Empire of Bones (44 page)

“Aye,” Niffy growled, spinning his own black blade. “In and out again. As many dips as she takes.”

“What can you do, dragon, to erase the life and the laughter I’ve already lived and already laughed?” Cyrus asked. “What can you do to frighten one as foolish as me?”

Radu Bey lashed a crackling chain at Cyrus’s head, but he caught it winding around his blade.

“What can you do?” Cyrus asked again.

Radu dropped to his knees and spun, giving his flesh to the dragon. The huge spiny tail snapped forward, hurling churning orange fire and barreling Niffy headfirst into the wall.

Cyrus jumped forward, and the dragon turned, snapping huge jaws. Cyrus swung, and the black blade shattered Azazel’s teeth and severed the forked tip of the dragon’s huge tongue.

The dragon backed away and Cyrus pressed forward, sword raised.

The tail lashed, flinging fire as cover, and the dragon turned, slithering down into the jagged hole in the floor.

Cyrus dropped his sword and dove, grabbing on to the spikes of the smoking tail and dragging behind it down into the darkness.

Slowly, Rupert Greeves raised his head. His eyelids fluttered and the corner of his mouth twitched up.

“What,” he asked the world, “can you do to erase my laughter?”

Cyrus slammed against a wall and splashed once more into deep water. He had his arms and legs around the tail now, and it twisted and thrashed as the creature raced through the water, down the long tunnel, toward light that poured in through a crack in a broken wall.

The creature smashed into the crack and through, scattering rubble. For one second, Cyrus glimpsed the inside of an empty, spherical tomb, and then the dragon leapt into a hall made of people. Cyrus blinked in horror, unsure if he was now dreaming as the tail dragged him across walls of people and through the dangling hair of hundreds of women. The dragon raced on until it reached a wide room lined with arches formed by sleeping people.

The long tail vanished in Cyrus’s clenched arms as Radu Bey resumed his human shape. Cyrus thumped to the floor and tumbled. With chains dragging, Radu disappeared.

From the floor, Cyrus looked up at the wall of people, at the dangling hair and arms, and he shivered. Beside
him, there was stack of old men, facedown. Cyrus sat up. Lying across their backs, there was a girl.

She had a straight cut on each cheek, black feathers in her hair, and fish scales painted onto her arms where the sleeves of her letter carrier’s uniform had been torn off.

Cyrus recognized her face, even though he had only ever seen it carved in stone.

He jumped to his feet and felt her neck for a pulse. Her skin was cold and damp, but her heart was beating. Barely.

Out of all the people trapped in the walls and the ceiling and the altar, Cyrus chose her. He slid his arms beneath her shoulders and knees and picked her up. From somewhere in the labyrinth of bodies, Radu Bey roared, but the voice in Cyrus’s head was sharper.

Thief! She’ll die if you take her
.

Cyrus turned in a circle. He could hear rattling chains. Radu Bey was returning. Cyrus quickly crossed the room to one of the human arches. He could see nothing through it but darkness, but he could hear the sound of falling water. It led somewhere.

She dies now!

Cyrus backed away until he could rest Mercy’s legs on the altar, freeing up one arm. Then he tugged the bamboo cane and tooth up out of his belt and set it on her stomach. He grabbed her limp hand and closed it around the silver knob.

With the loss of the tooth, his body sagged. Pain dragged daggers through him. His vision blurred.

He scooped up Mercy’s legs and staggered for the arch.

Fool
.

“Yep,” Cyrus said, and he stepped through.

Dan had been holding the dream patiently, watching for any kind of news. He sat at his metal table, and he stared at the empty black water around him.

Pythia sat beside him, but she didn’t like to be seen. Not by Cyrus, at least.

Dan yawned, sleepy even in his sleep.

Pythia elbowed him and pointed. A low bank had appeared in the water, a bank made of bones. Mobs of stone statues rose to the surface around the little table. They floated toward the bank, then quickened, climbed out, and walked into fog.

“So many,” Dan said.

Pythia put her finger to her lips, watching every shape closely. There had been no Babd Catha, and she sat back and crossed her arms happily.

“They’re not all out yet,” Dan said. He pointed at three shapes drifting toward them, low in the water, just below the surface.

Dan leaned forward over the table.

The shape was Rupert Greeves.

After him, a girl floated, her lips parted, pooling dark water. Her face was haloed in a swirl of red hair.

Diana Boone.

At first, the last shape looked like a cross. But then Dan could see that it was actually two shapes together. A girl—
the
girl—had her face just barely above the water. She was clutching the tooth to her chest. Completely submerged beneath her, carrying her, Dan saw the shape of Cyrus.

Dan turned away from his brother, unable to look at his battered and swollen face.

Alan Livingstone had known that they would likely be too late, flying in from Africa. But he hadn’t been prepared for what
too late
might look like.

His twin boys, George and Silas, went silent at the first sign of smoke. But as they circled low, approaching to land, smoke was the least of what they noticed. Huge holes had been punched in Ashtown. The kitchen was gone. The Brendan’s rooms were gone. The courtyard was cratered and dotted with bodies. The front doors were in splinters, and the pillars beside the main entrance had toppled down the stairs.

When they had landed and were walking solemnly up the slope toward what had once been the kitchens, they saw Big Ben Sterling talking to some sheriffs who had arrived by boat. He was doing an excellent job of keeping them out of the buildings.

Inside, they found a limping, wounded monk with a Mohawk collecting the O of B’s dead and wounded with help from Arachne and Antigone Smith.

Alan Livingstone was a hard man, and his boys just as.

John Smith was a headless body. Robert Boone had leapt from a third-story window already mortally wounded. John Horace Lawney VII, and Gunner beside. Little James Axelrotter had been crushed by falling stone, but he was still breathing. Somehow.

All those were grief, but it was the barely breathing body of Rupert Greeves that broke Alan’s heart.

Antigone Smith sat by the broken doors overlooking the destroyed courtyard of Ashtown. When Wrath had exploded, Justice had collapsed, melting into a boulder dotted with embedded blades.

Antigone felt the same. Cyrus was gone and she had turned to stone, unable to feel her own small wounds. Damaged Diana sat beside her, trapped in the shocked daze of loss.

Together they looked at the future, and it showed them nothing.

The sun set and the moon rose, and still they sat. Finally, Niffy joined them, with a glass of something the color of the autumn. He made them drink and he told them everything he had seen of Cyrus up until the end.

And Jeb came on crutches and sat with them, and he stared at the moon with dry eyes and thought about his father and said nothing. And Dennis Gilly sat with them and cried more than anyone. And Arachne sat with them and let her spiders drain out of her bag and flow down the cracked steps in search of food. And she was sad, though she tried not to show it, and they knew it was because Gilgamesh had broken his promises to her and to all of them, and had vanished in the first wave of the attack.

All the while, Antigone wandered through thoughts that she had never allowed herself to think. And she pushed them away like rotting fruit and focused on a new day, with a new sun and fresh smells and a young wind bringing back her brother, the brother who could never be taken from her, because he had already been written.

Beneath the bright moon, in one of those muddy places where land becomes liquid, not too far from where Antigone sat in the smell of smoke and the memory of harm, two tons of Leon eased himself into Lake Michigan and sank into cool forgetfulness.

He never wanted to see people again.

EPILOGUE

C
YRUS
S
MITH COULD HEAR A WATERFALL
. And birds. And insects. And … monkeys? He slowly managed to force his eyelids open. He was staring straight up at a thick green jungle canopy.

A girl’s face appeared above his own. She had deep brown eyes and cuts on her cheeks, but the black feathers were gone from her hair. She didn’t need them. Her hair was already black enough.

“You’re the sacrifice,” Cyrus mumbled.

“No,” she said. “I’m Mercy. I thought you were going to die. I gave you your stick back. I was going to bury you with it.”

Cyrus shut his eyes again. Both of his hands were on his chest. He clenched his fist and felt his fingers close around the bamboo cane. He felt for the silver knob on top. The jolt of cold when he touched it told him that the tooth was still inside.

“Where are we?” Cyrus asked.

“When I woke up,” Mercy said, “we were in this
weird temple made of bones up the mountain from here. I dragged you as far away from there as I could as soon as I could. You should drink something. We’ve been here two days and you’ve been sweating the whole time.”

Cyrus was drifting off into a strange dream with black water. Maybe he could drink that.

“There is water pretty close,” Mercy said. “You can hear it. But … hey!”

Mercy opened Cyrus’s eyelids with her fingertips. “You won’t believe this. It’s patrolled by these giant dragonflies. And I mean
giant
.”

Cyrus furrowed his eyebrows and his eyelids snapped back shut.

“Fine,” Mercy said. “Pass out again. But tell me your name first.”

Cyrus exhaled slowly. “I am called the Desolation.”

Mercy said something, but he didn’t hear. He was floating in black water, and his ears were below the surface. For some reason, it was easier to open his eyes here.