Empire of Bones (24 page)

“From Rupert,” she said. “This is the stuff he wants us to focus on. But don’t mention him. Go as long as possible without saying his name.”

Antigone looked at the short list of unexplained topics.

Radu’s Dragon

Brendan’s Breath

Tooth Tools (Weapons)

Cryptkeepers (Brother Boniface Brosnan)

She shoved it into her pocket.

“Go ahead,” Diana said. “And keep your hands up.”

“Dan?” Katie Smith said. “Shouldn’t you go first? Should you be with her?”

Antigone smiled at her mother. If Cyrus had been going first, Antigone would have been saying the same thing. But Cyrus was far away. It was her turn to do the worrisome thing.

“She’s good, Mom,” Dan said. “We’ll be right behind her.”

Stepping out of the plane, Antigone was looking over the rusty rail of the ship at the crescent island of cliffs and palm trees. She could hear distant waves crashing and the harsh laziness of complaining gulls. The trees along the cliffs swirled slowly in the wind, dry-mopping the sky. With her hands up, she hopped off the wobbly plane stairs and onto the grass-covered platform. She turned.

The ship was intensely gardened. Long, level lawns were densely framed with fruit trees in front of the tall white-and-rust bridge. She saw oranges and bananas, grapefruit and what she assumed were mangoes. Short, woolly sheep grazed in the open, but her eyes had already settled on three huge shapes creeping out of the shadows beneath the trees. They leaned forward on their fists, and as they entered the sunlight, she saw that they were covered with deep orange fur, a livelier version of the ship’s rust. Huge hairless faces as round as they were flat were pointed at her. Nostrils flared. Thick lips curled. Orangutans. Sixty or seventy feet away. Big ones. Bigger than gorillas. She wondered how quickly they could close that distance.

Antigone lowered her hands.

“Guys,” she said. “I’m not sure—”

A rifle cracked and turf kicked up at Antigone’s feet.

“Hands high!” The metallic voice blasted over the deck from a loudspeaker. Antigone threw her hands back up in the air. The orangutans were still moving slowly forward, heads cocking, nostrils sniffing.

“Okay!” Antigone shouted. “I’m sorry! The monkeys startled me!”

“Apes,” the loudspeaker barked. “Not monkeys. State your name and your business. And speak up!”

“Antigone Smith!” She looked up at the windows in the bridge. “I’m here to talk to Lemon Chauncey. William Skelton was my Keeper. He sent me.”

The ship was silent. Antigone’s eyes settled on the orange ape in the center. He moved around a nibbling sheep and the animal barely even took notice.

“Skelton’s been dead a year,” the speaker said. “Why should I believe you?”

“He left a message,” Antigone said. “A map. It took us a while to figure it out.”

The loudspeaker laughed. “Intelligent, are you? Well, I expected you here a year ago. Don’t feel too bad; Billy Bones overworked everything by half. I told him the Empire of Bones thing would be too much for ignorant moderns, but he couldn’t see past your last name. ‘They’re Smiths, Lemon,’ he said. ‘Smiths will crack it quick.’ It was almost too simple, he thought, but I knew you would be a pair of fools.”

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

T
HE 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 actually 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.