Empire of Bones (Ashtown Burials #3)

by N. D. Wilson

  The apes were getting closer to the platform. And their eyes were never off of Antigone.

  “Well, Billy,” the speaker said, “who was right and who is dead? Should have stayed here with us. The Fat Betty has more than enough.”

  “Um,” Antigone said. “Can I put my hands down yet? Please. The apes are getting awfully close.”

  “The apes!” The loudspeaker cackled. “You’re worried about them? They’re just big cozy carpets, though they do stink in the rain. Jerome! Cadders! Jane!” The three apes sat down instantly, slouching over like beanbags. The biggest one snorted and began to pick its nose.

  Antigone sighed relief and lowered her hands. The rifle cracked again, and this time the grass kicked up between her feet.

  Antigone shrieked and hopped away. “What are you doing? Are you nuts? I asked if I could put them down!”

  “And I didn’t answer.” The speaker chuckled. “Keep ’em up until every one of you is out of the plane and showing me empty palms.”

  Antigone backed away from the plane, hands high, and nodded at Diana crouching inside the cabin.

  Diana exited, followed by Nolan, Horace, Katie, and Dan. Katie walked to Antigone and gripped her daughter’s elevated hand. Dan hopped back into the plane to get Pythia. A second later, he was back outside.

  “I’m sorry!” he yelled. “She’s not going to do it. I’ll have to carry her.” Without waiting for an answer, he dove back into the plane and emerged a moment later with his own hands held high and Pythia clinging to his back, her arms around his neck and her ropes of hair wound around his chest and shoulders.

  The silence was awkward. Antigone squinted up at the bridge, then cleared her throat to make introductions.

  “This is my mother, Katie Smith,” she said.

  “You mean Cataan, daughter of Cataan, of the Cataan people,” the loudspeaker barked. “Taken from her jungle city and the halls of her mothers by Lawrence Smith and Rupert Greeves. I know who she is.”

  “Well, you’re the first,” Antigone said. “Beside her is Diana Boone.” Diana smiled and waved slightly.

  “And you bring Nikales, the transmortal thief. I know that pitiful pale face.”

  At the word thief, Nolan hardened his eyes and lowered his hands.

  “Hands,” Antigone said. “Nolan …”

  “She knows bullets won’t stop me,” Nolan growled.

  The loudspeaker barked on. “And Skelton’s short fool of a lawyer, John Horace Lawney the Seventh. He would be better tossed over the rail. But the real prize is at the end. You, the dark big lad, you can’t be Cyrus. What animal do you carry?”

  With his hands up, Daniel rotated so Pythia’s face was toward the bridge.

  “I’m Daniel Smith!” he shouted. “I’m sorry, she’s a little shy.…”

  A single burning leaf fluttered up on the breeze toward the bridge. The orange apes watched it drop into ash.

  The loudspeaker erupted with shrill feedback, and Antigone slapped her hands over her ears.

  “Pythia?” the voice squealed. “The Pythia? However did—Hands down, hands down!” Something thumped loudly against the microphone. “Come in! Come in! Bring her in now!”

  Antigone lowered her hands slowly. The huge apes hadn’t budged from around the platform.

  “Still want Antigone to go first?” Nolan asked Diana. He stepped forward and dropped three feet off the platform while the massive orangutans watched. He curled his upper lip and showed them his teeth. The apes inched backward. Then a whistle chirped from the loudspeaker and all three orange carpets turned and began moving slowly away toward the trees.

  Nolan smiled up at the bridge, his old worn eyes shining in the sun. “Look who spooked the monkeys. Come on, then, let’s go have words with Madame Crazy and be done with this.”

  Led by Nolan, the pack of seven wound their way through the gardens, past the diligently grazing sheep with the curly horns, and down a steel path between the trees. A wide metal door into the bridge was propped open. Stairs ran up, and stairs ran down. Nolan began to climb.

  “Down.” The voice popped out of a small round speaker in the wall just above their heads. Antigone, still holding her mother’s hand, squeezed in surprise.

  “Ow,” Katie said, squeezing back. Her eyes were wide and worried. She ran her free hand over her short black hair. “Tigger, I don’t like this. Why are we here? Why would Rupert send us to this place?”

  Tigger. Cyrus would have gotten a slap for using the name, but as far as Antigone was concerned, her mother could call her Steve and she wouldn’t care.

  “We’ll see,” Antigone said. Nolan and Dan were already leading the way down the steel stairs, and Diana was right behind them.

  Horace looked at Katie, then Antigone. He polished his half-moon glasses on the hem of his vest as he descended the wide stairs beside them. “I have to admit to the same worry myself,” he said. “Lemon Chauncey was a notoriously unstable and completely paranoid Sage prosecuted for witchcraft and unlicensed research into several extremely disturbing subjects. Skelton trusted her only because of her intense paranoia and her loathing of all living people.”

  “Why did she trust Skelton?” Antigone asked.

  Horace sighed. “You’re in it. He got her safely out of Ashtown and asked her to look after this boat. As for the greenery, Skelton required that I purchase whatever she wanted to make herself comfortable on board for the long term. The full contents of several exotic nurseries were delivered to her in a Japanese port. I never expected to see what she had done with it all.”

  Antigone stopped, and her mother stopped beside her. Horace continued two more steps and then paused, looking back up.

  “So this boat …,” she said.

  “Is yours,” Horace said. “Congratulations. You own a freighter turned floating greenhouse. And you and your brother are now landlords to one of the craziest women I had hoped to never see again.”

  “Tigs!” Dan’s voice floated up the stairwell. “You’re wanted.”

  One steel flight of stairs down, a metal hatch was open in the wall.

  Dan—still carrying Pythia—and Nolan stood on either side while Diana leaned through, looking around.

  “Out!” a speaker barked. “Send in the Smith girl and the oracle. The rest of you skunks continue down the stairs. There’s food and drink one deck down.”

  “Bad idea,” Diana said. “Tigs, I wouldn’t. Look in there.”

  The steel room was a maze of loaded shelves. Grill-covered lights were mounted on the low ceiling just inches above the crowded upper shelves. From where Antigone was standing, she could see little armies of jars filled with … what? Jam? Maybe. But some looked more like the jars that had held organs in formaldehyde in her science classrooms at her old school. Beyond them, she could see books and bones and bugs pinned to boards and racks of knives and rolled-up rugs.

  “What else am I supposed to do?” Antigone said.

  “Go back to the plane?” Dan suggested.

  Nolan yawned. “I’ll go in and find her,” he said quietly. “She can shoot me as much as she likes. I tie her to a chair, then the rest of you join us for a chat.”

  “I’ll go in with you,” Dan said.

  “Sure,” said Nolan. “Just as soon as you’re bulletproof.”

  Pythia dropped to the floor. A leaf fluttered up out of her hands and floated away down the next flight of stairs. FOOD flickered on it in fiery letters.

  The little oracle straightened up beneath her mass of hair and stepped through the open hatch and into the maze.

  Antigone hopped in after her. “I’ll be fine. I’m her landlady.”

  thirteen

  TENANTRESS

  THE SHELVES WERE OVERCROWDED in the same way that a brick wall is overcrowded with bricks. The shelving itself was virtually irrelevant, like a stencil used for the construction of solid walls. At some point, Antigone thought, they had to have bent under the weight of it, but now the weight of it was actu
ally holding the shelves up. It was hard to comprehend this much … stuff … being so intensely neat and organized.

  At first, what Antigone had thought of as the jam section had turned out to be the jar section. Strawberry jam was packed in tight next to jars of seeds, jars of tiny screws, jars holding animal—she hoped—eyeballs, jars holding yellow Lego bricks, and jars holding shells, ash, and colored sand. But regardless of the contents, every jar was the exact same size, with the same company name on the glass, turned at the exact same angle. Then came the slightly larger jars. Then the coffee cans. Then a whole section just of books with blue spines, organized in ascending height. Then red books. Then green books. It didn’t matter if they were children’s titles that Antigone recognized or bizarre titles clearly taken from some O of B collection, they were all sorted by color and size.

  Pythia didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. She moved slowly but steadily, trailing her hair behind her as she rounded corners or made hard turns. She knew where she was going.

  They passed a solid wall of rolled-up newspapers, next to a section of densely packed fish bones, stacked like tiny logs, beside shelves of peach pits.

  And then came the skulls.

  Huge flat-faced orangutan skulls in ascending size. Below them, skulls that looked far too human and began much too small.

  Antigone hopped up closer to Pythia, her mouth suddenly dry. The oracle strolled between them without a glance, but her hair seemed to notice, to tense and slightly tighten.

  “Stop.”

  Two metal chairs sat in the aisle. Antigone stopped and looked around until she spotted the nearest speaker in the low ceiling. Pythia did not stop. She walked between the chairs and took a right turn around a shelf loaded with stacks of loose paper, sorted in towers by matching width.

  “Stop!”

  Pythia still didn’t stop. Antigone hesitated and then ran after her.

  “No! No! NO!” the speakers screamed. But it wasn’t just the speakers now. The human voice was not far away. Pythia was accelerating, rounding another corner, and then a quick switchback turn; she was shooting the maze without hesitation, like one who knew and had always known.

  The speakers squealed. Something crashed to the ground, and Antigone followed Pythia through a small gap in a shelf loaded with little swaths of fur artificial enough to go on teddy bears at a carnival.

  They stood together in a small square room, walled in completely with shelves. A little mattress was on the floor, tidily made up with a pillow and one sheet. Black-and-white security monitors were stacked in a square at the foot of the bed, and an old-fashioned microphone was perched on top. A perfectly symmetrical arrangement of orange blossoms sat in a tiny vase on the floor beside the bed. In the corner, where a wall of coffee mugs met a bank of file cabinets, beside a tipped-over chair and a dropped long-scoped rifle, a woman was curled up in a ball, shaking. Her hair was blond going on silver, she was wearing old but clean coveralls, and her face was hidden in her arms.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “Please. Go away.”

  Pythia dropped a fiery leaf onto the floor in front of the woman’s face.

  NO

  The woman flinched. She sat up and scooted toward her bed. But only for a second. Then she dove back and frantically swept at the ash on the floor, dumping it into her pocket as she did. Finally satisfied, she set her chair back up and dropped into a crouch behind it, peering over the top with muddy green eyes nested in creased, sun-darkened skin.

  “What do you want?” she asked, eyes darting to Antigone. “Why are you here? Why now? Where is your brother? Why do you have the oracle? How did you find her? Will she answer my questions?”

  “Ms. Chauncey,” Antigone said, “Skelton told us to trust you. And we need your help. Everyone says you know a lot.”

  “Questions,” the woman said. “Mine for yours. One for one. We take turns, and you stop looking at me, you little Cataan devil with your Cataan devil eyes. Your eyes are cold midnight. I don’t like eyes. Turn your back.”

  Antigone began to turn, but Pythia grabbed her and shook her heavy head. Pythia sat down, crossing her legs. Her hair swept backward, away from her face and her body. It wound around and around itself, forming a single thick braid down the center of her back. Antigone’s mouth opened in surprise. Pythia always hid herself. She was always in the shadowy shelter of her hair, and Antigone thought of her as slightly more wild than woman. But with her hair back, she wasn’t a woman at all. She was a girl—young and pretty with smooth brown skin, wearing a simple brown dress with no sleeves that could have been made from a potato sack. But her eyes were what grabbed Antigone. Without the shadow of her hair, they were wide and bright and warm, like … like burning leaves. Antigone had seen them like that before, but not often.

  Pythia was showing herself to Lemon, and waiting for Lemon to return the favor. After a moment, Antigone lowered herself to the floor beside the oracle and crossed her legs.

  “Fine,” Antigone said, digging the slip of paper from her pocket. “One for one. But we look at you as much as we want. And my eyes aren’t cold. I’m not an Eskimo. My mom was from the jungle. Now, you ask first.”

  Lemon Chauncey sniffed and shifted her weight, rocking back and forth in her crouch behind the chair.

  “What happened to Billy?” she asked. “Is he dead?”

  Antigone sighed. Then she nodded. “He came to a motel where I lived with my brothers. Some of Phoenix’s men tracked him down. They killed him and burned our motel down. I was with him when he died.”

  Antigone saw tears in the woman’s eyes. They glanced at Pythia, waiting.

  TRUTH

  The leaf and its burning word floated over the chair and Lemon Chauncey snatched it out of the air, letting it turn to ash in her palm and then dumping it into her pocket.

  Antigone glanced down at her list. She might as well start at the top. Radu’s Dragon. She exhaled, trying not to grow tense. Feeling nervous was just silly. He wasn’t here. He was far away. He couldn’t touch her.

  “Tell me about the dragon in Radu Bey’s chest.” Her voice was steady, and she was glad. “The one he turns into.”

  Lemon grabbed the back of the chair, and she rose slowly. She pushed her silver-blond hair back behind her ears with rough-skinned hands, revealing a thin nose that turned up at the end and wide smooth cheeks speckled slightly with age. Creases clustered around her eyes. She was striking—pretty, even—but lost.

  “Radu,” she whispered. “The last Dracul. He and his dragon are gone. Bound. Buried. The Captain, your Captain, the noble traitor Smith, he ended the dragon gin.”

  Antigone scrunched her face. She didn’t want to get off track with the big bad news that Radu Bey was probably running amok in New York City that very minute.

  “Just tell me about his dragon,” Antigone said. She felt her throat tightening and she couldn’t stop it. She could see the chains he had used as whips, and the writhing dragon under the skin of his chest—the dragon that had taken over his body. It had almost eaten her just months ago, and now it was loose. They were going to have to beat it somehow. Maybe this woman had a jar of magic bullets next to the paper clips. Something. Anything. There had to be a way. Or … or she didn’t want to think about the other option. She cleared her throat.

  “Everything you know, please,” Antigone said. “Is there any way to kill it?”

  Lemon’s eyes locked on Antigone’s, but she seemed unaware that she was being seen, unaware of everything.

  “Everything I know of Radu begins with a scroll,” Lemon said, “written by the great Bar Yochai, who claimed to have been visited by the shade of Enoch himself.”

  “I don’t know who those people are,” Antigone said. “If you could—”

  But Lemon cut her off.

  “Listen, daughter of Cataan, heiress of Skelton. Radu Dracul, son of Vlad the Second, brother to Vlad the Third, was a powerful blood sorcerer and necromancer, one who feared no darkness. He was
sent to the courts of the sultan, and among the royal magicians, he heard whispers of the old powers bound by Solomon and long hidden away by Hebrew wise men and Persian magi. With his bloodthirst, Radu became Bey of the sultan’s armies, and he conquered many lands, always searching the synagogues while his men pillaged cities. He did much evil among the rabbis but loosened no tongues. With the armies of the curved sword behind him, he spilled rivers of blood and threw down walls until he found what he sought, sealed in the caves of an island on an Ethiopian lake, hidden with relics of the lost temple, guarded by African knights, claiming long descent from Levi. Radu cut them down but took only one relic—the scroll of Bar Yochai, the tale of the dragon gin, sealed by Solomon and cast into the sea, sought only by fools and dark ones.”

  Lemon was silent, staring straight ahead. Lost in memory and story, she moved around her chair and sat, with her rough gardener’s hands restless on her knees.

  “I am a Sage. I read and I do not forget. I found the accounts written by Vlad the Fourth, nephew of the great Radu Bey. He numbered the gin that had been recovered from the sea. He told Bar Yochai’s tale, how he had stolen the gin jars and lamps and stones from kings and emperors and warlocks, and where he had hidden them. He told how the Draculs quested alone for them, how they were found, and the name of the beast Radu claimed for himself. He told of the blood magic Radu performed, and the union made between man and dragon gin.” Lemon looked straight into Antigone’s eyes. “Radu’s dragon is called Azazel. He feeds on pain. His wings and his flesh were taken and destroyed by Solomon. Azazel needs a body. Radu is that body. Radu needs power and undying life. Azazel is that life and, when fed, provides power beyond any man. The two became one. You have asked and I have answered. Now tell me how the oracle comes to be with you.”