The Drowned Vault

by N. D. Wilson

  And then the water quivered with sound waves. The chamber walls shook, and rocks dribbled down from the ceiling.

  The walls shook again, and Cyrus watched, horrified, as Rupert bubbled in surprise and the squid unlatched from his face. Rupert snatched the gliding squid, peered through the tentacles at the beak, and then gargled frustration.

  “Do it!” Rupert bellowed, geysering bubbles. He kicked toward the tunnel, gliding through the water in a race to get to the surface before he ran out of air. A moment later, he was gone.

  Cyrus couldn’t move. How far away was the surface? Could Rupert make it? What had just happened? An earthquake?

  Cyrus looked at the body of his ancestor, and then back at the tunnel mouth. He was supposed to do this. It was up to him. Cyrus slid the silver key into the hole in the iron block and waited for a moment.

  The walls didn’t shake. The water didn’t quiver.

  Cyrus turned the key, and the block fell open. A small gold ring that had been hidden inside the block floated to the floor. The heavy chain links connecting the block and the Captain’s ankle clacked open one by one, settling slowly into a pile.

  Beside Cyrus’s head, the Captain’s toes splayed.

  Antigone raced toward the cliff, jumping logs and kicking through bushes, her bag bouncing on her back. The Boones and the Livingstones and Jax and Dennis and Nolan and Dan were in the planes, but she wasn’t leaving. Not without Cyrus.

  “Tigs!”

  She looked back. Dan was chasing her. Behind him, the forest was burning.

  “We have to get Cyrus!” she yelled.

  “I know!” Dan yelled. He was gaining fast. She’d never seen him run like this. “I’ll get him! Where were they diving?”

  Two planes roared overhead. Four shapes tumbled out of their bellies, but they weren’t bombs this time. They had glider wings, but Antigone could see human legs dangling beneath them. Two were heading toward the harbor where the planes were anchored. The other two were coming in her direction. She heard gunfire, and then spiraling white balls of fire dropped from the gliders like brimstone. She’d seen fire like that before—these were Phoenix’s men.

  One of the balls was growing larger, swirling toward them like a falling sun.

  “Dan!” Too late. The fireball splintered in the treetops and exploded. Antigone staggered as searing heat, burning branches, and shattered timbers fell all around them. Dan was on the ground. Antigone turned back, virtually blind from the afterimage and deaf from the explosion.

  Something heavy clamped onto the back of her neck and spun her around. She was looking at a hairy chest, and then at the snarling face and fiery cow-size eyes of Gilgamesh of Uruk.

  Gil laughed, his breath hot and rotten, and then another fireball crackled past. Gil looked to the sky. Something had caught his attention. Throwing Antigone to the ground, he unslung a heavy horn bow from his woolen shoulder.

  She blinked, struggling for breath. There were other shapes, too. Tall shapes all around her.

  Gil drew the thickest arrow Antigone had ever seen and nocked it. He drew the string back to his thick snake lips and raised his bow to the sky. She didn’t understand the words he murmured, but she saw the crackle of light that danced around the arrow point and heard the hum that buzzed along the waiting string.

  Antigone followed Gil’s aim. One of the gliders was swinging around to attack.

  Gilgamesh let fly.

  He’d already lowered the bow and turned back, laughing, before the tumble of wings and flame and legs fell from the sky. He drew a second arrow, eyeing Antigone.

  “Little Smithling!” he boomed. “Your life is forfeit to the dragons, not to that bastard Phoenix!”

  Gil’s companions came forward, lifted Antigone off the ground, and flung her high into the air. Gil raised his bow.

  The arrow struck like lightning, too fast for pain, too fast for sight. It slammed into her chest just above her heart and threw her against a tree trunk. She should have hung there, pierced and dying on a tree, a cursed Smith on a spit. Instead, she fell, tumbling through branches, and then bounced on the earth. The arrow shaft broke beneath her.

  She couldn’t breathe, and her mouth was pooling with blood. She could see it dribbling on the moss. She spat and coughed, and twisting slowly, she tried to crawl away. Six banana fingers closed around her arm and lifted her into the air.

  Her leather jacket and safari shirt were torn where the arrow had struck. Gil shoved a finger into the hole and touched the smooth pearly surface of the undamaged Angel Skin beneath.

  Antigone closed her eyes and drifted into a place without pain. She could hear timber burning and wind rushing through the trees, and then Gil filling the forest with an angry roar.

  “Arachne!”

  Cyrus worked on the metal head chained to Captain Smith’s right foot, the gold ring that had fallen out of the iron block now rattling on his thumb.

  Clean-shaven Vlad IV had a keyhole in his forehead, but it was full of grit. Cyrus punched at it with the tip of his knife, and then tried the silver key again. Frustrated, he rolled the head onto its face and shook it. Sand and gravel trickled down. He set the head back down and tried again. The key slipped in, and he turned it.

  The metal head fell open and a brown human skull rolled out into the water, slowly losing its lower jaw as it did. As had happened with the iron block, the chain links opened and rattled down, and the Captain’s right foot seemed to wake.

  Trying hard to ignore the skull rocking gently on the cave floor, Cyrus swam up to the Captain’s right hand. Vlad II. The key worked easily, and a second brown skull rolled out as the iron head opened and the chains fell off.

  Cyrus wanted very much to be done. To get whatever was about to happen over with. He pushed up and swam across the Captain’s chest, only able to make himself glance quickly at the sleeper’s face before diving down to the final head. What would he do if the man didn’t wake up? Drag his body to the surface?

  VLAD III

  TEPES

  As Cyrus slid the key into the iron forehead, silver flashed through the water and a saber blade pressed up against his throat.

  He couldn’t move. The squid bubbled and he couldn’t even inhale. He could feel the razor edge slowly parting his skin. A small cloud of blood floated up around his face.

  “Not that one.”

  The words were bubbled, but Cyrus understood. He slowly pulled out the key.

  fifteen

  SMOOTH STONES

  DAN KNEW he was seeing the present. The dream was fluid, and he drifted through it easily.

  There was a pretty young black girl strapped into a chair. She was bruised and damp, and her chin rested on her chest. Beside her, in another chair, was a damp boy with a broken nose and a swollen eye and long straggly brown hair. Dan knew him. His name was Oliver, and he was the sullen boy Antigone had tried to befriend in their Polygoners club. Dan could see the anger in him, the bitterness inside, planted long ago and growing.

  Dan drifted through wall after wall. He found a man in a pink shirt chained to a bed. And then another chained man, big and dark-skinned like the girl. Dan could see the fatherhood on him while he slept, the worry and the love he wore all over his soul.

  In other rooms there were guards. Some slept and some were waking. They were rotten inside, dying, but on the outside he could see their strengths, stolen and molded and stitched together from other men. When he looked at some of them, he could see only tattoo bones floating in the air around emptiness, and he knew that these had already cheated death.

  And then he found the freezers. Behind each door, he saw a relic of pain, bodies broken but laid in cold unrest, seeds unplanted, souls and flesh unhonored.

  And limping in front of the coffin freezers, he saw the man called Phoenix. To Daniel’s eyes, he looked to be made only of ash, held together by the weave of his white coat. Daniel felt anger swell inside him, and his anger bloomed into hate for the ash man who had broken hi
s eyes and undone his heart.

  “Daniel.”

  The voice was his father’s.

  “Daniel?”

  There was a freezer near the bottom of a stack, beside a clear glass pool. He saw the tall body lying on its back. He looked past the frosted glass and saw the face and the puckered holes in the chest where flying lead had done its violence.

  “I see you,” Daniel said. “He has you? Why are you here?”

  “Dan, son, I am not here.”

  “I see your body. He stole it.”

  “Yes, he stole it. But that is not my body anymore. There is more of me in you than in that cold and broken bonehouse where I once lived. That is ash where my fire once burned. My fire burns brighter now, and in flesh that will not decay. Look at him.”

  Phoenix was preparing the shallow pool, emptying vials into the water.

  “He clings to his ash until he can steal another’s. He wants to mold slaves that will call him god, men and women who will take up and lay down their souls at his word. He wants to call me back, to make that frozen body new and chain me up inside. But I pity him, Dan. Can you pity a destroyer?”

  “No,” said Daniel. “I can’t.”

  “You will,” his father said. “In the end.”

  “Am I dead?” Daniel asked.

  “You are dying,” said his father.

  “But why?” Daniel asked. “Why do I have to?”

  “Because you are flesh, and flesh is grass. It burns and is consumed. But your fire will not go out.”

  “What will I die of?”

  And then his father laughed, a laugh Daniel had not heard in years, a laugh he had never really heard, because this laugh was bigger and richer and deeper than any that had ever echoed in the chest of that body in the freezer.

  “Son,” his father said. “Run faithfully to the end, and like all good men, you will die of having lived.”

  The room went dark. Daniel was drifting away. His father’s voice followed him, fading: “When you see your mother, your sister, your brother, there you see a part of me—of who I will always be. Help your brother understand.”

  “Wait, Dreamer.” The whisper was female. Daniel was back in the room with the freezers, looking at a wide-eyed girl crouched in a corner. He had seen her before, in his dream of Cyrus and the grave. Her hair was like a mound of ropes, too big and too heavy for her body. Her arms and legs were chained to the wall, and she was looking straight into Daniel’s soul and he into hers. She was a tangle of loss and sorrow and slavery. But somewhere in it all, he saw pride. When she spoke, her mouth didn’t move.

  “Bridle your eyes and ride them. The Phoenix is ready. He has found the dark road. The seventy weeks begin. Mark this place.” She blew on Daniel and he passed up through the roof, looking down at the huge building. He could still hear her whisper. “Mark this nest where he will hatch his young. Mark the muddy river. Bring the Desolation.”

  Daniel opened his eyes. His face was pressed deep into moss, and he’d been snotting all over it. A heavy limb pinned down his head, and something larger was on his legs, digging into his back. Everything around him smelled burnt. Even the moss was smoking.

  He shifted beneath the weight and realized that he had found his limits—his body truly hurt.

  • • •

  Cyrus sat shivering on the gravel beach. The shallow slice on his throat stung with salt, and his teeth were chattering. If Patricia had been around his neck instead of his wrist when the Captain had raised his blade, she probably would have tried to take his arm off. She was back around Cyrus’s neck now, once again carrying the keys.

  Captain John Smith paced on the beach, water squelching out of his high boots. He held the iron head of Vlad III on his left hip—the only head Cyrus hadn’t opened—and had coiled the iron chain around his forearm. His naked saber was in his right hand, and his eyes were on the sea. Cyrus’s eyes were on the sea as well. There was no sign of Rupert anywhere, and they’d been out of the water for at least twenty minutes. He’d hoped Rupert would be waiting. He’d been afraid that Rupert would be floating.

  The Captain spun on his heel and pointed his sword at Cyrus. His beard was lopped off in an uneven square and his hair was a wild mane of jagged lengths. His brown eyes glowed with anger.

  “Fool, fool, fool!” He chewed the word like toffee, his voice as thick and sticky as syrup.

  “You said that already,” Cyrus said. “And before you ask again, no, I’m not sure what exact move we were planning next.”

  “I see no we. I see a thee.” The Captain strode forward and spat. “And ye, lad, haven’t the feel nor the timbre of a Smith—waking a Lord of the Order and a Knight of the Queen without cause.” He turned away, letting his eyes sail back across the sea to the horizon. Cyrus watched the man’s ancient battered hands clench and flex at the sight.

  “Aye,” the man said. “But the world is yet grand and worth the waking, and the sea remains my true queen, fool though ye be.”

  “I’m going to look for the others.” Cyrus stood up slowly. “I need to change my clothes.”

  “Sit!” the Captain bellowed. Water shook out of his beard. His eyes were alive with fire as he pointed his sword at the wet rocks under Cyrus. “Down, trespasser, or I’ll loose your head from your cursed bones!”

  Cyrus squinted at him. “What is it with you and heads? Listen to me: The current Avengel told me to wake you up, okay? He was hoping you’d help us fight the transmortals, that you’d be on our team. And I had to cut your nasty hair and hack off your sicktastic fingernails. So I’d appreciate it if you would stop yelling at me.”

  Cyrus raised his hand to the slice on his throat. It felt like a nasty paper cut. “And this hurts, by the way. You didn’t have to cut me.”

  The Captain snorted and shook back his hair. He held up the face of Vlad III. “Young gutterblud, count it blessed providence that I did.”

  Cyrus circled around the Captain to the little boat that still held his coat and his bag.

  “Better your head roll free,” the Captain continued, “than this chain be loosed.”

  “Stop it!” Cyrus yelled. He tugged his shirt out of his bag. Shivering, he pulled it on. “Enough with the heads!”

  “Cy!”

  Cyrus looked up. Dan was leaning over the cliff’s edge. He was filthy and favoring one leg, and his shoulders were smoking.

  “Is that him?” Dan hooded his eyes. “Where’s Rupe? The planes had to leave, and some massive guy with a beard grabbed Antigone. We have to go!”

  “Antigone …”

  “Gone, Cyrus! He took her.”

  The world spun, and Cyrus felt his knees sag. The Captain was yelling something and pointing his sword at Dan. Cyrus slid to the ground and leaned against the boat. Without Rupert, where would they even start? They were on an island. The planes had left. Antigone … no. He shook his head. A massive guy with a beard?

  Gil.

  The Captain was looking down at him, forehead creased, eyes questioning. Cyrus realized that he’d said the name out loud.

  “Gilgamesh,” he said. “It had to have been Gilgamesh. He took my sister.”

  The Captain’s brows collided. “Gilgamesh? He wouldn’t lay a Persian finger on any lady of the Order. I bound his treaty charms myself.”

  “The treaties have been voided,” Cyrus said. “He’s in the Ordo Draconis now.”

  The Captain’s mouth fell open, his solid beard thumping against his metal chest. “Daft damnation! Voided? Does the Brendan know? Have the Keepers mustered? Who leads these dragons against us?” He turned and strode down the beach. “The kings … Christendom … old alliances must needs prove strong. The Maltese. Prester John.”

  The Captain paused, stared for a moment at the iron head on his hip, and then turned around. “The dragons rekindling … you were right to wake me. Has Ashtown Keep held firm? Have the Burials been opened?”

  “Only yours,” said Cyrus.

  The Captain nodded. �
�Well, there’s some hope in that. Who leads these—”

  The rumble of jet engines rolled across the water. The Captain tensed. Dan limped quickly down the cliff’s goat track. Cyrus looked at the horizon. A plane was heading toward them, flying low and fast.

  The Captain hopped onto a boulder and faced the plane. He let Vlad III drop and dangle from his left wrist. His sword spun and flashed in his right, and then stopped, poised and ready.

  He glanced back at Cyrus. “Cover, fools, or burn.”

  Cyrus looked back at his brother. “Theirs?” he asked. “Or ours?”

  Dan was squinting. “That’s the Boones’ plane,” he finally said as the plane touched down, hundreds of yards out from where Cyrus and Rupert had been diving, sending up two long plumes of sea behind its wings as it cruised toward the little cove.

  The Captain watched with narrow eyes as the plane turned sideways at the harbor mouth and let its two jet engines whine. It was longer than Gil’s plane and had a sleeker silver body. On the side, just beneath the cockpit, there was a gold rampant lion holding a musket.

  A side door slid open and Diana leaned out, scanning the beach and then the cliff. She looked at Cyrus. “Antigone? Rupe?” she mouthed.

  Cyrus cupped his hands. “Gone!”

  Diana shook her head. She couldn’t hear. She beckoned them to come. Cyrus threw on his coat and grabbed his bag. Then he and his brother pushed the boat off the beach and splashed into the shallows.

  “Come on!” Cyrus yelled to the Captain, still perched on his boulder.

  “What is this wizardry?” the Captain cried, his eyes wide in wonder.

  Cyrus and Dan teetered and rocked the little boat as they tried to climb in at the same time. The Captain jumped down and splashed into the water.

  “Get in!” the Captain yelled. “Before ye shame the sea!”

  He tumbled Cyrus in over the side and Dan behind him, and then Vlad thumped against the bottom. Gripping the square stern, the Captain whooped and drove the boat forward, churning through the water with high splashing knees. And as he did, he began to chant: “Dead men sink, and dead men sail, ho for the bottle and the bonehouse! Ho for the bottle and my lady so lovely, ho for the Queen’s Virginia!”