only hill in Plumm, Nebraska. The brightness of the morning sun forced his eyes shut, to give his oversize pupils a chance to adjust. Then Phoenix moved down the steps and onto the broken sidewalk, which ran beside a stre
et that was more weeds than pavement. He enjoyed taking crisp, swift steps and not having a limp, but longer legs would be nice. He looked forward to it.

  “Father,” the redhead said behind him. “One more thing. When they got to the chapel, Greeves was talking to the monks about Skelton’s map.”

  Phoenix wheeled around, suddenly a snarling old man caged inside a boy. Decades of fury poured out of his new eyes, and his lip curled as he spoke. “One more thing? That is the thing, fool, that and the Smith boy. If your brothers return without a Smith or that map, I will gut them each myself.” He jerked the bamboo cane out of his belt and thumped the silver knob against the redhead’s chest. “How many of my sons are still there?”

  “Seven.”

  Phoenix clicked the knob open and pressed the tooth against the tall man’s neck, just beneath the gill. He wanted to slash. To kill. To end this fool like every other fool who dared frustrate him.

  “Then go join them,” he said. He reached out with his mind, trying to grope his way inside this oaf he had created, to make him feel fear, to make him shake with terror and awe, to motivate complete obedience.

  The redhead blinked in confusion and began to sweat.

  “Father, I’m … dizzy.”

  Phoenix lowered the tooth. He glared at his Oliver hand. He sneered at his Oliver mind. He was the Phoenix. He was the New Man. But this flesh was not yet what it needed to be. It channeled less power than his broken-down old carcass had. He needed time to train his Oliver self, to cut spirit doors inside his new skull so he could once again flood out into the skulls of others. Oliver could not be a mere flesh costume, a boy possessed. Phoenix knew he must truly be Oliver, and every cell of Oliver must be his.

  He had time. Plenty of it. Radu Bey and the transmortals were only getting started. But if Greeves had Skelton’s map, was that how they had found the cigar factory? Skelton had known that place. He had known many places.

  “William Skelton,” Phoenix said.