The Mask Falling

by Samantha Shannon

  “Vous allez rester avec nous,” he snarled, trying to pin my arms. “They will kill you, and Le Vieux Orphelin needs you!”

  “Putain d’imbécile. Espèce d’enfoiré—” I thrashed against him. “They needed us. You thought we were here to rescue our friends and no one else? What kind of cold-hearted bastard are you, Léandre?”

  “I made the call. I told you. Here,” he said through his teeth, spit flecking my face, “I am king.”

  White-hot fury burned through my mind, erasing all caution, all restraint. I belted my spirit right across his dreamscape, sending him reeling away from me with a roar of surprised anger.

  My vision crackled. He lashed out and clipped my cheek with his knuckledusters—by accident or on purpose, I had no idea, but I shoved him in return and lunged for the ladder again. When he ripped me back down, we both hit the ground in a turmoil of fists and teeth and boots. I rolled over and bashed a knee between his legs, but he kept hold of me, trying to drag me away from the ladder, the voyants, the promise I had made them.

  He slammed me back into the wall. Hands around my wrists. My back arched and my chest bucked, and then I was a trapped animal, a savage bear, and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, had to tear myself free. My skull thudded into his, hard enough to rattle my teeth and make him bellow in pain. Blood poured down his chin. As we grappled wildly for the upper hand, I heard it. Felt it.

  Movement. In the air, in the ground. Somewhere in the dark, a breaking-away. A change. A crumbling. A wrongness. Léandre stiffened, his nostrils flaring.

  First came the roar. In the distance, then not in the distance. And then came the water.

  A wave of water.

  All at once, it was everywhere. Erupting through cracks in the right wall of the tunnel. Pouring from above us. The sound and taste of it moved my legs before my mind had fully grasped the danger. As fear electrified my bones, my nerves, it also shut my throat.

  Flood.

  Adrenaline booted me in the gut. In unison with Léandre, I ran.

  Water soaked my hair and clothes as we pelted down the Passage des Voleurs. It was behind us, around us, blinding me. Through the fog of sheer terror that blurred my thoughts, I remembered what Renelde had said. That the water in these tunnels must come from an underground spring or lake. (A lake. It had to be. An entire lake was coming in.) Reaching the top of Apollyon was our only chance. I screamed a warning down the golden cord: Flood. The tunnel is flooding. Run!

  In return, a chilling tremor.

  Ahead of us, Ankou had thrown La Tarasque over his shoulder and reached the top of the steep incline that led back to Apollyon. I thought of the plaque Léandre had carved, the words that would soon be underwater, along with the entire Passage des Voleurs.

  Léandre reached the slope and scrambled up it, his hands and boots slithering. We were going to drown here. All of us. Bloated and dead. The knowledge paralyzed me.

  Léandre looked back, face dripping. He was almost at the top. I was at the bottom, frozen stiff. “Paige,” he shouted, and started to slide back down. I could only stare up at him. “Marcherêve, give me your hand—”

  Too late. A devastating wave smashed me off my feet, sweeping me into the abyss.

  ****

  When I was a child, my grandparents took me once a year to Lough Béal Sead, a jewel in a necklace of blue lakes in the Galtees. We would hike to it from the little village of Ros an Droichid. The first time, I was four years old, and my grandfather carried me most of the way.

  We had gone late in the autumn, before the frost could really set in. The gorge was often cloaked in cloud, the lake so cold it burned, but for Mamó, swimming in it it was a ritual. Each time she emerged ruddy-cheeked and weak, and she had to huddle in front of the fire for days before her bones warmed up again, but it fortified her in a way I knew I might never understand.

  That first year, I had watched with unease as she struck out into the fog. My grandfather was left to keep an eye on me, but there had been a difficult calving the day before, and he dozed off. Curious and worried, I had walked to the edge of the mist-covered lake and waited for Mamó to return. And when there was no sign of her, I decided to find her myself.

  I jumped.

  All I had was a proto-aura then. No power yet to let my spirit wander. But the water awakened an instinct that had slumbered within me, waiting for the right time to emerge. I remember being fascinated by the pale twists of my hair, the way they fanned out in front of me. How I became weightless. How, even as I sank, I was unanchored from the earth.

  And how that feeling was addictive.

  How it freed me.

  I had been smiling when Daideó pulled me out, white as ice and shivering. I hadn’t realized at all—not once—that in the water, I was dying.

  ****

  I was alone. And blind.

  A trickling nearby. The waterboard. My eyes flew open. I needed to get away from it—that sound, the smell, it soaked me in gooseflesh—but I was afraid to move, afraid to know how badly I was hurt.

  My mouth was dry as ashes. I tried moving my fingers and toes. They worked.

  Not the basement. The bottom of the pit.

  Through a solid ache in my skull, I tried to think. Clearly I was deeper than the Passage des Voleurs.

  Head rolling, I groped for my headlamp and switched it on. It was cracked, and the battery ran low, but a wavering light revealed yet more dripping tunnels.

  These ones seemed natural. Caves, not quarries. Behind me, water cascaded down a curtain of flowstone, stinking of sulphur. I struggled away from it, heels sliding on the damp floor.

  “You have got to be joking.” I pulled at my collar, gasping for breath. “Wasn’t the f-fucking reservoir enough?”

  A blurred memory returned to me. Grabbing onto something —slippery rock—and hoisting myself up, out of the torrent of foul-tasting water, onto what I had thought was an escape to higher ground. I had scrambled on my stomach through a rabbit hole of a passageway, driven on by the will to survive. Then the plummet. My head must have struck a rock.

  Somehow, in my last bid to live, I had found a way between the Passage des Voleurs and this cave system, buying me some breathing time.

  I needed to utilize what I had left. To stay calm and think.

  The Passage des Voleurs must slope downward. Right now, water would be pooling at its end—rapidly, if the lake was large. If my theory was right, it would not be long until it rose enough to fill these caves, as well as the human-made tunnels that must not be far above me. I could only have been unconscious for a few minutes, or it would already be here.

  Palms sweating, I turned my lamp upward. More water torrented from the opening I had fallen through. It was moving faster than before.

  My labored breathing punctured the silence.

  I was below the bottom of the earth. I would run like a frightened rat through these caves until the lake caught up with me. That was how it was going to end, after everything.

  My hand clammed into a shaking fist. Screwing my jaw shut, I staunched my bloody head on my sleeve and got to my feet.

  Water was starting to cover my boots. If it was rising, there was no down in these tunnels. Nowhere for it to drain. There was only up. I forged on, half running, boots splashing. I was almost in the next cave when I sensed another presence in the æther and slowed down.

  A perfect circle of ice lit the cave. In the dark, it had an eldritch glow, as if hit by moonlight.

  Close to it lay an Emite. Too weak to do anything but exist, it was a ruin of papery gray sarx, swarmed by its corrupted aura. Lidless white eyes stared into mine. It had entered this realm right below the beacon of the colony, but found no flesh to sustain itself.

  This had been a Rephaite once. A god. I wondered which family it had been from, whether it would have been an ally or an enemy. Unable to grab me, it let out a sound like a wounded animal and crumpled. All I could do was retreat from the chamber and leave it to starve.
/>   Murky water swilled around my knees. It was so cold. My thighs ached with the effort of wading. I retched more than once, but dread forced me onward, into the infinite black. My calf was ablaze where I had caught it on the rusty gate. Numbness set in everywhere else.

  A tunnel took me upward again, a short way out of the flood. Before long, I came to a pool. A lower tunnel, already full of stagnant water. The moment I saw it, I stopped.

  It could be a way out.

  Darkness or drowning. Hell or high water. I let out a strangled shout of frustration and knotted my fingers in my hair, panting. I tried to hold my thoughts together in the cracked glass of my skull.

  There was one other way. My shaking hand went to my pocket, where the silver pill waited, offering an escape from the nightmare. Better than the excruciating pain of water piercing my lungs. That could not be the last thing I felt. It couldn’t. My eyes pressed shut. My shoulders heaved. I started to undo my pocket, fingers slick and clumsy on the fastening.

  No.

  Somewhere in the black roar of the water, a clear thought. My hand wrapped into a fist again. The pill was certain death. If I could just swim, I had a chance, slim though it was. If not—if I died now—then Suhail Chertan had killed me. By stealing my ability to swim, to control my panic, he had murdered me from a country away. No one would ever find my body.

  Cold sweat drenched me. I took the vial from my pocket and threw it into the tunnel behind me. This time, I would fight for my life until my last breath. With trembling hands, I stripped off my sweater and removed my heavy boots, then buckled my backpack on again.

  Damn Suhail all the way back to the Netherworld. I had come this far. I had crossed the Couloir des Noyés and destroyed Senshield and seized the crown of London and I was still alive. I meant to stay that way.

  Shaking uncontrollably, I crouched beside the pool. Behind me, lake water was bubbling up the way I had come in, like vomit from a boiling stomach. My body rattled like a bag of dice.

  My headlamp failed. The abyss was here. All I could hear was the rush of the approaching flood. All I could see was the same crushing blackness I had only just survived before. I heaved in a breath and plunged headfirst into the pool. My fingers scrabbled at rough stone. Without any light, all I could see was Suhail. Perhaps the Underqueen would care for a drink.

  My chest tightened to the point of agony. Already out of breath. I thrashed my way back and broke the surface with a gasp. My lamp sparked on for an instant, long enough for me to see that the cavern was now half submerged, the lake crushing my air pocket. It was too late. More water sprayed from the ceiling, blinding me. I screamed into the void. Not for help. None was coming. Hair plastered to my face, fingers jammed into my ears, I waited for the end.

  I wanted you. I wanted us. I whispered my confession, willing him to hear. I’m sorry. I was a coward, too.

  My scream cracked into nothing. But then something drew my hand to the pendant. The æther quaked. In a strange, detached state—acceptance, perhaps—I exhaled through my nose. When the water had almost filled the tunnel, I took the deepest breath I could. Then I kicked off the ceiling and propelled myself back into the passage, hard and fast.

  This was it. No way back. With no light, I used my hands to navigate, keeping one above my head to protect it from crags. Suhail materialized in front of me, here to watch the death I had denied him once before. Bubbles erupted from my lips. Fatal panic crested again. I tried to swim through him and shatter his image. My headlamp flared, banishing his face for an instant, but in my head, he was still laughing.

  To disappear between shadow and stone.

  My legs thrashed. My fingers groped for purchase. Just as water burned my nose and I thought my chest would rupture, I shattered the surface. Coughing and weeping, I crawled out of the second pool, and with a violent retch, I brought up the last meal I had eaten.

  I gasped for breath. My headlamp flickered on again. I raked my soaking hair out of my eyes and looked back to see the pool already surging in my wake. The lake was coming. With a panic-stricken sob, I shoved myself up and ran. I clambered up walls and lurched through more tunnels, ascending now, always on the rise. Chips of limestone cut my soles, but I couldn’t stop. The lake was still after me. When a tapered crack in the wall appeared, I twisted sideways and writhed my way through it, scraping half the skin off my hip.

  A ladder. My hands clapped onto it. Somehow, I had found my way to the carrières. Arms shaking, clothes stuck fast to my skin, I scaled the mine shaft. The muscles in my thighs and calves scorched, but I kept going, rung after rung, until I could crane myself over the top.

  To rise from the depths, never seeking the sun.

  I had gotten up the ladder, but the effort had squeezed out my last drop of strength. I lay unmoving. Weakness would finish me off. I was going to pass out. Eventually, the water would take me.

  The headlamp went out for good. The blackness of my tomb closed over me. I listened to the distant swash of the water, closer by the moment.

  When I heard the voice, I thought I was hallucinating. Then a lamp half blinded me. Cool and bony hands found my arms. I looked up to see the silver-haired voyant who had entered the mausoleum with Léandre and Ankou.

  His face was distinctive, the skin almost stretched. Something about his dreamscape was familiar, even to my fear-addled senses.

  “Wait,” I slurred. Everything was spinning, his face sliding in and out of focus. “I know— I know you.”

  He offered a gentle smile. I looked down to see an empty syringe in his hand. A milky drop hung from the tip of the needle.

  “No, darling,” he said. “You never did.”

  My bones were disappearing. When my hand dropped to my side, I could have sworn his face came with it.

  I have shed my skin many times, he had told me. Underneath, I remain a serpent. I heard my own hysterical laughter. Darkness came to claim me yet again, but this time, I embraced it.

  20

  A Promising Start

  Candlelight. Softness under my back. My eyelashes were sticky, but I could feel enough to tell that I was lying on a rug. Someone had peeled off my wet clothes and covered me with sheets. I was warmer.

  Too warm. Scorching with fever, worse than before. A listless throb filled my leg, and my hair smelled of bonfire smoke.

  Shh, Paige, it’s okay, lie still. Deep, gut-wrenching coughs. Dangerous . . . sepsis . . . she needs a hospital . . .

  Still underground. Not lost anymore. I tried to recall how I had gotten here, to wherever this was, but all I could remember was the roar of water and the sound of my own screaming.

  Paige. A voice I trusted, a hand cradling the back of my head. Paige, you must take this.

  Lip of a glass. Bitter pill. Trickle of water over my tongue. All around me, waking nightmares: a golden blade, the soldiers, the anchor. My final glimpse of my grandmother, her face riven by fear, as if she had seen everything that would happen if I slipped between her fingers.

  My breath caught fire. To quench it, I swallowed. I wanted it to stop. All of it. I was deep under a sea of my own making.

  So I fled to my dreamscape—to my flowers, wilted, swamped by water. As the fever flashlighted my limbs, I relived the moment I had asked if he still wanted me. The heat in his eyes that set me alight. I dreamed his hands to my tender skin, to places no one had ever touched.

  I must have made a sound. A figure came into my mausoleum, and there was relief on my smarting back, some kind of liniment. The fire melted it down to water, and the water seeped inside me again, beaded on my face, drowned me from within. I was molten. Trickling back to the bottom of the earth, too loose and shapeless for the floor to hold me. Then a hand took mine—breaking my fall—and I pressed my brow to its scarred knuckles.

  Paige. His voice. Stay with me, little dreamer.

  I wanted to stay. So I clung onto that hand, to that voice, to him. I fought with everything I had left.

  Darkness banked the flam
es at last. I cooled back into a solid form. When my eyes cracked open again, the inferno in my flesh was gone, supplanted by fatigue.

  A low ceiling domed over me. I was in the carrières, and from the number of dreamscapes, I was directly under the citadel once more, far away from the hellfire in Versailles.

  I smelled fibrin gel. When I could muster the strength, I slid my bare leg out from under the sheets and saw a livid stripe on my calf, lined with stitches. Bandages wrapped my wrist and waist.

  I was alive.

  And Sheol II was gone.

  Weakness bound me to the rug. I thought of the voyants we had left in the colony, what horrors they might be facing now. As I floated in a doze, I was aware of someone trimming the candles. A hand on my forehead. Blankets wrapping the cold log of my body.

  And finally, a voice.

  “Paige.”

  Slowly, I turned my head. Nadine peered into the cave. She wore a knitted gray dress over tights, and her hair fell in damp waves to her jaw.

  “Are you awake?” she whispered.

  “Just.” My throat was dry as sawdust. “Never thought I’d ask this again, but is there any water?”

  She disappeared. With effort, I lifted my right hand to see a small dressing where a cannula had been. I was wearing a camisole and shorts with a button-down shirt over the top. From the size of the shirt, it belonged to Léandre.

  Nadine returned with a goblet, which she helped me hold and drink. “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Paris,” she said. “Le Vieux Orphelin has his own little system of carrières under Passy—his appartements privés.” Her accent was crisp. “Only his gang know about it. And now us.” She sat on the patterned rug beside me. “I cannot believe you chose this moment to wake up.”

  “Sorry. I’ll go back to the brink of death.”

  “I’m serious. Warden has barely left your side, and the minute he agrees to go back to the surface, you open your eyes.” She shook her head at me. “Poor timing, Mahoney.”

  Shadowed memories of his presence crossed my mind. “Why has he gone to the surface?”