The Mirrored Shard (26 page)

“We are at a place out of space, out of time and distance,” Crow said. “This was once your world, Aoife. It’s the only safe place where we can speak.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “One minute I was … well … trapped in another sort of dream, and now I’m here?”

Had I woken up? Or was this something worse, some other layer of Nylarthotep’s game?

“You’re not dreaming,” Crow said. “What he’s done to you is a perversion of a dream, using your own happiness and desire to forge prison bars.”

“I got that much,” I said. “But I left. I passed his test.”

Crow sighed. “No, Aoife,” he said. “You didn’t.”

I felt the void again, and I was plummeting through it, guts-first. It was the same sinking feeling I’d gotten when I’d realized Tremaine had tricked me, and again when I’d
realized that the cost of setting right what I’d wrought would be freeing the Old Ones.

“He tricked me,” I said matter-of-factly.

“More like sidelined you,” Crow said. He reached for me and drew me into his robe, which was a welcome relief from the cold.

“He trapped you here to study you, to exploit your weakness. When you return he will present you with the only choice you can make: allow him his freedom from the Deadlands in exchange for your life, Dean’s life and the lives of everyone else in the Lands. He’ll try to scare you—”

“He
does
scare me,” I snapped, pulling away from Crow. “He
made
the Deadlands to amuse himself by damning souls. He’s evil, Crow. He’s the root of all evil.”

“I don’t disagree,” Crow said. “But he cannot be allowed to leave that unholy playground he’s created. You cannot accept his bargain, because if you do, the Old Ones’ coming will be the least of your worries. Nylarthotep is more than a creature of evil. He is a force of nature. He is the end of all things.”

“The one who waits,” I murmured.

“Who waits for the end of the world,” Crow said, “and for his chance to dance on the ashes.”

I looked back at the city. I still felt nauseated, but unlike the last time Crow and I had met, I didn’t scream and cry and try to wrap myself in denial as thick as his robes. I just sighed. “What do you need me to do?”

“The Old Ones trapped Nylarthotep the first time with the same power that turns the Gates,” Crow said. “The
same power that flows in your veins. They created the opposite of a Gate, a lock so strong not even the first evil could break it.”

He pressed an aged piece of paper into my hands. “It’s called an Elder Sign—a representation of the Old Ones themselves, or at least their light half. The good they can bring to a world, the flip side of the devastation. The same minds that built this city here, this first place where living things crawled from the mud to begin what would become humans and Fae and even me, they created the Elder Sign. But the Old Ones have lost their way, and the knowledge has faded. Not even I can locate it.”

“What’s this?” I asked. I didn’t open the paper. I felt beaten-down and hopeless. I should have known that an impossible bargain with Nylarthotep was still too good to be true. That it wasn’t a bargain at all but a setup to permanently rid himself of the one person who could harm him, a person who would only be released when she was compliant and desperate, ready to free him instead.

“It’s the only clue to the Elder Sign I’ve been able to locate,” Crow said. “It was written down in the twelve hundreds by an Arabic scholar. He went mad, but he was the last to directly communicate with the Old Ones.”

“Probably why he went mad, then,” I said. Crow allowed himself a small smile.

“Likely. Good luck, Aoife.”

“Because I’ve had so much of that so far,” I muttered.

“Listen,” Crow said. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to bring back your dead friend. There’s nothing wrong with loving someone so much that you would cross oceans
and distances and over from life itself to look into his eyes again. You did what you had to do for Dean.”

He took my face in his hands. They were warm, surprisingly so, and they stilled the horrible emptiness inside me, filled me with something that wasn’t hope, but wasn’t the sucking hopelessness of a moment ago, either. I felt myself stop shaking for the first time.

“Now do what you have to do for the legacy in your blood. For the world, and for everyone in it,” Crow whispered.

I shut my eyes, feeling a tear freeze on my face, and when I opened them I was back in the awful hallway, lying on my side with tears still wetting my cheeks.

Nylarthotep sat a few feet away, watching me intently. “So how did you enjoy my test?” he asked, that pure white-bone smile slicing from under his cowl.

“I’ve had better days,” I said, pulling myself to my feet.

“Don’t be snippy,” he said. “And don’t pretend you wouldn’t give it all up for even ten more seconds with that Dean boy.”

Here it was. I’d ask for Dean back. He’d threaten me. And I’d … what?

Dutifully, I said, “I did what you asked. Let Dean and me go.”

Nylarthotep laughed, and he kept laughing. “My, you humans are simple creatures. Every time I think evolution might have finally made a jump, you do something that convinces me all over again just how wide-eyed and stupid you all are.”

I tried to put a convincing tremble in my voice, at the
same time praying he wouldn’t see I’d known this was coming. “But you promised …”

Nylarthotep stood to his full height, looming above me. I didn’t have to fake the trembles then. “Little girl, I made this world. What makes you think my promises need have any weight? I’m in control. Of you, of Dean’s soul, of every ounce of this place.”

“Yes,” I whispered, not able to look into the terrible blackness beyond his cowl. “You’re in control.”

“And I’ve been watching you, and I know that you’re weak. So you’re going to find me a way out of here, and I’m going back to a world of smoke and bone and blood, a world I can taste and touch. And if you do this, I might spare your life and Dean’s soul. Do you doubt me?”

I forced myself to look up, to face him. “No,” I said. My voice was small and raspy, like I’d been inhaling toxic smoke. “No, I believe you.”

“Good,” Nylarthotep said. He held out his hand, and I took it. The shock was like that of touching something long dead that had lingered underwater, grown spongy and rotten. Something that would corrupt you through your skin.

I drew back, wrapping my arms around myself. “I told you, I can’t go back to the Iron Land on my own. My soul is alive, sure, but I can’t put it back in my body like some stage-magic trick. The only way is if they wake me up.”

“Hmm.” Nylarthotep paced in a slow circle and then faced me. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to talk to them, won’t we?”

The thought of him getting his hooks into Conrad or Cal
spurred me. “Show me that Dean will be safe,” I said, “and I’ll do it.”

Nylarthotep cocked his head. “But you just said you couldn’t.”

“I’m a liar too,” I said. There was no untruth in that. I was an excellent liar, better than anyone in my family, besides my father, could ever hope to be. “I’ve had a way out of here since I came to you.”

In my waistband, Crow’s paper crackled. It warmed to the same temperature as my skin, and I showed no reaction. It was my only weapon against Nylarthotep.

“Clever little thing,” Nylarthotep said. “I knew you’d been holding out on me.”

“I’ll release you from the Old Ones’ hold,” I said. “But you’re going to give me Dean.” I straightened my spine and put force behind my next words. “Or you might as well kill me right here.”

Nylarthotep stared at me for a moment and then shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe my audaciousness. “Very well. Take the boy’s soul, take his body as it was when he lived. What lies in his grave will be returned to wherever his soul ends up, and it will be restored. Just take it all and bring it back to the living world. His remaining thread is yours.” His teeth showed. “There will be many more where he came from when I slip these bonds.”

“I’ll need space to work,” I said. “Constructing a Gate here is very complicated. I’ll need real materials.”

Nylarthotep caused another one of the iron doors to open, and inside I saw a complete inventor’s workshop, the best any engineer could ever hope for. “Take anything I
can create for you, little girl. I look forward to our partnership.”

“There’s one more thing,” I said as he started to sweep away. I had to seem defiant and angry, as if I were doing this under duress.

“What?” Nylarthotep demanded. “What is it now?”

“My name,” I said, glaring at him. “It’s not ‘little girl.’ It’s Aoife.”

The Elder Sign

A
S SOON AS
Nylarthotep left, I pulled out the paper and unfolded it. The paper was stained with rust-colored marks that I suspected were blood. There was a single word on it, and I felt as if it might have originally been in a language I couldn’t read, but the ink shifted under my eyes, a small enchantment I’d seen before. My father used it to encrypt his diaries. He’d been going to teach me someday.

The ink spelled out a single word.

BLEED

There was a small symbol below the word that looked like an ampersand turned on its side. With every blink of my eyes it twisted into something new.

“Oh yes, Crow,” I muttered. “You’re so helpful and direct. Never cryptic. Everything’s spelled right out.”

I looked around the workshop, though I knew there was nothing useful there. That had been pure distraction for
the Yellow King so it would seem like I was puzzling over the most difficult sort of problem, one that required solitude and concentration. Either he’d believe me and leave me alone, or he’d figure out what I was really doing and he’d kill me.

Then I’d be trapped here forever. Perhaps I’d even be turned into one of the Faceless.

That alone was enough to keep me staring at the page until pinpoints of light swam in front of my eyes.

Bleed. Hadn’t I done nothing but bleed ever since I’d come here? Bleed from the wound Dean had left in my soul, bleed for all the sleepless nights without him? How could I possibly bleed more?

I considered, watching that symbol turn and turn under the enchanted ink, until I knew I was out of time. After a number of minutes, a pattern began to emerge. It was of five symbols relentlessly flashing under my eyes.

Was the Elder Sign one of them? None of them? Some kind of optical illusion or trick?

I swatted the paper aside and then threw the rest of the materials on the table at the wall for good measure. A glass beaker shattered in my grasp and the shards went deep into my palm. I cursed and wrapped my hand in the hem of my shirt, but the blood was flowing freely.

Everywhere it hit the ground, I saw the image of the room Nylarthotep had constructed begin to melt away, like someone had applied heat to the celluloid film wound in a lantern reel.

Bleed
. It was so simple I hardly believed it possible, but the evidence was before me.

I picked up the paper again and folded it so the enchanted images were superimposed over one another. They made a pleasing pattern, and I wondered if the mad scholar hadn’t been trying to tell whoever found his diary something, without being too obvious about it.

Crow had trusted me to do this. He’d trusted me to be smart enough to figure it out. I couldn’t let him down.

I put the paper down and brushed my fingers along the broken glass. I was going to need a lot more blood.

It could have been minutes or hours until Nylarthotep came back—the time passed in a blur, and I finished dizzy and cold, sitting in the middle of the floor.

He regarded me and finally laid aside his cowl. His face was narrow and white, like a skull with a hide stretched over it rather than the face of a living thing. His skin, if you could call it that, was white, and long white hair trailed from the back of his head, gathered into a braid at the nape of his neck. His mouth was full of terrible, sharp teeth, and I saw stars and planets and galaxies whirling behind his black eyes, as if Nylarthotep had created worlds even within himself.

“What do you have for me?” he asked.

I’d cobbled together an utterly fake frame of pipes and wood, and pointed at it. “I need a … matrix for the Gate to work within,” I said. “We should be all set.”

Nylarthotep approached, and before he could realize the trickery I’d wrought, I shut the door of the workshop behind him and moved away from the fake Gate, where my feet had been covering the blood symbols.

Nylarthotep reacted as if I’d thrown boiling water on him. He whipped back and actually hissed, like a cat who’d seen a wild animal.

“You think this will stop me?” he howled. “You think
you
can stop me?”

I felt my Weird unfold and I pushed it into the symbols, allowing the ancient power to flow through them. They began to glow and rise from the floor, and then to combine, to vibrate before my eyes with the power of the cosmos.

“No!” Nylarthotep raged. He turned on me as the symbols began to engulf him, wrap around him, the blood they were made of running over his face, his bare skull, those terrifying eyes.