Empire of Bones

by N. D. Wilson

  “We will wake your sister,” he said. “We will bring her here. The altar is ready. I myself will stand with you as she receives her sacrifice, and Azazel shall honor her power with a temple of ten thousand souls when this city falls.”

  The charge guns had all been buried or burned. When Cyrus and most of the mortals had been helped up out of the rubble, Nolan began passing out weapons from his bag. Some he handled casually and quickly, but others received his full attention, and he was careful to touch them only with his gloves.

  Horace took a stone hatchet with a heavy black head. Nolan handled it like a jeweled egg.

  Gunner and Jeb both already had sidearms, but they took long black knives that made Nolan’s lip curl, and as many small glass canisters of pyro-newt eggs as he would give them. The eggs themselves were packed tight inside glass and surrounded with clear fluid. They looked like large charcoal olives, but Cyrus could see a dull orange glow in the center of each one.

  Cyrus watched Jeb, stitched up and grit covered, one eye patched and one eye squinting at the glowing eggs in his hand. Jeb was coming straight from the hospital back into battle.

  Nolan, shivering, handed Jax a short black machete, and Diana a black trumpet-mouthed blunderbuss, along with a bag of powder and a heavy sack of tooth-charmed shot.

  “Jeb,” Cyrus said.

  Jeb looked up at him.

  “Thanks,” Cyrus said. “For helping get my mom out of here. I haven’t seen you since.”

  Jeb cracked a dusty grin. “Anytime. You’d do the same for me.”

  Diana was watching the two of them from beside her father. Cyrus glanced at her, at her father, and then back down at Nolan’s bag.

  Yes, he would. For Jeb’s mom. Diana’s mom.

  Rupert was helping Sterling to his feet. Niffy was nowhere to be seen.

  The Captain and Gilgamesh exploded up from another buried cellar. Arachne crawled out behind them.

  The Captain roared, his face red and purple, his body shaking with anger. He stomped rubble off of his knee-high boots and then jerked his dragon sword out of its sheath.

  “Where are the beasties?” he bellowed. “Where are the fools who desecrate these halls with flame and fire?”

  While the Captain raged, Gilgamesh crossed to Nolan and held out his huge six-fingered hand. Nolan hesitated. Then he drew out a thick horn bow, unstrung. He handed it to Gil along with a quiver packed tight with thick black feathered shafts. The arrowheads were made of glistening obsidian.

  “Don’t touch the tips,” Nolan said. “Or maybe you should. Touch them with your chest.”

  Gil smiled.

  Sterling was wobbling on his metal feet.

  Nolan carefully handed Rupert a long, gently curving black sword and a belt of six glass spheres. Cyrus had seen them used before. Break them and a crackling lightning ball would rip through a room. Rupert strapped them on above the double holster he already wore.

  “Transmortals with me,” Rupert said. “Robert, get the mortals down to the planes and out of here.”

  “Hold on!” Gunner blurted. “I didn’t come to run.”

  “Rupe,” Jeb said, “I stand with you.”

  Cyrus reached into Nolan’s bag and grabbed one canister of pyro-newt eggs and a long fat-bladed knife. When he touched it, a cold electric whisper shot all the way up into his shoulder. He and that knife had both known the Dragon’s Tooth. But he didn’t have time to wonder or remember or wish about what had been. He grabbed Antigone’s arm.

  “Come with me,” he whispered. “Right now.” Then he turned and ran.

  He heard Rupert groan. Glancing back, he saw Antigone on his heels. Diana watched him go, and Dennis danced in place, eager but too afraid to follow.

  “John,” Rupert said. “Go.”

  The Captain jumped after them.

  Cyrus scrambled through the gash in the wall where a door had been and slid into the great hallway. Up ahead, he saw that Brendan’s boat had toppled from its stand. Chandeliers and portions of the ceiling had dropped onto the tile floor. At the far end, the tall wooden door to the courtyard had been blown in, and its splintered remains leaned against a wall of crushed displays, still smoking, its jagged edges licked with flames.

  Beyond it, an unseen Leon began to snort and roar.

  Cyrus didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he had to trust in Dan’s dream, and he had to move fast. There was girl somewhere who was going to be sacrificed, and he was meant to find her. He was meant to send Babd Catha back down into the dark, along with the hundreds of others who would try to rise behind her if he failed. And that meant he had to go down himself. Way down. Through doors Nolan had never let him open. As deep as or deeper than he had ever been.

  He knew where to start. Picking up speed, dodging rubble, he veered around the toppled boat and slammed against a locked door that he knew would lead him to a hallway with stairs down into hallways with stairs down into chambers with even more stairs down. This was the way to the Polygon. But there were forks to some of those stairwells as well. There were doors on those lower levels that led to whole subterranean wings of Burials.

  From the main entrance, Leon belched rage and Cyrus paused, listening to the echo. He couldn’t see past all the rubble, but he could hear shouting and the turtle’s chain rattling and jerking. Antigone stopped beside him.

  “Hold this,” Cyrus said. He handed Antigone the pyro-newt eggs and tucked the knife into his belt. Then he slipped Patricia off his wrist, slid the keys off her tail into his hand, and raised the snake up to his neck.

  The Captain grabbed Cyrus’s shoulder.

  “Come on then, lad,” he said. “Back to the flock with you.”

  Cyrus looked up into the grizzled face and sea-sharpened eyes of his ancestor.

  “They’re here,” Cyrus whispered. “They’re coming.”

  A tall shape ran up to the distant shattered door and leapt onto the side of the toppled boat. He wore leather on his arms, a long chain-mail shirt with loose flaps that hung between his knees, and a gleaming silver onion-shaped helmet with a single gold spike on the crown. He had a thin black beard that looked like lichen drooping off a tree branch, but his face was too solid for a mortal’s, and his eyes seemed to eat the light. Perched on the boat, he raised a sword in each hand, pointing them stiffly at the little group.

  The Captain backed into the middle of the hallway with his sword arm.

  “Tamerlane,” the Captain said.

  “Dog,” said the man on the boat. Another shape jumped up beside him—a man’s shape, but his face was hidden behind a mail mask. Three stones dangled from cords in his right hand, and he held a spear with a long, forking blade in his left.

  “Crescens,” the Captain said. “Will I find every maggot in the rot of this carcass?”

  A blond woman walked slowly around the boat, and the air seemed to ripple away from her like heat on a highway. She raised a long, slender, jewel-encrusted musket to her shoulder. Leon the turtle was still bellowing. More were coming.

  “Rupe!” Antigone shouted, and she threw the jar of pyro-newt eggs.

  The glass shattered at the foot of the boat. The eggs bounced out and rolled across the floor. The transmortals watched them, unworried, like bored children. For one moment, nothing. And then each egg flickered to life and sought a target, darting for the closest warm body.

  With concussions like gunshots, eggs punched into all three transmortals at once. Red fire slammed them into walls and sent them tumbling. One egg slammed into the Captain’s breastplate, throwing him backward. The red flash kicked Cyrus and Antigone up against the door, but they kept their feet.

  Cyrus fed his gold key into the locked door, pushed through it into cool darkness, and dragged his sister inside. Slamming it behind them, he locked it as quickly as he could.

  “Rise if ye dare!” the Captain was shouting. “I’ll reap your devil guts for chum!”

  More gunshots. Or eggs. And shouting.

 
“Cy, what are we doing? Where are we going?” Antigone was breathless. Cyrus couldn’t blame her. His heart was pounding and his lungs were fluttering. Just three transmortals. And there would be dozens. Hundreds? The reality of it was sinking in. Rupert wasn’t a pessimist. He might have actually seen the only way through this. Even if he and Antigone stopped the sacrifice and kept things from getting worse, Radu and all his transmortals would still be waiting for them after. And probably Phoenix. Along with his Reborn.

  Justice and Wrath and Rupert might have stood a better chance.

  Patricia slid easily off of Cyrus’s neck and wound her glow around his hand. He slipped his finger through the key ring and pulled his sister down the hallway.

  “We have to get down,” Cyrus said. “Into the Burials. There’s one we have to find. Dan had a dream. We can’t stop all of them. But there’s one … we have to.” He tried not to picture all the stone fingers rising out of the water in the dream. He tried not to think about leaving his friends under attack. Doom seemed heavy in the air around him, slowing his blood, slowing his limbs. “And a pair of huge statues,” he added. “It would be good if we found them. Just in case this goes as bad as Rupe thinks it will.”

  They reached the first stairs and Cyrus turned, raising Patricia, studying his sister’s terrified face in the silver glow.

  “I’m sorry I told you to come,” he said. “I … this might be it, Tigs.”

  Antigone shook her head. “No. It’s not. No way. Cowboy up, Tarzan. Let’s go.”

  Cyrus actually laughed. He felt lighter just hearing her use the line from the dream. Antigone forced him down onto the stairs.

  The first part of the descent was familiar. They ran down halls crammed with storage and furniture mounded beneath sheets. They watched for the ominous-looking doors—the oldest doors, the doors of foreboding that they had always been told not to open. Those would lead them down.

  The first door they tried led to a massive amount of antique and very clearly forgotten janitorial supplies. The second door led to spiral stairs that only ran up. The third door led to a completely empty room, with a stone floor layered in dust and rattraps in the corners.

  They ducked back out and moved on.

  “So,” Antigone asked, “what else can you tell me about this Burial we’re supposed to find?”

  “It’s bad,” Cyrus said. He was distracted and breathing hard. He slowed down in the hallway. Something was nagging at him. “Nasty woman war goddess human sacrifice girl going to die to bring her back.” He didn’t even hear himself. He’d been in two Burials before. One had been the Captain’s drowned vault. The other had been Rasputin’s, and he’d been sneaking around with his Solomon Keys for the first time when he’d found it. That was one of the most recent Burials, so it had been higher up, but it had still been hidden—the floor of an empty room had fallen away into stairs.

  Boom.

  The sound was distant enough, but the stone floor vibrated slightly under Cyrus’s feet. That had been huge. His friends were up there. Diana was up … No. He couldn’t think about that right now. He couldn’t be Rupert. Individuals might die. They all might die. But they couldn’t lose this fight.

  Antigone was looking around at the walls. She was thinking about the people they’d left behind.

  “The Burials don’t have doors,” Cyrus said suddenly. “I mean, they do. But not normal wood-and-hinges doors.”

  Antigone faced him. “Cy, do you—”

  “The empty room,” Cyrus said. And he ran back the way they had come.

  Inside the empty room, Cyrus began scraping at the dusty floor with his feet. Rasputin’s Burial had been opened with a single keyhole set in a stone. The Captain’s had been a keyhole in an epitaph.

  Antigone worked beside him. A dust cloud billowed up around their knees. Soon they wouldn’t be able to see at all.

  Antigone moved along the walls. She paused in a corner.

  “Cy?”

  Cyrus jumped over beside her. Antigone dragged her foot across a tiny silver chain with seven links inlaid in a single stone. In the middle of the last one, there was a keyhole.

  Cyrus dropped to his knees, slid his silver key into the hole, and turned.

  The room echoed with the sound of grinding stone. The floor sank away into a flight of stairs.

  Ancient air crawled up through the dust to meet the Smiths.

  “Okay,” Cyrus said. “Stay with the keys until I call you. It will shut again if I pull them out.”

  Cyrus raised Patricia above his head and stared at the dark spiral descent at his feet. He didn’t have time to be afraid. He didn’t have time to worry. He drew the fat-bladed knife he’d taken from Nolan’s bag and pointed the dark naked steel in front of him. His hand buzzed with cold power, a charmed memory of the Reaper’s Blade itself.

  From here, it was all new—very old—territory. He dropped onto the stairs, counting every quick step with a tongue-tip whisper inside his teeth. From here, he had to track his direction like Rupert had shown him.

  The stairs were longer than he had expected. The dropping floor had simply bridged him down to solid permanent stairs that bent and curled and twisted instead of keeping a consistent spiral. His legs tightened and grew heavy. His whispered count slurred into one prolonged but punchy hiss.

  The air was suddenly cooler on his face and in his lungs. It thickened so much, he felt like he was splashing through it.

  And his feet hit the bottom. He stopped, breathing hard. Heavy dust, undisturbed for centuries, swirled away from him.

  There was no choice of paths. A single arched corridor stretched away from the stairs, disappearing in nothingness beyond Patricia’s glow.

  He waited. He listened. Something hidden dripped. Something invisible scratched. The corridor was creepy enough to send any sane person right back up the stairs. But Cyrus had lived in the Polygon, bathing in icy drips, sleeping just out of reach of thousands of scratching feet. And he was here in search of one of the sleeping never-dead because his brother had shown him dreams.

  “Eighty-four, up,” he whispered. He extended Patricia left and right. No doorways, no keyholes.

  “Tigs!” He threw his voice back over his shoulder. A second later, grinding stone echoed above him. The floor vibrated beneath his feet.

  “Wow, that was close!” Antigone’s voice rattled down around him and the grinding banged to a stop. He could hear her incredibly slow footsteps, like she was stopping to tie her shoes on each step.

  “Cyrus? Cy? Could you turn Patricia on, please? It’s so dark, I feel dizzy.”

  Cyrus raced back up the steps, three at a time, burning his legs and his lungs all over again by the time he reached his sister.

  Antigone handed him the keys as he caught his breath. A dozen steps above her, the stairs simply stopped. The floor had closed. The ceiling was solid above them and well out of reach.

  “Great.” Cyrus dropped the keys into his pocket. “One light, one set of keys, we stay together now. And we have to hurry.”

  At the bottom, Cyrus didn’t stop to let Antigone take in the corridor. He settled into a jog, whispering his step count as he did, sweeping Patricia back and forth, trying to watch the walls.

  The corridor began to slope down, and at the same time, it bent slowly to the right.

  “Cy!”

  Cyrus stopped before his forty-second step. A large single slab of stone was built into the left-hand side. It was peaked and slightly smaller than a door, though bigger than the epitaph stone that had sealed the Captain’s underwater chamber.

  Cyrus extended his snake hand toward it, and Antigone ran her hands over the stone’s uneven surface. A tiny trickle of water from the ceiling had marred the stone over centuries, striping it with bulging mineral deposits that looked like vertical sinews. Right in the center, there was a small inscription and a single silver chain-link inset around a keyhole.

  “It’s in Latin,” Antigone said.

  “Thi
s is why I brought you,” said Cyrus. “What does it say? The nasty female we’re looking for is called Babd Cathy.”

  “Pietru Cax-something,” Antigone said. “The name isn’t Latin. It’s Greekish, and it’s definitely not Babd or female.” She looked back at her brother. “It’s like an epitaph, but it’s mostly hidden now. Do we open it to check?”

  Cyrus shook his head. “No time. Come on.”

  He picked up his count at forty-three, but the next stone was only ten steps farther on. And it belonged to someone named Ambrosius. Antigone skimmed the epitaph.

  “Something about being a father of witches,” she said. They moved on, but only ten more steps.

  “Horsa,” Antigone said. “Never heard of him. Or her, I guess. Might be a feminine ending.” The inscription was badly obstructed. “Invader, blood drinker, brother to someone, so definitely a guy.”

  Ten more quick steps around the curve and Cyrus slowed before he even saw the stone.

  Slab number four. Another silver link around a keyhole. There had been seven links in the floor of the entry room, and Cyrus was starting to think he knew why.

  This slab was already different. The stone was gray, but veined with green smokelike swirls. And when Cyrus wasn’t looking directly at it, the green veins seemed to be moving. The wet mineral deposits from the ceiling parted around this stone, leaving it clean. There wasn’t even any dust.

  The inscription was in the sharp chopped lines of Sanskrit or something like it.

  Antigone touched the stone and jerked her hand back. The surface had depressed under her fingers like mud. While Cyrus watched, his sister’s finger dents disappeared. The Sanskrit disappeared. With a low, wet sucking sound, another inscription formed.

  In English.

  Smoky green veins writhed through it. The silver link sprouted silver branches and tiny silver leaves.

  “Okay …,” Cyrus said. He turned to move on.

  “The touch of life,” Antigone said. “I’ve heard of him. He wanted to be Buried, but Brendan had him make two living statues first.”

  Cyrus looked at his sister. He looked back at the stone that should have been stone but was acting like clay—if clay could rewrite things, and if it could swirl colors like water.