“Guards,” Ian said. “Jailers. Protectors. Different things to different people.” He steered me past a group of souls in Crimson Guard uniforms, their faces burned beyond recognition above their high collars.
“Those devices don’t look friendly,” I said, nodding to the contraptions in the guards’ hands. As the needles on the faces of the things spun, one of the black figures stepped forward and snatched a soldier out of line. I gasped as the figure got close enough to me to twinge the shoggoth venom that still lived in the bite on my shoulder, and Ian grabbed my arm, keeping me upright and moving.
“They’re meant to pick out things from the outlands that try to creep into the city and steal souls,” he said. “The decayed, the screaming sands, things like that.”
The figures surrounded the soldier, more of them melting in from the shadows as if they’d dripped like inkblots from a pen, and the soldier began to scream. The appearance of a human soul sloughed away, and underneath was a skeletal thing with long legs that bent the wrong way and arms that scraped the ground. Its hands ended in long, bladed things that lived where fingers should on a person, and its jaw was elongated like a cricket’s, underslung and full of teeth.
I braced myself to see carnage fly in every direction at the thing’s exposure, but the four figures simply pressed closer, and after a moment the skeletal creature screamed and slumped to the ground, nothing but a pile of bones.
“Decayed,” Ian said, and shivered as we walked on. “Hate those things.”
I was glad I couldn’t breathe, because I would have been hyperventilating with nerves. The figures had made short work of the monster disguised as a soldier’s soul, but knowing things like that could be creeping among us made it difficult to keep walking, never mind keep my cool.
“The guards didn’t seem too bothered by it,” I ventured. “The Decayed, I mean. If they protect the souls from creatures like that, they can’t be entirely bad news.”
“Oh, no,” Ian said. “They don’t protect a damn thing but themselves. The Faceless are the worst thing in this place, by far. They feed on the energies of the souls. That’s why they keep the monsters out—so the souls are all theirs for the taking.”
He turned us away from the flow of new souls, which headed toward a central square much like Banishment Square in Lovecraft, where more of the Faceless waited. I craned my neck and saw the Faceless packing the souls in, shoulder to shoulder.
“Get deep enough into the Catacombs and the Faceless disappear,” Ian said. “The old souls outnumber them, and they can fight back. They tend to stay up top, where the pickings are easy, and suck down the last little bit of life in a soul for their master.”
“Master? You mean someone controls those things?” I said, casting a wary glance over my shoulder. I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet such an individual.
“Something, and yes, they wear his sign,” said Ian. “The sign of the Yellow King. He controls the Deadlands. Nobody sees him, but they’re so scared of the Faceless they obey whatever he says.”
“Sounds like a charming fellow,” I said as we made a dozen more turns through a rat’s maze of alleys that took us deeper and deeper into filth and squalor.
“I wouldn’t know,” Ian said. “I’ve never met him and I’m never going to. It’s hard enough to dodge the Faceless without antagonizing them.”
“Has it always been like this?” I asked as the sky blinked out, replaced by rooftops and smoke. “Is this really all that’s waiting after you die? Torture and things like the Yellow King?”
Ian wrinkled his nose against the stale air. The smell was incredibly awful—one part butcher’s shop, one part burning slag and many parts human filth and misery.
“People talk, of course,” Ian said. “They say it wasn’t always like this, that it was a land like any other and if you had a good life, you’d have a good death. An afterlife. But the Yellow King is all anyone knows now.” He shrugged. “It’s not like I can pick up and leave.”
The idea of this being the end of the line made me sick to my stomach, so I changed the subject. “How far are we going?”
“Deep down,” Ian said. “The guts of this place. That’s where she lives.”
He twitched at every sound, as rats—or something—ran over our feet, and I tried to put aside my own doubts and fears and reassure him. I was better at that than reassuring myself.
“I do appreciate your coming with me,” I said. “More than you know.”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt when you figure out this insane plan of yours won’t work,” Ian muttered. “I told you, Aoife—dead is dead. The Deadlands can change you, but you’ll never escape them.”
“And I think differently,” I snapped. “I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”
“Until you realize that your Dean is stuck here,” Ian grumbled. “And you might be, too, living soul or no.”
“You must have been the life of every party before you expired,” I told him. “Just a joy to be around.”
“Archie had the same smart mouth,” Ian said. “Nice to see you take after him so much.”
We walked in silence after that, a silence that was thicker and tenser than before.
After a time, we reached a tumbledown brick well house, rife with rats and stink. A soul dressed in garb several centuries out of fashion dozed in the mud, snoring, with a bottle spilling sticky green liquid across the cobbles. Roaches scattered from the puddle when we approached.
“Finch,” Ian said, kicking the man’s foot. “Wake up.”
Finch grunted and sniffed, red-rimmed eyes slowly rolling from his considerable gut to Ian’s face. “You!” he exclaimed. “Stone and sun, Ian … we all thought you’d buggered off for the screaming sands.”
“I did,” Ian said. “But I’m back and I need to speak with her.”
Finch grinned, exposing just how bad dentistry had been at the time he’d died. “They all come back sooner or later,” he said. “Once you’ve had her in your skull you can’t stay away.”
“Enough,” Ian snarled, and I saw something flash across his face, which at first I thought was anger but soon realized was shame. Ian was ashamed to be here, ashamed of what was about to happen.
I resolved to keep a straight face, no matter what occurred, and not reveal any reaction. He was jumpy enough as it was.
“Anyway,” Ian said, “I’m not here for myself. I’m here for her.”
“Oho!” Finch staggered up, and I caught the stench of absinthe as his breath blasted in my face like a furnace. “A pretty little one, ain’t she, Ian?”
“You’ll want to take a step back,” I told him. “I may be little, but I’m not nice.”
Finch laughed, deep and full-bellied, and then kicked open the door to the well house. “Same as it ever was, Ian,” he said. “Go down till you can’t go no more, then follow the trail into my lady’s chambers. She’ll be so happy to see you.”
“You’re a sad, stupid drunk,” Ian growled. “You’ve never been anything but, in life and in death, and now you get to spend eternity knowing exactly how sad and stupid you are.”
“Maybe so,” Finch said, still grinning. “But at least I get to stay up here, Ian. I’m not like you. I don’t have to see her. I don’t need anyone but meself.”
I caught Ian by the arm as he started to lunge for the fat man. “Come on,” I said. “The quicker we get this over with, the quicker I’ll be gone and you can go back to whatever you were doing.”
“Just trying to exist,” Ian muttered as the well house door swung shut behind us and left us in darkness. Gray light filtered through the broken roof, and I could just make out a huge bucket, large enough to hold me, with rusted sides.
Attached to the well chain was a sort of cage, equipped with a lever to move the chain from inside. The well was dry, and I swore I could hear music from far below.
“I know the feeling,” I told Ian as we climbed into the cage. It swung back and forth at an alarmi
ng rate, but appeared solid under our feet.
I could be hurt here, I knew that much. My soul was floating free, and if it was injured, I might not be able to come back to myself. I held on to the side of the cage as Ian engaged the lever.
“You couldn’t possibly know what I’m going through,” he told me. “What it’s meant to try to not be snuffed out ever since I came here.”
“Really?” I faced him as the chain unfurled and lowered us into the well. A red glow rose from below, giving Ian’s features a hollow quality, as if he really were disintegrating like the souls we’d seen on the road. I tried not to look at him. It just made the bad feeling I’d had ever since I’d woken up on the road worse.
“You don’t know me,” I told Ian. “You don’t know what my life has been like. I’ve spent most of it just like you—trying to exist, hoping someone much more powerful wouldn’t snuff me out. The only difference is that I’m not afraid. I’m stronger than the people trying to keep me from existing.”
“That’s great,” Ian said. “But in this place, the things looking to take you out aren’t some men in jackboots and a few Fae who whisper sweet lies in your ear. In this place, there are horrors you can’t imagine.”
“I don’t know,” I said, still furious that he was writing me off as a silly child. I’d had enough of that back in Lovecraft. “My imagination is pretty vivid.”
“Well, after this you’re going to have enough fodder for a lifetime of nightmares,” Ian said. “So get ready.”
11
The Graveyard of Memories
WE REACHED THE bottom of the well after an interminable ride punctuated only by the creaking of the cage and the rattling of the chain.
Finally, the cage came to rest on the small bones of rats and other, larger creatures with more teeth.
I was just glad they were only bones, and not entire souls waiting for us in the blood-tinged darkness.
The lights came from dozens of aether bulbs hung along a tunnel that had been bored into the rock and bricked over, crooked and jagged, the ground covered with piles of masonry from cave-ins.
The red light made everything shift and shimmer before my eyes. I could barely make out Ian in his dark suit as he walked ahead of me down the tunnel.
I stepped over the broken bricks, and managed not to cry out when something scampered across my foot. The tunnel widened, and Ian slowed to a stop.
“Just through there,” he said. He sighed and looked at me. “You’re about to see a part of me I’m not proud of, Aoife.” He ran a hand over his face and looked pained. “If you make it back to Archie, don’t tell him about this. I beg you.”
“Of course not,” I said, reaching out to touch the back of his hand. Was that it? Ian was so ashamed of whatever he’d done for this oracle spirit that he didn’t want his brother knowing what his afterlife had become?
I tried to smile, to let him know I was on his side. “It’s all right, Ian. I don’t have time to go into detail, but I of all people know that sometimes you do what you think you have to.”
Ian visibly relaxed. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”
I looked ahead into the darkness. “So what do I need to know before I talk to her?”
“She wants what’s most precious to you,” Ian said. “And she’ll bleed you dry little by little because it amuses her to see you suffer. But you need her, and she knows it, because she has powers beyond anyone I’ve ever met.”
“All right,” I said, taking a step forward. “Thank you, Ian.”
I wasn’t above lying to myself, telling the nervous, scared Aoife who just wanted to wake up that there was nothing to worry about, nothing to getting this oracle to tell me where Dean was and how to bring him back to the Iron Land with me.
That Aoife wasn’t a very good liar, but at least she gave me a little bit of comfort as Ian and I walked ahead. I could believe her, for the few minutes this would take.
We were inside an empty cistern, a storage place for water in the old times of the city, which were long gone now. “What does a dead city need with water and sewers?” I asked Ian.
“It’s what you see,” he said. “All the souls see a different city. Some see a medieval keep, some see a sleek metropolis. You and I know what lives under the ground in the Iron Land, and we know to be wary of it. So you and I see a soot-ridden industrial wasteland, because that’s what my afterlife is and yours will be too—nothing but monsters and smoke and iron, as far as the eye can see.”
“Thanks again for cheering me up,” I told him. “Were you always this grim or was it brought on by death?”
“My brother often said I could make a clown weep tears of despair,” Ian said. “But Archie mostly liked to hear himself talk.”
“Clowns deserve it,” I said. “After all, they make everyone else weep tears of despair.”
The center of the cistern was built up out of junk that had fallen into the sewers: furniture, old metal cargo boxes, even the front end of a jitney, its windows papered over with illustrations from books depicting scared children fleeing through a darkened wood.
The jitney door was covered with a silk curtain, through which even more red light shone.
“What now?” I whispered to Ian.
“Now you come in,” a rich, velvety female voice intoned, and the curtain twitched aside of its own accord.
“Go,” Ian told me when I looked back at him in question. “What’s said inside is meant for you and you alone.”
I girded myself and climbed the rickety steps into the jitney. It had been cut in half by some explosive accident, and the back was built out of old doors, some with carved gargoyle faces, some made of metal bars, all covered in silken rags and clothes.
In front of them was a pile of filthy cushions, and on that pile sat a woman wearing a mourning dress, the full skirt, corset and bustle speaking to a distant, more refined time.
Her face was pale but much younger than I was expecting, and she peered at me from under a hat and veil trimmed in black raven feathers.
“You’re a sight, aren’t you?” she said. “In my day, a girl would never run about in trousers, with her hair unpinned.”
“In your day, you were still alive,” I retorted. “So I guess we’re even.”
Her face split in a wide grin, and she patted the cushion next to her. “Sit down, my dear. I rather like you. How did you find me?”
I sat, but not too close. “Ian helped me.”
“Ian Grayson?” Her laugh sounded like the rough, hungry call of a ghoul. “Well, well. There’s a name I never thought I’d hear again.”
“He’s my uncle,” I said, deciding the direct approach was best, “and I don’t think he likes you much.”
“You’re correct,” she said. “But there was a time that he liked me very much indeed. When he was my eyes and ears aboveground, my enforcer, convincing souls to come and give up part of themselves so I could stay alive. We were in love, and then he ran. So many love stories end that way.”
I looked her in the eye. She had the same deep black voids as the spirits who’d attacked me in the Iron Land. “I know all about Ian,” I said. “I’m not shocked, so why don’t you and I discuss what I came here to do?”
Her smile vanished. “You know, suddenly I don’t think I like you so much anymore.”
“I don’t like you either,” I said. “There, now we agree on something. Can I ask my question and get your price?”
She bared her teeth for a moment, but I kept my expression stony. I wasn’t going to play games with this woman. She wasn’t any different from the petty students at the Academy or the manipulative care-parents I’d had to live with. As long as I didn’t show weakness, she didn’t have power.
“What’s your name, girl?” she said at last.
“Aoife,” I answered. I dared her with my gaze to make some comment one way or the other. “What do they call you?” I countered.
She brought back the grin, hungrier and
less sincere. “My name is Ariadne,” she said. “In my time, there were legends of a maiden who led a hero through a maze to safety. That’s why my father named me so—a fair girl with courage and heart.”
“Looks like he went wrong somewhere,” I muttered under my breath.
“Now they call me Miss Spider,” she said. “No longer the way out of the maze but the monster at the center of it.”
I forced myself to keep sitting still, holding her gaze. “I’ve met a lot of monsters. I just want to ask my question and be on my way.”
“Ah,” Spider said, running a fingernail up my arm. Her touch was like fire. “But what do you have to offer me in return?”
“Whatever your price,” I said. “I’m willing to negotiate.” I decided to just plunge ahead and let it all out in one breath. “I’m trying to find a soul trapped here in the Catacombs. His name is Dean Harrison. He wasn’t supposed to die, and I need to find him.”
Spider tapped her chin, as if she were doing sums in her head. “To find one of the new dead among the clamoring horde … if he’s even still in one piece after the Faceless are done with him—”
“Don’t say you can’t do it,” I interrupted. “I know you can. Ian said if anyone could, it was you.”
“Ian always was a flatterer,” she said. “And you’re right, Aoife. I can do it. But I won’t. You don’t have anything that’s worth leading someone into the Catacombs. You don’t have anything that will make me go head-to-head with the Faceless.” She flounced her skirts and looked away. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“That’s crap,” I said loudly, standing up. “You can do it. You just don’t want to.”
“I’m a businesswoman.” Spider stretched out on the cushions, dislodging a cluster of roaches that skittered into the darkness. “And you’re just a sad little scrap with nothing I want.”
I had sworn I wouldn’t reveal what I was to anyone except Ian, but if this was the only way to Dean, I had no choice. “I’m not dead,” I told Spider.
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