Empire of Bones (7 page)

“You mean
us
lot,” Cyrus said. He flexed his toes and groaned. “I guess I shouldn’t be feeling sorry for myself. Jeb almost died getting my mom out of Ashtown. I got shot for those stupid paper globes, and they were ruined anyway. I think I should make Antigone do my laundry for life or something. Where is she?”

“Up and useful, unlike you.” Rupert crossed the room and lifted Cyrus easily to his feet. Cyrus sucked in his breath through his teeth and hopped on his left foot. He leaned against the bunk bed and exhaled, trying to keep his breathing slow and steady. Rupert watched him.

“Can we at least stay here awhile?” Cyrus asked. “Or are we running off again?”

Rupert smiled slightly. “You should see the whole place before you ask that.”

“I’m serious,” Cyrus said. “For two months we’ve been running. When do we just park somewhere?”

Rupert raised his eyebrows. “Not long ago, Cyrus Smith was begging to come along wherever I went. Now he just wants to park? You want me to drop you someplace comfortable and go on with this alone?”

“Come on, Rupe.” Cyrus shut his eyes. “You know that’s not what I mean. I’m just tired, and I hurt.”

“Cyrus Lawrence Smith.” Rupert’s voice was a low growl. “You have witnessed the rebirth of an old war, the rekindling of a fire that once consumed nations like parched grass. The blame may not be yours, but you held the spark that set the flame. It is young and growing. Maybe,
maybe
it may still be quenched, so long as the Almighty bathes us in courage and luck and we do not rest and we do not tire and we do not listen to our own pain.”

Rupert’s chest heaved. His dark eyes did not leave Cyrus’s. “Phoenix sets out to remake men according to his own demented imagination, but that twisted creature needs time. And so he stirred up the transmortals against the Order. Now the beasts have been loosed and our eyes must be on them. The great transmortals need no time at all to begin their destroying. Radu Bey will be drawing servants to him—men and women will flock to him without even knowing what draws them, like metal shavings to a magnet.”

Rupert locked his jaw and gripped the side of the bunk bed. Old wood popped and Cyrus exhaled slowly. He’d rarely seen Rupert angry, and even now he knew the big
man was holding back. Clenched fists and muscle-striped arms were ready to hurl the whole bed against the wall. Rupert’s ribs rose and fell, and he seemed ready to shake the little cabin with a roar, but when he spoke again, his voice was calm and cold.

“My anger is with my own Order, Cyrus. Not with you. The O of B exists for such times as this. It exists
only
for such times as this, and yet it is the first to offer up sacrifices to the old darkness. Even good men and women of the Order now duck their heads and hide, hoping to avoid this war, hoping like so many fools through the ages have hoped before them, that only a few of the weak will die and then this storm of devils will quiet itself. You and I and your sister have been cast out to the Dracul, like the children of centuries ago, sent to feed a dragon.”

He sighed, shook the bed slightly, and dropped his head onto his extended arms.

Cyrus had no idea what to say. His calf must have been ashamed, because already the screaming pain in his leg had muted slightly. He lowered his right foot to the ground and forced weight onto it.

“So,” Cyrus said, “the last couple months …”

“Have been nearly pointless,” Rupert said. “We have quietly gained a few assets, but fewer allies. Beyond the Boones and the Livingstones, there are no families willing to openly defy the Order.”

“And the Smiths,” Cyrus said. “And the Greeveses.”

Rupert laughed, looking at Cyrus. “I had hoped to build an army. But we are the army. We must somehow quell the old gods, and even if we do
and
we survive, Phoenix will not have wasted his time. He and his new gods will be waiting for us.”

Cyrus leaned against the bed. “But what about, you know, normal people? Cops? Soldiers? If the transmortals start smashing a town or something, won’t everyone try to stop them?”

Rupert nodded. “Some will try. And that will add to the tragedy. When the great transmortals rise, the leaders and the powerful among men and women are the first to drop to their knees. Some will submit out of cowardice, while others have always worshipped and fed on power. When they encounter power raw, power primal, they will do anything to taste it, to be near it, to be enthralled. Sacred groves, ziggurats, fiery crags and labyrinths and valleys of bones, wherever the great transmortals make their homes, there also they will be worshipped with the shed blood of men and women and children. Agamemnon sacrificed his own child to such power, in exchange for his greatness. Babylon. Cambyses the Persian. The Scythians and their Amazon brides. All of them made blood sacrifices, all of them paid for strength and power with the lives of others. Wild and savage like the Picts, or ordered like the Aztecs, the Romans, the Nazis—it doesn’t matter. The dark ones demand bodies, they give
power, and they drive those who serve them into deeper and deeper madness.”

Rupert turned and looked directly, deeply, into Cyrus’s eyes. Cyrus blinked, but he could not look away.

“Cyrus Smith,” Rupert said, “you and I were raised in a world where good men feared only the darkness of other men—and that is enough—where children could laugh at nonsense dragons in nonsense books, where monsters and giants had long ago been chained and hidden away in the deep places, devouring no one, so thoroughly defeated that even wise men and women believed
magical
to mean the same thing as
imaginary
. But the dark truths that lie beneath the myths and legends and storybooks are now erupting. We and the world will see the beginning of such … 
magical
times. And, please God and all His angels, may we see them end.”

Cyrus shifted on his leg, watching Rupert’s eyes lose their focus and wander somewhere distant. Then Cyrus coughed.

“I’m sorry,” Rupert said. “I shouldn’t make this your burden.”

“Why?” Cyrus asked. “Because I had some pellets in my leg? Because I whined about it? I promise I’m done. Next time I’m shot, I won’t even mention it.”

Rupert smiled, but his eyes were still heavy.

“Seriously,” Cyrus said. “I’ll just think about human sacrifice and bite my lip. And I always want to know
what’s going on, no matter how bad it is. I started all this—”

“No,” Rupert said. “Cyrus—”

“Fine. I was
part
of starting all this,” Cyrus continued. “It’s kinda my burden already, Rupe. William Skelton made it my burden when he tossed me his stupid key ring and the Dragon’s Tooth with it.” Cyrus reached up and felt the keys and the empty silver sheath hanging from Patricia’s cool body. “So just tell me what we’re doing next. Another two months of hopping around and meeting with scared people? Hunting Phoenix? Hunting the
Ordo Draconis
? Even if it’s all math with numbers and cartography, I’m in.”

Rupert laughed. “You don’t even realize how much you’re like your dad. Just go jump in the lake. Get clean and move around on that leg. I have to skewer that Flint character and then listen to the ramblings of a Mohawked Irishman.” He grinned. “We’ll talk more after. I promise, you’ll hear all the news.”

Rupert gripped Cyrus’s shoulder and then smacked him lightly on the back of the head before he turned for the door. Cyrus watched his Keeper go, and an old spring banged the door shut behind him. Whatever news had come in, it wasn’t good. Rupert could always be a storm cloud, but he didn’t worry easily.

Cyrus exhaled and did what he’d promised. He bit his lip and thought about the stories Nolan had told about
Radu Bey and the Dracul family, stories Antigone had refused to listen to, stories about kids his age being carried into sacred groves and stretched over mossy stone altars, about forests of stakes sharpened to hold bodies, about whole buildings made of bodies. Then he tried not to limp as he walked to the door.

Cyrus limped less as he moved over pine needles and roots and bare earth beneath the huge cedar trees. He passed two quiet cabins and a leaning outhouse and then made his way slowly toward the lake. Old Llewellyn Douglas was down by the water, seated in his wheelchair on a tiny battered dock, with a big wool blanket and a rifle across his lap. He was wearing a green stocking cap with a pom-pom on top, and a red flannel shirt under a puffy down vest that had once been cream with bright stripes across the chest but now featured a number of large coffee stains.

One of the Boones’s amphibious jets was floating just thirty yards offshore.

Cyrus shuffled out onto the dock, barefoot and shirtless, and stood beside the old man in the wheelchair, squinting into the sun. The air was warm and dry, like California, and he filled his lungs with it. Even if he hadn’t been the one flying the plane last night, the taste of the air was all he needed to tell him that he was in the west. Above the dark lake and its fir-covered mountain walls, the sky was low and large. A migrating herd
of cumulus clouds seemed to barely clear the jutting trees as they slid east, and the loud blue all around them was close enough to taste. Cyrus loved being among old trees, breathing their breath, rich with age, and giving his own breath back. This air was mixed with the taste of running water from the mountain stream rippling the lake not far from the dock, and damp earth, and even in the sun, it had the small sharp teeth of air that has flown high and grown thin, air that has seen the poles and tumbled through skies of snow.

“Boy,” Llewellyn said, “you gonna stand there sniffing the wind, or you gonna help me in?”

“It’s nice to see you again, Mr. Douglas,” Cyrus said. “I never said goodbye when you left. You taught us a lot.”

The old man’s face was carved with deep creases but it still looked hard and taut—like wet and wrinkled leather left to dry in the sun.

Llewellyn snorted. “Lie, truth, lie, Smithling. You can do better. There isn’t a thing nice about seeing me again, not here, not now, not for you, not for me. No, you didn’t say goodbye, and no, I didn’t cry about it. I didn’t even tell you I was leaving. And as for teaching you … ha! I taught you nothin’. Told you some things, but teaching means learning, and I don’t know how as you learned a doggone thing.” The old man glared up at Cyrus. “Can you fill your sinuses with water and pressure-proof your brain for a deep dive? You been slowing down your heart?
No?” He shook his head, bobbing the pom-pom on his hat. “I didn’t think so. I talked
at
you. I didn’t teach.”

Cyrus laughed. “Well, I’m not lying. It is nice to see you. I never would have made Journeyman without you. Do you really want to get in the water?”

“Why do you think I’m sitting here, boy?” Llewellyn growled. “That plane ruins the view.”

Cyrus looked around. He wasn’t worried about the old man swimming. He’d never seen anyone more like a fish in the water. But with his own bad leg, he might not be able to help the old man back out.

Llewellyn Douglas set his rifle down on the dock and tossed his blanket on top of it. He was wearing a pair of very short, very old mustard-colored swim trunks, and his bare white legs were mostly bone and sagging skin where there should have been muscles. Cyrus tried to suppress a grimace.

“I have my suit on,” Llewellyn said. “But only because that young Rupert says I’m not to go without one. Some nonsense about scaring the fish.” He tugged off his hat, and his thin white hair floated away from his head, charged with static. The vest and the shirt were next, and Cyrus was left staring at a pale belly the color of a cave fish and ribs that marched up to the man’s collarbones like two ladders in a skin bag.

Llewellyn eyed Cyrus’s arms and chest, then assessed his own and sputtered out a laugh. “Boy, you’re as brown
as a nut, and you’ve strapped on some brawn beneath that skin, too. You almost look the Journeyman.” He held out his hands. “Now get me in the water before I freeze in this sun.”

Llewellyn didn’t need much help standing up, and Cyrus was sure he didn’t weigh more than a squirrel. The old man was vertical only long enough to fall forward, slithering into a dive that gave off more of a slurp than a splash.

Cyrus held his breath, hopped on his good leg, and then dropped into the dark rippling water feetfirst.

Cold
.

Cyrus didn’t gulp; he didn’t flail. Time threw away whole seconds. His lungs were stone. His heart stopped. The fibers in his muscles paused, suddenly asleep. His skin was heavy, numb with shock. He drifted, a corpse lost in icy water. And then, slowly at first, his body began to burn. Icy teeth chewed at every cell, and their bite was fire. His feet bumped the soft, silty bottom, and his legs pushed off with the slow speed of a sloth. Drifting back up, he managed one pulse with his arms, and his head broke the surface into the sun.

He didn’t gasp. Blinking, he opened his mouth and air came out, but he couldn’t expand his lungs to inhale again. Llewellyn’s face bobbed in front of him.

“Glacier lake,” the old man said, and he spat. “The stream right there is fresh snowmelt, down from the
heights. Nothing like it to make you know you’re alive, and to ask if that’s how you’d like to stay.” Llewellyn smiled. “Don’t take too long making up your mind.” He slid through the water to the dock and dragged himself out.

Cyrus managed to inhale and turn back toward the shore. He had an audience. Rupert and Antigone were watching. Antigone held a towel and a shirt. Behind them, he saw Diana and Arachne approaching. Diana was tan and freckled and chatting, but Arachne was cool and quiet, with skin like spider silk woven and polished into pearl. Off to the side, hulking in the shadows beneath a cedar tree, he saw the huge shape of Gilgamesh of Uruk, looking surly and scratching his hairy cheek with a massive six-fingered hand. Gil was wearing a pair of blue oil-stained, oversize mechanic’s coveralls that were too short for his legs, too tight for his thighs, and apparently unable to be zipped up past his bulging woolly chest. Gil looked too heavy for this world, denser even than the trees beside him. Cyrus didn’t like seeing the transmortal without chains. Buried for good would have been even better.